Cipher

by John Jantunen

  Curtis hadn’t seen her since she’d moved out of the house she’d shared with Terrence, their father, who even at his funeral she’d only called The Drunk, and Terrence’s mom, a woman who looked like three hundred pounds of lard pressed into a pillow case. The latter, Alice, was twenty years younger than The Drunk but, simple as she was, she was happy to have a man with a job and a house, and happier still to have the gift he gave her in Terrence. She never complained that he hit her and spent all of their money before he came home at night, and that he called her fat, and stupid, and asked his friends while she was standing right there if they’d ever seen such a disgusting sight and followed that by saying, “God, she’s lucky she’s got a cunt or I swear she’d be a complete fucking waste of flesh.” Never a frown on her face, so it was a surprise to everyone when she didn’t come home one night. The next morning a boy walking his dog found bits of her strewn on either side of the train tracks, more of her smeared along the ties all the way to the rail yard where the rest of her was found wedged underneath a boxcar.

  As if waking from a dream that spoke of this future, Rita had gotten out. She spent her teenage years in Saskatoon with her mother’s parents, who still blamed The Drunk for their daughter’s death (though it was cancer that had taken her). They didn’t speak of her father or Alice and had no connection to Terrence so they didn’t speak of him either. In time, Rita went to the University of Saskatchewan, earning a degree in engineering just to prove she could. After a heart attack and a stroke had conspired to kill her father, she bought 153 Montague with her half of the money. She took in her first child the next month, telling the woman from the agency that she’d seen plenty of bad parenting and wanted to know what the other kind looked like. They gave her little Eddie and then Clarice and Clarence, twins, and Joseph and his little brother Abraham and then they gave her one who was just a baby and didn’t have a name. She christened him William but called him Billy, just like her dad’s friends had called The Drunk, because she wanted to believe that good could come out of anything.

  Not having seen Rita for so long, and only having the stories that Terrence had told him to go by, Curtis expected to find clothes piled to the ceiling, rats burrowed into mountains of garbage in the kitchen and the floor covered with filth so thick it felt like you were walking on dirt. Instead, the hallway that led towards the kitchen was bright and uncluttered. The floor was made from strips of hardwood the colour of honey and the walls were peach with prints of sunflowers and Paris night scenes spaced at intervals. The living room, on the left, was daffodil yellow and the two full bookshelves at opposite corners almost reached the ceiling. The art on the walls was in the Native style, red and black birds with men inside them and a golden fish that changed into a wolf if you looked at it twice, and drums with eagle feathers hanging from them. Loud rap music blared from the stereo and there was a boy, his skin like molasses, lying on the couch with a hardcover book propped on his legs.

  “Honestly Abe, I don’t know how you can read with that noise.”

  The boy didn’t react and Rita didn’t move to turn it down, instead bumping past Curtis on her way to the kitchen where a faint aroma of oregano and basil could be smelled in the steam coming off a pot on the stove.

  “Are you hungry? The sauce is for tomorrow, I like to let it simmer all night, but I could boil you up some noodles.”

  “I’m good.”

  The kitchen walls were a shade of blue that made the sky seem grey and the shelves were stacked with hundreds of glass bottles filled with spices and herbs. Beyond that was an addition that took up half the yard (the other half taken up by the garden, visible in spires of green and red seen through the windows that made up three walls of this, the kids’ room). Eddie, the boy who’d let Curtis in, was pulling out beds from the four couches along its perimeter while Clarence and Clarice cleaned up the toys spread over the floor, Joseph played a handheld video game with earphones on and Billy dozed in the paws of a life-sized stuffed St. Bernard.

  At the stove Rita took up the wooden spoon propped in the large steel pot and began to stir.

  “So what can I do for you, Curtis?”

  “When was the last time you saw Terrence?”

  “So you are looking for him then?”

  “A friend of his is worried.”

  “You’re his only friend.”

  Rita licked the spoon then dropped it back in.

  “The last time he was here, I didn’t see him. He stopped by to pick up your letter. Eddie was here alone. He wouldn’t let him in and passed the envelope under the door.”

  “When was this?”

  “Three weeks ago, give or take.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Uh huh.”

  The smell from the sauce and the blue on the walls and the kids in the next room, helping themselves to their beds, pulling blankets and picture books up to their necks, were having a strange effect on Curtis. He felt like Rita was stirring him in that big silver pot, its bottom blackened from the heat. He gave himself over to the motion and he didn’t realize he was about to fall until Rita grabbed his arm and guided him to a chair at the table. A plate of spaghetti appeared in front of him and he ate it without a word. When he was wiping the plate with a piece of buttered white bread, Rita sat across from him, her hands flat on the table in front of her, the fingers spread out as if she was planning to draw lines around them.

  “You okay?”

  Curtis nodded, washing the bread down with a sip of water.

  “He have a job? After he —”

  “Not that I know. But he was making money. Left a few thousand dollars for me in an envelope when Eddie gave him your letter.”

  “You know how he got it?”

