Cipher

by John Jantunen

  As Terrence jabbed at the cat with the stick, Curtis said, “Don’t,” a little louder and even went so far as to grab his arm.

  “It’s dead. We can do anything we want with it.”

  Stated so simply that Curtis released his arm and took a step back, prepared to run if the queasiness in his stomach grew into something else.

  “So, what should we do with it?”

  The first thing that popped into Curtis’s head was to leave it on Mrs. Whitaker’s front porch. She was the old woman who lived at the end of his block, the owner of a vicious little terrier that always stuck its maw between the slats of her fence, barking and snarling at him, ferocious enough that he always worried that he’d find the gate open. And when he got past it, intent on turning the corner and being done with his street, Mrs. Whitaker’d be on her porch, barking and snarling too, yelling at him to stop teasing her dog though all he’d ever done was walk past the fence. Once, she’d phoned his mother and told her that he was being cruel to her precious Benny, squirting him in the eyes with vinegar and throwing him bits of chocolate, knowing that even the tiniest bit of chocolate was enough to kill a dog as old and as fragile as he was. His mother hadn’t been angry when she talked to him about the call; she worked in the kitchen at an old-age home and knew all about people like Mrs. Whitaker. But she’d got plenty mad when he called her a crazy old bitch, which is what his father would have said if he’d been there, and he’d lost TV privileges for a week because of it.

  A dead cat on her porch, maybe with its belly slit open and maggots pouring out of it, would have served her right, but Curtis kept his mouth shut, worried that Terrence would actually do it.

  In the end, they buried it because, so said Terrence, that’s what you do with dead things. On their way home, Terrence stopped at the edge of the patch of trees and told Curtis they should go back and dig it up so they could take a picture of it.

  “Why’d we want to do that?” Curtis asked, his doubts about his new friend as persistent as the itch of thorn scratches on his arms.

  “So we can put up posters, you know, in case anyone’s missing a cat.”

  Curtis walked on. After a second Terrence ran to catch up with him and neither spoke until they’d reached the fence separating their two properties. Curtis said goodbye but Terrence kept walking, not giving a sign that he’d heard what the other had said, and Curtis called after him again. Terrence turned and gave him the same smile he’d give his sister after he got out of jail, the one that made her tell Curtis how much he’d changed on the inside. Not knowing Terrence well enough then to know any better, Curtis took the smile, dazed like someone who’d just been hit with a frying pan and didn’t yet know he was about to fall, as a sign that Terrence wasn’t all there. Later, when he reflected on it, he saw that while that was true, saying it like that didn’t take into account where he was: in a world he created, the one where he was God.

  In that world cat posters littered every exposed surface in the neighbourhood. Even before Terrence had put up the last one, having to use his bike to get to the bottom of the stack he’d printed up, his phone would be ringing so that when he got home, his hands stained through with cheap ink and his knuckles scraped with the work of stapling pages to the rough-hewn wood of construction site fences, he’d find a family he’d seen around in the parks and the schoolyard, and they’d be crying but happy too. The mother would hug him and afterwards he’d lead the whole family to where he and Curtis had buried the cat, the smallest, little more than a baby really, carrying a cross made out of popsicle sticks with the name of the cat written on it in indecipherable kid scrawl (“Marsy, we call him Marsy” he’d say meaning Maisy or maybe Marty). Terrence, leading them to the spot, would leave them to their ceremony and their tears and words too gravely spoken for a ten-year-old much less someone younger than three. Afterwards when he saw them around they would say hi to each other and they’d tell him about their new cat and ask about his mother and they’d leave him feeling blessed that they still made kids with a heart as big as the one he had.

  Growing up with this smile, as constant a companion as the football his grandfather had given him — signed by the entire team after the Riders won their first cup in ’66 — Curtis had learned to sit or walk quietly beside his friend until it had begun to wane, a certain sadness crimping its edges. Only then would he ask, “So where were you this time?”

