Going Fast (18 page)

Ownie pushed and the shoulder screamed in pain. He had only taken the deer because it was jacked; because Benny Burgess was driving around town like he'd been on a safari instead of out in the woods with lights.

Moving Turmoil was like trying to stand a strip of rolled-out clay on its end. He managed to shove the fighter upright. On skates, the big man looked as pitiful as a newborn calf whose spindly legs could not yet support him. Turmoil lifted one foot, fast and high, as though he was warming up for a sprint. Then another fast high step, bending the knee to his chest, and collapsing on the third precarious step.

“Ah dohn like them skates,” he said, rubbing his head with a battery-operated glove, nursing what would soon become an egg-sized bump.

“C'mon, let's get out of here.” Ownie couldn't believe he'd been so stupid, a man his age. He felt like one of those dotty seniors who mails in five hundred bucks to a scam artist after being told that he's won a car.

“Ah tole you mine were blue,” Turmoil shouted. “Blue skates. Thas what everyone uses in Trinidad.”

“You are wasting my time, you goddamn liar. You've never been on skates in your life.”

At Video Madness, two cops were dragging out a man who was hanging motionless. He looked like Gandhi, if Gandhi wore a buttonless Naugahyde jacket cinched with a belt and lace-free sneakers. Another cop was talking to an agitated store clerk named Robert.

The store was run by a Lebanese family, short, unshockable men who worked for eight months and then, without explanation, disappeared. Flexible, they waived late charges to regulars; they slipped free candy to Dickensian waifs. There was no damage deposit on the upstairs apartments, and working girls got one call a night on the C
USTOMERS
O
NLY
payphone.

“He looks like he could fight a bit.” From Louie's parked Jeep, Ownie nodded at Robert with approval. “Just crazy enough.”

“You think?” asked Louie.

The Jeep door opened and Johnny hopped in. The houses on the street looked like accident victims, Ownie thought as they pulled away. The original shingles had been replaced by foot-high boards that skewered the symmetry; big wooden windows had yielded to squinty-eyed metal ones that made the downtown's demise easier to observe.

They drove by an old woman propelling a wheelchair with her legs, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Hanging from the back of her chair was a liquor store bag.

Ownie glanced at the window of Tony's Hairstyling, which was covered with faded models in 1950s hairdos, swarthy men with strong jaws and open collars. Inside, Ownie could see Tony, dressed completely in white, finishing a cut. With his powdered brush, Tony whisked the customer's neck, ta-da, the same cut for thirty years. One day, Tony had beckoned Ownie into the corner of the shop where he stored his towels and pet food. Tony always kept his dog, a teacup poodle named Bambino, with him during the day, placing the dog in the empty chair between clients. “When I worked in New York, some wise guys wanted to set me up,” he whispered to Ownie while Bambino dozed.

“Yeah?” asked Ownie, who thought wise guys were more stylish.

“Oh yeah,” said Tony with an ominous tone. “I had to leave. You can't say no to wise guys.”

Louie had parked the Jeep around the corner from Tootsy's. Johnny ambled up the gym's stairs followed by a greaseball named Damien, whom he'd found lurking outside the building.

“How's your brother?” Johnny asked as he unlocked the gym door.

Damien did a quick shadowbox, then feigned a shot to Johnny's stomach, a sign he was feeling good, sprung after sixty cool days for possession. “He was in for the autopsy.” Damien tried to sound knowledgeable. “He's just waitin' now.”

“Yeah?” Johnny fiddled with the lock, wondering what was keeping Ownie and Louie, who had told him to go ahead.

“They should have the results in ten days.”

“That long, eh?”

“Yeah, them doctors, they don't know nothin'.”

Pleased with his appraisal of the medical profession,
Damien puffed out his chest and strolled into the gym, which was still empty. I
F
Y
OU
T
HINK
I'
M
U
GLY
Y
OU
S
HOULD
S
EE
W
HAT
I W
OKE
U
P
T
O
, his T-shirt warned. On his shaved, pinched head was a leather do-rag.

