Going Fast (12 page)

Garth's mood darkened when he looked up. Powerhouse was emptying her tray like a murderer disposing of a body. Garth felt angry at the old man teetering in the aisle, as though he was imperilling them all. She's going to mow him down; she's going to hit him. Garth watched Powerhouse waddle down the aisle, rolling on the sides of her shoes past the warning: D
O
N
OT
B
RING
S
HOPPING
C
ARTS
I
NSIDE
. Oh God. She'll crush him like a steamroller, leaving a geriatric mess for the rest of us to look at.

Adding to the peril, a horde of teens arrived. “Hey, lend me a buck,” one shouted at another, who replied, “Screw off.”

Oh Christ! Garth muttered. The old man's arms were
trembling; his colourless flesh hanging from his skull. Why doesn't he stay put?

Powerhouse closed in, and the man, unaware, lurched again. Just as Powerhouse and the teens reached the decrepit man, a woman carrying food appeared and, with the speed of a pickpocket, grabbed his arm. Relief flooded his face as she lowered him into a chair, where he steadied his glasses. Then he lifted one blue-veined hand, as flimsy as onion paper, and pointed to the table he had felt compelled, at any cost, to leave. “No smoking,” he rasped. “No smoking.”

Ownie and Turmoil had decided to walk from Tootsy's to the Champion office in Halifax. They were nearing the entrance to the harbour bridge when they met an elderly man in a Cossack hat and matching car coat.

“How you doin, Slugger?” asked Ownie.

“Well, not too bad.” Slugger's replies were punctuated by the pauses of a censor delay. During the war, Slugger had served in the navy and boxed. “For a dinosaur.” A five-second pause. “I'm eighty-four, you know.”

“This man's eighty-four.” Ownie nudged Turmoil. “Look at what good shape he's in.”

Slugger
did
look trim, even to Turmoil. His nose had a slight dip courtesy of an air force sergeant named Powalski, and he walked with the nimble, hot-footed step of a log-roller. “I still like rough weather,” Slugger would muse when the wind screamed and the sea convulsed like a wringer washer. “When it was calm out there, I could never sleep. That's when it happened, you know, that's when you got the business.”

“You look good, mon,” Turmoil allowed. “You muss eat rite.”

Slugger acknowledged the compliment with a nod and then looked up at Turmoil and concluded with a swallow: “You're a
big
fella.”

Turmoil nodded back. Slugger paused as a tiny jogger scurried by. Spring will have to be here soon, Ownie told
himself, ending the impossible gloom that encircled life like a hospital bed curtain. The bad weather was a drag, Ownie decided, because he did a lot of his travelling by bicycle. Hildred used the family car for business, and he hadn't had a licence in decades.

“I swim, that's what I do.” Slugger adjusted a shoulder bag from a travel company. “In the winter, I swim at the YMCA every day.” Pause. “I still do a mile, sixty-four laps. With flip turns.”

“I know
kids
who can't swim a mile,” said Ownie.

Slugger touched Ownie's arm, then looked at his face, searching like he'd once searched the sea on a still night when the city was rimmed by lights and alive with the
clickety-clack
of troopships and the buzz of planes, when the war was so new that American tourists came north to gape at convoys.

“I've had a few problems, though. You see, these old women — I call them old, even though they're younger than me — complained to the manager at the Y that I splashed them when I dove in, that I got their hair wet.”

Ownie pulled Slugger into a huddle. “So what happened?” Sometimes, when the sky was this grey, Ownie felt that life was like a dirty blackboard, and nothing it recorded was ever sharp and clear.

“The manager said I couldn't dive when they were there because of the complaints, you know.” Slugger wiped the corners of his bloodless lips. “I was ready to live with it, but then, a week later, they went to the manager again. They said they could see through the back of my new bathing suit.” Slugger looked at Ownie to see whether he understood the magnitude of the charge.

