Читать книгу Cures for Hunger - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 10

DAREDEVILS AND INVISIBLE FRIENDS

Racing trains was one of my favorite adventures. This was what we were doing on the day I first considered that my father might have problems with the law.

“Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine!”

My brother and I practiced counting as my father kept up with the train.

“I’ll push harder!” he shouted. He thrust his bearded chin forward, bugging out his eyes as he jammed the accelerator to the floor. His green truck heaved along the road, outstripping the train whose tracks, just below the line of trees, skirted the incline.

Almost instantly we left the red engine behind. As the road straightened, he came up on a few cars and swerved past them with shouts of “Old goat!” He shifted gears and kept accelerating, though the train was far behind. Then he braked, holding my brother and me in place with his right arm, the air forced from my lungs as he spun the wheel with his free hand. We pulled onto the crossing, though the warning lights on both posts were flashing and bells were ringing.

With the truck straddling the tracks, he switched the motor off. He relaxed in his seat, looking out the passenger window, straight along the railroad.

As if on a TV screen, the train appeared in the distance, plummeting toward us. The engine broke from the shadow of the trees. Sunlight struck its red paint, and my brother and I began to scream.

My father turned the ignition.

“Oh no! It’s not starting!” He was twisting the key but didn’t give the engine gas. We knew the ritual and shouted, “Give it gas!”

He gave it gas and the motor fired. The truck shook but didn’t move. The train engine was sounding its horn, filling up the tracks, its two narrow windows glaring down at us.

The truck’s tires screeched, and we lurched and shot onto the road.

The train rushed past behind us, its iron wheels thudding over the crossing.

“That was a close call!” my father shouted and laughed like a pirate. But my brother had gone pale and he turned to me, his eyes so wide that I saw just how close we’d come to being crushed. “We almost died,” he said.

I glanced from him to my father, whose wild bellowing filled the cab. My fear had passed, and the air I drew into my lungs felt more alive, charged with a sudden, mysterious joy. I couldn’t help but laugh with him.

✴

OUR YELLOW FARMHOUSE was on the narrow road that ran the center of the valley. An apple tree and a row of blueberry bushes separated our back porch from damp fields, and the only neighbor my age was Ian, a dirty-faced farm boy with a intellectually disabled older sister. Though I spent many afternoons with Ian, I never learned his sister’s name. I simply thought of her as Ten Speed, because she raced up and down the road all day on what he referred to as “the ten speed.” She had wide-set eyes and was always listening to a bulky black tape player clipped to her belt, its headphones holding her mess of brown curls in place.

Pine forest topped the mountains, large trees distinct like spurs against the sky in the hour before sunset. Many of the fields around our house were planted with Christmas trees, hundreds of neat rows of the pine, fir, and spruce that my father sold each December.

By the time we arrived home, he’d convinced my brother and me to keep our adventure between the three of us. His joyful mood had ended as soon as we pulled into the driveway, and he said he had to check the trees—something to do with an order for spruce. We were to go inside, but the thrill of train racing hadn’t worn off, and I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in the house with my mother and sister. When I begged to tag along, he hesitated. “Okay. Come on,” he said.

As the two of us walked the rows, I asked him to tell me a story. He stared ahead, taking slow, deep breaths between his parted lips, as he stepped evenly, lightly over the wet, tufted earth. I had a specific story in mind. When I was younger, my mother had told me I’d someday grow facial hair, and I’d pictured myself, my face hidden in a stinky beard as I showed up to class and sat in the back, terrifying the other kids. I cried, and my father laughed at me. I was so embarrassed and angry that he told me about a fat bearded woman he’d lived with before my mother. She sat on him so he couldn’t leave, but he wiggled from beneath her butt and ran away because he didn’t want children with beards.

He stayed silent now, narrowing his eyes the way his dogs did before they ran after something. He kept six German shepherds in a pen, and whenever he let them out, they sniffed the air and gazed into the distance, the wind ruffling their fur, and then they raced away so suddenly that I felt they were the happiest animals on earth.

But he just walked, and I followed him to the Christmas tree fields on the other side of the road. We stepped over sagging barbed wire and crossed a stream on a plank nailed with asphalt shingles for grip. I lingered to watch for trout in the pools beneath overhanging trees. He kept on and I ran to catch up.

When I took his hand, his fingers closed slightly.

“Which story?” he asked.

“About the bearded woman.”

He nodded and said, “If she’d been your mother, you’d have a beard.”

He’d been like this more and more—at first normal, making jokes, doing something fun and crazy, laughing wildly; then, a little later, silent, staring off.

