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

in my landlady’s shed. I puffed through the cooling air, grinding uphill, and then rushed back, late at night, down that thrilling, terrifying sweep of highway.

Daily, the mirror in my room confronted me. I showed it indifference—a thuggish stance. I picked up gestures and expressions anywhere: the glowering brow of a burly redheaded man arguing over a beer bottle refund in a convenience store, or the squint of an Italian tough waiting for his girlfriend in a sports car. On the public bus the day I went to enroll in school, I wore my leather jacket. A gray-bearded man with reflective sunglasses and a Harley-Davidson vest sat next to me. He prodded my arm.

“Thick,” he said. “Good choice. It’s hard to stab a man through leather like that.”

On my first day in class, when another student said, “What’s up with the jacket?” I explained that I wore leather because it was hard to stab someone through it.

“I just want to play it safe,” I said gruffly. “You never know. It’s happened before.”

My stories soon established me as one of the school’s best fighters, and its most unpredictable and volatile student. The one time I was confronted—three lanky bullies appearing from the hallway crowd, peach fuzz on their chins and oversized Raiders jackets slung back on their shoulders—I puffed my chest, bugged my eyes, and conjured the scariest face I knew—my father’s, though I had no idea exactly when I’d seen him this way.

“You fuck with me,” I hissed, “I’m going to kill you—all of you.” Spit flecked my lips, and the boys edged back as I showed them all the white my eyes could muster.

“Yeah, you just be careful,” the one in the middle said. They turned and strutted awkwardly until they reached the end of the hall and pushed out the double doors into the pale sunlight.

By lunch, I was back at the corner table, writing a poem about the highway at night, the chug of diesel engines and big trucks downshifting to low gears. The cold slip of air behind each passing car evoked everything I could ever want to tell another person.

✴

“YOU KNOW,” MY father said over dinner, in what was to become our weekly routine. He intoned the two words in the voice he used when about to introduce an idea I might not like. “You know, I was thinking. There are these two men I buy from. They’re crab fishermen, a father and son. They work together. They drink together. They’re a real team. You used to love working with fish when you were a kid.”

I kept my eyes half-lidded. I shrugged and forked ravioli into my mouth, drank some beer, chewed and swallowed.

“Yeah, well,” I said out of the side of my mouth, “I’m not a kid anymore.”

“What do you want to do? Just go to school?”

“What’s wrong with that? I’m fifteen.”

“And then what?”

“I want to be a writer.”

“Why? What do you have to write? You’re just a kid.”

“No I’m not.”

I hunched, affecting the glowering brow of the burly redheaded man in the convenience store. I shoveled some more ravioli into my mouth.

“I need rent money,” I told him.

He forced an incredulous smile.

“You said you’re working. Haven’t you earned enough?”

“Almost,” I said.

“How much do you need?”

“A hundred and fifty more.”

“How about this? I give you the money, and you work it off for me this summer.”

I sighed, squinting like the Italian tough waiting in the sports car, but this was exactly what I’d expected. I knew that he thought I couldn’t survive on my own, that I’d come back to him and give up on school, but I wouldn’t.

“Fine,” I said.

He took a wad of cash from his pocket, peeled off three fifties, and tossed them before me, his eyes pretending compassion.

✴

THAT I’D WORK for him in June created constant apprehension, distracting me at school and keeping me up at night. He mentioned the job frequently over the next months, but I refused to say anything on the subject.

The face that worked best against him, I had learned, was impassive: the outside the opposite of the inside, offering nothing. I studied it in teachers when students complained, in the principal when he dealt with misbehavior, in the bus drivers who refused those who couldn’t pay the fare, in the police who directed traffic outside my school. This was how men dealt with the world. My father told stories, maybe to impress me or just to fill the silence, and though I enjoyed them, I did little more than nod. If I needed his money, I took it as if it meant nothing.

One night, entering a restaurant, we passed a man who was trying to ask for directions at the register, his English heavily accented. My father stopped abruptly and spoke in French, offering to help. The man, portly, with a ruff of gray hair, smiled and told him where he needed to go. As my father explained, his words came in bursts. He’d point outside, in the direction of the highway, and his mouth would hang open, and suddenly he’d give a list of instructions. Then he’d pause again, searching for words.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Ça fait longtemps que t’es parti?”

My father flushed.

“Plusieurs années,” he said and asked, “Tu viens d’où?”

“Chicoutimi,” the man told him, but his friendliness had faded slightly. He thanked my father for the directions and hurried out.

My father pulled at his jacket, trying to get it to sit right on his shoulders. Even after we were seated, he kept exhaling loudly. I wanted to ask him when he’d last spoken French, or other questions—who his parents were, where he’d grown up—but I didn’t want to upset him further.

“I was seeing this girl,” he finally told me. As if unsure of what to say, he rummaged in his jacket’s inside pocket and took out a Polaroid. A young woman sat on his couch. She had short, spruced-up brown hair and was maybe a little older than Jasmine.

“She’s pretty, huh?”

“Yeah,”