Читать книгу Cures for Hunger - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 11

LEVITATION CLUB AND THE END OF THE WORLD

The way my mother described the end, it didn’t sound bad. Nature would prevail, and those who’d chosen to return to it would survive. Speaking of chemicals and machines and our denatured lives, she seemed at odds with a force I couldn’t identify. But the two things she most hated were Christians and processed foods.

“See that?” she said in the supermarket. A fat man trundled down the aisle. “He eats foods made of chemicals.” She pointed at bloated bags of chips, leering cartoon faces on boxed cereal, or candy bars like turds in wrappers.

“Sugar corrodes your bones. Your teeth turn brown and fall out. Your muscles get weak, your brain stops working, and your skin begins to sag. The human race is becoming stupid because of all that unnatural junk.”

I considered an ancient man with a walker, his bald head speckled and seamed like a nut, and then another guy whose hands were crabbed up beneath his chin as he stepped awkwardly, with the plodding motion of an injured insect.

Back at home she made us drink the beery milk from her goats. My brother and I cramped our fingers around the glasses and chugged the frothy white sauce. We spoke of the end of goat milk season the way we did about the beginning of summer vacation.

“I can’t wait for cow milk,” he said.

“Me too,” I agreed, though I knew that goat milk might be my salvation.

✴

EVEN IF I missed holes when I buttoned my shirt and didn’t notice if my shoelaces came untied, I managed to draw a small following at school. We met beyond the playground, on the blustery slope where our teachers weren’t likely to catch us speaking English, and I told them about the powers of the mind, telepathy, and telekinesis.

On TV, I’d seen Marco Polo spy on a Buddhist monk who was levitating, and my mother had confirmed that peaceful men in faraway places could float and even speak with their minds. So I began practicing. Lying in bed, I let myself become as light as air, attempting to rise from the thin foam mattress. When this didn’t work, I tried with something small. I lay a sheet of paper on my dresser and stared at it. I put it on the floor and squinted over it with rage. I propped it against the wall and tried to help it slide down, which eventually it did, though I wasn’t sure how much of this was my doing.

“You just have to focus,” I told the other children, feeling inspired by my own words. “You let your eyes close halfway. You look at the paper, and it will start to float. You can even do it with yourself. In bed. You can levitate.”

A scrappy boy named Matthieu stared, his mouth agape. He had a scar like an operated cleft lip, though he insisted a kid had thrown a stone, and he’d beaten him up.

“You did that?” he asked. “You floated?”

I shrugged. “Only by accident. I was sleeping. I fell down when I woke up.”

Testing myself as a budding cult leader was risky. I was far from popular, bad at sports, and a pet for the girls who took turns tying my shoes. I often forgot to zip my fly, and after school, when I climbed into my mother’s van, the first thing she did was realign the buttons on my shirt and tuck the untucked side in or pull the tucked-in side out.

“You have to try,” I told them.

“Why?” asked Guillaume, big and awkward and freckled, with a blushing face the mean kids called la tomate.

“Because the world is going to change. We have to be ready.”

The children nodded. There was a hardy evangelical community near the school, and my classmates had heard talk like mine before. A few gave their own testimonials. One thought he’d floated ever so slightly in bed because he’d heard the plastic rustling beneath his sheet. Guillaume had also caused a paper propped against the wall to slide to the floor. Everyone was impressed.

Back in class, Mme Hans jabbered, making us do grammar exercises. As I conjugated the verbs in a story about sugar cabins and ice skating in Quebec, I couldn’t imagine why my father had left a place where everyone ate sugar and skated around all day, even if sugar was deadly and French Canadians did fight a lot—fairly important facts that the story didn’t mention. But Mme Hans cared only about verbs. She had short gray hair and was as stout as a sailor, and she was probably a good fighter too. Staring at her, I thought of a barrel wearing women’s clothing. I pictured it going over Niagara Falls. As she repeated, “j’étais, tu étais, il était, nous étions,” I closed my eyes and felt my body growing light. Soon, I’d no longer need grammar. I’d rise, passing through my desk unseen, and slip through the wall into the fresh air outside. Then I’d run like hell.

“Réveille-toi! Wake up!” Mme Hans slapped the back of my head.

