Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  That weekend, I read both books, sitting on the couch at a friend’s house, on the front porch, under the tree, on the picnic table, moving often as if to make myself inconspicuous. I’d have stepped into the pages: wandering, nights of camaraderie and the courting of women; the sense of innocence and hope and longing for experience. Even in their misdemeanors, the characters remained pure. They lived in the undeniable flow of life.

  But what startled me above all was the working-class world from which Kerouac came, the French Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts, and how he’d freed himself. There was something of the observer in him, a lack of connection, a rootless quality that denied him strength. I couldn’t help but think of my father’s disconnected life, the emptiness into which he pulled others. And yet I knew that because of him I loved Kerouac. He’d lived wilder things, a more desperate life driven by a greater longing than anything Kerouac described—a desire I sensed when he spoke of his past, but whose source I didn’t understand. No matter how I tried to forget him, I knew that his stories had first fed my imagination and made me want to travel, and that, when I myself had escaped him on the road, these stories had returned to me, ghosting my wanderings.

  As soon as I finished both of Kerouac’s books, I rushed through Pride and Prejudice. I’d grudgingly taken it from my English teacher for extra credit, but it surprised me. Unlike so many other characters in novels, Elizabeth Bennet seemed fully formed. Her rebellion emerged fluidly from the mechanisms of her society. I imagined meeting her, but her family would probably have hired me to dig a ditch, nothing more. An excruciating loneliness gripped my balls. Kerouac, too, I realized, would have dreamed of her—would have loved her fiercely, though eventually, unable to find his place, he’d have left, or she’d have kicked him out.

  As I read in the library, Charlotte joined me and pushed a college guide across the table.

  “Have you looked yet?” she asked.

  She and I had hung out at a party and become close, though she refused to be anything other than a friend, maybe wise to my life’s heedless trajectory. She’d been insisting for a week that I apply to at least one college.

  “Just pick one. Everyone else has applied.”

  “Nah,” I said and told her about Kerouac riding on the roofs of trains or living alone in a fire tower on a mountain for months, writing books.

  She rolled her eyes. “Just apply. You don’t have to go, but you’ll have the choice.”

  She had long auburn hair and a classical profile, and she seemed far too good for me in the same way Elizabeth did. Rebel or not, Elizabeth would have wanted a man with at least some education. I hated the idea of it, a sort of narrow cast that would force me to write and think like everyone else, but I leafed through the guide.

  “Okay, this one,” I said finally. It was the strangest I could find, the most individualistic, a school in Vermont called Marlboro College.

  For the application essay, I described my upbringing, my bank-robber father and occultist mother, exaggerating maybe a little. But I had no intention of going. Nothing I did could expend my energy. At times, it felt like bliss, exuberance filling my lungs so as to crack my ribs. At others, it was a virus in the blood, demanding movement and expression. The speed of my scribbling transformed words into hieroglyphs. I jotted on scraps that cluttered my car, which I now had to push-start, its alternator dead.

  After classes let out, I opened its door and pushed from the side, gaining momentum, then jumped in, threw it into gear, and popped the clutch. The engine revved and sputtered, and I sped out of the lot. I drove fast, the windows down, and as I climbed a long incline, a gust blew through and carried out several scraps. The anxiety of loss startled me. I felt it in a way I never had with people. I wanted to stop and search the roadside weeds, but the car might stall and I’d be stuck. Foot pressing the gas, I drove on, grieving lost verse, as if I finally understood that the people and places in those words were gone.

  The need, the desire, the disease—whatever it was that made me keep moving was unrelenting. Clear mornings, the sight of distant mountains filled me with such longing that I drove past school, wandered from town to town, or hiked. By graduation, I’d realized its alienating power.

  I was living on a river in a dome tent that I’d dug from my mother’s horse trailer and that my brother, my father, and I had camped in, its canvas now a Rorschach of mildew. The land belonged to friends of my mother’s, the riverbank remote. I bathed naked and scrubbed at clothes filthy from construction.

