Going Fast (25 page)

By the time Suey left, Ownie was in an unsettled mood. Listening to Suey talk about Sam, the epitome of class, had made the trainer angry with LeBlanc, who, at this point,
shouldn't even call himself a fighter. Ownie was too old, he decided, to be made a fool of by LeBlanc who, according to Louie, hadn't run in weeks.

The welterweight had taken an easy fight a few months back. LeBlanc was so fat he had to cut weight for a week, dehydrating with pills, garbage bags, and a sauna. At the weigh-in, Johnny stepped on the scale and held his breath until his weight popped up. And then, in a moment that still made Ownie livid, Johnny collapsed unconscious in the old trainer's arms, eyes closed, wearing only a pair of black bikini underwear. The ignominious moment, captured by a
Standard
photographer, was proof, Ownie believed, of how ridiculous the fighter had become.

Ownie summoned Johnny across the room and squared a scale on the hardwood floor. According to Suey, the photo was posted at Hansel's gym along with insulting comments. “Get on,” Ownie ordered. “Let's see if you're even close to fighting Sparks.”

“Oh, maaan.” Johnny tried to look betrayed. For support, he glanced around the gym but saw only the Dog doing push-ups and Louie, hiding the guilty face of a mole. “I just ate.”

“You give me a time, a particular hour, when you haven't just ate.” Ownie was getting crankier the more that Johnny protested. “I said, get on!”

Slowly, looking for time and a way to drop five pounds, Johnny peeled off his red jacket and his Ironman watch. He hawked into a spittoon and stepped on the scale, claiming, “These cheap ones aren't that reliable.” His eyes widened like Charlie Chaplin as the needle raced past one-fifty, then one fifty-five, every notch an indictment, every pound a lie.

“Ouch,” Johnny winced as the scale stopped at one sixty-five, twenty pounds over weight. He pulled a disbelieving face that reminded Ownie of a woman he'd seen at customs after officers hauled a two-foot Polish sausage from her suitcase. “I
don't know,” she had stammered, pulling the same counterfeit face. “I don't know how.”

“Look at that,” Ownie ordered. “Twenty pounds of blubber. You are as fat as a lactating seal.”

“Aw, I can get it off. I'm in the grind now.”

“Bullshit!”

Johnny's face was making Ownie as sick as that sausage woman, who had mugged with her mouth open, incredulous, as though the sausages had climbed in by themselves. Hearing the commotion, the Runner and little Ricky wandered across the room.

“You can get it off, but what'll you have left?” Ownie barked.

“There's a lot of muscle.”

“You'll have an empty tank. You should be ready to rock and roll for ten rounds, ready to drop the Fancy Dan, ready to charge in and tear Sparks's head off. That man's case-hardened by now; he been fighting world-ranked fighters Stateside while you've been hanging around like an old washerwoman eating jelly doughnuts.”

“But —”

“You are flabby, your reflexes are slow, and you're out of shape. You make me look like a bigger fool than I already am.” While Ownie paused for breath, Johnny gave the scale a hateful look. “You've got no bounce, no spring. Forget it, man, you are done.”

“I gotta fight him.” Johnny lowered his brows, shifting from shock to determination. “I gotta bad hate on for him, that gasbag, I gotta get it outta my system.”

“You hate him that bad, you fight him on the street. But don't go draggin' me in there to watch you get your head beat off.”

“I gotta, man. He's so much talk, him and that mother, Girlie. I
hate
her.”

Ownie could understand why Johnny didn't care for Hansel, who trash-talked non-stop, most of it for show. Hansel liked to keep busy, and LeBlanc, with his weight problem, would make an easy tune-up. Hansel's handlers weren't stupid; they weren't like the idiots who took fighters to hotbeds like Philadelphia to train and got them punched to pieces in the gym, every session more damaging than a real fight. They weren't that dumb.

Disgusted, Ownie walked across the room while Johnny mumbled something about cheap bathroom scales from China that could never be trusted.

