Cures for Hunger. Deni Ellis Bechard
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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