Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  “I didn’t want to have to do it,” he said. “I got lucky. My transfer papers came through the next day, and I was sent from Tacoma to Vancouver. If they hadn’t, I’d have killed him. Prison’s about honor. That’s all you have. If someone says he’ll kill you and you do nothing, you’ll be killed. Someone will do it. You’ll become a target.”

  His voice was severe, his breathing loud and ragged.

  “You know, I dreamed that stuff forever. I’ve seen a lot of bad things. I saw that guy get scalped in the car wreck. He came out of the backseat and hit his head on the dash. It peeled his scalp right off his head. I guess I got it worse. I ended up under the car. There was nothing good. Nothing worth remembering. The pen was terrible. There were men in there for raping women and biting off their nipples. We spit on them. They couldn’t be put in with us, because we’d kill them. When we served food in the line, we spit on their food and on them. We just kept spitting until they were through. I was in there for honorable crimes. I was respected.”

  He stopped speaking, just breathed hard. I couldn’t help but wonder what of his past he was leaving out. What was the truth? He’d served little time relative to everything he’d done. My frustration only grew as he spoke. I was sick of this, of how little we could actually say to each other.

  “Shouldn’t the sentences have been longer?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

  “No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Most of my crimes they could never pin on me. But police want to make deals. They need to close cases. They agreed to reduce the charges if I claimed a few robberies and gave them some information. Criminals always take advantage of the police bureaucracy like this.”

  “Did you have to tell them about your partners?”

  “No. It was never anything serious. They just wanted to close cases.”

  The intensity of my anger surprised me. It was the conversation itself, that we were discussing this—like this—that I had no tenderness, no way to voice sympathy or sadness. I knew with absolute certainty that he’d hate me if I did, if I made him feel weak. What was the point of all this talk? So he’d stay alive a few more days and I could put together his fractured life, writing it just to see and feel all that we’d lost? What else was there than to test limits, to keep sharing adventures? Not even the truth mattered.

  “So you never ended up killing anyone?” I asked quietly, at first not sure what I wanted, then realizing that I’d said this to hear his remorse, his pain, to see if I could make him admit even once all that he’d ruined.

  He didn’t answer right away, maybe surprised that I’d asked again after so long.

  “It’s—it’s complicated. Sometimes on jobs, things happen. But I never went in planning to. I never wanted to take away someone’s father. I made that my principle . . .”

  I listened, waiting for him to finish.

  “I should let you go,” he said. “It must be late there. We’ll talk tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

  Pages turned and I had a sense of understanding, like a surge of adrenaline, but just as suddenly it faded. I searched through sentences that blurred, pages turning faster and faster, the dark ink of words washing over my face like rain.

  Wind drove against the walls, rattling the windows, and I woke. There was the distinct sound of icicles breaking in the eaves, falling along the side of the house.

  I got out of bed and sat at my desk. I stared at the dark pages of my notebook, their empty outlines. How much of his life had he invented? Had his shirt clung to his back, itching, his shoelace too tight on one foot as he walked to the bank and pulled on the mask? Had every sound outside his window at night made him think of men watching, ready to dismantle the world as it turned in his head? Would I see myself in the rain, a baseball bat bumping my leg as I walked—or a tailgate crusted with ice and fish blood as I tallied illegal pounds, the dip toward the skyline as the sun unplugged the night and drained it away to show the filth that lay beneath, the river’s edge like solder beneath the mist, beyond the trees—and find something redeeming?

  His stories of crime didn’t haunt me, just simple images: a day I followed him through the rows of pines, his hands half-open against his jeans as he walked, and I asked why he didn’t cry or if he’d ever cried. He’d told me that I shouldn’t, and I wanted to understand how it was possible not to cry when angry or sad or hurt. He stopped. “I don’t cry. Men don’t cry,” he said. “I have work to do. Go back to the house.” I flushed, too furious to speak, tears coming into my eyes, embarrassing me and making me hate him all the more. I turned and started walking away, but he’d seen my face and he called for me to stop. He was looking at me as if confused, as if a thought had just occurred to him. He stared, his brow furrowing, cheeks lifted. Was he struggling to say something? I stood, waiting, and he said, “I’d cry if something happened to you, so be careful, okay?” And then he smiled, as if this were a joke, and we both laughed. He waved and I started back across the fields toward the house.

