Cures for Hunger (27 page)

That summer had begun with a long sigh of relief, but shortly after I'd exhaled it, I started plotting my next escape. Other students studied Chinese diligently while I wrote stories in my room and daydreamed. Before I'd left for the camp, my father told me that I still owed him that money and had to work it off. He added that if I worked for him, he'd forgive what I owed and would pay me instead.

An angry, restless sweat seeped from my pores and made the sheets cling. He wasn't going to give up. Like the irregular idle of an old engine, my heart repeatedly grew loud, then faint, as if roaming my chest. A nervous current pulsed along my spine. I got up and left the room. I sat on the dorm steps. Beneath streetlamps, the trees on the University of Victoria campus appeared golden and motionless, peaceful and indifferent.

After a while organizing my thoughts, I went to the pay phone just inside the door. My mother answered on the second ring, her voice thick with sleep. I apologized.

“It's okay,” she said quickly and cleared her throat. “I'm happy to hear from you.”

I described the camp, then brought up my plans for September.
She said that if I came back, she'd help me buy a car. She'd bought my brother a used Honda two years before. I told her I didn't like my father's life, and I asked why she'd really left him.

“Well, lots of reasons,” she said. “Our relationship might have survived if there'd been family around or even real friends. But there was no one else. He didn't want anyone to tell him how to live, or to say that he might be doing things wrong. And . . . and I guess I wanted to change and grow, and I couldn't do that with him. I had to leave.”

What she described made sense: his strange, deracinated existence. His anger had raged in a vacuum, without check or equal. No one else had seemed so free, and yet she'd felt trapped. I realized how much courage leaving must have taken. She'd tried to create all she wanted with him, but in their isolation, she'd struggled to transform her life.

Once, at the Granville Island market, when I was five or six, he'd gone outside and crouched at the edge of the quay. He held his sunglasses a foot before his eyes, peering down through them, something he did to cut the glare on the water in order to see the fish. I came out and, loving his ritual of scanning below the surface, ran to him and tried to climb onto his shoulders, jumping and knocking him forward. Though surprised, he caught himself and shoved both of us back, practically throwing himself away from the edge.

“What in the hell do you think you're doing?” he yelled. “Get out of here!”

My mother came into the sunlight beyond the market building, and I ran to her. When I could talk through my tears, I asked what had made him so angry.

“He can't swim,” she said, holding me.

“He can't swim?” I repeated.

“No, he never learned. People don't swim where he comes from. It's too dangerous. The water's too cold.”

I hadn't realized there were things he couldn't do, and I struggled to understand his confidence, how he could steer a boat or stand in a river and fish when he couldn't do this one thing that all children learned. He'd rarely shown weakness, all of us seeming helpless next to him, and only now did I realize that he might have liked us that way. It
didn't fully make sense to me why someone who'd craved freedom as much as he did couldn't see that we wanted the same thing.

Even though I knew that I would refuse to work for him, his face came to me, its disappointment and regret each time we'd met for dinner. There were so many aspects to him, so many contradictions. When I was a boy, he'd once sped his truck across a field, racing through tall, sunlit grass until he hit a hidden stump and broke not only his axle but his tooth against the steering wheel. When he came back to the house and told me what had happened, showing me the shard of tooth in his palm, I asked why he drove like that. He appeared confused, unable to explain, and he went on to tell the story again, making it sound less dramatic, as if he were just crossing a field. But I'd seen him be reckless often, and sensed how he breathed more easily in the thrill of that headlong rush. This had seemed normal, the dangers never real to me. Riding my bike on the narrow road, I swerved in front of oncoming trucks and tractors just to see them brake. I built jumps out of cinder blocks and slippery, half-decayed planks so that I could feel the joy of levitation at last.

But now, remembering this, I began to understand that the same impulse in him was part of what had ruined our family. Why were we so reckless and unsatisfied? It was simply a fact, a truth as clear as any physical need. And this longing still seemed to be my only distinct feeling—not sadness or fear or anger. When had I lost that core of emotion? At the ferry? When I held the baseball bat? All that remained was what I wanted, what I had to do. Beyond that, I felt empty.

