Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

Is this what my father had been looking for all those years before, when he had gone into the shelter, denied his body its sustenance? To see things more clearly, he’d said. To see what must be done. All that he had taken with him on his journey had been pulled from that brook, filling enough jars to keep him alive for forty days and forty nights, until his blood ran pure as the snow-chilled water.

  I remembered, on one of our last hunts together, how my father had led my brother and me into the forest, marched us for hours along skidder trails, across the ridges and down the draws of the country he had logged for cedar. I’d been pleased to be in his company, believing we were making headway, working toward common ground. I meant to show him what I was made of, prove to him my stamina, demonstrate the accuracy of my eye. What came instead was the moment he had planned all along: Greg and I had not been paying attention, he said, had been depending on him for our sense of direction. There was a lesson we must learn. “Now,” he said, pointing at me, “you will lead us out.”

  How could I? Walking the long miles in, I had noted only the lean of his back, the easy gait that carried him effortlessly over logs and through the thick buckbrush and vine maple. I had not marked the dog-legged red fir, slashed a V in the bark of pine, bled the carmine vein of wild plum. Clouds melded the sky to metal; there was no sun to guide my way.

  We wandered for miles, my father pretending the role of meek and willing follower, while all the time I inwardly raged. Finally, as the pewter sky darkened to lead, I’d turned to him in defeat.

  “I don’t know where we are,” I said. “I don’t know which direction is right.”

  He’d only nodded, moved toward a log where we might all rest.

  “You look down too much,” he said. “You haven’t been watching.”

  He pointed the ember of his cigarette toward the horizon. “You’ve got to see it all, forward, backward, sides. You get lost in here, it’ll be a long time before someone finds you.”

  I’d lowered my eyes, ashamed, fearful that he might see what I was thinking: You could. You could find me.

  “You won’t always have the sun, or even stars. You have to make your own map. Memorize it.” He rose, stretched the stiffness from his back. “Now,” he said, “let’s go home.”

  And we followed him, my brother and I, feeling his largeness before us, knowing we’d been lost and then found, each of us full of anger and gratitude, love and hate, and an awareness that wherever we walked in the world, we would carry this truth within us.

  I lay in my bed and heard my father’s voice and the voices of others come back to me—the same voices that had promised consequence and retribution, that had prophesied my harvest of pain. What the voices offered now was not condemnation but the harsh encouragement that was also my legacy, the rough prod that had boosted me up from the playground when the bully knocked me down, that had made me despise self-pity and believe that I could withstand anything with the sheer will of my body and mind. It was my grandmother’s voice, pesky and absolute, jolting me from morning dreams because there were chores to be done, joshing me from bouts of poutiness with a chuck under the chin. “Possum, possum, ’coon, ’coon,” she would chide, and I knew this meant that I was “puttin’ on,” like a possum “sulled up,” only pretending injury. It was my father’s voice, unmoving in the face of my announcement that I could not walk another yard, or stand another allergy shot, or produce the answer to yet another of his obstinate questions: “Yes,” he’d say, “you can.” And that was the end of it, and I would go and do what I thought I could not, and I would feel strong. It was my mother’s voice, when, ill with fever, I had fainted in the hallway. “Kim, what’s the matter with you! You get up from there!” she’d demanded, enraged by her own fear. And because she believed that I could rise and walk, I did.

  There was some of this yet in me, composed of a faith I could not unlearn and a peevish belief in my own survival—and something else: my inherent willingness to disobey. I had suffered the consequences of disaffirming the authority of the church and my father. I had been shunned and shamed, prayed for and denounced. Always, I believed, I could survive.

  That one fragment of will I had kept hidden from David came back into me, lodged itself in my breast. I saw clearly that things could not continue this way, but I had little sense of how they might change. Before, my boyfriends and I had “broken up,” given back class rings and sobbed our regrets for a night or two. But I knew I could not simply walk away from this. All I knew to do was confront, and that is what I planned, knowing that even as I rose from my bed and began gathering my clothes, I was risking something I could not name but recognized—the rage held deep, boiling, boiling.

