Cipher Page 5

  “So, anything happen to you over there?”

  Primed by his dad from an early age to answer all questions asked of him with the same grave deliberation, it would have been a moment before Curtis answered:

  “Something’s always happening. Doesn’t matter where you are.”

  As if to prove his point, Emily returned holding the still squirming baby and plopped her in Ron’s lap.

  “Your turn,” she said then looked to Curtis.

  He was on his feet and everything about the way he stood — his hands in his pockets, one foot towards the door — told her that he was about to leave. Emily followed him out onto the porch and they said their goodbyes and see-you-laters, neither of them holding out their arms for a hug. Emily then waited on the top step until Curtis drove past on his motorbike. He waved at her and she waved back, and that, as they say, was that.

  eight

  After he left his sister’s, Curtis drove straight back to the ranch house. He parked the motorcycle under the carport and took the quickest line from the front door to the servant’s quarters. The bed in the room beyond the kitchen was still unmade and the woman’s scent wasn’t so much flavouring the room as it was filling it with air. He stood for a while breathing at the foot of the bed then wandered through the ranch, its vast emptiness impressed upon him with every footfall. Finally, the never-ending hallways and the dark and the quiet led him to the room with the bullet holes peppering the wall. He sat in the easy chair and slept in spurts, his dreams filled with memories of the war he’d just left, the action superimposed over the streets of Regina. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Indians started taking the place of Muslims, and horses took the place of Jeeps, and he was wearing a cowboy hat, and driving a motorbike and shooting at anything that moved. Terrence was behind him, his hands fastened around his waist, and she was taking shots from the top of a building with a pool cue (and I was there too, hidden so that he couldn’t see I was a part of it). He awoke knowing it was too early to get up but that it was useless trying to sleep again.

  As it happened, I was also awake just then. I was sitting in front of my laptop at the fold-up card table the previous owners had left in the basement of my house and that I’d transplanted to the kitchen thinking it’d be a shame to waste such a solid piece of furniture. Buoyed by the thought that an opening line was out there waiting for me I typed, As far as I know Ruby Yee was the first person to figure out who’d kidnapped Lester Mann’s granddaughter. Pretty good for an opening line, I suppose, except it had nothing to do with the report I was supposed to be writing. Seeing Ruby’s name, and wishing that she was there to fill my glass without me having to ask, stripped the last of my resolve. I gave up trying to pretend that I could just leave whatever happened to Terrence and Curtis to the wind and wandered off in the general direction of my bedroom, thinking that I’d know what to do about it in the morning.

  While I lay in bed trying to remember how to sleep, Curtis had surrendered to his wakefulness and was concentrating on the buzz of a fly, trapped behind the curtains. Its frantic assault on the window was amplified by the quiet of the room, lit only by the haze of moonlight that filtered through the crack in the heavy black fabric, and it became a welcome metaphor for the thoughts cycling through his mind. Foremost was the feeling that something was closing in on him and when it found him that something would be carrying a swatter big enough to leave a Curtis-sized splat. What this closing-in-thing was he hadn’t the faintest idea, but the fly was telling him that it was real and that if he didn’t get up now and find a dark corner to hide in then he hadn’t learned a damn thing worth learning over the past three years.

  He didn’t, however, push himself off the chair because of the fly, having given up listening to the buzz of insects and the scratch of mice in the walls after they’d chased him, one too many times, into his parents’ room bursting with tales of bloodsucking monsters and child-eating rats. No, the reason he stood up and walked to the window was because he thought he heard footsteps on the gravel driveway, so crisp and clean that when he pulled apart the curtains he expected to find the window open, the house sipping at the night’s cool. The window was double-paned and hermetically sealed. There could have been a stampede of heifers coming up the driveway, he wouldn’t have heard. Still he stood there, listening.

  The yard beyond was dark, sporadic waves of light from the highway the only thing visible under the charcoal grey sky. He told himself that he was imagining things and chided himself for letting the fly play tricks on him. He thought about returning to the chair but knew that he wouldn’t. For lack of a better idea, he let himself out the kitchen door and walked to the carport. His bike was still there. The tires were hard and the key was in his pocket. There was no sign that anyone had been there except for a faint whiff of tobacco and an intermittent sparkle of white in the forest that could have been a firefly, except that fireflies shine yellow and they don’t smoke cigarettes. He waited for the white to blink off. When it did, he traced ahead. The spot flashed pretty much where he thought it would and he set off in the direction he expected it would appear next.

