Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  For a few weeks, he rented a room on Montreal’s Plateau and often sat on the fire escape teaching himself English from a book. He’d bought an eight-track and listened to rock ’n’ roll. He went to a few boxing matches, frequented bars, and tried liquors whose labels were as foreign as the logos on the sides of trucks he’d watched pass as a kid. He held his bandaged finger before him like a symbol of nobility.

  When he was almost out of money and nearly healed, he ran into Gaétan, a wolfish man from the high-rises who had a gift for making men laugh two hundred feet up while standing on a twelve-inch I beam. They talked about the poor pay and Martin’s death. Then Gaétan admitted he’d quit his job and said he was moving that afternoon. He asked if my father would help.

  “You drive,” he said and directed him into an alley behind an apartment building and told him to wait. My father wondered how Gaétan could afford to live there or own such a nice car or why he’d insisted on putting the ragtop down, when clothes started falling from a balcony—silk dresses and pinstriped suits, a small wooden chest that bruised the upholstery, a jewelry box with a mirror that shattered. Rings tumbled along the floorboards.

  When Gaétan swung down from the fire escape, my father was furious. But Gaétan was already in the car and said, “Dépêches-toi!”

  My father hit the gas, and they raced off.

  As he drove, Gaétan showed him a Judy Garland record. “C’est du quoi ça!”

  My father didn’t respond. When he reached the east end, he parked and got out and began walking, insulted to have been used like this. Gaétan called after him that if he wanted to make real money, he could ask for him in the bar.

  My father left Montreal, afraid to be tied to the robbery. He took a job on a dam up north. He was there for several months. Sundays, he skipped Mass to go fishing, and just before sunset he sat on the scaffolding and smoked, staring off toward the West.

  But within a month he had an accident. He’d been working at the top of the dam, pouring concrete into the wooden forms along its rim. He stood on the wood, guiding the sluice behind the truck. The sun was rising through mist and clouds, sometimes pale yellow or silver white, at times blinding. Bulldozers shifted mud and rock below the dam. He heard a cracking sound and grabbed the wood beneath his feet as the form he stood on broke free. The wall of the dam was rushing past, and he gripped the two-by-four frame that skidded like a sled along the concrete cliff, nails striking sparks.

  He reached the shallow water below, crouched, his heart eerily calm, his mind empty, as if he’d been made to do this and nothing could be more natural. When the men along the rim saw that he was still on his feet, they began to cheer, and at first he couldn’t understand why.

  The next morning, he packed and took his final paycheck. At the post office, he divided his money and sent half to his family. He began hitchhiking west with what remained.

  Travel was recent in my life, the thrill of setting out still familiar. There was the first breath taken as the journey began, the expansiveness in the lungs and heart. His words recalled this for me, the freedom of movement, the hunt for simple needs—food and places to rest—and above all the realization of how asleep we are, animals in our own cages, feeding ourselves indifferently. As we explore, meals and beds are not promised but won, coming into our lives with a power like revelation. He crossed the continent, amazed at the endless variety of earth and people. He saw the Native American man trapped on a rock in the river, and he understood that he wanted to live for himself and forget the dead.

  He traveled aimlessly west and then, as his money ran out, back east. He arrived in Montreal penniless.

  “Gaétan introduced me to the man who taught me safecracking. I was good at it. I liked the challenge. Safecracking’s not for idiots. It takes concentration. It was like a game. I’d test myself. I knew I was good. But he didn’t pay much. We’d steal a thousand, and he’d give me a hundred. I wanted to go out on my own. I told him I wasn’t making much more than in the mines. He’s the one who set me up.”

  The night he broke into the sporting-goods store, he huddled in the doorway—wet streets, coronas beneath hooded lamps, no sound of footsteps. A long car with finned rear fenders passed, throwing up lines of spray. His hands were tight in his pockets, his chin to his collar, heart and mind still. He began to understand this strangeness in him, that he was at home only in uncertainty, in that place where possibility and danger extended about you like a naked plain.

