Cures for Hunger, page 28
“I didn’t want to be pathetic,” he told me. “I didn’t want to be grateful and stuff all that food in my mouth. It looked like a good meal, and after I kicked the tray, the cell smelled like good food. It drove me crazy. But I didn’t want those fuckers to think I’d thank them for feeding me like that. So I enjoyed myself. I made it a game. I did nothing but push-ups and sit-ups and stretches. My body had never been that hard.”
I knew the light in his eyes, the joyful madness that had driven him into so many reckless situations just to test himself. He didn’t want to fall asleep. He would keep his fire. It was better to stay hungry.
The next Sunday, when the guard opened the door, my father kicked the tray again, faster, with more strength. Though the guard was ready, the food still splattered. The warden stormed back into the basement.
“Another two weeks, you son of a bitch!” he shouted through the thin rectangle that several times a day framed a bored, indifferent eye rimmed with red.
But a few days later my father was released back to his cell because higher powers had interpreted his actions as a hunger strike, and no one wanted to risk that he might die.
Several months passed, and he learned that he was to be deported to a prison in British Columbia, where Canadian taxpayers could feed their own criminal. He was waiting for the transfer papers to arrive, but shortly after he told the other inmates, one of them spread the word that he was planning to kill my father. It was the first death threat my father received in prison. Though the man might have been bluffing, trying to sound tough because my father was leaving, my father had no choice. He told me the rule: if a man says he’s going to kill you, believe him and kill him first. He sat up all night in his cell, readying himself.
“I didn’t want to have to do it,” he said. “I got lucky. My transfer papers came through the next day, and I was sent from Tacoma to Vancouver. If they hadn’t, I’d have killed him. Prison’s about honor. That’s all you have. If someone says he’ll kill you and you do nothing, you’ll be killed. Someone will do it. You’ll become a target.”
His voice was severe, his breathing loud and ragged.
“You know, I dreamed that stuff forever. There was nothing good. Nothing worth remembering. The pen was terrible. There were men in there for raping women and biting off their nipples. We spit on them. They couldn’t be put in with us, because we’d kill them. When we served food in the line, we spit on their food and on them. We just kept spitting until they were through. I was in there for honorable crimes. I was respected.”
He stopped speaking, just breathing hard, and I couldn’t help but wonder what of his past he was leaving out. He hadn’t served much time relative to everything he’d done.
“Shouldn’t the sentences have been longer?” I asked.
“No,” he said hoarsely. “Most of my crimes they could never pin on me. But police want to make deals. They need to close cases. They agreed to reduce the charges if I claimed a few robberies and gave them some information. Criminals always take advantage of the police bureaucracy like this.”
“Did you have to tell them about your partners?”
“No. It was never anything serious. They just wanted to close cases.”
The intensity of my anger surprised me. It was the conversation itself, that we were discussing this—like this—that I had no way to voice sympathy or sadness. I knew with absolute certainty that he’d hate me if I did, if I made him feel weak. All we had were these stories. Not even the truth mattered.
“So you never ended up killing anyone?” I asked quietly.
He didn’t answer right away.
“It’s—it’s complicated. Sometimes on jobs, things happen. But I never went in planning to …”
I listened, waiting for him to finish.
“I should let you go,” he said. “It must be late there. We’ll talk tomorrow. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
✴
PAGES TURNED AND I had a sense of understanding, like a surge of adrenaline, but just as suddenly it faded. I searched through sentences that blurred, pages turning faster and faster, the ink washing over my face like rain.
Wind drove against the walls, rattling the windows, and I woke. There was the distinct sound of icicles breaking in the eaves, falling along the side of the house.
I got out of bed and sat at my desk. I stared at the pages of my notebook, their empty outlines.
His stories of crime didn’t haunt me, just simple moments: a day I followed him through the rows of pines, his hands half-open against his jeans as he walked, and I asked why he didn’t cry. He’d told me that I shouldn’t, and I wanted to understand how it was possible not to cry when angry or sad or hurt. He stopped. “I don’t cry. Men don’t cry,” he said. “I have work to do. Go back to the house.” I flushed, too furious to speak, tears coming into my eyes and embarrassing me. I turned, but he’d seen my anger and he called to me. His brow was furrowed, his cheeks lifted. “I’d cry if something happened to you,” he said, “so be careful, okay?” And then he smiled, as if this were a joke, and we both laughed. He waved and I started back across the fields.
The days I spent with him are among those I recall most clearly. I studied him when he spoke—his beard and dark, expressive eyes. He was often lending small amounts of money, and once, standing outside his store as sunlight filtered past the three pines he’d planted there, I asked him why. He told me it was worth a little money to know if you could trust a person. I considered the wisdom in this and began lending nickels at school.
Once, during the early years of his success, he gave in to my begging to go fishing, and took me to the Nicomen Slough, near where I was born. He let me row downriver as he set up the lures. Then we drifted and fished. The sky was a field of gray, and the wind churned the water, small waves slapping the boat’s hull. When needles of icy rain fell, he began to row. We’d drifted far, the bridge a thread of shadow. I didn’t think we’d get back. He put the rods in the bottom of the boat and pressed the oars rhythmically. I huddled into my lap as the wind swept spray into our eyes.