  The forest that had come with the ranch house, and that Horace Milne had used to cover up the den of his most secret desires, was made of jack pines set in rows, five feet apart. It was a little patch planted as a token to mark the passing of the trees that had come before them, the oaks and maples and cedars having sacrificed themselves to a century’s worth of winter nights and pots simmering on the stove. The bed of needles at Curtis’s feet and the canopy blocking out the sky above him meant that there wasn’t much growing in between the stalks that, in the dark, more resembled a field of giant corn than a forest. The ground cover ensured that he didn’t make a sound as he followed the intermittent flashes until they disappeared completely, replaced moments later by the lit outline of a window.

  From inside the cabin he could hear the clatter of things being thrown around and breaking glass and could detect the odour of gasoline. The light from the window changed from yellow to a flickering orange and Curtis pressed himself up against the wall beside the window. Heat grew out of the slats of wood at his back. The front door opened and then there were footsteps running through the forest, the soft rustle of the pine needles underfoot quickly drowned out by the crackle of a fire. Curtis waited until the warmth at his back became hot coals then pushed himself off the wall and walked back through the forest. There was a light through the trees and Curtis had to look to the horizon to know that it wasn’t the sun, it was something else: a great heap of flame piled upon itself. It reached into the night and devoured it in great hungry licks and ash painted the clouds.

  Curtis stood at the edge of the trees, watching the ranch house burn. He thought, It followed me, meaning not the fire, but the taste of smoke in his mouth and the heat of the desert. The hiss and pop of wood and the air thickening with the sting of tar reminded him of the bike and he ran to the carport to see if he could save it. The fire hadn’t yet reached the three concrete pillars supporting its slanted roof but the bricks were steaming. Curtis pushed the bike into the driveway as bits of terracotta burst from the wall, making him duck low, same as he would have if someone was shooting at him.

  nine

  Before the sun had risen enough to find reflection in the city, Curtis had stopped holding his coffee cup up to the waitress at the only place he’d found open upon his return. Having nothing left to his name but his futurebright and a debit card with the better part of three years’ wages on it, he’d sat there long enough to eat two specials and hear all there was to hear about the fires. Near as anyone there could figure, they’d all started at exactly the same time, around three in the morning, and had left a total of six holes, like blackheads, on the face of Regina.

  Every one of the several dozen patrons drifting in and out the diner had a story to tell — about road closures and detours and a few, not so readily believed, about last-minute res
cues and narrow escapes — but none of them mentioned the ranch. There was plenty of talk, however, about the suspicious deaths of three prisoners at the federal penitentiary up in Prince Albert that had happened around the same time. This turned talk towards the worry that the fires were the start of a war amongst Regina’s increasingly volatile Native gangs.

  Mathers was of much the same opinion. When I got to work, a half-hour early for want of sleep and a terrible hurt to be the first person Ruby saw when she opened her store at six, he was lingering as close to the back door as he could without making it look like he was waiting for someone.

  “The Natives are restless,” he said after he’d got through with shaking his head at my general appearance.

  “Better start circling the wagons then, I guess.”

  “That what your report going to advise?”

  “Something along those lines.”

  He followed me up the stairs to the third floor where my office was, keeping his distance so that I knew that the conversation was over. I ducked into the kitchenette, on the pretence of getting a cup of coffee. After he’d passed by, I stuck my head out and called after him.

  “What’s the date today?”

  “Huh?”

  “The date?”

  He spun around and would have, I’m sure, made some surly comment about me wasting his time again if a uniform passing by hadn’t answered my question.

  “Hmmm,” I said, trying to sound thoughtful.

  “That supposed to mean something to me?”

  “It would have been her birthday, is all.”

  “Whose birthday?”

  “Trisha Mann’s.”

  “So?”

  “Odd coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  Mathers shook his head all the way into his office. The door slammed behind him with a rattle that told me the first call he’d be making when he got to his desk was to Jennifer Harding, the force’s shrink.

  Satiated with six eggs and the rest that came with them, Curtis paid his bill, finding a measure of comfort in the fact that he’d escaped breakfast without being asked any questions he’d feel obliged to answer. Back on his bike, he circled the streets until the sun was high enough to unfold Open signs in stores as far away from half-price sales and BOGOs as you could find in the city. He spent the rest of the morning getting measured by a tailor then bought a shirt and a pair of pants to hold him over. He changed into them standing by the cash register. The clerk smiled when Curtis told her that she could burn the ones he’d been wearing and her disappointment was clear in the lines around her eyes when he gave her Emily’s name and phone number, telling her to leave a message there when his suits were done.

  It was almost noon when he walked out of the tailor’s feeling, if not like a new man, then at least like a man wearing a new pair of tan khakis and a golf shirt who was on his way to find the woman he hoped to marry. Such was the nature of his transformation that there was no seam between his plan to track her down and the questions bubbling in his head over Terrence. Both were part of the same story and on the drive to The Hole he tried to think of how it would sound ten years down the road but couldn’t get past the worry that it hadn’t even begun yet. He parked in the alley, gave The Fix’s spray-painted scowl a touch, for luck, and pressed the buzzer beside the back door.

