Cures for Hunger (8 page)

She loaded the spinning wheel she'd bought in hopes of making everything, even our winter clothes, from scratch. Then she filled several jugs with water. We asked why and she said that the water in the valley was from a spring and we would miss it. We pulled out of the driveway, each of us holding a shimmering jug in our lap. My sister had her hair pinned back, her forehead high and pale, her chin lowered to her collar as she looked out the window. My brother stared straight ahead. What were they thinking? I could hardly make sense of everything in my own mind. What would my father say when he knew I'd left without him? Would he understand that it wasn't my fault?

We passed Ten Speed where she'd stopped on the roadside, one foot on the ground as she watched, her head thrust forward, eyes full of fear for us, dark and wide and flashing with refracted light as our van drove by.

I took a breath and stared out. I made myself stop thinking and just looked at everything. I was seeing all this for later, for the rest of my life. I knew this with an unmoving wisdom that made me feel that someday I would indeed be someone else.

And then I was no longer in my seat, in the van, but on the mountain where my father had once taken me. I could see the entire valley, its fields and streams, the curve of the road whose presence alone, each day after school, gave me a sense of certainty. It descended past wet rocks and old, gaunt trees, then leveled and turned and gave onto the straightaway. Past a few farms and the fields of Christmas trees or sod,
it rose back along the mountains and returned to where it entered, beyond rock faces lit with quick, brittle streams.

Just outside was a service station where carpooling parents waited. If we turned right, we headed to my school in Abbotsford or to Vancouver. Left led toward Nicomen Island, that piece of muddy earth where my father got his mail and where I was born.

Mountains stood against the distance, larger and whiter than those of the valley, the flat, humid, windy ranges washed down from them over millennia and called prairies by those who'd chosen to stay. This was the shape of the world. As a child, I could have drawn it with a crayon: that damp sheet of alluvial land hemmed in by the horizon.

And now we were gone.

PRAYERS, MANTRAS, AND HOW TO SWEAR

On the paper there was a tree, the trunk split in two, and each of those branches split in two, and so on. At the top were the words
arbre genéologique,
and at the trunk and each fork stood empty boxes. I'd been trying to act normal, but I couldn't stop yawning, and now there was this. Other kids were filling in the boxes. I couldn't concentrate. It had taken me a while even to write my own name on the trunk. In the two boxes on the branches above, I printed
Bonnie
and
André.
But the highest boxes were the problem. Mrs. Hand told me to write the names of my grandparents—“your father's father and mother.” When I said, “
Je ne les connais pas,
” she said, “
Ta grand-maman et ton grand-papa?
” as if I hadn't understood. But I couldn't even remember the names of my mother's parents. My head hurt. I'd met them once, years before, but no memories remained. Mrs. Hand told me to take the sheet home and fill it in, but I forgot and accidentally sat on it for hours while reading a novel. The next day I got an F+.

Normally, when I had really bad grades, my mother marched into school and grilled my teacher. Sometimes this embarrassed me, and sometimes it was fun to watch. But when I showed her this grade, she just sighed. Even I was too exhausted to ask the usual questions about why I was the only kid who didn't know anything about his father's family.

The boredom of school stretched out beneath an overcast sky. How was it possible to survive twelve years? Without my father, life became as silent and tense as a classroom during a math quiz—no driving fast, no stories about bruisers and close calls. Just thinking about him
made my heart speed up—its throbbing in my chest, its slippery bumping against my ribs like a panicked frog in my fingers.

I was sure I'd never see him again, but then, four days after my mother took us to the new house, I woke to find him eating breakfast, my mother silently preparing our lunches on the counter. He just said, “Hi” and smiled. His empty suitcases were in her room, so he must have come in the night. I sat across from him, and he told me about a lobster at his fish store that was the size of my arm, and how he'd saved it so we could eat it together. I asked if maybe it was prehistoric, and he nodded and said, “Maybe.”

Over the next few days, I expected fights, shouting, or slammed doors, but he moved in naturally, as if it had been planned, and I soon gave up trying to make sense of it. Our family always seemed on the verge of disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed.

 

 

That Friday, he picked me up from school shortly after my mother dropped me off.

“I'm taking you fishing,” he said, his face lined and grim, as if our outing were a form of punishment. “We'll come back in the afternoon, and I'll leave you in the playground before she gets here. Just pretend you went to school. You won't tell her about this, right?”

I nodded, this lie by far the most extreme ever. I loathed the idea of standing in the playground as the other kids stared and wondered where I'd been all day. It seemed like a lot to make me do in exchange for a little fishing, but I felt guilty for having left him. I also wondered if I might get special treatment, and after a few minutes on the highway, I asked for a lesson in swearing—something I had requested fairly often—and amazingly, he agreed.

“
Fuck,
” he said, “well,
fuck
means a lot of things.
Fuck off
means go away right now.
Fuck you
means I really hate you.
Fuck
just means you're angry. You know what
shit
is, and
damn,
well,
damn
's not that bad.”

“What about
cocksucker
?” I asked.

“You should probably stay away from that one,” he told me, then was silent, as if thinking up more vile types of profanity. I was eager to
learn them. Swearwords gave me the feeling that good stories did, a sense of disembodiment, of being carried away, beyond rules, beyond everything. But instead he said, “Your mother wants to leave, you know.”

I looked at him. His eyes were glued to the traffic ahead.

“She wanted to abandon you guys. I barely convinced her not to.”

He glanced over, checking my expression, then looked back at the road.

“If she has to go,” he said, “she can take your brother and sister, but you can stay with me. We'll get a motor home and travel the country and do nothing but fish.”

