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

this would be easier there, but by moving between Vancouver and Virginia, I could break his hold.

“You listen here,” he said in a furious voice that no longer bothered me—“if you go back, you can’t expect anything from me. I’m cutting you off.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s okay.”

He didn’t speak, and I just stood there, the phone in my hand, waiting for the silence to drag on long enough so that one of us would hang up.

PART IV

THE HUNT

The single-story house with auburn wood siding was nearly finished, sitting on a hill of naked red clay and surrounded by forest.

“Welcome back,” Dickie said, crossing the empty living room with a heavy-footed hunch. He hiked the corners of his mouth, the skin rucking up around his eyes.

My brother and sister came out of their rooms, his hair crushed on the side from his pillow, though it was the late afternoon, and her carefully brushed sheen reaching to her shoulders. Their eyes were glassy with solitude.

I hitched my thumbs in my jeans and sized up Dickie, measuring myself—significantly taller and built from months of weight lifting.

“I’ll get dinner on the table,” my mother said and escaped to the kitchen.

Later, as we ate, she told me she’d received her certification in massage therapy and had started a practice, but dinner was otherwise silent. We cleaned up and then everyone slunk off to a different room, Dickie to the basement.

I read and eventually tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I got up and opened my door, the house silent—living and dining rooms without furniture, wires dangling from holes in the ceiling. I put on my shoes and went outside, and then started down the driveway, into the forest.

The gravel, lit by a shard of moon, offered a faint path. Not a single tree distinguished itself from the night.

As soon as I had a car, I would move out. On the flight, telling myself this had calmed me. But here, I felt demoted, a boy again, as if the conflict with my father—the steady facing off over dinners and beers in drab restaurants—had indicated a sort of respect, a station that, while not manhood, felt close.

I walked, following the network of long driveways—gravel roads freshly cut through forests for new homes. When I became afraid, I imagined myself wild, hunting, eager for a fight. When this didn’t work, I pictured myself dead. As I let go of life, fear dissolved.

I returned with silent steps, pausing to scan the forest, to study myself—the mechanisms of my body—so that each new step would be quieter.

I eased the front door open. The fridge switched on, the buzz of its motor loud in the empty, unfinished rooms. I peeled off my shoes and crossed the floor, stepping slowly. I crouched at my mother’s door. There was no sound inside. I slipped down the basement stairs, testing each step with the ball of my foot.

A weak yellow bulb lit a water-stained lampshade. The crowded shelves of Dickie’s shop surrounded an unlit woodstove, and he lay facedown on a rug before it. A dozen beer cans stood in rank next to a rocking chair.

I moved silently, pausing often, examining everything—the spray paint that would color nothing, the lacquers and enamels that would never protect, whose cans would rust with the tools gathered here.

The marriage was fraying—I had no doubt now—the knick-knacks of their affection abandoned, her presents to him had become shop rags: the T-shirt drawn with lines like those on a butcher’s diagram (love handles, beer belly, man boobs), the boxers that said It’s Not the Size that Counts. Both hung from nails, blackened and greasy. The mug that read Small Men Do It Best held a stiff, dried-out paintbrush and a residue of turpentine.

✴

SUMMER ENDED AND I began eleventh grade. Soon the cooling leaves turned and dropped, revealing the deforested swath of power lines. Dickie came home from work and got out of his truck with his finger crooked in the plastic netting of a six-pack of Coors. He took his gun and threw his orange vest over his oxford. From my window, I could see his back as he drank, facing the open space beneath power lines. Occasionally, his shotgun pounded the silence as he clipped the squirrels that scurried past, preparing for winter.

When I’d turned fourteen, almost two years earlier, he’d taken me deer hunting. A classmate had told me about his first hunting trip, how he and his uncle drove all night and through the dawn to a remote mountain camp. After he shot a sixteen-point buck, his uncle cut out the beast’s heart and put it in the boy’s hands, and then painted his cheeks with the blood of his first kill. The idea of a primitive rite thrilled me—the sense of brotherhood and initiation by hunting down something elusive and possibly dangerous.

But Dickie just drove us in his Datsun past a new subdivision of identical houses with sunbaked dirt for yards and pulled to the side of the highway.

“This is a secret place I know,” he said and chuckled, shaking his head.

From the hatch, he took a rifle that appeared huge in his arms. He gave me an old shotgun, its stock scuffed as if it had been dragged on asphalt. A trail cut into the forest, and next to it ran two fresh wheel ruts, at the end of which someone had dumped a stove.

A hundred feet into the woods, we came to a depressed clearing of beaten grass. He motioned for quiet and grinned conspiratorially.

We sat at the bottom of a large oak and loaded our guns.

“Deer hunting is about patience,” he said, but then a squirrel began to run along the branches above us, and he trained his shotgun on it, one eye pinched shut.

“Bang bang, I got you,” he said softly. “Heh heh. Bang bang. Got you again.”

I leaned against the oak, my feet propped in its gnarled roots. The November air hadn’t cooled much, yellow and red leaves still