Cipher

by John Jantunen

  No more words were spoken between them than would have been if they’d met on a web strung between two branches. The spider unslung his rifle, setting it on the hood of the closest car, never once taking his eyes off her. He stood, relaxed, his hands at his side, a gesture meant to mock her. A deep breath, a quick exhale and she shot out at him (that much she remembered from what her father had said to her brother, she most often with her mother so she caught only snatches of his instruction). Hands and feet like knives thrown at his face, aiming six inches behind his head (another fragment overheard from the kitchen) so that her arm was still bent, its power unspent, when the spider grabbed her by the wrist. With a flick, he snapped her arm at the elbow, and the crack sounded enough like a starting pistol to propel Curtis out from under the car.

  Rolling, he was on his feet before the light had found him. Four strides to reach the spider holding Terrence; so quick that the spider hadn’t yet turned to face him when the butt end of the gun in Curtis’s hand crushed the man’s nose. He dropped out of sight and the shadows consumed him. Curtis spun to face the other one, his gun leaving no doubt as to who was in charge.

  The spider held Amanda’s other arm with two hands, ready to break it as one would a piece of kindling (and afterwards who knows? Break her legs too, then toss her up onto the hood of the car beside his rifle and fulfill the promise that her body had made him). He released her, his hands raised in a caricature of surrender, his eyes betraying the truth: they’d meet again.

  Curtis knew the look from his time on the field and in the desert; one that boys playing at being men and men playing at being boys always wore when they were on the losing side of a game or a gun; one that it would take getting beat or shot to erase. Having neither the time nor the desire for either, Curtis turned to Amanda who had both time and desire in abundance. He shrugged and that was all she needed to get her to her feet, her broken arm cradled in the other, her eyes inflamed. She aimed her first kick six inches above the spider’s groin, robbing him of any pretence, and he crumpled to the floor.

  Then Amanda, now Ling-Ling for once and for all time, stepped into his light and made it her own.

  thirty-five

  “His hands were swollen up like two balloons. Bound together so tightly with a plastic zip-tie they were dark red and the tips of them had the feel of ripe grapes, ready to burst.”

  (So said Curtis, the last time we ever spoke of such things. Shortly after, his life would be shortened by a blood clot so that he’d miss, by three months, seeing the son he’d claimed as his own graduate from high school, though he’d live long enough to meet the girl Mason would take to the prom, as pretty a young woman as he himself could have hoped for, and would get to offer the advice his father had never given him: treat her well and always listen to her and never only pretend to when your mind is on other things.)

  “We made it into a hallway, don’t ask me how, I guess there must have been some light leaking out from under the doorway leading to it from the garage because otherwise we’d have never found it. The hallway led past the visiting team’s change room and along the wall there were paintings of all the players on the Roughriders. They were ten feet tall, the size of giants, each of them snarling and looking mean, meant to intimidate the other team. I had a picture up there too, right at the far end where the hallway opens up onto their benches, except I wasn’t snarling, I was smiling, probably so that the last thing they’d see before hitting the field was how happy they’d made me, just by showing up.

  “I didn’t see myself though, not yet, I was busy pulling at the doors lining the walls, looking for something I could use to cut off the ties turning Terrence’s hands purple. He still had the tape over his mouth, I hadn’t removed it. I guess I’d forgotten, or maybe I’d left it there on purpose, I don’t know, and he was shuffling along behind me. Finally, I got to the last door and found it locked like the others. It struck me then that he’d never be able to ride on my bike with his hands tied, much less get over the fence, and that if I didn’t find something to cut them loose with, we were both screwed. Well, I couldn’t think of any reason not to anymore, so I yanked the tape off his mouth and pulled out the dirty rag, and right away I knew why it had taken me this long to remove it.

  “‘Did you do what they said you did, Terrence?’

  “That’s what I asked him, not meaning to but there it was.

  “‘Goddammit, Terrence,’ I screamed, ‘Answer me!’

  “But he wouldn’t say a word, it was like he’d used up the store between us with all those stories he’d told when we were growing up. He just looked up at the wall behind me. I turned to look too and there I was, smiling five feet wide. How long I looked at myself, it’s hard to say, longer than I’d care to admit. When I turned back to the hallway, Terrence was gone. And, uh, that’s the last time I ever saw him.”

