Cipher

by John Jantunen

  JC: I understand this is difficult for you, Mrs. Hering, but the court’s time is limited. Do you have anything to say that has bearing on your son’s sentence?

  GH: Crying, yes, he cried. He never seemed to stop.

  JC: Mrs. Hering.

  GH: He cried from the day he was born, that’s my memory. Cried about everything. They said, the doctors, that there was nothing wrong with him, that he shouldn’t be crying like he did. I don’t think they believed us, how much he cried. But he did, tears as my witness, how much he cried. I —

  JC: Please, Mrs. Hering.

  GH: It was always about the little things. We wouldn’t buy him something he wanted. Like all kids I guess, but he cried for days over a toy he’d seen on TV. Cried until we bought it then he’d break it the moment that it was out of the box and cry for a week because he wanted another. Later, later he cried because his father was too old to play football with him like the other fathers did. Not much to cry about, I know, less to explain why he is like he is, but it’s all I have. And the tears would turn to rage. He’d wreck the house; once with a baseball bat, he broke every window. And he would taunt us, horribly. We lived in fear, your honour, from the time he was ten, and already as big as a man and stronger than his father, and faster too. We should have called the police, I know. This is what I am trying to say. It was our fault. We were fools. Old and foolish. Please understand. We thought we could manage. Please, your honour. Take him, I can’t, can’t, I can’t.

  The record ended there, with a period, when three dots, or perhaps a dash, surely would have better captured how she’d been interrupted and led outside so that she could calm down and get a drink of water: a period like it was the end of the matter as far as the court was concerned.

  It was far from the end for her, though. She became his mother again. In prison, sentenced that first time for three years so that he wouldn’t be out until he was legally a man, he became her son. It was a relationship measured in compartments of time, one hour every week, but precious: one hour more a week than they’d had for as long as she could remember. What they talked about, or even if they talked at all, was not recorded. Her visits, over three prison terms, numbered in the hundreds. Enough of being a mother for a book of its own, and certainly enough for Mrs. Walter Hering who never saw him otherwise, so that neighbours of fifteen years had no idea she had a son even though they shared their backyards with each other’s grandchildren and passed beer and canisters of propane over the fence when the other was lacking. Drops of motherhood, distilled, flavouring her life, like the vanilla she added to the olive oil she rubbed on the dry skin behind her ears.

  When he was released, and she wasn’t anything to him, she wept and prayed for him to do something wrong, not at all like a mother should. God, being what he was, answered her prayers, this time giving her exactly what she wanted: a few more drops of motherhood. Separated from her son by Plexiglas when he was in the Saskatchewan Federal Penitentiary and across a picnic table from him when he’d earned the right to be at Riverbend, she loved him in those drops like she’d never loved any of her children; a love made more so because she kept it to herself.

  An extraordinary woman, by any definition I can think of.

  On the night of the fire, she was awoken by the alarm outside her bedroom, her room hazy, her husband lying in the bed beside her already dead from the smoke, flames engulfing the stairs, her only escape, so that she was found, burnt up, her skin as crisp as dragonfly wings, huddled in the tub. She was dead, I was told, before the tub had fallen through two floors and into the basement, finished with wood panelling and a shag carpet, a washer/dryer combo and a three-piece bathroom, as a signing bonus when they’d bought the house fifteen years ago, their deed rubber-stamped by none other than Lester Mann, the same person who’d kill them for the part their son played in his grief.

  twenty-one

  The tub where she’d huddled, praying for help and not, for the last time, getting the answer she’d wanted, sat in her front yard when Curtis stepped to the police barrier blocking the road. Six firemen had dragged it out of the basement. One of them had covered Mrs. Hering with a blanket until she could be shipped off to the morgue. The blanket had been reclaimed and someone else had draped a piece of green shag over the tub to hide the stain of charcoal seared into the enamel so that to Curtis, it looked like a bump in the lawn, and not a tub at all.

  Curtis turned back to his bike and saw Desmond Leaks leaning against a car on the far side of the street. It had been there when he’d pulled up: a blue Neon so innocuous that it would’ve had to be standing on its hind wheels for him to give it more than a glance. He hadn’t seen anyone inside it, or rather he hadn’t looked, and hadn’t heard Desmond get out and walk around to the passenger side where he now leaned, aiming a camera at him. For a moment the fear was there in his legs again. He told himself that Desmond wasn’t a threat so it didn’t matter that he’d snuck up on him, but he couldn’t get his legs to believe it.

  Desmond took the picture and released the camera, letting it hang loose from its strap. It sat propped on his belly, the size of a breadbox though his arms and legs were as thin as cattails. His hands found the pocket of his jacket like he was reaching for a pack of smokes, the way journalists embedded with his unit always did after hearing even the distant boom of an IED. Instead he pulled out a pad and a pen and wrote something then held it up.

  “The Hero Returns,” he said in case Curtis couldn’t read what he’d written. “It’ll be on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.”

