Читать книгу Cures for Hunger - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 12
ОглавлениеPRAYERS, MANTRAS, AND HOW TO SWEAR
On the paper there was a tree, the trunk split in two, and each of those branches split in two, and so on. At the top were the words Arbre Genéalogique, and on the trunk and each fork stood empty boxes. I’d been trying to act normal, but I couldn’t stop yawning, and now there was this. Other kids were filling in the boxes. I couldn’t concentrate. It had taken me a while even to write my own name on the trunk. In the two boxes on the branches above, I printed Bonnie and André. But the highest boxes were the problem. Mrs. Hand told me to write the names of my grandparents—“your father’s father and mother.” When I said, “Je ne les connais pas,” she just said, “Ta grand-maman et ton grand-papa?” But I couldn’t even remember the names of my mother’s parents. I’d met them years before, but no memories remained. Mrs. Hand told me to take the sheet home and fill it in, but I forgot and accidentally sat on it for hours while reading a novel. The next day I got an F+.
Normally, when I had really bad grades, my mother marched into school and grilled my teacher. Sometimes this embarrassed me, and sometimes it was fun to watch. But when I showed her this grade, she just sighed.
The boredom of school stretched out beneath an overcast sky. Surviving twelve years of it seemed impossible. Without my father, life became as silent and tense as a classroom during a math quiz.
But then, four days after my mother took us to our new home—a brown house at the top of a steep driveway, on a forest road—I woke to find my father eating breakfast, my mother silently preparing our lunches on the counter. He just said hi and smiled. I sat across from him, and he told me about a lobster at his fish store that was the size of my arm, and how he’d saved it so we could eat it together. I asked if maybe it was prehistoric, and he said, “Maybe.”
Over the next few days, I expected fights, shouting, or slammed doors, but he moved in so unnoticeably it seemed planned. Our family was always verging on disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed.
✴
THAT FRIDAY, HE picked me up from school shortly after my mother dropped me off.
“I’m taking you fishing,” he said, his face lined and grim, as if our outing were a form of punishment. “We’ll come back in the afternoon, and I’ll leave you in the playground before she gets here. Just pretend you went to school. You won’t tell her about this, right?”
I nodded, this lie by far the most extreme ever. I loathed the idea of standing in the playground as the other kids stared and wondered where I’d been all day. But I felt guilty for having left him. I also wondered if I might get special treatment, and after a few minutes on the highway, I asked for a lesson in swearing—something I’d requested fairly often—and amazingly, he agreed.
“Fuck,” he said, “well, fuck means a lot of things. Fuck off means go away right now. Fuck you means I really hate you. Fuck just means you’re angry. You know what shit is, and damn, well, damn’s not that bad.”
“What about cocksucker?” I asked.
“You should probably stay away from that one,” he told me and then was silent. Swear words gave me the feeling that good stories did, a sense of disembodiment, of being carried away, beyond rules, beyond everything. But suddenly he said, “Your mother wants to leave, you know.”
I looked at him, but he stared at the traffic ahead.
“She wanted to abandon you guys. I barely convinced her not to.”
He finally glanced over, checking my reaction.
“If she has to go,” he said, “she can take your brother and sister, but you can stay with me. We’ll get a motor home and travel the country and do nothing but fish.”
Maybe this was why he’d moved in with us, because she’d decided she’d had enough and was planning on running away. I tried to console myself with the idea of fishing trips and that he might like me best. He rarely spent time with my sister, and my brother didn’t care for fishing. I wanted to smile, but the muscles of my face tensed up as if they were doing the thinking.
“What about school?”
“You can take a year off. It won’t change anything. You never liked school, and I didn’t either. Look at me. I didn’t need it.” He pushed his jaw forward confidently. “You don’t let yourself get picked on at school, do you?”
“No,” I lied.
“Because,” he said, “if you stay with me, I’ll make sure you’re one tough goddamn kid.”
“Really?”
“I’ll teach you how to fight. I was a good fighter. I could’ve been a boxer. I just had no direction. But I’d give you direction. I’d teach you how to kick some ass.”
An image of me came to mind, my fists swirling like bugs around a light bulb as all the school bullies fell. My father once tried to teach my brother and me to box, making us put on gloves in the living room, but my mother had been furious and he’d relented, his expression strange, almost embarrassed. It was the only time I’d seen him surrender to her anger. I struggled to believe that she was leaving. Though he was fun to be with, I couldn’t imagine a day without her. My clothes would stink and my grades would all be Fs and I’d starve to death. But then again, life with him might be very, very fun.
