rhythmically strung together—crisse de câlice de tabarnak!—reminded me of how my father swore in English. But when I practiced them, I didn’t get the same heady feeling as with fuck or goddamn. Still, each time we learned a new insult, we ran toward the students from the English classes, shouting it at their helpless faces.
Now, in our new house, my brother and I shared a room for the first time since we were toddlers. After my mother tucked us in, we switched on our flashlights and played Dungeons & Dragons, working through modules, The Keep on the Borderlands or The Lost City. Magic and endless journeys and the satisfaction of easy violence were so attainable that each morning I woke surprised that I had to go to school.
And while we wandered catacombs, listening for predators, my mother delved into past lives. She attended a psychic church where there was no religion, she assured us; they just used a real church for meetings. Prayer, she said, was a way of talking to invisible beings who existed in nature and who cared about us. She taught us to repeat om, which was relaxing and sounded like mom. She’d learned to do it at the church. She said the members shared their mystical experiences. One man had teleported himself while riding on a bus. He’d wanted to be somewhere so badly that suddenly he was there. The next day he boarded the same bus and the driver said, “Hey, I saw you get on last time, but I didn’t see you get off.”
I watched her closely for signs of whether she might leave us, but she kept baking bread and flat cookies, and driving us to school with lunches so hard to chew they made my jaw ache. Maybe she was planning on teleporting away, or just vanishing, moving on to her next life.
One Saturday, while she was at the psychic church and my brother and sister were with friends, I again went with my father to work. The night before, he’d been arguing with her, and I’d pretended to go to the bathroom. It didn’t sound as if she was leaving, but rather as if he was trying to convince her to leave me behind. But all I overheard clearly was him saying, “Deni’s like me. He doesn’t need school.”
This was how he started in as soon as we were in his truck.
“You and me, we like being in nature and fighting,” he said and referenced his own frequent battles as a child, sounding angry, as if the fights hadn’t been fully resolved and somewhere there was a brutish nine-year-old with whom he still had to get even.
“If I stay with you and we travel together,” I asked, “can we go to other countries too?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can we travel around Africa?”
“Africa?” he repeated. I’d read a story about the descendants of dinosaurs surviving in the African interior, deep in isolated lakes, and I told him about it.
“That’s probably not a good idea,” he said. “There are lots of snakes in Africa. Don’t you think it’s nice to go camping and not worry about getting bit?”
As he spoke, he paused between each few words. I pictured snakes coming through the windows of our motor home while we slept, but I was more afraid of him losing his temper.
“I guess,” I said, wondering if he was scared of snakes.
He changed the subject to how hard it was to keep his seafood business going. My mother, he told me, didn’t care if the economy was bad or that the cocksuckers at the bank were making work hard. I pictured bankers throwing rocks, his employees ducking while trying to sell fish. But he said that the bankers wanted to force him into bankruptcy and explained what that meant. I listened, though as far as I could tell, things couldn’t be going so badly. He had a new truck and had bought a briefcase and explained how important it was for a successful businessman, showing me its cylinder lock and the tag that said Patent Leather. Besides, if he no longer had his stores, that would be better since we were going traveling.
At his fish market, I didn’t see any lack of money or any cocksuckers. Everyone was nice, and customers were shoving ten and twenty-dollar bills over the counter. He took a wad of cash from the till and put it in his jacket, and then sat me on a stool with a book, under the watch of the two men who worked there, and disappeared for an hour with a young, very pretty Chinese woman who also worked for him and whose name I could never remember.
I questioned his employees about whether they might have accidentally cut up any strange, very ancient fish, but they said they hadn’t, so I checked. Inside two bubbling tanks, crabs and lobsters clambered over each other, their pincers held shut with rubber bands. In the display were prawns, speckled trout, thick halibut steaks, silky salmon fillets, bags of fist-size clams, and red snappers with startled eyes. Seeing the creatures on the ice, I felt how big the earth was and pictured the deep, prehistoric dark of the ocean. I began telling the employees that I planned to travel around Africa and find the lost descendants of dinosaurs.
“What are you guys up to?” my father asked when he returned alone, the shoulders of his jacket flecked with rain.
“We’re talking about dinosaurs,” I said, and then told the employees, “André and I are going to travel and do nothing but fish after my mother leaves and he goes bankrupt.”
Both men blanched, but my father’s face became so red it looked painful. In his truck, he grabbed my arm.
“You can’t say those things!” He tried to catch his breath. “You’re lucky. My father would have thrown you through this window.”
I sat perfectly still, showing no emotion, because if I got upset when he was angry, he got even angrier. He let go of my arm and gripped the steering wheel. I pictured him lying in broken glass and wondered about his father.
“It’s okay,” he told me. “You didn’t mean to. You just need to stop talking so much.”
He began to drive us home, and after a while, he said, “I hate those fuckers. I hate the bank.” He told me that he’d planned his revenge. He would rent a safe-deposit box and put a package of fish inside. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think they can legally take it out no matter how bad it smells.”
Later, at a red light, he pointed to a bank and an armored car parked in front of it.
“You see,” he said, “the money gets delivered on Friday. That’s when people bring their paychecks, and the bank has to have lots of money for everyone.”
I nodded, not sure why this mattered.
✴
AS WE WERE nearing home, I began talking again. I’d managed to stay quiet for most of the drive until my tongue began tapping back and forth against my teeth. It needed to speak, and I’d been thinking about how my father didn’t like my mother’s spiritual ideas. I wondered how he felt about an all-powerful god staring down on him, knowing everything, even his adventures and other family.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Life’s a big joke. God’s playing a joke on us.”
To me, this made God sound like him. I asked if he prayed, and he said, “I hate church. I grew up with those fucking priests. I’d never go back.”
“But Bonnie said you see things sometimes.”
“She said what?”
I repeated a story she’d told me. “One time,” she’d said, “he woke up and
