Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  He nodded, watching the road. “It’s been twenty years, but I wrapped everything in plastic. Maybe I can find the place. We can look later today.”

  Until then his face had been creased with fatigue, his skin slack, but he brightened at the thought of us unearthing his old guns and laboratory.

  “If we can find the house,” he went on, “we can buy a shovel at the hardware store.”

  We followed a gravel lane and parked at a high embankment clearly bulldozed in place years ago to keep the river from washing out the roads.

  Standing before the headlights, we attached our reels and threaded the rods. He squinted, taking his time tying the hook on, finishing long after I had. Seeing him, I remembered a night at the reservoir when I was a child, the workings of his hands as he threaded the line. He’d muttered and reached in the truck window, and the headlights came on. He’d crouched before the bumper, his hands moving in the beam, scars across their knuckles, the blunt fingertips pinching and pulling. I’d stood in the light falling past him and looked at my own hands, the soft pads, the pink rounded fingertips and my few pale scars. The memory startled me with a sense of loss, that the years between that moment and now had been a mistake, that I should have lived a different life. I took a few slow breaths and stared off until the emotion passed.

  When he was ready, we climbed the embankment and followed the shore. He stepped carefully between rocks and driftwood, his head bowed. Something had changed in him, his movements slow.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. I’d noticed Tylenol bottles in the truck but had thought nothing of them.

  “I got in a fight the other day.”

  “What?”

  “With some idiot. This guy—you’ve met him, Tom Alding.”

  “That guy?” The man was tall, not burly, but well over six feet and solid looking.

  “Yeah. He tried to sell me bad salmon. We were in the store, and I smelled one. I don’t know if he took me for an idiot. I guess he really needed the money. I told him no way, and he grabbed me by the neck and pushed me backward over the counter. It hurt my back.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I hit him. I punched him in the face and got him by the hair and kept hitting him until I had him out the door. Then I kicked him in the ass, and he fell off the porch. He had the nerve to say, ‘Take it easy.’ Jesus Christ, the guy pushes me and then he says, ‘Take it easy’ in the middle of a fight. I went in and got the baseball bat from under the cash register, but by the time I returned he’d run away.”

  “You keep a baseball bat under the register?” I asked.

  “You didn’t know? I have one in all my stores.” Then he grit his teeth and said that his back hurt and he hadn’t been able to sleep. He conveyed this with no self-pity, speaking harshly as if still at odds with the other man.

  Dawn lightened the sky above the wide river, and its water, broken by boulders, shone silver like a long rippled fabric running on toward the mountains.

  “I’m fifty-four,” he said, watching the current. “I shouldn’t be fighting at my age. It’s stupid. All of this is stupid.”

  I nodded. I didn’t like seeing him weak. It shook me in a way I couldn’t explain, but I knew he’d hate me if he saw me feeling sorry for him. I realized that if I let myself worry about him, it wouldn’t be as easy to leave, so I tried not to think about it, and just breathed the air off the river.

  Gradually, as we began to fish, he moved more naturally. Chum salmon weren’t in season, and we were trying for the rarer, smaller coho, whose meat was better. Though we occasionally hooked a large chum, we let it go and competed to see who could catch a coho. In the late afternoon, he shouted and laughed, and I walked along the riverbank to join him.

  The salmon’s gills pulled for air, and I crouched and looked at the markings.

  “It’s a small chum,” I told him.

  “No, it isn’t. I work with fish all day. You don’t even like them.”

  “It’s a chum,” I repeated, gliding my finger along the scales. “Look here.”

  He drew his face near, lips pursed with anger. The salmon opened and closed its mouth and snapped its tail against his hand. He reached into his jacket and took out a pair of glasses.

  In the lenses, his eyes appeared large, like toys, blinking slowly. He crouched and stared, then straightened and folded the glasses and put them away.

  The salmon struggled, drowning in the air, and he picked it up and carried it to the water. He eased it in and released it, then rinsed his hands and shook them dry. He told me that we should go and look for where he’d buried the guns while there was still enough light.

  We followed the river in his truck. Warm air blew in the vents, and the cab smelled of the mixed, hard odor of his life, a briny animal scent of dogs and fish and cologne. A few unlit cabins stood in the woods, and we slowed at each one as he scrutinized it, frowning, before we continued on. The embankment was soon gone, replaced by stretches of scattered stone along the river that shone violet in the sunset.

  He took the road slowly, gazing out, all around us naked branches reaching against the luminous sky. I’d come here with him once when I was a boy, just he, my brother, and I, and we’d camped in the same dome tent I later burned. We got up at dawn to fish, and as the sun rose, he told us that we should do this every fall. I agreed. None of us could have imagined how much our lives would change.

  It was getting dark. We’d driven for nearly an hour along gravel roads, pausing at washed-out flats where the water had risen in the past and uprooted trees.

  He pulled the truck onto the shoulder.

  “I don’t recognize anything,” he told me. “There was a big flood some years back. Everything’s different now. Even the roads.”

  As soon as the waitress brought his beer, he took a long drink and sighed. He said he should have spent his life in nature.