Ownie stared out the window at a taxi stand. Tootsy worked there sometimes, but he preferred the airport route, which was safer. The drivers at this stand looked like truckers, middle-aged men in failing health. Except for a midget and a grandmother whose licence plate said
Hot Mama
, they were interchangeable.

A month ago, two new guys showed up, both with long, bleached hair like that band, Nelson. Somehow, they managed to park together as though they were planning a gig, even though the line was supposed to be random. One day, while heading to the gym, Ownie glanced through one of their windows and saw instead of a sweet-faced teen a fifty-year-old man with a pitted face, Charles Bronson in a blond wig, which is how you deceive yourself, Ownie figured, how you end up in a mess like this.

Johnny was surprised to see the trainer back before him. But then again, Johnny figured, they were too tight to end things this way.

“Okay, up to now, we've been working on the honour system,” Ownie said, and Johnny sucked pounds from his cheeks. “That doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere, right?”

“Right.” Johnny was prepared to agree with anything.

“Now, if we're going to go through with this, if we're
actually going to fight Sparks, we're going to have to do things my way.”

Johnny nodded willingness.

“This gentleman here” — Ownie pointed to the Runner, who was hovering in black tights and a long-sleeved jersey, a resistance-free mass of hollow bones and weightless muscle — “he is going to help us out. From now on, you'll be running with him.”

“But I . . .” Johnny stared at the Runner, a helium-filled fanatic with grasshopper legs. The Runner sniffed his orange nose, and Johnny thought he looked anemic or like someone in chemotherapy, with his eyes too large, his face too drawn. The Runner's body always seemed to be in a state of recovery, rebuilding cells and replenishing glycogen.

The man is so crazy, Johnny wanted to tell Ownie, that he would rather run than watch the Stanley Cup on TV, he would rather run than have sex with two women. Johnny looked at the greedy teeth, the narrows hands shaped like claws, and he wanted to set Ownie straight.

“You two start tomorrow,” Ownie ordered. “I'll be expectin' reports, because this man” — he pointed again at the Runner, who seemed more surprised than anyone — “this man is an intelligent man. This man wants to make something of his life. This man is not a big, fat, good-for-nothin' washerwoman.”

In the back of the Press Club, under a cover of ferns, Scott could hear a couple flirting. “I met my boyfriend at sculpting class.” The woman laughed an airy laugh that sounded forced. “We had to do each other's heads.”

“Ahhh, that sounds romantic.” The man feigned enchantment.

“It was, but now whenever we move we have to cart these big plaster heads.” Another laugh, which added a tinkle of whimsy. “Monstrosities that weigh ten pounds.”

“Ahhh, love.” As the man sighed, Scott stole a glance at the couple. The man was Michel Coté, a national newspaper correspondent from Montreal, banished to the boondocks, where women and intermittent marine disasters were his only solace. Short and dark, Michel had a habit of running a hand up his forehead, brushing back his hair and, with it, the problems of the world.

“Mine doesn't even look like me,” the woman complained, and Michel rewarded her with a sympathetic pout.

The door buzzer sounded and a TV anchorwoman in orange makeup trotted in, two discreet steps ahead of the married producer she was dating. An old flack draped over the bar managed to lift one arm in a wave that she ignored. “I had her!” the scorned man then told the room. “She was nothing special.”

“Did I ever tell you my first marriage ended when my wife caught me having an affair with her best friend?” Michel raised his forlorn Raúl Juliá eyes. Partial to oversized trench coats and thin Italian loafers, he had already confessed his disappointment with the lack of improv theatre and Thai restaurants in Halifax. “The three of us enrolled in a gourmet cooking class. My wife noticed that we were spending too much time shopping for fresh basil.” Scott sensed a
je-ne-saisquoi
shrug. “It isn't that hard to find, you know.”

Scott stole a look, trying to see the woman, who, to his surprise, turned out to be Squeaky, the Books editor, the same woman who had wrestled with Smithers in the darkroom and now hated his guts.