We came to where the fields gave way to tall tangled grass and huge weeds and forest. The mountain rose steeply above us, and we turned and walked along its base, the rows of Christmas trees at our side. With each few steps, another long, thin corridor appeared, descending out of sight.

Where the trees ended, a shallow, overgrown ditch separated the neighbor’s blueberry farm from our land. There was a bad smell, like an alley trash can in the city, behind one of my father’s seafood stores.

“He got some bears,” he said, and told me that our neighbor had set up bear traps. He waded into the yellow grass, crushing a path that I followed.

I stretched my neck. He’d often warned me to stay away from black bears and their cubs, and he’d made me promise that if any came along when I went fishing alone, I’d get on my bike and hurry home. I’d seen them once, four dark spots near some distant trees, and I’d pedaled as fast as I could over the rutted dirt road, my fishing rod pinned to my handlebars. I felt a little nervous now, the stink of rotten meat stronger, but he was there, between me and the bears.

“Look.” He motioned me forward.

The dense grass came up past my elbows, and I walked ahead, my heart beating faster. Two large shapes lay on the earth. One haggard carcass was just before me, its jaws open and its eye sockets hollow.

“You’re not afraid?” he asked as I measured my breath, studying the second bear, sprawled on its side, a naked leg bone raised stiffly, claws struck into the rank air.

“No,” I said. The bears were dead, and this wasn’t a big deal after all. I moved closer to the fanged, gaping jaws, the rotting fur like torn carpeting over the ribs. The stench made it hard to breathe.

He turned and said, “Let’s go.”

“I want to look at them.”

He chuckled. “Come on. You’ve seen enough.”

I crouched. Two long curved teeth protruded from the top and bottom jaws. A few weeks earlier, in class, I’d read a story in my fourth-grade primer about the loup-garou, the werewolf. Because my classes were in French, we often read folktales from Quebec, but this one was my favorite, and I’d imagined myself growing fangs as I stared at the full moon.

My father started walking, and I jogged after him, through the battered grass. As I followed him back across the rows, I told him the story, feeling a little breathless at the thought that what I’d just seen might not really be bears.

“There’s this hunter who likes to hunt more than he likes to be in the village. He hunts all day long and he sleeps in his cabin, and he almost never goes home or talks to anyone. Then, one night, when the moon is full, his uncles and cousins visit his cabin. But it’s empty. They find clothes covered with animal hair, and there are huge wolf tracks in the snow.”

“I heard that a lot when I was a boy,” he told me, his eyes serious, maybe a little worried, as I tried to match his pace.

If he were a loup-garou, his beard would spread over his face and neck and arms. I pictured him standing at the edge of the forest beneath the mountain, dressed in torn fur, the bear skull on his head as he stared out at the valley through the ragged jaws.

I expected him to say more about the loup-garou, but he just glanced over the spruces as we silently made our way back, pausing at a few old tool and fertilizer sheds that smelled of wet earth.

“See,” he said and touched one of their wooden corner posts. “Each year they’re smaller. They rot into the ground. The valley’s moisture eats up the wood.”

He turned in a circle, and then he kept on while I hurried after. I couldn’t remember him ever acting like this. We came to the ditch separating us from the road, walked along it and crossed over a large culvert.

As we followed the asphalt, I heard the low whine of a bicycle chain against its gears, and Ten Speed shot past with a sound like someone snapping a wet towel. Briefly, shouting voices blared from her headphones. I’d asked Ian about this, and he’d said that she listened to radio shows. We’d once found her sleeping in the hay of the barn, curled up, the voices clamoring from her frizzy hair. Then her eyelids popped open on large, terrified pupils, and she ran past us, staying crouched low, and went down the ladder and out the door.

My father glanced behind us. A white car had appeared in the distance. He kept walking, reaching out and telling me to take his hand.

The car pulled next to us, and the darkening sky warped in the window that descended on two clean-shaven men. The driver, with eyes as blue as my mother’s, said, “Excuse me. Can you tell us where André Béchard lives?”

My father squeezed my hand. He then tilted his head, scrunching up his face.

“Who?” he said in a loud, ridiculous voice.

“André Béchard. Do you—”

“Oh, ’ey, dat guy. Oh yeah, I see ’im. ’E drive a big truck and ’e out drivin’ in de city.”

The men watched as he gesticulated, and it was all I could do to stand perfectly still.

“Yeah, ’e come back later,” my father was saying. “Dat’s right, later.”

The driver gave me a long, searching look, and I barely breathed. “Okay,” he said. He drove off.

I gazed up at my father, but he just laughed.

