Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  My father is there, where the red meets the earth, where the fire eats the trees and moves the air into funnels. He is swinging an axe, or running a saw, cutting what the fire would consume, stealing its hunger. He is gray with ash, the white and blue of his eyes alive in the blackness, and he is alone because that is how I imagine him, because he has said that he works best that way and thinks best that way—because that is how he makes sense of his life. I want it to be good for him, to be just as he wants it, so that he can fight the fire well and it will not hurt him.

  In the kitchen, my mother works—the click click of dish against dish. A pot simmers on the stove—brown beans fat with bacon. The table is set with plates and forks and knives, salt, butter, cornbread in its cast iron skillet covered with foil. There is tea in the refrigerator, cake in the oven. She has to keep busy, keep the food in its place, the dirt in its place, the children clean and fed and where they should be. She believes I am asleep, as my brother is in the room next to mine, and I think I should lie down and close my eyes, but then I can’t breathe because the smoke is thicker with my eyes closed. I wish I could go to her, but I know she would scold me. It is late, and she, like my father, prefers to work alone, efficient in her chores, quick and precise.

  The fire could shift, the wind rise up. The fire could crown, racing through the tops of the trees, a whirlwind of heat, impossible to outrun. The fire could find us, where we live in the hollow with the trees all around. We are circled by trees. I try to imagine our path of escape, what route we might take away from the fire, but there is nowhere for miles, nowhere without tinder and fuel. But my father would find us, I believe. He would lead us out. He is notching the tree with the fire in its crown, stepping back as the trunk begins its slow pivot and fall. The smoke and ash rise up and cover him. He is a ghost, wading the fog of cinder. Even his footprints swirl and disappear. He has gone where I cannot follow.

  I remember what I have been told. Don’t panic. If you run, you will die. But the berries I might eat are all gone, the spring choked with charred branches. The fish are dead, floating like pearly toy boats on the water’s surface. Everywhere I look the forest is burning.

  I squat and lay my head in the nest of my arms, my world a dream I’m adrift in, smoke and fire, dust devils and dry air, stench of burned flesh and birds crying. Somewhere, my mother is praying. The sound of my father’s voice comes to me like a whisper.

  I AWOKE still swaddled in the blanket with which David had covered me, the early sun coming in tilted and gray. I lay for a long time, trying at first to remember, then to forget.

  I moved to the shower and stood beneath the hot spray, not thinking about David or food or money, not thinking about anything except how the water ran from the top of my head to my shoulders, back, and legs, then into the drain. I sat on the couch, smoked one cigarette, then another and another, until the pack was empty. Strips of thin light shone through the curtains, and when I stepped to the door and looked out, I saw the spring grasses and the trees suddenly green.

  I felt a sudden, urgent need to get away from the apartment. I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, brushed my teeth, stepped onto the porch and stopped. I had no money. Les and Marc had retrieved the Mustang while I slept; my Capri remained in their driveway, only days away from repossession. I couldn’t remember what time it was, whether it was Wednesday or Sunday, whether people were at church or school or work. I looked up the street, then down, began walking straight ahead, southwest toward the airport, toward the canyon where the Snake River eddied and slowed.

  Four blocks, then four more. I turned east, circled back, exhausted. My mouth and throat were dry. Back in my apartment, I bent over the kitchen sink and drank from the faucet, remembering the cool splash of spring water on my face. I knelt, rested my head against the cupboard door, then lay down on the kitchen floor, and the sleep came again and there was nowhere I must go.

  A WEEK LATER, when the landlord knocked on my door, he could not meet my eyes, and I saw in his face my own shame reflected. The rent remained unpaid: I had ten days to pack my things and leave. I ate what little was left in my cupboards, then scavenged aluminum cans from Dumpsters, pawned the thin gold ring that Tom had given me with his promise of love. I bought white bread, canned chili, cigarettes, cheap schnapps, its peppermint flavor a comfort, like the gum my grandmother passed to me in church when, as a child, I became restless with the everlasting Sunday sermon. That need I’d felt then—to escape, to make for the aisle and run for open air, to twirl and fall down in grass and watch as the sky continued its motion—still possessed me, but now without end, without the Amen of prayer, without the rising to stand, the being led away by the hand, away to the table set with fried chicken, string beans, white gravy and potatoes, corn from the summer garden, plums picked sweet from the shadowing trees.

