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

place. You don’t want to rob people like that. Common sense doesn’t work with them …”

Our food had arrived, but he kept staring off, serious now.

“We used to dress up nice when we did a job, that way no one would suspect us. People think the poor are criminals. We’d just go in and ask to look at the jewelry, and then hold them up. I sold it all to some guys I knew in the mob. They didn’t give us much, but jewelry stores were easier than banks. There was almost never security.

“Anyway, when I pulled my gun on this guy, he grabbed his. I almost shot him. There was at least a second—and that’s a long time—when we stood with our guns pointed at each other. I saw he wasn’t going to shoot. I don’t know how I knew. I told him I would kill him. He had his gun aimed at my chest, but I had mine to his head and that’s scarier. I asked if he was ready to die, and he put the gun down.”

He studied me now, maybe wondering why he was telling this, what it meant.

“I don’t talk about this anymore,” he said. “I barely think about it. But that was a crazy moment. I thought I’d shoot him. If you kill someone, the police don’t give up on you the way they do when you pull a robbery. Insurance can’t do anything for dead people.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I saw my mother’s face so clearly she might have been there. She’d said she trusted me. She’d written that my father charmed people, but there was nothing he wanted from me, and she’d been wrong about so much.

“You want me to tell you these stories?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I want to hear them all.”

He nodded. “I remember getting the paper the next day. The guy described me as over six feet tall and dark. I thought that was funny. It’s amazing what fear will make you see.”

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“Sometimes.” His expression softened. “You’d be good at crime. It takes people with nerves. But you have to want that feeling. I don’t know why I did. I just did. I was so angry. When I was growing up, we were so fucking poor. I didn’t want to have a miserable life.”

All this made sense. It was how I’d felt in Virginia, why I’d come here.

Then he referred to the story I’d told him earlier, the one I thought he’d ignored, about trying to derail the train.

“I did things like that,” he said. “When I was a kid, some friends and I went into a work site and pushed a big roll of metal fencing over a hill. It could have killed someone. We didn’t care. We just wanted something to happen. I remember, when I left Quebec, after I got out of prison, I was so angry. I was driving to Calgary, and I couldn’t stop thinking how I’d never had a chance, just a shitty life. The angrier I got, the faster I drove. A police car came after me, and I couldn’t stop. I knew that the longer I waited, the worse it’d be, that I was ruining my life, but I didn’t care. I hated everyone. By the time I got to the city, there were three cop cars behind me. I drove over medians and through parking lots and yards, down sidewalks and alleys. People were jumping out of the way. I knew I couldn’t escape. More police joined in, and we just kept going until I ran out of gas. By then I wasn’t angry anymore. I was laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“That’s probably the angriest I’ve ever seen police,” he told me, though he said nothing else about the arrest. “I started robbing banks not long after that. It felt good, you know. Each time I got away with it, it was like winning the lottery. I loved that life.”

For a moment after he stopped speaking, his expression reminded me of when I was a boy and he would read the paper in his chair. Sometimes I went to the living room door and watched. He was serious and concentrated and sat a long time without moving. Then he lifted his eyes, and there was a moment when he was just seeing me, staring, before warmth entered them. He had the intensity of a guard dog trying to recognize the person approaching.

That evening, when we got home, he sat and turned on the TV as he always did, the channel muted and set to hockey.

“Have you ever thought about being a criminal?” he asked.

I tried to swallow but couldn’t. Years with Dickie had taught me to be cautious. I mixed a shrug and a nod, letting my head tip to the side thoughtfully, the entire gesture slow and considered so I could insist he’d misunderstood if he was angry.

Up to this point, my fantasies had been of easy heists and open horizons, the distant blue jewel of a roadblock on a desert highway. Again, I thought of my mother.

“It’s a good life,” he said. “You have the best of everything.” He set his elbows against his knees and studied his watch, tracing the dial with a flat fingertip. He was cleaning it, picking away fish scales. “It’s better than what I do now. A lot better.”

“Isn’t it different than how it used to be?” I asked, hoping he’d say it was still possible.

“You have to find the right bank. I still know people out there.”

He hunched in his chair but didn’t speak.

The phone rang, and he looked unsure of where he was. He answered. He listened for a long time, the receiver cradled against his shoulder as he moved his fingers through his arm hair. He wrote down some prices and replied yes several times.

I stared at the muted TV. I’d never considered actually stopping school or not writing. All my