After I said good-bye to my mother and she hung up, I punched in his number. I didn't give myself time to think. My hand dialed with an automatic motion.

“Deni,” he said. “How's your Chinese?”

“Good. Listen. I was thinking about next year.”

“Next year.”

“For eleventh grade. I want to go back to Virginia.”

“To Virginia,” he repeated, his voice absent of all intonation.

“Yeah, I want to study there. I like that school better.”

The plan I'd formulated involved turning sixteen in Virginia, getting a driver's license and a car, and moving out. It wasn't that this would
be easier there, but by moving between Vancouver and Virginia, I could break his hold. Dickie had already lost his power, and it would be easy for me to find a job and earn money.

“You listen here,” he said in a furious voice that no longer bothered me—“if you go back, you can't expect anything from me. I'm cutting you off.”

“Okay,” I said. “That's okay.”

He didn't speak, and I just stood there holding the phone, waiting for the silence to drag on long enough that one of us would hang up.

THE HUNT

The house was largely finished, sitting on a hill of naked red clay, the wet bulldozed terrain deeply eroded and surrounded by forest.

“Welcome back,” Dickie said, crossing the empty living room with a heavy-footed hunch. He hiked the corners of his mouth, the skin rucking up around his eyes.

My brother and sister came out of their rooms, his dark hair crushed on the side from his pillow, though it was evening, my sister's carefully brushed sheen reaching to her shoulders, their eyes glassy with solitude.

I hitched my thumbs in my jeans and nodded, sizing up Dickie, measuring myself, significantly taller and built from months of weight lifting.

“I'll get dinner on the table,” my mother said and escaped to the kitchen.

As we ate, she told me she'd received her certification in massage therapy and started a practice. Her enthusiasm reminded me of when she'd left my father, as if she needed the gravity of new ideas, new passions and possibilities, to pull herself free.

After eating, everyone slunk off to a different room, Dickie to the basement.

I read and later tried to sleep, but couldn't. I got up and opened my door, the house silent, living and dining rooms without furniture, wires dangling from holes in the ceiling. I put on my shoes and went outside, then started down the driveway, into the forest.

The gravel offered a faint path, a ragged strip of sky above, palely
lit by a shard of moon. I stopped. Not a single tree distinguished itself from the dark. If I stepped off the driveway, into the forest, would my eyes adjust and my senses recalibrate—touch, smell, hearing, the electric antennae of intuition? What was out there, and what did I want? I'd known before I arrived that I wouldn't stay long. As soon as I had a car, I'd move out. Even on the flight, telling myself this had calmed me. But back here, I felt demoted, a boy again, as if the conflict with my father—the steady facing off over dinners and beers in drab restaurants—had indicated a sort of respect, a station that, while not manhood, felt close.

When I was a child following him through fields of spruce and pine, he'd seemed attuned, his shoulders relaxed, his step fluid and ready for the spongy, uneven earth. He prowled, head shifting side to side in subtle motions as he scanned the rows. I'd imagined him a loup-garou, verging on the wild, so far from a normal life that the dark, animal transformation could no longer be resisted. And yet what did that creature want once the old self had been shed? What would satisfy it?

I walked for hours, following the network of long driveways, gravel roads freshly cut through forests for new homes. When I became afraid, I imagined myself wild, hunting, eager for a fight. When this didn't work, I pictured myself dead. All was lost, and nothing could hurt me. I'd let go of life. It worked. Fear dissolved. Was this how it was for him when my mother took us, when he couldn't get out of bed and gave up on everything? Did the hunter have to die as a man?

I came to moonlit gravel but kept to the dark. Prey, not hunters, stood in the light. I returned with silent steps, pausing to scan the forest, to study myself—the mechanisms of my body—so that each new step would be quieter.