  Then he exhaled, the sound loud in the darkness, surprising him. He turned and slid a flat bar from inside his coat and jimmied the lock, cracking the casing. Inside, he waited until his eyes adjusted. He crept past racks of hockey sticks, shelves of ice skates and helmets, all colorless in the dark. At the back, his hands hunted over the panels of a door. With a stab, he locked the bar and levered it. Slivers of wood crunched beneath his boots, screws trilling on the uneven floorboards.

  In the next room, past the desk, he found the safe. As he knelt, the doorway flared. He rushed out. Blinded by the brightness, he slammed into a shelf. Balls fell and bounced across the floor. Each window was a brilliant grid, red and blue eddying behind the keen light.

  He never described being arrested, only prison, the inmates no tougher than the men in his village, the constant tension, the almost-sexual sizing up as he passed cells and brushed shoulders. He hated the thin cots that smelled of sweat, the exposed toilet and the cracked sink stained from the drip of rusty water, the blood on its rim after that first fight, when he struck a man’s head against it then let the weight of the slumping body pull the knotted hair from his fist. He hadn’t foreseen that the inmates would explain his arrest, saying he’d been set up, patching theories as they pressed spoons into lukewarm potatoes.

  “That was my school,” he told me.

  Through talk and stories, the inmates taught him to pick any lock, to crack the hardest safes—they carried him beyond prison, to jewelry stores flush with daylight, to banks, and like a final secret, through steel-ribbed concrete vaults.

  Behind his voice, there was the clear sound of pouring rain, its steady beating on his roof. Outside my window, in the moonlight, the first snow flurries lazed in the wind.

  “Did you see your family again after that?” I asked.

  “One more time,” he said. “One time after that. But I wasn’t the same. I realized that I couldn’t stay. Too much had changed.”

  He was quiet a moment, his breathing barely audible against the rushing rain.

  “I used to dream of going back rich. I realized how easy it would be. I learned everything in prison. I made a plan to go straight to the top. I would do the big job and take the money and go home. I never thought about what I’d do after that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess I knew I wouldn’t go back. I knew I’d never be satisfied there.”

  “Would you go back now?”

  “No. Too long has passed.”

  “What if we went back together?”

  He hesitated. “That might be okay. The two of us. That could be all right.”

  “Where do they live?” I asked, trying to sound patient, to mask the anger and resentment that came more and more frequently.

  But he was silent. I wanted to insist, to tell him that it was my past, too, but I didn’t. From the pause, the way he cleared his throat, I knew he would ask me to come back and work with him. He did so often. I would say no, so I didn’t ask.

  CURES FOR HUNGER

  My father’s birthday was the day before mine, and I decided to call after midnight so it would be both of our birthdays. He liked finding similarities in us and, during a previous conversation, had told me that every eleven years our ages were inverted: fifteen and fifty-one, twenty-six and sixty-two, thirty-seven and seventy-three. He also said he’d come across a book on astrology in a bookstore and read some—only out of curiosity, he added, as if to keep from sounding ridiculous. He’d noticed that we were Scorpios and tigers, an
d he wondered aloud if this meant anything, though he changed the subject before I could respond.

  Leaves had fallen, winter had come early, the radio calling for a light snow. I pushed through the campus-center door and dialed from the pay phone, but he didn’t answer.

  What if he really was going to kill himself? Was college so important? The continent protected me from his life, though I hated myself for thinking this. Nothing but stories held us together, our conversations nearly devoid of the present.

  “Sometimes I don’t know what it was all for,” he told me one night. “I was trying to get away, but I never really knew what I wanted to get to. I was too busy just trying to get away.”

  Other times he laughed, recalling his wildness. I sensed in his words the drive to do something dramatic and impossible for others—to take action and say, “This is mine. I did this.” The impulse seemed true to me, to leave a mark on the world before you could think about whether that mark was worth making. Even as I wrote, I was trying to figure out what I hoped to find, why I was composing this.

