The Lock Artist (10 page)

I had never been that good with the sign language, remember, but it all started to come back to me as I taught him a few signs every day. Eventually, a few of the signs became his favorites. He’d flash them at me when we were in the hallway, like they were our secret code. Grabbing the thumb and waving for “incompetent.” The double twist to the nose for “boring.” If a particular girl was walking by, the hand pulled away from the mouth for “hot.” Or his own invention, both hands pulled away, meaning “double hot,” I guess.

We ate lunch together every day, then we went to our art class. Me and my friend. You have to understand what this meant to me. It was something I’d never had before. Between hanging out with Griffin and the art I was trying to do—hell, it was almost like I had a real life now. Everyone in the school started treating me a little differently, too. I mean, it wasn’t like I was suddenly a sports star or anything. Kids who were good at art or music were way down on the totem pole, but at least I was
on
the totem pole now. I wasn’t just the Miracle Boy anymore, the mute kid with the mysterious trauma in his past. Now I was just the quiet kid who could draw.

Like I said, this was such a rare time in my life. In a way, I don’t even want to keep going with my story. Just stop it right there, let you think, yeah, this kid turned out all right. He had a rough start, he found something to do with his life. Everything worked out okay.

Of course, that wouldn’t be the truth. Not by a long shot.

Fast-forward to my junior year. Griffin’s senior year. I was sixteen and a half then. My hair was such an unruly mess I had to finally prune it back just enough to see where I was going. I could tell that the girls in school were looking at me differently now. I was allegedly a decent-looking guy, although at the time it would have been news to me. But hell, if you add in the mysteriousness factor, I guess I could see how I’d be worth a look, at least. I even thought about the possibility of going out on a date. There was this new girl in our art class. Nadine. She was blond and pretty and was apparently on the tennis team. Not like the other girls in art class at all. She’d give me a shy smile whenever I saw her in the hallway.

“She wants you, dude.” Griffin’s voice in my ear one day. “Go ask her out. I mean, hell, I’ll do it for you. I’ll be your messenger.”

I had a car now. Uncle Lito’s old two-toned Grand Marquis. We could have gone and seen a movie or something. It was just . . . I don’t know, the thought of sitting there in a restaurant before the movie. Or driving her home afterward. I’d listen to her, of course. I’d listen to whatever she’d have to say. Then what? She couldn’t talk forever. Nobody can, not even an American high school girl. When the silence finally came, what would I do? Start writing her notes?

So maybe I wasn’t ready for that scene yet. Still, I hadn’t ruled it out. Nadine wasn’t going anywhere. In the meantime, a few people were actually saying hello to me when I walked past them in the hallway. They were showing my artwork in the big display case at the front of the school now. I was still doing a lot of pencil and charcoal then. Griffin had a big painting out there, too, with his outrageous splashes of color. I wasn’t sure what I’d do the next year, when I was a senior and Griffin was long gone to art school, but I wasn’t worried about that yet.

We ended up in gym class that semester. Of all the places in the world for my whole life to start turning . . . it was that very first day, when we were opening the padlocks on our little gym lockers. I couldn’t help noticing that if I pulled down while I was spinning, the dial seemed to catch in twelve
different spots, and one of those spots just so happened to be the last number in the combination. Was it my imagination or did that spot feel a little different from the other eleven?

When I went home that night, I was still spinning the dial on that padlock in my mind and thinking about what was going on inside. By then I had already gone about as far as I could go with key locks. I mean, I was pretty sure I could open just about anything. But this was a new challenge that made me remember why I had been so drawn to locks in the first place. As I worked the dial one direction, then the other, I could feel how it made the separate cams turn underneath it. It made me wonder how hard it would be to open the damned thing if I didn’t know the combination.

So I went back to that same old antique store, I bought a few combination locks, and I took them apart. That’s how I learned.

It was that same semester. In November, the week of the big game against Lakeland. You see, Lakeland was the newer high school in the district, a few miles to the east. Milford was usually pretty good at football, and they’d been dominating the big game ever since Lakeland got built. I suppose because we still had our shabby old dump of a school, it must have felt pretty good to kick Lakeland’s ass in anything. That had changed the year before, when Lakeland finally won for the first time ever. Because the varsity players usually only played for two years, that meant that the Milford seniors had just one more chance.

Our best player was a senior man named Brian Hauser, a.k.a. “the House.” We didn’t exactly move in the same social circles, Brian and I, but even I could see that he was bouncing off the walls in school that week, getting himself psyched up for the last game of his high school career. Griffin and I were still getting through our semester of gym, and our class happened to be last period, so by the time we were getting dressed, the football players were usually getting ready for practice. That always got Griffin going, hearing the whole team making a racket on the other side of the locker room. He’d always have a running commentary for me on what the football players were saying, how sophisticated their conversation was, how much sensitivity they showed to the opposite sex, and so on. He kept his voice down, because he didn’t actually want to end up stuffed in a locker. But today, we could really hear the football team going at it. Brian Hauser, in particular, was making a hell of a racket and banging on his locker like a madman.

“Motherfucking son of a bitch! Stupid whorebag fagbiscuit!”

Then more voices from his teammates.

“Fagbiscuit! What the hell is a fagbiscuit?”

“That’s a new one, House.”

“I know what a fagbiscuit is—”

“No, man. Don’t even go there. I don’t want to know what a fagbiscuit is.”

“When I think they can’t get any wittier,” Griffin said to me, “they surpass even their own high standards.”

There was more banging, followed by laughter. I don’t know what possessed Griffin to go check it out at that point, but he went around to the end of the row of lockers, still buttoning his shirt. I followed him.