This was her warning. It was why I referred to her—to the other students—as “Mrs. Hand,” which seemed funnier because I was breaking the rule against speaking English.

During reading time, I asked to go to the library. But when the librarian saw me, he made himself busy, ducking into his office and fussing about. I’d been hounding him to find me books on ESP and psychic powers.

I pulled out a chair and sat and slumped. The elbows of my red checkered shirt had holes that my mother would patch as soon as she noticed. The tabletop felt cold through them.

In a few days, school would let out for Christmas, and I needed enough to read. My parents rarely spoke, and the mystery of my father’s simmering rage and my mother’s muted fear dug at me. Whenever my father left, my mother went through papers or made phone calls in the hushed voice of a TV villain. I’d definitely need a lot of books to get through the break. I couldn’t sit still without one.

I went to the shelves and stood the way I did before the open refrigerator. I’d planned on giving up reading about fish, so maybe I could take the novel about mutant telepathic children living after a great war. I’d already read it once and had drawn on it for my recess sermons.

But there was also a volume I loved on prehistoric fish, so I walked to the section of fish books. It was empty, and I realized that I’d checked them all out, and they were at home.

✴

JUST BEFORE DARK, my father’s truck crunched into the driveway, and my brother went out to say hi. I sat in the kitchen, reading about the coelacanth, a prehistoric fish thought to have gone extinct 66 million years ago, until a fisherman caught one off the coast of South Africa in 1938. This made me wonder what ancient fish might accidentally be in my father’s stores. Outside, the pulse of my brother’s words sounded light and quick next to the slow, somewhat gravelly voice of my father.

My mother was helping my sister with something in her room, so I got up from the table, went outside and stood on the back porch. The gray sky sagged into the valley, promising cold rain and not the snow I was hoping for.

“Sh,” my brother whispered. He was peeking from behind the shed, the bangs of his brown bowl cut in his eyes. “Hurry up!”

I hustled behind the wall. My father was there, grinning through his beard, and seeing him, I knew that we’d do something bad and very fun.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “You promise?”

I nodded as he took a long, curvy bottle of Pepsi from his jacket. He popped the cap and it hissed. My brother lifted his shoulders and dropped them, sighing nervously.

“Just a little drink,” my father said. “It’s going to burn.”

My brother held the bottle in both hands and tipped it back. He swallowed and shook his head, clearly as worried as I was, though we both tried to smile.

“Good, huh?” My father passed the bottle to me. I hid my fear and took a swig. The cold liquid fizzed on my tongue, burning gas rising into my sinuses. Permeating sweetness followed, chemical in its intensity, and I gave the Pepsi back. I could feel my bones corroding just beneath my skin.

“You’ll learn to like it,” he told us and raised the bottle, draining most of it in a few gulps. It was a miracle he was still alive. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and told us to promise again. Even as he smiled, his eyes became still and menacing. We promised. Then he sent us back inside.

My mother was standing at the stove.

“Have you done your homework?”

“I’m almost finished,” my brother told her, but I just took my backpack to the living room, dumped it, and then crouched as if I’d come upon strange droppings. Sometimes only by misbehaving could I hide previous misbehavior. The composition manual with three ducks on the cover lay before me, and I kicked it about like a soccer ball. The cover fell off, and my heart seized.

“Deni’s acting weird!” my brother complained. My mother came in, and I opened the mangled manual. This was just another thing that would make me stand out in class. I closed my eyes to hold back tears. I was always the weird kid. The others had colorful backpacks and new clothes while my brother and I had big flannel shirts with brown patches on the elbows and patched oversized pants that hid our shoes. Our backpacks were made by cutting a leg off my father’s jeans, chopping it in two, sewing one end shut and putting a drawstring on the other. All the kids had pointed and said, “What’s that?” and the next morning my father had walked into the kitchen with one naked leg, hollering, “What the fuck happened to my jeans?” My mother had turned red with strangled laughter and told him, “Oh, I thought you didn’t use that pair anymore.”

Now he undressed by the kitchen door and prowled into the living room in his underwear. He glanced about like an animal in a box, and my mother retreated to the stove. He sat in his chair and turned on the TV.

