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

I could feel only the pressure of my feet against the ground as my heart beat vertigo into my bloodstream. My chest ached and I wanted to cry. I thought of my father’s stories, journeys across the continent, winters logging in the north or mining in Alaska. My limited life, this body waiting on strength, it all seemed a sort of detention.

The heavy-metal reverb tore up my head as I ran along the ramp and crossed the overpass to the other side. I jumped a concrete barrier and began thumbing.

It took an hour to get a ride, again in a rig, this time with a grizzled, tattooed man, and little by little, I calmed. I’d made it to Memphis, or close at least. I was heading home. Just three simple turns. That’s all it would take. As the havoc in my skull drew to a close, I started to talk again. I described the father I hadn’t seen in almost four years. At first, I said just a few things: that I was wandering the country like him, making my way. I put the pieces together as I spoke them, discovering what I wanted to say. He’d traveled. We were the same. We’d been the same in so many ways, and now I was drinking and fighting. I couldn’t help but break rules. He’d broken them too. The words my mother had spoken over the phone fit together. He wasn’t allowed across the border because of his past—his record. After we’d left, the nights when he’d called and made threats, I’d overheard her whispers and understood the gravity of her fear. Whatever he’d done was serious. He must have been to prison and done terrible, amazing things, and I would too. Just hearing myself, I felt wounded, older and stronger.

“What did he do?” the trucker asked.

“I don’t know. I only know it was bad. He isn’t even allowed in the United States.”

My lack of knowledge seemed to satisfy him. It had the ring of truth, and he nodded solemnly.

Eventually, he let me off, and I caught another ride, again with a trucker, this one younger, tall and skinny, with a mullet, and more responsive—saying “No shit” and “Oh man”—as I continued telling stories, finding the same truths, becoming more certain. I described that early memory of the fight on the reservation, seeing him with blood on his cheeks.

The sun was falling like a burning cataclysm, the immolation of a realm—the horizon as red as sacrifice. I got off at the ramp to I-66. I was almost there. I caught a ride and was dropped off at Route 17. Three hours in the dark, I walked until someone slowed, lighting me up with their brights, no doubt studying me, making sure I was safe.

I arrived home a few hours before dawn on Sunday. I couldn’t go inside yet. I had to pretend I was coming back from a friend’s house, but I’d done it—something worth bragging about.

The lock on the van’s passenger door had been broken for over a year. I went into the back, opened the couch into a bed, and lay on it. The fabric smelled of dirt and hay and sawdust, of dogs and horses and sweet oats, of the far-off valley and the homes in between. I put my face to it and cried.

DISCOVERING FIRE

I had been nursing the question for days, waiting to be alone with my mother, and now, driving home, we were.

“Was André ever in prison?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

She didn’t speak for a moment.

“Why are you asking about him? Have you seen him?”

“No,” I said quickly, not wanting to scare her. “I was just thinking about him. It made sense to me. He’s been to prison, right?”

She considered this and then exhaled, a tired, controlled sigh, though she still didn’t look at me.

“Yes,” she said, “but just for small things.”

“What small things?” I didn’t believe her. Her words hardly matched her fear.

She didn’t answer, sitting primly at the wheel as we cruised Route 28. We passed overgrown fields, their slated destruction announced by billboards with the names of subdivisions.

She pulled into our driveway, killed the engine, and stared ahead. The backyard’s dusty yellow was broken by a swath of green near the clothesline, where the septic system ran.

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“I have a right to know.”

She was still staring ahead.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

I didn’t speak, afraid to interrupt her.

“Your father … he spent a lot of time in prison.”

I studied her, unable to tell what she was thinking and conscious that in some way I might be hurting her with my questions.

“What for?”

“I was going to tell you when you were older. He got in trouble before you or your brother were born. He robbed banks.”

She turned in her seat to look at me. I was used to the way she gazed openly, trying to see what I’d been up to at school or if I was lying, but I showed nothing. My father was a bank robber. The truth was better than I’d expected. I felt as if I were reading the stories of gods and their progenitors. This was what I’d wanted, something that would set me apart forever.

✴

THAT SAME DAY, she sat down with my brother and me in the living room. He listened intently, his masked expression no different than when he played computer games for hours, but I knew that what she was saying must be affecting him. I’d sneaked into his room to read his notebooks and had been startled by the emotions in his stories. Men paced the smooth floors of control towers or faced the darkness above futuristic cities, gazing out with rage and loneliness.

“What your father did is wrong,” she told us, “but he’s still your father.”

When the discussion was finished, I got up and went to my room. I shut the door and stood with my back to it.

Bank robbery.

Never again would I