Cures for Hunger (7 page)

As I crossed the frozen fields, I wished for spring and that first breathless warmth that was no warmth at all but seemed it after so long in the cold. Dandelions would bloom, like when I was very small and everything was perfect.

I sat in my favorite place, a grove of oaks that were larger than the other trees. The ground beneath was without weeds, soft and dark and always in shadows in the summer, though now I stared up through the naked branches at the colorless sky. Everyone I knew had died. The house had burned down. The school had been incinerated. I was the hunter, the loup-garou transformed by the forest and the animal power of solitude. In nature, I would survive. The world would end, and when it began again, I'd still be here.

But when would that happen? My brother liked
Dungeons & Dragons,
and his
Monster Manual
described lycanthropy, which turned men into werewolves. Though I'd thought of my father when I read it, I knew that it was too simple—that nothing, not even the end of the world, would happen the way I wanted it to.

Eventually it grew dark, and my mother's voice called across the valley from the back porch, my name echoing off the mountains. I started home.

 

 

The snowmelt came suddenly, flooding drainage ditches, covering the fields, water gathering toward our backyard until it shone in a crescent around the slight rise where our house had been built. The sun blazed day after day, and I forgot my frustration and boredom and loved the sense of expectation and change, of possibly having to survive a natural disaster.

I'd read a book about young people who bonded after society's collapse. The abandoned cities sent shivers up my spine, the vines that
grew through cracked concrete and broken windows, the mountains where the youths sheltered beneath overhangs, staring out over the desolate landscape for a flicker of light.

Reading made me feel as if I'd swigged my father's vodka. Did my brother or sister experience this? My brother loved video games, and my sister sang constantly so that her location in the house could be determined according to her volume. My mother always told us to read, but did she know that books made me want to run outside and breathe the air rolling off the mountains, smell the wet fields and drying mud, hear the crunch of onion grass under my feet? Stories seemed like paths. If you went outside and looked, there was the world, just the world, but if you went and looked after reading a story, there was a world where anything could happen, as if beyond the mountains were a hundred countries to which I might go, a hickory cane over my shoulder and my few possessions tied in a red bandanna.

But there would be no escaping this time. The flood hemmed us in, our house like a frog on a lily pad. Neighbors put out sandbags, and in a few places the water on the road was so high that my father had to drive through it very slowly, afraid of shorting out his engine.

My mother had gotten two horses a few years earlier and checked on them and on her bedeviling goats. She cooked restlessly, baking crumbly bread in coffee cans so that each loaf came out with the can's seams printed on it. She made flat, hard cookies that looked like very wet mud thrown at a wall.

As I studied the flood, imagining all the ways to cross it, she joined me on the back porch.

“We're going to leave soon,” she told me, and my heart beat with an excitement so involuntary, so sudden, that it ached.

“Where?”

“We're moving. Just you and me and your brother and sister.”

“What about André?” I asked, realizing something terrible was happening to my family, though I had no word for it.

“He's staying here.”

“When will we come back?”

The wind gusted in her hair as she stared beyond the smooth surface of the water to the mountain, her expression like my brother's as we rushed the train track.

“We're not coming back,” she said, her voice almost breaking.

“Ever?” I didn't understand. Though I loved the idea of setting out, I couldn't imagine never seeing the valley again. It was the one place we were sure to return to after our many temporary homes, and I'd never known spring or summer anywhere else. What would we do if we were separated from my father, gone away somewhere strange and new?

My mother stared off, lips slightly parted so that I thought she might say something else, her eyes narrowed as if to glare past the limits of the sky.

 

 

The next morning, I checked on the flood. I walked out to where the water began. Beneath the surface, the grass appeared distorted, like the bottom of a swimming pool, undulating. Far off, the red-ribboned tops of a few Christmas trees showed, and then there was simply the smooth surface of the deluge, stretching on toward the mountain.

I wanted to worry that we were leaving, but it seemed impossible—not just because of the flood, but because my parents often said crazy things that never happened. Besides, just before going to work, my father had made a comment that now obsessed me.

“I bet carp are swimming up from the rivers, right through the fields,” he'd said. “If we take the boat and shine the flashlight in the water, we'll see them.”

I couldn't think of anything but carp—gliding out of the river, nestling in the branches of submerged trees, riding currents through the beams of flashlights.

The rowboat lay upside down in the shed, and I discussed with my invisible friends whether we should take it and do some exploring. Eleven of them were in agreement, making me suspect that I had eleven invisible friends but maybe only one spirit guide. The guide was concerned. In fact, he sounded a lot like my brother later did.

“We're not allowed,” he said.

“Come on. Just for a little while. There are carp out there.”

“No. We can't. We'll get washed away by the river and die.”

In the past, my father had been more open to ideas like this, but I suspected that convincing him to do something wild might not be as easy as before.

“Can we go out in the boat?” I asked him that evening,

“I'm busy.”

“But we can see carp.”

“That's true,” he said, nodding to himself. “There might be carp out there.”

I hesitated, knowing what I had to say next.

“Do you think it would be
really
dangerous?”

He looked at me and grinned as if he'd just woken up and was himself again, not that person who cared only about his business.

“Okay,” he said, “we can go later on tonight.”

After dark, the moon shone against the water, turning the flood into a silvery plain. In the rowboat, we crossed the hidden fields of Christmas trees as my brother and I took turns aiming the flashlight through the luminous surface. My father kept letting go of the oars and taking it from us, saying we were using it wrong, but he couldn't find any carp either.

As he peered down, we sat on the opposite side, trying to counterbalance. His edge of the boat sank dangerously close to the water, but he didn't seem to care. Did he know we were leaving him? He didn't show it. Sitting there, saying nothing, I felt what a relief it would be if the end came now, the three of us in the boat, with no choice but to find a new home.