As soon as we both peeked around the corner, we saw Brian slamming his fist on the locker. There was already a fair dent in it. The rest of the team was almost dressed, but Brian was still in his street clothes.

“What’s the problem?” one of his teammates asked him. “Did you forget the combination?”

“It’s three whole numbers,” someone else said. “I can see how that would be a challenge.”

“Yeah, fuck all of you,” Brian said. “I didn’t forget the combination. It’s a new lock, all right?”

“Did you check the little sticker on the back? That’s how you learn it the first time.”

Someone else reached for the lock to verify exactly that, but Brian knocked his hand away.

“It’s not there, genius. I left it at home, all right? I bought a new lock because the old one was a piece of shit. I had the combination in my head this morning, but now I’m just . . . Fuck.”

“What are you gonna do, get a hacksaw?”

“Why don’t you call your mother? Maybe she can find the piece of paper with the combination.”

“There was a seventeen in it,” Brian said. “God damn it. Then it was . . . Wait.”

“Think, man. Think.”

“Will you guys shut the fuck up? I can’t concentrate.”

Now, I knew that Griffin would do some crazy things now and then, but I had no idea he’d actually step around the corner and walk right into the middle of the football team. What was going through his head, I couldn’t possibly imagine . . . until he opened his mouth and dragged me right into it.

“Hey, Brian,” he said. “You need some help?”

Brian Hauser was about six-four, and he had to weigh at least 250 pounds. They didn’t call him “the House” for nothing. He was a little soft around the edges, one of those fat kids who manage to sprout up and become athletic for a few years, before losing the battle for good by the time they’re thirty.

“What do
you
want?”

“My associate here can open your lock, if you’d like,” Griffin said.

“Your
associate
?”

As you can probably guess . . . yes, once I had opened up those padlocks from the antique store and saw how they worked, I had to show off to
somebody
. So I had grabbed Griffin’s lock one day and opened it for him. It had taken me about two minutes.

That was obviously a mistake. Which, as I stood there and watched him offer my lock-opening skills to Brian Hauser, I was about to pay for.

“Come on over,” Griffin said to me. “Show him how it’s done.”

The whole football team was looking at me now. I didn’t think I had much choice. I looked at Griffin and put an imaginary gun to my head, then pulled the trigger.

“Don’t be shy,” he said. “We’re all buddies here.”

He was showing them up, I thought. He was making fun of them and they didn’t even know it.

“What the fuck are you gonna do?” Brian said. “Try all thousand combinations?”

Actually sixty-four thousand, I thought, but who’s counting? I went to his locker and grabbed his lock. I pulled down and spun the dial past the fakes and felt for the real sticking point.

I won’t drag you through the whole thing, but here’s the basic idea. The combination to my gym lock happened to be 30-12-26, and the combinations to those two locks I bought at the antique store were 16-28-20 and 23-33-15. Notice how all of the numbers are either even or odd, first of all. Then notice how the first and last numbers are in the same “family,” and that the middle number is in the opposing family. By that I mean that 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, et cetera are one family, while 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, et cetera are the other family. Once you get the touch for finding the real last number out of the twelve “sticking points,” you can work backward from there, trying all of the combinations that start with a number in the same family, then a number in the other family, and then the final number. You can even learn to “super set” all of the second numbers once you know how that second
cam can be bumped four numbers at a time without having to start the whole thing over. With a little practice, you can go grab most any combination lock from the junk drawer and have it open in a matter of minutes.

Got that?

So on Brian’s lock, I could tell that the last number of the combination was 23. So far so good. Clear the cams, spin to 3, and start on the super sets.

“Somebody get a hacksaw,” Brian said. “He’s gonna be here all day.”

“Give him a chance,” one of his teammates said. “Maybe he has ESP or something.”

“What the hell are you talking about? That wouldn’t be ESP.”

Everybody shut up, I thought. Go away and leave me alone for a few minutes. I worked it back to 9, then to 23, then to 13-23, then 17-23, working my way up the dial, bumping that second cam, feeling it move just the right amount and then staying smooth on the reverse to make sure I didn’t jar it out of position.

Wham!
Brian slammed his fist on the locker next to me. “Are you seriously going to open this lock? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“He’s not telling you anything,” Griffin said. “In case you hadn’t noticed . . .”

“Yeah, okay. I get it. He’s a fucking mute.”

I looked up at him for one second, then went back to the lock. I started the second set, hoping to God that the second number wasn’t all the way up the dial. Hoping to God that I could do it at all. What the hell was Griffin thinking, anyway? Why the hell did I have to do this in front of everybody?

7 next. I went 7-13-23, then turned back to keep the set going.

I heard a door open.

“Shit, it’s Coach!”

Mr. Bailey, the football coach, came into the room. “What’s going on in here?” he said. “Brian, why aren’t you dressed?”

I dialed 7-17-23.

The lock opened.

“What are you doing, young man?” Coach Bailey said to me. “Are you his personal servant now? He can’t even open up his own locker?”

He was holding a playbook in one hand. I made a writing motion to him. He took a blank page from the book and handed it to me. Then he fished a pen out of his pocket. I wrote
7-17-23
on the paper and gave it to Brian. Then I gave the coach his pen back. Nobody else had said a word yet.

“Everybody outside while Mr. Hauser gets himself dressed,” Coach Bailey said. “Have you forgotten what week this is?”

That’s how it began. I remember it so well because I can trace so much of what would happen next right back to those few minutes. If I had had any idea . . .

But no, I hadn’t learned that lesson yet. I hadn’t learned that some talents cannot be forgiven.