Cipher Page 13

  Curtis looked past her and into the dining room of the small eatery where an assortment of framed newspaper clippings hung interspersed on the walls along with various items that were familiar enough to make him think that his parents’ house had been robbed while he was away.

  “There’s a forty-minute wait.”

  Mrs. Coffee pointed towards the exit with the polished deer femur she used as a walking stick, and Curtis squinted, trying to make out if one of the men with their backs to him might have been Desmond.

  “I’m meeting someone.”

  “Your number?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your number.”

  “Uh, 21?”

  Mrs. Coffee frowned and lowered the bifocals resting on top of her wire mesh of black hair so that she could see who was having her on. She immediately recognized the man standing in front of her and called for a waitress to show him to the table being cleared in the far corner.

  On his walk through the dining room Curtis saw that Desmond wasn’t one of the patrons, and also that he’d been too quick to discard the notion that he’d died and that everything that had happened in the last three years was a dream. Surely, he thought as he sat with his back to a shelf lined with an assortment of toys from his childhood — Hot Wheels cars, a bag of marbles and a stuffed tiger he swore he’d lost years ago — this was purgatory. He half-expected, any minute, the kitchen door would open revealing hellfire, so that he could see what was in store for him after he was done eating.

  Truth was, aside from a staunch belief in the persuasive power that the absurd has over the lives of people with too much money in their wallets, Mr. Coffee’s guiding passion was football. Like a lot of people, he’d devoted his off-hours to following Curtis, but unlike most, he’d let his devotion have its way with him beyond a few extra trips to the bathroom after drinking a keg with his buddies while watching the away games on cable. His old diner, the one that almost nobody ever went to, was itself a shrine to the boy wonder, much of it decorated from a box Curtis’s mother had intended for the yearly Tartan yard/bake sale but which had mysteriously vanished from the trunk of her car while she brought in the cupcakes she’d baked. He’d filled the gaps on the walls with a few items he’d paid too much for at the charity auctions Curtis’s high school ran every year. Had Curtis’s life taken a different path, he would have been content to serve up greasy hash browns and burnt toast to a loyal clientele of likewise dedicated fans. Then Curtis went to war and the next day Mr. Coffee closed The Fan-Tastic Foodery, telling his wife only that he needed a change. After three days of sitting on the couch and watching reruns of Curtis play from his exhaustive collection of VHS tapes, he came up with the idea for Coffee’s Diner and rushed to tell his wife. Her reaction was understandable, given her husband’s appearance and how he had only his bathrobe to cover the stink of three days spent wearing the same underpants.

  “You’re crazy,” she said and proceeded to spray him with air freshener.

  “I’ll tell you what’s crazy,” he told her, “that a boy who could run like that is probably lying in a ditch somewhere with his legs blown off.”

  “He only left three days ago. He hasn’t even finished basic training.”

  “Bah!”

  Setting aside his wife’s misgivings, he proceeded to refashion The Fan-Tastic Foodery into Coffee’s Diner. Then, using what little money he’d manage to squeeze out of his loyal clientele, he bought a full-page ad in the Saturday edition of The Leader-Post that read, “How Far Will You Go?” Over the next two weeks he paid to pepper the paper with numbers, 1 through 100, each one accompanied by a question mark. He then solicited Mrs. Coffee’s cousin, the Post’s lifestyle columnist, and Arty Waldorf obliged by offering a guest spot writing his column to anyone who could collect all 100 of the mini-ads and solve the mystery of what they were about. On the day before he opened, he bought another full-page spread, “Go All The Way, At Coffee’s Diner.” Then, certain that all that could be done to publicize his restaurant had been done, he settled into bed for a restless night.

  “Nobody’ll come,” his wife said lying next to him, also unable to sleep (a chronic condition that stemmed from the osteoporosis she’d had since she was a child).

  “Hmmm.”

