Cipher

by John Jantunen

  Terrence was standing with the book closed in his hand when Curtis came back from the bathroom. He gave it to Curtis and mumbled something about life imitating art or vice versa. Curtis gave the paperback a cursory glance and tossed it in a garbage can on his way to the parking lot. Terrence led him to a charcoal grey Mercedes and, holding up the keys, asked Curtis if he wanted to drive. Curtis said he didn’t and slipped into the passenger seat, biding his time by flipping through the stations on the radio until he found something suitably loud.

  These two boys-cum-men cruising Regina in a stolen Mercedes, taking the long way to the place both knew they were going, couldn’t have looked any different from one another than they did: Curtis with his almost-cartoonish good looks and physique, and Terrence, equally cartoonish — a skinny rat-like creature hiding a patchwork of scars behind a greasy curtain of dark hair while peering over the steering wheel not unlike a myopic old woman. Neither spoke a word during the trip. Curtis, in the dark about his friend’s role in the death of Trisha Mann, didn’t know that he was sitting beside the most wanted person in modern Saskatchewan history who, for reasons that the part of me that gets out of bed every morning pretends has some sort of logic behind it, wouldn’t be publicly linked to the abduction for another four days. Being thus oblivious, the greeting his friend had extended and the subsequent ride in the Mercedes couldn’t have better suited his mood. It was exactly the way he’d pictured things unfolding as the train pulled into the station. This perfect meshing of expectation and reality, so rare in life, didn’t come as a surprise either. It was precisely Terrence’s ability to anticipate his friend’s every desire, the moment before it had arisen, that had kept them close for so long.

  As with all moments of perfection, this one too had a short span, and its demise coincided with their arrival at a bar called The Hole. I’ve been there many times with Curtis since, and I understand very little has changed except the name of it, shortened to H for no reason that anyone working there could explain. It would be wrong to call it a strip club although they do have shows at five-thirty and nine, more so, it seems to me, to create a mood of ironic detachment than out of something as base as the exploitation of sexual desire for profit. The people who visit The Hole rarely gaze at the peelers who play along by dancing with a mild look of boredom while they clench their thighs around the pole or spread their legs to reveal their inner selves.

  It was just after eight when Terrence and Curtis walked through the front doors, painted black, same as the circular windows cut into the wood-like eyes. The bouncer didn’t so much as glance at them, a sign of respect reserved for only the most distinguished guests. And for Clive Winkle, The Hole’s improbably named owner, there were few guests more distinguished than Curtis Mays.

  Curtis was just sixteen when Clive welcomed him for his inaugural visit. It had been arranged through Terrence, then Terry-B, as were most of Curtis’s extracurricular activities. Clive had wanted to give Curtis a special something-something, as he put it, for his birthday. Curtis accepted the offer without hesitation, such was his faith in Terrence. At two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon Clive ushered him through a back door reserved for the talent, the mainly young petites whose small breasts and skinny legs made them seem younger than their verifiably legal ages.

  The Hole’s main draw was the myriad of rooms that connected off a hallway at the back of the bar. A red door guarded the entrance to it and anyone foolish enough to think they didn’t need an invitation to venture through soon learned the gravity of their mistake at the hands of an ex-Roughrider fullback I’ve never heard called anything except The Fix. On his first week at The Hole he’d had himself painted in full Rider uniform on the brick wall ten feet from the door at the other end of the hallway from where he stands on duty. After the offender had hit the wall so hard his own name was a mystery to him, The Fix wanted to make sure the victim knew who it was that had delivered him his lesson in manners.