“I played a good joke on those guys,” he said. “But don’t tell your mother. She doesn’t like jokes—not the way you and me like jokes.”

I smiled and agreed, though he had a wincing expression, nothing like the joy of escaping the train. As we walked home, he stepped faster, and the hand holding mine felt hot and damp.

✴

OFTEN, AFTER SCHOOL, I wandered the fields alone, catching frogs and grass snakes, putting them in my pockets as I explored the woods along the stream. I couldn’t stop thinking about the two men in the car. I was certain they were police. My father knew everything about police and had told me that they didn’t always dress in uniform or drive cop cars. Whenever he saw them, he made fun of their clothes, especially the yellow stripe on one leg of their pants. He said he’d have joined the RCMP himself if their outfits weren’t so ugly.

As I sat beneath the trees, a memory resurfaced: a night that I was afraid to ask about, that I couldn’t place—like a bad dream after waking, but vivid, constant in my recollection. There was a house where we’d stayed, at a river ferry crossing on a Native reservation. My mother and father had spoken in hushed tones. She wore a sweater, her long brown hair pulled back, and looked worried. I wanted to know what was happening, and he told me that a man was coming to fight him.

“I want to fight too.”

“You’re too little.”

“No! Let me fight.”

“Okay. Maybe. You just wait inside. Maybe you can help me.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling at me. “All right. I’ll probably need your help.”

I sat on the couch as he paced the small living room, stopping only to draw back the curtain and look out at the gravel driveway and the unlit road to the ferry landing. The man who was coming had worked for him and wanted money he didn’t deserve. My father had told me stories about fighting. He made it sound fun, and I was desperate to hit the man too.

“He’ll be here soon,” my father said and prowled back and forth, hunched like an angry dog. His rage burned into the air so that I breathed and tasted it.

But then I was opening my eyes, lifting my face from the cushion, rubbing my cheek.

My father had just come in the door, red gouges on the skin around his eyes, the collar of his shirt torn. He picked up the telephone’s black receiver. Blood covered his knuckles.

“He’s knocked out,” he told my mother. “I knocked him out.”

“What happened?”

“She jumped on my back. His girlfriend—she tried to scratch my eyes.”

“She’s out there?”

“I broke her jaw. I didn’t mean to. She jumped on my back.”

My mother just stared.

“I wanted to fight,” I shouted and began to cry.

She hurried to the couch and lay me back against the pillow.

“Go to sleep,” she told me, her voice stern. There was a tension in her that I knew from my father’s rages.

“I didn’t mean to,” he kept saying. He was holding the phone, repeating, “I didn’t mean to.”

I understood that outside the man and his girlfriend lay on the dark gravel.

My father dialed and spoke into the phone, telling what had happened, that two people had come onto his property.

Then I was waking again. Red and blue lights flashed outside, rippling in the folds of the curtains. My father was putting on his jacket, the door opening, cold night air and the smell of the river washing into the room.

At some point in the days or weeks afterward, there’d been a visit to court, my brother and I neatly dressed, our mother not wearing jeans or farm clothes but a dark outfit. She was grim and silent, trying to keep us quiet, giving us the candy she usually forbade, rotting out our teeth and bones.

Maybe the police had come to the valley because my father had beaten someone up again. For months now, my mother had been withdrawn, my father—when he was home—like a watchdog in the seconds before it snarled. Shouting woke me at night—slammed doors, my mother crossing the house, naked but for a blanket wrapped around her, telling him to leave her alone.

At times the fights were obvious: he got angry when she cooked strange meals like boiled oranges and rice, or he told her to stop harping on him for having shared his vodka with me. He’d let me have a swig on a fishing trip, and, proud of how much I could handle, I’d sneaked more, the bottle lifted above my face, a shimmering bubble rising with each gulp. My brother called out to my father, who snatched it from my hand. I became drowsy and passed out, but at school I bragged that my father had let me get drunk. My mother became furious when she heard me say this, and my father later reminded me that drinking was one of our secrets. But lately everything was becoming a secret.

✴

WE WERE DRIVING to get the mail, the five of us, my father at the wheel, my mother holding my sister on her lap, my brother and I wedged in between.

Large, distant mountains stood at the horizon, the highest already white. A few rusty leaves clung to the roadside trees, and as we drove, sunlight broke in along the clouds, flashing over the hood of the truck.

The post office was a two-story building next to the muddy slough near the house where I was born, just outside the valley. A brass bell rang when we opened the door. The owner, a bespectacled man who lived up a set of creaky stairs, was reading the paper. He got up from his stool, pushed his glasses high on the bridge of his nose, and gazed at the wooden pigeonholes on the wall. He took down a sheaf of letters.