“You should pay attention to the news,” he told us, interrupting our homework. “It’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

We joined him in learning how the United States could deploy nuclear missiles from thousands of underground shelters joined by tunnels beneath the desert. The commentators discussed the importance of surviving a first strike and what had changed since Brezhnev’s death. My father grumbled and said, “Things were getting better until he screwed it all up.”

A little later, he proclaimed the ayatollah “a mean son of a bitch” and said, “Maybe Reagan can clean up the mess Carter made. That guy didn’t know his head from his ass.”

“If World War III starts,” my brother asked, “can we capture a tank and can I live in it in the backyard?”

My father looked sharply to where we lay before the TV.

“Well,” he said, “okay, I guess that’s fine.” But he kept studying my brother.

I tried to picture the camouflage tank beneath the apple tree and wondered if I should ask for one too, but I could tell from my father’s face that he thought my brother’s request was weird.

I carried my book into the kitchen and sat across from my sister, who was coloring horse pictures. She wore bell-bottoms and a plaid shirt, her blond hair in a barrette.

My mother looked at me and her blue eyes saw right into my head.

“What’s a nuclear missile?” I asked to distract her.

“Oh, that’s hard to explain,” she told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing, and it could kill all of us. It will probably destroy the planet someday.”

But she didn’t explain the way she usually did. She just stared into the bubbling spaghetti sauce, seeing this future.

“The world,” she said more quietly, “is a terrible place. It’s not so bad for boys, but girls have to be strong.”

My sister looked up. She was seven, and I wanted to tell my mother to be quiet.

And yet I longed to see the fierceness of the world revealed, to witness it at last.

✴

THE ENTIRE CLASS was laughing at me. It was the day before Christmas break, but they still made fun of the lunches my mother packed. Usually, to hide my sandwiches, I ate them from inside my brown lunch bag, like a wino swigging from a wrapped bottle.

“Show it,” they were saying. They had chips, PB&J, and cookies. I took out two crumbly slabs of bread with six inches of lettuce and tomatoes piled between.

“Oh,” I said as the tomato slices slid free and the bread broke and the lettuce spilled onto my desk. The children howled. To make my accident appear intentional, I lowered my head and snuffled about like a cow, gobbling from my desk. Kids were falling out of their seats. I sat up, making bovine eyes and working my jaw with a ruminating motion.

Mrs. Hand swatted the back of my head.

“Cochon,” she scolded, and the students fell silent.

During recess, when I spoke about levitation, the kids were doubtful, having seen me imitate a cow. Only Guillaume was enthusiastic. He was getting better at moving sheets of paper propped against the wall. He talked until his face turned red and spit gathered at the corners of his lips, and even I wanted to knock him down.

I explained that my mother had said I should build mental powers slowly, by meditating with a candle. She’d set one up for me, and when I’d concentrated, the flame had wavered considerably. Guillaume sputtered that he would try this, though his parents didn’t let him play with fire.

No one else cared. They were taking stock of my unzipped fly, my lopsided shirt, my shoelaces trailing in the dirt. They trickled away as I rambled—great wars, mutations, superpowers. I felt that if I talked enough, something amazing would happen.

“You have to focus,” I said. “It takes time.” I said all sorts of things.

“Maybe you aren’t the right type,” I told Matthieu as he turned away.

“The right type of what?”

I had no answer, and he snorted and wandered off.

For the rest of recess, I followed the path around the playground, walking backward. Each time the wind gusted, I leaned back into it, trying to see if it would hold me up.

✴

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, my father returned, smelling of pine sap. He’d shut down his lots and stripped his rain gear at the door without speaking to my mother. He turned up the heat that she kept low since, as I’d heard her complain, he didn’t give her much money for gas and we’d once run out and had to warm ourselves around the stove. He sat in his chair wearing boxers, and stared at the TV as the anchorman mentioned the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was a clip showing men outside a church, all wearing sandwich boards printed with The End Is Near.

At least when the end came I wouldn’t have to go to school, and my life would be like The Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe I’d do things my father had, catch huge salmon that took hours to reel in or drive a truck without brakes, crashing into things that people no longer needed.

“Did you like school?” I asked him.

“I didn’t go for very long,” he said, his eyes on the TV. “I had to work, but my brother and me, we’d walk my sisters to school and beat up kids who bothered them on the road.”

