Cures for Hunger (28 page)

“I thought I might have seen some little horns,” Dickie said.

The man finished chugging. “Yeah, it could've had tiny antlers.” He crunched the empty can and tossed it behind him.

“Looked like a doe to me,” another hunter said, pushing plastic bifocals up his nose. He held a half-rolled
Playboy
magazine.

“I thought it might've been a little buck,” Dickie pressed on, but everyone lost interest and wandered back to their bushes and trees.

We left soon after. Dickie told me it wasn't worth staying, that those fools had ruined everything. This had been my only experience deer hunting. Now he hunched before the power lines, hoping for a buck.

I'd be sixteen soon.

Leaves fell, ticking away the seconds.

 

 

I blared music—Metallica or the Rolling Stones—and read whatever I could find:
The Stranger, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises,
interplanetary sci-fi, a fantasy series with another elusive Dark Lord whose henchmen seemed more threatening than he did. As the characters traveled to East Egg or the mountains of Spain, or across monster-inhabited lands and eerily desolate solar systems, I relished their freedom.

Then, finally, my birthday came, and I had my driver's license.

I did a quick reckoning. Of the few things in my room, only the schoolbooks, some copied cassettes, and a few changes of clothes were mine. It would all fit in the blue three-hundred-dollar Honda my mother had found.

I twisted the stereo's knob. The plastic speakers rattled against the floor with Megadeth's bass line. Dickie had hardly spoken to me since I returned, barely looked at me if we passed each other. But when my mother told him that I had my license, I felt the atmosphere shift. He'd been my age once, and he knew his duty.

The guitar riff had risen to a wild pitch when he threw the door
open. His eyes weren't furious, the drama scripted. It was a prophecy whose edicts we—youthful hero and dodgy lord of darkness—were destined to fulfill long before we met.

“Out!” he shouted with perfunctory rage. “Just get the hell out!”

He seemed afraid, yelling drunkenly before scurrying down the basement stairs.

The narrative of exile was mine. If I stayed, I'd be no different than everyone else, lacking courage. Sameness seemed like a disease, or a form of retardation, like not hitting puberty.

“So, yeah,” I said that evening over dinner, to the parents of a classmate I'd called from a pay phone, “he kicked me out. He's a drunk. I doubt my mom will stay with him . . .”

But when I called my mother later, she tried to convince me I was wrong.

“He said he didn't kick you out!”

“Well, he did.”

“He didn't mean it. I talked to him. You can come back.”

“No, I can't. I'm not living in that house with him. You're not even happy . . .”

Her silence told me that I was right about one thing—she'd rather not be there either. It wasn't that Dickie wanted me gone. He wanted all of us to disappear, and she knew it.

 

 

From couch to guest bedroom I went, consuming food, books, and the sitcoms other families watched, laughing with them. I mowed their yards, chopped firewood, and washed dishes. I loved the car, the smell of sunlight on the cracked plastic dashboard, the taste of dust when I ripped down dirt roads.

Until this point, the weeks had been predictable, unlike this satisfying challenge of finding a place to sleep, of measuring the days when a friend said, “My parents agreed that you can stay over until Wednesday,” and another offered me a basement couch for the weekend. The details of survival, of getting enough food, of telling stories to parents that won me further invitations, of being among strangers, talking, doing chores,
finding odd jobs on farms—the sense of action, of achievement—nothing could have made me happier.

When I didn't have a couch, I lived out of my car. I got a job mucking stalls and another washing dishes at Pizza Hut, where I subsisted off mistaken orders. In January, I moved in with a friend who had an apartment, and changed schools to be nearby, but the apartment ended up crowded with cast-off youths jockeying for the bathroom, for the stale pizza in the fridge, for places to sleep. Three months later, after a dispute, I went back to my itinerant life.

Half-asleep, often late and disheveled, I rushed to school each day from a different direction. In science class, as we learned about the origins of life, I wondered where the shift had occurred, from one protozoan digesting another to an organism just longing, staring at the horizon, wanting to feel fully alive.

The highways to school or work or friends' houses seemed to pulse, to rumble with the arterial thrill of my blood. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he left Quebec. Sometimes he came to me, his wild joy when I raced through traffic, or his rage when someone confronted me. Why did he seem to hold the secret to what I was looking for?

My life was building to a crescendo, I told myself. With each curve of the highway, I felt that I was arriving, only to be disappointed when nothing changed.

 

 

One afternoon, I was driving down a hill on a country road that ended at a T where another beaten strip of gravel followed the wooded shore of a small, rocky river, when my brake pedal went soft. I slammed my foot two, three times, but there was only a hollow chopping sound, like a hatchet striking dry wood. I threw the gearshift into first and popped the clutch, and the car jerked, the gear whining as I slowed. I spun the steering wheel before I reached the T, and came onto the road sliding sideways. Then I slammed the gas, gravel rattling against the undercarriage, and the right tires bumped the raised grassy shoulder before their treads caught and shot me forward.

I eased up on the accelerator and coasted, then switched the ignition off and let the car putter and jerk to a stop. I got out and stood and caught my breath. Crickets whirred in the tall grass, and somewhere, behind the few faint sunlit clouds, a jet rumbled.

I went to the front and knelt. Brake fluid dripped from the burst caliper, and I sighed and sat against the bumper. The dust that I'd stirred up at the T was catching up like a slow shadow, drifting over the car, speckling the paint.

I didn't have enough money to repair this, and between work and school and the houses of friends where I commandeered the empty bedrooms of older siblings who'd left for college, I had to drive constantly. Briefly, I found it hard to swallow or breathe. I told myself I was fine. I could handle this, enjoy it, even. I'd driven a bike without brakes in BC, and my father had traveled from Calgary to Tijuana in a truck without brakes.