I followed my father back outside and down the steps. He stood in the sunlight as he tore the envelopes open. One held a flowery card. He stared into it. I’d never seen him get mail like this, and I stepped in close but still couldn’t make out the words.

“What is it?”

My mother laughed. “It’s from his other family.”

The skin of his neck flushed. He didn’t appear to breathe.

“What other family?” I asked. I had no idea what she meant and tried to see inside the card. But he didn’t respond, and she stared at the ground and sighed. “It was just a joke. I was just joking.”

He folded the card and put it in his jacket pocket, and we got in the truck.

Though we often received cards from my mother’s parents in Pittsburgh, he almost never spoke of his family in Quebec, other than to say, “My brother and me, we beat up all the kids in our village, so you and your brother should stick together.” And then he’d look a little angry, probably because of all the fights he’d been in.

The only time I thought about where he came from was at school, because I spoke French there and often read about Quebec. My mother loved French but didn’t speak it, and she told me that my father grew up speaking it even if he almost never did now. He claimed it was useless, but she insisted on making me learn it.

That evening, as I did my homework, I kept thinking about the card. I approached the chair where he was watching TV.

“Est-ce que tu peux m’aider avec mes devoirs?” I said. If he checked my homework and spoke in French, I might figure something out. Maybe there were questions I could ask in French that I couldn’t in English. Besides, I was always curious to hear his voice change.

“Okay, viens,” he told me, but as soon as my workbook came into his big hands, he furrowed his brow. His eyelids drooped and he hunched in his chair as I rattled away, explaining a translation assignment. When I stopped, he made a suggestion on how to write a sentence about a moose, but accidentally used the French word for mouse instead—une souris. I corrected him, telling him that a moose was un orignal.

He lowered the book and stared at the TV. Black smoke rose from an aerial view of a city. He seemed upset, as if this were a place he knew. All around him hummed familiar danger, the electric buzz of his irritation.

When he switched to English and said, “This isn’t a good time,” I felt relieved.

✴

MY MOTHER HAD clear blue eyes, not dark like his, and silvery stripes in her light brown hair that, when she pulled it back in a ponytail, reminded me of the markings on a cat.

“Whose eyes do I have?” I asked. We were alone in the kitchen while she made goat cheese and I pretended to do my homework. I spoke as if the question weren’t a big deal, though my teacher had made us read about eye color and told us that to have blue eyes the genes had to come from both parents. My mother said that mine were probably from her, unless someone in my father’s family also had blue eyes, but she didn’t know. I didn’t bother to explain how it really worked and asked, “Why don’t you know?”

“Because I’ve never met them. He’s not close to them anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t really know. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Oh,” I said, grudgingly. I fiddled with my pencil and considered my workbook. “And whose hair do I have?”

“I had blond hair when I was younger.”

“And my nose?” She’d often told me that I was lucky not to have her small nose. She called it a ski jump, though I saw nothing wrong with it.

“Your nose is your father’s. You have his real nose.”

“His real nose?” I repeated. “His nose isn’t real?”

“He had his real nose smashed in a fight. Doctors rebuilt it and gave him a new one that’s smaller and very straight. I never saw his real one, but I’m sure you’ll have it when you grow up.”

I was sitting at a picnic table, the kind you saw in parks but never in other kids’ houses. My life was nothing like other kids’. I never said “Mom” and “Dad,” but “Bonnie” and “André,” and no one I knew had changed homes so often. Summers, we used to stay in a trailer on blocks in the valley, with goats and German shepherds in pens. My first memories were sunny days and broken-down motors, the mountain just above us, no electricity or running water, and our drinks in wire milk crates set in the stream. Winters, we moved to places with heat, rundown houses where my father got electricity using jumper cables, clipping the ends above and below the meter after stripping away the rubber. From my mother’s stories, I knew she’d gone to art school in Virginia but ran away with a draft dodger. I pictured a guy really good at dodgeball, but, as if angry, she said he was dodging war, not balls. She met my father in Vancouver while working as a waitress, an encounter that—because he’d once described it to me as “She served me ham and eggs, and I left with her”—made me hungry whenever I thought about it. After that, they traveled British Columbia, living out of a van and fishing, an existence I fantasized about—mornings waking up and going straight outside to the river, no bedroom to clean, no school to worry about. But they decided to have children, and my perfect life ended just before I was born.