“Even if I learn to fight,” I asked, “can we still travel and fish?”
“Yeah.”
I was picturing our motor home climbing a mountain road and then pulling onto the gravel above a shimmering river.
He exited the highway and we soon arrived where we often fished, off the broken rocks near the Lions Gate Bridge, where everyone tried to snag salmon while keeping a lookout for the warden. He gave me my rod, but once fishing, I kept catching the lure in seaweed because I was watching the others or trying to see salmon in the water.
A damp, irregular wind blew in along the rocks. I drew my chin down and breathed into my collar. The towers of the bridge were fading into low clouds.
A man hooted. I reeled in my line and climbed onto the rocks. He’d hooked a salmon, and as he brought it close, the fish fighting wildly in the shallows, he asked my father to use a metal gaff lying near a tackle box.
My father took it and crouched at the edge of the water. He swung it as the fish thrashed. He swung three or four times to get the hook to stay. A chunk had fallen out of the salmon’s head. The man swore and for the first time I sensed real danger in those words, not for my father but for the other man.
“You didn’t have to ruin the fucking fish,” he yelled. He was big, with veins on his face and a fat nose, the sleeves of his black sweater rolled up. I was pretty sure he qualified as a bruiser.
“I didn’t ruin your fucking fish,” my father said, and though he was smaller, he swore much better, not chewing his words like the bruiser. Each time he roared fuck his size doubled so that he soon towered over the other man, his back curved and puffed up, his arms bowed out, fists like bricks. “You fucker, you shouldn’t have asked if you didn’t want me to hook it.” He spun and threw the salmon and gaff into the water.
The bruiser seemed ready to drop his rod and fight. The men along the shore watched, fishing rods lifted like antennae. I had no idea swearing could do this, and I was sure there was no way the bruiser would attack, though I was excited to see him try. His eyes shifted from my father to me, where I crouched on a rock. He turned away, swearing under his breath.
As we drove home, the sky was so cloudy that headlights shone like flares against the wet streets. My father clutched the wheel, glaring past the cars in front. He hadn’t fully returned to his normal size, and I knew he’d do something wild and impatient. I held on to the seat as he tore past a yellow light and swerved through an intersection, tires screeching.
A siren wailed. Police lights flashed behind us.
“Motherfucker,” he said, his shoulders drawing in. Maybe the police had caught him at last.
With him, police were never the way they were with my mother. They asked about work and where he lived and what he’d done that day, and then they stayed a long time in their cars with his driver’s license. Once, when we’d all gone to dinner, he’d been pulled over and we’d waited for so long that he told us the cop was deciding whether to arrest our mother. He said that one time they tried to take her away and that he grabbed her legs while they pulled her arms, and that he finally hung on and got her back for us. She remained silent, looking out the passenger window, and he forced a smile in her direction. But she hadn’t been driving, and I’d known the police were interested in him.
“Why do they ask you so many questions?” I said.
He rubbed his face and sighed, letting out all the air he’d ever breathed.
“Because they like me,” he mumbled. “They like how I drive.”
✴
MY BROTHER AND I never had much in common. He started school the year before French classes were offered, so we lived a strange playground phenomenon, each of us in his own language group, like boys growing up on opposite sides of an ethnically divided city. His friends were well behaved, and one of them, Elizabeth, invited him to parties where kids rode around her lawns and gardens in an electric train. Now that I no longer talked about levitation, my friends seemed increasingly like ruffians. We discussed deep-sea fishing and creatures such as sharks and electric eels. Those who’d grown up in Quebec taught us French profanity. The words and the way they were rhythmically strung together—crisse de câlice de tabarnak!—reminded me of how my father swore in English. But when I practiced them, I didn’t get the same heady feeling as with fuck or goddamn. Still, each time we learned a new insult, we ran toward the students from the English classes, shouting it at their helpless faces.
Now, in our new house, my brother and I shared a room for the first time since we were toddlers. After my mother tucked us in, we switched on our flashlights and played Dungeons & Dragons, working through modules, The Keep on the Borderlands or The Lost City. Magic and endless journeys and the satisfaction of easy violence were so attainable that each morning I woke surprised that I had to go to school.