  Clive answered and a few moments later appeared on the other side of the open door. On the short ride up to the second floor in his private elevator, he stood facing Curtis. The wry smile he wore and the reddish glow on his cheeks, as if he’d just pinched them, made Curtis recall the one time he’d hit a person out of anger.

  Curtis had been seventeen and the boy — whose name he couldn’t remember and whose face was unknown to him when he told me the story except for a crook to its nose and a pimple in the middle of its forehead — had bumped into him in the hall. Sorry, the boy had said, and it was the last thing he’d be able to say free from pain for two months. The grin he wore when he said it told Curtis that it was no accident that the back of the boy’s hand had brushed against the bulge in his jeans. He left him on the floor outside the biology lab and went to see his coach. He showed him the skin on two of his knuckles, peeled back so that there was only blood to hide the bone. His coach smoothed it out and bandaged them up. Somewhere between dressing the first and the second knuckle, the principal had come in and Coach Reynard left Curtis holding the roll of gauze so he and Mr. Dowell could have words. While Curtis waited for them to return, he practised the visualization exercise coach had taught him for when he got injured on the field. He imagined that he was in a huddle and the QB was calling the next play and that the pain was there with him wearing a jersey and a helmet like everyone else so that when the huddle broke he went to his position and the pain went to his and the only time they met on the field was when the pain was throwing a block or helping him to his feet again. He’d run through a few plays by the time his coach had returned, squeezing him on the shoulder and sitting down on his stool to finish the patch-job.

  “Don’t worry, Clarence is on our side.”

  Curtis nodded and hadn’t passed a moment thinking about the boy whose teeth and jaw he had broken, and whose lips forever bore the mark of his rage, until he was riding up in Clive’s elevator. It didn’t bother him that Clive lingered so that he could follow him out, his eyes playing a very different visualization exercise with the cut of his pants, and he didn’t protest when Clive led him past his office to the end of the hall where there was a section of wall that slid open when he reached into his jacket pocket. He did, however, feel his stomach tighten when Clive touched his shoulder with four finger tips and a thumb, pushing him past the threshold of what Clive called The Inner Sanctum, but which was known in boys’ locker rooms around the city as The Inner Scrotum.

  Curtis had endured his share of questions about what it was like, and more than anything it was those questions that he’d been answering when he’d hit the boy with the crooked nose. Truth was, until that day it was the one room in The Hole he’d never been in. It came as a surprise then that there was nothing in the decor to satisfy a teenage boy’s expectations of what the residence of the most notorious homosexual in Regina should look like, aside from a slightly too-bright shade of orange on the walls and a vase of fresh-cut flowers on the small round table in one corner, the crust of a sandwich on a plate and a paperback novel in front of its only chair.

  I don’t know the name of the book Clive was reading nor, for that matter, what was pressed between the two slices of darkish bread, rye or perhaps pumpernickel, but I know they were there as certain as I know that the first thing Clive said to Curtis after he shut the door behind him was:

  “Cup of tea? Coffee?”

  And that Curtis answered:

  “Just water, thanks.”

  I have watched Clive walk to the kitchen, dipping slightly to the left on his way past the table so he could collect the plate with the uneaten sandwich on it, and have scrutinized Curtis as he waited for him to return, standing not five feet inside the door, as stiff as a soldier who’d just read a sign that said ‘Minefield,’ not moving an inch until Clive was handing him a glass.

  The picture is not great on the videotape that bore witness to this scene and frayed lines splinter the screen from too many rewinds. The black and white gives it a grainy, emotionless feel. It hides the expressions on the faces as well as any dark and I can’t say for certain what Curtis’s lips were doing, or his eyes, when Clive’s hand lingered a moment, his index finger brushing Curtis’s thumb. Clive let the glass go with the utmost reluctance and Curtis drank half of it, not once taking his eyes off the man in front of him, worried perhaps that the drink was drugged and at the first twinge of something funny in his belly he wanted to make sure he’d be able to get his hands around the other’s throat before passing out.

  “Not what you expected, I imagine.”
>
  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Clive showed him his teeth to let him know that he couldn’t be fooled.

  “But then you haven’t seen the bedroom, yet.”

  Curtis drank what was left in his glass and handed it back to Clive.

  “I’m never sure if the, um, people I bring here are disappointed or relieved.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That it doesn’t look like the place where a dirty old queer would live.”

  “Are you?”

  “A dirty old queer? Maybe that’s a question best answered by your friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Do you have more than one?”

  “Terrence?”

  “He prefers Terry. With me, anyway. He did tell you about us, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t —”