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

I more desperately wished that the powers of the mind were real—that I could read her thoughts. I crept back to my room and shut the door.

I sat at my desk. Behind everything I wanted, I sensed an impulse, deep inside me, like light filling the emptiness, a longing so rooted and absolute that I pictured holy men in fantasy novels lighting fires to sacred powers. I knew that the messiness of life could be made perfect in a poem. All the lost places and people could be saved in a story. And just as stories reached into the past, they opened out into my future.

I got up and put on my shoes. I lifted the window screen and swung myself to the ground too quickly, my hand catching on the aluminum frame. Blood ran along my palm as I crouched, holding it, willing the pain away. An image came to me, startlingly vivid.

When I was six, my father had cut his hand working on a mower. I went into the bathroom to see him cleaning the wound. I climbed onto the toilet seat to look into the sink. There was the surprise, the pleasure at the sight of his cut, the way his fingers worked around it as blood fell in ribbons, turning the water pink. Neither of us spoke, both absorbed in the slow, serious work.

Then he opened the gash with his fingers and showed it to me, letting the blood rush up to clean it before he closed it with his thumb.

It was a summer day—the fragrance of cut grass and mower exhaust through the window screens, and the brilliance of his blood and how I loved him.

There was something else I had to understand.

✴

TRACTOR-TRAILER RIGS IDLED on the side of the highway not far from the 7-Eleven. Diesel exhaust misted and blew past the cab lights.

“Hey,” I said to a man waddling back to his rig. He held four bags of chips, several large bottles of Dr Pepper, and a grease-stained paper bag.

“Yeah?”

“You going to Memphis?” I asked.

“Sorry, kid, I’m just heading to Roanoke.”

To each trucker, I asked the same question, keeping my bandaged left hand in my pocket. I was almost fourteen, but I claimed to be sixteen and homeless. I was going to Memphis to stay with a cousin. I’d seen the city on the map, not so far away and yet in the heart of the country, flush with the Mississippi, which cut the continent in half.

Most of the truckers said they were heading elsewhere, but a husband and wife team heard me out.

“What the hell,” he said. He had sparse red hair and a scar like a divot in his cheek, another above his eyebrow. He’d done worse himself, I knew. He understood.

The tractor trailer had Oklahoma plates. The man said we’d be passing through Memphis in eleven or twelve hours. My mother had long ago ceded my independence, letting me be away entire weekends so long as I showed up on Sunday night. She might be angry that I hadn’t told her where I was going, but that wasn’t unusual anymore.

I followed the woman up the ladder to the cab. The upholstered seat was wide enough for all of us, but she crawled through an opening behind it, into a sort of bunk and said she was going to sleep.

I kept track of signs as we gusted down Route 17 past Warrenton and then caught the ramp west onto Interstate 66 for a short jaunt before heading south on I-81.

Past Appalachian ranges and vales of scattered house lights, through Virginia into Tennessee, the continent spread before us. The man shared his sandwiches with me and I invented stories about my cousin in Memphis. I told him how my stepfather had kicked me out, which seemed destined.

Dawn breathed pale light over the countryside, the world a misted glass, but no matter how I thrilled at all I saw, fear rumbled in my gut. I ate chicken-salad sandwiches until the cab smelled like mayonnaise and the man said, “Well, let’s save some for later.” I told stories of every near fight I’d had, every teacher and kid who’d done me wrong. Then I hesitated, certain that I had other stories, better ones, but not sure what they were.

The sun flared at the horizon, not quite behind us, the light warm against my cheek, and as we drove, the landscape outside my window flickered beyond the tall roadside trees like the frames of an old film.

A few hours later, the woman joined us in the cab, the pouches under her eyes so swollen that her eyeballs appeared to be riding in boats.

“Where do we drop you off, kid?” she asked and drank coffee, horked and swallowed.

“Soon,” I said, squinting at the next roadside sign. Inside my skull, anxiety began to wail like feedback at the end of a heavy-metal song, when the guy in torn jeans shoved the electric guitar in front of the speakers. I pretended to recognize the names on signs.

“Not much further …” I wet my lips, wondering how I’d get back. There’d been only three major turns, aside from some merging interstates near Knoxville. I could manage all that. I was sure I could.

A look of worry flitted between the couple.

“Here. This one,” I said.

The engine chugged, and the man ground a gear, pulling the rig to a stop just beyond the exit.

I thanked them and got down quickly to hide my fear. The truck jerked forward, mud flaps swaying, embossed with silver reclining nudes. The square end of the trailer diminished and melted into the heat lines over the interstate.

Where in the hell was the river? I was expecting a canyon, a rift that I’d pictured on the map, like the long zipper on the front of a woman’s jeans.

Heat poured off the concrete that was everywhere—entrance and exit ramps. Pickup trucks and cars drifted onto them with weekend laxity. I craned my neck as if the river