  I did not doubt that I could run from David. I did not doubt he would find me.

  IT WAS DARK when I left the apartment. I breathed in the crisp evening air as I slid behind the steering wheel of my Capri and coaxed the engine to turn over. I’d driven little in the last several months, always a passenger beside David. The car itself had fallen into disrepair. I pumped the gas pedal, worked the clutch, then remembered the linkage was broken and I had no reverse, only first gear. Straight forward, then, across the lawn and onto pavement, ten miles an hour, the small car screaming its resistance. I’d already called Les, asked if I could borrow her Mustang to get me where I needed to go.

  It wasn’t until I got to Les and Marc’s house that I realized the time: after midnight, and Marc had to rise for work by five. He came into the kitchen, shirtless and barefoot, listened as I explained my intent: to find David, force him to face me.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Marc asked. I’m not certain how much he knew of the truth of my relationship with David—perhaps only enough to understand the danger. “Do you want me to go with you?”

  I should have a man with me. I could see that’s what he was thinking.

  “No,” I said. “Thanks.” I wasn’t sure what I was doing or why I was doing it, but I knew I wanted to do it alone.

  They watched me pull away, standing on the porch and waving good-bye like worried parents. I turned onto Thain, swung east. In my mind there was a map I would follow, a logical progression from one point to another.

  I drove by his mother’s house first, looking for his pickup, then headed toward downtown, cruising parking lots along the way—the Strike and Spare, the Sidetrack, the Arbor, the Bull Room, where Charlene and I had once drunk every last drop of rum the bartender could pour, then down Normal Hill to Modern West, with its enormous dance floor and fancy-booted cowboys who knew how to put a shine on the two-step. I searched the littered alleys behind Curley’s and Effie’s and the Silver Dollar. I turned on the radio, then clicked it off, distracted by the music: I wanted nothing to interfere with what might lead me, what sounds I might catch coming in from the night. I rummaged through Les’s ashtray for anything worth smoking, lit the stub of a Winston, and kept driving.

  Colored lights flashed through the shuttered windows of the disco; I could hear the steady bass beat as I checked the lineup of cars. I recognized a number of the vehicles, including John’s four-wheel-drive, and for a moment I felt the pull of the known and familiar, the safe passage his strength might offer. I idled past the entrance, turned left, and caught the one-way over the bridge across the Snake into Clarkston, Washington, where the bars stayed open longer and people came to end their nights.

  Smitty’s Barrel, Der Litten Haus, the Jade Lantern. The Red Shield was the last chance for liquor if you were headed west out of town, and it was there I found David’s pickup. I threw the Mustang into park and nearly ran before catching myself. I had to remain calm.

  I entered the restaurant, through which he’d walk to get from the bar to the parking lot. I was shaking and winded as I moved to the counter. People turned to look, then slid their eyes away. I didn’t care that my hair and clothes were mussed, that I’d forgotten to put on lipstick or blush. The waitress kept her eyes lowered, busying herself with my flatware and water. I
ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich, suddenly ravenous for food. She didn’t ask me if I wanted a drink but simply nodded when I ordered a double gin-and-tonic.

  It would be a lie to say I wasn’t afraid, because I was, afraid in an excited, fatal way. My choices were to run or to stay and fight, and the impulse to face my enemy made my pulse race; in the mirror behind the counter, my eyes reflected back deep blue, my pupils dark and dilated.

  I felt the gin hit hard and welcome. My plate was in front of me when David came out of the bar and into the bright light of the restaurant. Another woman was with him. He saw me immediately and stiffened, then told her to wait outside.

  We were two patrons at the counter then, David and I, a tall, painfully thin man with wild hair, towering over a young woman who looked as though she, too, might be crazy. The air around us must have filled with the animal smells of fear and rage, for he was angered beyond words by my disobedience. It was the first time I had seen in him such loss of control, the only time I had seen any outward show of passionate emotion, and this strengthened my courage, for some part of the sterile mechanism that drove him had broken down.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he said. “You don’t want to make me mad.”