“Where are your sisters now?”

He didn’t answer, just stared at the TV, sitting tensely, as if he might jump out of his chair and run forever.

“Can I stop going to school and work with you?” I asked.

He smiled faintly, almost sadly, and said, “Someday.”

I wanted him to tell me a story about what we’d do. If I could think about the future, then each boring day at school wouldn’t be so bad. But he said nothing, and I sprawled on the rug and watched the news, which felt more serious even than school. With his eyes locked on the screen, he inhaled slowly through his mouth, the way I did when my nose was plugged. I wondered if he breathed like this because of something to do with his nose.

“Bonnie said your nose isn’t real,” I told him.

“What?”

“She said doctors gave you a new one. How did it get broken?”

He hesitated, cheeks scrunched up, though I kept my expression curious and unafraid. It wasn’t easy, but it worked.

“Someone hit me,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s a long story. I was coming out of a … a bar, and they were waiting for me, and they … they hit me in the face with towing chains.”

“What’s a towing chain?”

“You use it to pull cars.”

He returned his attention to the TV, so I asked, “What did you do?”

“Well,” he said and then hesitated before cracking a grin, “I gave them the worst beating of their lives. They cried like babies and ran away.”

I expected the story to go on, but he yawned and returned his focus to the TV, and I grew so bored of the man’s head droning away on the screen that I left to read at the kitchen table.

After dinner, I asked my brother what would happen if there was a nuclear war. He focused his large brown eyes on mine and described a future of cannibalistic humanoids in caves who’d hunt down good humans. The monster humans would eat people because there’d be no animals left. The good humans, though, might not eat at all. Given that I had to eat endlessly, it occurred to me that I might become a monster human.

Later, in bed, I stared at the dim ceiling until the house became quiet and stayed that way for so long I thought I might fall asleep. Then, downstairs, footsteps slowly crossed the wooden floor and just stopped, as if someone was standing and thinking, not sure where to go or what to do next.

In a dream, I crossed a yellow field, running toward my mother, who was gray, caught in motion, a colorless snapshot—her hand extended, floating before me as I reached. In the center of the sky appeared a black shape like a fighter jet. It began to spin as, from every horizon, darkness rose, and there was no more light.

✴

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, my father was gone, and after breakfast my mother said that we were going into town. A bag held her presents, and if ever there were proof of the nonexistence of Santa, it was this: my mother with her receipts, leading us into the mall to return everything my father had bought her.

Outside the clothing store, she put my brother in charge while she went inside. My sister sang quietly to herself as we watched the crowds surge past Boxing Day signs.

A slouching woman stopped and stared. After glancing around, she came closer. She had blond, frizzy hair and a long jacket that reminded me of burlap. She asked if we were alone.

“Our mother is just over there,” my brother told her, repeating the words that my mother had drilled into us.

The woman’s big eyes rolled from one side of the mall to the other. Instantly, I knew she’d do something repulsively sexual. Both during school assemblies and by my mother, I’d been warned about perverts.

She slipped three pamphlets from her purse and gave one to each of us.

My brother blanched. “We can’t,” he told her.

“It’s all right. Your mother won’t mind,” she said and hurried off, not having exposed her naked body from beneath the jacket after all.

His shoulders slumped, as if he’d returned home with a bad grade. The pamphlet showed two abandoned-looking children in saggy diapers waiting in a doorway as Jesus approached along the sidewalk. He’d probably change their diapers. No, whatever he’d do had to be bad if my mother hated Christians so much. Maybe he’d feed them processed foods. She’d never explained why, if proselytizers came to our house, she slammed the door.

She snatched the pamphlets from us.

“Who gave these to you?” She made a constricted huff like a growl and went to a trash can and tossed them. As she led us out, she asked if we recognized the woman. My brother said he didn’t, and I could no longer recall her face.

“Why were you so angry?” I asked her that night as she was tucking me in.

“I don’t want you to grow up with that garbage in your head. When I was a kid, I had to go to church. I imagined God was some big, mean guy staring down, and I was afraid to do anything, afraid to be myself or have fun.”