Whenever I asked her questions—about war or why it was wrong—she answered carefully, explaining with so many details—Vietnam, corrupt government, the loss of individual freedom—that I didn’t understand much. She talked to me as if I weren’t a child but rather a very old and serious man.

Unlike her, my father barely answered whenever I asked about his family. “Why don’t you like to speak French?” or “What did your parents do?” earned me few words: “There’s no point,” or “He fished. She took care of the kids.” Then he told me about his travels or fights, like the time he hitchhiked cross-country to Calgary and went to a party and got in a terrible fight over a beautiful woman.

“This bruiser,” he said, “was two or three times as big as me. We were throwing each other across the room. We broke the table and chairs and knocked all the pictures off the walls. There wasn’t anything we didn’t break. That guy was tough, but I didn’t let myself get worried. You get worried in a fight, and you’ve had it. So I kept hitting him, and pretty soon everyone at the party started cheering me. They were originally his friends, but he was arrogant, and I was the better fighter. They could see that, so I guess they wanted to be on my side. Each time I got him down, I’d say, ‘Stay down,’ and everyone else would shout, ‘Stay down!’ but he’d get up, and then I’d hit him five or six times, and he’d fall on his ass again, and everyone would yell, ‘Stay down!’ I tried to be nice, but that guy was big, and he kept shaking his head and trying to get back up and then I’d have to hit him again. It wasn’t easy, but I finally made him understand.”

If I asked him whether he’d had worse fights, he told one story after another. His confrontations with bruisers, this being one of his favorite words, often had strange endings.

“The bruiser was so strong I had to bite his nose to win. We were on the docks, by the fishing boats, and I got him down and bit his nose and just hung on until he started crying. Sometimes you have to do things like that to win a fight.”

He told me about journeys, from Calgary to Tijuana in a truck without brakes, or driving an old Model T along Alaskan railways to get to towns not connected by roads. Whenever a train came, he swerved off the tracks, and afterward he and his friends hefted the Model T back on.

My favorite was the time he and a friend were driving through Nevada and picked up a Mormon. He drove so fast that the Mormon prayed in the backseat and wept to the Lord until my father, racing at over a hundred miles an hour, slammed the brakes. The Mormon flew onto the dash, his back against the windshield so that the car was briefly dark and all my father saw was the screaming face of the religious man. The friend kicked open the door and they chucked the Mormon out. He grabbed at the earth, kissing it—“Like the goddamn pope,” my father said.

I didn’t know what a Mormon was, but I’d seen the pope on TV, descending from an airplane and kissing the ground.

“I bet dogs pissed all over that ground,” my father had told me and changed the channel.

✴

THE PROOF THAT his stories were true was his madness. He raced through traffic or hit large puddles with such speed that his truck had wings of muddy water and sputtered until its engine dried. Watching TV, he contemplated Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump a motorcycle over buses, or how Houdini had escaped handcuffs, live burial, and torture cells.

Yet many of his exploits involved not escaping torture but subjecting us to it. In the mall, when I was four, he hid, standing with mannequins in a window, arms lifted and motionless, head cocked at an angle as he stared into space. He blended in perfectly, his posture so convincing that my brother and I walked past him repeatedly, crying as we called out his name. Only when a woman stopped to help us did we see the mannequin leave the display and hurry toward us, laughing.

Or once he took my brother and me to an empty store that he intended to rent. Along with running Christmas tree lots each winter, he’d established three seafood shops in the city and wanted to open more. But while my brother and I explored the musty backroom with its peeling linoleum or old cardboard boxes, he locked us in and hid outside. We raced to the storefront window, calling out, and my brother pounded on it until, suddenly, it cracked.

My father loomed in the broken glass. His key ring jangled against the door and he threw it open. He spanked us for acting like babies, but as he struck me, I struggled and shouted, “I wasn’t crying!” Even afterward, following him to the truck, I yelled, “I wasn’t crying!” I stopped only when he turned and glared.

✴

USUALLY WHEN I woke up, my father had already gone to his stores, and he returned after I was in bed. But some mornings before school, if his truck was in the driveway, I stood at the window and searched the misted rows of pines. His figure passed between them, followed by the swift movement of his German shepherds.

The November of my fourth grade, while he worked his tree lots, I worried that the salmon runs would end and checked spawning dates in the books I’d hoarded from the school library. He and I used to fish often, in the streams between the fields or in the reservoir outside the valley, but he had less and less time and often wasn’t even around, so I couldn’t ask. I lay in bed, looking at pictures of fish—the toothy great barracuda or the gaping goosefish with its antennae. Their mystery riveted me, the way they appeared from deep, shadowy water and vanished again.

