Cures for Hunger (2 page)

The dense grass came up past my elbows, and I walked ahead, my heart beating faster. Two large dark shapes lay on the earth as if crushed into it, their legs twisted awkwardly, one haggard carcass just before me, its jaws open, eye sockets hollow.

“You're not afraid?” he asked as I stood, measuring my breath, studying the second bear, sprawled on its side, a naked leg bone raised stiffly, claws struck into the rank air.

“No,” I said. The bears were dead, and this wasn't a big deal, after all. I made myself go closer to look at the fanged, gaping jaws, the rotting fur like torn carpeting over the ribs. The smell made it hard to breathe, but I took another step.

He turned and said, “Let's go.”

“I want to look at them.”

He chuckled proudly. “Come on. You've seen enough.”

I crouched. Two long curved teeth protruded from the top and bottom jaws. A few weeks earlier, in class, I'd read a story in my fourth-grade primer about the loup-garou, the werewolf. Because my classes were in French, we often read folktales from Quebec, but this one was my favorite. I'd tried to imagine the werewolf's mouth, its sharp teeth, and how my jaw would feel growing fangs as I stared at the full moon. I'd turned in my chair and made bug eyes and growled at the girl behind me, and she'd called out to the teacher, who'd threatened to send me to the principal's office as usual.

My father started walking, and I spun and jogged after him, through the crushed grass. As I followed him back across the rows, I told him the story, feeling a little breathless at the thought that what I'd just seen might not really be bears.

“There's this hunter who likes to hunt more than he likes to be in the village. He hunts all day long and he sleeps in his cabin, and he almost never goes home or talks to anyone. Then, one night, when it's the full moon, his uncles and cousins visit his cabin, but it's empty. They find clothes covered with animal hair, and there are huge wolf tracks in the snow.”

Just describing this gave me goose bumps, and I rubbed my arms, picturing myself coming to the door and pushing it open and seeing my clothes on the floor, covered in black hair.

“I heard that a lot when I was a boy,” he told me, his eyes serious, maybe a little worried.

I stared up at him, trying to match his pace. What would he look like as a loup-garou? His beard would spread over his entire face and neck and arms, and I pictured him standing at the edge of the forest beneath the mountain, dressed in torn fur, the bear skull on his head as he stared out at the valley through the ragged jaws. I knew I was seeing this wrong, that this wasn't like a werewolf at all, but my brain always played tricks on me. I'd look at something and minutes later I'd picture strange things, as if from a dream, and then I'd no longer be sure of what I'd really seen. I glanced up again. I'd expected him to say something about the story or the dead bears, but he was silent, eyes narrowed.

We made our way back toward the farm, past a few sheds that smelled of wet earth, and he stopped to look inside, as if he'd forgotten something.

“See,” he said quietly. “Each year the sheds are smaller. They rot into the ground. The valley's moisture eats up the wood.”

He spoke as if he'd already forgotten the bears, and he sighed, looking back at the rows. I couldn't remember him ever acting like this. He turned in a circle, as if to do something, glancing slowly here and there. But then he moved on, and I hurried after until we came to the ditch before the road and walked along it and crossed over a large culvert.

As we followed the asphalt, I heard the low whistle of a bicycle chain against its gears, and Ten Speed shot past with a sound like someone snapping a wet towel. Briefly, shouting voices blared from her headphones. I'd asked Ian about this, and he'd said that she listened to radio shows. We'd once found her sleeping in the hay of the barn, curled up, the voices clamoring from her frizzy hair. Then her eyelids popped open on large, dark, terrified pupils, and she sprinted past us, staying crouched low, and went down the ladder and out the door.

My father glanced behind us. A white car had appeared in the distance, and he stared, then turned and kept walking, looking straight ahead. He reached out and told me to hold his hand.

The car pulled next to us, and the darkening sky warped in the window that descended on two clean-shaven men. The driver, with eyes as blue as my mother's, said, “Excuse me. Can you tell us where André Béchard lives?”