After he put the boat in the truck and tied it down, we walked to a diner across from the landing. He sat at a booth and I went to the bathroom. My numb fingers couldn’t get the button back through the stiff jean, so I held them under hot water, too proud to tell him. When I came out, my hands burning with renewed sensation, he had two coffees waiting. He’d never let me have coffee. It was a light chocolate brown and, in my mouth, creamy and rich. He watched me with pride, and I had a sense of all that he knew and how similar we were. The storm blew against the windows, and his fingertips fluttered the edge of a napkin as his eyes focused beyond the glass, on something far away.
✴
HE CALLED JUST before midnight, having forgotten the time difference. I apologized to my landlords and switched to the phone in the living room. I asked if he was okay.
“I’d like to disappear sometimes,” he told me. “Do you understand it’s not cowardly?”
I struggled to swallow.
“I do,” I said.
He cleared his throat and asked, almost childlike, “Do you think it’s wrong?”
I wished I could see him and read the intention in his eyes.
“You have to understand that it’s not cowardly,” he told me, “what I want to do.”
“I do,” I repeated.
“I worried that if I told you, you’d be upset …”
I moved my lips to speak again but he said, “I was thinking maybe you could take some time off. You could come out here and help me, and maybe we could get the market going again.”
“I can’t do that,” I said too quickly. “I don’t want to work in your business.”
“I understand. But maybe in the summer …”
“I can’t,” I told him, wishing I could find a gentler way to say this. I added, “I’ve been writing all your stories.”
“Good. I like that you’re writing them.”
In the long silence that followed, I thought of all he’d described—journeys that never quite linked up and how he’d wanted a new life for so long that he’d learned to live for the pleasure of hunger alone. Hunger for the unattainable, for what you will never have and what will never disappoint you. Hunger for solitude, where no matter how you grapple with yourself, you will always be victorious. Hunger for intensity, a sensation like the seed of all experience stripped of its colorings and shells, made the same, so that whatever has been lost can be gained again in something else, so that nothing is desired for what it is, only for a fleeting moment of connection, of recognition, before it has been expended and cast away. Hunger for truth, for love, for God, for a single thing that we can trust because it is not of this world. Hunger for the perfect pleasure of wanting, a hunger that lasts so long it can no longer be cured in the ways we are told it should, by the simple joys of life.
I carried the phone to the window. The moon lit the clouds. The unreal past was there, winters returning, blown across the yard in gusts and flurries.
THE LONGEST HIGHWAY
By the time my parents met, my father had his German shepherds, one black and tan, the other black with a silver flare at the throat. He’d received early parole and lived in a van, fishing and sleeping under the stars.
When he’d spoken of meeting my mother, saying, “I ordered ham and eggs and left with her,” I hadn’t understood what had brought them together. But maybe it’s fair to say that there are simple needs, empty spaces that must be filled.
Twenty years old, she’d separated from the draft dodger she’d followed to Vancouver, and, loving Canada, had stayed. She met my father and they traveled, but eventually he needed money and went looking for men from his past. He began making speed for a friend.
“That friend …,” he’d told me, “he was the guy who got his eyes burned, the one who set fire to the apartment in Hollywood. He still couldn’t see too well. I felt sorry for him. He had this idea, for the speed. He had the recipes and ingredients. I thought I could help him out.”
The story lacked ballast—that he, who’d brutalized others, had forgiven so easily. But the friend had been in his life for years, he explained. He’d been a partner in many crimes. My father likely had his sentence reduced by making a deal with the police, and so had tempered his view on disloyalties.
He never described the period following this clearly. When my mother got pregnant, he quit crime, not wanting another child born while he was in prison. He believed that a family would hold him in place and give him satisfaction. To make money, he began buying and selling salmon. He still had to check in with his parole officer and had received permission to visit his son in the US, but he decided to break contact, as he did with his family in Quebec after calling his mother a few times.
“I wanted my own life,” he told me. “Too much had changed.”
Those years, he built dog pens, put up fences, sold trees, and established stores. He hadn’t been sure he’d enjoy this work, but the skills his father had taught him came back quickly—the fish on this coast not so different, his hands moving the knife on their own, working him past the soft boundaries of memory. Often, it seemed he was challenging himself to do as much as he could, satisfied with the authenticity of the life he was building, affirming his strength and finding new ways to grow.
I recalled his transformations during that period. One morning he came out of the house wearing a sports jacket, a briefcase in his hand. Our mother sat on the steps as we played. Wind rustled the leaves of the tree near the porch, casting a shadowed map of branches and sunlight across his face. He tugged at his sleeves, and she looked up. I watched, sitting on my bicycle, one foot on the ground, and she laughed. It was a laugh of pleasure and surprise, but he flushed and walked to his truck and left.
✴
AS FINAL EXAMS neared, I called my father less often. I watched myself study. I was withdrawn. Daily, I walked the road to school and on occasion drove my uninsured SUV into town, usually after midnight, to the twenty-four-hour supermarket, the streets empty beneath cold Christmas skies—colored lights on a few leafless trees.