“I am not myself today,” Michel moaned, stroking his hair. “My girlfriend has me tired out. She always wants to stay up and talk after sex, while me, I just want to sleep.''

Michel's girlfriend was a twenty-two-year-old nymph who sold art supplies. “But I am in love.” She wore bowling shirts and cut her hair like Edith Piaf. “I have decided the woman should always be at least ten years younger than the man; it is more natural that way.''

A blast of frigid air shocked the room as the door opened. Hmmm. Recognizing the
hmmm
, Scott shrunk in his seat. Ever since he'd been ordered to profile School Boy, he'd been avoiding MacKenzie, who now cleared his throat and headed for a smoker with a beer. MacKenzie seemed blind to his surroundings, Scott noticed, his vision narrowed to a one-foot corridor. Scott kept his head down where all he could hear was Michel and Squeaky, two sensitive souls afloat in a sea of White Russians.

“Why did you leave the wire?” she asked.

Michel pushed back his hair and, with it, the philistines who had once signed his cheques. “I did not fit their colour scheme. They want to paint everything brown, while me, I see more colour in life.”

“I know what you mean. Some of the morons I work with.”

MacKenzie's voice was suddenly clear. “Hi, Dick. How's the lodge?”

“Comin' along, comin'.” The chain-smoker was wearing vinyl shoes and false teeth that rattled in his mouth. “I had a little problem with them raccoons, but I took care of them.”

“That's good.”

“They can be buggers if they get into the roof.”

“Terrible nuisance.”

“Not any more!” Dick's sadistic smile signalled a grisly end for the creatures.

“Doing any hunting?” Garth asked.

“I got my name in for the moose lottery,” said Dick with a conspiratorial wink. “I got pretty good connections, you know.”

Dick had oily skin with pores that looked like they had been created by an HB pencil poked in clay. He had ingrown whiskers that festered and black, subversive brows that filled in as quickly as a dredged channel. Dick's face was well known in his small town, where he ran a weekly paper with nine employees and a circulation of one thousand, a shoestring operation kept afloat by printing circulars. Reporters used their own cars and cameras, and Dick kept a meticulous log of long-distance calls, ensuring staffers did not exceed their quota.

“I seen Corky Bungay last week.” Dick looked up from his beer.

“Best damn baseball player ever to play on Canadian soil.”
Garth sounded like a poll had been taken and Corky had been named the indisputable winner.

Dick kept the editorial operation as simple as his outlook on life. Whenever he received a press release, he pencilled out the date, inserted (STAFF) after the placeline, and sent it to composing. He ran speeches from the local politicians verbatim; he filled pages with social notes and free submissions.

“I seen him when they won the Maritime title.”

“With the Liverpool Larrupers.”

“That's right, that's right.” Dick was excited.

“Hell of a team.”

Scott flinched, wondering if MacKenzie would think about the unfinished Where Are They Now?

The mention of Corky seemed comforting to Dick, who was burdened by rumours that his paper was about to be sold. With a grade eight education and no real skills, he was as vulnerable as the raccoons, so Dick, a survivor, had staked his future on a fishing lodge, a ten-cabin spread on a river.

“Corky was in for the knee replacement.”

Michel and Squeaky wobbled to the door, unseen by Garth, who had met Dick thirty years ago at a mine cave-in. While Garth's politics had evolved since then, Dick's had congealed in the 1960s, forming a wall against the forces that were, in his mind, oppressing him: women, minorities, and unions. Dick's loyalties rested with the town's biggest employer, a pulp mill that sponsored the paper's softball team. Last year, in a show of allegiance that the mill rewarded with new uniforms, Garth wrote a spirited editorial after the CBC did a story on asthmatics allegedly dying from airborne pollutants.

Seething from the anchor's snub, the smelly flack, who claimed he had once been a figure skater, was yelling at the bartender: “I had so many women when I was with the Ice Capades that I actually got sick of them.”