She told me about her father, how strict he was, as if this were also God’s fault. She said she’d wanted her freedom. The way she told me this made me feel that she was still struggling to be free. She seemed about to tell me more, but her expression became pained and she said nothing.

“Who is God?” I finally asked, just to make her speak. She sighed and explained how some people believed in an all-powerful, judgmental geezer who saw everything we did. Her description was so convincing that I forgot what we’d been talking about before and became a little jealous of this old man’s mental powers. Above all, I was angry at the thought of being spied on, and I told her that I was never going to take a bath again.

✴

MY SISTER WAS lying on her belly with a book, the blinds drawn, her room so faintly lit I didn’t know how she could read.

“Want to hear a story?” I asked and flopped down next to her.

“Okay,” she said and turned onto her side. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering her. Vacation had ended and winter dragged on, my parents fighting, all of us busy with our own things, books or music or video games.

I began to describe a future in which everyone could levitate, but she said, “Tell me about how Bonnie and André met.”

“Well, she’s from Pittsburgh,” I said and thought of all she’d shared over the years. “Grandma’s mom is German, and Grandpa’s from somewhere else. He made steel. Bonnie didn’t like them because they believed in God, so she ran away to live in nature. Since André grew up really poor, he could do everything—farm and catch fish and even … deliver babies.” This always sounded funny to me, as if he were a mailman, but now the story I’d been struggling to find became clear. It was about my birth, and I repeated the version he’d often told me. “I was born on the living room couch. André delivered me. The cord was around my neck.”

“What cord?”

“Babies are born with a rope. Sometimes it feeds them, but sometimes it strangles them. He took it off and blew into my mouth, and then I began to breathe.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, as if expecting something else. I didn’t know what happened after my birth, and feeling vaguely irritated, I got up and walked away. The next day, after school, she asked me to tell another story, but I said I was busy and left her in the musty silence of the house.

As I crossed the frozen fields, I wished for spring and that first breathless warmth that was no warmth at all but seemed it after so long in the cold. Dandelions would bloom, like when I was very small and everything was perfect.

I sat in my favorite place, a grove of large trees where the ground was without weeds—soft and shadowed all summer, though now I stared up through the naked branches at the colorless sky. Everyone I knew had died. The house had burned down. The school had been incinerated. I was the hunter, the loup-garou. The world had ended, but in nature I would survive.

Eventually it grew late, and my mother’s voice called across the valley from the back porch, my name echoing off the mountains.

✴

THE SNOWMELT CAME suddenly, flooding drainage ditches, covering the fields, water gathering toward our backyard until it shone in a crescent around the slight rise where our house had been built. The sun blazed day after day, and I forgot my boredom.

I’d read a book about young people who bonded after society’s collapse. The abandoned cities sent shivers up my spine, the vines that grew through cracked concrete and broken windows, the mountains where the youths sheltered beneath overhangs, staring out at the desolate landscape for a flicker of light.

Reading made me feel as if I’d swigged my father’s vodka. Did my brother or sister experience this? My brother loved video games, and my sister sang constantly so that her location in the house could be determined according to her volume. My mother always told us to read, but did she know that books made me want to run outside and breathe the air rolling off the mountains, smell the wet fields and drying mud, hear the crunch of onion grass under my feet? Stories seemed like paths. If you went outside, there was just the world, but if you went and looked after reading a story, there was a world where anything could happen, as if beyond the mountains were a hundred countries to which I might go, a hickory cane over my shoulder and my few possessions tied in a red bandanna.

But there would be no escaping this time. The flood hemmed us in, our house like a frog on a lily pad. Neighbors put out sandbags, and in a few places the water on the road was so high that even my father had to drive through it slowly, afraid of shorting out his engine.

My mother had gotten two horses a few years earlier and checked on them and on her bedeviling goats. She cooked restlessly, baking crumbly bread in coffee cans so that each loaf came out with the can’s seams printed on it. She made hard, flat cookies like wet mud thrown at a wall.

As I studied the flood, imagining all the ways to cross it, she joined me on the back porch.

“We’re going to leave soon,” she told me, and my heart beat with an excitement so involuntary, so sudden, that it ached.

“Where?”

“We’re moving. Just you and me and your brother and sister.”

“What about André?”

