Cures for Hunger (14 page)

When the silence lasted almost a minute, I hit the accelerator on the remote control.

The engine made a zinging sound, the car banged into a wall, and my mother screamed.

I stuck my head out the door and looked at them and said, “Heh, heh.”

“Outside! Go outside!” she shouted.

Dickie was smiling his yellow teeth at me, but his eyes were as still and unentertained as nailheads.

“Boys,” he said, and cleared his throat and swallowed.

Evicted, I took my remote-controlled car into the early evening. I revved it along the street, making it do swift 180s and 360s.

Normally, I didn't think much of the toys. They arrived, and I played with them until I got bored. But the car impressed me, its engine powerful, and I knew that my father had gone out of his way. This bugged me. If he really was bad, then why should I accept these presents?

More than six months had gone by since we'd left, and I'd never imagined that my mother would find another man. Whenever I thought of my father, I got angry, then remembered that I loved him. What was he doing now? Living in the same house, watching TV by himself, eyes cold and unfriendly? An image came to mind of him in a field, standing expressionless like a statue I'd seen in a book on archaeology, a figure alone in a vast desert, the face almost worn away. Nothing about him had ever made sense. He was too hard to think about, and I wanted to forget him. But the red car zoomed along the street, hopping when it struck cracks. It was a pretty amazing present. Why couldn't he be all
good or all evil, like in a fantasy novel, not this mishmash of confused feelings?

A hunched, slightly bowlegged boy approached, head swiveling as he looked for the source of the car's shrill rev. His hair was buzzed close in the front and at the sides, long in the back. His squat face, blemished and sprouting a patchy beard, made his bug-eyes seem all the more prominent. Dickie must have looked like this when he was a boy.

He stopped, his gaze following the zigzags and straightaways of the red racer, his head moving like that of a cat watching a bird.

“You're gonna give me that car,” he blurted.

“What?”

“I'm gonna take it.”

I pushed the antenna down in the handset and went to stand next to the car.

“My dad gave it to me,” I said. “You're going to have to fight me if you want it.”

He appeared to consider this, his little whiskery face chewing at the thought.

“Well then,” he said, “I'm gonna go get my daddy's gun and shoot you.”

I picked up the car and ran. I entered the trailer as Dickie and my mother were kissing, one of his hands reaching into her blouse.

“They're going to shoot me!” I shouted.

I raced for my room, leaped into bed, and closed my eyes, clutching the car, its hot engine against my chest.

CROSSING WIDE SPACES

Not long after my mother met Dickie, we all got hepatitis A from devouring a dip that had soured for days on my aunt's table. While my mother was at work, Dickie showed up and took us to his house, jauntily saying that we'd be better off under his care. That evening, she picked us up in a fury, hair disheveled, the first pallor of illness in her face.

“How dare you take my children without my permission!”

“Hey, hey, I'm sorry—”

“No, don't you think for a second you know what's best for them. If you want to help, you ask me. You call me. I'll tell you where they belong.”

He kept saying
please
and
sorry,
something my father never would have done. I expected her to throw him out, but he stayed, taking care of us, doing what she asked. Not long after, we moved in with him, into a brick rambler near Bealeton, a town that was little more than the intersection of two highways, a 7-Eleven, and a makeshift flea market with booths of pirated heavy-metal cassettes, secondhand tools, and Elvis memorabilia. Thirty feet of lawn separated our house from Route 28, and the fields beyond our backyard were overgrown, strewn with trash, and slated to be razed for a shopping center.

My mother, who'd never married, because my father had refused, tied the knot with Dickie in a courthouse pit stop, their only expenditures a ring and a new dress. Over the next three years, she accompanied him to annual sales conferences in New Orleans and Ocean City. He had two weeks a year for vacation, and we visited his family farm near Canton, Ohio, where his nephew had his uniform number shaved
into his crew cut and I learned to make a muffler out of beer cans. The men fished at night, drinking as they jacklighted carp, shooting them with a bow and arrow. Whenever I expressed boredom, Dickie handed me an ancient bolt-action rifle and sent me to eliminate groundhogs, whose holes could break a horse's leg, though the pastures had long been unused, given over to a few rusted oil jacks that wearily raised and lowered their prehistoric birds' heads.