  On Curtis’s first visit, The Fix wasn’t at his station just inside the red door. It being a Sunday, and two in the afternoon, Clive was the only other person there except for the something-something who was waiting in a room at the end of the hall. There were a dozen doors in all but, my experience having been confined to The Pool Room, I can only describe what was behind the last. True to its name the room’s main feature was a billiard table. There were a variety of cues in a rack on the wall along with some tasteful photographs of famous people playing pool. Two black leather couches lined the far wall and there were six bar stools arranged under the ledge that ran the length of the other three. There were no windows and the only light came from a single stained-glass fixture hung low over the pool table. When you entered the room, the table looked like it was suspended in a black hole, the walls and even the floor out of sight. It was only after a few seconds that your eyes adjusted so you could see the couches and the pictures. Standing inside the door that first time, I suspect Curtis was pretty impressed and not a little nervous, like he was staring into an abyss out of which he wasn’t sure he’d return.

  Clive told him that he’d heard about how much Curtis liked nine-ball, he’d read about it in The Leader-Post’s hobbies section, and with that he closed the door. Curtis didn’t move an inch into the room until he heard the creak of leather and, at the exact same moment, caught of whiff of something sweet, like cinnamon wrapped in honeysuckle. The scent got him moving towards the rack of cues, trying not to seem too interested in the woman walking towards the far end of the table where the balls were kept in a tray underneath the lip. She racked while Curtis chose a stick, then she spoke the first and last words either of them would say their entire time together.

  “Your break.”

  Curtis, like myself upon hearing him describe this scene, was certain that the pool they were playing was a prelude to some sort of one-of-a-kind erotic adventure. The woman, Curtis assured me, was obviously chosen with that in mind, and for confirmation he needn’t look further than the outfit she was wearing: a slinky black number, more a slip than a dress, that left enough showing to throw him off his game but kept enough hidden to keep his gaze wandering back to see what he might have missed. She was the total package, is how he described her, and I suspect him being sixteen meant he had a hard time concealing his interest. After an hour though, during which she beat him eleven to nil, she packed up her stick and left through a door secreted between the couches. A moment later, Clive appeared and escorted Curtis to the rear entrance.

  “Something to look forward to, huh kid?”

  Curtis nodded, not a little confounded by the odd turn of events, and Clive ushered him into the alley. He closed the door and The Fix’s scowl on the wall opposite did its job by hastening him towards the street.

  four

  On the night that Curtis, the returning hero, followed Terrence through the front doors of The Hole, his mind was not on The Pool Room but on the bar. His plan, if it could be called one, was to get so plastered that he’d stick to the ceiling (his words). Up until that night he’d never been much of a drinker, although in the service he’d discovered that turning down a beer or a shot of tequila wasn’t met with the bemused smile as when a teammate offered him the same after a game. While serving his country, he’d had plenty of opportunities to feel the ground shift beneath his feet but he’d never lost control, never did anything he’d regret come the dawn. That night he wanted it to be different. Three years in the desert had made him appreciate the prospect of living a mundane life in a small city surrounded by endless sky. And nothing is more mundane, he’d tell me, than getting shitfaced on a Thursday night when you’re supposed to be somewhere else.

  Clive was behind the bar by the time Curtis and Terrence had crossed the floor, though nobody had seen him all night. Otherwise the place was empty except for a couple of men hunched over their drinks at tables as far away from each other as the room allowed.

  “You feel like a game of poo
l?” Clive asked, assigning no special importance to Curtis’s reappearance after three years.

  “And a bottle of the stuff we had last time,” Curtis answered on his way to the red door.

  I can just imagine, having seen its pale reflection the next morning, how his stride carried him across the room with nothing but the glitter from the ball over the dance floor to distract the easy swing of his hands and the gentle glide of his sneakers. Quite a sight and all for the benefit of Clive, who just so happened to be the type of person to appreciate such a thing: a swagger that should have taken Curtis all the way to the big leagues with enough left over for a broadcasting job in his latter years to keep him from withering on the golf course.