  I WILL ALWAYS BE GRATEFUL for the miraculous offer that came from Michelle, an acquaintance from high school, who had heard that I needed a place to stay and invited me to share a house with her and another roommate, Connie—both former cheerleaders, both students at the local college.

  Although I had seen them little since graduation, I had known them for some time, having met them in ninth grade, after I had been expelled from my old school for truancy, after the summer spent with the preacher’s family, when I had come to my new junior high fresh and eager. I was no longer the delinquent but a true crusader, bent on bringing every classmate to Christ.

  Connie and Michelle had been easy targets for conversion. Both had sampled various religions with little sense of fidelity. Both had been involved in Girl Scouts and any number of other organizations, and they understood the ritual of presentation and gesture. But they had not cut their spiritual teeth on the pews as I had, and so their entrance into and exit out of salvation seemed comparatively unencumbered, as though they had simply outgrown Girl Scouts and were headed for Ladies of the Elks.

  Connie had shoulder-length auburn hair that never lost its summer highlights, brown Cleopatra eyes that looked lined in kohl. Michelle was several inches taller. She had brown hair cut short, a long neck, large green eyes, a look that radiated disdain and froze men on the spot. Her mother had been a French war bride, and this seemed reason enough for her exotic beauty and seeming aloofness.

  They helped me move my things the few blocks from the apartment to their house, made room alongside the pots of violets and shamrocks for my philodendron, which had begun to sprout runners and would soon grow a variegated border around the kitchen window. As I watched my new roommates laugh and cut up, jostling each other in the hallways, I felt the distance between us, the years, it seemed, that separated us from one another. Had I ever been like them? Even my skin felt old, my eyes and mouth used up. I could not imagine their interest in me, except to take up the spare bedroom and add another fifty dollars a month toward the rent, which they hoped I would do as soon as I got a job. I hung my clothes in the closet of my new bedroom, stacked my books in milk crates, nailed my rifle rack on the wall and underneath tacked my medals for marksmanship and my certificates in karate—hex signs, hedges against what haunted me. After the bars closed, I could feel safe with Michelle and Connie at TJ’s Pantry, where we ate eggs and hash browns at three in the morning.

  Lewiston is the kind of town that holds on to its generations. As I eased back into the normal flow of everyday life, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the attention of old schoolmates who called my name across the produce aisle, or the parents who stopped me in the parking lot to show me photos of their latest grandchild. Often I averted my eyes, walked the other way, shamed and reluctant to construct plausible alibis about the years since graduation. Even in the company of women whose lives were directed by the normal desires and concerns of young adulthood, in the rooms filled with nothing more than the cast-off blouses and jeans of fashion indecision, I could not forget my life with David. What I wanted was to sit with someone, to talk, to be included in a circle that kept what was out there away. Ou
t there—that place I had been so eager to gain, that wilderness of sight and sound, taste and touch, where I believed I might find some truer sense of myself. Perhaps I had.

  Michelle and Connie never asked about my life before, and I offered little: it was easier to act as though it had never happened. And even if I had been willing to talk about it, what would I have said? What did I want them to know? I wanted to believe that in their innocence, I could find some remnant of my own. I slept with my bedroom door open to let the sounds of their breathing reach me, the small sighs of their dreaming.

  There were times when I came upon David, at the gas station or department store, and he would smile at me knowingly and nod, and I would feel all the fear and confusion come flooding back. Shouldn’t I hate him? Shouldn’t I act as though he were a villain, a rapist, a thief? No. Because I believed it was not David but I who had brought it all on, and I believed he knew this and was secure in his knowledge, while I stumbled and flushed and hurried away.