And while we wandered catacombs, listening for predators, my mother delved into past lives. She attended a psychic church where there was no religion, she assured us; they just used a real church for meetings. Prayer, she said, was a way of talking to invisible beings who existed in nature and who cared about us. She taught us to repeat om, which was relaxing and sounded like mom. She’d learned to do it at the church. She said the members shared their mystical experiences. One man had teleported himself while riding on a bus. He’d wanted to be somewhere so badly that suddenly he was there. The next day he boarded the same bus and the driver said, “Hey, I saw you get on last time, but I didn’t see you get off.”
I watched her closely for signs of whether she might leave us, but she kept baking bread and flat cookies, and driving us to school with lunches so hard to chew they made my jaw ache. Maybe she was planning on teleporting away, or just vanishing, moving on to her next life.
One Saturday, while she was at the psychic church and my brother and sister were with friends, I again went with my father to work. The night before, he’d been arguing with her, and I’d pretended to go to the bathroom. It didn’t sound as if she was leaving, but rather as if he was trying to convince her to leave me behind. But all I overheard clearly was him saying, “Deni’s like me. He doesn’t need school.”
This was how he started in as soon as we were in his truck.
“You and me, we like being in nature and fighting,” he said and referenced his own frequent battles as a child, sounding angry, as if the fights hadn’t been fully resolved and somewhere there was a brutish nine-year-old with whom he still had to get even.
“If I stay with you and we travel together,” I asked, “can we go to other countries too?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can we travel around Africa?”
“Africa?” he repeated. I’d read a story about the descendants of dinosaurs surviving in the African interior, deep in isolated lakes, and I told him about it.
“That’s probably not a good idea,” he said. “There are lots of snakes in Africa. Don’t you think it’s nice to go camping and not worry about getting bit?”
As he spoke, he paused between each few words. I pictured snakes coming through the windows of our motor home while we slept, but I was more afraid of him losing his temper.
“I guess,” I said, wondering if he was scared of snakes.
He changed the subject to how hard it was to keep his seafood business going. My mother, he told me, didn’t care if the economy was bad or that the cocksuckers at the bank were making work hard. I pictured bankers throwing rocks, his employees ducking while trying to sell fish. But he said that the bankers wanted to force him into bankruptcy and explained what that meant. I listened, though as far as I could tell, things couldn’t be going so badly. He had a new truck and had bought a briefcase and explained how important it was for a successful businessman, showing me its cylinder lock and the tag that said Patent Leather. Besides, if he no longer had his stores, that would be better since we were going traveling.
At his fish market, I didn’t see any lack of money or any cocksuckers. Everyone was nice, and customers were shoving ten and twenty-dollar bills over the counter. He took a wad of cash from the till and put it in his jacket, and then sat me on a stool with a book, under the watch of the two men who worked there, and disappeared for an hour with a young, very pretty Chinese woman who also worked for him and whose name I could never remember.
I questioned his employees about whether they might have accidentally cut up any strange, very ancient fish, but they said they hadn’t, so I checked. Inside two bubbling tanks, crabs and lobsters clambered over each other, their pincers held shut with rubber bands. In the display were prawns, speckled trout, thick halibut steaks, silky salmon fillets, bags of fist-size clams, and red snappers with startled eyes. Seeing the creatures on the ice, I felt how big the earth was and pictured the deep, prehistoric dark of the ocean. I began telling the employees that I planned to travel around Africa and find the lost descendants of dinosaurs.
“What are you guys up to?” my father asked when he returned alone, the shoulders of his jacket flecked with rain.
“We’re talking about dinosaurs,” I said, and then told the employees, “André and I are going to travel and do nothing but fish after my mother leaves and he goes bankrupt.”
Both men blanched, but my father’s face became so red it looked painful. In his truck, he grabbed my arm.
“You can’t say those things!” He tried to catch his breath. “You’re lucky. My father would have thrown you through this window.”
I sat perfectly still, showing no emotion, because if I got upset when he was angry, he got even angrier. He let go of my arm and gripped the steering wheel. I pictured him lying in broken glass and wondered about his father.
“It’s okay,” he told me. “You didn’t mean to. You just need to stop talking so much.”
He began to drive us home, and after a while, he said, “I hate those fuckers. I hate the bank.” He told me that he’d planned his revenge. He would rent a safe-deposit box and put a package of fish inside. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think they can legally take it out no matter how bad it smells.”
Later, at a red light, he pointed to a bank and an armored car parked in front of it.
“You see,” he said, “the money gets delivered on Friday. That’s when people bring their paychecks, and the bank has to have lots of money for everyone.”
I nodded, not sure why this mattered.
