Cures for Hunger (34 page)

When I didn't respond, she added, “You don't want to say anything?”

“No,” I told her.

Later, on the playground, a group of boys came over, shoulders rolled forward and hands half-lifted as if to begin throwing punches.

“Hey, frog!” one of them called, then hesitated. “Are you a frog?”

“No.” I tried to think fast. “The frogs are from somewhere else.”

“Oh,” the boy said, he and his gang clearly disappointed.

After dinner on my eighteenth birthday, I couldn't stop thinking
about my father's omissions. Where had he come from? Why had he left? I no longer wanted stories about prison or his ambition to pull the big job and throw it all on the betting table; I wanted to hear those brief, muted recollections of the life he'd fled.

 

 

The highway curved beyond our headlights, following the mountain. As he drove toward Squamish, he told me how he and my mother had lived out there, in a cabin near the river. He'd made some speed and sewed a sample into the seam of his jacket, but on his way into Vancouver to deliver it, he'd realized the police were following him. He drove to a garage and sloppily painted his van green, then hurried home but came to a highway checkpoint.

“This cop, he had a sense of humor. He asked if I'd been drinking. I said no, and then he said, ‘I liked your van better when it was blue. Have a good day.' Without that tip, I might not have acted so fast. He saved me. I had my laboratory and two guns, and that night I went into the woods and buried everything under a fallen tree. The next day the police arrested me. They kept me for a few days, but they had no evidence. When I was being released, the officer who gave my stuff back started going through the box. He began feeling along the seams of my jacket, and I realized I'd forgotten to take out the speed. I pretended to be furious and shouted, ‘Are you going to keep me here another day? Give me a fucking break! You guys arrested me for nothing!' This guy just looked at me and said, ‘Okay.' He pushed everything off the counter and let me pick it up. He'd been seconds from finding the speed.”

“Do you think we could go to where you buried the guns and dig them up?” I asked, thrilled at the thought of it—the foray a mixture of old passions: crime and archaeology.

He nodded, watching the road. “It's been twenty years, but I wrapped everything in plastic. Maybe I can find the place. We can look later today.”

Until then his face had been creased with fatigue, his skin slack, but he brightened at the thought of us unearthing his old guns and laboratory.

“If we can find the house,” he went on, “we can buy a shovel at the hardware store.”

We followed a gravel lane and parked at a high embankment clearly bulldozed in place years ago to keep the river from washing out the roads.

Standing before the headlights, we attached our reels and threaded the rods. He squinted, taking his time tying the hook on, finishing long after I had. Seeing him, I remembered a night at the reservoir when I was a child, the workings of his hands as he threaded the line. He'd muttered and reached in the truck window, and the headlights came on. He'd crouched before the bumper, his hands moving in the beam, scars across their knuckles, the blunt fingertips pinching and pulling. I'd stood in the light falling past him and looked at my own hands, the soft pads, the pink rounded fingertips and my few pale scars. The memory startled me with a sense of loss, that the years between that moment and now had been a mistake, that I should have lived a different life. I took a few slow breaths and stared off until the emotion passed.

When he was ready, we climbed the embankment and followed the shore. He stepped carefully between rocks and driftwood, his head bowed. Something had changed in him, his movements slow.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I'd noticed Tylenol bottles in the truck but had thought nothing of them.

“I got in a fight the other day.”

“What?”

“With some idiot. This guy—you've met him, Tom Alding.”

“That guy?” The man was tall, not burly, but well over six feet and solid looking.

“Yeah. He tried to sell me bad salmon. We were in the store, and I smelled one. I don't know if he took me for an idiot. I guess he really needed the money. I told him no way, and he grabbed me by the neck and pushed me backward over the counter. It hurt my back.”

“What did you do?”

“I hit him. I punched him in the face and got him by the hair and kept hitting him until I had him out the door. Then I kicked him in the ass, and he fell off the porch. He had the nerve to say, ‘Take it easy.' Jesus Christ, the guy pushes me and then he says, ‘Take it easy' in the middle of a fight. I went in and got the baseball bat from under the cash register, but by the time I returned he'd run away.”

“You keep a baseball bat under the register?” I asked.

“You didn't know? I have one in all my stores.” Then he grit his teeth and said that his back hurt and he hadn't been able to sleep. He conveyed this with no self-pity, speaking harshly as if still at odds with the other man.

Dawn lightened the sky above the wide river, and its water, broken by boulders, shone silver like a long rippled fabric running on toward the mountains.

“I'm fifty-four,” he said, watching the current. “I shouldn't be fighting at my age. It's stupid. All of this is stupid.”

I nodded. I didn't like seeing him weak. It shook me in a way I couldn't explain, but I knew he'd hate me if he saw me feeling sorry for him. I realized that if I let myself worry about him, it wouldn't be as easy to leave, so I tried not to think about it, and just breathed the air off the river.

Gradually, as we began to fish, he moved more naturally. Chum salmon weren't in season, and we were trying for the rarer, smaller coho, whose meat was better. Though we occasionally hooked a large chum, we let it go and competed to see who could catch a coho. In the late afternoon, he shouted and laughed, and I walked along the riverbank to join him.

The salmon's gills pulled for air, and I crouched and looked at the markings.

“It's a small chum,” I told him.

“No, it isn't. I work with fish all day. You don't even like them.”

“It's a chum,” I repeated, gliding my finger along the scales. “Look here.”

He drew his face near, lips pursed with anger. The salmon opened and closed its mouth and snapped its tail against his hand. He reached into his jacket and took out a pair of glasses.

In the lenses, his eyes appeared large, like toys, blinking slowly. He crouched and stared, then straightened and folded the glasses and put them away.