  My mismatched transcripts had added up, and I’d been accepted to college and even offered funding. Classes began in two months, but going seemed impossible. I didn’t have enough money for the small amount not covered by financial aid, and I was in trouble with the local police, who’d fined me for driving without an inspection sticker, then without a muffler, and finally for missing my court date. My brother had told my father about college and sent me a message, saying that my father wanted to pay my way back for a visit. Though I hated my job, I didn’t want to give in to him.

  I opened my car door and sat. The clothes I wore had dried on a tree branch and were as stiff and coarse as animal hides. I didn’t know where to go from here. I hated the idea of college, but what else was there?

  I stared at the sky, the sun flashing through leaves. I punched the windshield and it split. The irreversible damage brought out my fury, and I kicked the side-view mirror off and beat on the door. I took a plastic jug with some gas in it and splashed it on the tent and lit it. I pitched much of what I owned inside. Not waiting for it to finish burning, I turned the car on. The engine backfired, sounding like a lowrider. I raced along the tractor path through the woods, half a mile to a long gravel driveway, and finally to a county road and then the interstate. I accelerated until the car shook, vibrations clapping in my ears. After an hour, the engine boomed, and I drifted to the shoulder.

  When a tow truck arrived, I just signed the car over. With the sun in my eyes, I squinted off, trying to make a plan. The driver chuckled, the zipper on his overalls open to the black thatch of his beer gut, his clipboard propped against it as he wrote his name on the title.

  I stuffed what I owned into my backpack and began hitchhiking to where a friend lived on a failed commune, a community built of landfill scraps, walls of mortared jars and pop bottles. But I knew the freeloading couldn’t last. I’d done so much, and nothing had changed.

  “Deni,” my father said when I finally dialed his number collect.

  How many times could I do this—keep running somewhere else?

  “How are you?” he asked, trying to sound jaunty. “I heard about college.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, so when would it start?”

  “In two months. In September.”

  He was briefly silent. “Two months. You should come and visit me first. You’re going to be busy once you start, right?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I’ll probably be busy.”

  We were going through the motions. I’d accept whatever he offered. I couldn’t see how I could get to college from where I was, with two changes of clothes and less than fifty bucks. My mother had little for herself and couldn’t help me. I’d been pushing to be unattached, as far on the edge of life as possible, and here I was.

  A day later, crossing the country once again felt like a solution. As I drifted west, the plains opened before me in a green unfurling of sunlight, until the jagged skyward saw of the Continental Divide warned me of change.

  THE FLOOD

  The lines on either side of his mouth had deepened, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, though his dark hair didn’t have a hint of gray. We were eating dinner together but hadn’t yet talked about why I ran away.

  “I remember one time I’d just robbed a bank,” he said. “I bought a new Thunderbird with the cash and decided to drive cross-country, but I picked up this kid hitchhiking. He probably wasn’t even eighteen. We were in Nevada, and I asked
him, ‘How long do you think it will take for the engine to blow if I drive this car as fast as it can go?’ He laughed and dared me. That’s back when I was still pretty crazy. A dare was all it took. So I buried the needle and just kept going. We were in the desert, and it was hot. After about an hour, the hood shot up. It sounded like I’d crashed into another car, but it was just the engine blowing. Steam and smoke sprayed everywhere. We were on the side of the road like that when a cop showed up.”

  My father was smiling, and I tried to figure out what had made him think of the story.

  “This cop,” he told me, “he was a real hard ass. You could tell he didn’t believe that the engine of a brand-new Thunderbird just blew. So he said to us, ‘Have either of you ever been in trouble with the law?’ And this eighteen-year-old kid says, ‘Yeah.’ He’s playing it tough and giving the cop a hard time, but I had a suitcase of cash in the trunk. I wanted to kill that kid. The cop finally took him in to check his record and dropped me off at a towing company. I realized then that I wasn’t as crazy as before. I’d been just like that kid, but I wasn’t anymore.”

