Cipher Page 6

  “Interesting. He told me he did. Wouldn’t have been the first time he lied though, now would it?”

  “Um.”

  “Fancy a screw?”

  “What?”

  “Something I always wanted to say. He loves you, did you know?”

  “Who?”

  “Come now.”

  Clive was an old pro, I’ll give him that. The other videotapes in his collection reveal a similar pattern to his play, a deftness to his patter buoyed by an unerring sense of timing. Watching Clive work, I knew I would never be able to tell Ruby Yee how I feel about her because the calm deliberation and wilful play in his voice would always be there, pulling on my tonsils like my head was a bell, and nothing I could say would ever seem as genuine.

  “Have you ever loved anyone, Curtis?”

  He spoke with his back to the younger man, his fingers, it would have seemed to Curtis, arranging the flowers in the vase on the table. From the angle of the camera I can see that his hands were not within an inch of the stems so that it was only the air he was teasing, a nod or a wink to himself so that when he was watching it he could smile and whisper ‘dirty old queer’ under his breath.

  “Yes.”

  “And did you tell her?”

  “No.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “That’s what I’m here about.”

  “Oh.”

  And though I couldn’t see it clearly, surprise was there on Clive’s face. In the pause that followed I could tell he was savouring it, so unfamiliar a sensation with a fresh-and-lovely at the door. I could see it even through the squiggles on the tape, penetrating deeper from the edges to the centre every time I rewound it so I could hear him say it again.

  “Oh.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She didn’t tell you her name, did she? And you didn’t ask. Strange, love is.”

  That he was making fun of Curtis is clear to anyone watching, but Curtis was just as soldier-in-a-minefield as ever.

  “Wouldn’t have been hard to find out, though. Odd you never bothered.”

  Clive reached into his pocket and fiddled with something, a rabbit’s foot or maybe an old key he kept to remind himself how lucky he was.

  “She’s my niece, did you know?”

  Curtis shook his head.

  “Maybe I should tell you — No. That would be premature.”

  “What?”

  “Her name, by the by, is Amy.”

  “Amy.”

  “Does it make you tingle when you say it?”

  “And her last?”

  “For later. First, there’s the matter of your friend.”

  “Terrence.”

  “He left you something, didn’t he? Can I see it?”

  Curtis paused, unsure of what he meant. The weight pulling on his belt reminded him and he slipped the gun from his pants, holding it out grip-end first to Clive. Clive took it and popped out the cartridge then removed the lone round from the chamber. He held it up to the light as if it were a flawed diamond he now saw he’d paid too much for.

  “So it’s true.”

  Chambering the round he passed the weapon back to Curtis.

  “You must find him.”

  “I didn’t know he was missing.”

  Clive reached out and put his hand on Curtis’s arm.

  “You owe him that.”

  Curtis nodded.

  I have watched this less-than-an-instant a dozen times. I know that there was a smile there too, buried beneath the poor picture-quality and the disappointment. Curtis was smiling because he suddenly understands why he is there and that regardless of what Clive says to him afterwards he knows it won’t matter, that the piece of paper he gives him with a name on it might as well be blank because nothing short of being a windswept pile of bones on the far side of the world would stop Terrence and him from meeting again.

  Curtis accepted the note, not bothering to read it before tucking it into the space between his driver’s licence and his bank card, the emptiness of his wallet compensated for by the ease with which it slid into his pants pocket. He then turned for the door, not so much as offering his host a goodbye or a kiss on the cheek, though Clive had surely earned it.

  In the years between when Clive stared fixedly up at the chandelier, its slabs of cut glass concealing a camera of the pinhole variety, and the day when the same gaze stared at me from the screen of a TV in a corner of the evidence room, I had seen Clive maybe a dozen times at The Hole. He rarely passed more than a glance at me as he and Curtis chatted amiably: two old soldiers catching up and never once mentioning why they bothered taking the time to do so. These encounters didn’t happen more than once or twice a year and, like snapshots in a forgotten photo album, they charted Clive’s decline from a vibrant and evasive figure who only appeared when he was certain that he had the upper hand into a frail, old man, desperate like someone chained to a hospital bed by tubes and wires who treats the staff like long lost brothers and speaks to anyone who’ll give him a moment of their time. I felt nothing for him beyond a mild indifference: two logs bumping against each other at a bend in the river. It was only after one of his patrons, ejected for grabbing at a piece of the talent, had kicked his way into The Inner Sanctum, the spray of cocksucker, faggot, shit-licker and pedophile picked up by the same microphone as clear as the pops of the rifle that gave each an exclamation point, that I saw how close the two of us really were. I saw it in the look in his eyes, buried in a box of irrelevant evidence marked C. Winkle VHS, C. Mays Vol. 1-21, as he stared up at the overpriced light fixture that hid his secret pleasure and his shame. I saw it in the whisper too faint to be heard but that, from repeated viewing, I was able to read in his lips.

  “Please forgive me,” he said.