✴
AS WE WERE nearing home, I began talking again. I’d managed to stay quiet for most of the drive until my tongue began tapping back and forth against my teeth. It needed to speak, and I’d been thinking about how my father didn’t like my mother’s spiritual ideas. I wondered how he felt about an all-powerful god staring down on him, knowing everything, even his adventures and other family.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Life’s a big joke. God’s playing a joke on us.”
To me, this made God sound like him. I asked if he prayed, and he said, “I hate church. I grew up with those fucking priests. I’d never go back.”
“But Bonnie said you see things sometimes.”
“She said what?”
I repeated a story she’d told me. “One time,” she’d said, “he woke up and saw a bright white light above him, and he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed all night.”
“She told you that?” he shouted as we pulled into the driveway.
I’d done it again. I’d talked too much.
I cranked the door handle and dropped to the ground and clomped inside.
My mother had just returned with my brother and sister, and they were watching a TV show about amazing people. My father loved Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and That’s Incredible! and he often called us in to explain what was being shown—the chain saw juggler or the parachuting escape artist. This time the host discussed the yogis of India, men who could control every function of their bodies and stop even the beating of their hearts.
“This is the sort of stuff we talk about at the church,” my mother told us.
I sensed my father’s interest, a lull in the anger he’d brought into the room. He sat, leaning forward to learn something about this mysticism business.
The host explained that to clean their intestines, yogis swallowed long strips of linen that they worked through their digestive tracts. The TV image switched to a small, mostly naked brown man who was feeding linen into his mouth, his Adam’s apple moving laboriously, as if he were trying to eat a very large spaghetti noodle. As the yogi rolled his belly with each gulp, the host said it took hours for the linen to reach the intestines. Then the yogi would draw the linen back through his body. The last shot was of him pulling it from his mouth. He smiled as he held it out, black from its journey into his bowels.
My father was motionless, his mouth open.
“That’s shit,” he finally said. “That guy’s pulling shit out of his mouth. That’s disgusting!”
He picked up the small book he kept his business numbers in and hurled it at the TV.
“Go to bed! All of you, go to bed!” he shouted. “That’s fucking disgusting!”
Lying beneath the covers, I wondered what about the yogi had made him so angry. The little man’s actions hadn’t seemed magical at all, but rather like a difficult and time-consuming form of flossing, which I despised.
✴
SUMMER CAME AND went, my mother and father rarely together, my brother and I reading and playing so much Dungeons & Dragons that we hardly noticed anything else. Then school started again, and we mourned the loss of our free time.
Now everything was definitely changing. My mother and I sat in Baskin-Robbins, and as I ate my ice cream, she explained that she wouldn’t be with my father much longer. She said that she loved me and never wanted to leave me.
“But how do I know what I should do?” I asked and licked a run of melting chocolate off the waffle cone.
She considered the question.
“The world is both physical and invisible,” she told me and described how thoughts and moods hung about us like clouds. We shared subtly in the lives of others by crossing paths with them, by breathing the same air. Truths could also come to us like this.
I licked my Rocky Road and gnawed on the cone. It seemed she was telling me that by taking a few deep breaths I’d know what was best.
“You just need to meditate on the right choice,” she said and smiled, as if, were I to do so, the white light of my soul might flare up like a neon sign in a bar window, spelling out not Budweiser or Molson but Go with Your Mom!
Her hair was graying quickly, and it reminded me of when she’d once picked me up from school after getting a perm. I’d neared our van, seeing the woman with the curly hair, and had turned away. She’d laughed and called to me, but I’d been afraid. If she left without me now and I didn’t see her for years, maybe the same thing would happen.
“But André and I are going to travel and go fishing,” I told her, suddenly upset, letting the chocolate drip over my fingers.
“What?” she asked, the gentleness emptying from her eyes.
“He’s going to get us a motor home, and we’re going to live in it.”
“That’s bullshit,” she told me. “He’s going bankrupt. He can’t even afford to make payments on his car. He’s lying to you. He lies to everyone.”
✴
DAY AFTER DAY, I tried to think of what else he might lie about. There had been the afternoon when the two men stopped us on the valley road and he lied about not being himself. The police hadn’t come again, so maybe he’d tricked them. I denied the bad things I did, so why wouldn’t he? And he misbehaved even more. The list was long.
He drove like a daredevil.
He’d been in lots of fights.
When we lived by the ferry, he’d knocked a man unconscious and broken a woman’s jaw.
When he was angry, he yelled at my mother.
She’d tried to run away, and he’d just followed her.
Often, he made cruel jokes.