I eased the front door open and crept inside. The fridge switched on, the buzz of its motor loud in the empty, unfinished rooms. I peeled off my shoes and crossed the floor, stepping slowly. I crouched at my mother's door. There was no sound inside. I slipped down the basement stairs, testing each step with the ball of my foot.

A weak yellow bulb lit a water-stained lampshade. The crowded shelves of Dickie's shop surrounded an unlit woodstove, and he lay
facedown on a rug before it. A dozen beer cans stood in rank next to a rocking chair.

I moved silently, pausing often, examining everything—the spray paint that would color nothing, the lacquers and enamels that would never protect, whose cans would rust with the tools gathered here.

The marriage was fraying—I had no doubt now—the knickknacks of their affection abandoned, her presents to him become shop rags: the T-shirt drawn with lines like those on a butcher's diagram (love handles, beer belly, man boobs), the boxers that said It's Not the Size that Counts. Both hung from nails, blackened and greasy. The mug that read Small Men Do It Best held a stiff, dried-out paintbrush and a residue of turpentine. There wasn't enough love left to sustain the sort of self-effacing humor that I'd never trusted anyway.

 

 

Summer ended and I began eleventh grade. Soon the cooling leaves turned and dropped, revealing the deforested swath of power lines. Dickie came home from work and got out of his truck with his finger crooked in the plastic netting of a six-pack of Coors. He took his gun and threw his orange vest over his oxford. From my window, I could see his back as he drank, facing the open space beneath power lines. Occasionally, his shotgun pounded the silence as he clipped the squirrels that scurried past, preparing for winter.

When I'd turned fourteen, almost two years earlier, he'd taken me deer hunting. A classmate had told me about his first hunting trip, how he and his uncle drove all night and through the dawn to a remote mountain camp. After he shot a sixteen-point buck, his uncle cut out the beast's heart and put it in the boy's hands, then painted his cheeks with the blood of his first kill. The idea of primitive rite thrilled me, the sense of brotherhood and initiation by hunting down something elusive and possibly dangerous.

But Dickie just drove us in his Datsun past a new subdivision of identical houses with sunbaked dirt for yards, then pulled to the side of the highway.

“This is a secret place I know,” he said and chuckled, shaking his head.

From the hatch, he took a rifle that looked huge in his arms. He gave me an old shotgun, its stock scuffed as if it had been dragged on asphalt. A trail cut into the forest, and next to it ran two fresh wheel ruts, at the end of which someone had dumped a stove.

A hundred feet into the woods, we came to a depressed clearing of beaten grass. He motioned for quiet and grinned conspiratorially, as if we were doing something sneaky.

We sat at the bottom of a large oak and loaded our guns and waited.

“Deer hunting is about patience,” he said, but then a squirrel began to run along the branches above us, and he trained his shotgun on it, one eye pinched shut.

“Bang, bang, I got you,” he said softly. “Heh heh. Bang bang. Got you again.”

I leaned against the oak, my feet propped in its gnarled roots. The November air hadn't cooled much, yellow and red leaves still on trees and bushes, and I thought of the novels I loved, civilization on the verge of collapse, a warrior traveling into the unknown.

“Psst,” Dickie said.

A scrawny deer emerged into the clearing, stepping gingerly. It paused and began to twitch its ears wildly. Moving slowly, I aimed my shotgun. Dickie had his own stock to his shoulder. “Is that a buck?” he whispered. “Wait . . . wait until you see the horns . . .”

Directly opposite me, on the other side of the clearing, a hunter stood from the bushes. He aimed his rifle at the deer and at me, and my bowels clenched. The deer bolted.

“Dang it,” Dickie said. “That might have been a buck.”

I followed him into the clearing, and three other hunters came out of the bushes, one of them zipping up his fly, two holding bonus-size cans of Coors. Each cradled a rifle with a scope. Dickie was talking to the man who'd aimed his gun at me.

“Was that a buck?” he asked.

“Couldn't be sure,” the man replied. He towered over us, his short-cropped
beard and eyebrows as red as his hunting vest, as if he'd dyed them for the season. He pulled an open beer from the netting on the front of his hunting vest.