  Through the red door and past The Fix, past the TV Room and The Fish Room and The Purple Room and The Blue, past the ironically named Next Room, and the other rooms whose names I’ve forgotten, until his hand was on the knob of the last room in the hall, turning it with nothing ahead of him but the blur of balls and the sting of wormwood, the active ingredient in the several crates of absinthe that Clive had smuggled back while on a “fact-finding mission” to Prague. Then he was stepping into the void, undaunted by the absolute darkness that swept the pool table away ahead of it, along with the walls and the couches and all the rest. Terrence closed the door behind them and inched sideways so as not to bump into his friend, a statue of finely rendered Greek perfection known to the room only by the sudden intake of air through his nose.

  Terrence could smell it too, the cinnamon and honeysuckle. Unlike Curtis, it didn’t come as a surprise nor did the sudden flash of light from the fixture over the table, timed to come on the moment after her cue had struck the ball so that it found her frozen as if it had been a mannequin that had caused the upset on the table. Only when all the balls had come to a rest did she move, to chalk her cue and to walk to the table beside the couch where there was a glass, its contents as clear as water but confined to a flute too tall and thin for something so benign.

  Midway through the first game, Curtis missed a shot that he never would have tried against anyone else. Stepping back he watched her clear the table and Terrence handed him a drink. His glass was empty by the time he was called on to rack and when he lined up his next shot all that was left of his second was the smudge of fingerprints on the glass. Between his fifth and sixth drink he came very close to winning a game, losing only because he pulled his shot on the nine when she knocked her glass off the table with the butt of her cue.

  Aside from this brief smattering of glass, there was nothing but Terrence’s nasal draw to interrupt the clattering of balls until Curtis was emptying the last of the bottle directly into his mouth. A moment of clarity passed amidst the confusion of staring at a bottle that was clearly labelled Vodka, when every one of his senses had claims to the contrary, and Curtis turned to Terrence, a forgotten figure perched on a stool just inside the darkest corner.

  “Why aren’t you drinking?” he said.

  “I am.”

  Terrence held up his empty hand. His fingers were curled around an imaginary bottle of beer and, Curtis swore to me, his state was such that it didn’t seem strange at the time.

  From there the night progressed with the predictability of a hangover: the murky cloud of back alley regurgitations and missed steps unbroken until, sobriety beckoning in the wee hours, Curtis opened his eyes to find the woman rocking back and forth on top of him; the bed springs creaking to the thrusts of her hips and the smell of her sex on him the next morning the only things to tell him she wasn’t a dream.

  five

  After I left Curtis sitting at the table in the servant’s quarters of Horace Milne’s ranch house, he took a shower. He came out smelling pleasantly of apples and oatmeal from the bar of soap he’d found in the dish by the bathroom sink, then wandered from room to room, amazed at how little evidence there was that anyone had ever lived there. Each room was occupied by a lone piece of furniture, expansive four-poster beds and oversized loveseats. Heavy drapes were pulled shut over all the windows. Only one room had any ornamentation on the walls, if a splash of bullet holes around an easy chair could be called such, and it was standing there that Curtis got the feeling that something definitely wasn’t right. I hadn’t been enough and neither had the gun nor Terrence’s absence. Facing the wall, the plaster pitted and bits of it splattered on the floor, the yellow light that had kept him alive during his tour in Afghanistan started flashing. Every movement thereafter was reduced to a deliberate action, whether it was walking towards the front door or scratching behind his ear when he stood on the porch steps scanning the grove of cherry trees, the taste of dirt in the air and the heat making him think of rain.

  If he’d still been in a desert marked by a lifetime of war, he might have circled around back to make sure the place was as quiet as it looked, but then if he’d been in the desert he’d never have come out in his bare feet wearing only a towel. He wouldn’t have been alone either and could have sent someone to secure the perimeter while he called in his coordinates to see what the day might have in store. As it was, he retreated into the house, locking the door behind him, and took the shortest route back to the servant’s quarters.

