Cures for Hunger (3 page)

He lowered the book and stared at the TV. Black smoke rose from an aerial view of a city. He seemed upset, as if this were a place he knew. All around him hummed familiar danger, the electric buzz of his irritation, and I didn't move or speak.

When he switched to English and said, “This isn't a good time,” I felt relieved.

 

 

My mother had clear blue eyes, not dark like his, and silvery stripes in her light brown hair that, when she pulled it back in a ponytail, reminded me of the markings on a cat.

“Whose eyes do I have?” I asked. We were alone in the kitchen while she made goat cheese and I pretended to do my homework, my brother and sister watching TV, my father gone. I spoke as if the question weren't a big deal, though my teacher had made us read about eye color and told us that to have blue eyes the genes had to come from both parents. My mother said that mine were probably from her, unless someone in my father's family also had blue eyes, but she didn't know. I didn't bother to explain how it really worked and asked, “Why don't you know?”

“Because I've never met them. He's not close to them anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don't really know. He didn't get along with them. He doesn't like to talk about it.”

“Oh,” I said, grudgingly, surprised that even she didn't know much about him. I fiddled with my pencil and considered my workbook. “And whose hair do I have?”

“I had blond hair when I was younger.”

“And my nose.” She'd often told me that I was lucky not to have her small nose. She called it a ski jump, though I saw nothing wrong with it.

“Your nose is your father's. You have his real nose.”

“His real nose?” I repeated. “His nose isn't real?”

She was always doing this—telling me shocking things.

“He had his real nose smashed in a fight. Doctors rebuilt it and gave him a new one that's smaller and very straight. I never saw his real one, but I'm sure you'll have it when you grow up.”

I looked down at my workbook. I was sitting at a picnic table, the kind you saw in parks but never in other kids' houses. My life was nothing like other kids'. I never said “Mom” and “Dad,” but “André” and “Bonnie,” and no one I knew had changed homes so often. Every winter, we used to move to places with heat, rundown houses where my father got electricity using jumper cables, clipping the ends above and below the meter after stripping away the rubber. Summers, we'd stayed in a trailer on blocks in the valley, goats and German shepherds in pens outside, my first memories sunlit days and broken-down motors, the mountain just above us, no electricity or running water, and our drinks in wire milk crates set in the stream.

From my mother's stories, I knew she'd gone to art school in Virginia but had run away with a draft dodger. I pictured a guy really good at dodgeball, but, as if angry, she said he was dodging war, not balls. She met my father in Vancouver while working as a waitress, an encounter that—because he'd once described it to me as “She served me ham and eggs, and I left with her”—made me hungry whenever I thought
about it. After that, they'd traveled British Columbia, living out of a van and fishing, an existence I fantasized about—mornings waking up and going straight outside to the river, no bedroom to clean, no school to worry about. But they'd decided to settle down and have children, and my perfect life ended just before I was born.

Whenever I asked her questions—about war or why it's wrong—she answered carefully, explaining with so many details—Vietnam, corrupt government, the loss of individual freedom—that I didn't understand much. She never talked to me like I was a child, but as if I were a very old and serious man, and so I sat and listened, trying to remember the big words she used. And then, to let off some steam, I asked her to retell
The Little Engine That Could,
and she did, though she seemed much less interested in this than in the world's problems.

As opposed to my mother, whenever I asked my father about his family, he barely answered. “Why don't you like to speak French?” or “What did your parents do?” earned me few words: “There's no point,” or “He fished. She took care of the kids.” And then he'd tell me how he'd traveled cross-country to Calgary and gone to a party and got in a terrible fight over a beautiful woman.