If I did stay with him, I might starve, since he ate candy bars and Pepsi the way a gerbil lived off brown pellets and water. And yet he was wild and didn’t care what others thought. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. An exciting new disaster might happen at any moment.
And I loved the tricks he played. He called everything an old Indian trick, so that I pictured an old brown Native man telling him, “Don’t forget to blow on a fire to get it to start,” or “If you’re losing a fight, kick him in the balls and then in the face. Who gives a shit if he’s down. Kick his teeth out. It’s a fight.”
“This,” he said, “is my favorite old Indian trick.” He was storing the chain-link fencing he used each winter at his tree lots, and after he stood the rolls on end, he propped cinder blocks on top, just out of sight. If thieves tried to steal the fencing, the blocks would fall on their heads.
Once, on his big lot downtown, he discovered that someone was climbing the corner of the fence each night and stealing a tree.
“Here’s a good old Indian trick,” he said and emptied a bag of dog shit on the ground. He rolled a tree in it and then he propped it in the corner where the thief had been. The next morning, he took me outside the fence to where the tree lay near the road. We laughed long and hard about the thief who’d gotten smeared with shit.
But sometimes his antics didn’t make me feel that good, as when he caught a long-legged spider on his dashboard. We were waiting at a light. It was summer, the windows down, and he said, “Look at that old goat!” In the car next to us, a geezer with thick glasses hunched over his steering wheel as if it were a book in the hands of a nearsighted reader. My father leaned past me and threw the spider onto his bald head.
Now I had to decide. I was sitting on the couch. Hinges creaked in the mudroom and footsteps crossed the kitchen. My father stood in the doorway. The skin on either side of his mouth was slack, his gaze too still.
“Is that for school?” he asked.
A Jules Verne novel lay on my lap. It had enraptured me, the idea that a land existed beneath the earth. But I said nothing.
“You read too much,” he told me. “You should get some exercise.”
As I tried to think of what to say, a feeling of loneliness, still beyond words, dawned.
“I got in a fight today,” I told him.
“You did?” He raised his eyebrows but then yawned, lifting his forearm to hide his mouth. “That’s good. I’m glad you’re standing up for yourself.”
I’d been trying to be tough at school, using fuck and goddamn to swear kids to tears and run them off. When Matthieu had pulled on my jacket, I’d called him a fuck banana. He’d appeared so dazed that I’d taken the opportunity to punch him.
“Good. That’s good,” my father said, eyeing me. “You really let him have it, huh?”
“Yeah, I let him have it pretty good.” Hearing myself, I felt that my victory was far grander than it had seemed.
My father leaned against the doorjamb and yawned again. He went into the kitchen. The fridge door opened, bottles clinking.
“Goddamn it,” I heard him say, “there’s nothing to eat.”
I closed my book. I had to make up my mind. Maybe I should leave with my mother.
He came back, anger all around him, like the smell of cigarettes on a smoker’s jacket. He sat and put the peach-colored phone on the armrest, and then lifted the receiver. He pushed his jaw forward and began to dial.
Seeing his expression, I knew that he was going to swear at someone. The sadness eased from my throat, and an odd feeling of lightness came over me. No one could swear like him! It was his gift. Each insult came from his stomach, not like a belch but like the sudden act of vomiting, a sound that caught in the throat and burned in the sinuses like bile.
The faint ringing from the earpiece reached me, and a tired tinny voice said, “Hullo.” My father didn’t even introduce himself. He shouted, “Don’t you fucking play games with me!” Then he took a breath so deep I could see all his teeth and the lines of his many fillings and the red of his throat.
“Motherfucking cocksucking piece of shit, I’ll kick your stupid fucking ass!”
Without realizing it, I jumped up and began dancing on the carpet in victory.
He grabbed his address book and threw it at me.
✴
THE END WOULD be like a fishing trip, a long drive through night mountains and washed-out roads, to a dawn over a river where all that mattered began.
I went into the woods and closed my eyes and turned in circles with the intention of getting lost. I had to hone my survival skills. Wandering, I searched for tunnels under bushes or magic portals beneath the low branches of trees.
And then I just sat. There was something I couldn’t understand, that made it hard to breathe, my throat thick with sadness. My father had always told me I was like him, and I did my best not to cry in front of him. But my mother watched me sometimes, her brow furrowed, a wetness in her blue eyes, as if just seeing me race through the door might make her cry. She liked it when we talked or read books, but he wanted me to be crazy at times, quiet at others. I never knew which.