“He’s staying here.”

“When will we come back?”

The wind gusted in her hair as she stared beyond the smooth surface of the water to the mountain.

“We’re not coming back,” she said, her voice almost breaking.

“Ever?” Though I loved the idea of setting out, the valley was the one place we’d returned to after our many temporary homes, and I’d never known spring or summer anywhere else. I couldn’t imagine not seeing it or my father again.

My mother stared off, lips slightly parted so that I thought she might speak. She narrowed her eyes, staring as if to see past the limits of the sky.

✴

THE NEXT MORNING, I walked out to where the water began. The grass appeared distorted, like the bottom of a swimming pool, undulating. Far off, the tops of a few Christmas trees showed, and then there was simply the deluge stretching on toward the mountain.

I wanted to worry that we were leaving, but it seemed impossible—not just because of the flood, but because my parents often said crazy things that never happened. Besides, just before going to work, my father had made a comment that now obsessed me.

“I bet carp are swimming up from the rivers, right through the fields. If we take the boat and shine the flashlight in the water, we’ll see them.”

I couldn’t think of anything but carp—gliding out of the river, nestling in the branches of submerged trees, riding currents through the beams of flashlights.

The rowboat lay upside down in the shed, and I discussed with my invisible friends whether we should take it and do some exploring. Eleven of them were in agreement, making me suspect that I had eleven invisible friends but maybe only one spirit guide. The guide was concerned. In fact, he sounded a lot like my brother later did.

“We’re not allowed,” he said.

“Come on. Just for a little while. There are carp out there.”

“No. We can’t. We’ll get washed away by the river and die.”

In the past, my father had been more open to ideas like this, but I suspected that convincing him to do something wild might not be as easy as before.

“Can we go out in the boat?” I asked him that evening.

“I’m busy.”

“But we can see carp.”

“That’s true,” he said. “There might be carp out there.”

I hesitated, knowing what I had to say next.

“Do you think it would be really dangerous?”

He grinned as if he’d just woken up and was himself again, not that person who cared only about his business.

“Okay,” he said, “we can go later on tonight.”

After dark, the moon shone on the water, turning the flood into a silvery plain. In the rowboat, we crossed the hidden fields of Christmas trees as my brother and I took turns aiming the flashlight. When my father let go of the oars, I gave it to him.

As he peered down, his edge of the boat sank close to the water, and we sat on the opposite side, trying to counterbalance. If he knew we were leaving him, he didn’t show it. I considered what a relief it would be if the end came now, the three of us in the boat, with no choice but to find a new home.

He shone the light on the eerie shapes of drowned Christmas trees below us and worried that if the water didn’t go down soon, they would die. We’d had floods before, and afterward, I’d followed him along the rows as he pulled up yellow yearling pines, their dead roots slipping from the earth.

“I’m going to lose a lot of money,” he said, staring down, the oars dragging in the rowlocks.

Then he shut off the light and we just sat, gazing along the gleaming surface to the mountains, the water still, the moon full and blazing all around us.

✴

A WEEK LATER, when the waters went down, my father hired a helper from a nearby farm, a young man with a fuzzy, lopsided mustache and bulging biceps who, as a boy, my mother once confided in me, had jumped from the roadside bushes to make cars swerve until he caused a grisly head-on collision.

But rather than cause more deaths, he helped my father replace the tractor bridge. They finished at sundown, returned to the back porch and each drank a beer. My father was telling him how quickly floods could begin, that he’d seen rivers triple their size in seconds and had himself almost drowned in a Yukon mining camp.

“I’d just finished my last shift and had a few days off, and there was no way I was going to stay in camp. I wanted to get out and drive into town and have some fun. A gorge with a river in it separated the camp from the main road where our cars were parked. A wooden footbridge went across, but the snow was melting in the mountains and it was raining so hard the gorge had almost filled. There was a narrow point not too far upstream, and the water was coming through in surges. I was standing in front of the bridge. I really wanted to leave, but each surge was higher. The water carried uprooted trees that almost hit the bottom of the bridge. I remember watching. I had a bad feeling. I counted the seconds between the surges. One passed, and the water shook the bridge, and then I sprinted. But halfway across I realized I’d waited too long. I heard the roar of the next surge, and I jumped just as the bridge snapped in half. My chest hit the earth, and I dug my fingers in and pulled myself up and ran, because the water was starting to come over the edge.”

