Cures for Hunger (33 page)

He hurried off and returned with the boss, a short, slightly hunched Chinese man who watched everything with eyes as still and unrevealing as the lenses of security cameras.

“You're fine,” he barked.

“No, I'm not. I really hurt my foot.”

“No. You are fine!” he repeated as if chanting at a rally.

“I can't stand up.”

“Yes, you can!”

“No, I can't.”

I could see that he didn't believe me, that he could find no shock or pain in my expression.

The foreman, a French Canadian with a lean face and pale brown eyes, stepped to the front of the growing knot of onlookers. “Show us your foot,” he mumbled.

The employees craned their necks. A gigantic, bearded Pole came to the rear, a man who referred to himself in the third person and who was often called upon for heavy loads. “Stan wants to see!” he announced.

The Chinese before him looked like smiling children with Kool-Aid-stained teeth.

Gingerly, I removed the rubber boot. I peeled back the three pairs of socks that I wore to prevent blisters. The distended skin of my foot felt as if it might pop.

The crowd said, “Ah” and “Oh.” They were speaking in Chinese all at once, very quickly, pointing as if the others might not have seen what they had.

My foot looked like a glimpse of a murder-scene photograph on a detective's desk, or something sticking out from beneath a sheet in a morgue. The crowd parted, and Stan stepped to the front and helped me up with surprising tenderness.

At the emergency room, anxiety made sweat bead on my forehead. The doctor would see straightaway that the injury was two days old. He was a gangly Al Pacino, his breath reeking of mint as if he were a teenage
smoker returning home. He touched the taut skin and whistled, then poured Tic Tacs into his mouth and almost choked on them.

“Let's get you an X-ray,” he said between crunching. “You're not going to be putting weight on this baby for a while.”

The X-rays showed that nothing was broken, but he told me that soft-tissue injuries could be worse than fractures. I went home on crutches, with an appointment for physiotherapy and the determination to use workers' comp to finish my first real book. When I shared these plans with my father over dinner, he dropped his gaze and sighed.

“I guess you won't be training,” he said.

“I'm not even supposed to walk.”

He stared out the window and asked if I'd train again once my foot was better.

“I don't know. Maybe I'll go traveling then, or else I'll just write.”

He nodded, but I could tell from his expression that he recognized his mistake.

 

 

Night after night, my blinds drawn, I expanded on my vision of the future, a militant world purified in a flood of biblical fire, destroyed back to its natural state, civilization ground down to a primal level, to a society of matriarchal cave dwellers.

I'd never been so happy. Society constantly hovered between fear of loss and desire for change, and I was trying to understand what it meant to believe in the world. My villains valued only themselves, their satisfaction and survival. If you believed the world was cruel and selfish, it was easy to live only for yourself. It made me think of the trailer park in Virginia, or my time with Travis and Brad, the three of us conspiring to shoplift or outsmart others, to steal whatever we could. The world had seemed a primitive place, indifferent if not hostile, willing to walk over us, and we'd just been making room for ourselves, eager to jump into the fray, to see what we could get away with.

I found myself wondering once again where my father had come from, why he'd rejected Quebec. He'd told me years before how, when he was young, he'd supported his family, working for them, keeping almost
nothing for himself. In my novel, the worst character felt betrayed by everyone he loved. Was this an accident or universal?

Each time I met my father for dinner, I asked if he wanted to read what I'd written, but he shook his head and said, “I don't read novels. I don't know much about that.” He asked if I'd like to go fishing before the salmon runs ended.

“Maybe later,” I said.

I finished the novel the night before my eighteenth birthday, and the next morning, to celebrate, I printed and read it. Shortly before heading out the door to meet my father, I threw it in the trash.

“I'm going traveling,” I told him as soon as we'd filled our plates from the buffet. I needed to live more. My book felt childish and false, lacking the ring of experience, bloated with big ideas I'd loved only in the moment of their discovery.

“When?” he asked.

“Maybe after Christmas. I'll go to California. A friend from high school is living there.”

He prodded his rice with his fork and sighed. I'd expected rage or derision, but the fight had gone out of him.

“Why don't we go fishing one last time?” he asked, the lines in his face deep, as if with grief. “The salmon runs are still on. You used to love to fish. It was your favorite thing. You'd beg me to take you. It was like the world was going to end if I didn't.”

The memory of myself as a child was startling, and I nodded, sad for no reason I could identify. I no longer thought about our past much, or anything other than my immediate goals.

“Sure,” I told him. “That sounds okay. We can go before I leave.”

He stared off. “You know, I don't regret working with fish. There's something special about them. I've always felt that.”

The tenderness in his voice surprised me, his sadness, and I recalled how I'd felt about fish as a child, their mystery.

“I don't know how to explain it,” he told me. “I'm not a writer. I just know I've always liked the water. When I was a kid, I could tell where the fish were out there.”

“Did you use a line back then?” I asked, uncomfortable with the way
he was speaking, wanting to bring our conversation back to the concrete and simple.

He dropped his gaze and hesitated. “No. Mostly a net. When I was older, I'd go fishing with a rod. But that wasn't for money. It was just to be in nature.”

“No one fished with lines when you were growing up?”

“Of course they did, but we mostly used nets.” His gaze faded out, growing distant the way it did before he told a story, and I felt relieved to see the sadness leave his expression.