In novels, something bad happens so that the hero has to travel and change, but my life just dragged on. Only when I read did the pressure in my chest go away. As I turned pages, I felt a rush of vertigo, tingling along my arms and face. Even telling stories at school, I became transfixed, lifting into the air, toward the sky, more and more distant from the truth. And once I’d told a story, no matter how outlandish, how embroidered with magic, I knew it was true.
To my classmates, I bragged about the immense salmon and steelhead trout that my father reeled from icy rivers, standing deep in the current, almost swept away. They listened, but at some point—when the salmon bit his leg or gashed his hand or wrapped the line around his boot and tried to drag him downriver—someone snorted and called me a liar.
What they didn’t realize was that their stories stank because they thought too much about time. There was too much walking, too many opening and closing of doors. They didn’t see that two shocking events years apart, on opposite ends of the country, longed for each other the way a smiling girl across the room made me want to sit next to her. Hearing my father, I forgot the slow march of minutes. A dog had once tried to bite him, and he’d also reeled in a forty-pound salmon, so it seemed natural that the injured fish would bite him too. Minutes and hours had to be done away with, the thrilling moments of life freed from the calendar’s prison grid.
Soon, I told myself as I walked home through the forest, my life would be a story, and I’d be free.
✴
SCHOOL LET OUT for Christmas. The autumn had been mild, but the weather finally changed. Snow fell in the naked forests and turned the ditches to ice.
We moved again, to a smaller farm, this time to be closer to the city and my father’s stores. My mother barely unpacked. She no longer paid much attention to food, making slapdash sandwiches and rushing off to meet friends from the psychic church. Though she still had two horses, the years of goat home brew were over.
On Boxing Day, she once again took us to the mall so she could return her gifts. My father had given both my brother and me a hundred dollars in loose change. We’d spent Christmas counting, huddled like misers over stacks of coins, but at the mall I noticed that my brother didn’t buy anything.
I sidled up to him. “What are you going to get?”
“Nothing. I gave my money to Bonnie.”
“You did? Really?”
“She needs it. It’s important.”
I shuddered. In my backpack, I had rolls of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, and I couldn’t believe that my parents’ stupidity might deprive me of the pleasure of spending them. As I bought a book of mystery stories, my mother stood off and watched with the expression of a kid enduring classroom humiliation.
As I walked back across the parking lot next to her, she stared into the distance, searching for something, an answer from her own invisible friends, a way to bridge the annoying, relentless minutes in which nothing at all happened, so that she could connect two pieces of her own story. I knew she’d need the rest of my money to do this, and that I’d give it to her.
When we got home, my father’s new cargo minivan was in the driveway, and he was back on the farm preparing a burn pile. He’d been busy closing his lots and wasn’t around more than a few hours on Christmas. He began walking toward the house. I went to my room and lay on the bed with my new book.
The fighting began just outside, and I rolled off the bed and went to the window. I wondered what they’d said to start the argument, but I was getting angry too, and yelling might have felt good.
“I’m sick of this nonsense,” he tried to bellow, but to my surprise, the unlit fields didn’t care, and a wind blew through his voice, hollowing it.
“It’s none of your business,” she shouted back, drowning his words. She spoke with his force, as if she’d put on his boots and jacket and glared at him with his brown eyes.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “You talk to … to some psychic and now you think Vancouver is going to be destroyed by an earthquake.”
“I’m sick of explaining myself!” she told him. The clouds cleared the moon, and the dark thinned so that the stars pulsed once, all together, and withdrew like barnacles.
“You don’t respect my wishes. You don’t give me space to grow,” she said, her voice still loud, something exploratory in the way she raised it to new heights.
She got in her van. Its taillights flared and scorched off along the driveway.
The night lulled, and a fire began on the back of the property. He was burning hundreds of leftover Christmas trees, the light blurring in the frosted window glass. Ever since I could remember, he’d loved building fires: garbage on the property, tires and old appliances, wood from rotting sheds, and once a camper that fit on the back of a truck. He’d piled branches and dead pine and spruce on top, and then doused it all with so much gasoline that he’d had to pour a long thin trail of it far away just to light it safely. We’d crouched together, and he’d dropped the match. The flame zipped like a shark’s fin across the grass and the heap burst skyward, the air sucked in and up, sudden heat against my face. It got so hot that Christmas trees turned to ash before our eyes, and the metal of the camper sagged and collapsed. He’d stood with his hands on his hips and laughed, and I’d wondered why burning things felt so good, like yawning or stretching in the middle of class. Maybe he was trying to feel that way now, all alone burning trees.