  “That’s all I ever really cared about. Everything else was bullshit.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “Come on. You’ve lived. You’ve really lived.”

  He shrugged. “And what the fuck do I have now?”

  I hesitated. “Have you ever thought about getting in touch with your parents?”

  “My parents?” he repeated, as if he’d never had such things.

  “What were their names?”

  He cleared his throat. “I left Quebec to give myself a new life. Too much time has passed now.”

  He finished his beer, drinking more quickly than was normal for him.

  “What would I go back to?” he asked. “I quit school when I was in fifth grade. Every morning, I used to ride along the coast looking for wood that fell off barges. I fished or I worked in the fields, planting potatoes or digging them up. When I was sixteen, I started logging on the north coast. I was younger than you are now, and I spent all winter in a camp with grown men. At your age, I was working in uranium mines and on high-rises, whatever I could find.”

  He called for another beer and told me that if his body hurt it was because he’d worked too hard as a child. “It stunted my growth. My shoulders hurt. Everything fucking hurts. We used to read by candlelight and now my fucking eyes are ruined. Why in the hell would I go back? I worked and sent my money to them, and they didn’t even give me an education.”

  He stared past me, his cheekbones and forehead pronounced, casting shadows.

  “Maybe I could write your stories,” I said, as if I had nothing else to offer.

  He took a drink and put the bottle down and nodded.

  “Sure. I’d like that. My stories deserve to be told.”

  “They do. But I don’t know anything about your childhood.”

  He shrugged. “There was work. There was some fighting. There was a lot of church. I hated the church. I remember my first confession. I was a little kid, and when I told the priest I hadn’t sinned, he said that everyone sins and it’s a sin to say otherwise. So I had a choice between telling my sins or saying Hail Marys for lying. I m
ade up little sins, being jealous of my brother or angry at a friend. But it was bullshit. We worked. We did nothing but work on the farm, and that fucking priest made us invent sins. We didn’t have toys. All we did were chores. We got up and fed the animals and picked up wood or worked in the fields. When was there time to sin? Maybe if it weren’t for him I’d never have started breaking rules.”

  He hesitated, nodding to himself, his gaze distracted.

  “My older sister used to walk with me to church in the morning. It was about a mile. The road was just above the gulf, and it was cold. We weren’t allowed to have breakfast until after confession, so we’d walk to church, then home, then back to the village for school. My sister wanted to say her Hail Marys quickly so we wouldn’t be late, but the priest caught us leaving. He yelled at us and made us stay. The nuns at school would hit us on the hand with the strap if we were late. So we both got punished that day . . .

  “But you know, that fucking priest, he lived in a big house behind the church, and he had a live-in maid. That’s what people called her. His maid. Everyone knew he was screwing her. But if a girl went to confession and said she was having sex, he’d yell at her so everyone could hear. That happened to . . . to some girls I knew. I wanted to kill that son-ofa-bitch priest . . .”

  He sighed. “These kinds of stories—you want to hear them?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “There’s one I’ll never forget. One Sunday that priest preached against adultery. A man and woman in the village had left the people they’d married and were living together, and the priest told us to pray and call down the fire of heaven on them. I snuck out of church and ran to their house. I went right to their window. I’ll never forget it. They looked happy. There was no fire. I kept waiting for it to come down and burn them, and I was worried I was too close to the house and might get burned up, too. But when the fire didn’t come, I knew that fucking priest was a fake. After that I never believed another word he said.”

  He finished his beer. The waitress was bringing our plates, and he called for another.

  “Remember how we used to talk about just living in a motor home and fishing? That’s what we should’ve done. This business, everything, crime, all of it, it’s bullshit.”

  He ate slowly, searching out bits of chicken with his fork, then paused.

  “Our best years were in the valley,” he said.

  I didn’t know how to respond. He gazed off for a moment, then looked at me.

  “Promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “When I die, promise me you’ll do one thing.”

  “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever seen him drink like this.

  “Promise you’ll bury me in the mountains on the edge of the ocean.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  “No. Fucking promise. I haven’t asked fuck all of anybody and I haven’t gotten fuck all. So promise.”

  “I promise,” I said, though I had no idea how I’d take his body into the mountains. “Why are you talking about dying, anyway?”

  “People die. Sometimes you’re here and everything’s okay, and then the next day you’ve lost your health and money, and no one gives a fuck about you and you die.”

  “Are you worried about dying?”

  “I’m just saying that sometimes it happens. Money’s always a problem. The economy is shit. It’s never easy. Life doesn’t get better.”

  “But your health is okay.”

  “Of course it’s okay. My grandmother lived to a hundred. I’ll probably live to a hundred, too.” He stared at me, his eyes suddenly clear and unguarded. “I never thought about that. Maybe you’ll be too old to climb into those mountains to bury me. You’ll be an old fart. Maybe I should die young. You can drive me into the mountains and bury me overlooking the ocean. I’d like that, but you’d have to be young and strong. I wouldn’t be able to wait until I’m a hundred.”

  “It’s probably illegal,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Yeah. A lot of things are illegal if you get caught. You figure it out. If you can’t get my body, just use the ashes. I won’t be angry at you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I don’t like this okay bullshit.” He asked me to promise one more time, and I did.

