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

I met his gaze, trying to see if his anger was for show—a pretense to say I should be working for him, making money and not fucking around.

“Where were you?”

“I went out for breakfast. I just got back.”

“Bullshit. You were with that girl all night.”

“So what?”

“You listen to me,” he said, faint hesitation in his words. “You don’t want to work except when it’s good for you, and you say you care about school but you don’t even sleep. How do you expect to get by?”

“I have good grades.”

“But you don’t give a shit about school,” he told me in that theatrical voice of his, exaggerated, somewhere between anger and ridicule.

“I’m not dropping out.”

“Then you’d better learn to take things seriously. And you can’t be a good fighter without sleep. If you’re going to stay up all night, you might as well work for me.”

I put on my impassive face. We stood ten feet apart as he held the door, and I shook my head faintly. His scowl faded. He knew what I was thinking—that he’d been a criminal, had left home and lived as he’d wanted.

He shut the door, but the next morning, at four, he was pounding on it.

“What?” I shouted, exhausted, having tried to make up for two nights of sleep.

He threw the door open.

“I need your help,” he said, that angry laughter in his eyes.

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“What’s the big deal? You don’t sleep anyway.”

“I’m tired.”

“I need your help now. At the store. Get your clothes on. It’s an emergency.”

I sighed and flopped back onto my pillow.

“Get out of the fucking bed!” he shouted.

I rolled off and began pulling on my clothes.

Our headlights swept out across the suburbs as I drove behind him, the night moonless and without clouds. We pulled up to his store. Frost had sketched icy calligraphy on the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. School would be letting out for Christmas soon, and I’d spend the entire break here.

“I just got a shipment of salmon for almost nothing,” he told me as soon as he’d closed his door. “But I need to get them cleaned up fast.”

As he unlocked the gate, his two German shepherds came to greet us. We went into the fenced-in backyard where he received deliveries.

The lid of the large plastic crate was level with my chin, and he heaved it back. The soup of melting, bloodshot ice contained hundreds of smallish salmon. Something about them didn’t look right. I reached in and pulled one out. Filaments of slime dribbled from it. The fish had a bulge in its head, another in its side. All of them appeared misshapen.

“They have tumors,” he said. “I got them from a fish farm. Some of the batches go bad.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? Maybe it’s the shit they feed them. They have those experimental foods and hormones so they grow fast, and they give them dyes to make their meat red. It could be anything. Bad luck. They weren’t supposed to be sold. I bought them for next to nothing from a contact, a guy responsible for disposing of them.”

“Like a garbageman?”

“Yeah. Kind of like that.” He laughed and repeated, “Garbageman.” He said we’d fillet the salmon and resell them at normal price, a transaction that was almost pure profit. I understood that he needed my help because he couldn’t let anyone else see this. Though a few of his employees were ex-cons themselves, they seemed incapable of not talking about their crimes.

A gold-streaked dawn lit the horizon as we worked, the fenced-in yard cluttered with waxed cardboard boxes and trash cans. We cut the fillets, often half-size, tail sections, or strips—whatever was left after removing the hard, red knots of flesh. We ran our fingers over the silken meat, feeling for lumps. Not a single fish was normal.

“Who are you selling these to?” I asked.

“Restaurants. I have a lot of orders for fillets. They’ll never know the difference.”

I kept checking the time as the sun clambered through the clouds.

“I’m going to be late for school.”

“No you won’t. Just go straight there.”

“Like this?” I motioned to my work clothes speckled with fish blood and scales.

He threw his knife down on the plastic cutting board.

“I don’t know why I put up with you. I’m giving you two choices. From now on you work for me in the morning, or else I take the truck away …”

I nodded once, stiffly, but said nothing.

We double-bagged the tumors, bones, and guts in black plastic, and carried them to the Dumpster outside. Then I got in the SUV and rushed home to change, already late.

✴

THE IRISHWOMAN IN the housedress reminded me of my old detention monitor. She came to the door and showed me a Dodge Omni parked in the street. It had mismatched tires and blemished yellow paint, as if it had been splashed with bleach. Dirty boxing hand wraps lay in the backseat. The car had been listed in the paper for two hundred dollars.

“It was my son’s,” she told me when I asked about the wraps. “He was a boxer, a good one, but he gave it up when a girl broke his nose.”

“A girl?”

“A lady in the boxing ring. She gave him a right beating, and he didn’t have the heart for it no more.”

I slipped the folded money from my pocket.

“I’ll take it,” I told her. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

It was a week after New Year’s. I’d scanned the classified ads daily over Christmas vacation. Having finished high school, my brother had come to live with us, hoping to build a relationship with my father and work for him, so the pressure was off me. Still, I was determined to leave. A coldness had set in between us. When I stayed out late, my father commented: “You’re lazy. Look at you! How do you expect to be a boxer? You don’t even sleep.” Or he gritted his teeth and said, “Goddamn it, you’d better grow