My father squeezed my hand. He tilted his head to the side and looked at the man as if he didn't understand. Then he scrunched up his face.

“Who?” he said in a loud, ridiculous voice.

“André Béchard. Do you—”

“Oh, 'ey, dat guy. Yeah, I see 'im. 'E drive a big blue truck and 'e out drivin' in de city. Oh yeah, 'e out in de city. Dat's right.”

The men stared as he gesticulated, and it was all I could do to stand perfectly still and make no expression.

“Oh, yeah, 'e come back later,” my father was saying. “Dat's right, later.”

The driver gave me a long, searching look, and I barely breathed, certain he could read on my face that my father was lying. But he finally shrugged.

“Okay,” he said, his eyes like my teacher's when she was fed up with me. He drove off.

I gazed up, trying to understand why my father had pretended to be someone else, but he just laughed.

“I played a good joke on those guys,” he said. “But don't tell your mother. She doesn't like jokes—not the way you and me like jokes.”

I smiled and agreed, though there was a wincing look in his eyes, nothing like the wild joy of escaping the train. As we walked home along the asphalt, he stepped faster, and the hand holding mine felt hot and damp.

 

 

Often, after school, I wandered the fields alone, catching frogs and snakes, putting them in my pockets as I explored the woods along the stream. I couldn't stop thinking about the two men in the car. I was certain they were police. My father knew everything about police and had told me that they didn't always dress in uniform or drive cop cars. Whenever he saw them, he made fun of their clothes, especially the yellow stripe on one leg of their pants. He said he'd have joined the RCMP himself if their outfits weren't so ugly. Then he called them criminals in uniforms and told stories about the stupid pigs he'd fooled.

As I sat beneath the trees, a memory resurfaced: a night I couldn't place, that I was afraid to ask about. It seemed distant, like a bad dream after waking, but vivid, constant in my recollection. There was a house where we'd stayed, at a river ferry crossing on an Indian reservation. My father and mother had spoken in hushed tones. Was this years ago? I'd wanted to know what was happening, and he'd told me that a man was coming to fight him.

“I want to fight, too.”

“You're too little.”

“No! Let me fight.”

“Okay. Maybe. You just wait inside. Maybe you can help me.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling at me. “All right. I'll probably need your help.”

I sat on the couch as he paced the small living room, stopping only to draw back the curtain and look out at the gravel driveway and the dark road to the ferry landing. The man who was coming had worked for him and wanted money he didn't deserve. My father had told me stories about fighting. He always made it sound fun, and I was desperate to hit the man, too.

“He'll be here soon,” my father said and prowled back and forth, hunched like an angry dog. His rage burned into the air so that I breathed and tasted it.

But then I was opening my eyes, lifting my face from the cushion, rubbing my cheek.

He'd come in the door, dark red gouges on the skin around his eyes, the collar of his shirt torn. He picked up the telephone's black receiver. Blood covered his knuckles.

“He's knocked out,” he told my mother. “I knocked him out.”

“What happened?”

“She jumped on my back. His girlfriend—she tried to scratch my eyes.”

“She's out there?”

“I broke her jaw. I didn't mean to. She jumped on my back.”

My mother just stared.

“I wanted to fight,” I shouted and began to cry.

She hurried to the couch and lay me back against the pillow.

“Go to sleep,” she told me, her voice stern. There was a tension in her face that I knew from my father's rages, when he was angry at her, though he wasn't now.

“I didn't mean to,” he kept saying. He was holding the phone.

I understood that outside the man and his girlfriend lay on the dark gravel.

My father dialed and spoke into the phone, telling what had happened, that two people had come onto his property.

Then I was waking again. Red and blue lights flashed outside,
rippling in the folds of the curtains. My father was putting on his jacket, the door opening, cold night air and the smell of the river washing into the room.

 

 

After the fight by the ferry, there'd been a visit to court, my brother and I neatly dressed, our mother grim and silent, trying to keep us quiet, giving us the candy she usually forbade, rotting out our teeth and bones, turning us into retards.