  Curtis bent low and scooped a handful of the gravel piled in the crease between the road and the sidewalk and flung it at Desmond with the casual ease of a lateral pass. Desmond, expecting the attack, already had his back turned when the rocks pelted him, peppering his sports coat with dust and making the rat-a-tat sound of machine-gun fire on the windows and doors of the Neon. Turning to Curtis, half-expecting another volley to be in the air, he held his hands up in mock surrender.

  “I give, I give.”

  Curtis strode towards him, his hand raised to toss a Hail Mary, though it was empty this time except for a few grains clinging to the sweat on his palms.

  “I waited for you,” Curtis said.

  Desmond dropped his eyes and slipped his notepad back into his pocket. He wasn’t really embarrassed. It was an act, the same as when he’d said he’d go freelance after he’d taken the picture that would grace the front cover of The Leader-Post the day Curtis left; that he’d track him through Hell if need be so people could see firsthand what he was doing for his God and country.

  Curtis had known it was a lie because he’d known Desmond as long as he’d known anyone outside his family; longer than Terrence by six years. His mother was a close friend of Desmond’s mom. He’d called her Aunt Carol until he was a teenager. Desmond, five years his senior, had babysat him until he was twelve and allowed to stay home by himself even though, by the time he was nine, Curtis outweighed Desmond and no longer felt the need to do anything that the older boy told him to. In all that time, he’d never found a reason to genuinely like Desmond. He tried to believe that it wasn’t only because scoliosis had bent Desmond over to the side, drawing one shoulder up almost to his cheek, giving him the look of something made out of Play-Doh by a pre-schooler.

  Before Curtis was old enough to form his own mind about such things, he’d taken his father’s view about the strange misshapen boy who watched over him when his mother was drinking coffee with Auntie Carol or, later, whom he sometimes found sitting on the couch in his living room when he got up at night to use the bathroom, growls and screams and other terrible noises drawing him to the end of the hall. Desmond would be watching TV and the young Curtis would press himself tight against the door frame, too scared by the sight of all the monsters and the helpless young women and the blood to return to his room. One night Desmond turned to him and the pale glow cast from t
he television made him into a monster worse than anything he’d seen on the screen. Curtis scurried back to bed and lay counting from one to a hundred, endlessly, waiting for the click of the front door to tell him that his parents were home. Afterwards no amount of screaming or growling would draw him into the living room and whenever he came across Desmond in the street or the playground he would throw rocks at him and call him names like Troll or Goblin.

  Odd then, that it was Desmond who was the first to see Curtis for what he would become. And odder still that he would do his best to help Curtis along the path that had been chosen for him, if not by God (which Desmond refused to believe in), then by a conspiracy of nature and circumstance. It was he who took the famous photo of Curtis, aged eight, playing pick-up football in the park: the ball tucked under his arm, his shoulder bent into some other kid’s face, his name long forgotten, so that it was like a nuclear bomb had gone off on his chin, sending a blast wave rippling through his cheek; so serious as he knocked the eight-year-old into obscurity and took his first stride into the hearts and minds of the good people of Regina.

  The picture won the annual Leader-Post photo contest and even then, when Desmond should have been getting all the accolades, the questions were always about Curtis. At the time, they called him The Boy and the answers Desmond gave always caught people off guard because they didn’t know that he used sarcasm like most people used soap and always talked like he was a character in a book whose role was to tell the truth regardless of how little The Hero wanted to hear it.

  So he’d say, “He’s a freak all right. Way I heard it is, his mom fucked a bull and every night she prays he won’t grow horns so her husband don’t find out.”

  Or, “Damn right he looks mean. If your dad kept you locked in a cage and fed you dog food, you’d look mean too.”

  The people would go away stowing their contempt behind pursed lips and shortly they’d forget about The Boy. And that’s where the story would have ended if Curtis’s dad hadn’t taken the photo as a sign. Seeing it in the paper, he would say for years after, he was as proud as a father could have been even though, truthfully, he’d never been a big fan of the game. (Growing up, Kelly Mays’s father had been crazy about football and he would get drunk and yell at his mother, or hit her, when the Riders lost and would do other things to her when they won. Listening to her crying and moaning, and sometimes howling through the drywall, Kelly would pull the covers over his eyes, the way his son would do years later after Desmond let him watch horror movies from the end of the hall.) Kelly immediately enrolled his son in the Regina Minor Football League. Halfway through the season he lobbied to have him moved up a division since the other eight-year-olds posed absolutely no goddamn challenge to The Boy. They did and two games later they moved him up to the next division so that he was playing with twelve-year-olds, and still there was no one who could catch him once he got the ball in his hands.

  Desmond Leaks, a teenager by then — awkward and hateful towards the world on days when it hurt to get out of bed but determined not to give in to bitterness — came to every one of Curtis’s games and took pictures. He always sent his best one to The Leader-Post and the editor saw in them something special. He contacted Desmond and asked him if he wanted a job. Desmond said he would and shortly after he was spending most of the time he wasn’t in class taking pictures of baseball players and bowlers and basketball games. Whenever he handed them in, the editor would say that they were good, better certainly than the pictures he usually got. Then, one day, he spread the latest batch of photos out on his desk and told Desmond that while they were good they lacked that certain something special that had first caught his eye. Desmond, who knew this to be true, told him that it was because they didn’t have Curtis Mays. The editor smiled at Desmond for being young and misunderstanding him, and the next time Desmond submitted a batch of photos, he made sure to include one of Curtis. The editor spotted it amongst a dozen or so others and sent his secretary after the young photographer. She found Desmond leaning against the water fountain with his arms raised and crooked like a scarecrow so that it looked to her that he was a marionette, his strings invisible and the silly grin on his face painted.

