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

I didn’t know how to respond, and before I could, he said, “Promise me something.”

“What?”

“When I die, promise me you’ll do one thing.”

“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever seen him drink like this.

“Promise you’ll bury me in the mountains on the edge of the ocean.”

I nodded. “All right.”

“No. Fucking promise. I haven’t asked fuck all of anybody and I haven’t gotten fuck all. So promise.”

“I promise,” I said, though I had no idea how I’d take his body into the mountains. “Why are you talking about dying, anyway?”

“People die. Sometimes you’re here and everything’s okay, and then the next day you’ve lost your health and money, and no one gives a fuck about you and you die.”

“Are you worried about dying?”

“I’m just saying that sometimes it happens. Money’s always a problem. The economy is shit. It’s never easy. Life doesn’t get better.”

“But your health is okay.”

“Of course it’s okay. My grandmother lived to a hundred. I’ll probably live to a hundred too.” He stared at me, his eyes suddenly unguarded. “I never thought about that. Maybe you’ll be too old to climb into those mountains to bury me. You’ll be an old fart. Maybe I should die young. You can drive me into the mountains and bury me overlooking the ocean. I’d like that, but you’d have to be young and strong. I wouldn’t be able to wait until I’m a hundred.”

“It’s probably illegal,” I said.

“Yeah. A lot of things are illegal if you get caught. You figure it out. If you can’t get my body, just use the ashes. I won’t be angry at you.”

“Okay,” I told him.

“I don’t like this okay bullshit.” He asked me to promise one more time, and I did.

He drank another beer, and as we finished the meal in silence, he noticed me watching him and glared, letting me know he was still awake, that I’d better not count him out.

Getting up, he swore and grabbed at the table.

“I’m too drunk to walk,” he told me with a smirk and drove his elbow hard into my ribs. “Yep, I’m too drunk to walk. Looks like I’ll have to drive.”

✴

WE MET A few more times before I left. He told stories after late dinners in restaurants. Snow flurried across the parking lot, and his eyes almost closed as he gazed through the window. He described the boredom of work camps, a day when polar bears maundered through a mining town, a night so cold his axles froze, though he’d left the engine running as he slept.

“Crime,” he said, “was better than anything I’d known. If you saw where I came from, you’d understand. It felt like the only way out.”

I dropped him off at his house one evening when his truck was in the garage. As he went through the metal gate, his five German shepherds ran across the yard. They gathered about him anxiously, lifting their heads as he moved his hands, touching each of them on the nose until they calmed. He stood still as they sat or stretched out at his feet.

Though I’d soon be free, I no longer felt the need to run. I simply craved the highway, its lightness and sense of loss, as if the divine could be found only by leaving, by losing myself in the country. Yet even as I thought this, I refused to let myself imagine my father’s future, afraid I might stay. So I watched, remembering, as if I knew he’d soon be gone. In the big dogs’ wordless allegiance, I sensed his need for one thing that would never betray him.

My mother’s talk of destiny came back to me, but nothing in our futures seemed as perfect as our lives in the valley. I’d stood at the window of our house as dogs loped across the fields, followed by a man. They raced away from him, toward an invisible point, leaping and falling over each other, and then rushed back as he continued through the rows of trees with the same steady pace.

Once, my father had taken me to sloping mountaintop pastures. He wore his rain jacket and sou’wester and walked the rows, pruning trees. I huddled in the green pickup as fog blew past, silhouetting him and masking all but the snap of the machete. When he came back, his clothes were soaked. I asked why, and he tousled my hair and said it was the clouds. “What clouds?” I asked. He said that what was all around us wasn’t fog. Later the clouds broke and sunlight raced over the damp trees and grass. Beneath us the valley opened, a swath of green marked with specks of color, the road and streams intertwined like sleeping snakes.

✴

THE DAY I left for California, the sun flashed on snowmelt.

We met where I was having my SUV serviced for the trip, and he drove me to get lunch.

“It’s good that you’re going to travel and go to college,” he told me, squinting in the light through the plateglass windows. “I’d have done the same thing if I could.”

“I can come back and visit,” I said.

He smiled. “Who knows? Who knows with this fucking life?”

“No, seriously, I’ll come back.”

“You don’t know that.” He sat with his shoulders curved forward.

Afterward, as he drove me back to the garage, we came up behind a red convertible.

“Look at that guy,” he said. “It’s not that warm.”

The blond driver was bundled in a jacket, his posture alert, maybe nervous. The four-lane road had a broad median, and he pulled into the left-hand turn lane as we did, and then stopped just in front of us.

The oncoming traffic passed in packs, offering several openings during which he could have turned, but he didn’t take them. With each gap, he lifted his head and inched forward. The car appeared new, its red paint brilliant and its tires a solid black.

“Goddamn it,” my father said, “doesn’t he see he’s had plenty of