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

“But the police found out it was me. It wasn’t my fault. It was my partner’s job to make sure the surveillance apartment was clean. His girlfriend and me took the money into the country. She had a gun so she could feel safe, and he should’ve been ten minutes behind. Only thing is, he got nervous about the apartment and was afraid we’d left prints, so he decided to set fire to it. I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking, because the police would see right away it was connected. We’d already cleaned it once, and he just had to wipe the knobs down one last time if he thought there were fingerprints. He could have splashed soapy water. Instead, he poured gasoline on everything.

“In the kitchen the gasoline dripped down to the pilot light. The whole place went up. I don’t know how he didn’t get killed. His eyes got burned. That’s the only serious thing that happened to him, other than getting arrested.

“I guess the police made him a deal, because he told them everything. I already had a criminal record. All the police had to do was get my files and fingerprints. They sent pictures all over the country. It was about a year before they found me in Miami …”

He studied me now, his eyes moving in slow, barely discernable increments. All this was bigger, more complex than I’d expected, more businesslike. He spoke of his partner as a disappointed employer might of an employee. And yet I was relieved that my earlier impressions were false. He was more than he’d seemed to be.

“Never repeat any of this,” he told me, his voice stark, his eyes on my face—“not to anyone. Nobody ever needs to know what I’ve done.”

✴

HIS HOUSE STOOD off a wooded lane on the edge of Surrey, a sprawling suburb. Trees and overgrown hedges and a high fence closed it in, and his six dogs ran free. He’d bred German shepherds since before I was born, calling them simply “shepherds,” and now, oddly, he sold new litters to the police. He also had three cats, and hair of various colors crosshatched the carpets and linoleum. A sweaty crust of flea powder edged the rugs.

He’d built the back patio into a high enclosure where he kept a hulking breeding stud. When he’d run across the ad for the 150-pound shepherd and gone to see it, the people at the kennel had directed him to the cage but kept their distance. True to what he’d read—and to what I saw through the chain links—the dog had bullish shoulders and a handsome snout brimming with teeth. My father walked up, opened the gate, and went inside. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch. He petted the dog, inspected its paws and mouth, and decided he liked it. Only later did the owner tell him that he was the first person the dog had allowed near it in almost a year.

Unfortunately, the same was true of the years to follow. The patio door had two crossbars like those on a barn, and when I passed it, the dog’s heavy, padded steps approached and it snuffled about the cracks at the bottom and sides, and then began to growl. It stood and put its paws against the door, and the wood creaked and popped softly within its frame.

I slept on a dusty couch in the basement. Cobwebs strung the ceiling, and the floor’s peeling linoleum was like leather. The furnace came on with a loud whirring, the air smelling of exhaust.

“What’s there to eat for breakfast?” I asked in the morning, opening the fridge.

Aside from Pepsi and cream-filled chocolate rolls, it held only a plate and cup.

“Why do you have dirty dishes in here?”

“So they don’t get moldy and I can reuse them without washing,” he told me.

✴

THOUGH HE’D GONE bankrupt five years earlier, he now had three stores. There was the one in the public market as well as the same snack bar at the ferry landing where he’d had his fight years ago. He seemed to be retracing his steps. He owned even the main store he’d had before the bankruptcy, a rundown building, the rotting floors reinforced by loosely placed plywood, so that crossing the room felt like walking on ice.

His acquaintances sometimes reminded me of when I was a boy. He’d taken me along to meetings with Native men in gravel parking lots near highways, during which I chewed strips of smoked salmon as he spoke in a hushed voice. I grew accustomed to the presence of men whose strength I sensed in their stillness, in the way they watched.

But many of his current employees had fallen on hard times, evicted or newly paroled. They cleaned fish behind the store, glaring at the knife and bloody cutting board. Everyone he knew worked for him in some capacity. They borrowed money or wanted to sell him things, and he had a list of men who’d tried to take him for a ride and who could no longer be trusted. Oddly, even these men came by to meet with him, shaking his hand before leaving.

That first week, we made deliveries often. He was reticent when I asked for stories. He said his life had changed, that he wasn’t the same person. Sometimes he told me how happy he was to have me back. He smiled, but then studied me intently. Often, when we passed stores, he asked if I liked anything and insisted on buying whatever I showed interest in. He got me the leather jacket I wanted, bulky and thick. And then, as soon as I put it on, his gaze went dead.

I couldn’t stand his work: the odor of fish, the scales that stuck to everything like dull sequins—and, in return, he got annoyed each time he saw me with a book. Whenever I was bored, waiting in the car or while he