Maybe the police had come to the valley because he'd beaten someone up again. Or the train engineers had complained. But now that I was listening and watching, I realized that something had changed, my mother withdrawn, my father—when he was home—like a watchdog in the seconds before it snarled. If I could read minds, I might make sense of the shouting that woke me at night, the slammed doors, my mother crossing the house, naked but for a blanket wrapped around her, telling him to leave her alone.

Sometimes the fights were obvious: he got angry when she cooked strange meals like boiled oranges and rice, or he told her to stop nagging him for having shared his vodka with me. He'd let me have a swig on a fishing trip, and, proud of how much I could handle, I'd snuck more, the bottle lifted above my face, a shimmering bubble rising with each gulp. My brother called out to my father, who snatched it from my hand. I became drowsy and passed out, but at school I bragged that my father had let me get drunk. My mother turned the color of chalk when she heard me say this, and my father later reminded me that drinking was one of our secrets. But everything was becoming a secret. Even most of their fights were mysterious. They just had to look at each other and they started yelling.

So maybe she knew. Maybe she'd discovered he was in trouble. I wondered how long it would be before the police returned.

 

 

We were driving to get the mail, the five of us, my father at the wheel, my mother holding my sister on her lap, my brother and I wedged in between.

Large, distant mountains stood at the horizon, the highest already white. A few rusty leaves still clung to the roadside trees, and as we drove, sunlight broke in along the clouds, flashing over the hood of the truck.

The post office was a two-story building next to the muddy slough near where I was born, just outside the valley. A brass bell rang when we opened the door. The owner, a soft-looking, bespectacled man who lived up a set of creaky stairs, was reading the paper. He got up from his stool, pushed his glasses high on the bridge of his nose, and gazed at the wooden pigeonholes on the wall. He took down a sheaf of letters.

I followed my father back outside and down the steps. He stood in the sunlight as he tore the envelopes open. One held a flowery card. He stared into it. I'd never seen him get mail like this, and I stepped in close but still couldn't make out the words.

“What is it?”

My mother laughed. “It's from his other family.”

The skin of his neck flushed. He didn't appear to breathe.

“What other family?” I asked. I had no idea what she meant, and I looked up at him, trying to see inside the card. He never talked about his parents the way she talked about hers. But he didn't respond, and she stared at the ground and sighed. “It was just a joke. I was just joking.”

He folded the card and put it in his jacket pocket, and we got in his truck and left. But I couldn't stop wondering what had made him so angry. We often received cards from my mother's parents in Pittsburgh, but this was the first time I'd seen him get one. Though I knew he was from Quebec, he almost never spoke about where he'd grown up, other than to say, “My brother and me, we beat up all the kids in our village, so you and your brother should stick together.” And then he'd look a little angry, probably because of all the fights he'd been in.

It was frustrating. I knew almost nothing about him. Why hadn't I realized this before? Did he keep secrets from me the way he did from her? The only time I thought about where he came from was at school, because that's where we spoke French and often read about Quebec. My mother loved French but didn't speak it, and she told me that my father grew up speaking it even if he almost never did now. He claimed it was useless, but she insisted on making us learn it. Though
French classes weren't offered when my brother started school, they were the year I began.

That evening, as I did my homework, I couldn't stop trying to make sense of the card and his other family. I approached the chair where he watched TV.

“
Est-ce que tu peux m'aider avec mes devoirs?
” I said. If he checked my homework and spoke in French, I might figure something out. Maybe there were questions I could ask in French that I couldn't in English. Besides, I was always curious to hear his voice change.

“Okay,
viens,
” he told me, but as soon as my workbook came into his big, dark hands, he furrowed his brow. His eyelids drooped, his expression guilty, as if he'd lied. He hunched in his chair as I rattled away, explaining the assignment. When I stopped, he made a suggestion on how to write a sentence, but I was pretty sure he was wrong, and I corrected him.