I walked along the road to clear my head, then turned. The paint along the front edge of the Honda's hood and roof had long ago worn away, as if from a sandstorm. At a glance, no one would know that it lacked brakes. The emergency didn't work either, but I could stop by downshifting hard or cutting the engine.

I got back in, started it, and practiced accelerating then stopping, seeing how long it took after I switched off the ignition. Putting the car in first gear also worked. So long as I didn't tailgate or come up fast on a stop sign or a red light, I should be fine.

By the end of the day, I felt exultant. I understood what my father must have experienced crossing the United States this way, testing himself.

Just before sunset, I pulled into the driveway of a girl who'd invited me to dinner. She was a senior, and in the carefree energy of that last week of school, the sun a growing presence in the blue, humid sky, she'd invited me over.

“Do you want to sleep here tonight?” she asked as we ate canned ravioli, only the two of us at the table. Her long brown hair lay against one shoulder, and she wore a blue summery dress with tiny white flowers on it.

“What about your parents?” I glanced around the empty house.

“Don't worry about them.”

As she explained the plan, a state trooper pulled into the driveway, and I almost jumped out of my seat.

“That's my stepfather,” she said. “He doesn't care about anything. He won't even notice you.”

He came through the front door in uniform, didn't say hello or look at us, and prepared a sandwich in the kitchen with brisk, silent motions. His gray face had a metallic tinge, his chin protruding more than his small nose, as if to hold the strap of his round state trooper's hat.

I said good-bye to her and drove to a nearby church, where I parked as she'd instructed. When it was fully dark, I crept back through the woods, pausing just beyond her yard to survey the windows. Then I moved quickly to the basement door and let myself inside.

But the tryst lacked heart, her plan a little too smooth in its execution, and our passions muted so as not to betray my presence. Lawmen seemed far scarier than criminals. Still, I did my best. Later, as she snored softly, I stared at the ceiling, planning, thinking through the next steps. She tried to draw close in her sleep, but I pulled away. I'd had a few flings over the past year, but survival overshadowed romance, and if someone held on even a little tightly, I panicked and fled.

Now I had to decide what to do once school let out. I was running out of avenues, nearly penniless, my car without brakes, its engine knocking, the muffler coughing black smoke. I hadn't called my father since I left, but he might understand. I'd never managed to hold all the different versions of him in my head: the reckless, entertaining man I'd known as a boy; the criminal I'd imagined; or the fishmonger, racketeer, and thug.

Maybe I could go back for a few months, for a breather. Then I could escape again, stay moving. He'd realize that I was living as he had. His stories of travel still inspired me, and I saw myself in them just as I'd once imagined bank robberies, the raised pistol as motionless as a planetary body, or the sudden dusk of shot-out lights.

When I woke, dawn hung like sea scum in the glass. I dressed and crept into the empty basement, the house silent but for the gnawing of
carpenter bees in a beam above the door. I eased it open. This part scared me, the thought of her stepfather dressed for work, gun on his hip as he had his coffee and looked out the upstairs window. My exposed back tingled as I high-stepped across the yard, into the woods.

When I made it to the church, my pant legs were wet with dew. I swung the car door open and sat inside and started my homework. Sunlight spilled over the forested horizon, making the nerves behind my eyes pulse, and a family of five large, ragged stray cats returned from a night of hunting to their home beneath the church's foundation. They sat just outside, nuzzling each other with scarred faces, their calico tufts brilliant in the early light.

 

 

My mother was waiting in the parking lot outside Pizza Hut, her van door open. My shift had finished, and I glanced around to make sure that my co-workers couldn't see me.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I'm fine. Why are you here?”

“I wanted to check on you. I didn't know how to get in touch. You should call more.”

“Listen, I can't talk now.”

“I just wanted to know if you're finishing school this year.”

“Yeah, I am. I'll be fine. I have two days left. It's easy—too easy.”

She stared at me, her gray hair pinned back. She had one hand on the door, her sleeve rolled to the elbow, her forearm finely muscled.

“I'm not moving back,” I told her.

“I'm not asking you to. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to stay with him either.”

“So what will you do?” I said, suddenly worried, and yet angry at her for making me think of anything but myself.

“I don't know yet. I'm figuring it out.”

“I might go back to André.”

“Have you been in touch with him?”

“No, but I think I could be.” I didn't tell her that my car had no brakes, or that I was sleeping at a friend's house. I'd stopped seeing the
girl. She'd told me she felt I didn't need anyone, that she couldn't get close. A mother of a friend was a guidance counselor. She'd read an article I'd written for the school paper, and when she'd found out I was living out of my car, insisted I stay with them.

“Well, I guess you're fine,” my mother told me, and we spoke a bit longer, mostly about my classes, before she said good-bye. She gave me a hug, pulling me close.

When she let go, I glanced to make sure that my co-workers were still in the kitchen.

Her van lumbered into traffic and sailed off, and I drove slowly until I was past the stoplights for which I had to turn off the car and downshift. On a country road, coasting over hills, I tried to decide. She'd trusted me. She'd let me take chances and go back to my father. Having fought for her freedom against him, had she recognized my own need? Remembering this gave me confidence, made me feel that whatever happened, I'd be fine.

I parked at a pay phone. This wouldn't be a surrender. I'd tell my story, and he'd want me to come back. Moths fluttered about the lit panels of the booth as I dialed.

“You're doing what?” he said when I told him how I was getting around.

“That's what you did.”

“That must've been in the early sixties. Things have changed. You don't drive without brakes now.”

“Well, it's working for me.”

“So,” he said, “what are you doing? Where are you living?”

“With a friend.”

“I'll give you work. Just get on a bus and come back. I'll send you the money. Is there a Western Union near you?”