I woke up later that night with my cheek glued to the page I’d been reading. I carefully peeled it off and sat up. He was shouting somewhere downstairs.

I got out of bed and opened my door. No one was in the kitchen, and I crept downstairs, gently setting my foot on each step so that it wouldn’t creak.

I went to their door and listened. My mother was crying.

“It’s all bullshit,” he said.

“I saw it. It was as real as you standing here. I was lying there dead, and my body rolled over, and half of my face was rotted. It was me from a past life.”

I held the doorframe, my cheek to its cold, painted wood.

“Stop going to those things. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m not stopping. I want to know who I used to be.”

Her description was like a mystery in a novel. But maybe he was protecting her. That happened in stories too. I’d thought she was angry at him, not the other way around. I was so confused that I stomped back to my room.

The next day he was gone, and she made us sit with her on the living room carpet. She wanted to teach us something special she’d learned. We sat cross-legged and closed our eyes, and she told us to calm our minds until we saw a white light. The white light was our soul. This, she said, was called meditation.

I rolled my eyes in the dark and then opened them. My brother and sister sat, my mother, too, their eyelids settled. The sun descended against the mountains, the fields in shadow. The last flare of daylight dimmed in the dirty glass.

I closed my eyes again, and there it was—a pale thumbprint in the inky substance of my mind.

That night, when she came to say good night, I told her.

“I saw my soul. I saw the white light.”

Tears came into my eyes, not from sadness but the spinal thrill of mystery—all that could be discovered. She knelt by my bed and stroked the hair from my forehead.

“I’m proud of you,” she said. “I want you to keep looking inside yourself and to tell me everything you see.”

✴

MY MOTHER OFTEN talked about purpose.

“You all have one,” she said, driving us home from school, staring off above the glistening, leaf-blown highway as if we’d keep on toward our purpose and never return.

She told us that our gifts helped us to understand our purpose. Since my brother’s and sister’s report cards contained stars that mine lacked, they were clearly gifted in school. In particular, my sister’s gifts were singing and, when necessary, punching boys, and my brother’s were math and behaving. He was also gifted with an obsession for space travel and Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and he played so many hours of Tron Deadly Discs on his IntelliVision that his thumbs blistered.

Though I’d tried my hand at creating sculptures from trash and even made dolls with my mother’s old maternity underwear, stuffing them with cotton and twisting them the way clowns did with long balloons, none of this was appreciated. The sculptures returned to the trash, and the dolls, shortly after I gave them to the neighbor’s toddlers, unraveled and were left on the roadside.

As we were nearing home, I asked my mother why I had a purpose.

“So you can do something great for the world,” she said.

“But how can I know?” I practically yelled.

“What?”

“What my purpose is?”

“Just ask inside yourself,” she said. “All the answers you’ll ever need are inside you.”

Along the road, dead autumn grass resembled a dirty shag rug. Ten Speed appeared in the distance and zipped past, turning her head to take us in with her wide eyes. And then the road before us was clear. A few leafless trees leaned this way and that, hunched and bent and reaching, like old people.

“Do you have any invisible friends?” my mother asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are there people you talk to?”

It seemed like a dumb question. I talked to stuffed animals and books, to my pillow and the trees. I walked across the fields talking.

But my brother was eager to explain. “Not real people,” he said.

“Spirit guides,” she interrupted. “Your brother and sister have one. How many do you have?”

Ten Speed had made a U-turn and was trying to catch up to our van, her chin to the handlebars. I watched her, giving my mother’s question some thought.

“Twelve,” I said.

Briefly, no one spoke.

“Well then,” she told me, “you should have no problem finding your purpose. Just ask. I’m sure at least one of them will tell you.”

✴

NOVEMBERS WERE DISAPPOINTING. My father was gone, running his seafood stores or selling Christmas trees. My birthday passed while he worked, and that Friday, at school, the kids sang “Bonne Fête à Toi,” though I wouldn’t actually turn nine until Sunday. As they yammered, I mourned the few remaining weeks of salmon season. The teacher told the class my age, and they all asked, as they did each November, why I was a year younger than they were. I explained how my mother had thought kindergarten was a waste of time and made me go straight to first grade. They told me kindergarten was fun, and I said it was for slow learners, which she’d also said, though from what I’d heard, it did sound fun.

The next morning, when my father was saying good-bye to my mother in the kitchen, I grabbed my book on fish and ran downstairs.

“The salmon runs are going to end,” I whined and showed him the dates. “Can’t we go for my birthday? It’s tomorrow. You were going to forget it. You always do.”

