Cipher Page 4

  “What’s so funny?”

  Curtis set the stuffed animal on the counter before he’d realized the question was meant for him.

  “Private joke.”

  The cashier scanned the toy and took his money and was reaching for a bag before she spoke again.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Being Curtis Mays, he wasn’t in the habit of checking out cashiers at the local Toys “R” Us. He hadn’t even passed her a glance but he was polite enough to do so then. What he found was a ragged little woman, her arms thin enough to suggest an eating disorder and her ponytail knotted with clumps. Her swollen belly had drained the colour from her lips and she didn’t wear any makeup to hide the blistered red patches on both of her cheeks. While he was unable to place her, exactly, he did have to admit that she looked familiar.

  “Robin Millhauser,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “We had homeroom together. With Mr. Shipton.”

  “Right. Nice to see you.”

  That got a smile but it didn’t get the stuffed animal she was holding in her right hand any closer to the bag she held in her left.

  “I thought you weren’t coming back for another week.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  Frowning, she dropped the toy in the bag and handed it to him along with his receipt. Curtis gave the line behind him a sly glance and the glare he got from a sour-looking woman with a cane gave him every reason to linger.

  “So who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Sorry?”

  Curtis looked to her swollen belly and she got his meaning, “lucky” and “guy” insufficient to the task.

  “Oh. Dale Best.”

  “Best, huh? So what’s he up to these days?”

  “Don’t know. But if you see him, you can tell him to go fuck himself.”

  Over the years I have come to know Robin as well as any woman young enough to be my daughter. Contrary to how she first appeared to Curtis, in the middle of a bad day at the end of nine months’ worth, she’s smart and pretty and I’ve never found a better wife and mother. She’s also the only person I’ve met who could pull off saying ‘fuck’ at the crowded checkout of a Toys “R” Us without anyone taking the least offence. I can picture her expression when she said it and the best way to describe it would be to recall Ruby Yee’s special black bean balls: sweet and sour and spicy all at once. Curtis, who would soon become a convert to Ruby’s blend of contrasting tastes, and Robin’s too, caught a whiff of her potential right then and there. He gave her another look and it was in that moment, if you believe that such moments exist, that Robin knew that this wasn’t a chance encounter, it was something else, something she wouldn’t call fate (there was too much work ahead of her for that), but something nonetheless that would bind them together in a way that even her wildest dreams couldn’t touch.

  Curtis, for his part, didn’t feel any of this. He’d looked into many a young woman’s eyes and had seen the same expression staring back at him so often that he’d come up with a name for it: The Steel Wheels Look, meaning that the girl who’d given it to him would fall into bed so quickly that you’d have thought she had steel wheels for feet. The disappointing familiarity of her expression and the loud tapping of the old woman’s cane on the floor propelled him towards the exit. Not wanting to leave without giving Robin something to remember him by, he offered her his patented thumb-cock, the bullet coming out of his index finger in the form of his once-familiar catchphrase.

  “That’s a promise.”

  Robin laughs about it now. At the time, however, and I can’t blame her, she muttered ‘asshole’ under her breath before picking up the price scanner, the promise of a long and painful labour the only thing she had to ease the stifling boredom she always felt when facing the next person in line.

  six

  Curtis parked The Ripper a half block from his sister’s house so she wouldn’t hear it in the driveway and look out the window. Argyle, the street that Emily, her husband Ron and their infant daughter Violet lived on, sits in the middle of the oldest section of Regina. Its trees have a span that makes them irresistible to climb and its dogs can piss on the neighbour’s garbage cans without the police getting involved. While these days front doors aren’t kept open anymore, most of the people who lived there wished they were, and it’s understood that you don’t have to knock before peering over the side of your neighbour’s fence if no one answers the doorbell.

  Emily, with Violet slung on her hip, answered Curtis’s first ring. The only hint that she was surprised to see him was the slight pause she took before saying that she didn’t think he was coming home until next week. Curtis didn’t get a chance to respond as he’d caught Violet’s eye and she immediately started screaming.