  Why hadn’t this world lasted? Was it his restlessness or the constant fight in his eyes, as if he was most himself when trying to overcome someone or something, or to set himself free? And yet he’d tried, transforming himself into a businessman, opening seafood stores and selling trees, and at one point he could even boast the largest Christmas tree lot in BC’s lower mainland. But he’d always seemed to be leaving, uneasy in any one place, and when he told stories, I’d felt, from the way he laughed or the eagerness in his gaze, that he’d soon be living these adventures again.

  Once we went fishing in the Nicomen Slough, near where I was born. He let me row downriver as he set up the lures. Then we drifted and fished. The sky was a field of gray, and the wind churned the water, small waves slapping the boat’s hull. When needles of icy rain fell, he began to row. We’d drifted far, the bridge a thread of shadow. I didn’t think we’d get back. He put the rods in the bottom of the boat and pressed the oars rhythmically. I huddled into my lap as the wind swept spray into our eyes.

  After he put the boat in the truck and tied it down, we walked to a diner across from the landing. He sat at a booth and I went to the bathroom. My numb fingers couldn’t get the button back through the stiff jean, so I held them under hot water, too proud to tell him. When I came out, my hands burning with renewed sensation, he had two coffees waiting. He’d never let me have coffee. It was a light chocolate brown and, in my mouth, creamy and rich. He watched me with pride, and I had a sense of all that he knew and how similar we were. The storm blew against the windows, and his fingertips fluttered the edge of a napkin as his eyes focused beyond the glass, on something far away.

  He called just before midnight, having forgotten the time difference. I apologized to my landlords and switched to the phone in the living room. I asked if he was okay.

  “I’d like to disappear sometimes,” he told me. “I don’t want to weigh you down with this, but after your mother took you away, I planned to kill myself. I didn’t because I worried that you’d think I was a coward. But you understand it’s not cowardly?”

  I swallowed a few times. What was he asking me?

  “I do,” I said.

  “I was afraid if I told you, you’d be upset and it’d interfere with your school.”

  “I want to know. It’s important.”

  He cleared his throat and asked, almost childlike, “Do you think it’s wrong?”

  I wished I could see his face, read the intention in his eyes. How could I make this decision—how could I tell him to give up or go on suffering, waiting?

  “You have to understand that it’s not cowardly,” he told me, “what I want to do.”

  “I do,” I said, absent of emotion, set adrift.

  “I worried that if I told you, you’d be upset . . .”

  “I wanted to know,” I said. “It’s important.”

  I moved my lips as if to speak but hesitated, and he sighed and said, “I was thinking maybe you c
ould take some time off. You could come out here and help me, and maybe we could get the market going again. In the summer, we could rent a cabin somewhere and do some fishing. We could get a motor home and just travel and fish.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said too quickly. “Listen, I really can’t—I don’t want to work in your business.”

  I shifted the phone and rubbed the hot lobe of my ear, digging my fingertips into the skin as if to wake myself. I wanted to ask him how he’d thought his life would end after all he’d done. But I said nothing, and he told me, “I understand. But maybe in the summer . . .”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” I wished I could pause and answer more carefully, but I couldn’t imagine going back. I liked who I was becoming here. I’d worked so hard for it and didn’t want to get stuck in the life he’d created. Still, I silenced my thoughts and forced myself to stay calm and keep the conversation going. I said, “I’ve been writing all of your stories,” but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I wanted to hear more. He’d already shared so much in a short time, urgently, as if only when he finished could he die. And yet I knew that we’d never finish, never come to a place of real failure, or that of our shared pain. I wanted to be angry at him for what he was, for what he hadn’t been able to be, for us, for our family. To do this, to believe he was wrong, I would have to renounce what I most loved.

