Cures for Hunger. Deni Ellis Bechard
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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