  (A lie, so close to the end, his and ours, after a lifetime of telling me the truth. I forgive him now, this indiscretion. I couldn’t then, him thinking I was a threat that far along. So I asked him what happened to the bullet. He turned away from me and wheeled out of the kitchen, into the bathroom or his bedroom, connected by the same hall, I didn’t follow him to see which, the lie driving a wedge between us ever after.)

  The bullet, the only thing that matters this late in the telling, has a different tale. Speaking through the science of forensics, its drama is not dulled by the clinical jargon in which it was written.

  With the bullet as my witness I know that Curtis followed Terrence out of the hallway to where the visiting team’s benches sat straight along the edge of the field, so green it looked painted on, the white lines like exclamation marks on a blank page. Terrence was in the middle of the field, high-wire walking on the fifty-yard line, his body swaying backwards and forwards, close to toppling, his legs like two sticks. Curtis ran to him, checking over his shoulder at The Stable and the window at which Lester Mann stood watching, unsure how this fit into his plan but willing to let it play out, the same way he never called down to his coach until after the game was done.

  Curtis ran to his friend, yelling his name, breathless when he got there even though he’d run ten times as far in a single play without being the least bit winded. He grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. Up until that moment Terrence had been thinking about what he’d have to say to make Curtis do what he had to do. He hadn’t come up with anything beyond an endless succession of words that explained too much but did little to incite the critical action, separated from the thought that had conceived it by days, no longer a span than the width of the kitchen table where he’d waited for Curtis to awaken, the gun and the bullet all that was left between them. Terrence knew then what he’d have to say but now the words seemed feeble or were lost and he threw himself at his best and maybe only real friend.

  He mashed his lips against the others’ — Curtis’s dried out from the desert and prickly to the touch, Terrence’s moistened by his tongue, getting there just in time. Curtis, in his surprise, did not push him away. He simply stood there and let the kiss run its course. After his breath was expired, his heart pounding, the hair on his arms standing at attention, Terrence lingered for a moment. Taking a quick nip of air, he plucked one of the petals of skin curling upwards from Curtis’s bottom lip between two teeth. He peeled it back so that, for Curtis, the kiss ended with a sharp pang and the taste of blood in his mouth. Retreating a step, Terrence mouthed the only words he had left inside him (I love you) and Curtis raised the gun in his hand. He pointed it at Terrence’s chest and pulled the trigger.

  thirty-six

  The parking lot was the same as it had been when Curtis had crossed it earlier; the same waves of heat seeping from the fresh asphalt, perhaps pushing a little harder against the cool night air; the same pools of light at carefully spaced intervals, though the shadows of moths caught within were a trifle more persistent. He stepped out a side door, his stride n
o longer governed by stealth, and walked to the fence, still propelled by the power of two legs (nobody more surprised than myself when I heard that he was in the hospital, that he would never walk again, certain that if he didn’t meet his fate at the hands of Lester Mann, he’d be spared).

  He climbed over the fence and dug a hole under a bush beside the tracks and buried the gun. His hands muddied, his fingernails caked with dirt, but otherwise unsullied by the preceding events, he mounted his bike. Thoughts of a warm embrace and a shower guided him through Regina to where Victoria Street connected with the TransCanada, and from there it was a straight line to White City and a house he’d never lived in though one he still thought of as home.

  His bike leapt at the chance for some real speed after two days puttering around city streets and he lent his will to the throttle. With the asphalt passing effortlessly beneath him, there was little to suggest he was a changed man, someone who knew the price of all that speed. Such was the nature of the fold that once it had come back together it was seamless, the last three years lost within its crease, and he was for once the man he was always meant to be.

  And hadn’t Lester Mann said as much at the edge of the field, Curtis’s back to Terrence, dead on the fifty-yard line, the home team’s benches funnelling him towards a hallway painted the same way as the visitors’, but for different reasons. Clayton Farber had appeared in front of him, blocking his way, his gun drawn, looking like he meant to use it, pausing only to glance at his boss, waiting for a nod, or maybe just the sight of his back as he walked away.

  His boss, striding across the field, gave him neither, but he raised his gun anyway, aiming it at Curtis’s heart.