“We had a small wooden boat,” he said, “and I used to go with my father on the Saint Lawrence. I'll never forget this one time. We'd just put down anchor when we saw two giant fins coming across the water—the biggest fins I'd ever seen. Both turned at the same time. It was like they belonged to the same fish. They came right at us. It's hard to believe, but these enormous black and white fish, they started jumping over the boat. I was wearing a red Canadiens sweater, and my father knew that fish often go after the color red. You could even catch some fish with just a red string tied to a hook. He pushed me into the bottom of the boat and started swinging his oar at them. But as soon as I was out of sight, they left. This must have been around 1946. He'd been fishing the Saint Lawrence since he was a boy, but he'd never seen anything like that. There were rumors that a fisherman up the coast had gone missing and his boat had washed up with large, sharp teeth stuck in the wood.”

He looked down and stabbed his fork at small shoots of stir-fried broccoli.

“A journalist came and saw us afterward, and there was a newspaper article about it. They told us that the fish were
épaulards
—killer whales. Years later, I saw a picture of the same fish, but when I read about them, the book said they were rarely in the Saint Lawrence. One time at Stanley Park I asked a woman at the aquarium, and she said that killer whales sometimes wander out of their normal territory and become more aggressive because they don't have enough to eat.”

He took a bite, then pushed his food around slowly.

The whales interested me less than my grandfather, whose name I
didn't know. When I was a boy, my father's few stories about his village always involved fights, drinking, and religion. I'd pictured weathered shacks slanting from a ridged, windy sea, or men in church, each holding a foaming tankard. He'd described a bar where a local tough, for a drink, would jump and kick the low ceiling with both feet, leaving sets of sooty boot prints on the boards. I'd stared at our own ceiling, trying to imagine how I could do the same.

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“What?”

“Quebec. Why did you never go back?”

“There's nothing for me there.”

“But you still have family, don't you?”

He waved his hand. “I've been gone too long . . .”

“Why did you leave in the first place?”

“It was backward. The church ran everything. They kept the people poor.”

“You think it's still like that?”

“No. It isn't. It's changed. But there's no reason for me to go back.”

I remembered something I'd read when I lived in Virginia. Assigned a history report for school, I had chosen Canada because I thought it would be easy. I studied
les coureurs de bois,
the hardy trappers who went against fur laws and lived in the wild. The book said that because the early French population of Quebec was largely composed of men, there was a great deal of intermarriage with the Indians.

“Do you think we have Indian blood?” I asked.

“What?” He looked up from the food that he was prodding more than eating. When I told him what I'd read, he said, “I don't think that's true.” He picked up his water and emptied it, then put down the misting glass and sighed, the skin loose at his throat as he lowered his chin.

“The older generations were hard people. You wouldn't understand. You've had it easy. When the winters were bad, the men would leave their wives and children with the food and they'd go into the woods to live with nothing but their guns and tools. They'd just hunt and find ways to survive. That way they didn't take away from what the family had.”

I was going to ask about my grandfather, but he was staring past me, above the buffet, squinting as if struggling to make something out. I turned. Over the kitchen door, a plastic sign showed a cartoon pig rolling in food: Take What You Can Eat, and Eat What You Take.

He shook his head.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“They had the same fucking sign in prison.” He shoved his plate back, spilling rice on the table. “If people are paying, it shouldn't be there.”

Without looking at me, he got up from his chair and left.

 

 

When I was six, at a time when his business was growing rapidly, he told me that a man who owed him money had agreed to give him anything we wanted from his house.

“It'll be like going shopping without having to pay,” he explained to my brother and me.

He laid out the plan. We would carry cardboard boxes into the house, and my brother and I would pillage the bedroom of the man's son while our father did the kitchen and living room. My mother refused to go.

“It's wrong,” I heard her tell him.

All the houses on the street were a lot newer than ours. My father knocked loudly and turned the handle, opening the door and calling inside with a playful voice, as if a good friend lived here—“Anyone home?”

“Hey, André,” the man said, sounding tired. Bald but for some carroty fluff, he slouched, hands in his pockets. “Go ahead. Take what you want.”

My father perused the kitchen, putting a few pots in his box. He snatched a lamp and said, “Hey, this is nice!” The man watched from the corner, and I sensed an intention to humiliate in how my father dismissed objects. He poked at some oven mitts and made a nasal sound to indicate no. He opened drawers and didn't bother closing them.

“Go on upstairs,” he told my brother and me. “Take whatever you like.”

I wanted this to be one of our wild adventures, but I knew it wasn't, that laughing now would be wrong. My brother and I climbed the stairs and hesitated at a doorway. Toys covered shelves and the floor, and a big boy with red hair and freckles blocked us and crossed his arms.

“Stay out of my room!” he shouted, but his father hurried up the stairs and pulled him down the hall by his elbow.

My brother and I went in, filling our box with G.I. Joes, Star Wars toys, and the new Gobots. The loot extolled on TV was finally at our fingertips. We took it all and went out to where my father was putting boxes in the truck, already having loaded a mini pool table. The boy was sitting on the steps, staring off, and I realized how he must feel.

I took a Gobot from the box and offered it to him.

He stared at the blocky figure in my hand, then glared into my eyes.

“Keep it, you fucking frog!”

I didn't know what he meant, but I recognized an intention in his insult that was deeper, more direct than profanity.

Years later, after my mother had left my father, during our first week of school in Virginia, my fifth-grade teacher announced that we'd be watching a video about racism.

She wheeled the TV to the front and put in a tape. The narrator told the story of a neighborhood where the English and the French didn't like each other. We saw the lives of two boys, one from each background, and at some point the French boy, with his gang of friends, jumped the English boy on his way through an alley and took his money.

“You frog!” the English boy called him.

When the video ended, I sensed all eyes on me. I'd known I was in trouble the moment it started. In a school where black and white kids fought in the halls, it seemed strange that the video would be about French and English Canadians. She'd wanted to teach the other students about where I came from, and now she asked how I felt about it. “It sure wasn't easy to get a video about Canada,” she said, “but I finally found one!”