“I felt terrible.” Slugger's brow was twisted into a plea for understanding, underscored by the fear that maybe, somehow, he had done something wrong. Ownie silently cursed Slugger's accusers and others like them, getting old people so confused
they didn't know themselves, projecting their own hang-ups onto others.

“So I took the suit back to The Bay and I asked the lady, ‘Can you see through this?' And she said, ‘Of course not,' but she was nice and she gave me a new one.” He wiped his mouth as though he was wiping away the last traces of shame.

“They just hate to see a man like you doing somethin',” Ownie reassured him.

Ownie noticed Turmoil stomping his feet, so he tapped Slugger's arm as a sign that he was about to leave. The heavyweight had trouble adjusting to the weather, Ownie noted. The rooming house was freezing, Turmoil had complained, and, to make matters worse, someone had found a dead man in the front hall. Turmoil was also fed up with a wild-eyed bum who, after months of threatening silence, had jumped from a nearby doorway while Turmoil was out running and screamed, “Put some clothes on or I'll shoot you with a rocket launcher.” He'd had enough of him.

“Where are you going now?” Ownie asked.

“I'm going to the bank. My son's having some problems with his business, and I'm going to lend him some money, five grand.”

“What'll they do, write you a counter cheque?”

“Naaah,” Slugger scoffed at the idea. “I don't like to bother with that stuff. I'll get the cash.” He tapped the shoulder bag.

“Do you think that's a good idea with all the robberies?”

“They're not going to bother with someone like me. They're looking for an easy mark, somebody old and weak.”

“Right on.”

Ownie saw a couple approaching on the mile-long bridge, eyes aglaze with post-coital bliss. The man was a wearing a Sure Shot camera, the woman a white sailor's hat and dreams of moving to Charleston, South Carolina. The wind caught the man's words and laughter as he whispered in a voice as sweet and southern as pecan pie: “Y'know, honey, if you lost thirty pounds, you could be a model.”

She giggled, holding his white hat and all her silly hopes with one hand.

“I'm serious, honey, you're beautiful.”

It was a lie as old as the city, Ownie decided. He peeked over the railing at a US aircraft carrier looming over pint-sized destroyers. It would be a busy week downtown. Anticipating the influx of four thousand sailors, businesses had responded in the usual manner by stockpiling Montreal escorts and Cuban cigars that filled the air with a pungent smell.

Ownie pointed up the harbour past a red Coast Guard ship. “During the war, they put an underwater net out there for the German subs,” he shouted. “It was made from steel cable. The outer part had grommets, round pieces of steel that would keep a torpedo from going through.”

Looking down, he could still see the convoys, dozens of disparate ships, hastily armed with young boys, ready to be sprung onto the North Atlantic like pinballs, zigzagging past the death traps, blind and erratic, hoping God would take them through. Boys like him and Slugger and his best friend, Teddy.

The wind picked up, swaying the suspension bridge nearly two hundred feet above the water. Ownie braced against the nameless forces, the ones that lured the jumpers and shoved luckless workers to their deaths. Up this high, it felt surreal,
post-apocalyptic, with all rules suspended, like some maniac could come along and toss you over or you could lose your faculties for one split second, just long enough to jump. Ownie tried to take his mind off the height.

In the distance, a dilapidated bum was fighting the wind. He was wearing a Scout's hat and wheeling a bicycle decorated with a tiger's tail.

“Look, look!” Turmoil pointed at the bum's bike. Mounted on the handlebars was a milk crate and a sign that said, Q
UEEN OF THE
J
UNGLE
. Inside the crate, was a cat wearing a bow.

“I always heard that white cats are deaf,” Ownie noted. “I had one once, but it was the most awful excuse for a cat. It had missing fur and rheumy eyes that were always sore.”

“Mah sister had a beautiful cal'co cat,” Turmoil shouted over the wind. “And then she loss it. She wuz so sad, she just mope aroun till one day ah comin home from school and ah see the cat. Ah pick it up and put it under mah shirt. Well this cat, he fight me like a tiger; he just abou tear me apart cuz he been spooked. When ah get home, mah sister open up my shirt, take one look at that cat, and nearly faint. ‘That not mah cat,' she say.”