  Terrence would tell him of the future, the one he imagined, filling it with details that he couldn’t possibly have known unless he’d been there. In the breathless excitement he brought to it, Curtis would see it too and they would be bound by it like a promise made by soldiers certain they were about to die.

  Later, having grown into young men, whenever Curtis asked him where he was, the stories Terrence told were always about Curtis and his futurebright (a word Terrence coined). Terrence was on the periphery, cheering him on and, for Curtis, each became like an episode in a favourite TV show that never grew stale regardless of how many times he’d watched it.

  So the last time he saw that smile he had no reason to fear that Terrence was thinking of a future that didn’t include him in its brightness. That he was thinking quite the opposite: of a future that couldn’t be bright without a little darkness to measure it by.

  Bending at the boy he’d hit — drunk and driving his bike fast on an empty stretch of night blackened by factories and chain-link fences, Terrence holding on too tight behind him, his head resting on his back, like a lover would (the only way Curtis could think to say goodbye on the night before he left for the desert) — Curtis had looked up, searching for the smile to tell him that things would turn out well even though the cramp in his belly, and the way his head spun, told him different.

  “Terrence?”

  He’d yelled it, shocked that the evil in the world was real like his father’d always told him it was; Terrence’s hands on the boy’s neck, feeling for a pulse in the body crumpled like a doll thrown from a passing car, doused with blood the colour of diesel; his bicycle in the middle of the street looking like it had been abandoned years ago.

  “It’s okay. Okay.”

  Terrence mouthed the words, it seemed to Curtis in the retelling, because he couldn’t have said them; he was talking on the phone, giving directions, his voice slurred, though he wasn’t really drunk.

  “I killed him. He’s dead. Please come. Hurry.”

  Hanging up, slipping the phone into his pocket, he slung his leg over the motorbike’s seat.

  “Terrence.”

  Feeble, a plea to a merciful god: a plea for forgiveness.

  Terrence smiled and it opened a rift between them, the futurebright shining within. How long he stood staring at it, touchdowns and glory and women and all the rest, he couldn’t say but there were sirens and then the smile was gone, buried beneath the roar of the motorcycle as it leapt forward. Zero to sixty, he thought, too fast for memory, and he watched his bike jump the curb at the end of the block. He saw Terrence catapult into the air, saw him careen past the light post, missing it by inches, and hit the fence on the far side, and felt the cold of the earth beneath his feet for what it really was: a grave as big as the world.

  Then he turned to the darkness and ran.

  nineteen

  Out of the ordinary and back on the sidewalk, the urge to run again weighed heavy in his legs. But to run from what? Drunk as he was on that night, he’d seen clearly what Terrence had done, same as if he’d read it in a book, like what had happened was the climax of some story — disparate strands coming together in a way that, after the shock wore off, he knew was inevitable. After running for hours, but failing to outrun the night, Curtis had collapsed on a park bench by Wascana Lake. In between fevered breaths he’d promised himself that Terrence’s sacrifice would not be in vain. It was what he’d wanted, Curtis now saw, what he’d always wanted: to die like his mother but to have it mean
something beyond anguish and grief. Sitting there on the bench, waiting for the light to leak into the sky, Curtis was amazed that he was capable of such insight and thought that only God could account for such a miracle.

  Now though, looking at the street, his pain muted with Tylenol so that his head felt a thousand miles away, unable to think beyond his last step, there was nothing left of the certainty he’d felt then. There was only a feeling that Terrence was wrapped up in something horrible and that if he ran it would chase him no matter where he went.

  It’s like I’ve died, and haven’t yet realized it.

  A fleeting thought that didn’t stand the test of the sun squinting his eyes nor of the way his neck bones grated when he moved his head to peer towards the intersection a few houses away, looking for a sign to tell him where he was.

  He thought of a movie he’d seen in Afghanistan. It was about a soldier who’d died (but didn’t yet know it). He’d come home and then people, everyone he held dear, began disappearing. It was his mind’s way of comprehending death: an endless loss.

