Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

because I’d heard him and my mother whispering about the custody battle. Given that I’d unsuccessfully eavesdropped on the details, I thought maybe I could pry something from him.

“What do you think of the court case?” I asked while the cookies were puffing up in the oven.

But he was opening a box he’d received in the mail. “Check these out,” he said, showing me dozens of ziplock bags containing white powder, and told me his father had sent them.

“Cool,” I said. “You’re dealing drugs.”

“Hey, watch your mouth.”

“Okay. What’re they for?”

“Peeing.”

“What?”

“Peeing while I’m in the car.”

I knew that he carried coffee cans for the DC rush hour. He also kept a life-size doll that my mother had made for my sister in the passenger seat so he could drive in the HOV lane. His office job robbed him of dignity. I’d always felt that adults had the freedom I craved, but now I was seeing how wrong I’d been.

He returned from the bathroom. The powder had turned to gel. Therefore, I deduced, the piss couldn’t spill. He held the bag to the window, the sunset making his congealed urine blaze like million-year-old amber.

“Jeez,” he said, “this is great stuff.”

But I was still thinking about the custody battle, determined to learn more. I almost never talked to my father, at most once every six months, and when I did, he’d share a few stories: about one of his dogs that ran away and how he spent a day wandering the woods until he found it dead next to some poisoned meat left out to kill wild animals; or about how he bought a van with an engine problem, smoke pouring from the muffler, and a stupid police officer stopped him and said he didn’t want a van like that on his highway. My father told him, “It’s not your highway. I’m not breaking the law, and you’re keeping me from taking my van to get it fixed.” The stupid cop left, and my father kept driving the van, the engine using almost as much oil as gas. I always got interested if he was telling stories, but when he stopped, we didn’t have much to say.

“Do you think the court case is necessary?” I asked Dickie.

“I don’t know,” he said. He jiggled the bag of urine. “The military must have invented these for pilots. The military makes all the best stuff.”

Since he wasn’t answering questions about the custody case, I asked what it was like to be in the military.

“You’re too much of a pussy for the army,” he said.

“Yeah? Thanks. Did you ever kill anyone?”

“Just once,” he said. “I was putting up telephone poles in Vietnam, and some guys came out of the woods and shot my partner. I shot them.”

“Really?” I sat down, ready to be enthralled.

He put on his white mitts—the ones no one else was allowed to use—and took out the pan. When he made cookies for work, he didn’t share. There was no point asking, though he paraded them around. He did this, I knew, because he was itching for a fight. Someone shat on him at the office, and he came home hankering to shit on us. My mother had warned me that he had a bad temper but a good heart, as if this were a complicated medical condition.

“That’s it?” I said.

“Huh?”

“You just shot them?”

“Yeah.” Then he told a story about the friend who’d been shot, how one time they were drunk and goofing off. The friend had accidentally stabbed Dickie through the hand with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

“Why were you putting up telephone poles in Vietnam?” I interrupted.

“Because they needed them.”

“Is that how you got into the phone business?”

“No. That’s just a coincidence.”

I sighed. The story sucked. There was no hope of getting details about what must have been a grisly war scene, or the custody battle, or my father.

✴

THE PLEDGE OF Allegiance and pickup basketball, pep rallies, fights and cigarettes, cheap beer sneaked into football games, a black cheerleader who disappeared and haunted us from the backs of milk cartons. Life had become predictable.

The summer before ninth grade, I worked any job I could find: mucking stalls on a horse farm, mending fences, and bucking hay. Back among the tribal rivalries of the junior high, my improved girth won me some respect.

“Farm work will turn you into a man,” Dickie told me when I visited him in his basement redoubt, and he confided what a badass he’d been at my age. “I stole cigarettes from my dad. If I had a date, I stole flowers from the graveyard. If someone messed with me, I hit him when he wasn’t looking.”

I supposed that a sucker punch was kind of like stealing a punch.

“I have to go take care of my poor man’s Corvette,” he said in an at once self-deprecating and proud fashion, and he went outside to change the oil on his Datsun, which he’d bought after selling his Camaro.

Alone in the basement, I took a pack of his cigarettes from the carton on the shelf and went up to my room, where I put it in my book bag.

To undo my reputation as a bookworm, I had begun hanging out under the overpass after school, sharing Dickie’s cigarettes. I befriended Travis and Brad, both metalheads, though Travis was a redneck and Brad an army brat who bragged about unverifiable sexual exploits from his years in Germany and liked to speculate about what had really happened to Hitler’s bones. I asked about their fathers. Brad’s was always at a military base. Travis’s was on welfare and spent his days in a room with a single upholstered chair and walls of narrow shelves that he’d built himself. He’d filled them with cassettes in plastic cases, each one containing a sermon. He sat in the chair for hours, listening to the word of God.

Sometimes, I told them my father’s stories about fighting over a woman or driving a Model T on railways, and