  On the morning I watched the tape, my own frailty betrayed by the way my hand shook as I cued the remote, I surely felt he was speaking to me, and that what he was really saying was that neither of us could ever be forgiven.

  ten

  Progress has a will of its own. It needs us as a flame needs a matchstick and has little use for those who do not burn as brightly as it demands. I could be talking about the march of history or a child scribbling on his daddy’s tax return; it amounts to the same thing. Once we see a rock rolling down the hill or the pen sitting beside a stack of papers on the kitchen table we are powerless to do anything but invent the wheel or add our scrawl. If this wasn’t so, police work would be about as fruitful as building an airplane out of spit and watermelon seeds, and after leaving The Hole Curtis would have driven straight for White City, to see his father, instead of heading for a house that he’d never seen before, occupied by a family that he didn’t know except by name.

  Barry Stilton, the pater of this familias, holds similar views about progress as I do and while he prefers to use the word God he’d confirm that the fire burned just as deep when it reached out and touched you. Barry was raised on a farm and was quick to tell people that it was as good a place as any to get to know the ways of the world, the cruelty of its winters being matched only by the oppression of its summer months. He was the second youngest of eight children and had come to the city to get a degree in agriculture, all the better to carry on the tradition of humility and servitude to a plot of land that had been in his family since before the North-West Mounted Police had swept the Indians out of the way of the CPR, giving the first of the prairie Stiltons access to the world’s wheat market.

  For over a hundred years it had been the solemn duty of the Stilton women to save what they could for the lean times, paper mostly, but nickels and dimes when they were trying to make a point beyond mere propriety. They’d bury it beside one of the thousands of fence posts that had once kept buffalo and Cree on horseback out of their fields but whose deterioration were now used mainly as a pretence by the Stilton men t
o grab a smoke and a pull off a bottle, the labels sun-bleached and curled at the edges from being stuck behind rock piles. The coffee cans in which Barry Stilton’s mother used to keep the fat of the land from her husband have long since rusted out from the steady drip of lean times but the memory of digging for them whenever his mother was visiting neighbours has not. It was this memory that had kept Barry from completing his agricultural degree, turning him instead towards an MBA even though the only suit he owned was the same one worn by three of his older brothers for church and for funerals.

  He’ll relate this to anyone who asks and while he’s doing so he’ll smile as if in the telling there’s a secret buried in there as deep as the loose change that the young Barry swore he could hear rattling whenever he lay in bed. I went to his office on the twenty-second floor of the tallest building in Regina to listen to his story and to hear what he had to say about my retirement. From his window there is an unobstructed view of Mann Stadium and that’s enough, he told me, to keep the walls bare of everything but his degree. Bookending his desk is a football on a pedestal, signed by the entire 1989 Roughriders team — the best damn squad to ever play the game, he said — and a framed photograph of his teenage son with Curtis Mays that he’d taken on the fifty-yard line during half-time festivities some years earlier. Both men are in wheelchairs and my glance returned to it with enough regularity that when he was done telling me what had led him away from the farm he asked me if I’d ever seen him play.

  “A few times.”

  “What that boy could do with a ball in his hands …”

  His eyes wandered to the window, and I knew he was thinking about what might have been.

  “It’s tragic, what happened,” I said, baiting him. I’d come for the whole story and didn’t plan on leaving until I got it.

  “Words don’t have it in them.”

  He leaned back in his chair, crossing his hands over his chest.

  “My boy was the first person he came to see when he got back from his tour, you know that?”

  I told him I didn’t, which was as much of the truth as I was willing to contend with.

  “Came straight from the airport, right to our house, like we was family. Sat there for, I don’t know how long. My wife was the first to see him. Called me at work, said there was a stranger outside on a motorbike, just sitting there. Made her nervous, you know how women are, but then there’d been some break-ins in the neighbourhood, and the situation with the Indians — sorry, Natives — being what it was, well you never can be too careful. I said if he’s still there at lunch, I’ll take a run-by. Well he was, and I did. I parked in the driveway and stood watching him for a tick. He was wearing his bike helmet but right away it occurred to me that it was Curtis, don’t know how I knew. Seen him on the field so often, I guess, that I could just tell. And I knew why he was there too.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He was there to say he was sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s right.”

  And then Barry Stilton laid out the story like it was new cement, hardened in his mind without cracks or handprints or names scrawled with a stick while the workmen were off eating their lunch. His voice never wavered and there wasn’t room between any of the words, not even for a breath or a grunt, so I listened and wondered what he would do if I told him the truth about what had happened, knowing that I wouldn’t, the same as I knew I wouldn’t buy insurance from him and the next time we’d meet he wouldn’t remember who I was.

  “The boy in the picture is my son. His name’s Darren. He’s a man now. Family of his own, which is a miracle, sure as if it happened in the Bible. He was seventeen when I took that picture, twelve when he got the chair. I used to take him to see Curtis play. Never missed a game. He’d scream his throat harsh every time number 21 got the ball and, truth be told, so did I. We’d leave the game barely able to talk but then we didn’t need to. On the car ride back, there was something more powerful than words between us and when we got home Eunice, that’s my wife, she’d smile and treat us like we were brothers and not father and son. The three of us would go for a walk after dinner and stay out until it was dark, not wanting the day to end. That was the effect that Curtis had on our family and that’s why, when Darren turned eleven, he tried out for his school’s football team as a running back. Of course, half the kids wanted to play running back, same as they wanted to wear his number. I understand most of the schools still don’t use 21, to keep the kids from fighting over it. Darren wasn’t a big kid, and he wasn’t too fast neither, but he was determined and the coach saw that so he made the squad. Second string, mind you, but a running back nonetheless. He couldn’t have been happier if he’d learned he could fly.