He finished putting on his rain gear by the door and said, “We can’t go fishing, but how about I take you to work for your birthday? There’s a spare bed. I’ll bring you back tomorrow.”

“Sure, okay,” I told him, though I planned to harass him about salmon fishing and make him feel bad. On our way into the city, as I tried to bide my time, we passed a shallow river where Native people stood in the current, spearing salmon that splashed between the rocks. My father had long ago explained why they were allowed to fish this way and catch as much as they wanted, and I’d been jealous. I couldn’t help but mutter, “I wish I was Indian” as we drove past.

My father sold Christmas trees near downtown Vancouver, on a parking lot rented from the Pacific National Exhibition, which had closed its rides for the winter. He’d put up fences and turned the space into a maze of pine, spruce, and fir, and he slept in the mobile home that served as an office and a warm-up place for his employees, the young men who hauled trees and flirted with Helen, a pretty blond with fringed bangs who ran the till. She played Christmas music over the speakers until the last customer left, and then put on the Eurythmics or Duran Duran as everyone gathered in the cramped living room to drink beer and rum and coke, the trailer floor creaking.

Though his workers all had yellow rain jackets and pants, my father wore green, as if it were a general’s color. Yellow was ugly, he told me, and he pointed out that you called cowards yellow. In green, he blended with the trees, so that sometimes I didn’t notice him watching. I would be wandering, talking to myself, and then I’d see him, his eyes as still as unlit windows.

Though I was actually proud of going to work with him, I couldn’t stop worrying about the salmon runs. Each time I reminded him, he said, “Okay. I’ll think about it,” or “Stop asking, will you?” Then he went back to speaking with customers or giving commands.

By that night, I was starving. On the couch, I huddled in my jacket, trying to read Mystery of the Fat Cat, wishing I had enough friends to form a gang or that I lived someplace with interesting creatures like rats and cockroaches. My stomach clenched and gurgled, and I pictured myself sinking my teeth into Helen’s arm, like a famished rodent. I never used to worry about food. I feared I might cry, and this made me angrier. I threw down the book and went outside.

Misting rain drifted over the lot, gauzy halos shining around the hanging colored bulbs. No one stood near the trailer, the music turned low, Perry Como crooning softly as if from far away. Pine needles covered the asphalt, and I walked into a row of trees, hundreds tied in twine and leaned against two-by-four supports. Voices reached me, rising and falling, like the ocean from a distance. The corridor of trees became so gloomy that I froze, my senses overpowered by the smell of pine sap.

“André …,” I called. My voice broke, and I swallowed and tried to make my throat work. “André!” I shouted. Footsteps scuffed past beyond the trees and stopped.

“Hey, André!” a man barked. “Your kid’s looking for you.”

The footsteps scuffed off, and I pictured big rubber boots on indifferent feet, dragging through pine needles.

“Where?” my father shouted.

“Just over here,” the man said. “Over there.”

My father called my name, sounding tired. His silhouette appeared at the end of the corridor, his sou’wester gleaming faintly. He didn’t drag his feet but stepped quietly until he stood before me, his eyes lost beneath the rubber brim.

“What is it?”

“I’m hungry,” I said, trying to keep my voice under control, though it sounded whiny and on the verge of tears.

“It’s late. You should’ve told me before.” He spoke slowly, holding back his anger, and I forced myself to answer calmly.

“I didn’t know. I just realized.”

Hazing rain gathered on my face as I tried to read his expression.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll order you a pizza.”

I followed him back between the trees, and in the space before the trailer, with the colored lights and chrome coffeemaker, the music and the blue tarpaulin tied up above the door, he shouted, “Helen, order Deni a pizza.”

“What kind does he want?” she called through the slit in the sliding window.

“Whatever. He’ll eat anything.”

He tried to smile and said, “Why don’t we get your room set up?”

We went inside, down the narrow hall of fake-wood paneling, to a flimsy door. A mattress lay on the floor, an upside-down plastic milk crate next to it, a lamp on top. He flicked the space heater on, and its front began to glow red. The air smelled of burned dust.

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You can read in here. Helen will bring your pizza. Then you can sleep.”

“Okay,” I told him, concentrating on keeping my voice steady.

He stared down, not into my eyes, but just seeing, as if I were something he’d found on the roadside. Then he forced a big smile.

“Goddamn it!” he said with the exaggerated enthusiasm he used when he flashed money or bought employees beer. “We should decorate your room, shouldn’t we?”

In the closet, on a shelf, he found a battered magazine. He opened it, and a long piece of paper, with the picture of a woman, folded out from the middle.