  An hour later, I called again, wanting to fall into that momentary grace, our shared attraction to a life that denied nothing, that made holy the imperatives he could not begin to understand, so that I could do the same, write it with an equal fierceness.

  I called over and over from the pay phone and gave up only after 3:00 a.m., when that brief, diminishing time, which I’d wanted to gift to him, had passed.

  Two years in prison. He felt like a gambler who’d lost half the money in his pocket and was desperate to win back what he imagined was his. The lost years meant that his return home had to be dramatic. He couldn’t go with nothing to show. He hadn’t called them and didn’t want to see them until he was rich. Only money could justify his absence.

  Prison taught him the nature of the self, the way it can be shaped and hardened. He learned to like the adrenaline, to thrive on the thrill of a fight. He craved the world—all that he’d take for himself when he was free. Longing carved out an empty space within him. He felt gutted and learned to like this, too.

  After prison, as he headed west and left Quebec behind, the plans he’d made began to come apart. Rage and a nameless desperation rushed him forward. Someone only had to bump into him in a bar and he’d fight. He pulled armed robberies, but the cash was never enough. With the intention of going straight, he took a few jobs, mining and construction, in the Yukon and Alaska, but they only confirmed his belief that without crime he’d never escape the life he’d been born into. It was his wildness that repeatedly put him back in jail, for fights or reckless driving.

  After his release, he got a new social insurance card and a license with the name Gaston Tremblay, then crossed to Montana. He’d made friends in bars and prison, and they robbed a few banks. Drunk, they went into country tourist shops, guns ostentatiously tucked into their belts. They put on clothes and hats, filled their pockets with candy bars and beef jerky in front of the clerk, then walked out, waving good-bye. They ate dinners, then tore hair from their heads and threw it on the plates and said, “I’m not paying. There’s hair in my food!” They once fought an entire kitchen staff and finally ran out when the chef began swinging a cleaver at them.

  Eventually they were arrested for robbery, and he did a year and a half in a prison where local teenagers took their mufflers off and drag raced outside the walls at night to wake the inmates. He’d lain in bed hating these kids, that they saw him as nothing more than a criminal who deserved punishment, that they didn’t know what had brought him here, what he’d been running from. And yet he knew that in their place he’d have done the same and laughed over it. His stupidity and that of all people sickened him, and each morning he woke, waiting, impatient, a child again in his father’s house, counting the months until his freedom.

  One January afternoon, as he walked in circles in the yard, smoking diligently, he heard the tremulous voice of an old man announce, “I own the world. I tell you, I own it all.”

  My father turned to the man who stood in the cold with his arms spread. He shook his head. “No, you don’ own world. Everyt’ing excep’ Quebec.”

  According to my father—who told this proudly, as if he’d met a celebrity—the man was one of the last living members of the Karpis-Barker gang. He had worked for Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis, though now, when asked about their exploits, he talked about his childhood. “Oh, those days fishing brown trout in the spring, the warm spring!” He lifted rickety hands to show the size of the big one his dad caught. He had a tremendous nose and hit it each time he slipped on the ice, so it was frequently bandaged. Guards and bruisers alike loved him, and even the meanest inmate, Joe Yates, who’d knifed his obese cell mate with the sharpened rusty shankpiece of a boot, would take the old man’s elbow to walk him over patches of ice. The guards had contrived to have a fake checkbook printed up for him, and he was forever buying things.

  “How much is Quebec? I’ll buy it off you.”

  “One hundred million dollar.”

  The old man pursed his lips. “How many zeroes?”

  “Eight.”

  He wrote out the check clumsily and tore it off and handed it to my father.

  Hearing this, I laughed, and in that moment, I felt there was hope, that I could ask about his family again, about going back. But he was still thinking about the check, and he told me that he’d gotten the better deal. He cursed the Catholics, the backwardness of Quebec, and finally, that night, when he stopped speaking, I no longer had the courage to ask.