  He hesitated. “That’s part of being young. You have to take risks and piss people off.”

  I finally got it. This was his way of saying he knew why I’d left. We would never discuss it directly. But though I didn’t relate to the boy and was cautious around police, I understood the wild pleasure of driving a car just to see it blow.

  “Anyway, I was thinking,” he went on, “before you leave, we should go fishing.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  He dropped his gaze and nodded to himself, knowing better than to remind me of the boy I used to be, or the things I’d once loved.

  Encouraged by him, I began kickboxing again. The trainer, a bowlegged Irish Newfoundlander with webs of broken veins on his cheeks, encouraged his fighters, often illustrating endurance with stories of fishermen adrift in fog or miners trapped underground who resorted to drinking their own piss. In his hip pouch, he carried a bottle of painkillers.

  “Hey, do I sign you up for the tournament?” he asked, though I’d been back only one month.

  “Sure. I mean, you think I’m ready?” I was pleased by his enthusiasm, but he shrugged and said, “Why not?” then wrote down my name.

  The summer was passing too quickly, days sunlit and cool. By mid-August, I still hadn’t made up my mind. I was supposed to be in Vermont soon. My father and I hadn’t mentioned college since I’d arrived. He’d given me back the SUV and paid me too well, tossing me wads of cash as if it meant nothing. Three or four times a week, we had dinner.

  “A tournament!” he said, leaning forward. “When is it?”

  “In a couple weeks, I guess.” I didn’t want him there. Though I liked that he believed in me, I knew the truth. I got no thrill from battering others, and the best fighters in our gym lusted to hammer on anything. Besides, I’d been working on a dystopian novel, an epic of social breakdown, and often, after writing all night, I could barely train.

  “I’m considering deferring,” I told him to change the subject.

  “What’s that?”

  “It means I’d put it off for a year.”

  “Put what off?”

  “College.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “You can do that?”

  “Yeah. Besides, I never planned on going. I can write without it.”

  He nodded, his expression neutral, as if this were a conversation of no great importance.

  “You know,” he said, “I read in the paper one time about a really popular writer who didn’t go to school. Besides, you should be a fighter, and there’s this tournament.”

  “I might not even be ready,” I told him. “It’s not a big deal—just practice.”

  He studied me, then looked off. He got the point and wasn’t going to push, probably satisfied for now that I’d dropped my plans. But I hadn’t done this for boxing, and telling him, I’d felt cold, involuntarily, as if I couldn’t risk sharing even my uncertainty for fear that he’d impose his own vision on me.

  “If you’re planning to stay a while,” he said, thinking hard, eyes focused on the floor, “you’ll probably want your own place and a job that pays more.”

  “I guess,” I replied, mostly just to prompt him to keep talking.

  “I know a guy with an apartment for rent, and there’s a job I could get you. It’d probably be good for you to do things on your own. You want your freedom, right?”

  Over the past month he’d mentioned that his stores weren’t doing well. Did he think we’d be better off if I didn’t work for him, or was he struggling? I tried to see how he’d benefit from what he proposed, but I couldn’t. Regardless, I liked the idea of my own place, of having distance from him, writing and reading where no one could bother me. So a week later, I moved into the apartment and started the job he’d lined up at a seafood processing and packing plant, a huge rectangle on the edge of a canal just outside Vancouver.

  My days started at five in the morning. Boats lagged, unloading crates of codfish under clouds of wheeling seagulls. The sun rose beyond the cargo doors as forklifts crossed the processing rooms, propane fumes stinking up the salty air.