  “Good,” he told me, after a pause, softly. “I like that you’re writing them.”

  I thought of all he’d described, journeys that never quite linked up, and how badly he’d wanted a new life. Had he learned to live for the pleasure of hunger alone—for challenge, for winning, for escape? Could this be it? Hunger for the unattainable, for what you will never have and what will never disappoint you. Hunger for solitude, where no matter how you grapple with yourself, you will always be victorious. Hunger for intensity, a sensation like the seed of all fruit stripped of its colorings and shells, made the same, so that whatever has been lost can be gained again in something else, so that nothing is desired for what it is, only for a fleeting moment of connection, of recognition, before it has been expended and cast away. Hunger for truth, for love, for God, for a single thing that we can trust because it does not seem of this world. Hunger for the perfect pleasure of wanting, a hunger that lasts so long it can no longer be cured in the ways we are told it should, by the simple joys of life.

  He spoke as I carried the phone to the window. The moon lit the clouds. The unreal past was there, winters returning, blown across the yard in gusts and flurries.

  THE LONGEST HIGHWAY

  After classes let out and five months after his death, I drove to Virginia to work construction and thaw myself in the sun.

  I was house-sitting for a friend, and one evening I visited my mother where she lived near the Appalachians. Large, thick-bodied moths battered the windows with powdered wings, startling our reflections as we sat at the table. The sweltering dark came through the screen door, crickets chirping, the faint, distant echolalia of night birds.

  “I want to talk about André,” I told her.

  “I don’t think about him anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t do any good.”

  “I want to hear how you saw him—what you remember.”

  Her eyes were pale blue, the skin around their edges slightly pinched as she scrutinized her hands, strong and tanned from garden work. She rubbed one along her arm. She’d never been a storyteller, reticent in that Scottish way, and only through casual disclosures had I come to understand her: her anger at the US during the Vietnam War, the time she’d seen Jimi Hendrix play in a college basement before he was famous, or the Guatemalan boyfriend she’d had in DC in the sixties, a man from a powerful political family who’d wanted her to move to his country. She’d shown little need to speak of her past, so if I wanted to know something, I had to insist.

  She began to tell me the usual things: that my father knew how to live off the land, offering her the life she longed for. They traveled and fished, their freedoms mirroring, his from jail, hers from her Protestant upbringing. But when he got involved with the men from his past, she became afraid. He left with them, and she didn’t want to know what he was doing. She felt she could hardly step outside their cabin. She’d go to the door and the horizon would fall away, the sky empty and colorless and unfathomable, a void echoing her distrust and uncertainty.

  When I asked about his crimes, she sighed.

  “God, it’s hard to admit to myself that I was so stupid.”

  “You were young,” I said. “Besides, it wasn’t what you signed on for.”

  “No, it wasn’t. But it’s still hard to accept.”

  I asked for details of his drug dealing: the rifles and speed, the laboratory.

  “Well, he had some guns, but I never saw them. He kept everything from me. And he didn’t have a laboratory. Maybe that’s what he called it, but it was more like a kitchen. He cooked some stuff on a hot plate. It was definitely a kitchen, nothing fancy at all.”

  Only when she became pregnant did he stop. Her pregnancies were among the happiest times of her life. She loved how her body thrived. Other women she knew complained, but she found it easy, feeling alive and calm, and she believed he’d turn his life around.

  “He was extremely intelligent. It was amazing sometimes to hear his ideas. And as soon as he got into business, he was successful. Within five or six years, he had several seafood stores in and around Vancouver. He had a knack for business, and as far as I knew, everything was legal. I kept his books for him, and I saw what he was buying and selling. If there was anything else going on, he did a good job of hiding it.