  “I have a few ideas.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Maybe, and …”

  “And?”

  “Just a feeling I got.”

  “What sort of feeling?”

  “He changed in prison. I guess there’s no helping that. Hardly came by anymore. Not even Sundays. Especially not Sundays, maybe. I try not to judge him, what he had to put up with after I left.”

  “Changed, how?”

  “Like he wasn’t here anymore, but that doesn’t capture it. Like he was better than this. All of it. Like he was laughing at the world. Like only he got the joke. I don’t know, something. Like he could see the future, and it was just as he’d imagined it would be. Like he was creating it. Like he was a god. Like, like, like …”

  Rita shook her head then took up Curtis’s plate and carried it to the sink. In the background he could hear the low voice of one of the children, he couldn’t see which, reading a story to the others. “Chug, chug, chug,” he said. Then, “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”

  “You know where I can find Mo?”

  The plate dropped into the sink too loudly to have been by accident and Rita turned round to face him.

  “You really think it’s that bad.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He’ll kill you, you know that.”

  Curtis gave her a shocked look, feigning surprise.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because you’re Curtis Mays.”

  sixteen

  He found them playing football. Them, and not him, because Rita had finally said, in answer to his question, that he’d find them on Mikiwam Street. “You got an address?” Rita had smiled and repeated, “You’ll find them on Mikiwam Street.”

  Parking two blocks away, he hid his bike in an alley behind a pickup truck on blocks. He walked out of the alley, feeling every bit awake as a point man on patrol, but the pressure of the gun wedged in his pants turned him back. He locked it in the compartment under The Ripper’s seat, telling himself that not being armed at least gave him a chance of getting back alive.

  He found the street j
ust where Rita said it would be. He stood halfway concealed behind a tree, not hiding so much as peering into his future, seeing it spread out in lines, hearing it in the grunts and curses as the two opposing teams converged.

  Mikiwam is really just a notch at the end of another street, Angus, that Mo’s gang claimed as their own, going so far as to print up their own sign for the corner (Mikiwam, Google tells me, meaning home in Cree). It’s less than a block long and dead-ends at a chain-link fence, the razor wire curling over its top meant to protect the tracks on the other side from the unnamed trespassers, mentioned on signs fastened to it at intervals. A dozen houses, all of them looking like they needed a vacation somewhere warm, are squeezed into yards too small for anything but a few lawn chairs.

  The whole street was out watching the game, its residents confined to a couple dozen Indians, none older than thirty as far as Curtis could tell and none with hair shorter than to the small of their backs. Cars were pulled up onto the sidewalks, flush with the curb, so that they formed a boxed-in field made of metal, glass and asphalt. Two chalk lines were drawn for end zones. Between them the scrimmage didn’t stop when the person carrying the ball was mashed up against a black Chevy coupe, making the car emit a loud whine that sent a shiver of laughter through the crowd before a remote was produced to silence the alarm. The Indian who’d done the mashing got in a couple of extra blows before the ball carrier was released and came back at him swinging, his fists grazing the air close enough to the other’s face that all it would have taken was the right angle to make it a knock-out punch. A seven-foot-tall Indian, his swollen belly hanging out from under a black T-shirt, grabbed the tackler by the shoulder and pulled him backwards, delivering a backhand across his face as he did. They exchanged a couple of words. The smaller man must have got the point because he bowed to the man he’d mashed up against the car and both smiled as the ball was flipped to the only man on the field whose face Curtis recognized.

  I have spoken to Moses Black several times. His name came up early in the research I did for my report. He was at the head of a gang called The Warpath and I didn’t have to wait long before getting a chance for some alone time with him while he was awaiting trial for possession in the remand unit at the Regina Correctional Centre. Rumour had it that he was the driving force behind the establishment of a gang council, a loose organization based, partly, on traditional ideas of governance, although when I brought this up he shook his head and muttered something about media hype.

  He is soft spoken to the point of incoherence and regardless of how many times I asked him to speak up, the tape recording I made of our first talk was more monologue than conversation. He had a scar running from his left collarbone to his ear with a double line of stitches tattooed over the ragged gash, made to look like train tracks. On his throat, in the same crude black ink, it read ‘This Is My Country.’

  When I asked him what it meant he smiled and said, “It could mean pain or maybe it means this,” he fanned his hands down his body, “or could be it means your time is limited, friend.”

  All of his answers were in a similar vein and within them I found that his politics ran deep. Post-apocalyptic was the word I used to describe them when I finally found the will to write my report.

  Whites were at the centre of it all, Mo said, and they may have thought they’d stolen the story of his people but what they didn’t realize is that they’d just borrowed it.

  “Indians’d be coming back to the fore soon enough, a few more wars, a couple of meltdowns, a continent lost to drought, you wait and see. Who’s it you think’s going to survive? Someone looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy fucked the Michelin Man or me? Well, I’ll tell ya, friend, it ain’t gonna be you.”