  “Who’d pay for food when they don’t know what they’ll be getting?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “And one hundred breakfast items? It’s madness.”

  “Madness.”

  Mrs. Coffee rolled over. Joint pain and thoughts of being put on display like a circus freak irritated her restless leg syndrome and she kicked out at her husband every time she heard him snoring. By the time the person responsible for her husband’s madness came into the restaurant, she’d long since conceded that it might just have been some sort of genius, although living with Mr. Coffee made her suspect that geniuses were a decidedly overrated lot.

  Sitting under a shelf full of artefacts from his childhood, surrounded by framed pictures of himself, most of them taken by Desmond Leaks for The Leader-Post’s sports section, and facing a fifty-four-inch screen playing the high school championship against Thom Collegiate from five years previous, Curtis could be forgiven for feeling that this was all part of a dream and that shortly, the last few flickers of brain activity would give way to the sight of him standing over his lifeless body.

  He watched Jerry Holoday, his QB for two of his four years, hand him the ball and for a moment he was envious of his other on the field. It all seemed so easy, the way he moved, each motion, every twitch, turn, twist and nod, getting him closer to the place where thought had no purchase. Now dodging right, sliding back to the left for half a step then spinning and going straight through a gap that hadn’t been there a second before (and closed again as soon as he was through). He had no memory of the play itself, lost as he was in The Quick. Seeing himself move, his legs a blur and his helmet a battering ram, he couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly stop him. Then, out of the mass of grappling bodies, there appeared a uniform so large that it looked to be made from a sail. An arm as wide as the prairies caught him by the shoulders, flipping him end-over-end.

  A groan went out in the diner. Curtis looked over at the man at the next table, his deep green suit glossy and his hair dyed the colour of wheat, now shaking his head as his fork cut into a crepe rolled in icing sugar and doused with whipped cream. On the field, The Tide helped his other to his feet. He gave him a pat on the back that made his neck hurt all over again and he knew that the next time he got the ball he’d score and after that nobody’d be able to touch him.

  A plate of three eggs, toast, hash browns and ham, sausage and bacon slid onto Curtis’s placemat.

  “Smile,” the waitress said. He did, staring up at the cellphone she was pointing at him. She snapped his picture then blew him a kiss and hurried towards the kitchen. The door swinging to a standstill behind her gave Curtis a few snapshots of his own: of her holding the phone over her head, like a trophy, and of a fat, bald man on two knees in front of her, apparently lost in prayer.

  “My head’d still be ringing if something hit me as hard as that.”

  Curtis looked back to the man with the dye job, grinning broadly so that Curtis could see the whipped cream squeezing out through the gap between his two front teeth.

  “Heard you weren’t due back for another week.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I get you. Mum’s the word.” He put his finger to his mouth then thought better of it and held out his hand.

  “Spar Williams.”

  Curtis took it. When he drew it back he saw there was a card in his palm.

  “Listen, CM, I’m the head salesman at Sask Honda, on the highway there, I’m sure you’ve seen it. Now I understand that you’re a Chevy man but —”

  “You done with that?”

  Curtis pointed to the paper folded ove
r on the man’s table. It was in his hand quick enough to tell him that Spar dabbled in magic.

  “Keep it. It’s yours. Au gratis.”

  Curtis opened it to the front page. 7 Houses + 7 Fires = 9 Dead. It was the headline that had caught his attention when he’d sat down. He stared at the pictures below it trying to figure out which burned-out ruin was the ranch house. He narrowed it down to a photo in the second row and one in the bottom corner, but couldn’t say beyond that, then scanned the words arranged neatly beside them: ants leading somewhere, home he hoped as he read what Desmond Leaks had to say about the fires that had tried to make him number 10.