  Maybe it’s true, Curtis mused, letting the thought root him to the sidewalk. Except he didn’t die in battle, like the soldier in the movie. He died three years ago when he hit that kid — Darren. Died beside him on the asphalt, and he was only now beginning to understand. That’s why the last three years seemed like a dream, no more clear to him now than memories of his first step or getting lost in a crowd when he was five.

  “I’m coming for you, Terrence.”

  Spoken resolute and firm, the voice of a commanding officer ordering his men into battle, his legs obeyed, walking him to the end of the block. He looked up at the street sign. The name on it, Montague, was familiar but his head was in a cloud and it took a moment for him to remember that it was the street Rita lived on. He followed it to her blue bungalow then traced his way back to the alley where he’d left his bike. It was still behind the truck on blocks but now there was a pair of legs in his way. He stepped over them and unlocked the compartment under the seat.

  “That your bike?”

  The man who trundled out from under the truck and sat up on the dolly was old, seventy-five or eighty. His grease-stained coveralls were rolled down to his waist exposing a pick-up sticks’ worth of scars, his chest as hard as gravel. Seeing him glaring through milk-white eyes, Curtis thought that he’d have to help him to his feet if the man wanted a shot at kicking his ass, which is what he looked to be thinking about as Curtis took out the gun and checked to make sure the bullet was still there. The sight of the gun didn’t seem to bother the old man but then likely he couldn’t see it, glaucoma reducing his vision to blurred patches of light and dark.

  “This ain’t a goddamned parking lot,” he said.

  “My mistake.”

  Curtis returned the gun to the compartment, slipped on his helmet then flicked the kickstand up. The weight of the bike came as a surprise and it almost got away from him, toppling. He righted it, breathing heavier than he could have imagined from such a simple thing, and pushed it around the front of the truck, away from the old man, who’d somehow got to his feet and was holding a pry bar in his hands like he meant to use it.

  Curtis keyed the ignition, letting the jolt of the machine coming to life feed him its courage, then eased the throttle out, slow and steady. The old man’s anger and the dinginess of the alley gave way to the street and cars, lines pointing straight, and he let a string of green lights lead him to the parking lot behind The Leader-Post.

  The building that houses Regina’s daily is two stories tall and unassuming in a way that always makes me think that it’s about to explode in a shower of broken shards and office furniture. Curtis parked in a space reserved for Desmond Leaks and walked around to the front, knowing he wasn’t going to find the person he was looking for inside. The girl at the front desk, as thin as a colony of ants climbing a bean pole, was nodding patiently at an elderly woman trying to explain why it was the paper’s fault that her lottery numbers kept coming up wrong. Curtis bided his time by smoothing his hair into a rough approximation of what it looked like on the enlarged front page framed on the wall across from the counter.

  Make Us Proud, CM!

  (We know you will)

  That’s what it said above a stone-faced picture of him wearing a grey army T-shirt, holding a football outstretched in one hand and a desert camouflaged helmet tucked under his arm.

  It’s the front page of the bestselling edition of The Leader-Post (ever). Originally, I understand, he was holding his old team helmet when they took the picture but the editor got it into his head that it’d look better the other way so he had it photoshopped or some such thing. That was about the level of integrity Curtis had come to expect from the paper. There was only one reporter he knew he could trust and it was him that Curtis asked for when the unlucky octogenarian finally shuffled off.

  “Desmond Leaks,” he said, not bothering to look any closer at the ant lady than the bulge of hair tied at the back of her head.

  “He’s out.”

  “I know.”

  The ant lady took a moment to digest what he’d said, or maybe she was thinking about what it’d feel like to run her fingers along the soft blond strands running up both his arms that, I’ve been told, made him shimmer when the stadium lights caught them just right.

  “You want me to call him?”

  She was reaching for the phone already and Curtis let her get it to her ear.

  “I’d rather he be surprised.”

  “I’m not supposed to give out the whereabouts of our staff.”