  The Polaroid photographs that he had taken tormented me. When I imagined what use they were to him, I felt a hot rush of humiliation. I did not want them in his possession, or in the hands of anyone he might show or give them to. I didn’t think of this in terms of exposure; my fear was not that they would show up in some skin magazine. What I couldn’t bear was the thought of them being passed from hand to hand, the moist fingers, the wander of eyes across my skin. I wanted them back, not because they were mine but because they were me.

  I chose a night I knew David would be in town, pulled on black pants and black sweater, borrowed Michelle’s car, and set out to find him. I’d heard he still didn’t have a place of his own, and I knew that most of what he owned would be stowed in his pickup. Again, I cruised his mother’s house, and then the bars, even the homes of some of the women I knew he most favored. I made my way across the Clearwater River to North Lewiston, circled around behind the motels and gas stations, and came upon a clutch of trailer houses, settling into their flimsy foundations, irises bunched tight in flower beds gone to grass. It was where one of David’s fellow drivers lived, where we’d stopped once or twice for a beer.

  David’s four-wheel-drive was there. I turned off my headlights and coasted to a stop a block away, let the car door swing shut without latching. When I reached the driveway, I stopped to breathe before opening the passenger door of the pickup, switching off the overhead. I found them in the glove compartment, banded together in a manila envelope. I slid to the ground in a crouch, hurried to my car, and pulled away with my lights off, nearly deaf with the hot fear in my ears.

  Back in my room, I studied the woman in the Polaroids. I examined her in pieces until she was no one I recognized, just arms and legs and hair and eyes. Then I took newspaper and matches and went out on the back patio, where I first lit my cigarette, then the pile of paper. I watched the pictures burn, watched the flesh pucker and bubble into ash, soft and still formed. I took a fist-sized rock and scraped and hammered until all that remained was a smear of black that the next good rain would wash clean.

  PURGATION IS NEVER SO EASY. I don’t remember when the nightmares began, but they came to me sure as sleep. I was being chased—someone meant to kill me. Most often, it was a man who hunted me, and I would wait in the shadows of a door or alley, hiding, preparing myself to strike for the eyes, the windpipe, to catch the knife blade brought down on me with the open palm of my hand, as the sensei had taught—allowing the piercing of flesh to avoid greater harm, wresting the weapon away.

  I’d awaken, charged with adrenaline. Once, beset by near-panic, I reached for the telephone, dialed my parents’ number. My father was working. When I heard my mother’s drowsy voice, I whispered, “Please help me. I am so afraid.”

  My mother had never known me like this. She said, “You stay where you are. I’ll send your brother.”

  It had been months since I’d seen Greg. He’d graduated from high school and was working in the pea fields, earning money to pay for college in the fall. He drove the few blocks to where I lived, pulled into the yard with his lights still on. He called to me from outside the locked door. I pulled on jeans, a shirt, let him lead me to his car. I was grateful for my father’s absence, for the presence of my mother, who held me until the shaking and crying stopped. She made me a bed on the couch, covered me with the old quilts, stayed there, sitting at my shoulder, her hand on my forehead, quietly praying.

  That night, for those few hours, I let myself come back into that circle of comfort, let myself be rocked and protected, let myself believe I was safe. But it was a belief that the light would not hold, and when the sky began to color, my mother and brother still sleeping, my father still driving the moon-licked highways, I felt the wrongness of my presence there. To stay would be giving in to that other life I no longer believed, the life from which I had made my first escape.

  I pulled back the covers, heard my brother groan in the next room. My house was only blocks away. I would walk. I thought of my mother, how she would wake and find me gone. What did she make of my nightmare, my fear? She had lain her hands upon me, prayed that Satan take his demons and leave me in peace, and I wondered what demons she spoke of: the ones whose apparitions had filled my dream, or the ones she must believe still possessed me, drove me to reject the love she and her god might offer?