  The article was pretty lean on details. We, meaning the police, weren’t saying much except that all the fires had started at roughly the same time and that they were being treated as suspicious. We were looking into another connection but wouldn’t say what it was. In the brief interview, Desmond asked the officer in charge if they were gang related and was told that we weren’t discounting anything. A few eyewitness accounts followed, along with an estimate of the damage, in the millions. Curtis searched each word for any clues that might have slipped in. By the time he’d finished his eggs, he’d written the ones he’d found in the margins of the paper with a pen he borrowed from the car salesmen. The list amounted to four street names, the name of a park where a man walking his dog had called 911 when he saw spirals of smoke over the fence and finally just the east end, which was all he could find about the location of the sixth fire. The seventh, the ranch house, wasn’t mentioned at all.

  He turned back to the car salesman and found the table occupied by a young couple acting like they were on their honeymoon. Her right hand played with a loose thread on his sweater and, as she tugged on it, he uttered little moaning sounds, making her giggle. Curtis tore the list from the newspaper and threw a ten beside his empty plate. On the TV, his team was carrying him on their shoulders. He walked past, sneaking only the narrowest peek at the lopsided score highlighted in the top left corner of the screen.

  twenty

  In the service Curtis had seen his fair share of smouldering ruins and he knew how to read their remains: a library’s worth of moments, the words obscured by the blackness of the ink poured over the page leaving only faint imprints, nothing to trouble yourself over, too many things to do in a day and all that. Still, Curtis lingered sometimes, pushing at the piles of char on the floor with his boot and other times picking something up, a trinket, foreign and unrecognizable (a child’s top maybe?), or something familiar (once a CD, the name Ghostface Killah on it, warped with the heat; the same one he’d listened to before the big games. He’d worn it around his neck until he was as far from home as he was ever likely to be then he’d flung it into the desert).

  Sometimes a soldier in his unit would ask him what he was doing while he was sifting through the remains. He’d answer, “Just looking,” and they’d remind him to be careful, it might be rigged, like someone would have gone to the trouble of rigging a burnt-out husk in case an enemy soldier happened by, missing home and finding a strange sort of comfort in wandering through other people’s houses, trying to uncover what they were doing in the moment before the fire swept them away, thinking maybe that it was the same thing his parents were doing, or his teammates, or his ex-girlfriends. He found sheets pulled back, tousled on the floor, and imagined a young couple making love, the child in the playpen next to the bed holding himself up by the bars, watching his mother and father, the sight making him happy so that he smiled and sucked on his fingers. He found pots on the stoves and imagined dinners and laughter. He walked through living rooms and prayed that he wouldn’t find any photos. Photos meant there was no one left to come back; no one to gather them up and hold them like a child or a brother; no one to remember what it was like in the moments before, when they were making love or eating or watching TV.

  Now, parking his bike across from each of the addresses on his strip of paper, he again lost himself in the comfort of a makeshift routine that had him walking to the police tape, taking a good look and tasting the smoke-tinged air with the tip of his tongue. Two apartment buildings, a townhouse and a squat bungalow, all that remained of the latter being a splat of black that looked like a can of paint had been dropped from a plane. It was close to five when he pulled up to a house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in the west end. The only thing left of its front wall was splintered boards and broken bits of white vinyl siding, the rest consumed by fire and axes and water. He could see inside where the remains of two lives, blackened furniture mostly, were pushed up against the far wall.

  The cul-de-sac was in the middle of one of the subdivisions that Lester Mann had bought from the city after the previous developer had skipped town, though bought is maybe too strong a word. A promise was the only currency that had exchanged hands. There were plenty of sceptics who’d cried foul but in the end he’d fulfilled his promise to finish every house that had been zoned, and then threw in a couple of mini-malls and a half-dozen neighbourhood parks besides. By the end of the ’90s, the fear that Regina was on its way to becoming the largest ghost town on the continent eased, a result of the natural gas boom that would shortly make Mr. Mann the richest person in the province. Every one of the houses he’d built out of charity, Mann Industries had sold, clearing a profit that anyone familiar with Saskatchewan’s real estate market would have sworn was impossible.