  In response to the central question my report was meant to answer — why weren’t there any Native gangs in Saskatchewan before the 1990s? — he pointed to the Oka crisis. It was a moment, he said, that crystallized a generation of young Indians around the country but especially on the prairies where Native boys had about even odds of graduating from high school as they did of killing themselves.

  “Oka made them see they had recourse. At first it was just a few raggedy motherfuckers blockading the rail tracks. Ten years later, we weren’t raggedy no more and we didn’t need to be blockading the tracks to get our point across. We were in the papers, they were saying we’re a threat. You might as well have told us we’d won the lottery. A threat? Shit, you better believe it and we coming for you, motherfucker.”

  This quote, unattributed, I grouped with a bunch of similar comments under the header: A Common Thread — Oka and the Media. I could have included a hundred such quotes but settled for an even dozen. After the requisite posturing, which is where most of the other interviewee’s comments slid into demands for a pack of smokes and a lawyer, Mo continued.

  “I’ll tell you the funny though; the whole thing started because of a bunch of pasty-faced high school kids. I was only a baby at the time but I’ve heard, in whispers because nobody wants it to get around, like it makes us less of who we are. Bullshit, I’d be living on a goddamn reserve if it wasn’t for them so I say, give ’em their due. These kids, they drew up a bunch of signs, marched down Scarth Street, can you imagine, all up in a rage about the way a bunch of Indians were being treated over in Quebec. Set up a vigil in Victoria Park, right downtown. The chiefs see that shit and they go down there, take over the thing. They kicked the white kids out and pretended it was them all along. They don’t get it though. The irony, you know, about how it was a bunch of middle-class white kids who are responsible for the problems you’ve been having with the gangs. There’s a moral in there somewhere, I say, and if you can figure out what it is then maybe the thing you say you’re writing won’t just be another load of shit being dumped on top of the mess we already got to deal with.”

  I did try, so far as the mandate of my report allowed, to figure out what he meant. In the end, it was beyond me and I resigned Moses Black to the sidelines, a few mumbled quotes all there was to say we’d ever spoken.

  It was Curtis who told me that Mo had played football, had in fact been the second best running back in the league for the four years he played at Thom Collegiate. He set a bunch of records there and would have broken most of the provincial ones too, if Curtis hadn’t beaten him to it. Still, his picture didn’t make the papers but once, under the headline, “Run Indian Run — TC Running Back Beats CM in Season Opener.” Curtis explained that he’d cracked a rib on his first hit but managed 312 yards before being taken out in the third. Mo ran 384 yards, which was still a hell of a total except that Curtis was averaging over five hundred a game. The two of them never met off the field but each made it a habit to be there when the other played. Curtis said it was professional curiosity that brought him out to Mo’s games (“He had some legs on him, that’s for sure” were his exact words), but there was something about the way he said it — maybe it was regret — that made me wonder if that was all there was to it.

  At one of these games Curtis saw a pretty, young girl talking to Mo at the sidelines. Thinking it was Mo’s girlfriend, he sent Terrence over to speak with her. He arranged for them to meet for an ice cream and a walk along the Wascana. It was there that Curtis found out that she was Mo’s cousin and that rejection tasted like Rocky Road.

  Trying to remember her name now and trying to think of what he hoped to learn by stepping into the middle of a dead-end street full of people who thought pain was a place on a map, Curtis saw a spot of something against the streetlights. The whirr of air getting out of harm’s way brought his hands to his chest at the exact moment a football dropped into them. Mechanically his hands tucked the ball into his ribs and he looked up-field at the bodies between himself and Mo. The closest player, in jeans and a ripped muscle shirt, his arms stacked like cordwood, walked slowly towards him, no doubt trying to think of something suitably hard-assed to say. Curtis didn’t give him the chance. Thre
e strides halved the distance between them, and by the fourth Curtis was lost in what he called The Quick, where everything happened too fast for memory. Shifting his weight left, he faked then drew back right and put his shoulder into the man’s sternum, his balled-up hands waving wildly and clipping Curtis’s cheek as he went down. There were five strides to the next player, enough for him to get to top speed where nothing but a bullet’d be able to catch him, and two beyond that before it got tight. By the time the thought had caught up with him, two men were bleeding on the asphalt behind him and he was in the thick of it, fists and elbows and knees all doing their bit to put him down, battering through the wall of bone, blood and sinew with the force of a bull. Then there was a fraction with nothing but a sharp intake of air to tell him that he was free.

  If he had known this was the last time he’d feel what it was like to burst out of the pack and find only open ground ahead, he’d have stopped right there, he told me, so it could have been perfect, even if the chalk line was still ten yards away. As it was, he let the air out of his lungs. His legs chased after it, pushing for one last burst, and an elbow dropped out of the sky.

  On the other side of dark he tasted blood and there was a hand reaching down. He took it and let it pull him back to his feet. For a second he heard the roar of the crowd and looked to the sidelines to check the yardage. A group of kids were cheering on top of a car, their feet stamping the hood. He turned back to Mo, holding the football and looking at the cut on his arm where he’d caught Curtis’s front teeth.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”