Cures for Hunger Deni Béchard (easy books to read .TXT) 📖

and Elizabeth liked the story and took it up, saying it collapsed just after we left, while we were crossing the field.

We all heard it, we agreed.

“I heard something, anyway,” Elizabeth said. “I was scared just being in there.”

✴

THE NARROW LANE, shaded by high trees, followed the sunlit train tracks and then veered over them and wound down through forest that, with each turn, became increasingly crowded with battered cars.

Dickie came here often to buy the parts he claimed he’d been seeking forever, even though he just cleaned them and never used them. I liked seeing the wrecked vehicles and imagined the swarming lights of police cars and ambulances, the arms and legs sticking from crushed metal.

“Hey,” Dickie called. He hunched in the shadow of a massive oak, his bucket of tools in hand. “Why don’t you go ask the old man for a job?”

“I don’t want to,” I said, making myself stern and uninterested. Dickie and his ideas were beneath me. I’d accompanied him just to get out of the house for a while.

“What the hell? Come on. You’d be a good mechanic.”

“I don’t want to be a mechanic.”

He curved his back like an angry dog. “Get your ass down there!”

My dirty sneakers scuffed red lines in the sunburned clay. I knocked at the trailer.

The old man pulled the door open with one hand while groping at his fly with the other.

“Yeah, what do you want?” Head tilted back, mouth open, he studied me from beneath his glasses.

“I was wondering if you need to hire someone.”

“Hire someone?” He glanced around at the fields and forest that looked like a crowded parking lot decades after Armageddon. “To do what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hell, boy.” He shook his head as if I were the nuttiest damn kid on earth and he had nothing but sympathy. “I don’t make no money, can’t pay no money.”

Later, when Dickie and I got home, I saw the oily metal stashed under the front seats. He’d used me as a distraction so he could take things without paying. He’d also stolen the old man’s portable welding kit. Pathetic, I thought—robbing a junkyard.

He carried it all into the basement to clean, and I worked out on the back porch, furious that I had to live like this. With my feet propped on the steps, I did push-ups until sweat ran into my eyes and dripped from the tip of my nose. I did sit-ups with a thirty-pound dumbbell behind my head, counting eight goddamn it, nine goddamn it, ten motherfucker. I wanted a new life, a new body, money, and respect—to get laid. I did biceps curls until the veins in my arms bulged and my hands shook and I couldn’t flex my fingers to hold the weights.

Dickie slunk up from the basement and stood, wiping his greasy hands on his work jeans as he blinked in the sunlight.

“Check it out,” I told him and came down from the porch. I flexed my arm.

His eyes popped open. Then he lifted his right hand as if to make a muscle too, but he grabbed the meat of my arm. My knees almost gave out.

“Have you been using my stuff to make bombs?”

“No!”

“Bullshit. I’m missing a lot of stuff.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My jaw clenched as he dug his fingers, but I forced myself to show nothing. That was how you won with men, by not caring, by making them feel stupid.

“Don’t let me catch you in my shop. I’ll tear your fucking arm off.”

He let go and went back downstairs.

The next day, each finger was imprinted in black on my skin. After school, when my mother came home, I showed her. Her eyes lingered.

“What did you do?” she asked, her cheeks drawn. “You must have done something.”

“Don’t blame me,” I shouted, though I knew she’d yell at Dickie in private. “I don’t want to stay here anymore. I want to go back and live with André.”

I stormed outside, onto the back porch and down the stairs, intending to sulk in the fields, where I could find things to smash.

She caught hold of my sleeve in the yard. Her hair had gone entirely gray, though she called it frosted, and the curls of her perm had relaxed so that a few strands hung about her face.

“You know what? Your father was just a kid. He had to be the center of attention. But he was worse than a kid because you couldn’t question a damn thing he did. If he came home late, he had to wake you guys up. He’d play games so you knew he was the good guy. I was the bad one. I made you go to bed. I made you eat good food. He’d let you do anything as long as it didn’t threaten him. And he’d take you places with those people of his, let them drink around you or whatever. If you want that, fine, you can go back when you’re fifteen. But if you do, your life won’t be what you want. It will be what he wants. You’ll be there for him. Maybe that doesn’t make sense now, but it will someday.”

Stars were appearing behind the filmy light of the nearby subdivisions. A firefly blinked above the trash bins.

“Why did you stay with him so long?” I asked.

“I was afraid. I didn’t believe in myself, and he kept me from believing in myself.”

Dickie opened the screen door onto the porch. He leaned on the banister, the sleeves of his T-shirt lifting above his faded army tattoo, an eagle just beneath his shoulder.

“I’m getting tired of this. Why don’t y’all come inside?”

“Go back in the house,” she told him with a coldness that made me proud. “We’re talking.”

“Christ,” he said. The screen door clacked behind him, and the stove light flickered as he passed in front of it.

“All I ask,” she went on, “is that you trust me. I’m doing what’s best for you. That’s why I took you