I went to the mudroom and put on my boots and pulled the door from its warped frame. Frozen air spilled over me, and I followed the hard earth of the driveway back.
Halfway there, I came to a ditch, the spine of the buried culvert visible where big trucks carrying trees had passed. Beyond that was the tossing light of the fire. The cold stung my skin, the night silent but for cars on the road. I hadn’t had time to get used to this farm, the sheds and barn unexplored, the forest scant and far away, beyond a frostbitten field.
My heart clenched as the world came unstrung. The lights of the house drifted out toward the road. The rising moon slipped a little higher in the sky, bumping over the stars.
I took a few more steps and stopped, my rapid breath misting, the smoldering center of the fire a red eye. I couldn’t see him. Sparks rushed up through the chill air, planing as they cooled and died. When the wind shifted, the heat warmed my face.
He called my name.
Fear released from my chest, and I continued over the baked earth. He was just beyond the fire, his arms crossed, and I stood next to him.
“She’s upset,” he told me.
I made myself appear calm and asked matter-of-factly, “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said, as if he might want my advice. “Maybe we can all go on a trip. Sometimes, when you go on a trip and come back, things are better. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
I pictured this, a long journey, days and days with trees and mountains outside the windows, and then him saying, “This is far enough.”
Firelight shone on his cheekbones but hid his eyes, and though I worried that he might tell me to go back inside, he didn’t.
“Things will be better,” he said, and in his voice I heard my mother’s, the sadness and uncertainty and fear, and I knew that something had changed.
✴
ONE NIGHT I fell asleep reading on the couch and I heard my parents come in the front door after arguing. They walked into the living room, and I didn’t open my eyes. I sensed them above me. My mother said she’d take me to my bedroom, but my father told her that he’d do it. He lifted me, my cheek against the coarse fabric of his shirt, my arm hanging. I could have opened my eyes and said I’d walk, but in his gentleness, I knew he wanted to carry me. I breathed the odors in his shirt, pine sap and coffee, gasoline and sweat, but I didn’t drift asleep in this safety. I felt angry to be this little boy.
After he’d closed the door, I turned on my lamp and read. It was the only way to feel calm.
The next day, at my new school in the city, I jostled through the morning crowd, kids turning and saying, “Hey, watch it!” I fell asleep in class. I forgot my homework. When kids talked about the presents Santa had brought them, I said Santa didn’t exist. “Only babies believe in Santa,” I told them. “Get over it.”
A girl began to cry. I heard someone say he hated the new kid.
During recess, I explored the sprawling grounds. I despised everyone. I couldn’t talk to others without wanting to hurt their feelings. As I turned the corner, five boys appeared before me.
“Hey, it’s the new kid,” Tom said. He was in my class, tall and blond, his bangs neatly brushed back.
The kids formed a half circle and began closing in.
Years ago, when I started first grade, my father had given me talks about fighting, as if I weren’t heading off to elementary school but to become a mercenary. He’d warned me never to show fear and said that I should terrify my enemies.
“Fuck you, dog-shit-faced cocksuckers!” I howled.
The boys backed away, but Tom broke from them, ran forward, and kicked me in the balls. I dropped to my knees, the air gusting from my lungs.
“Run!” he shouted to his friends. “This kid’s crazy!”
They raced off while I held myself, waiting for my body to work.
Back in class, Jamil approached me. He was fast and known as a good fighter, and that morning, near the school entrance, I’d seen him push down another boy, fart in his face, and speed off.
“I don’t believe in Christmas either,” he told me. “It’s a bunch of crap. Do you want to be friends? We can beat up Tom after school.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s beat him up.”
As he passed the information through class that I was challenging Tom to a fight in the alley between two brick buildings, I could hear myself describing the victory to my father. But an hour later, walking into the alley, I began to tremble.
Tom was with his friends, their shirts rumpled, wet with the interminable winter drizzle. Rain beaded along Jamil’s hair as he stood at my side, saying, “Go! You take him!”
Tom shoved me in the chest. I got him in a headlock. We stumbled against the wall, the bricks rasping our clothes like sandpaper.
His friends tried to jump in, but Jamil blocked them. He kept slapping them in the face, dancing from side to side as if guarding a volleyball net.
“What’s wrong, pussy?” he shouted. “Tom can’t fight for himself?”
Tom popped out of the headlock. From behind me, he tried to dig his fingers into my eyes. I rammed him backward into the bricks. I threw my body against him again and again until his head struck the wall with a wooden sound.
