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

He’d finally realized that leniency would get him nowhere. Only his rage could keep me in line. I didn’t think he was wrong, but I preferred freedom.

Sleet was falling as I picked up the license plates for the Dodge. I drove to my father’s house and parked the SUV. Frost had burned the grass yellow, and the unlit windows reflected the large wet pines along the property. I knew his schedule, but he sometimes returned to drop off hefty bags of dog food or to put fish in the garage freezers. He was restless, his days filled with errands that seemed like excuses for him to prowl the streets in his truck. Maybe he felt the same need for movement that I did.

I hadn’t packed anything yet. I was afraid he’d go downstairs and see my bags. In fifteen minutes, a classmate would be there to take me to the Dodge.

I got out, swung myself over the iron gate, and ran through the door and down to my room. I rushed, throwing everything into a duffel. I sprinted back out, pitched it over the gate, and followed. I shoved it behind my seat and sat inside my SUV, pretending to read.

My classmate’s Toyota pulled into the lane. When he stopped, I shuttled the duffel from my vehicle to his. I tossed the keys onto the floorboard, took the new plates, and slid into his car. He did a quick three-point turn and sped away. The tires made a rushing sound over the wet asphalt, large half-frozen raindrops striking the windshield. Soon we were on the highway, the downpour slackening unevenly, falling in hard pulses.

✴

AN HOUR LATER, I crossed the border, retracing the windy path of my mother’s migration seven years before. The rush-hour ranks advanced cautiously, the parade of taillights made garish by the icy downpour. In my rearview, endless headlights appeared crystalline behind the same rain. The motor buzzed like the remote-control car my father sent when I lived in the trailer park. Each time I gained speed, I feared it might explode.

After midnight, I pulled into a rest stop on I-90, in eastern Washington. I folded the backseat and curled up in my blankets, my feet in the hatchback and my clothes serving as a mattress. The engine idled, fans beating hot air through the vents. I’d never been happier.

To avoid the cold, I cut south on I-15 through Idaho and into Utah, before turning east on I-70. I taped a notebook to the dash, and as I drove, I wrote the sloping deserts and arid plateaus, the Rockies and their companionship with a sky wider and greater than my faith in anything. It lifted peaks into its light, making new monuments of them each hour, and then abandoned them into the dark, which—I told myself as I tried to sleep, staring up at snowy, starlit crags through the hatchback window—was why mountains at night are a lonely thing to see.

As the motor’s vibrations cradled me, I tried to envision my life. I saw the red lines of highways on the map, stretched between cities like threads of torn cloth. I imagined a book that could hold it all together, plains and mountain ranges, dust-drab towns beyond interstates, and somewhere on the far edges, the valley in British Columbia and those nights in Virginia when I sneaked out and stalked the highway, trying to fathom where I belonged on this threadbare continent. Everyone I knew should see the world though my eyes, every friend, every girl I’d ever liked: frost glittering on dry plains at sunrise, or the highway carving through rolling hills with the perfect geometry of longing.

The writer’s life was said to be chaotic and destructive and adventurous, and I felt that by choosing this over and over again, so much of who I was would become acceptable.

✴

THE MESSAGE CAME through my brother: my father’s anger, that I’d insulted him, that he never wanted to speak to me again and that I should expect nothing else from him.

I tried not to think about it. The farther I got from his life, the clearer I was about mine. But the way I’d left had been extreme, a reminder for him of my mother’s betrayal. When I tried to decide if he deserved it, I thought of how he had broken our family. Everything he’d built in his life seemed temporary, hopeless, even—like a few sandbags set against an incoming deluge.

Again, I worked the circuit of couches and guest bedrooms and odd jobs: construction, demolition, roofing, landscaping, washing dishes. My mother had left Dickie and was seeing someone new, a thin, bald man with a Wyatt Earp mustache and such a kind demeanor I could hardly believe she’d chosen him.

At my high school, the poet Henry Taylor, who’d won something called the Pulitzer Prize, gave a reading. His talk was casual, his first poem prefaced with a concern for grammar. It described a horse eating grass through barbed wire, when it was spooked—by what wasn’t clear—and ran along the fence, barbs gouging its neck, tearing chunks from its throat. Hearing the rhythms, I wanted to jump up and shout, to tell the horse to stop, to command Taylor to keep reading, to feel the tremendous urge for life that the horse did in the final seconds of its destruction, as it “gave up breathing while the dripping wire / hummed like a bowstring in the splintered air.”

Mumbling the lines over and over, I left school and drove to the restaurant where I washed dishes.

The line cook with the greasy ponytail annoyed me, but I told him about the poem so I could snag half an English cucumber.

“You wanna be a writer, huh?” he said, his front tooth chipped at a nicotine-stained angle.

“Yeah.”

“Well, you should read Kerouac.”

“Whatever,” I said. Worn-out hippies were always telling me to read Kerouac. No one who didn’t look as if he’d scorched his neurons and had his skull sooted up with cobwebs