Cures for Hunger Read Online Free Page A

backseat and wept to the Lord until my father, racing at over a hundred miles an hour, slammed the brakes. The Mormon flew onto the dash, his back against the windshield so that the car was briefly dark and all my father saw was his screaming face. The friend kicked open his door and they chucked the Mormon out. The man grabbed at the earth, kissing it—“Like the goddamn pope,” my father said.
    I didn’t know what a Mormon was, but I’d seen the pope on TV, descending from an airplane and kissing the ground.
    â€œI bet dogs pissed all over that ground,” my father had told me and changed the channel.
    Neither Mormons nor the pope could be too bright or brave. Hearing his descriptions, I forgot about my questions and his secrets. Reckless speed and the thought of untamed distance thrilled in my blood.
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    The proof that his stories were true was his madness. He raced through traffic or hit large puddles with such speed that his truck appeared to have wings of muddy water and sputtered until its engine dried. Watching TV, he contemplated Evel Knievel, who, dressed in his cape and the shirt
with crossed lines of stars, jumped his motorcycle over buses. Though he calculated how difficult this would be, he preferred Houdini. Having seen a documentary on him, he discussed ways of escaping handcuffs, live burial, and torture cells.
    Yet many of his exploits had involved not escaping torture but subjecting us to it. In the mall, when I was four, he’d hidden, standing with mannequins in a window, arms lifted and motionless, head cocked at an angle as he stared into space. He blended in perfectly, his posture so convincing that my brother and I walked past him repeatedly, crying as we called out his name. Only when a woman stopped to help us did we see the mannequin in the display leave its place and hurry toward us, laughing.
    Or once he took my brother and me to a store that he intended to rent. Though he ran Christmas tree lots each winter, he also had three seafood shops in the city and wanted to open more. But while we snooped in back, he locked us in and hid outside. My brother was six or seven and, having taken on the role of voicing our terror, pounded on a window until it cracked. My father loomed in the broken glass. His key ring jangled against the door right before he threw it open and spanked us for acting like babies. But as he tried to strike me, I struggled and shouted, “I wasn’t crying!” Even afterward, following him back to the truck, I was enraged, yelling, “I wasn’t crying!” until he turned and glared at me and said, “Okay. That’s enough!”
    Train racing was more frequent and always fun, though he did it rarely now, unlike when I was little. Sometimes he didn’t stop, just raced in front, swerving past the gate, striking the embankment like a ramp and sailing to the road with the clatter of rusted shocks. Or he waited on the tracks, though under normal circumstances his battered truck was known to stall or refuse to start. He even got out once, pocketing his keys after telling us to wait. We screamed as the train heaved into sight. We beat on the windows and called, “André! André!” until he hurried back and jumped behind the wheel and pretended to turn the key, yelling, “It won’t start!” But finally the engine fired, and we screeched from the tracks.

    Only later did I wonder why we loved danger so much, why my mother hated this feeling that made me happier than anything else.
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    Usually when I woke up, my father had already gone to his stores, and he returned after I was in bed. But some mornings before school, if his truck was in the driveway, I searched the misted rows of pines through our windows. His figure passed between them, followed by the swift movement of his German shepherds, all soon obscured by rain.
    The November of my fourth grade, while he worked his tree lots, I worried