  “He was coming home from practice one night, riding his bike, which he insisted on even though I told him I’d be happy to drive him. ‘Dad,’ he’d say, ‘you can see me play at the games, now quit bugging me.’ Determined, like I told you. Well, he was riding home, it was around ten so it must have been a Friday night practice (coach always got the kids home by eight on school nights), and that’s when he got clipped. Officer who talked to us afterwards said they could tell from the skid marks that the motorcycle was travelling well over 150 kilometres an hour when it hit Darren. Said if he wasn’t wearing a helmet — I made sure he got a new one every year for Christmas — he’d have been dead for sure. Just the same, he never walked a step after that day and I haven’t got enough tears in me to cry for every scar the surgeon’s knife has put on his back.

  “That’s why my son was the first person Curtis came to see when he got back to town. See, it was his bike that hit Darren. Maybe you read about it. It was big news for a while. Last night before he went off to the desert, to make us proud, he gave the bike to his friend, for safekeeping, that’s what he said anyway. Some people said his friend stole it and Curtis was covering for him, didn’t want him to get into more trouble than he already was. I don’t believe it, but either way …

  “The boy was Terrence Bell. You’d have heard the name, everyone has, for the mess he got himself into with the Mann girl. Afterwards, they said a lot of things about the two of them, I don’t know how much of it was true, none of it most likely. People see the photo, they still ask me why Curtis’d be friends with someone like that, and I can see what they mean by it. I’ve got no patience for what they’re insinuating so I tell them flat out, Curtis never set out to make it easy for himself, the great ones never do. Why do you think he went to war when he could have been pulling eight figures down south as sure as the left shoe points towards the right? They’d been friends since they were kids. Terrence’d had a rough go of it, we all heard the stories. They don’t justify what he did but there they are. You think Curtis is just going to cast him to the wind? If that’s what you think, then I’m going to need you to get out of my office. That’s what I tell them, when I see that look. Self-righteous, is what it is. Always looking for fault where there is none.

  “Curtis, he gave Terrence his bike because nobody else would have. He was doing that boy a good turn. If anyone’s got a right to be mad it’s me. If anyone’s got a right to be casting about for someone to blame, you don’t have to look further than right here. Curtis gave him the bike and Terrence got drunk, all on his own, that’s what the judge said, I know, ’cause I was there when he said it. He may have stopped and he may have called 911, I heard his voice same as everyone else in the courtroom, heard him say what had happened and give the address as calm as if he were ordering Chinese takeout, but that doesn’t change the fact that he still drove off, left my boy dying there in the street like a dog, cold and thinking that there couldn’t be a God because no God would leave him to die, cold and alone, when he didn’t do nothing to hurt nobody. If he hadn’t been so drunk, he’d have got away too, but he was so far gone he drove into a light post at the end of the street, so they got him and three years later Curtis came str
aight from the airport to our house and told us how sorry he was about what had happened to our son.

  “And there were tears in his eyes and I was crying too and then Eunice pushed Darren out and Curtis asked if he could give him a ride on his bike. If it had been anyone else, I’d have said no, flat out, but I knew with Curtis he’d be safe. They were gone for over an hour and when they came back Darren was wearing Curtis’s old jersey, the same one he had on for the game he ran over a thousand yards, the one he was wearing when the people from the Guinness records book took his picture and for the past three years had been hanging in the front lobby of Campbell Collegiate, his old high school. Darren was wearing that jersey and he was laughing and when I saw them I squeezed Eunice’s hand so tight that she had to wear a brace for a week after.”

  Leaning forward, his fingers rotating the signed football in its stand, Barry took a long, even breath and he searched about for the next line, not wanting the story to end, not wanting it to ever end.

  “We invited him in for dinner but he had other things to do. I could tell he had some heavy thoughts on his mind, maybe about the part he played in the war, I don’t know, so I didn’t push him. He shook my hand and Darren’s too and even hugged Eunice though I could tell he wasn’t so comfortable when she grabbed him like she did, whispering ‘thank-you’ into his ear and kissing him on the cheek like a mother’s supposed to. He’s been back plenty of times since. And of course there’s the games — we all get season’s tickets together and sit on the fifty-yard line where they have special seating for people in wheelchairs, one row up from the home benches — and I’m not lying when I tell you that he’s as close to family as another man’s child could be.”

  “I guess that’s progress for you,” I said, standing.

  Barry looked back at me like I’d just let a skunk loose in his office. I smoothed out my shirt, even though it was my stomach and not the fabric that was making the bump. He walked me to the door and shook my hand and told me that he’d have the policy ready for me to sign by Monday.