The only constant those years was the van. We didn't eat meals together, so we never seemed a family more than when we were on the road. If Dickie drove, we became prisoners, the van suddenly a box, a fight brewing, electricity in the air as before a summer storm. But like my father, he couldn't handle it, complaining that the wheel had too much play and felt like driving a boat. My mother sailed it between homes and school and work, used it as a bus for a day care where she worked, and refused offers by a local mechanic who wanted its massive engine for his race car. Her obese coworker at IBM broke the back of the passenger seat, and from then on we drove with my mother sitting up and the passenger reclined, our conversations looking like therapy sessions.

Sometimes, from the back, I stared down on cars piddling along behind. One was a state trooper's on Interstate 66. Remembering my father's stories, I gave him the finger, and he pulled us over, inspected the van, and questioned my mother about its origins and registration.

Often, though, I waited for the feeling I loved: not just the motion of the highway, but a luxurious sense of loss. Sitting in the back—always in summer, with a window open, air whipping through and stirring up dust—I smelled the places we'd lived, the hay and grain for the farm, the stacks of fresh pine for building stalls. As we traveled, it seemed as if, for as long as I could recall, I'd wanted to set out and never return.

 

 

When I was thirteen, I walked to school, relishing this time alone. After rainy nights, passing cars fanned moisture against my face. Or warm afternoons, I took a shortcut home through farmland, breaking dry stalks in my fingers, staring out over yellow fields gone to seed, the tall, rangy trees on windbreaks like images from the African savannah.

But wandering the halls, I cautiously eyed the clusters: rednecks and metalheads, preps and nerds, army brats with “Nuke Kaddafi” pins on their jean jackets. Sometimes I hung out with white kids, sometimes with black kids. Eventually, they all told me I was weird and to go away. My mother's talk about purpose made me surly. She'd forced me to take French 1, and even though it was ridiculously easy, whenever the teacher asked me a question, I'd say, “I don't know,” then shrug and look off. I had no idea why I'd even learned this language that my father hated or what it had to do with his life in the first place. Nights, I dreamed that long black hair covered my body and I played football, though in reality I couldn't. My mother had banned me from violent sports not only because it was for brutes but because we had no insurance.

Only when I read or wrote did I feel calm. Was it like this for my siblings? My brother played video games as soon as he came home from school, his blinds drawn, his room a dim cavern. My sister sang behind her closed door, listening to the radio.

It seemed as if none of us had stopped changing since we'd crossed the border. My mother was different each time I blinked: cutoff jean shorts, a yellow halter top, a tight perm, then, before a dinner with Dickie, a narrow blue dress with heart-shaped mesh that showed a hint of cleavage, her hair wavy. The next morning she'd have on pleated trousers and a tight-waisted blouse, a steel barrette at the back of her head. Sometimes she talked differently, laughed differently, as if trying out a new voice.

“You all have a purpose in life,” she reminded us when she convoked an evening talk—a recent idea of hers, since communication was important.

As she had for years, she spoke not to middling students but seminal thinkers. My sister had music in her blood. She could pick up an instrument she'd never seen and play a song as if there'd been cellos and pianos in the womb and she'd been waiting all these years to find them again. My brother was a computer genius. He'd befriended a few rural pioneers of the Commodore 64 and scored among the best in the state math exam. Myself, I'd be an archaeologist and learn as many languages as Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered Troy.

Later that night, Dickie disagreed.

“I had lots of dreams, too,” he confided, “but that stuff just doesn't
happen to everybody. I wanted to be a pilot. Look where I am now. Besides, you're lazy.”