I spun and punched him. He just stared, his nostrils too large and dark. Blood began to drip from one of them. His eyes teared up. He ducked and grabbed his backpack and ran. He disappeared down the alley, his jacket flapping.
I had blood on my lip from one of his fingernails.
I hurried to the pickup zone. My brother was on the sidewalk. His eyes went to mine and then, like a switch, dropped to my mouth.
“What happened?”
“I got in a fight.”
Kids gathered around, pushing between us. They told him about it, speaking quickly, pointing here and there.
My mother’s brown van swerved from the traffic and pulled to the curb. I got in, and she reached across the space between the front seats and took hold of my chin.
“Are you fighting?”
Her blue eyes glared at my cut.
“I had to.”
“Fighting is wrong. You don’t fight. You talk to people. And if you can’t resolve the problem through talking, you tell your teacher. You tell the principal. You tell me. Do you understand?”
I just sat. It was pointless to argue. What she was saying would ruin me at school. I’d have to fight constantly.
My brother spoke from the seat behind us.
“Everyone said that Jamil helped you.”
“What?” she asked.
“It’s not true,” I shouted. “He just made sure no one else hit me.”
I tried to meet her gaze but felt blinded—sunlight flashing on seawater.
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t want you to fight again, but André is going to ask what happened. When he does, don’t tell him that you got help. He’s not going to like that.”
✴
MY FATHER WAS so busy with his shops that we hadn’t seen much of him, but that night he was taking my brother, my sister, and me to dinner. By the time he picked us up, my mother had already left for one of her meetings. My father hardly spoke, not even in the restaurant. He called for coffee and then noticed my lip.
“Did you win?” he asked, his eyes suddenly still.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You did?”
I nodded, trying to hide my anger. The story was almost perfect. The confrontation in the alley, the kids gathered, the rain falling along the narrow slice of sky. As far as fifth-graders went, Tom was a bruiser. But with my brother sitting across from me, I couldn’t tell it right.
“What was it like?” my father asked.
I glanced once at my brother and hesitantly described how I’d knocked Tom into the bricks, spun, and hit him, giving him a bloody nose.
“That’s good,” my father said.
My brother was watching me, nervous and confused. I pinned my gaze on my hands, but it was too late.
“What is it?” my father asked. “Why are you looking at him like that?”
When I didn’t say anything, he turned to my brother.
“Come on. Let’s have it.”
My brother shrugged. He could never lie. I was doomed.
“Deni got help,” he finally said.
“No I didn’t,” I shouted. My tongue curled in my mouth, son of a bitch caught in it, trying to get out as I clenched my jaw to keep it in.
“What help?” my father asked.
Reluctantly, my brother explained, but he was telling it wrong. He hadn’t even been there, and all he described was Jamil protecting me. He had the details right, but the way they went together wasn’t. Tom had almost clawed my eyes out! I’d banged his head against the bricks all by myself. It was a close call!
My father glared at me. “From now on, you stand up for yourself. You can handle a couple of kids, you hear me?”
I wanted to remind him how he and his brother had watched each other’s backs in their village. But there were creases beneath his eyes, and the bones of his skull seemed close to the skin. A look came into his eyes, like that of a dog about to bite.
“Anyway, we all know you’re not too smart,” he said, his lips smiling thinly, showing his upper teeth. He began to say something else, but my tongue came loose and I yelled, “Shut up!”
The room tilted and blurred. I had blood on my lips again. My brother and sister stared into their plates. I felt dizzy and didn’t speak.
As we were leaving, my father kept sighing and rubbing his face and looking over at me, but I ignored him. What he had taught me, I knew, was what I had done. If I could have told the story my way, he’d have understood.
“That fucking bank,” he said to himself. “It’s ruining my life. I’m going to dump a load of manure on their steps.”
I sat near the window, cold radiating from the glass. If the end was inevitable and there was a new beginning, why not get it over with? I’d had enough of my parents’ rage, of them crying out like animals in the night.
The next day, I told my mother that I wanted to leave.
✴
SHE PACKED OUR lunches, but instead of taking us to school, she drove us to the house of one of her friends and told us to stay there and play Dungeons & Dragons.
When she returned, it was almost noon. Everything we owned was inside the van, boxes and blankets crammed to the walls, her favorite German shepherd lying between the seats. Her white horse trailer had been hitched up, both horses inside.
She hurried us into the van, saying she’d explain soon. We drove to the border.
On the interstate, she told us that we would stay with our aunt in Virginia.