“This bruiser,” he said, “was two or three times as big as me. We were throwing each other across the room. We broke the table and chairs and knocked all the pictures off the walls. There wasn't anything we didn't break. That guy was really tough, but I just didn't let myself get worried. You get worried in a fight, and you've had it. So I kept hitting him, and pretty soon everyone at the party started cheering me. They were originally his friends, but he was arrogant, and I was the better fighter. They could see that, so I guess they wanted to be on my side. Each time I got him down, I'd say, ‘Stay down,' and everyone else would shout, ‘Stay down,' but he'd get up, and then I'd hit him five or six times, and he'd fall on his ass again, and everyone would yell, ‘Stay down.' I tried to be nice, but that guy was really big, and he kept shaking his head and trying to get back up and then I'd have to hit him again. It wasn't easy, but I finally made him understand.”

By this point I no longer remembered my original question, and I
asked him if he'd had worse fights, and he told one story after another. His confrontations with bruisers, this being one of his favorite words, often had strange endings.

“The bruiser was so strong I had to bite his nose to win. We were on the docks, by the fishing boats, and I got him down and bit his nose and just hung on until he started crying. Sometimes you have to do things like that to win a fight.”

He told me about journeys, from Calgary to Tijuana in a truck without brakes, or driving an old Model T along Alaskan railways to get to towns not connected by roads. Whenever a train came, he swerved off the tracks, and afterward he and his friends hefted the Model T back on.

My favorite was the time he and a friend were driving through Nevada and picked up a Mormon. He drove so fast that the Mormon prayed in the backseat and wept to the Lord until my father, racing at over a hundred miles an hour, slammed the brakes. The Mormon flew onto the dash, his back against the windshield so that the car was briefly dark and all my father saw was his screaming face. The friend kicked open his door and they chucked the Mormon out. The man grabbed at the earth, kissing it—“Like the goddamn pope,” my father said.

I didn't know what a Mormon was, but I'd seen the pope on TV, descending from an airplane and kissing the ground.

“I bet dogs pissed all over that ground,” my father had told me and changed the channel.

Neither Mormons nor the pope could be too bright or brave. Hearing his descriptions, I forgot about my questions and his secrets. Reckless speed and the thought of untamed distance thrilled in my blood.

 

 

The proof that his stories were true was his madness. He raced through traffic or hit large puddles with such speed that his truck appeared to have wings of muddy water and sputtered until its engine dried. Watching TV, he contemplated Evel Knievel, who, dressed in his cape and the shirt
with crossed lines of stars, jumped his motorcycle over buses. Though he calculated how difficult this would be, he preferred Houdini. Having seen a documentary on him, he discussed ways of escaping handcuffs, live burial, and torture cells.

Yet many of his exploits had involved not escaping torture but subjecting us to it. In the mall, when I was four, he'd hidden, standing with mannequins in a window, arms lifted and motionless, head cocked at an angle as he stared into space. He blended in perfectly, his posture so convincing that my brother and I walked past him repeatedly, crying as we called out his name. Only when a woman stopped to help us did we see the mannequin in the display leave its place and hurry toward us, laughing.

Or once he took my brother and me to a store that he intended to rent. Though he ran Christmas tree lots each winter, he also had three seafood shops in the city and wanted to open more. But while we snooped in back, he locked us in and hid outside. My brother was six or seven and, having taken on the role of voicing our terror, pounded on a window until it cracked. My father loomed in the broken glass. His key ring jangled against the door right before he threw it open and spanked us for acting like babies. But as he tried to strike me, I struggled and shouted, “I wasn't crying!” Even afterward, following him back to the truck, I was enraged, yelling, “I wasn't crying!” until he turned and glared at me and said, “Okay. That's enough!”

Train racing was more frequent and always fun, though he did it rarely now, unlike when I was little. Sometimes he didn't stop, just raced in front, swerving past the gate, striking the embankment like a ramp and sailing to the road with the clatter of rusted shocks. Or he waited on the tracks, though under normal circumstances his battered truck was known to stall or refuse to start. He even got out once, pocketing his keys after telling us to wait. We screamed as the train heaved into sight. We beat on the windows and called, “André! André!” until he hurried back and jumped behind the wheel and pretended to turn the key, yelling, “It won't start!” But finally the engine fired, and we screeched from the tracks.

