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

day.’ Without that tip, I might not have acted so fast. He saved me. I had my laboratory and two guns, and that night I went into the woods and buried everything under a fallen tree. The next day the police arrested me. They kept me for a few days, but they had no evidence. When I was being released, the officer who gave my stuff back started going through the box. He began feeling along the seams of my jacket, and I realized I’d forgotten to take out the speed. I pretended to be furious and shouted, ‘Are you going to keep me here another day? Give me a fucking break! You guys arrested me for nothing!’ This guy just said, ‘Okay.’ He pushed everything off the counter and let me pick it up. He’d been seconds from finding the speed.”

“Do you think we could go to where you buried the guns and dig them up?” I asked, thrilled at the thought of it—the foray a mixture of old passions: crime and archaeology.

He watched the road. “It’s been twenty years, but I wrapped everything in plastic. Maybe I can find the place. We can look later today.”

Until then his face had been creased with fatigue, his skin slack, but he brightened at the thought of us unearthing his old guns and laboratory.

“If we can find the house,” he went on, “we can buy a shovel at the hardware store.”

We followed a gravel lane and parked at a high embankment bulldozed in place years ago to keep the river from washing out the roads.

Standing before the headlights, we attached our reels and threaded the rods. He squinted, taking his time tying the hook on, finishing long after I had. Seeing him, I remembered a night at the reservoir when I was a child—the workings of his hands as he threaded the line. He’d muttered and reached in the truck window, and the headlights had come on. He’d crouched before the bumper, his hands moving in the beam, scars across his knuckles, blunt fingertips pinching and pulling. I’d stood in the light falling past him and inspected my own hands, the soft pads, the pink rounded fingertips and my few pale scars. I took a few slow breaths and stared off until the emotion passed.

When he was ready, we climbed the embankment and followed the shore. He stepped carefully between rocks and driftwood, his head bowed. Something had changed in him, his movements slow.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I’d noticed Tylenol bottles in the truck but had thought nothing of them.

“I got in a fight the other day.”

“What?”

“With some idiot. This guy—you’ve met him, Tom Alding.”

“That guy?” The man was tall, not burly, but well over six feet and solid looking.

“Yeah. He tried to sell me some bad salmon. We were in the store, and I smelled one. I don’t know if he took me for an idiot. I guess he really needed the money. I told him no way, and he grabbed me by the neck and pushed me backward over the counter. It hurt my back.”

“What did you do?”

“I hit him. I punched him in the face and got him by the hair and kept hitting him until I had him out the door. Then I kicked him in the ass and he fell off the porch. He had the nerve to say, “Take it easy.” Jesus Christ, the guy pushes me and then he says, “take it easy” in the middle of a fight. I went in and got the baseball bat from under the cash register, but by the time I returned he’d run away.”

“You keep a baseball bat under the register?” I asked.

“You didn’t know? I have one in all my stores.” Then he grit his teeth and said that his back hurt and he hadn’t been able to sleep. He conveyed this with no self-pity, speaking harshly as if still at odds with the other man.

Dawn lightened the sky above the river, and its water, broken by boulders, shone silver like a long rippled fabric running on beneath the mountains.

“I’m fifty-four,” he said, watching the current. “I shouldn’t be fighting at my age. It’s stupid. All of this is stupid.”

I just breathed the air off the river. Seeing him weak shook me in a way I couldn’t explain, but I knew he’d hate me if he saw me feeling sorry for him. And if I let myself worry, it wouldn’t be easy to leave.

Gradually, as we began to fish, he moved more naturally. Chum salmon weren’t in season, and we were trying for the rarer, smaller coho, whose meat was better. Though we occasionally hooked a large chum, we let it go and competed to see who could catch a coho. In the late afternoon, he shouted and laughed, and I walked along the riverbank to join him.

The salmon’s gills pulled for air, and I crouched.

“It’s a small chum,” I told him.

“No, it isn’t. I work with fish all day. You don’t even like them.”

“It’s a chum,” I repeated, gliding my finger along the scales. “Look here.”

He drew his face near, lips pursed with anger. The salmon opened and closed its mouth, and snapped its tail against his hand. He reached into his jacket and took out a pair of glasses.

In the lenses, his eyes were large, like toys, blinking slowly. He crouched and stared, and then straightened, putting the glasses away.

The salmon struggled, drowning in the air, and he picked it up and carried it to the water. He eased it in and released it, rinsed his hands and shook them dry. He told me that we should find the buried guns while there was still light.

We followed the river in his truck. Warm air blew in the vents, and the cab smelled of the mixed, hard odor of his life—a briny animal scent of dogs and fish and cologne. A few unlit cabins stood in the woods, and we slowed at each one