  Only then did Lester yell, “Stop!”

  Clayton lowered the gun and Curtis walked past, one foot in front of the other carrying him slow and deliberate into the tunnel ahead, so that he was still near enough to hear Lester Mann say, more a statement than a question, “Don’t you know who that is.”

  He was Curtis Mays. He knew it from the way the road ahead was empty save for the brightness he brought to it, from how the yellow line, broken into fragments for everyone else, blurred into one line just for him and above all, from how when he slipped his fingers from the handlebars, the wind lifted him off his seat.

  He was flying.

  thirty-seven

  The world was white and smelled of bleach and sounded like a baby’s cry.

  Curtis awoke in the hospital. Robin Millhauser was by his side, Mason at her breast (as she’d been every day since she’d given birth on the same night he was brought in by ambulance, a sign, she’d told herself, of better things to come than a lifetime behind the till at Toys “R” Us, a promotion to assistant manager her only hope). Curtis wasn’t sure where he was or who the woman was now clutching his hand, but he knew why she didn’t say anything, why she stared into his eyes with such tender devotion. It was because he was Curtis Mays, the only thing he knew for certain. It would take months of physio, his legs as dead as his best friend, before he’d cease being that person, instead becoming someone else, and maybe, he’d think, just as well.

  During the weeks he slept, his Curtis Maysness still locked safely inside of him, Bob Hammond stopped asking questions about the death of Terrence Bell, shot once through the heart and found by the side of the highway on the outskirts of Qu’appelle, and of The Killer Dragons, discovered in a field by a farmer who’d seen the flames and the smoke, their car on fire, the three bodies inside burnt beyond recognition so that it required dental records to figure out who was who.

  “It was the Indians,” he told Desmond Leaks, off the record. Desmond asked him if it was the start of a gang war. Bob answered that he didn’t doubt it, and The Leader-Post printed what he said, calling him an unnamed source inside the Regina Police Services. Public outcry fuelled a commission from the mayor’s office and the commission demanded that the police act to stem the tide of violence. They did and their midnight raids and their moonlit tours and the mysterious bruises and broken bones that appeared when prisoners were locked in for the night really were the start of something. So The Warpath earned their name, and Moses Black became the most wanted man in Saskatchewan since Louis Riel. Everyone forgot about Trisha Mann and Terrence Bell and, after a while, they even forgot about Curtis Mays.

  I wrote my report while the city was under siege and it was filed away, read by no one except Bob Hammond who wasn’t paid to read it. In it I said a whole lot of things a whole lot of other people had said before, although never specifically about Regina: how it wasn’t really about the Natives or the drugs or the violence or the poverty, it was about us and this place and how we treated it and each other. The last person I’d have expected to have agreed with me, agreed, and maybe it didn’t make us friends but it did make us something less than enemies.

  The gang war ended, Mo Black hunted down and killed while I sat at home, alone. Thinking of Ruby, and of what might have been, and of Mo and Curtis and Terrence and Lester Mann and Amy, and of all the rest, I remembered an opening line I’d once written, and it led to a second line and a third.

  Shortly after Curtis awoke in ICU, I paid him my first visit. In time, I became an almost-member of his family and I grew to love Robin like the daughter I never had and Mason like a grandson. Slowly, the words piling on top of each other, I began to think that maybe I was writing about something other than what I had intended at the start, and that a story for our times has to be about more than greed and envy and the way they twist us.

  about the author

  John Jantunen lives in Guelph, Ontario. This is his debut novel.

  Copyright © John Jantunen, 2014

  Published by ECW Press

  2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Jantunen, John, 1971–, author

  Cipher : a mystery / John Jantunen.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77090-615-0 (ePUB)

  978-1-77090-614-3 (PDF)

  978-1-77041-200-2 (PBK.)

  i. Title.

  PS8619.A6783C56 2014 C813’.6 C2014-902593-9 C2014-902594-7

  Cover design: Cyanotype

  Cover images: man © ivan101/Shutterstock; field © Mark Herreid/Shutterstock

  Back cover image: © welcomia/Shutterstock

  Author photo: Jeremy Luke Hill

  Type: Troy Cunningham

  The publication of Cipher has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,793 individual artists and 1,076 organizations in 232 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution
of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.