  Walter Hering Sr. had been the first person to move onto Mann Court. Being at the end of a cul-de-sac guaranteed him and his wife the same kind of quiet he’d grown used to living in his family’s old farm house, the slow battle against its fall into decrepitude enough to keep them together for forty-three years but which, he’d joke to his new neighbours, they’d had to sell because he couldn’t stand the sight of anyone ploughing the three-hundred-foot driveway he’d done by hand ever since he was five. Fifteen years ago CP had offered him early retirement. He took their package and bought 17 Mann Court in cash. He was secretive about how much he’d paid for it but was as quick to tell anyone that the house was worth more than five times that now as he was to call Lester Mann the greatest visionary that the province had ever borne (even if the general consensus ran in favour of the Honourable Mr. Douglas).

  Two nights before Curtis parked in front of the police barrier at the foot of the street, Walter Sr. had picked up his wife, Greta, from the hospital where she was visiting her only son. She’d had six children in total, five girls and Walter Jr. — conceived years after the last time her husband had shown any inclination to lying with her for anything other than sleep — but he was the only one who still lived in the city, if breathing through one tube and eating through another fits your definition of living. Neighbours couldn’t recall having heard either of them speak of their only male progeny although Mrs. Wynn, the woman who lived next door, did remember the night that Walter Sr. had chased, so he’d said, a burglar out of his house while screaming, “You ain’t no goddamn son of mine!”

  Greta was more subdued in her relations with Walter Jr. Records indicate that she visited him weekly on the three separate occasions he spent time in jail, and also that she spoke on his behalf the first time he stood before a judge for sentencing (he was fifteen and charged with theft over five thousand and wilful destruction of private property after he’d stolen a car, crashed it through a farmer’s fence and ran over twelve of the sheep penned there).

  The people I spoke to at her funeral all said much the same thing about her: she was a shy woman, to the point of being a recluse. I can only imagine then how hard it must have been for her to say what she said when standing in front of the judge, her teenage son’s future hanging by the clap of a gavel.

  GH: Your honour, I am not here to plead for my son.

  (This recorded by the stenographer who made no mention of how her voice cracked when she said it nor how she was perspiring so that her dress, the same one she had worn to every one of her daughters�
� weddings, was soaked before she’d finished addressing the judge as ‘your honour,’ the way she’d seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people address a legion of judges on television, her only contact with the courts until then.)

  I am too old for that …

  (She continued, now feeling like she’d fallen off a boat, she was so wet with sweat and worry, and was clinging to a log while she waited for someone on a passing ship to pull her out.)

  … too old to be a mother, if the truth were told. When I had Walter, I want you to understand, I was already too old to feed him. I was all dried up. I fed him out of a can, do you understand what that felt like, to feed your child from a can of powder mixed with water? I should have understood it was nature’s way of saying I was too old, that we should have given the boy up when it might have done him some good. But I couldn’t. He was our first boy after five girls, and he was my little miracle. A miracle because the doctors said he shouldn’t have been possible, me being so far into the change of life — though they must have been mistaken, with Walter as my only proof — and doubly a miracle, it seemed to me, because I’d prayed for a boy a hundred times for every one of my girls — not for myself but for Walter Sr. who had his reasons, which were good enough for me even if I didn’t agree with all of them. They say that God always answers your prayers but that he doesn’t always give you the answer you want and I now understand what that meant. He gave us Walter, my little miracle, and we kept him even if it meant feeding him out of a can and being too tired to do all the things that you’re supposed to do with a baby — and I was tired for years, it seemed, after he was born, too tired to do anything but dream of sleep, so tired that the sound of him crying made that dream of sleep into a terrible dream: the dream of eternal sleep.

  (And here Mrs. Hering must have paused, fifteen years of weariness finally overcoming her so that she felt her hands slipping off the log, for it was the judge who spoke next.)