  He wanted to hurt me, and if it had not been for the place of our confrontation—well lit, peopled by potential witnesses—my escape may not have been so easy.

  I absorbed David’s anger, met his eyes and would not look away.

  “You fuck with me, Kim, and you’ll regret it. You don’t want to know what I’ll do to you.”

  I was beyond that now, beyond caring. Others were watching us, and I saw the burly cook come from his kitchen, wiping grease on his white apron. David saw him, too, and backed slowly away from me, never taking his eyes off mine until he reached the door, which swung shut behind him in a rush of cold air.

  Yes, I assured the cook, I was fine. No, the man wasn’t bothering me. I pushed back the sandwich I hadn’t touched, drank what was left of my gin. The waitress slipped the tab into her pocket. I nodded my thanks, turned, and walked out the door. I knew David was already gone, and maybe I knew it meant nothing.

  The way back to my apartment was a straight shot across the river and down Main Street, a right on Twenty-first, up onto Thain, another right onto Eleventh. I stopped by Circle K, asked for a pack of Virginia Slims, though I only had half the change that it cost me. I told the clerk I was low on money, that I would drop off the remaining quarter the next morning. She shook her head, placed the cigarettes in my hand, patted my fingers.

  “I’ll catch you next time,” she said, then turned to the three boys who had followed me in, mumbling their orders for chew.

  The smoke was a good thing, filling my lungs, dulling the hunger. Back in the apartment, I emptied David’s clothes into grocery sacks, threw his belongings out on the porch, the last thing the owl, which came down heavy in my arms and smelled of dust. I clicked my fingernails against its glass eyes, felt the dry roughness of its beak, imagined its push from my arms were it to come alive, take flight, disappear from the lights of the city.

  I thought about the past summer, when David and I had gone into the woods to scout deer for the coming fall. The day had smelled of grasshoppers and licorice; the cicada hum of insects trilled the air. We’d been following an old skid road, mostly grown over, idling down an easy pitch in granny gear, when, from the dense brush to our left, a whitetail doe jumped onto the road, then bounded up and across the ditch and into the woods on the other side. Behind her came a late fawn, still wobbly on its delicately pointed hooves. The fawn froze in front of us, confused by the noise, the sudden absence of its mother. Its ears were translucent in the sun.

  “Watch this,” David said.

  He opened his door quietly, stepped out, slid the rifle from its rack in the back window.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t shoot it.” It was out of season, too young, too small. There was no reason.

  He smiled at me. “I’m just going to scare it, watch it run.”

  He leveled the barrel, clicked off the safety. I felt my pulse quicken, a shout rise in my throat. I had not wanted to see its fear, the terrified jolt of its body. The fawn stood still, unsure of its direction, turned its head toward us just as the rifle fired.

  There was the shock of the noise, which I’d expected, but instead of scrambling for safety, the fawn had leapt up, then crumpled in a dervish of dust, its spine severed.

  David looked from the fawn back to me, and I saw that he was genuinely surprised: David was an expert rifleman; he never missed his mark. He’d intended only to send the bullet under the deer’s nose, encourage it to entertain us with its awkwardness and fear. It was the fawn’s error, the fawn that had made the fatal move.

  David scanned the road behind us for anyone who might have seen. He ran to where the fawn lay, picked it up by one thin leg, threw it high and far into the sumac and young lodgepole. I remembered the fawn’s graceful flight through air, so golden and limber, the slow, undulate circles.

  David would not meet my eyes. Had he felt it even then, my growing resistance to him? We had left that place, gone deeper into the woods, until David felt we were safe from detection, from any connection to the body of the fawn that someone might find while hunting squirrels or mending fence. The evidence would all be gone by now—the flesh eaten by coyotes, the joints separated and dragged and gnawed clean of the tender meat; the tufts of hair blown free, gathered by birds to darn their nests; the bones whittled by mice.

  I stroked the owl’s cool back, felt the dry quills beneath the satin feathers. I held it for a moment, then leaned it against the outside wall of my apartment, where it sat like a gargoyle, guardian between two worlds.