  While he got dressed he thought of her, whose name he did not yet know. He admitted to me later that he was both disappointed and relieved that she wasn’t there to share a coffee with, or a quick kiss on the lips. He’d carried her image in his mind for so many years that she had passed beyond the fold of his day-to-day, settling firmly into his thoughts and dreams. Now that they had finally been reunited, if only for a night, he was certain that it wouldn’t be another six years before they’d meet again. Through sheer force of will, aided by several of the strategies he’d learned during his military training, he pushed her memory into the recesses and tried to think of what number he’d put her on the list of things for which he owed Terrence, his best and maybe only real friend.

  (This list, as real as the piece of paper he’d never get around to writing it on, he’d recited to me years later while we were sitting on his front porch during one of my weekly visits. We were watching his three-year-old driving his tricycle over the ramp he’d made in the driveway out of two boards and a brick. The boards kept slipping whenever Mason drove onto them and he was crying and carrying on as three-year-olds are wont to. Curtis told me about the list, I think, to keep himself from helping the boy who, he said, he didn’t want to treat like a baby. The night he spent with her he ranked number two and it’s where he stopped, choosing the next moment to roll his wheelchair down the ramp his front porch had in place of steps figuring, I guess, that Mason’d already had plenty of being a man for someone who still took an afternoon nap.)

  Showered and dressed and feeling clearheaded enough to confront the questions the morning had thrown at him, he returned to the kitchen. He checked the fridge and the cupboards looking for food and something to drink. Finding neither, he drank straight from the tap and thought how far a plate of eggs, bacon, toast and hash browns would go towards making him forget that he should be looking for answers instead of doing what he was thinking of doing, which was carrying on with the two-day plan he’d come up with during the train ride. Forty-eight hours had seemed like an easily manageable parcel of time, but he saw now that he’d been overly optimistic. Still, his plan was a long way from being derailed and he was certain that he could get it back on track if only a few things would fall into place.

  Figuring out where he’d ended up was chief, as was finding some means of getting from there to where he wanted to be. There wasn’t a phone in any of the rooms and the keys weren’t in the Mercedes parked in the carport at the end of the driveway when he circled around back. Then he saw the motorcycle. He knew its keys would be hidden in a metal box stuck to the underside of the gas tank and also that once he got out on the highway the hairs on his exposed arms, prickling in the wind, would be making a strong argument for driving
until they could taste a lick of salt from the Pacific Ocean. The yellow line led him towards an outcropping of cement and glass, a prairie Oz on the horizon, and a Toys “R” Us sign suspended against the sky brought his plan back into focus. He coasted into a space near the entrance and walked through the front doors, his movements still deliberate and the gun a bulge in the back of his shirt.

  Wandering through the aisles, he passed a shelf loaded with machine guns and grenades and other toys of a similar kind, and he thought of how funny it’d be to go Rambo, loaded down with cheap plastic imitations of the weapons he’d been using only a few days ago. A whole scenario opened up in his mind based, I think, on real life events although he never said as much. In his imagining, he’d chased a man wired with explosives into the store and was trying to clear the people before the man detonated. He’d be yelling at them in a mishmash of English and whatever Pashto he’d been able to pick up, and they’d all be looking at him like he was crazy (a fear that the string of plastic bullets on his chest, the Nerf rocket launcher he held in one hand and the Star Wars blaster he held in the other would do little to ease). All of a sudden, knowing that it was futile, he’d grab the closest kid and run for the exit. Diving through the sliding doors, explosions rumbling deep in his throat, he’d beg passersby to take the kid, whose mother he’d say was killed by the bomb even though she was yelling at him from the sidewalk in between instructions from a 911 operator on the cellphone pressed to her ear. Having given in to this urge to fold these two worlds together, their separation marked only by a thirteen-hour flight, he’d chuckle to himself as he returned to his bike and his two-day plan, certain that it had been a good joke even if the police and the TV news anchors and his C.O. didn’t agree.

  Instead, though, he found something soft and fuzzy that growled when he pressed its paw and, without creating a media spectacle, made for the checkout line.