He coughed into his fist as his helper bobbed his head self-consciously, took a drink of his beer, and licked his lopsided mustache.

“It was a dangerous thing to do,” my father said, a hint of anger coming into his voice, his gaze unfocused as if he were alone—“but I didn’t regret it. I hated that camp. The men there just talked about women and what they’d do when they got out. It was no different than prison.”

Though his telling was gripping—the rising river, the shaking bridge, his bold dash across its planks—it wasn’t this that haunted me. It was the way he’d spoken about the camp. I reran that line over and over in my head, how he said it with intensity and anger: “It was no different than prison.”

✴

BEYOND MY WINDOW, a pale splotch in the low clouds showed where the moon hid.

Shouting had woken me.

“You can’t go! I won’t let you!”

“You can’t stop me!” she shouted. Her footsteps crossed the living room.

“You’re fucking crazy!” He slammed a door, making the house shake.

I stared at the ceiling, willing my brain to do more than listen to the battering of my heart. There was a secret at the center of our lives. It was like something from a dream, a shape that I glimpsed but couldn’t remember and then saw again another night; I woke knowing I’d seen it, but not what it was.

I might have slept, drifting in and out, sensing a subtle change like a snowfall in the night, the gradual silencing of the outside, though now the season’s shift was within our walls.

In the morning, I went down the stairs, more tired than ever. My mother was packing, hurrying about. My father’s truck was gone.

“I don’t have time for questions,” she said. She told us only that we were moving across the Fraser River to a town called Mount Lehman.

My brother sidled close. The strangeness of his gaze shone in a way that made me want to run to the mirror. He said he had something to ask, and I saw from his expression that he’d readied one of the trick questions he used to torment other kids. They often involved World War III, and his favorite was, “If America dumped boxed cereal on the USSR, why would it be chemical warfare?” He then had to explain in minute detail our mother’s lessons about chemical foods.

Now he said, “If a nuclear bomb strikes a mile away, do you run toward it or away?”

I let myself see this. A wall of blinding light approached, melting cars and incinerating Christmas trees and cooking human flesh from the bone. Though I knew he’d fool me, I blurted, “Away! I’d run away!”

“Wrong,” he said, loudly but without inflection.

I went to the kitchen door and outside, over the wet grass, past the apple tree to the waterlogged fields. I stood in the windy silence of the valley.

✴

THE PACKING REVEALED how little we owned—blankets and clothes, worn-out books, and some binders of school papers. My mother loaded the spinning wheel she’d bought in hopes of making everything from scratch. Then she filled several jugs with water. We asked why and she said that the water in the valley was from a spring and we would miss it.

We pulled out of the driveway, each of us holding a shimmering jug in our lap. My sister had her hair pinned back, her forehead high and pale, her chin lowered to her collar. My brother stared straight ahead.

We passed Ten Speed where she’d stopped on the roadside, one foot on the ground as she watched, her eyes full of fear for us, wide and flashing with refracted light as our van drove by.

I made myself stop thinking, just seeing, for later, for the rest of my life. I knew this with an unmoving wisdom that made me feel I would indeed become someone else.

And then I was no longer in my seat, in the van, but on the mountain where my father had once taken me. I could see the entire valley, its fields and streams, the road at its center whose presence alone, each day after school, gave me a sense of certainty. It descended past wet rocks and old, gaunt trees, and then leveled and turned onto the straightaway. Past a few farms and the fields of Christmas trees or sod, it rose back along the mountains and returned to where it entered, beyond rock faces lit with quick, brittle streams.

Just outside was a service station where carpooling parents waited. If we turned right, we headed to my school in Abbotsford or to Vancouver. Left led toward Nicomen Island, that piece of muddy earth where my father got his mail and I was born.

Mountains stood against the distance, larger and whiter than those of the valley, the flat, humid, windy ranges washed down from them over millennia and called prairies by those who’d chosen to stay. This was the shape of the world. As a child, I could have drawn it with a crayon: that damp sheet of alluvial land hemmed in by the horizon.

And now we were gone.