I shrugged. Normally I argued with him, but maybe he was right.

“I saw you rebuild that radio the other day,” he said. “You'd be a good mechanic. You should talk to the guy at the junkyard and see if he'd hire you.”

Life was so pathetic that I couldn't formulate a counterargument. In the new age, everything would be better, but I was getting tired of waiting for Armageddon.

 

 

“I have something important to say,” my mother told us at our next evening talk. “There's a custody battle between your father and me. He's trying to get the right to see you, and I've offered reasonable terms. But he's refused, so I'm asking for full custody and no rights for him. I don't trust him. He might take you away and run off.”

She paused and very slowly looked at each of us in turn. “How do you feel about this?”

None of us spoke. Whenever she mentioned my father, a sense of danger hung about us. He seemed unreal now, like something from long ago, the memory of a summer storm with its hail and hot rain and thunder. When I thought of him, I had the same disorientation that comes after a dream—not sure what day it was, what time, the uneasy sense that there was something I was trying to understand. At the borders of my life—in the highway fading to the gray smudge of distance, in the junior high rules that could be broken with a curse or a fight—I sensed him, as if he stood just out of sight, waiting.

The next morning, in English class, we had a substitute teacher, a goateed young prep from DC. I was reading a book about the discovery of ancient cities, and after class, I loitered and told him that I planned on being an archaeologist and a writer.

“No way, man,” he said, “don't do that. Archaeology is boring. A friend of mine's at the Smithsonian now, but he used to be in the desert. He said it was the most boring thing ever. He was out there four years, living off warm martinis and antidepressants.”

Though I guessed antidepressants might be like antifreeze, I was pretty sure that martinis were a sort of rodent—maybe small ones. I'd read about early North American fur trappers shipping martini pelts back to Europe, and I had no intention of eating such things just so I could be an archaeologist. Besides, I liked writing better.

In the clamor of the cafeteria, I sat with my notebook. I didn't know how a custody battle worked, so I couldn't write about it. I'd tried a story about running away and daydreamed constantly about fleeing school or home, but I realized I had no idea what was out there, what would really happen when I left.

My mother and brother often exchanged fantasy novels or knocked at my door, offering me tomes with half-naked elfin princesses on the cover. Like drug pushers, they kept at it until I got addicted and had to finish each epic series with them. There was always an impending confrontation between good and evil, a world that would be made barren and empty or that would be born again, and this appealed to me, that something definite would happen. But above all, in fantasy, you could just set out, and life was a little like my father's adventures: strangers and random fights and new landscapes. Briefly, my mind wandered to what else he might have done, to what could possibly make my mother feel that he was so dangerous.

Mandy, a pretty brunette with feathered hair and a short rollerskating skirt, sat nearby, and I told her I was writing a fantasy story about a wanderer with no identity. She just forced a smile, lifting her cheeks as if squinting into the sun, then turned away.

Maybe my mother was wrong and I didn't have a gift or purpose. I wanted to do something, anything. But even if I wrote my story now, nothing would change.

At the next table, two boys were talking about sex, one saying that the girl, a cheerleader, had put her feet behind her head. In my notebook, I began to sketch a tiny naked woman even though I'd probably never see one in the flesh. Ever.

After school, while other boys were busy destroying their uninsured knees playing football, I sat outside, penciling more naked women, dark little graphite V's between spread legs, tits like U's with a dot in them.
The women were pretty realistic, I thought. I was getting excited looking at them. Maybe this was my gift.

On my way home, I passed through the makeshift flea market. When I stopped to look at Quiet Riot and Metallica bootlegs, the man there noticed my notebook. He grabbed it and called the guys manning the booths of tools and Elvis statues. They laughed and snorted, pausing to wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands.

“I'll give you ten cents for each page you bring me,” the bearded, overall-wearing proprietor of the tool booth said. “But I like variety, so keep them good.”