  She led him back to the editor’s office and closed the door behind him. She didn’t look back while her boss held up the photo of a football player, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, standing alone on the one-yard line, facing away from his end zone. He clutched the ball in his hand, hanging limp at his side, like he had all the time in the world even though, at the edge of the frame, there was a member of the opposing team charging towards him. All that could be seen of this other boy was a knee, a hand and part of his helmet but you could tell that he was older than the first, fifteen or sixteen. Measuring the space from him to the boy, just standing there, the editor figured that there couldn’t have been more than two strides between them. It was the way the boy seemed reconciled to the hopelessness of his fate that made him stop and stare and send his secretary to chase after Desmond.

  “See, this is what I’m talking about,” the editor said while the secretary was settling back at her desk.

  “That’s because it’s Curtis Mays.”

  The editor frowned, thinking Desmond was making fun of him, and looked at the picture again. The number on the boy’s chest was 21 and it did strike him as familiar. He called his secretary and asked her to gather up all of the photos Desmond had ever submitted and have them delivered to his office by that afternoon. Desmond, already on his way out the door, saw the gesture the secretary made as she hung up the phone and took a guess as to the word she muttered under her breath. He paused a moment to give the editor a chance to ask the question he knew had been on his mind since he’d first come across the picture.

  “What happened to number 21 after you took it?”

  “He scored a touchdown, of course.”

  Desmond closed the door, leaving the editor staring at Curtis, trying to work out the physics of the thing. Later, with every photo Desmond had ever taken of The Boy spread out on the floor of his office, he stood on his desk and saw the truth of what Desmond had said. Not knowing what else to do about it, he gave Desmond a raise.

  The increase in Desmond’s pay meant that he had money to spend on a car and nice clothes and the latest music to blare from his top-of-the-line stereo when he pulled into the parking lot at school. Still, he couldn’t get a girl to look at him for longer than it took her to turn away. Taking his cue from the photo of Curtis that had led to his sudden change in fortune, Desmond was determined not to resign himself to the hopelessness of his fate. He had the photo enlarged and hung it on the inside of his closet door. Seeing it there every morning as he dressed endowed him with a brazenness that he’d have sworn was beyond him and, over the summer holidays, he made a list of all the girls at his school. He ranked them according to the ones he desired the most then set out on a course so reckless he was certain that it could only end in calamity.

  On the first day back, he approached Shelly Waters. Not caring that four of her closest friends were there (ranked 6, 8, 15 and 22 respectively) he asked her how much it would cost him to have sexual intercourse with her.

  “What did you say to me, you little freak?” she asked, quite, I would say, within her rights.

  “Sexual intercourse,” he repeated then added, so his meaning was clear, “With me. How much?”

  As certain as the editor had been that she was being made fun of, Shelly stomped away and in homeroom Desmond crossed her name off the list. By the end of the week he’d made it to number 19 and on the second week he made it all the way to 42. During the third week something unforeseen happened. Between asking number 47 and 49 (48 was out for a week with the flu) Donna Klimpt approached him while he ate his lunch on the bleachers overlooking the school’s football field. She sat beside him and waited for him to finish his sandwich then stated, as simply and as plainly as she could, “Sev
enty-five.”

  Desmond slipped the list from the folds of his notebook and scanned down the names until he came to Donna’s at number 61 (so far down — though her body was slim and her breasts, bursting from sweater and T-shirt alike, were never far from his sight in history class — because of a rather unfortunate grouping of freckles on the left side of her face). He hadn’t planned for this contingency and part of him desperately wanted to believe that he could do better than 61, maybe something in the low fifties. Still, he reasoned, better not to look a gift horse in the mouth or count two birds in a bush or a hundred other things he half remembered adults saying to him that seemed to fit.

  After only the slightest pause he said, “All right.”

  Desmond and Donna’s romance — for that’s how he saw it, the money that he gave her after they met seeming to him a more honest exchange for services rendered than movies and dinners and school jackets — lasted through to the end of their senior year. It was around their seventh or eighth month together that they came to my attention. At the time, I was serving as the Regina Police Services Youth Liaison Officer, a position that cycled me through the high schools on a biweekly rotation. Cramped into what I assumed was a broom closet during the fifty weeks that I wasn’t occupying it, Donna’s guidance counsellor had paid me a visit. He was a hollow-faced man with deep-set eyes, folds of dark baggy skin drooping underneath, with a beard meant to make him look less like a ghoul (but which, I found, had the opposite effect). He walked past my door three times during the course of a morning, each time looking sheepishly in my direction (I always stood in front of it to make my presence known and also because the odour of cleaning supplies had my head in a fuzz if I spent more than a half-hour inside). Finally, I asked him what was up and, without a word, he slipped into my closet-cum-office.