Maybe this was why he'd moved in with us, because she'd decided she'd had enough and was planning on running away. I tried to console myself with the idea of fishing trips and that he might like me best. He rarely spent time with my sister, and my brother didn't care for fishing. I wanted to smile, but the muscles of my face tensed up as if they were doing the thinking.

“What about school?”

“You can take a year off. It won't change anything. You never liked school, and I didn't either. Look at me. I didn't need it.”

He pushed his jaw forward confidently, then shot another glance my way.

“You don't let yourself get picked on at school, do you?”

“No,” I lied.

“Because,” he said, “if you stay with me, I'll make sure you're one tough goddamn kid.”

“Really?”

“I'll teach you how to fight. I was a good fighter. I could've been a boxer. I just had no direction. But I'd give you direction. I'd teach you how to kick some ass.”

An image of me came to mind, my fists swirling like bugs around a lightbulb as all the school bullies fell. My father once tried to teach me and my brother to box, making us put on gloves in the living room, but my mother had been furious and he'd relented, a strange, almost embarrassed look on his face. It was the only time I'd seen him surrender to her anger. Could it really be possible that she was leaving? Though he was
fun to be with, I couldn't imagine a day without her. My clothes would stink and my grades would all be Fs and I'd starve to death. But then again, life with him might be very, very fun.

“Even if I learn to fight,” I asked, “can we still travel and fish?”

“Yeah. And when we're not fishing, I'll teach you to be tough. You should get started now and make sure no one fucks with you. If someone does, you let them have it, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, but I was picturing our motor home climbing a mountain road, then pulling onto the gravel above a shimmering river.

He exited the highway and we soon arrived where we often fished, off the broken rocks near the Lions Gate Bridge, where everyone tried to snag salmon while keeping a lookout for the warden. He gave me my rod, but once fishing, I kept catching the lure in seaweed because I was watching the others or trying to see salmon in the water.

A damp, irregular wind blew in along the rocks. I drew my chin down and breathed into my collar. The gray sky appeared low, the towers of the bridge trailing mist.

A man hooted and everyone turned. I reeled in my line and climbed onto the rocks. He'd hooked a salmon, and as he brought it close, the fish fighting wildly in the shallows, he asked my father to use a metal gaff lying near a tackle box.

My father took it and crouched at the edge of the water. He swung it as the fish thrashed. He swung three or four times to get the hook to stay. A chunk had fallen out of the salmon's head. The man swore and for the first time I sensed real danger in those words, not for my father but for the other man.

“You didn't have to ruin the fucking fish,” he yelled. He was big, with veins on his face and a fat nose, the sleeves of his black sweater rolled up. I was pretty sure he qualified as a bruiser.

“I didn't ruin your fucking fish,” my father said, and though he was smaller, he swore much better, not chewing his words like the bruiser. Each time he roared
fuck
his size doubled so that he soon towered over the other man, his back curved and puffed up, his arms bowed out, fists like bricks. “You fucker, you shouldn't have asked if you didn't want me to hook it.” He spun and threw the salmon and gaff into the water.

The bruiser seemed ready to drop his rod and fight, but he hesitated. The men along the shore watched, fishing rods lifted like antennae. I had no idea swearing could do this, and I was sure there was no way the bruiser would attack, though I was a little excited to see him try. He glanced from my father's face to me, where I crouched on a rock. He looked down and turned away, swearing under his breath.

As we drove home, the cloudy sky was so dark that headlights shone like flares against the wet streets. My father clutched the wheel, glaring past the cars in front. He hadn't fully returned to his normal size, and I knew he'd do something wild and impatient. I held on to the seat as he tore past a yellow light and swerved through an intersection, tires screeching.

A siren wailed. Police lights flashed behind us. He looked into the rearview mirror.

“Motherfucker,” he said, his shoulders drawing in. Had the police caught him at last? He pulled over, and I turned to look through the back window at the officer getting out of the car.

With him, police were never like they were with my mother. They asked about work and where he lived and what he'd done that day, then they stayed a long time in their cars with his driver's license. Once, when we'd all gone to dinner, he'd been pulled over and we'd waited for so long that he told us the cop was deciding whether to arrest our mother. He said that one time they tried to take her away and that he held her legs while they pulled her arms, and that he finally hung on and got her back for us. She remained silent, looking out the passenger window, and he forced a smile in her direction. But she hadn't been driving, and I'd known the police were interested in him.

“Why do they ask you so many questions?” I said.

He rubbed his face and sighed as if letting out all the air he'd ever breathed.

“Because they like me,” he mumbled. “They like how I drive.”

 

 

My brother and I never had much in common. He started school the year before French classes were offered, so we lived a strange playground phenomenon, each of us in his own language group, as if we'd grown
up on opposite sides of an ethnically divided city. His friends were well behaved, and one of them, Elizabeth, invited him to parties where kids rode around her lawns and gardens in an electric train. Now that I no longer talked about levitation, my friends seemed increasingly like ruffians. We discussed deep-sea fishing and creatures such as sharks and electric eels. Those who'd grown up in Quebec taught us French profanity. The words and the way they were rhythmically strung together—
crisse de câlice de tabarnak!
—reminded me of how my father swore in English. But when I practiced them, I didn't get the same heady feeling as with
fuck
or
goddamn.
Still, each time we learned a new insult, we ran toward the students from the English classes, shouting it at their helpless faces.

Now, in our new house, my brother and I shared a room for the first time since we were toddlers. After my mother tucked us in, we switched on our flashlights and played
Dungeons & Dragons,
working through modules,
The Keep on the Borderlands
or
The Lost City.
Magic and endless journeys and the satisfaction of easy violence were so attainable that each morning I woke and looked around, surprised that I had to go to school, that my life could actually be this boring.