  “Don’t mind her, she’s going strange on people.”

  Curtis nodded like he knew what she meant and followed her inside. The house was a thin wedge of hardwood flooring and baby-related clutter. Everywhere he looked he found something that spoke of his sister and the life she’d made with Ron and Violet, the only evidence that she’d had a life before The Baby being a large bookshelf in the hall, the volumes too neatly arranged to give any evidence of when she’d last found time to read.

  Emily plopped Violet on a rug in the living room amongst a mingling of toys and Cheerios splayed around an overturned bowl and the child’s screams increased fourfold. Squeezing by her brother, she hurried down the hall and disappeared into the kitchen. The seeming indifference that she held for her wailing daughter, coupled with the manic screams of the child herself, caused an unexpected feeling of gravity in Curtis’s legs. He suddenly knew that he shouldn’t have come, that he should be out looking for Terrence, now certain that something horrible had happened to him because the child’s screams were accompanied by a clear memory of the way Terrence had thrown skittish glances at him in The Pool Room whenever he didn’t think he was looking.

  Emily said something to him from the kitchen but the only word he could make out was “baby” before she disappeared again. The word spurned Curtis into action and with the precise movements of a scout on patrol, he retrieved the fuzzy/soft/growly toy from the bag. Holding it like a shield, he advanced on the near-to-bursting red-faced child.

  There is very little mystery to children. I’ve found this to be true except in the most extreme cases, when abuse and deprivation have fractured the clear pattern of childhood. The mystery comes later, when we tell ourselves, or the world does, that only fools wear their hearts on their sleeves and to be a player means one must gain control of all one’s tells. Like a professional gambler, we quickly discover that it’s not sufficient to erase these tells but that we must also fabricate subtle new ones to lead the others where we want, giving them only enough of our true selves to create doubt, and above all we must never let up, thinking that this is strength, all the while wishing we’d meet someone who’d let us be weak again. Children know nothing of this du(tri? quad?)plicity and to understand them one must only be willing to take a moment to observe. This is a cornerstone of child psychology and was also the first lesson that Curtis was made to learn during Basic Training, albeit for an entirely different reason.

  So Curtis, whose experience with screaming children had been limited to those he’d encountered in restaurants, gave up shaking the growly/soft/fuzzy thing in Violet’s face and rested on his haunches, watching for any sign that would give him a direction. Nothing in the way her voice was growing hoarse nor the way her hands clutched at her jumper gave him any clue as to how he might proceed, but during the few seconds he sat crouched, watching her, he recalled something one of his instructors had told the class: When you’re knee deep in shit, be the flush.

  Only someone calm of mind and clear of purpose, Curtis was made to understand, could expect to contro
l a situation that was neither. That’s why, before firing his weapon or pivoting around a wall or speaking with a local who may or may not want him dead, Curtis was told to take a deep breath, exhale, take another deep breath then act with the same deliberation as it was that he let the second breath out: slowly and evenly.

  He did this then and, on the verge of letting out the second breath, he leaned forward and blew into Violet’s face. It had the desired effect, reducing the fervour of her distress, and a few more blows gave him enough of a window to get her into his arms. She didn’t exactly look happy as he swung her this way and that but she quieted into a state of amazement that lasted until she dozed off. The sudden quiet, so rare over the past few weeks, seemed to permeate the house. Emily, who’d just called her husband to ask him to bring home a bottle of wine and was waiting for his secretary to put her through, hurried down the hall to see what was wrong. She poked her head through the living room door and watched Curtis slow dance with the sleeping Violet. The phone wedged between her chin and shoulder concealed the crinkle forming at the corner of her mouth, all there was to say of what she thought about another one of her brother’s easy wins.

  seven

  Ron returned home at five-thirty and brought with him the person he’d called as soon as he’d got off the phone with his wife. Standing in the open door presenting Emily with the bottle of wine he’d taken from Ron in the driveway, Roy Davies had the look of a man who was urgently needed somewhere else, owing as much to his job as to the dozen cups of coffee he was reputed to drink before noon. He was in futures, he would tell people on the odd occasion he’d stuck around long enough to be asked. Invariably, this would lead to questions about stocks and bonds and the tenacity of the global recession. Roy answered any and all questions the same way, “It’s not that kind of futures,” before he made one of his infamously quick escapes.