  Though I planned to put away money for travel, I immediately realized my mistake. Rent and a vehicle ate up a lot, and my job and training left me exhausted. The date for college passed, the weather cooling, rain replacing sunshine, and to prove I’d made the right decision, I bought a secondhand computer and wrote every night. The more I did, the more my emotions overwhelmed me, and the hungrier I got. Insignificant scenes, a young man leaving a new friend, were charged with grief, as if I were saying good-bye to everyone I’d abandoned. My stomach rumbled, and I emptied the fridge, making 3:00 a.m. supermarket runs: orange and apple juice, blocks of cheddar, quarts of strawberry yogurt, instant mashed potato mix, value packs of sirloins.

  “What happened?” my trainer blurted after weighing me in at the tournament. I was one pound over the limit for my class. Seeing my name in the heavyweight column, he took the pill bottle from his hip pouch, popped the lid, and swallowed one.

  I’d read most of the night, and now sat against the cinder-block wall to finish Brave New World. Fighters from my club glanced over and shook their heads.

  When it was my turn for the ring, a redheaded teenager standing next to me said, “Aw, man, you got the half-breed. Be careful.”

  I hadn’t given much thought to the fight. As soon as I put down the book, I felt disoriented, then indifferent, as if none of this mattered and I was just biding my time. A twinge of concern made it through only when I went into the ring. Nearly a foot taller, my opponent faced off, half-Chinese and half-Irish judging from his last name. Almost instantly, he was midair, spinning, driving his heel at my gut. He kicked repeatedly as I tried to circle in. I timed his landing and struck at his ribs, driving him back, but one of my kicks hit wrong, the side of my foot catching his hip bone, the pain sudden and intense. Backing away, I limped, shocked to find myself here. The pain felt like the truth—that I should be elsewhere, that I didn’t care about this—as if it were true that only by disaster, or something resembling it, could I learn what was real.

  “You lost,” my father said without inflection, sitting at the table, his arms crossed. When I’d called to tell him about my foot, so swollen it barely fit inside my shoe, he’d insisted that I meet him right away.

  “I don’t know what to do about work,” I said, limping to the chair.

  His eyes focused in, seeing the concern on my face, and for the first time since I’d returned, he leveled his look of disdain.

  “Fake hurting yourself.” He spat the words. “That’s why I told you to come here and not go to the doctor.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to get my face back under control, embarrassed to have him see me like this.

  “Isn’t it obvious? You go to work on Monday and pretend to hurt yourself. Then you collect workers’ compensation.�
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  I was taking slow, deep breaths, willing my expression to indifference, telling myself that none of this mattered, that I could deal with it. But when I spoke, the emotion was there again.

  “I’ll have to spend the weekend like this,” I said.

  “What’s the big deal? All you do is write. You don’t need to walk.” He waved his hand as if dismissing me, then explained how to defraud workers’ compensation. “Everyone does it,” he added as if offering me a joint. “I did it once when I wasn’t much older than you. I was on a construction site, and I smashed my pinkie with a sledgehammer.”

  “Did it hurt?” I asked, wanting to take the attention off myself.

  “Of course it hurt. I was trying to break the bone. You always got a longer leave for a broken bone, but my finger didn’t even break. The skin just opened right up. I could see the entire bone. It hurt so goddamn bad I couldn’t bring myself to hit it again.”

  I nodded, considering what he was proposing, that it was probably easy, though I didn’t want to do it. It didn’t seem necessary.

  “But what if I get caught? Can’t doctors tell how old a bruise is?”

  “What the fuck?” He leaned close, looking hard at my face, the edge of his lip lifting. “This is nothing. You used to talk about robbing banks. Get over it.”

  The waitress came, and he sat back and smiled and ordered pasta with chicken. She strutted off, the menus in one hand, and again, he hunched over the table.

  “Just so you know,” he told me with an anger that conveyed his full disappointment, “I’m not supporting you. You want to write all day, then you figure this one out.”

  I shrugged. “I have enough money left over to get by for a while.”

  “Aw, fucking come on.” He gripped the table as if he were going to flip it. “You’re a minor. If you get caught, your record will be erased when you turn eighteen. Have some balls.”