Only later did I wonder why we loved danger so much, why my mother hated this feeling that made me happier than anything else.

 

 

Usually when I woke up, my father had already gone to his stores, and he returned after I was in bed. But some mornings before school, if his truck was in the driveway, I searched the misted rows of pines through our windows. His figure passed between them, followed by the swift movement of his German shepherds, all soon obscured by rain.

The November of my fourth grade, while he worked his tree lots, I worried that the salmon runs would end and checked spawning dates in the books I'd hoarded from the school library. He and I used to fish often, in the streams between the fields or in the reservoir outside the valley, but he had less and less time and often wasn't even around, so I couldn't ask. I lay in bed, looking at pictures of fish—the toothy great barracuda or the gaping goosefish with its antennae. Their mystery riveted me, the way they appeared from the deepest, darkest water and vanished again, how they belonged to a different world. I wanted nothing more than to catch one, for my father and me to go to the river the way we used to and stand together and then laugh over what we'd caught.

When I woke, my face was on the book, the page glued to my cheek. I carefully peeled it off and sat up. He was shouting somewhere downstairs.

I got out of bed and opened my door. No one was in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs, and I crept down, gently setting my foot on each step so that it wouldn't creak.

I went to their door and listened. My mother was crying.

“It's all bullshit,” he said.

“I saw it. It was as real as you standing here. I was lying there dead, and my body rolled over, and half of my face was rotted. It was me from a past life.”

My hand fit against the edge of the doorframe, my cheek to its cold, painted wood.

“Stop going to those things. What's wrong with you?”

“I'm not stopping. I need to figure this out. I want to know who I used to be.”

It was unfair that he didn't want her to learn more. Her description was thrilling, like a mystery in a novel. But maybe he was protecting her. That happened in stories, too. All this was confusing. I'd thought she was angry at him, not the other way around. I was so frustrated by all I didn't understand that I stomped back to my room, not trying to be quiet at all.

The next day he was gone, and she made us sit with her on the living room carpet. She wanted to teach us something special she'd learned. We sat cross-legged and closed our eyes, and she told us to calm our minds and look inside until we saw a white light. The white light was our soul. This, she said, was called meditation.

I rolled my eyes in the dark, then opened them. My brother and sister sat, my mother, too, eyelids settled, faces smooth. The sun descended against the mountains, the fields already in shadow, the last flare of daylight in the dirty window glass. I closed my eyes again, and there it was—the glow, a pale thumbprint in the dark substance of my mind.

That night, when she came to say good night, I told her.

“I saw my soul. I saw the white light.”

Tears came into my eyes, not from sadness but the spinal thrill of mystery—all that could be known and discovered. She knelt by my bed and stroked the hair from my face.

“I'm proud of you,” she said. “I want you to keep looking inside yourself and to tell me everything you see.”

 

 

My mother often talked about purpose.

“You all have one,” she said, driving us home from school, staring off above the glistening, leaf-blown highway as if we'd keep on toward our purpose and never return.

She told us that our gifts helped us to understand our purpose. Since my brother's and sister's report cards held stars mine lacked, they were clearly gifted in school. In particular, my sister's gifts were singing and, when necessary, punching boys, and my brother's were math and
behaving. He was also gifted with an obsession for space travel and Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and he played so many hours of
Tron Deadly Discs
on his IntelliVision that his thumbs blistered.

Though I'd tried my hand at creating sculptures from trash and even made dolls with my mother's old maternity underwear, stuffing them with cotton and twisting them the way clowns did with long balloons, none of this was appreciated. The sculptures returned to the trash, and the dolls, shortly after I gave them to the neighbor's toddlers, unraveled and were left on the roadside so that it looked as if a pregnant woman had been carousing the valley night after night.