“Why is that page so long?” I asked, and took an easy breath, feeling that he might be normal again, that we were about to do something fun, and that if I were patient, there’d be another chance to ask about going salmon fishing.

“It’s called the centerfold,” he said and pulled the page free, the paper popping off the staples. There was a nail in the wall, and he pressed it through the top of the centerfold and stepped back.

A dark-haired woman wore only a long blue shirt. It was open in the front, and her nipples stared out from the white skin of her breasts. There were shelves behind her with old, serious-looking books.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is she in a library?”

He leaned close, furrowing his brow. “I guess so.”

“It’s strange that she’s in a library, isn’t it?”

“Well, I never thought about it …”

“What books do you think she’s reading?”

One lay on the floor, next to a blue sandal that had fallen off her foot.

“I don’t know. Anyway, she can keep you company tonight.”

“Can I take her home and put her up in my room?”

“Ah …” He lifted a hand and scratched his beard. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

I understood. My mother wouldn’t like it. This would definitely have to be a secret too. So I hesitated and then asked, “Do you think we can go salmon fishing for my birthday?”

He stared down. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“It’s because I really wanna go. It’s important.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We’ll go salmon fishing.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah, I promise. Look, I have to get back to work. Helen will bring your pizza.”

After he’d left, I stared at the centerfold, wishing I had a library like the naked woman’s. The books appeared expensive, with covers as thick as those on encyclopedias, but when I tried to make out the names on the spines, I couldn’t read a single one.

✴

THE NIGHT BEFORE our fishing trip, I could hardly fall asleep. Then, as soon as I did, my father was waking me. My brother and I huddled into our clothes in the cold room, and we followed him to the truck.

Though he normally drove like a maniac, yelling at slow drivers and telling us to keep an eye out for lazy pigs who sat in patrol cars doing nothing, he now drove slowly, yawning and drinking from a thermos. Hushed music was on the radio, and I liked the dim glow of its dial, the yellow headlights tunneling through the valley, the way steam washed through his beard as he drank, and the smell of coffee.

My brother was asleep, and I turned in my seat.

Behind us, in the center of the lane, rode Ten Speed, her hair hidden beneath a hood and her face lit red from our taillights. She took the mountain turns faster than we did, her legs pumping like the bars on my mother’s sewing machine. She neared and lagged and neared again. I thought to tell my father, but it was fun to watch her. I figured we’d lose her on the highway, and we did, though she kept up longer than I expected.

After two hours, we followed a narrow asphalt road into the mountains, which led us to a gravel trail. Finally we parked. As soon as we opened the door, the stench was unbearable.

“Goddamn it,” he said. Dawn lit the treetops as we followed him through the forest to the river. Water rushed past boulders and gravel bars. Everywhere, all around us, large, brilliantly colored salmon with hooked jaws rotted. I’d studied them—had in fact stolen the best book on them, scissoring out the pages that showed it belonged to the school library—and I knew that as they spawned, their jaws became curved, their teeth canine, their backs humped, and their coloring no longer silvery blue but a bruised red.

A few bloated salmon struggled upstream, moving through the current with the laborious motion of an old dog wagging its tail.

We’d waited too long. The season was over. Still, we pretended to fish, testing our waders against slippery rocks and rushing water. I didn’t let myself show disappointment, and he didn’t either. He stood, a little haggard, lines beneath his eyes as he stared at the swirling current. He breathed through his parted lips, his jaw slightly pushed forward, and I imitated him, inhaling the cold air blowing down over the river, feeling instantly tough.

We caught nothing and left early, stumbling back to the truck in rubber waders. As he drove, I talked.

“I still like fishing,” I told him, “but mental powers are more interesting. When I meditated, I saw my soul, and when I’m really quiet, I can hear the advice of my invisible friends. Now I’m trying to learn how to do telekinesis.”

He was silent, the day ending, the sky gently streaked like one of his old faded shirts.

“Your mother told you all this stuff?” he asked.

“Yeah. I can even read people’s minds if I want. Did you know that’s possible?”

He didn’t answer, just clutched the steering wheel. My brother looked out the side window. The truck gained speed, swerving along the narrow road until we came to the highway. It raced into the turn, wobbling. The tires screeched and then caught, and we surged forward.

“Goddamn it anyhow!” he shouted.

I watched the stark motions of his hands, the way he hunched, narrowing his eyes—aiming us at something far away.

Beyond the windshield were the last smoky colors of sunset, the sky ragged above the trees as if torn from a picture book. I gazed at it, not thinking, not wanting to, and after a while pushing against the density of night, the truck slowed and I fell asleep.