  “He won’t mind.”

  “That a promise?”

  Curtis was too tired and sore to give her the response he’d worked up for when someone threw his own words back at him so instead he just said, “Yeah.”

  The receptionist wrote something on a Post-it note and stuck it to his chest, her fingers lingering long enough to let Curtis know that she was a woman, anatomical evidence notwithstanding. Curtis turned away from the desk and peeled the slip of paper from his shirt. On it was written ‘Coffee’s Diner.’ He’d never heard of it but the address written below seemed familiar and as he walked towards the door, he tried to locate it in his mind, without success.

  I myself knew the place well. I used to eat there on the occasion that I found it open (the Coffees kept odd hours for a breakfast joint, opening every day at a different time, to keep their clientele from a life of apathy, Mr. Coffee told me, and sometimes not opening until midnight so as to get a stab at the bar crowd and quite often not opening at all for days at a time). I always had menu item number 1: three eggs over easy with toast, home fries and my choice of ham. It was $2.99 and came with a complimentary cup of coffee (refills were fifty cents extra). It was as good a deal as you were likely to find in Regina although that’s not why the place was invariably packed, with line-ups on the sidewalk if its hours of operation happened, by chance, to fall around a mealtime. The reason for its popularity was the sign painted in the window: How Far Have You Gone, At Coffee’s Diner?

  It was the diner’s hook. That’s what Mr. Coffee called it, and there’s no doubt that it had worked for a time so I won’t get into my opinion of it one way or the other, except to recall a line from a short story I once read: catching suckers in the city is like fishing for bass with dynamite. The man who wrote it called himself O. Henry, a pseudonym he took from a guard that he met while serving time. This was almost a century ago, and judging from the crowds at Coffee’s I’d say he has as much claim on immortality as anyone.

  The first time a customer came in, the hostess, Mr. Coffee’s diminutive wife, gave out a card with a number on it (mine was 107) and the only thing Mr. Coffee would cook for that person was menu item number 1. The next time you came in, Mrs. Coffee asked for your number and you were allowed to order item number two (French toast, $3.25) or, like me, you cou
ld have number 1 again, with the caution that if you did, the next time you come in you’d only get the two choices again. The only way to get more choices was to eat the next item on the menu, a somewhat spurious proposition since you never knew what the next menu item was until it was sitting in front of you. It’d be breakfast for sure, and slightly more expensive than the last, but if it’s poached salmon on toast and you have a fatal allergy to fish you’d better eat it because if you didn’t it’d be the last time you’d be eating anything at Coffee’s Diner.

  As I said, I always had item number 1 and it surprised me how so few followed my lead. Most of the people fell for the hook — line and sinker too — and Mr. Coffee had a chart on a blackboard behind the till showing how many people were at what stage on his menu, all the way up to 100. I did some rough calculations and I figured menu item 100 must go for somewhere in the vicinity of $75, which is a little stiff for breakfast if you ask me. Before he closed, not two months after the events I’m relating, the chart said that at least three people had made it that far and, so goes Mr. Coffee’s promise, were entitled to a free T-shirt (black with a golden ‘100’ on the front). A rather dodgy gimmick, as I say, but for $2.99 and the best cup of coffee I’ll likely ever drink, I wasn’t about to complain.

  It being close enough towards noon to call it lunch when Curtis pulled up in front of the one-story brick building matching the address on his Post-it note, there was a line-up inside a roped-off area on the sidewalk. Curtis walked past it, paying no mind to the glares of the couple next in line as he stepped through the front door. The jingle of the bells called him to the attention of Mrs. Coffee. She’s a brazenly stout middle-aged woman who, early in her life, rejected the idea that her height — four feet and inches — meant she’d be forever condemned to looking up at people. At Coffee’s she stood on a platform that her husband had built just inside the entrance and looked not unlike the barker at a Bradburian carnival. Everywhere else she spoke directly into your midsection, which is more disconcerting than it sounds.