  When I stepped out into the yard, I felt the chill of wet grass beneath my feet. In the east, the sun was a lavender promise. The streetlights dimmed and flickered off. I stood there longer than I should have, without coat or shoes, knowing my father would be coming home soon. I did not want him to find me shivering on his doorstep, lost and afraid.

  I turned, opened the door behind me. Back to my place on the couch, where I could be warm for a while longer, where I could feign sleep and listen to the known voices whispering around me, until my mother and brother left for work and my father found his bed. Then, I would take a few pieces of the bacon they had left, borrow a coat, a pair of my mother’s shoes. I’d leave that house and step back out into the city, its numbered streets and named avenues, where everything was familiar, where nothing was the same.

  AT THE EMPLOYMENT OFFICE I sat listening to the sharp-faced woman behind the desk tell me how little was available for someone without a college degree, how my few office skills were not in demand, how, as a woman, I didn’t qualify for the jobs that required heavy lifting. In my hand I held the letter stating that my pitch for unemployment benefits had been denied. She straightened her papers, making little taps with the balls of her fingers around the edges. If only I hadn’t quit the bank, ditched the insurance company, she said, disappeared from the drive-in. So few points to recommend me. I thought I might explain, speak of mistakes and regrets, but it all came out sounding like lies and excuses. She nodded without meeting my eyes.

  I watched the decided way she separated my copies of the papers from hers, pushed them toward me. She smelled like baby powder. I stood, brushed the wrinkles from my skirt. “I’m a good worker,” I said. “I learn fast.”

  She smiled tightly. “You might try the County Health Department for any medical needs. They charge minimal fees.” She folded her hands atop her desk, said, “There are others waiting behind you.” We were separated from the lobby by a low partition. I turned to see the line of men and some women, impatient and weary, a few dressed neatly, many wearing the ill-fitting donations of better folk.

  No openings at the mill or bullet factory; nothing at Penney’s or Sears. When I did apply for advertised positions—at the offices and warehouses, fast-food chains and clothing boutiques—the response was the same: I’d been fired from my last job; my former supervisors would not recommend me. I left each interview with less hope, less reason to spend my hours filling out forms and waiting for calls that never came.

  When I went to the health clinic for free birth control pills, the nurse pointed at the waiting room. “You see all those women in there?” I looked from one young mother to the next, each car
rying or scolding or ignoring a clutch of children. “You make sure you take these,” she said, handing me the small plastic case. “You find work. You scrub floors if you have to.”

  ———

  SLOANE SUPPLY. The dress I wore to the interview had long sleeves, hem to the knees, a modest neckline—and still the middle-aged owner asked his few questions without taking his eyes from my breasts. When he offered me the secretarial position, I rose to shake his hand, but instead of taking it, he looked at my open palm and grinned. Stupid, I thought, for me to have risen first, to have stuck out my hand like a man.

  “See you at nine tomorrow,” he said, and nodded that I was free to go.

  When I told Connie and Michelle, we celebrated. Money to pay my share of the phone bill; money to buy new clothes, get my hair permed, pay for breakfast at TJ’s. Money to put down on a used car. I felt hopeful for the first time in months.

  Michelle dropped me off the next morning. Sloane Supply was located in a refurbished 1950s house. The former living room was now the front office, and as Mr. Sloane showed me to my desk, I marveled at the sudden turn my life had taken: a new IBM Correcting Selectric; a rolling office chair; a multiline telephone with a spongy shoulder rest; an electric pencil sharpener. The office skills I had excelled at while in high school under the tutelage of Mrs. Morris—a stout, disciplined woman who wore black cat-eye glasses and believed secretarial work was an exact science—were still fresh, and I imagined the dictation I would take in shorthand, the speed with which I’d add up the day’s numbers on the ten-key. This was my chance to do it right, and as Mr. Sloane leaned over my shoulder to demonstrate the intercom, I was already lecturing myself on things to avoid: tardiness, daydreaming, misfiling, coffee left too long in the pot.