Cures for Hunger (20 page)

We paced a bit as if making a serious decision, as if he might tell me something. A map of the airport was set into the wall, and we stopped before it. He lowered his head, looking at his shoes, then glanced quickly at my torn jeans. He drew in his cheeks as if to spit, but swallowed.

I felt dizzy. This wasn't what I'd imagined. I forced myself to stand straighter. He had to realize I was no longer a child.

His expression became impassive, his eyes collecting information in their steady, nondisclosing fashion. It was a look of strength that I knew I could quickly master.

Outside, a misting rain was falling.

“That's my truck,” he told me. He motioned with his jaw to a red and gray GMC.

“I like having a new one.” His lips hinted at a smile. “Having a nice car is like wearing a good suit. If you want a loan or you want to be trusted in a deal, people see your car and they know you're making money.”

The inside smelled of cologne and vaguely of fish. As he drove, he talked about music. He said he liked what was new, what was popular, and had the same tastes as young people.

Going a little too fast, he steered the truck through scattered traffic, then jerked the wheel and took us onto a spur and into a sluggish procession of wet cars.

“I need to check on the market,” he said. “Then we can go eat.”

The barn-shaped building's parking lot was mostly empty, a line of
broken flowerpots against the wall, an old woman in a mustard trench coat shuffling in circles, searching for change.

As we walked through the doors into the airy space of glass displays and food stalls, I thought to mention Granville Island, where he'd once had a shop. The babble of scents—bagels and flowers, seafood and hot dogs and bread—recalled my brother, my sister, and me running between booths.

“Deni,” he said, “meet Sara.”

A young woman stepped away from the stainless-steel counter, blond, thin-boned, and petite, round sapphire earrings a shade darker than her eyes. He put his hand on the small of her back, and his quiet demeanor, the vague sense of a hidden fragility, vanished. He stood, chest lifted, eyes no longer veiled but like a flash of light on dark water.

With a snap, she pulled off a yellow glove and shook my hand, her fingers clammy.

“How was your trip?” she asked.

“We'll need to get Deni settled,” he interrupted, and she smiled thinly, as if humoring him.

“Bill is at the delivery door,” she said, and he hurried to the back of the shop and went just outside. She and I stood awkwardly, not looking at each other as we listened.

“Where do you want this?” a man asked, his voice unfriendly.

“Leave it here. I'll get my son to help me bring it in.”

“Huh?” A pause. “This on credit again?”

“I'll have money for you at the end of the month.”

“Fine, fine . . . How's the shop?”

“Business picks up closer to Christmas.”

“Always does.”

At the display, a woman with a purple head scarf scrutinized a tray of raw squid, squinting as if reading fine print in the mess of tentacles. Sara glanced at her, then looked at me. She held my gaze a little too long.

“We'll get you settled,” she said and winked, then turned her slight hips to the counter.

I wasn't used to being flirted with so openly. Her smile had told me that with her, everything would be easy.

“What do you think?” my father asked, walking back from the door.

“What?” The pulse in my jaw resonated with another one behind my knee.

“What's funny?” He frowned, glancing about. “This shop took a long time to put together.”

A few salespeople at nearby stalls were looking over. Suddenly, there was that pent-up energy I remembered from childhood, the sense that he'd do something wild. He approached and in a quiet, tense voice explained how long it took to get a business going again, after the separation, the bankruptcy.

“Your mother left me with nothing,” he said. I considered telling him that she'd left with nothing, too, but my head hurt, a buzz in my ears like the static of a rapidly turned radio knob. He was proud of his shop and thought I was laughing at it.

I glanced at the display coolers, the white ice with salmon, green crabs, orange-mesh bags of mussels. Maybe the store wasn't as fancy as those he used to run. I wasn't sure and I didn't care. I simply commanded my face to show nothing.

He was studying me, searching. He dropped his gaze. He stood like that, lips pursed, eyes on the floor. He picked up a quarter.

“Anyway,” he said and let out a sigh. “Come on. Help me bring in the delivery.”

The rain had churned into fog, inseparable from the sky. The light was fading, and the damp chilled my lungs. Beneath the ice in the crate shone the dark eyes of small metallic fish.

 

 

The restaurant had a neon sign—Knight and Day. A mermaid coughed irregular spouts into a fountain, her breasts mossy, the water brown. Drizzle gusted. The mist had disappeared into night.

As my father crossed the parking lot, he checked his pockets for his keys. The image jarred a memory, a younger him doing the same. But the man I remembered was large and strong. My father seemed to hover between two selves, like a TV screen caught between channels.

We sat at a window facing the street. The emptiness of the dining room gave it a tawdry look, a few hunched men eating late dinners alone. The air of tension around my father returned, vanished, and returned again, like the flickering of a fluorescent bulb. Despite my age, he ordered me a beer. This was where he went after work, he told me. He knew the waitress by name and commented on her legs. She had bleached hair and blue, bruised shadows under her eyes from running makeup.

“You don't like talking about women?” he asked when I glanced away.

“I just don't think she's pretty.”

He laughed. “Of course she's pretty. Look at her. Either a girl's pretty or not pretty. She's pretty. Maybe you're too young to know.”

He didn't speak for a moment, and I said, “I want to hear about the banks.”

My voice ended in a croak, as if these were my dying words.

“What?” he asked.

“The robberies. You know, Bonnie tried to make it sound bad—”

He slid his place mat back and forth, staring at it, breathing through his mouth, lips slightly parted and jaw pushed forward. He did this because his nose had been broken so many times. As a boy I'd occasionally imitated the look, hoping for the sculpted chin, the furrow below the bottom lip like the mark of a finger pressed into clay.

