Going Fast (19 page)

The cashier shrugged, poured a coffee, and dropped a doughnut in a bag. “Whatever,” she muttered, as the man reverted to his catatonic state. “Have a nice day.”

Through the window, Turmoil watched the man reclaim
his shopping cart on the sidewalk. With a flick of indignation, as though he was used to better surroundings, Turmoil dumped his sunflower seeds on the counter. “You gedda lotta crazy peeple in here?” He nodded at the ringing door. The clerk looked at him suspiciously, at the bare arms, at the Everlast helmet, at the ten-inch-high boots, then handed him his change. It was clear she didn't like the question.

“Why?” She blew a puff of smoke in his direction. “You plannin' to start a club?”

The wind was an icy needle, tattooing misery on his skin. “This place,” Turmoil grumbled outside the store. “Ah shun' never come here. This cole is killin me. If ah be back home, ah could be sittin outsahde in mah shorts.”

A pickup truck with a Polaris snowmobile in the back rattled over frozen speedbumps, catching Turmoil's eye. He stared at the Polaris, a deluxe model with heated handlebars, a headlight cover, and carbide runners. As he stared uncomprehendingly, everything surreal and confusing, a bus painted like a beer can slushed him. “Ah-yah-yai,” he moaned.

It had taken them an hour to reach the movie set of a town, a tasteful backdrop built on rum and cod. On the drowsy main street were widow's walks and gingerbread trim, period colours and dormers that drained the tension from Katherine's body.

Meandering down the coast past fishing sheds and pilings, Katherine and Dmitry had taken the back road from Halifax, arriving around 7 p.m. They stood outside a restaurant, where a fisherman was arguing with the owner, a man in a red cham-bray suit.

The fisherman's voice floated through the brackish air, joining a veiled chorus of rocking boats and buoy bells. Under the restaurant's porch light, his jacket looked as damp and rubbery as a shark. The owner was trying to guide him down the steps while mumbling something about an out-of-order phone.

“Ya lyin' dog,” roared the fisherman, whose name was Lester. “You're not fit for gull's bait.”

The owner winced. He was part of a wave of Americans who had migrated north in the 1970s, looking for something different, determined to make everything the same. They descended on tax sales, scooping up whole islands for ten thousand dollars; they transformed rundown Cape Cods into
Country Living
makeovers with herb gardens, horses, and sheep; they salvaged wooden boats, raised long-haired kids, and waxed, when anyone was within earshot, about Groton and Smith.

Lester kicked the door, rattling a weather vane shaped like a pig. The owner shot Katherine and Dmitry a can-you-believe-this look, while Lester shifted his duffel bag and took an anxious puff of his make-em.

“Hey, Lester.” Dmitry waved a thick hand in the air. “Come here.”

Lester shuffled down the steps with the lead-footed walk of the shift worker. Up close, he looked like a shirt washed too many times. A side tooth was missing, one finger on his left hand ended at the knuckle, the pockets of his pants stuck straight out.

Dmitry ran a hand through coarse, greying hair. He was a big man, with the body of a worn-out catcher with square fingers. Dmitry had knees ravaged from the weight of the silver boxes he travelled with, magician's trunks. He pulled out a cellphone. “These are the 1990s, you know.”

Lester puffed out air, tension leaking from his sleep-deprived body. “I juss wants to make a phone call,” Lester apologized, making it clear he was not unreasonable. “Them boats leave roight on time. You miss 'r, they got someone ta take yur place roight off there. I can't afford ta miss a trip to Georges this time a year as the scallaping's too rich.”

While Dmitry showed Lester how to use the phone, Katherine scanned a posted menu illuminated by a lamppost. Kippered herring, finnan haddie, and hodgepodge. Part of a sea captain's mansion, the eatery was named Tongues and Sounds for the crispy dish with salt pork and onions.

Inside the restaurant, with Lester safely dispatched, Dmitry leaned back and studied Katherine across the table. With one finger, he stopped the drippings of a candle that smelled like vanilla.