  He drank another beer as we finished the meal in silence. I felt that I’d never seen things so clearly, the strangeness of my family, how hard it was to make sense of him. He’d been the person I’d stood against, measured myself against, declared my freedom from. I didn’t know how to see him weak.

  He noticed me watching and narrowed his eyes, glaring, letting me know he was still awake, that I’d better not count him out too soon.

  Getting up, he swore and grabbed at the table.

  “I’m too drunk to walk,” he told me with a smirk and drove his elbow hard into my ribs. “Yep, I’m too drunk to walk. Looks like I’ll have to drive.”

  We met a few more times before I left. He told stories after late dinners. Snow flurried across the parking lot, and his eyes almost closed as he gazed through the window. He described the boredom of work camps, a day when polar bears maundered through a mining town, a night so cold his axles froze, though he’d left the engine running as he slept.

  “Crime,” he said, “was better than anything I’d known. If you saw where I came from, you’d understand. It felt like the only way out.”

  I dropped him off one evening when his truck was in the garage. He went through the metal gate, and five large shepherds ran across the yard and gathered about him anxiously, lifting their heads as he moved his hands, touching each of them on the nose until they calmed. He stood still, gazing on them as they sat or stretched out at his feet.

  Though I’d soon be free, I no longer felt the need to run. I simply craved the highway, its lightness and sense of loss, as if the divine could be found only by leaving, by losing myself in the country. Yet even as I thought this, I couldn’t imagine my father’s future. I refused to let myself feel anything, afraid I might stay, so I just watched, seeing, studying as if for later, as if I knew that he’d soon be gone and only these memories would help me understand. In the big dogs’ wordless allegiance, in the way his presence calmed them, I sensed his need for one thing that would never leave or betray him.

  My mother’s talk of destiny came back to me, the hope and necessary destruction I’d found in her words. But nothing in our futures seemed as perfect as our lives in the valley. I stood at the window as dogs loped across the fields, followed by a man. They raced away from him, toward an invisible point, leaping and falling over each other, then rushed back as he continued through the rows of trees with the same steady pace.

  Once, he’d taken me to sloping mountaintop pastures. He wore his rain jacket and sou’wester and walked the rows, pruning trees. I huddled in the green pickup as fog blew past, silhouetting him and masking all but the snap of the machete. When he came back, his clothes were soaked. I asked why, and he tousled my hair and said it was the clouds. “What clouds?” I asked. He said that what was all around us wasn’t fog. Later the clouds broke and sunlight raced over the damp trees and grass. Beneath us the valley opened, a swath of green marked with specks of color, the road and streams intertwined like sleeping snakes.

  The day I left for California turned out bright, sun flashing on snowmelt.

  We met where I was having my SUV serviced for the trip, and he drove me to get lunch.

  “It’s good that you’re going to travel and go to college,” he said, squinting in the light through the plateglass windows. “I’d have done the same thing if I could.”

  “I can come back and visit,” I said.

  He smiled and looked down. “Who knows? Who knows with this fucking life?”

  “No, seriously, I’ll come back.”

  “You don’t know that.” He sat with his shoulders curved forward, appearing fragile.

  As he drove me back to the garage, we followed a red convertible
in the traffic.

  “Look at that guy,” he said. “It’s not that warm.”

  The blond driver was bundled in a jacket, and his alert posture made him appear nervous. The four-lane road had a broad median, and he pulled into the left-hand turn lane in front of us. The oncoming traffic passed in packs, and there were several openings that he didn’t take. With each gap, he lifted his head and inched forward. The car looked almost new, its red paint brilliant and its tires a solid black.

  “Goddamn it,” my father said, “doesn’t he see he’s had plenty of chances to turn?”

  Traffic surged past again, and two more openings came and went. My father lowered his window and leaned out.

  “Turn!” he roared, the tendons in his throat standing out. “Turn, you son of a bitch!”

  The driver hit his accelerator, and an oncoming sedan braked and rammed his fender, crumpling the hood and scattering shards of plastic and glass over the road.

  “Jesus Christ!” my father said. He swerved back into traffic and sped away. He glanced at me. “I didn’t mean for him to turn right then.”

  My heart hammered as I looked back at the crushed, diminishing cars, wondering if anyone had been hurt. They vanished from sight and we stared forward, neither of us speaking. Then we glanced at each other and began to laugh.

  We were still chuckling and swearing under our breath when he dropped me off. We shook hands, and I told him I’d call, and he said I could always come back if I wanted.

  I just nodded, and he started his engine and pulled his truck next to me.

  “Hey,” he said. “Do you know I’m the number one driver in Vancouver?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what everyone tells me. Whenever I drive by, they say, ‘Hey, you’re number one,’ and they do this.” He showed me his hand and lifted his middle finger.

  He laughed and jammed his accelerator, spraying slush and oily grit from the asphalt. I covered my face as he scorched a half circle. Then, as if to say that he was the one leaving, he raced into traffic, cars braking and swerving, and soon his truck was gone from sight.