The salmon struggled, drowning in the air, and he picked it up and carried it to the water. He eased it in and released it, then rinsed his hands and shook them dry. He told me that we should go and look for where he'd buried the guns while there was still enough light.

We followed the river in his truck. Warm air blew in the vents, and the cab smelled of the mixed, hard odor of his life, a briny animal scent of dogs and fish and cologne. A few unlit cabins stood in the woods, and we slowed at each one as he scrutinized it, frowning, before we continued on. The embankment was soon gone, replaced by stretches of scattered stone along the river that shone violet in the sunset.

He took the road slowly, gazing out, all around us naked branches reaching against the luminous sky. I'd come here with him once when I was a boy, just he, my brother, and I, and we'd camped in the same dome tent I later burned. We got up at dawn to fish, and as the sun rose, he told us that we should do this every fall. I agreed. None of us could have imagined how much our lives would change.

It was getting dark. We'd driven for nearly an hour along gravel roads, pausing at washed-out flats where the water had risen in the past and uprooted trees.

He pulled the truck onto the shoulder.

“I don't recognize anything,” he told me. “There was a big flood some years back. Everything's different now. Even the roads.”

 

 

As soon as the waitress brought his beer, he took a long drink and sighed. He said he should have spent his life in nature.

“That's all I ever really cared about. Everything else was bullshit.”

“No, it wasn't,” I said. “Come on. You've lived. You've really lived.”

He shrugged. “And what the fuck do I have now?”

I hesitated. “Have you ever thought about getting in touch with your parents?”

“My parents?” he repeated, as if he'd never had such things.

“What were their names?”

He cleared his throat. “I left Quebec to give myself a new life. Too much time has passed now.”

He finished his beer, drinking more quickly than was normal for him.

“What would I go back to?” he asked. “I quit school when I was in fifth grade. Every morning, I used to ride along the coast looking for wood that fell off barges. I fished or I worked in the fields, planting potatoes
or digging them up. When I was sixteen, I started logging on the north coast. I was younger than you are now, and I spent all winter in a camp with grown men. At your age, I was working in uranium mines and on high-rises, whatever I could find.”

He called for another beer and told me that if his body hurt it was because he'd worked too hard as a child. “It stunted my growth. My shoulders hurt. Everything fucking hurts. We used to read by candlelight and now my fucking eyes are ruined. Why in the hell would I go back? I worked and sent my money to them, and they didn't even give me an education.”

He stared past me, his cheekbones and forehead pronounced, casting shadows.

“Maybe I could write your stories,” I said, as if I had nothing else to offer.

He took a drink and put the bottle down and nodded.

“Sure. I'd like that. My stories deserve to be told.”

“They do. But I don't know anything about your childhood.”

He shrugged. “There was work. There was some fighting. There was a lot of church. I hated the church. I remember my first confession. I was a little kid, and when I told the priest I hadn't sinned, he said that everyone sins and it's a sin to say otherwise. So I had a choice between telling my sins or saying Hail Marys for lying. I made up little sins, being jealous of my brother or angry at a friend. But it was bullshit. We worked. We did nothing but work on the farm, and that fucking priest made us invent sins. We didn't have toys. All we did were chores. We got up and fed the animals and picked up wood or worked in the fields. When was there time to sin? Maybe if it weren't for him I'd never have started breaking rules.”

He hesitated, nodding to himself, his gaze distracted.

“My older sister used to walk with me to church in the morning. It was about a mile. The road was just above the gulf, and it was cold. We weren't allowed to have breakfast until after confession, so we'd walk to church, then home, then back to the village for school. My sister wanted to say her Hail Marys quickly so we wouldn't be late, but the priest
caught us leaving. He yelled at us and made us stay. The nuns at school would hit us on the hand with the strap if we were late. So we both got punished that day . . .

“But you know, that fucking priest, he lived in a big house behind the church, and he had a live-in maid. That's what people called her. His maid. Everyone knew he was screwing her. But if a girl went to confession and said she was having sex, he'd yell at her so everyone could hear. That happened to . . . to some girls I knew. I wanted to kill that son-ofa-bitch priest . . .”

He sighed. “These kinds of stories—you want to hear them?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“There's one I'll never forget. One Sunday that priest preached against adultery. A man and woman in the village had left the people they'd married and were living together, and the priest told us to pray and call down the fire of heaven on them. I snuck out of church and ran to their house. I went right to their window. I'll never forget it. They looked happy. There was no fire. I kept waiting for it to come down and burn them, and I was worried I was too close to the house and might get burned up, too. But when the fire didn't come, I knew that fucking priest was a fake. After that I never believed another word he said.”

He finished his beer. The waitress was bringing our plates, and he called for another.

“Remember how we used to talk about just living in a motor home and fishing? That's what we should've done. This business, everything, crime, all of it, it's bullshit.”

He ate slowly, searching out bits of chicken with his fork, then paused.

“Our best years were in the valley,” he said.

I didn't know how to respond. He gazed off for a moment, then looked at me.

“Promise me something.”

“What?”

“When I die, promise me you'll do one thing.”

“Okay,” I said. I couldn't recall if I'd ever seen him drink like this.

“Promise you'll bury me in the mountains on the edge of the ocean.”

I nodded. “All right.”

“No. Fucking promise. I haven't asked fuck all of anybody and I haven't gotten fuck all. So promise.”

“I promise,” I said, though I had no idea how I'd take his body into the mountains. “Why are you talking about dying, anyway?”

“People die. Sometimes you're here and everything's okay, and then the next day you've lost your health and money, and no one gives a fuck about you and you die.”

“Are you worried about dying?”

“I'm just saying that sometimes it happens. Money's always a problem. The economy is shit. It's never easy. Life doesn't get better.”