“How's Dan?” she asked of a mutual friend.

“I saw him in Bosnia and he kept saying ‘Ciao.'” Dmitry looked tired. “Every time he did, I thought it was time to eat.”

Katherine laughed. “I heard he was getting married.”

Dmitry held up four square fingers.

“Number four?” she asked in disbelief.

“Uh-huh, and every time it's the last. It's love, it's passion, it's Mount Vesuvius for six months.” He shook his head. “Dan's the supernova of love; he burns out fast.”

Katherine took a bite of her scallops smothered in a creamy tarragon and pink peppercorn sauce that tweaked her senses. She chewed the fish slowly and let herself taste it.

“Those guys, they all want to be Sean Flynn but stay alive.”

The food was arranged on antique china plates of mixed patterns, roses and checks brought together by a theme of apricot. The same colour was picked up in the cotton curtains and the pads of the cleverly mismatched wooden chairs, the overall effect serendipitous.

“You look great,” he said, as though he was seeing her clearly for the first time, as though apricot became her. “What have you done: changed your hair, lost some weight?”

She sipped her Beaujolais and nodded.

“I thought so. You know, when I met you, I thought: fantastic woman, great smile, impossible legs, but a bit of baby fat.” He smiled a bashful smile that came from somewhere in his past, a trick smile that made you look beyond the puffy lids and the broken nose. Katherine wondered whether the smile was real or contrived, if he thought about when and where to use it.

“That's because I was a baby, remember?”

Dmitry broke into a full grin, more persuasive than the smile. The first time she saw it, she had felt like she was in Vegas buying the whole counterfeit vista. “Don't lose too much. They've proven that people who like food like sex. You have to keep the pleasure channels open.”

Mmm. Now and then, an audible phrase rose from
surrounding diners and drifted over antique pine tables up to a painted tin ceiling, playing to a whimsical audience of long-lashed oxen and cows hung on the walls.

“Look at this.” Dmitry leaned close, pressing his face near hers, so that she could see the scar on his brow. She feigned nonchalance, teeth chattering. “I got it playing pick-up hockey in Prague.” The top button on his shirt pulled open, showing a chest so hard that it made her ache. The chest reminded her of a beautiful boy she had met her freshman year in college, a boy as tall and lean as a sapling, with long hair that turned up around his ears and crinkly green eyes. He wore a pendant around his neck on a string of leather, and when he drew her close, she felt the pendant and his heart beating beneath his skin. They were destined, she decided, after two weeks of secrets and naked poems, and then she went to his room and found someone else pressed against the pendant.

“Did I tell you I met Nelson Mandela?”

After the fettuccine with smoked salmon and leeks, Dmitry had tackled a rack of lamb with honey hazelnut crust.

“What was he like?”

“Well, he had it, that presence, that aura you can't define. All the big people have it, the Pope, Bono, Castro. The clarity, the definition; they are always in focus. It's as though they're being shot with a Hasselblad while the rest of the world is on Polaroid.”

She picked at a white chocolate and strawberry ice cream torte. The owner, the man who had rebuffed Lester, hovered over the table like he was ready to close. Dmitry whispered something and the red chambray shirt vanished. Katherine relaxed, knowing Dmitry was in control, able to handle anything.

“The more you do, the more they want. They always give you the feeling that there's someone ready to do your job, but
there isn't.” Dmitry looked hard to make sure she understood. “Not everyone can do it.”

There was something absolute about the eyes, something that said, Don't cross me. Maybe you needed eyes like that to work in war zones, to pay your way through college diving for cadavers in Massachusetts river bottoms.

“I almost didn't get sent to Bosnia. They wanted to send one of the new bucks just to try him out. Now they're glad they didn't.” Dmitry finished his wine. “They offered me a desk job in New York; I couldn't handle a desk job.” He flexed the catcher's hands, stretching out stiffness. “The agency had a going away party for Gallagher. The boss's wife was there, tarted up, looking for someone to . . . ah . . . talk to. Within twenty seconds, she tells me she's lonely, she's depressed, that her husband doesn't do it any more.” Dmitry frowned. “Now this guy's my boss.”