And as I had when I was a child, I studied him. Whatever had taken place earlier, the confusion and discomfort could be wiped away like mist on glass.

“I'm proud,” I told him with a confidence that surprised me. “I'm proud to have a father who's done incredible things. I've always dreamed of being like that.”

“I don't know why in the fuck she ever told you,” he said. With his fingertips, he continued to slide the place mat back and forth.

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“Robbing banks.”

His gaze was briefly sad, but he said nothing, just sighed and shook his head.

“I don't care about all this other stuff,” I told him. “I want to hear about that.”

“What other stuff?”

“The market. It's boring. I want to hear about your crimes.”

I moved my hand dismissively, and he stopped fidgeting. He thrust his jaw forward, narrowing his eyes. Then something changed, the way the mood around an actor might shift after he's asked to get into character.

“You want to hear those stories?”

“Yes,” I said. “More than anything. They're what matter.”

His jaw had gone a bit crooked, and he was squinting one eye, working something out.

“I don't talk about it anymore.”

“But it's amazing.”

“That's what you think.”

“Who wouldn't?”

“A lot of people.” He scrutinized me. “I know why you want to hear about it. You're like me. You have that in you. Some people are just like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You'd be good at it. Not everyone is. It takes something. You have to be a little crazy. You have to want that kind of life and the way it feels. It's scary, but it's a rush, too. You have to like that. I think you probably would.”

“I want to hear about it,” I told him, more softly than intended, as if coaxing.

Very faintly, he nodded. “What do you want to hear?”

“Just a story. A good one.”

“A good one?” He considered. “There was this one bank job in particular. In the pen, that's all the guys talked about. The big job. The last crime. Once you did it, you'd never have to work again. Everyone had ideas. Everyone was a fucking genius of crime. I didn't know anything until I went to prison. I was just a kid. It was like going to school, and there were all these men talking about the big job. I didn't go in with plans, but once
I was there I learned fast. The big job was all that mattered to me. I imagined one perfect crime. It's like I'd have been famous if I did it. It's stupid.”

“It's not stupid,” I said, thrilled that he was talking to me like this, like a man. “Did you do it?”

“Yeah. I did a perfect one, but someone else fucked it up. It was the biggest one. It was the craziest. The best aren't always the craziest. But this one was. I planned it for a long time.”

“Could it still be done?” I asked.

He shrugged, then stared off, as if composing himself or remembering or simply accepting that he was going to tell something he hadn't spoken of in years.

“There were three of us—me, my partner, and his girlfriend. I set the whole thing up. I knew more than they did. It was in 1967, in Hollywood. I rented a surveillance apartment across the street from the bank. I planned the job for the night LBJ was in town. He was giving a speech, and I knew that all the police would be looking after him.”

His words confused me. I'd seen him as wild and careless in his risks. This calculation was new, and it felt dangerous.

“For a week before I broke in, I parked a box truck in an alley by the bank. I parked it right next to a window with bars in it. The night LBJ was giving his speech, I backed the truck up to the window and went into the box and cut the bars. No one could see me because I was inside and the window was hidden by the back of the truck. And if anyone did come by, they didn't think anything because the truck had been parked there all week.”

As he spoke, he reminded me of someone doing math, first considering an equation, staring off blankly, trying to work it out in his head, then seeing how it could be done, certainty and confidence returning to his gaze. Telling the story, he seemed stronger than he ever had, as if this were who he really was and his words were bringing him back.

“I used a gas-powered jackhammer to blow a hole through the vault. My friend was with me, and his girlfriend watched from the apartment across the street. They had walkie-talkies, and whenever she saw someone, I stopped jackhammering.

“The hole I made wasn't very big because the concrete had bars running through it. I could blow out only what was between them. Then I pulled myself in. I threw all of the money out. But when I went to leave, I couldn't. It's hard to explain, but the jackhammering made a grain in the concrete that pointed inward. When I tried to crawl out, it hooked on my clothes. I didn't want to tell my friend, because with half a million in the truck, I was worried. I took off my clothes and put them through the hole. Then I pulled myself out. I had scrapes everywhere. I was covered in blood . . .”

He paused, swallowed, and looked down, his expression confused, as if he were struggling to connect his life now to his past.

“Right before we left, we smashed open all the safe-deposit boxes. That was probably the only dumb thing we did. We already had a lot of money.

“But the police found out it was me. It wasn't my fault. It was my partner's job to make sure the surveillance apartment was clean. His girlfriend and me took the money into the country. She had a gun so she could feel safe, and he should've been ten minutes behind. Only thing is, he got nervous about the apartment and was afraid we'd left prints, so he decided to set fire to it. I don't know what the fuck he was thinking, because the police would see right away it was connected. We'd already cleaned it once, and he just had to wipe the knobs down one last time if he thought there were fingerprints. He could have splashed soapy water. Instead, he poured gasoline on everything.

“In the kitchen the gasoline dripped down to the pilot light. The whole place went up. I don't know how he didn't get killed. His eyes got burned. That's the only serious thing that happened to him, other than getting arrested.

“I guess the police made him a deal, because he told them everything. I already had a criminal record. All the police had to do was get my files and fingerprints. They sent pictures all over the country. It was about a year before they found me in Miami . . .”

He looked up and studied me, his eyes moving in slow, barely discernable increments. All this was bigger, more complex than I'd expected, more businesslike. He spoke of his partner as a disappointed employer
might of an employee. And yet I was relieved that my earlier impressions were false. He was more than he'd seemed to be.

“Never repeat any of this,” he told me, his voice stark, his eyes on my face—“not to anyone. Nobody ever needs to know what I've done.”