“I'm waiting for Godzilla,” Damien explained.

“He should be here soon.”

Godzilla was Turmoil's latest sparring partner. Another Great White Dope, Ownie called him behind his back, a mucklehead who made it one Olympic round before he fractured his elbow. His real name was Dylan Atwood.

Atwood arrived at the same time as Louie and Ownie, who greeted him with a curt nod. “This guy had it handed to him on a silver platter,” Ownie explained to Louie when they moved across the room. “There hasn't been a white heavyweight champ since Ingemar Johannson back in 1959, so whenever a good white guy appears, it's as exciting as an albino ape. The handlers were so thrilled about Willie DeWitt that they took out kidnap insurance.”

Out of earshot, Atwood was changing. He was two hundred and forty pounds of pig-headed arrogance with the mindless superiority complex that started in the reinforced crib of a thirteen-pound baby. A maple leaf tattoo adorned a bicep with stretch marks. After his Olympic fizzle, Ownie remembered, after he'd worn his Canada tracksuit to every rum room in town, after he'd been introduced at city hall and the legislature, Atwood turned pro. In the third round of his debut fight, when a banger from Chicago was playing “Wipeout
”
on his head, Atwood's mother started screaming, “Stop it, stop it,” like Atwood didn't regularly hurl drunks down stairs, like she wasn't an old grease bag with a grey rat-tail. Before Ownie could intervene, she threw a towel into the ring. “You'd have stayed in that ring all night before I'd have stopped it,” Ownie told Atwood. “Things were just getting good.”

Champion Management paid for Atwood's services, and, for the most part, left Turmoil's training to Ownie. Champion's lawyer, Douglas, did, in a nod to modern science, arrange to have the heavyweight tested by a sports physiologist at one of the universities, a dour little man named Attilla. Over two days, Attilla attached Turmoil to wires, he pinched his skin with calipers, he sat him on a bicycle ergometer and made him breathe through a mouthpiece while wearing a nose clip. He did blood lactate tests, anthropometric testing, and a flexibility assessment, and concluded, to no one's surprise, that Turmoil was an extraordinary athlete. “I have only had one athlete, a powerlifter, score higher on the strength tests,” Attilla reported back. “And Turmoil's VO
₂
max was astounding.”

In the ring, Turmoil swatted the red spittoon. “Ah met girls who hit harder than that,” he shouted at Atwood.

“Shut up and go to work,” Ownie ordered. “You couldn't do nothin' with the man last month.”

Atwood nodded and wiggled a tooth, checking for firmness. On most nights, Atwood worked as a bouncer at Kissin' Cousins, a dive with watered-down beer and line dancing. When bored, Atwood used to hurl drunks down the stairs, fracturing two skulls before someone sweetened the tank of his Monte Carlo.

“Okay, mix it up a bit,” Ownie shouted. Atwood was useful, but everyone knew Ownie didn't like him, not since he had ruined a lovely little middleweight from New Glasgow. The kid's coach was a moron who put him in the ring with Atwood, and the fathead punched him out of his boots.

Turmoil charged, his punches moving Atwood backwards, stealing his counterpunches.
Boom
.
Boom
.
Boom
. Atwood took two pokes, but the blows slid off Turmoil's chest like a sparrow hitting a plate-glass window.

“Okay, take it easy,” Ownie ordered.

Atwood's bulky torso was dotted with the pink patches, like oversized flea bites.
Boom
.
Boom
.
Boom
.
Boom
.
Boom
. Turmoil pummelled the bouncer with a five-punch volley and then charged again. Atwood's legs were moving in the wrong direction, as though he was trying to balance on a unicycle. Turmoil connected low and Atwood screamed “Aaah!”

The sparring was over. Ownie knew that beating up Atwood was progress.

After Sanchez, Turmoil had picked up three wins, two at home and one in Montreal. The second fight was the only setback, a strategic error, a loss to Art Moore in Montreal, six months too soon. Now, Ownie decided, they were back on track.