  I THOUGHT I KNEW the dangers of opposing David. I believed I could bear the consequences. When he’d threatened me at the bar, I’d felt even stronger, more determined, and I knew that this is what I must do. I called his mother, said that he should come and get what was his.

  The next day I watched as he carried the boxes and bags to his pickup. I didn’t flinch, didn’t offer a word of apology or regret. He came out of the bedroom with the shotgun John had given me, said he’d take it for what money I owed him—the rent, the food. He left me with less than he’d found me with, and that seemed right.

  Why, then, having made such a clean break, did I call him the next week, agree that he could come over for dinner? I know I was crazy with loneliness, but that is not enough to explain the risk I was taking. I can almost believe that I knew what it was, why it was I who must initiate some final scene: because he was not finished with me. I wanted control, owning what I could of time and place. If I called him to me, he could not take me by surprise.

  Or was there part of him, part of who I was with him, that I could not let go of? Something more than simple dependence, something less than love—a last fix of the intoxicating rush of the forbidden he had introduced me to, a good-bye kiss to my bittersweet shadow.

  I cannot cheat here; I do not mean to be coy. Let me play it like a movie, then, because that’s how it exists for me, a reel that can be run forward and back and wraps around on itself and begins and ends and begins again.

  A man comes to the door, and the woman lets him in. They talk, a few cool words, then she rises to make dinner. They sit together on a worn green sofa, plates of deer meat and potatoes balanced on their knees. They watch TV. We cannot hear the television or what few words pass between them. The woman drinks a single glass of the wine he has brought, but it goes to her head in a way she will remember later as odd, making her feel less drunk than pleasurably sleepy, a little giddy, high, really—the world seems a good place. He draws her to the carpeted floor, undresses her, ties her wrists and ankles, gags her with a scarf—the familiar gestures of his particular intimacy. He takes pictures with the Polaroid he has brought in a bag.

  He hurts her then in ways he has not done before, and the pain and fear cut through the feeling she has
had of floating, being coddled. She’s quit fighting the ties that cross over her back and between her breasts because she knows how they are made to tighten this way. She tries to scream. Whether out of fear that a neighbor might hear or compassion she would never assume, he pauses, lifts her to the couch, unties her, takes the cloth from her mouth. But then he hurts her again. She cannot cry. She’s tired, so tired.

  He covers her with a blanket, wraps it behind her back. He’s done with her now, she thinks. Now she can sleep. But then he lifts her and moves toward the door. Where are you taking me, she asks. There are others, he says, waiting. Others want to have her. He will take her to them.

  No.

  He hesitates in the doorway. There between the cold night and the warm room, she says it again. No. She says, I will scream. She says this without looking at him because she cannot open her eyes or raise her head, because she is so tired. She cannot be afraid because there is no fear left in her.

  He stands in the doorway for a long time, it seems, holding her like a child, one arm beneath her shoulders, one arm beneath her knees. She rests, given over now to what must happen next, and when he turns and steps back into the room she is not surprised but indifferent.

  He lays her on the couch. He kneels down beside her, strokes her hair. And then he tells her, makes this promise: just as he has done with other lovers, he will someday come back for her. Years from now, when she has nearly forgotten, when she is alone and the world sleeps deafly on, he will find her.

  He leaves, closes the door behind him in a shush of air. She is asleep before the noise of his engine can reach her, and she does not hear him pull away. The woman, who as a child could numb herself to the belt, finds that she can once again shed her skin and slip away, untethered, untouched, dreaming of nothing, gone, gone, gone to the nothing-song of air.

  I LIE AMID A DREAMSCAPE OF ASH. The smoke comes to me damp and heavy, settles in my throat, my chest, my belly. I am trying to sleep, but the forest is burning, so close I can see its aura above the dark horizon. I rise from my child’s bed and move to the open window, where I can watch the dome of sky—black, then melting to white, yellow, orange, red. I breathe in, taste the soot, almost sweet. I suck my finger, lift it to test the wind’s direction. Hardly a wind at all, a breeze coming in from the west, but any movement of air might feed the fire and cause it to run.