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

driving without an inspection sticker, and then without a muffler, and finally for missing my court date. My brother had told my father about college and sent me a message, saying that my father wanted to pay my way back for a visit. Though I hated my job, I didn’t want to give in to him.

I opened my car door and sat. The clothes I wore had dried on a tree branch and were as stiff and coarse as animal hides.

I stared at the sky, the sun flashing through leaves. I punched the windshield and it split. The irreversible damage brought out my fury, and I kicked the side-view mirror off and beat on the door. I took a plastic jug with some gas in it and splashed it on the tent and lit it. I pitched much of what I owned inside. Not waiting for it to finish burning, I turned the car on. Lacking a muffler, the engine backfired and sounded like a lowrider. I raced along the tractor path through the woods, half a mile to a long unpaved driveway, and finally to a county road and then the interstate. I accelerated until the car shook, vibrations clapping in my ears. After an hour, the engine boomed, and I drifted to the shoulder.

When a tow truck arrived, I just signed the car over. With the sun in my eyes, I squinted off, trying to make a plan. The driver chuckled, the zipper on his overalls open to the black thatch of his beer gut, his clipboard propped against it as he wrote his name on the title.

I stuffed what I owned into my backpack and began hitchhiking to where a friend lived on a failed commune, a community built of landfill scraps—the walls made of mortared jars and pop bottles. But I knew the freeloading couldn’t last. I’d done so much, and nothing had changed.

✴

“DENI,” MY FATHER said when I finally dialed his number collect.

“How are you?” he asked, trying to sound jaunty. “I heard about college.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, so when would it start?”

“In two months. In September.”

He was briefly silent. “Two months. You should come and visit me first. You’re going to be busy once you start, right?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I’ll probably be busy.”

We were going through the motions. I’d accept whatever he offered. I couldn’t see how I could get to college from where I was, with two changes of clothes and less than fifty bucks. My mother had little for herself and couldn’t help me. I’d been pushing to be unattached, as far on the edge of life as possible, and here I was.

A day later, crossing the country once again felt like a solution. As I rode the bus west, the plains opened before me in a green unfurling of sunlight, until the jagged skyward saw of the Continental Divide warned me of change.

THE FLOOD

The lines on either side of his mouth had deepened, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, though his hair didn’t have a hint of gray. We were in a restaurant, finishing a steak dinner, and still hadn’t talked about why I ran away.

“I remember one time I’d just robbed a bank,” he told me. “I bought a new Thunderbird with the cash and decided to drive cross-country, but I picked up this kid hitchhiking. He probably wasn’t even eighteen. We were in Nevada, and I asked him, ‘How long do you think it will take for the engine to blow if I drive this car as fast as it can go?’ He laughed and dared me. That’s back when I was still pretty crazy. A dare was all it took. So I buried the needle and just kept going. We were in the desert, and it was hot. After about an hour, the hood shot up. It sounded as if I’d crashed into another car, but it was just the engine blowing. Steam and smoke sprayed everywhere. We were on the side of the road like that when a cop showed up.

“This cop,” he said, smiling, “he was a real hard ass. You could tell he didn’t believe that the engine of a brand-new Thunderbird just blew. So he said to us, ‘Have either of you ever been in trouble with the law?’ And this eighteen-year-old kid says, ‘Yeah.’ He’s playing it tough and giving the cop a hard time, but I had a suitcase full of cash in the trunk. I wanted to kill that kid. The cop finally took him in to check his record and dropped me off at a towing company. I realized then that I wasn’t as crazy as before. I’d been just like that kid, but I wasn’t anymore.”

He hesitated. “That’s part of being young. You have to take risks and piss people off.”

I finally understood. This was his way of saying he knew why I’d left.

“Anyway, I was thinking,” he went on, “before you leave, we should go fishing.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

He nodded to himself, knowing better than to remind me of the boy I used to be, or the things I’d once loved.

✴

ENCOURAGED BY HIM, I began kickboxing again. The trainer, a bowlegged Irish Newfoundlander with webs of broken veins on his cheeks, encouraged his fighters, often illustrating endurance with stories of fishermen adrift in fog or miners trapped underground who resorted to drinking their own piss. In his hip pouch, he carried a bottle of painkillers.

“Hey, do I sign you up for the tournament?” he asked, though I’d been back only one month.

“Sure. I mean, you think I’m ready?” I was pleased by his enthusiasm, but he shrugged and said, “Why not?” and then wrote down my name.

The summer was passing too quickly, the days bright but cool. By mid-August, I still hadn’t made up my mind. I was supposed to be in Vermont soon. My father and I hadn’t mentioned college since I’d arrived. He’d given me back the SUV and paid me too well, tossing