  “I suppose,” she said and hesitated, “I suppose when I left him I’d finally accepted that he’d never change. He’d never be satisfied. But he was so charismatic and convincing. Most of our friends criticized me. Nobody could imagine that he was doing anything wrong. That’s why I stayed with him so long. All those years I thought he’d become a better, kinder person, because that’s how he seemed. But it was as if he had to destroy everything, as if some part of him had to make his life as bad as it could possibly be so that he could have something to fight. And even then he managed to look good to others. I don’t know how he did it.”

  “I want to find his family,” I told her. “Did you ever meet them?”

  “No. I talked on the phone with them once, but we barely understood each other since I hardly spoke French and they had almost no English.”

  “Why did he stop talking to them?”

  “He told me French families were invasive, that they’d be visiting all the time. That was the reason he gave.” She hesitated. “After we met, we drove cross-country. We went through Quebec, right past where he grew up. He kept saying how backward it was. We stopped and ate at one of the fry stands they had along the road.” She described the Saint Lawrence, the windy coast and how they’d parked to walk along it.

  “He called his parents from about fifty miles away. He told them he was in Vancouver. That night we drove through the town where his family lived and didn’t stop.”

  By the time my parents met, he had his German shepherds, one black and tan, the other black with a silver flare at the throat. He’d received early parole and lived in a van, traveling and fishing, sleeping under the stars. He couldn’t satisfy his longing for freedom.

  When he’d spoken of meeting her, saying, “I ordered ham and eggs and left with her,” I hadn’t understood what had brought them together. But maybe it’s fair to say that there are simple needs, empty spaces that must be filled.

  Twenty years old, she’d left the draft dodger she’d fled to Vancouver with, and, loving Canada, stayed. She met my father and they traveled, but eventually he needed money and went looking for men from his past. He began making speed for a friend.

  “That friend . . . ,” he’d told me, “he was the guy who got his eyes burned, the one who set fire to the apartment in Hollywood. He still couldn’t see too well. I felt
sorry for him. He had this idea, for the speed. He had the recipes and ingredients. I thought I could help him out.”

  The story lacked ballast. How could he, a man who’d brutalized others, forgive so easily? But the friend had been in his life for years, he explained. He’d been a partner in many crimes. Perhaps my father had his sentence reduced by making a deal with the police, and so maybe he had a different view on disloyalties.

  He never described the period following this clearly. When my mother got pregnant, he quit crime, not wanting another child born while he was in prison. He believed that a family would hold him in place and give him satisfaction. To make money, he began buying and selling salmon. He still had to check in with his parole officer and had received permission to visit his son in the US, but he decided to break contact and never went. He called his mother a few times in Quebec, but decided he needed a fresh start.

  “I wanted my own life,” he told me. “Too much had changed.”

  But his words didn’t ring true. That was the week before exams. I watched myself study. I was withdrawn. Daily, I walked the road to school and on occasion drove my uninsured SUV into town, usually after midnight, to the twenty-four-hour supermarket, the streets empty beneath cold Christmas skies, colored lights on a few leafless trees.

  It was always late when we spoke, his voice loud while I kept mine hushed. He told me that life was a joke. He’d been raised without education and given direction by criminals.

  “I robbed those banks in my early twenties,” he said. “I was a kid. A fucking kid. I’d do anything to start over. I wish I could’ve been you. You were always so full of hope.”

  I’d heard enough about crime, but if I asked about his family, he’d just tell me that too much time had passed, that there was no point in going back.

  “Still, I never lost heart,” he said. “I always had the nerve. I remember the last bank I tried to rob. I was with a guy who’d pulled a lot of jobs. I’d seen him rob other places. But we walked around the building, and he couldn’t get his mask on. He kept saying, “Not yet.” After we passed the door the last time, he told me he couldn’t do it. He was sweating and shaking. He didn’t know what the point was anymore. He told me he just wanted his life to be simple. We were in the alley, and he asked to be let out. That’s how it was. You could do it for years, and then the nerve just went out of you.”