  Roy was, in fact, the chief scout for the Roughriders and the futures he spoke about were the kind made of flesh and bone. Prospects might have been a better word to use but Roy was a player and preferred a look of confusion to a nod when dealing with the opposing team, which is what he called anyone who didn’t sign his paycheque. It was well known that he never wore a tie when he was giving someone bad news and also that, because everyone knew this, he never wore a tie if there was money on the table. When he shook hands with Curtis in his sister’s kitchen, he had on a simple green one with speckles of gold in it, meant to do exactly what it did, which was to reassure Curtis that this was just a social call. Ron ushered them out onto the deck, ignoring the way Emily quite plainly shook her head. He left them with a bottle of beer apiece and the promise that they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “I heard you weren’t coming back for another week.”

  It was becoming one of those comments that could start to define a person and Curtis thought it best to sidestep.

  “What can I do for you, Roy?”

  “That’s funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “That so?”

  “Ron seems to think that I might be of some help to you.”

  “That what he said?”

  “Near enough.”

  “I’ve been to war, Roy.”

  “You won’t have been the first.”

  “It’s just, I’m not sure football’s all that important to me anymore.”

  And there it was, three years wrapped up in one neat little sentence, and without so much as a quiver when he said it.

  “That’s too bad but then …”

  Whatever Roy’d meant to say he didn’t, and the two of them drank the rest of their beers in silence, their sips like the second hand on a clock. When the hour struck in the knock of their empty bottles on the deck rail, neither looked at the other and each went his separate way: Roy down the stairs and Curtis towards the kitchen where Ron was standing at a reasonable distance from the window, opened a crack, so that he could just hear Roy call back over his shoulder, “Give my best to your dad.”

  As Roy padded across the yard to the gate on its far side, I have no doubt that he thought his parting shot was burrowing itself deep inside Curtis, and that by the time they met again it’d have germinated into something he could use.

  He was right in one regard (history would prove him wrong about the other): Curtis was thinking about his dad while he spoke to Roy. Specifically he was thinking, ain’t no use in useless. It was one of his father’s favourite sayings and it popping into his head when it did caused Curtis to split, right then and there, into two men: the one he would become and the one we all wanted him to be. He saw then that it was true; there really ain’t no use in useless — and him giving up football would be the most useless thing of all. It took him saying out loud that football wasn’t important to him anymore to see that he’d been telling himself a lie. And when he saw that, he saw a whole lot of other things in the mix that he’d never seen before. He saw that just because his father was wrong about a lot of things, it didn’t make him any less right about the one thing, how the promise had stretched so tight between them that it had to have snapped and that the past three years were a blank slate. He also saw that these were things that no boy could have seen but that seeing them didn’t make him any more a man because no man owed a debt like he did.

  While one Curtis stayed outside on the deck brooding over the matter of how to deal with the debt he owed, the other Curtis helped himself to seconds of roast beef and mashed potatoes. There was a weight lifted, a definite lightening of the load, and the consensus between Ron and Emily was that the meeting with Roy had gone well. Their conversation didn’t touch on Curtis’s plans nor on football, instead winding around them like strips of cloth on a long-dead pharaoh so that by the time Emily served homemade peach crumble with vanilla ice cream, the shape of what they’d really been talking about was a matter for the ages. Most of their talk revolved around the coming boom that was about to make Regina into the new centre of the universe, and Ron led the discussion with the zeal of a preacher passing the collection plate. He’d just got his real estate papers and was, as he put it, dabbling in a market that was set to explode.