The trainer nodded at Scott, who had slipped in during the sparring and sat on a bench. Ownie then headed across the gym to talk to Louie, who he suspected was back on the juice. Ownie heard Turmoil following him.

“Ah got a good idea, Ownie.” Turmoil beamed. “Ahm gonna buy you a pair of gloves.”

“Don't get into it.” Just when things were going well. Ownie cursed.

The trainer braced himself for another mental arm-wrestle in a power struggle Turmoil seemed determined to win. Ownie thought they'd established something during glove work when Turmoil, in a test of dominance, let loose a thundering hook and the old man stayed as fixed as a tackling block.

“I told you before,” Ownie growled. “I'm not rubbing you down.”

Turmoil stormed across the room, took a drink from the water cooler, and announced his return with one high-pitched syllable: “Why?”

“I don't need to explain myself no more.”

“What am ah s'posed to do?”

“Go see Benny Bishop over at the Ocean Boxing Club. He's a lovely man, always nice to the sailors on the weekend. He takes them in and never charges a dime.”

Atwood, recovered from his beating, snickered as Turmoil's face scrunched in pain. “Ah muss be the only fighta in the worl' who cahnt git a rubdown. Ah godda sore neck and mah own trainah wohn do nuthin 'bout it.” Turmoil touched his neck theatrically; Scott lowered his eyes.

“I told you before, I'm no masseuse.” Ownie felt the irritation creeping up his neck while Atwood poked Damien's ribs. “That's not my thing.”

“Ah juss say ah godda sore neck! That dohn mean it godda be mah thing.”

“I've heard more about those rubdowns than the troubles in Ireland.” Ownie turned a page and the air tightened. “I don't want to hear it no more!”

“You thin Michael Moorer, he can' get rubdown?” Turmoil waved his arms, summoning Moorer as an expert witness. “You thin he beggin his trainah cuz he got a sore neck? Ah dohn think so.”

Ownie pointed a finger. “No more, you hear?”

Ownie glanced at Scott and wondered whether the reporter understood the thing that worried him, the unacknowledged but unavoidable mental
if
. Scott lowered his eyes and pretended that nothing had passed. But, on Turmoil's face, Scott had seen not just petulance, but desperation, a sense that maybe there were moments when he was not in control, moments that scared him. Scott saw how the fighter, even when battling Ownie, when testing and pushing, understood the old trainer's stability, which he envied, resented, and, at times, found more calming than anything he knew.

Turmoil charged across the room, grabbed the door, and lobbed a parting shot. “You shun even call you'self a trainah.”

T
HIS
S
TORE
S
OLD A
$100,000 W
INNER
.

Turmoil opened the glass door, which was heavy with Lotto stickers and the hope that lightning could strike twice. Inside, a faded photo of the winner presided over a case of hot pepperoni. The lone cashier was engrossed in a
True Romance
magazine and a smoke.

Briiing
.
Briiing
. A bell on the door announced a ravaged man with Irish moss hair and a beard. His Mary Maxim sweater, once a lively duck-hunting tableau, looked shot full of holes. The man shuffled to the counter and thrust out a crumpled two-dollar bill.

“Yes?” asked the clerk. Holding out his money, the man stared past the clerk, his glasses sagging with electrical tape. Unencumbered by shoes, his feet were swaddled in layers of work socks, coarse and grey as his beard. The clerk tried again. “What would you like?”

“I'd like to be a Lipizzaner stallion!” he decided abruptly and turned his eyes skyward as though his wish might be heard by a higher being. “I'd like to enter this world dark, drab, and awkward and metamorphise into a spectacular white acrobat.”

Standing in an aisle, Turmoil moved up, drawn by the man's performance. “The prima ballerina of the horse world performing caprioles and pirouettes.” The man did a spin, Irish moss hair afloat. “I'd like to become more brilliant each year instead of fading and rotting like human garbage. That's what I'd like.” He kicked a shoeless foot.