Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (story books for 5 year olds txt) 📕

care about chores and homework. No one could tell me what to do.

I closed my eyes and took a breath, my body bracing for the rush of adrenaline as I pulled the mask down. My father and I burst through the doors, sweeping pistols before us and sending everyone diving to the floor. As if in a cartoon, he glided across the lobby to the vault and, pulling on a handle like that of a microwave oven, swung it open. A very serious manager stepped out, holding before him a single white bag marked with a golden dollar sign.

“Fuck yeah!” he shouted once we were in the car, the engine revving.

We escaped over dusty roads and desolate ranges, laughing, the wind in our hair.

This is how it worked, I knew. In fantasy or gritty American fiction, the best characters refused the laws of a weak, conformist society. They craved intensity and the unknown.

I opened my eyes. Starving, I hurried to the kitchen to see what was in the fridge. As I ate, I considered my new existence as if reading it in a book. I wanted to fight, to test myself and write about it. I would be a novelist and an outlaw.

✴

ANOTHER CARD HAD arrived. It bore glittery words, “Thinking About You.” Inside was his number, nothing else. As if in a movie about prison, I felt like an inmate who receives a gift in which the means of escape are hidden. I left the house and went down the highway to the 7-Eleven.

A storm was blowing in, the sky gray and the power lines swaying. Trucks slowed and chugged into turns where the highways intersected, and after I dialed collect, his voice came thinly onto the line.

We hadn’t spoken in months. He sounded different, reserved and unsure of himself, nothing like what I’d imagined since my mother had confessed his crimes to us.

He asked how I was, and I told him, “I’m okay. I’m just sick of school.”

“Oh,” he said. He asked how my brother and sister were, and I said, “Okay.” I talked a bit about a leather jacket I wanted and an old motorcycle I’d found in a horse barn and had been rebuilding. But then I ran out of things to say and we were silent for so long that I knew I had to tell him, that I had to share the only thing I could think about.

“Bonnie told me.”

“She told you what?”

“About”—I said—“about your crimes.”

He didn’t speak.

Clouds were moving in, drawing evening with them.

“What did she tell you?”

“She didn’t say much. I was the one who asked. I guess I already knew.”

“You already knew what?”

“That you’d been to jail. I was proud of you. She said you robbed banks.”

Again the long silence. Wind blew through the dust of the parking lot, knocking a crushed Styrofoam cup against the brick wall.

“She said that?” he asked, softly.

“I want to know about what you did.”

“What I did?”

“I want to know everything. It’s amazing.”

He was breathing into the receiver.

“What do you want to know?”

“About the banks. Did you only rob banks?”

“No.”

“What else did you rob?”

“I …” He sighed. “Lots of things.”

“Like what?”

“You want to know about this? You’re proud?”

“It’s amazing. I think it’s amazing.”

I’d been almost panting, my heartbeat too fast. I sensed how much of a stranger he was. Four years had gone by, and from the way he spoke, the care with which he chose his words, I knew he’d changed.

“I robbed banks,” he said. “It’s true. I robbed a lot of banks. And jewelry stores.”

“How many?”

“Maybe … I don’t know … maybe fifty banks. Armed robbery wasn’t a big deal. It was easy. I only did one bank burglary. That’s different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Burglary is when you go in at night and take everything. You go into the vault. Robbery is with a gun. Anyone can do that. But burglary takes brains.”

The image of him with a gun, robbing a bank as if it were nothing, impressed me, but burglary didn’t interest me at all.

“What about the jewelry stores?”

“Lots of them,” he said. “I unloaded what I got with the mob.”

“The mob?”

“It’s not that big of a deal. It’s pretty common. I probably robbed—I don’t know—fifty jewelry stores too. It was like a job.”

His voice became hoarse, and he coughed. I asked how bank robbery worked, and he told me about surveillance, knowing what time the armored truck came on payday. That’s when the tellers had more money. He cleared his throat and said, “Anyway.”

I could hardly breathe, hardly think of what to ask next. I had so many questions. I wanted him to speak, but he grew silent. Then the words came out of my mouth.

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

Rain had begun to fall, striking up the parking lot dust, the clouds low, the wind strong.

“No,” he said finally, so hoarsely he was almost whispering. “Listen, Deni, I got out of crime because of you guys. I wanted a family. I didn’t want to go back to jail and not see my children. That’s why I stopped.”

“But I think it’s amazing. No one else has a father like you.”

The downpour began in force, gusting under the overhang, soaking me where I huddled at the phone. Lightning flared beyond the highway, illuminating the crowded rooftops of a subdivision. Thunder shook the ground, and the line went dead.

I hung up, pulled my jean jacket over my head, and ran home.

✴

“WATCH THIS,” BRAD said to Travis and me, hoisting a Coke bottle plugged with a burning rag. We’d filled it with the proportions of gasoline and dish soap necessary to make a good Molotov cocktail, according to what he claimed he’d learned during riots in Germany. Standing in a field, he hurled it against the weathered husk of a junked car, and fire spread along the door.

“See that?” he said. “The dish soap makes the gasoline stick. You get that stuff on your skin and you’re going to burn to death.”

Since my house was