He shone the light on the eerie shapes of drowned Christmas trees and worried that if the water didn't go down soon, they would die. We'd had floods before, and afterward, I'd followed him along the rows as he'd pulled up yellow yearling pines, their dead roots slipping from the earth.

“I'm going to lose a lot of money,” he said, peering over the edge, the oars dragging in the rowlocks.

Then he shut off the light and we just sat, gazing along the gleaming surface to the mountains, the water still, the moon full and blazing all around us.

 

 

A week later, when the waters went down, my father hired a helper from a nearby farm, a young man with a fuzzy, lopsided mustache and bulging biceps who, as a boy, my mother once confided in me, had jumped from the roadside bushes to make cars swerve until he caused a grisly head-on collision. I'd spent a recess describing crushed vehicles, bodies plunging like divers through windshields and flailing over the road, beheaded and skinless, and just the sight of him now made me shiver so badly that my joints rattled.

But rather than cause more deaths, he helped my father replace the tractor bridge. They finished at sundown and returned to the back porch and each drank a beer. My father was telling him how quickly floods could begin, that he'd seen rivers triple their size in seconds and had almost been killed like this in a Yukon mining camp.

“I'd just finished my last shift and had a few days off, and there was no way I was going to stay in camp. I wanted to get out and drive into town and have some fun. But a gorge with a river in it separated the camp from the main road where our cars were parked. A wooden footbridge went across, but the snow was melting in the mountains and it was raining so hard the gorge had almost filled. There was a narrow point farther up, not too far upstream, and the water was coming through in surges. I was standing in front of the bridge. I really wanted to leave, but each surge that came through was higher. The water carried uprooted trees that almost hit the bottom of the bridge. I remember watching. I had a bad feeling. I counted the seconds between the surges. One passed, and the water shook the bridge, and then I sprinted. But halfway across I realized I'd waited too long. I heard the roar of the next surge, and I jumped just as the bridge snapped in half. My chest hit the earth, and I dug my fingers in and pulled myself up and ran, because the water was starting to come over the edge.”

He coughed into his fist and cleared his throat. His helper bobbed his head self-consciously, then took a drink of his beer and licked his lopsided mustache.

“It was a dangerous thing to do,” my father said, a hint of anger coming into his voice, his gaze unfocused as if he were alone—“but I didn't regret it. I hated that camp. The men there just talked about women and what they'd do when they got out. It was no different than prison.”

Though his telling was gripping—the rising river, the shaking bridge, his bold dash across its planks as the water descended—it wasn't this that haunted me. It was the way he'd spoken about the camp, reminding me of all that I didn't know about him. I reran that line over and over in my head, how he said it, the intensity and anger in his words: “It was no different than prison.”

 

 

Beyond my window, a pale splotch in the low clouds showed where the moon hid.

Shouting had woken me.

“You can't go! I won't let you!”

My heart knocked at my ribs as he swore, his words banging about the house, thudding against the walls like one of the outside dogs gotten in and running from room to room as quickly as possible, just to see this strange inside world.

“You can't stop me!” she shouted. Her footsteps crossed the living room.

“You're fucking crazy!” he yelled and slammed a door so that the house shook.

I stared at the ceiling, trying to make sense of all this, to will my brain to do more than listen to the battering of my heart. There was a secret at the center of our lives. It was like something from a dream, a shape that I glimpsed but couldn't remember, then saw again another night; I woke knowing I'd seen it, but not what it was or meant. In the dark, I couldn't sleep, certain that someday this thing would reappear, as
a man or a place, or just a feeling, the awareness of danger I had before I turned my eyes and saw. It would reappear and I'd have known it would but without any power to stop it.

I might have slept, drifting in and out, sensing a subtle change like a snowfall in the night, the gradual silencing of the outside, though now the season's shift was within our walls. Who had made this world up? Who had created all this for me? It was as if my life were important and I had to be ready to face something, but that moment never quite arrived.

In the morning, I slowly went down the stairs, more tired than ever, yet vividly aware of the changes in the house. My mother was packing, hurrying about. My father's truck was gone.

“I don't have time for questions,” she said. She told us only that we were moving across the Fraser River to a town called Mount Lehman. She shoved everything in boxes, occasionally pausing at the window.

My brother sidled close, puffy dark circles under his glassy eyes. He hadn't slept either, and the strangeness of his gaze shone in a way that made me want to run to the mirror. He said he had something to ask, and I knew from his expression that he'd readied one of the strange questions he used to torment other kids. They often involved World War III, and his favorite was, “If America dumped boxed cereal on the USSR, why would it be chemical warfare?” He then had to explain in minute detail our mother's words about chemical foods.

Now he said, “If a nuclear bomb strikes a mile away, do you run toward it or away?”

I let myself see this. My gut ached. A wall of blinding light approached, melting cars and incinerating Christmas trees and cooking human flesh from the bone. Though I knew he'd trick me, I blurted, “Away! I'd run away!”

“Wrong,” he said, loudly but without inflection.

My chest felt tight. I went to the kitchen door and outside, over the wet grass, past the apple tree.

I wanted someone to tell me what to think or hope, but there was just the waterlogged fields and the windy silence of the valley and,
like a music far away, from a distant car window, the threat of nuclear extinction.

 

 

The packing and dumping of boxes revealed how little we owned—blankets and clothes, worn-out books, and some binders of school papers—but the moving still took all day. We carried boxes out to the van for her or helped unload. Now, as we returned for our final trip, she drove up to the house slowly, craning to see whether my father's truck was in the driveway. It wasn't, and she sighed, then sped onto the gravel. She told us to wait in the van.