  “It’ll be Calgary all over again except the price of gas has tripled in the meantime. Damn, it’ll be raining money, and that’s only half a joke. You ever meet my brother? Bought a house ten years ago for an amount that I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t see the paper on it. Sold it last year for seven times what he paid and this is only the beginning. Mark my words, in five years …”

  The glow of the bright, bright future carried them through dessert and only began to wane, Ron ensconced in front of the news with Violet bouncing happily on his belly, while Curtis washed the dishes and Emily dried.

  “How’s Terrence?” she asked after it had seemed the time for talking had passed.

  “Who says I’ve seen Terrence?”

  “He gave you the bike you rode in on, didn’t he?”

  “You saw it?”

  “No, I heard it. The whole damn city heard it. I guess it’s the least he owes you.”

  When that failed to achieve the desired stutter to her brother’s hands scrubbing at the roasting pan, she continued.

  “Honestly I don’t know how you can still defend him.” And satisfied that he needn’t have spoken a word in Terrence’s defence for it to be so, she added, “I mean, after what he did to that boy.”

  It would have been at this point, had the split not merely been a conceit of my own devise, that the Curtis on the back deck, overhearing such a remark, would have burst through the kitchen door, his anger and venom not soothed by a well-cooked meal.

  “What do you know about what he did?” he would have shouted or possibly just, “Shut the fuck up,” it doesn’t matter, the tone of his voice alone sufficient to make his point clear.

  With both men sharing the same full belly, Curtis finished washing the dishes without furt
her comment. When they were done, Emily left the few that were in the rack and went to relieve her husband of Violet, her mood tempered by the comfort of routine: a bath ahead of stories and the crib by eight with the promise of a glass of wine in front of the TV and a foot rub if Ron wasn’t too tired.

  Curtis followed her into a room that was both too long and too narrow for the size of the screen that confronted him. The news was on and a reporter stood in the desert while soldiers in tan khakis ran a training exercise for the camera. Curtis looked for any sign to tell him where they were but aside from the glare off the sand there was nothing and the caption at the bottom simply read, ‘Afghanistan.’ When he looked up, his sister had gone with Violet. He sat on the couch beside Ron and watched the rest of the news, then a sitcom that he’d already seen twice.

  Personally, I have very little patience for television. Keeping track of what’s good and when it’s on and what to watch when that gets cancelled is far too much like gardening, a passion I saw played to the death by my father. On the occasion that it’s on at the bar or the barber shop, and I don’t have to crimp my neck too far to see it, I have found that it does give one the feeling that anything is possible. And if Curtis was in need of anything, at that moment, it was a sense that his possibilities weren’t limited by the facts that were as stubbornly resisting his attempts to form into a coherent picture as two different puzzles jumbled in the same bag. Sitting there, aided by the drone of canned laughter and the flickering lights, he managed to separate the pictures enough to recognize that one piece was the same for each so that there’d always be a hole in the other.

  That hole, of course, was Terrence Bell. If Curtis had known what Terrence had done to Trisha Mann it might have made his future a lot easier to see spreading out before him than it did for the hour that he sat with Ron waiting for Emily to come back, and I take full responsibility for being the one who could have told him. My only defence, other than that overly poetic bit about choosing not to breathe, is that I was a police officer and as a police officer I answered to a higher duty and was just doing my job, and I could go on like this for quite some time if I thought it would do any good, which obviously it wouldn’t. The truth was, there were only six or seven people who knew that Terrence Bell was the bad, bad man who did the bad, bad thing. Of those six or seven people, one was my boss, one was the richest man in Saskatchewan and one was the man, under the guise of the latter’s head of security, hired to track down the men responsible for taking little Tish Tish. They all had good reasons for not wanting any information released to the general public, of which Curtis Mays was the leading example. Wrapped together, their reasons were enough to give me one of my own. So I kept quiet on our first meeting in Horace Milne’s kitchen, and only made the most general intimations about T-Ball’s culpability during our second meeting, less than a day away from the only words that Ron said to Curtis the whole time they sat in front of the TV.