They laughed into the cold. It was one of those raw days when the wind sliced through your clothes and brought tears to your eyes, the kind of raw that settled in your bones and bred arthritis, and for a moment, Ownie decided that Turmoil was, despite any reservations he might have had, okay company.

“I heard that all calicos are female,” said Ownie.

“Ah dohn know nothin 'bo that. Ah dohn know much 'bo cats at all.”

They passed a green support tower with blotches of red primer paint. Ownie followed the blotches up to a maintenance worker, dangling from a belt, and then steadied himself. “It's an awful height.”

Turmoil stopped and turned as though he couldn't believe what he had heard. Then he bounced on his toes like he was waiting to return a tennis serve. “No, mon, it not high.”

“Not high?”

“No, if ah had mah bathin suit, ah dive right off here.” Turmoil bounced again from a hidden trampoline, higher and higher, until his hips kissed the railing.

“You'd dive off here?” In a moment that he would later replay in his head, Ownie felt the mood change as though someone had cut the background music at a party or turned the lights on too soon. He stood still to make sure he had heard correctly.

“Oh yes, mon, ah would.”

“You'd be broken into a dozen pieces if you dove off here.”

“No, mon.” Turmoil laughed like Ownie was crazy, speaking in Tagature language or claiming that all white cats are deaf. “Ah dive off higher places than this back home.”

“I've got my doubts about that.” Ownie looked in his eyes, but he couldn't find the laughter, he couldn't see the joke.

“Oh yesss.”

“I wuz in a seniors' home for a spell,” Suey confessed.

“How was it?” Ownie was sitting on a bench at Tootsy's.

“I might as well been in the hoosegow,” Suey snorted in disgust. “They seen me comin' inta my room one day with a big blonde lady and they start chewing: ‘Suey Simms this, Suey Simms that.' I said, ‘What Suey Simms does is
his
bidness; you bess get that straight.'”

“Right on.” Ownie laced a glove.

“She was a nice lady too, 'bout forty, forty-five.”

“Ahhh, some people can't let nothin' be.”

“There was a time when Suey Simms had three wimmin. Three wimmin. You rememba that, doncha?”

“Sure.”

“All good wimmin too. I loved them all. Yeah, I loved them all.”

Suey spit into a handkerchief and stared at a speed bag.

“I didden care if they wuz big and fat.”

“Right on.”

“I loved them all.”

“Why not?”

“I hear Girlie been after LeBlanc about fighting her boy, Hansel.”

“Yeah.” Ownie shrugged. “She and Hansel been around, trying to rattle his cage.”

“You know Girlie, doncha?”

“I trained her brother.”

“Which one?”

“Thirsty.”

“Oooh, he's baaaaad.”

“Years ago, we were down in New Glasgow for a fight.” Ownie chuckled. “Girlie and her friends were there, all doozied up, watching Thirsty go through the motions. Anyway, Butch was on the same card, fightin' a six-rounder, and the old man showed up with a teddy of shine in him. Ever since Butch was a little boy, the old man called him Kitty. Everyone else knew him as Butch. So the old man starts screamin' ‘Come on, Kitty, for Jesus' sakes, do somethin', you no good bastard.' His voice was like a stepmother's breath, the way it would go right through ya. ‘Come on Kittttty!' he said again. Girlie and her friends were lookin' back and forth, rumbling like a volcano. I thought, Christ, there's going to be trouble; they're going to blow. Finally, Girlie spins and says, ‘Man, I don't know what you been drinkin', but there's no kitty cat in that ring, just two sorry white boys.'”

They laughed, and Suey spit. “Your boy gonna fight her boy?”

“I dunno.” Ownie stopped laughing, sobered by the suggestion. “Hansel's been after LeBlanc ever since they had that fight two years ago. The two of them, Girlie and Hansel, came into the bar where LeBlanc works and tried to run him down, trash talking in front of the customers.”