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

close to the junior high, we often walked there. Dickie commuted from DC and my mother had to pick up my brother and sister from their schools, so no one was around until six. We smoked Dickie’s cigarettes and went through the materials that he compulsively bought for his crowded shop. We made flamethrowers out of spray cans of engine lubricant or paint. We put Styrofoam peanuts in jars of gasoline, concocting what we called homemade napalm. In overgrown fields, well out of sight of the highway, we set things ablaze. Bottles of rubbing alcohol and cans of spray paint wrapped with burning rags burst as we shot them with the .22 rifle I’d gotten for my fourteenth birthday. We filled an old TV tube with gasoline and ran into the trees as it exploded. We competed to see who could hold a lighter’s flame under his palm the longest. It seemed there could be no love for life without a love for fire.

When I was alone, restlessness drove me from books to my notepads, and then into the fields and along the sides of the highway, and back to my books again. A few times I hounded my mother for details of my father’s crimes, but she claimed she didn’t know much. I was desperate to hear these stories, and yet I didn’t call him again. I was less than a year from fifteen, and I sensed that calling would open our life to him and put my mother in danger. I knew that if I talked more, all my frustration and anger would come spilling out. It was better to wait, to call him just before I turned fifteen, and then to leave once and for all.

To calm myself, I made a list of everything I’d do:

Steal a car

Break into a house

Get shot (revised to, Get shot and survive)

Rob a bank

But what was the point of breaking and entering if I hadn’t even lost my virginity? I had tried, to be sure, but I was too frank, too honest. With boys, I showed nothing. But to girls I wanted to reveal everything, all that I’d read and dreamed. I gazed at the letter sewn to the chest of their cheerleading outfits: T for the school mascot, the Trojan. We all carried one in our wallets. The older boys sold them, ancient, wallet worn, meeting us in the bathrooms and slipping them into our palms for a few dollars, so that we could hurry back into the adolescent throng like immigrants carrying fake passports.

But what was the point of condoms if I couldn’t show the rough indifference of the older boys, the meanness that drew girls like crows to roadkill.

“My father was a bank robber,” I told Travis and Brad. They looked me over, seeing the kid who’d always been obsessed with books.

“Yeah right,” they said.

Furious, I was determined to impress them.

✴

FOR AS LONG as I’d lived on Route 28, my neighbors had had a dirt bike in their carport, and I’d never seen it moved or used. I came up with a plan and then went over and knocked.

The woman next door had messy brown hair and a slack, somewhat harried expression. I’d often seen her rushing two small children out to her decrepit Buick. I told her some friends and I were interested in buying a motorbike and were wondering if theirs was for sale. Her eyes lit up at the mention of money, and she went into the kitchen and made a phone call. She was speaking to her stepson, she told me. It was his bike, and he wanted nine hundred dollars.

“I don’t know why he’s asking so much. He hasn’t touched that thing in years.”

I put on a disappointed face. I told her that my friends and I would have to save up more. She seemed to want to negotiate, but I left.

Back in my room, I moved my desk to the window facing her carport, and each day after school, while reading East of Eden or Tortilla Flat, I kept a log of my neighbors’ comings and goings. This must have been how it was done for banks. The mother was never back before five o’clock, and the husband returned each evening around seven thirty. The only wild card was a lanky young man with long hair who’d show up once a week. He wore acid-washed jeans and would make himself a sandwich in the kitchen, take a beer, and consume both in the carport. Then he’d leave. His arrivals had no clear pattern but were rare enough and usually took place around four o’clock, an hour before the woman—his stepmother, I assumed—returned.

The next week, I knocked again, and she answered.

“I’m doing a fund-raiser for a field trip,” I told her. “We’re cleaning up carports. It only costs fifty cents.”

“That’s all?” Her mouth hung open, showing small crooked teeth.

She got the change out of her wallet and gave it to me, and while I was sweeping, she took her children to the Buick, telling me that she was off to get groceries.

I pointed to where a faded yellow raft lay deflated in the corner.

“This is getting mildewed,” I said. “I’ll hang it out to dry, okay?”

“Sounds great,” she called. “Thank you. This garage has been a mess forever.”

Since Dickie obsessively used sprays for mildew in the basement, I knew about it, but I hadn’t actually seen any here. The cluttered carport was a concrete slab built off the house, with a roof supported by metal posts and no walls, so I’d itemized everything in it while keeping track of the family and trying to come up with a plan. I hung the raft over the motorcycle. It covered it perfectly, barely revealing the front tire. I cleaned, making sure that the job was impeccable. I went home just before my mother arrived at six o’clock.

I watched the house for another week. Then I told Brad and Travis my plan.

“If we leave school