  After Montana, he crossed the border and changed his name again. He tried to be calm, businesslike in his crime, but the wildness still took hold. He pulled a few jobs in Edmonton, but worried that the police were onto him. Then his partner ran with the money.

  “That time,” my father told me, “I almost got it for good. It’s crazy how things work out—the chances I took. It’s like I was charmed. The cash was from a small job, but you let a guy fuck with you and everyone will take you for a sucker. So I went to his girlfriend’s house and asked if she wanted to get something to eat. It was winter, and there’d been more snow than usual. Snowbanks practically blocked out the sky. As soon as she was in the car, I started driving at least a hundred miles an hour. She was begging me to stop, and I said I would if she told me where her boyfriend was. She claimed she didn’t know. She swore she’d tell me if she did. She said she hated the guy, and she said some bad things about him—that he had a little dick. Stuff like that. I was going to stop. At that point I believed her. Just then we came over a bit of a rise. I barely had time to see the car accident on the road. It was almost funny. One of those funeral cars—a hearse—had hit a milk truck. All I could do was put my car into the snowbank. We went right into it, right into a field. The snow was so high we couldn’t open the doors. The engine was still running, and the heat was on. The antenna had broken off so the radio didn’t work. It took the police three hours to get us out of there. She and I made up during that time. We got along pretty well. Then we had to go to the station to file a report. There were always lots of wanted photos on the wall, and there was an old one of me, but nobody seemed to notice.”

  I could picture the fear on their faces, the car slamming into jewel blue dark and sudden calm. The headlights still shone, a faintly luminous core before them, like a diamond somewhere out there, buried in the snow. He turned up the heater and adjusted the vents. The engine chugged, the sound seeming to come from deep below them.

  I love this image, two people captured in ice, held within stillness and cold light, like characters caught, set together in a flash of the imagination. Memory holds us until we are ready to see. Speaking, he knew his words had the charm of impossible odds, the close call, the signature of magic that reminded him that his life was truly his own.

  He returned to Calgary and pulled a job with two men he’d met in prison. But he’d seen his own wildness in them and should’ve known. Escaping, they hit a patch of black ice
and went over an embankment, the police a mile back.

  The car rolled, and when it stopped, he was underneath, arms and legs broken and gasoline soaking his chest. Vehicles pulled off the road, and their drivers stood, talking and smoking, though my father tried to draw air into his lungs to tell them not to. One of his partners had struck his head on the dashboard with such force that he’d been scalped, his bloody skull exposed, his hair hanging from the back of his head. For the first time, my father was relieved to see the police arrive. The judge gave him a lighter sentence because God’s hand had been swifter than earthly justice.

  The day he got out of prison, the paddy wagon dropped him off in an alley, and the officer gave him five dollars. Then my father went to a dive hotel. He’d stashed money in the ceiling vent of the room where he’d been staying when he was arrested, and that afternoon he bought a battered truck without brakes from a farmer.

  He was ready to cross the border for good. When he’d been in the prison hospital, he’d known it was time to change. This wasn’t the life he’d been after—a tiny cell or, when he was out, a seedy hotel room or a rundown house in the suburbs, enough cash from robberies to get by. Lying in bed, he’d thought of America, so close, like the beating of a woman’s heart.

  Each failure promised a new beginning, proof that his will was strong and nothing could extinguish his fire. Was he driven by the desire to risk everything, to lose everything, to be stripped—of language and culture, of name and family—to his essence, as if there might be a self as absolute and free as the soul? Only then, when all else had fallen away, could he sense the transformation that he craved, the possibility of stepping into another life.

  He drove his brakeless truck to Tijuana. I knew his need for exuberance, for release, the impulse to freedom the same as that to fiction, the liberty to remember his life as he chose. He sometimes offered descriptions with an impetuous edge to his voice, as if seeing what he could get away with, still testing the limits of the possible.