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

on trees and bushes, and I thought of the novels I loved, civilization on the verge of collapse, a warrior traveling into the unknown.

“Psst,” Dickie said.

A scrawny deer emerged into the clearing, stepping gingerly. Its ears began to twitch wildly. Moving slowly, I aimed my shotgun. Dickie had his own stock to his shoulder. “Is that a buck?” he whispered. “Wait … wait until you see the horns …”

Directly opposite me, on the other side of the clearing, a hunter stood from the bushes. He aimed his rifle at the deer and at me, and my bowels clenched. The deer bolted.

“Dang it,” Dickie said. “That might have been a buck.”

I followed him, and three other hunters came out of the bushes, one of them zipping up his fly and two holding bonus-size cans of Coors. Each cradled a rifle with a scope. Dickie was talking to the man who’d aimed his gun at me.

“Was that a buck?” he asked.

“Couldn’t be sure,” the man replied. He towered over us, his short-cropped beard and eyebrows as red as his hunting vest, as if he’d dyed them for the season. He pulled an open beer from the netting on the front of his hunting vest.

“I thought I might have seen some little horns,” Dickie said.

The man finished chugging. “Yeah, it could’ve had tiny antlers.” He crunched the empty can and tossed it behind him.

“Looked like a doe to me,” another hunter said, pushing plastic bifocals up his nose. He held a half-rolled Playboy magazine.

“I thought it might’ve been a little buck,” Dickie pressed on, but everyone lost interest and wandered back to their bushes and trees.

We left soon after. Dickie told me it wasn’t worth staying, that those fools had ruined everything. This had been my only experience deer hunting. Now he hunched before the power lines, hoping for a buck.

I’d be sixteen soon.

Leaves fell, ticking away the seconds.

✴

IN MY ROOM, I blared music—Metallica or the Rolling Stones—and read whatever I could find in the school library or lying around the house: The Stranger, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, interplanetary sci-fi, a fantasy series with another elusive Dark Lord whose henchmen seemed more threatening than he did. As the characters traveled to East Egg or the mountains of Spain, or across monster-inhabited lands and eerily desolate solar systems, I relished their freedom.

Then, finally, my birthday came, and I had my driver’s license.

I did a quick reckoning. Of the few things in my room, only the schoolbooks, some copied cassettes, and a few changes of clothes were mine. Everything would fit in the blue three-hundred-dollar Honda my mother had found.

I twisted the stereo’s knob. The plastic speakers rattled against the floor with Megadeth’s bass line. Dickie had hardly spoken to me since my return, but when my mother had told him that I had my license, I’d felt the atmosphere shift. He’d been my age once, and he knew his duty.

The guitar riff had risen to a wild pitch when he threw the door open. His eyes weren’t furious. The drama was scripted; it was a prophecy whose edicts we—youthful hero and dodgy lord of darkness—were destined to fulfill long before we met.

“Out!” he shouted with perfunctory rage. “Just get the hell out!”

He yelled drunkenly before scurrying down the basement stairs.

The narrative of exile was mine. If I stayed, I’d be no different than everyone else, lacking courage. Sameness seemed like a disease, or a failure to develop properly—like not hitting puberty.

“So, yeah,” I said that evening over dinner, to the parents of a classmate I’d called from a pay phone, “he kicked me out. He’s a drunk. I doubt my mom will stay with him …”

But when I called my mother later, she tried to convince me I was wrong.

“He said he didn’t kick you out!”

“Well, he did.”

“He didn’t mean it. I talked to him. You can come back.”

“No, I can’t. I’m not living in that house with him. You’re not even happy …”

Her silence told me that I was right about one thing—she’d rather not be there either. It wasn’t that Dickie wanted me gone. He wanted all of us to disappear, and she knew it.

✴

FROM COUCH TO guest bedroom I went, consuming food, books, and the sitcoms other families watched, laughing with them. I mowed their yards, chopped firewood, and washed dishes. I loved my car, the smell of sunlight on the cracked plastic dashboard, the taste of dust when I ripped down dirt roads.

Until this point, the weeks had been predictable, so unlike this satisfying challenge of finding a place to sleep, of measuring the days when a friend said, “My parents agreed that you can stay over until Wednesday,” and another offered me a basement couch for the weekend. The details of survival, of getting enough food, of telling parents stories that won me further invitations, of being among strangers, talking, doing chores, finding odd jobs on farms—the sense of action, of achievement—nothing could have made me happier.

When I didn’t have a couch, I lived out of my car. I got a job mucking stalls and another washing dishes at Pizza Hut, where I again subsisted off mistaken orders. In January, I moved in with a friend who had an apartment, and changed schools to be nearby, but the apartment ended up crowded with cast-off youths jockeying for the bathroom, for the stale pizza in the fridge, for places to sleep. Three months later, after a dispute, I went back to my itinerant life.

Half-asleep, often late and disheveled, I rushed to school each day from a different direction. In science class, as we learned about the origins of life, I wondered where the shift had occurred, from one protozoan digesting another to an organism just longing, staring at the horizon, wanting to feel fully alive.

The highways to school or work or friends’ houses pulsed with the arterial thrill of my blood. I wondered if this was how my father felt when he left Quebec. Sometimes