you fishing,” he said, his face lined and grim, as if our outing were a form of punishment. “We’ll come back in the afternoon, and I’ll leave you in the playground before she gets here. Just pretend you went to school. You won’t tell her about this, right?”
I nodded, this lie by far the most extreme ever. I loathed the idea of standing in the playground as the other kids stared and wondered where I’d been all day. But I felt guilty for having left him. I also wondered if I might get special treatment, and after a few minutes on the highway, I asked for a lesson in swearing—something I’d requested fairly often—and amazingly, he agreed.
“Fuck,” he said, “well, fuck means a lot of things. Fuck off means go away right now. Fuck you means I really hate you. Fuck just means you’re angry. You know what shit is, and damn, well, damn’s not that bad.”
“What about cocksucker?” I asked.
“You should probably stay away from that one,” he told me and then was silent. Swear words gave me the feeling that good stories did, a sense of disembodiment, of being carried away, beyond rules, beyond everything. But suddenly he said, “Your mother wants to leave, you know.”
I looked at him, but he stared at the traffic ahead.
“She wanted to abandon you guys. I barely convinced her not to.”
He finally glanced over, checking my reaction.
“If she has to go,” he said, “she can take your brother and sister, but you can stay with me. We’ll get a motor home and travel the country and do nothing but fish.”
Maybe this was why he’d moved in with us, because she’d decided she’d had enough and was planning on running away. I tried to console myself with the idea of fishing trips and that he might like me best. He rarely spent time with my sister, and my brother didn’t care for fishing. I wanted to smile, but the muscles of my face tensed up as if they were doing the thinking.
“What about school?”
“You can take a year off. It won’t change anything. You never liked school, and I didn’t either. Look at me. I didn’t need it.” He pushed his jaw forward confidently. “You don’t let yourself get picked on at school, do you?”
“No,” I lied.
“Because,” he said, “if you stay with me, I’ll make sure you’re one tough goddamn kid.”
“Really?”
“I’ll teach you how to fight. I was a good fighter. I could’ve been a boxer. I just had no direction. But I’d give you direction. I’d teach you how to kick some ass.”
An image of me came to mind, my fists swirling like bugs around a light bulb as all the school bullies fell. My father once tried to teach my brother and me to box, making us put on gloves in the living room, but my mother had been furious and he’d relented, his expression strange, almost embarrassed. It was the only time I’d seen him surrender to her anger. I struggled to believe that she was leaving. Though he was fun to be with, I couldn’t imagine a day without her. My clothes would stink and my grades would all be Fs and I’d starve to death. But then again, life with him might be very, very fun.
“Even if I learn to fight,” I asked, “can we still travel and fish?”
“Yeah.”
I was picturing our motor home climbing a mountain road and then pulling onto the gravel above a shimmering river.
He exited the highway and we soon arrived where we often fished, off the broken rocks near the Lions Gate Bridge, where everyone tried to snag salmon while keeping a lookout for the warden. He gave me my rod, but once fishing, I kept catching the lure in seaweed because I was watching the others or trying to see salmon in the water.
A damp, irregular wind blew in along the rocks. I drew my chin down and breathed into my collar. The towers of the bridge were fading into low clouds.
A man hooted. I reeled in my line and climbed onto the rocks. He’d hooked a salmon, and as he brought it close, the fish fighting wildly in the shallows, he asked my father to use a metal gaff lying near a tackle box.
My father took it and crouched at the edge of the water. He swung it as the fish thrashed. He swung three or four times to get the hook to stay. A chunk had fallen out of the salmon’s head. The man swore and for the first time I sensed real danger in those words, not for my father but for the other man.
“You didn’t have to ruin the fucking fish,” he yelled. He was big, with veins on his face and a fat nose, the sleeves of his black sweater rolled up. I was pretty sure he qualified as a bruiser.
“I didn’t ruin your fucking fish,” my father said, and though he was smaller, he swore much better, not chewing his words like the bruiser. Each time he roared fuck his size doubled so that he soon towered over the other man, his back curved and puffed up, his arms bowed out, fists like bricks. “You fucker, you shouldn’t have asked if you didn’t want me to hook it.” He spun and threw the salmon and gaff into the water.
The bruiser seemed ready to drop his rod and fight. The men along the shore watched, fishing rods lifted like antennae. I had no idea swearing could do this, and I was sure there was no way the bruiser would attack, though I was excited to see him try. His eyes shifted from my father to me, where I crouched on a rock. He turned away, swearing under his breath.
As we drove home, the sky was so cloudy that headlights shone like flares against the wet streets. My father clutched the wheel, glaring past the cars in front. He hadn’t fully returned to his normal size, and I knew he’d do something wild and impatient. I held on to the seat as he tore past a yellow light and swerved through an intersection, tires screeching.
A siren wailed. Police lights flashed behind us.
“Motherfucker,” he said, his shoulders drawing in. Maybe the police had caught him at last.
With him, police were never the way they were with my mother. They asked about work and where he lived and what he’d done that day, and then they stayed a long time in their cars with his driver’s license. Once, when we’d all gone to dinner, he’d been pulled over and we’d waited for so long that he told us the cop was deciding whether to arrest our mother. He said that one time they tried to take her away and that he grabbed her legs while they pulled her arms, and that he finally hung on and got her back for us. She remained silent, looking out the passenger window, and he forced a smile in her direction. But she hadn’t been driving, and I’d known the police were interested in him.
“Why do they ask you so many questions?” I said.
He rubbed his face and sighed, letting out all the air he’d ever breathed.
“Because they like me,” he mumbled. “They like how I drive.”
✴
MY BROTHER AND I never had much in common. He started school the year before French classes were offered, so we lived a strange playground phenomenon, each of us in his own language group, like boys growing up on opposite sides of an ethnically divided city. His friends were well behaved, and one of them, Elizabeth, invited him to parties where kids rode around her lawns and gardens in an electric train. Now that I no longer talked about levitation, my friends seemed
