Cures for Hunger (15 page)

Each day after school, I brought him a few pages, but soon thereafter the booths were shut down to make way for the shopping center, and the porn market dried up.

 

 

Dickie was baking cookies for an office party. It was the only thing he could cook, and he had a pair of red socks, like ceremonial trappings, that he wore for this activity. They had rubber grips so he didn't slip on the linoleum, as if baking were a high-risk procedure.

I was hanging around because I'd heard him and my mother whispering about the custody battle. Given that I'd unsuccessfully eavesdropped on the details, I thought maybe I could pry something from him.

“What do you think of the court case?” I asked while the cookies were puffing up in the oven. But he was opening a box he'd received in the mail.

“Check these out.” He showed me dozens of ziplock bags containing white powder. His father had sent them.

“Cool,” I said. “You're dealing drugs.”

“Hey, watch your mouth.”

“Okay. What're they for?”

“Peeing.”

“What?”

“Peeing while I'm in the car.”

I knew that he carried coffee cans for the DC rush hour. He also kept a life-size doll that my mother had made for my sister, but he put it
in the passenger seat so he could drive in the HOV lane. His job seemed to have robbed him of dignity. I'd always felt that adults had the freedom that I longed for, but now I was seeing how wrong I'd been.

He returned from the bathroom. The powder had turned to gel. Therefore, I deduced, the piss couldn't spill. He held the bag to the window, the sunset making his congealed urine blaze like million-year-old amber.

“Jeez,” he said, “this is great stuff.”

I wasn't sure why I was so determined to find out about the custody battle, but I sensed that there had to be more to it than what they'd told me. I almost never talked to my father, maybe once every six months, and when I did, he'd try to tell a few stories: about one of his dogs that ran away and how he spent a day wandering the woods until he found it dead next to some poisoned meat left out to kill wild animals; or about how he bought a van with an engine problem, smoke pouring from the muffler, and a stupid police officer stopped him and said he didn't want a van like that on his highway. My father told him, “It's not your highway. I'm not breaking the law, and you're keeping me from taking my van to get it fixed.” The stupid cop left, and my father kept driving the van like that, the engine using almost as much oil as gas. I always got interested if he was telling stories, but when he stopped, we didn't have much to say. He sounded tired and far away, though memories of wildness lingered, our adventures so unlike my boring existence now. No one else had seemed so full of life.

“Do you think the court case is necessary?” I asked Dickie.

“I don't know,” he said. He jiggled the bag of urine. “The military must have invented these for pilots. The military makes all the best stuff.”

Since he wasn't answering questions about the custody case, I asked what it was like to be in the military.

“You're too much of a pussy for the army,” he said.

“Yeah? Thanks. Did you ever kill anyone?”

“Just once,” he said. “I was putting up telephone poles in Vietnam, and some guys came out of the woods and shot my partner. I shot them.”

“Really?” I sat down, ready to be enthralled.

He put on his white mitts—the ones no one else was allowed to
use—and took out the pan. When he made cookies for work, he didn't share. There was no point asking, though he paraded them around. He did this, I knew, because he was itching for a fight. Someone shat on him at the office, and he came home hankering to shit on us. My mother had warned me that he had a bad temper but a good heart, as if this were a complicated medical condition.

“That's it?” I said.

“Huh?”

“You just shot them?”

“Yeah.” Then he told a story about the friend who'd been shot, how one time they were drunk and goofing off. The friend had accidentally stabbed Dickie through the hand with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

“Why were you putting up telephone poles in Vietnam?” I interrupted.

“Because they needed them.”

“Is that how you got into the phone business?”

“No. That's just a coincidence.”

I sighed. The story sucked. There was no hope of getting details—about the custody battle or my father or even what must have been a grisly war scene.

 

 

The Pledge of Allegiance and pickup basketball, pep rallies, fights and cigarettes, cheap beer snuck into football games, a black cheerleader who disappeared and haunted us from the backs of milk cartons. Life had taken a reliable shape.

The summer before ninth grade, I worked any job I could find: mucking stalls on a horse farm, checking fence lines for breaks and repairing them, bucking hay. Back among the tribal rivalries of the junior high, my improved girth won me some respect.

“Farm work will turn you into a man,” Dickie told me when I visited him in his basement redoubt, and he confided what a badass he'd been at my age. “I stole cigarettes from my dad. If I had a date, I stole flowers from the graveyard. If someone messed with me, I hit him when he wasn't looking.”

I nodded. I supposed that a sucker punch was kind of like stealing a punch.

“I have to go take care of my poor man's Corvette,” he said in an at once self-deprecating and proud fashion, and he went outside to change the oil on his Datsun, which he'd bought after selling his Camaro.

Alone in the basement, I took a pack of his cigarettes from the carton on the shelf and went up to my room, where I put it in my book bag.

After school, to undo my reputation as a bookworm, I hung out under the overpass and shared the cigarettes. I befriended Travis and Brad, both metalheads, though Travis was a redneck and Brad an army brat who bragged about unverifiable sexual exploits from his years in Germany and liked to speculate about what had really happened to Hitler's bones. I asked about their fathers. Brad's was always at a military base. Travis's was on welfare and spent his days in a room with a single upholstered chair and walls of narrow shelves that he'd built himself. He'd filled them with cassettes in plastic cases, each one containing a sermon. He sat in the chair for hours, listening to the word of God.

Sometimes, I told them my father's stories about fighting over a woman or driving a Model T on railways, then mixed and matched, taking away the Model T's brakes or having my father bite his enemy's nose. Speaking, I felt that weightlessness, the way words made everything possible. Brad and Travis saw my eyes get feverish and laughed. We got into pushing contests with our puffed-out chests, heads cocked back, about six inches between our eyes as we reeled back and forth, looking like roosters.