The next time I called, I again tried to ask about his family, but he turned the conversation back to crime.
“I never lost heart,” he said. “I always had the nerve. I remember the last bank I tried to rob. I was with a guy who’d pulled a lot of jobs. I’d seen him rob other places. But we walked around the building, and he couldn’t get his mask on. He kept saying, ‘Not yet.’ After we passed the door the last time, he told me he couldn’t do it. He was sweating and shaking. He didn’t know what the point was anymore. He told me he just wanted his life to be simple. We were in the alley, and he asked to be let out. That’s how it was. You could do it for years, and then the nerve just went out of you.”
I think of songs, of men in prison longing for motion, envious of the rumbling of trains, the inescapable sun above the road crew and the passing cars, the staring children or the naked shoulders of girls. The man said he wanted out because he had a baby coming, as did my father, whom he’d turned to because he knew him to be reliable. They both had women waiting.
“I let him off,” my father told me.
Hearing him, I had the impression that he was bothered by his life since, that the family he’d wanted had failed him. But the banks and jewelry stores were easier for him. He’d always been that boy afraid of wintering at home.
“Maybe I could have gone back to Quebec,” he said, “if things had turned out differently with your mother. I could have shown them my family and business. They’d have understood that. But even then, it was complicated …”
✴
AFTER MY MOTHER left, he’d stayed in bed for weeks, hardly eating. He got up only to use the bathroom or drink water or continue the calls he made to her or her parents. In a drawer, he found the address of a psychic she’d seen, a woman who’d told her that Vancouver would be destroyed in an earthquake. He made an appointment, wanting his own prophecy. The woman said she couldn’t talk about my mother, but told him that his middle child would be the first to return. It wouldn’t be soon. That was all she could say.
When he finally drove downtown, his hands shook, nausea grabbing at his throat as he turned with the traffic. He side-swiped two parked cars but didn’t stop. His store was unlocked and abandoned. He’d eaten a carton of fries, but he threw them up when he opened the door to the melting ice and rotting fish, the bluebottle flies flecking the display windows. The power had been shut off, and a reddish, jellylike fluid seeped from beneath the door to the walk-in freezer. He stayed only long enough to see that no money was in the register. A wino’s rusty shopping cart had been parked in the back room. Letters from creditors had piled on the floor. An eviction notice was posted on the door.
He sat in the minivan he’d bought a few months before, new on the market then—perfect for deliveries, he’d told everyone. His leather briefcase lay on the passenger seat and again he had a vision of filling it with fish. He’d take it to the bank and buy a safe-deposit box and put the fish inside.
Back home, the phone rang constantly. He had too many creditors and no money for taxes. He packed up a few of his possessions and stored them at a friend’s house. Then he went home and got some gasoline, a rope, and a knife. He poured the gasoline on his head, made a small cut at his throat, and managed to tie himself up. He struggled free and called the police. When they got there, he told them that men had come to his house, bound his hands, put a knife to his throat, dumped gasoline on him, and threatened to set him on fire. He’d confessed to where he kept his stash of money, and they’d taken everything. The police filed the report of stolen earnings, which he sent in the next day with his tax papers.
Then he loaded a backpack with food, a can opener, and a bottle of whiskey. His creditors would be after him, and he knew that everything would be repossessed. He hitchhiked until he was dropped off at an entrance ramp of the TransCanada Highway. The moon was rising, and it was the hour when he’d normally return home to the comfort he’d struggled against. He wasn’t far from a place he recalled, where the wide median was heavily forested, and where, just beyond the nearest exit, there was a convenience store. He waited until no headlights were in sight and crossed the pavement. The median was two hundred feet of forest. He pitched his tent in a deep, comfortable gully out of the wind. Even the sound of traffic seemed remote. He had a good sleeping bag. A little snow had fallen, preferable to the damp.
“No one expects you to disappear on the median of one of the world’s longest highways,” he told me over the phone. “Your creditors will think you’ve changed provinces or gone across the border.”
He said that when he was in the city, every now and then he still ran across men who were amazed to see him. “We thought you were dead,” they’d say. “You just disappeared.”
And that night, unable to sleep, he did consider dying. He wished he could see his mother one last time and apologize for decades of absence and the grandchildren she didn’t know existed. He lay with the bottle of whiskey as snow began to fall again, and his breath condensed into beads of moisture that speckled the canvas roof and froze.
But this wouldn’t be an ending. He’d dreamed that a family and business would put his old life behind him, though my mother still tells me that what made him who he was couldn’t change—too strong or too broken, strong in the way that injuries become strengths through endurance, that fractures mend hard within the bone.
I imagine his tent pitched in the evergreens, in that wide descent of stony earth, an echoing culvert below. I’ve traveled enough to know the solitary emotions of highway nights, but I can’t imagine that loneliness and rage. As he lay there, tremors passed through the earth, semis carrying raw tonnage from the interior along the highway that cut through the continent’s vast wilderness, from Vancouver to Quebec, connecting the lives he’d abandoned.