“How old is he?”

“Forty. So I sympathize. Who wouldn't?”

Once at an airport, Katherine had seen a flushed woman dash across the floor, gasping, “My God, Dmitry!” and for a strange heightened moment, Dmitry and the stranger were part of something glorious, something he could not, for the life of him, recall.

“She tells me that it's the agency's fault; it's keeping him from her and the kids, killing his libido with stress.” Dmitry pushed aside his mud pie. “Anyway, she half believes it — or she wants to. So I tell her she should do something for herself, like take a course. So then she says, ‘Yes, that's a great idea,' that she always wanted to be an actress, that people had told her for years she was the spitting image of Sissy Spacek. Of course I had been thinking along the lines of computer programming.”

“Hmmm.”

“So I told her I'd take some pictures for her sometime.” He winced in shame. “It was the best I could think of at the time, honey. It made her feel better.”

“I bet.”

“I'm never in New York anyway.”

Walking to the bed and breakfast, they lingered at store fronts. The town teemed with craft shops and art galleries that proffered everything from majestic oils of schooners to purple pigs with polka dots. Unchanged over the years were the established merchants that had provided socks and sweaters to generations. A jewellery store displayed dusty fiftieth-anniversary plates and silver-plated cases that said, O
UR
W
EDDING
C
ERTIFICATE
. Next door was a ladies shop that sold knitwear and mother-of-the-bride dresses. At the General Supply Store run by Wick's Trawlers was an endless supply of work shirts, coveralls, and rubber boots.

“I hate those pictures of people covered with bees,” Katherine laughed, sloshed after a languid dinner topped with Grand Marnier. “Please tell me you've never taken one of those.”

“No.”

“Why do they keep moving them? Every few months, I see one on the wire, a guy with a bee beard, a bee body suit. They're gross . . .” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Why stop at bees? Why not go for rats or cockroaches?”

Katherine caught a glimpse of herself in the gilt mirror on one wall, so relaxed that her body had dissolved like bubbles. There was no need to fear the future, no reason to lament the past. “Who are you living with now?” she whispered.

“No one.”

“Really?” She uttered the word like a prayer.

“No.” His voice was hoarse. “Does it matter?”

Turmoil was being readied for a TV appearance. Parked in a hydraulic chair, the heavyweight's clothes were covered by an apron decorated with a galaxy of shimmering stars. An elflike man with cropped hair and taut cheeks was working on his face.

“Mek me beaut'ful now,” Turmoil urged him.

“Don't worry, dear.” The makeup man slashed on highlighter and then tapped him scoldingly. “I'd give my entire collection of Alan Ladd movies for bones like these.”

Moving behind Turmoil, the man tilted the boxer's head on its axis. M
ALCOLM
G
REY
, M
ASTER
E
STHETICIAN
, T
HEATRE
M
AKEUP
. His card was tucked in the corner of a mirror, near an Arthur Kent (the Scud Stud) press pass and the inky pawprint of a dog named Shane. Turmoil admired himself while Malcolm rotated his head, examining his canvas from every angle. Malcolm's iguana tongue shot out, licking his upper lip. The wall behind him was a heavenly blue. A tree strung with miniature lights twinkled in the corner.

“Thass a nice bowtie,” Turmoil said, and Malcolm reflexively touched his Nova Scotia tartan, a garish plaid that flourished in airport gift shops. Underneath was a starched white shirt. “Sum people dohn dress rite for the jawb,” Turmoil complained. “Ah t'ink it's importan to dress rite. Ah tell mah trainah that all the time.”

Malcolm scrunched his nose for an impetuous I-can't-help-myself-look,
then whispered like an unrepentant sinner seeking absolution: “It's a bit camp.”