Weekends, we roamed the county, drinking what we could shoplift, getting into fights. We went to carnivals where the scene was so country that the babies crying sounded like part of the music. Hayseeds stumbled past with the swagger and eye-bulge squint of cartoon hound dogs as we drank ourselves sober from the spigot near the refreshment booth, splashing our faces. We stood in the shadows comparing knives.

Walking home late, I let the wind off passing trucks buffet me. When a solitary rig drew close, I timed its approach and stepped into the highway, just far enough that I was inches from it and could see the shaking,
rushing metal blur past my face. My heart hammered, a thin acrid sweat breaking on my skin and drying just as quickly in the night air.

I'd been thinking of my father more and more. In his stories, he hitchhiked or drove cross-country, took dangerous jobs in the wilderness, or fought strangers to protect himself. No one else I'd met had a life like that. If he was living here instead of me, bored of school and tired of being at home, would he just stick his thumb out and catch the first ride and see where it took him, then figure out how to survive?

Eventually, even the highway quieted but for the occasional car sweeping down from the overpass, its headlights dwindling filaments against the empty dark.

I crossed through the unlit field behind my house, having forgotten it had been bulldozed, deep trenches cut into the earth for the cement footers of the shopping center, so that I had to move cautiously, as if infiltrating a war zone.

 

 

Daily, Dickie watched me when he thought I wasn't looking. I could see him contemplating the potential excesses of my badass behavior.

“This guy started a fight,” I told him and described some pushing and how I'd held the kid's arms until he backed off.

Dickie nodded. He was clearly undecided.

“I've been there before,” he said.

He'd told me about getting in trouble at school. Detention. Drinking and fights. Soon, my exploits would match his, and he'd see me as a badass in my own right. Maybe then he'd tell me what my mother wouldn't about the custody battle. It seemed unfair that he of all people knew more about my father than I did.

Walking the halls of the junior high, I held my shoulders stiffly, an electric tension in my spine. I felt that if I looked right or left, I'd go crazy, swinging and kicking.

So that I'd be late to class, I waited in the hall, hoping the intentional tardiness might draw the girls. But everyone saw me as a bookworm acting out. The rednecks shook their heads. There was a rural caste, and I confounded them. Still, I was diligent.

I slouched in my chair, wearing two-dollar shoplifted sunglasses with the tag still on the reflective lens. I took out a mechanical pencil and leaned over to the girl next to me.

“I need my fix,” I whispered.

I clicked the shaft of lead out until it looked like a syringe. Then I slapped the inside of my arm. I had an audience now. I held the button and pressed the tip against a fat vein. The lead slid back into the canister, appearing to stab my flesh. I rolled my eyes and kicked my legs and whispered, “Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah,” before I died in a blissful OD.

“Guess what?” I told Dickie that evening, leaning against his tool shelf.

He stood at his workbench, spraying WD-40 lubricant into the receiver of the telephone. It had been staticky, and he thought this might help. “Yeah?”

“I got detention. I got paddled in school.”

“What?” He turned toward me.

I explained how the vice-principal had hit me three times across the backs of the thighs with a large wooden paddle drilled with holes for aerodynamics. School rumor had it he'd been in the big leagues.

I was about to describe my indifference after the punishment, how I'd said, “Whatever,” and slouched out, but Dickie's lips drew back from nicotine-stained teeth.

He shoved me, and the back of my head hit the wall. He lunged and gripped my throat, pinning me there. My face pulsed, the room darkening and his furious grin expanding, caught as if in a bubble. He squeezed, digging his fingers, his palm crushing down on my windpipe. My eyes strained as if they would pop.

“You little shit,” he said. “You need to learn a thing or two. If you ever act out again, I'll kick your ass.”

The skin of my face felt like it would split.

“And I know you're taking cigarettes. If I ever catch you, I'll beat you senseless.”

But he still wasn't done. I was sputtering, my tongue between my teeth.

“Not so tough, huh? When you're ready, you come get me. We'll see who wins.”

The instant he let me go, I ran up the stairs. I was coughing, holding my throat. I slammed my door behind me, then stood there, panting.

My father sent cards often, and in each he wrote his number, as if afraid we hadn't received the previous one, or maybe because it often changed. I found one in the mess on my floor.

I opened the window and let myself down, then ducked across the yard and ran to the 7-Eleven.

But even as he was answering, I realized that I couldn't ask him for help, because he was crazy. And yet how much worse than everyone else could he really be?

“Hey, Deni,” he said, sounding confused and sleepy.

“Hey,” I said. He asked how I was doing, and I said, “Okay. Everything's going pretty good. I don't like school, but things are okay.”

I spoke as if nothing had happened. If I told him what Dickie had done, he'd come here and kill Dickie. I knew that with more certainty than anything I'd ever known.

Since I had no idea what to say, I told him that I'd pierced my ear. I said this as if it were the most natural choice, and he said, “Yeah, that's popular now, isn't it?”

The truth was that a month before, I'd been at the 7-Eleven with Dickie, and the pimply cashier had a pierced ear. Dickie had told me that if I ever did this, he'd kick me out. The next week, at the mall, I had it done, and when I returned home, he stared but said nothing. In homeroom, my teacher made me wear a Band-Aid on my earlobe, and I told my father this last detail. He coughed and said, “That's stupid. What an idiot. Why do people do such stupid stuff?” Then he was quiet. He was just listening, waiting.

Pressure was building in my chest. I had so much to ask. The breathless desperation was like the desire for motion that made me walk the highway just to watch semis pass in the dark.

“Wouldn't you like to come see me?” he said.

I didn't answer. This was the question he used to ask when my mother drove my brother, my sister, and me to a phone so that we could talk to him. He'd say this, and one of us would start crying, and she'd take the phone from our hand and hang it up.