Going Fast (32 page)

“Ah nebba robbed no banks.” Turmoil stuck out his chin.

“I wouldn't put it past you.”

“Ah nebba.”

“You crazy bastard.”

“Ah
neba
!”

“You crazy, bank-robbing bastard!”

Turmoil took an outraged step into Ownie's confusion. “Dohn talk to me that way.” Ownie braced himself, thinking about the time Turmoil had sucker-punched Suey, laying out the Tumblebug and hissing “Iccce.” You'll sucker me, all right! Ownie picked up a rolling pin stained with fondant and issued a silent challenge: Make one move, just one. C'mon, baby!

“God dohn wahn you to have eeevil in your heart. In Jamaica, long time ago, there wuz a cit-ee full of py-rits and bukc'ners. They call it the moss wicket city on Earth. They wudden change, they wudden lissen to God. They juss keep robbin ships, killin peeple. So one day, there be a big earthquake and a tidal wave and it bury them all.”

“Should've taken you with them.”

“Ah wassen even bohn.”

“Too bad!”

“Ahll put a spell on your fam'ly.” Turmoil arched his brows and let the words hang, knocking the wind out of the room. “All of them.”

“You'll what?”

“Ahll put a spell on them all,” Turmoil muttered, as though he had reconsidered. Ownie dove across the room, hitting a stool. He lifted the rolling pin over his head and yelled, “You crazy, no-good bastard!”

“You'll be sorry,” Turmoil screamed as he bumped into the
Love Boat
, knocking a deck and life raft to the floor with a sickening thump.

Light streamed through Tootsy's windows, exposing ghostly spots on the walls, spaces left by Turmoil's ripped-down clippings. Music drifted upstairs, the unmistakable strains of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”

The music was coming from a new business downstairs. That day, Ownie had peered through its window, which contained a mannequin, a picnic blanket, and a bottle of Spanish wine. In the centre of an unfurnished room was a couple waltzing. One-two, one-two across the floor. The woman looked like a cook Ownie had known in the navy; she had the same skinny hips and pot belly.

B
EGINNERS
S
PECIAL
,
a sign said. 5
LESSONS
: $19.95. B
ALL-ROOM
. L
ATIN
. C
OUNTRY
.

As Ownie watched the middle-aged dancers, a mustachioed man in tight white jeans and an open shirt darted toward him, desperate for business. Ownie was surprised he could move that fast in cowboy boots. Life, Ownie conceded, was tough.

Ownie had made himself come to Tootsy's, but he wasn't in the mood for much. He was determined to ignore Louie, who was talking nonsense to the Runner. Louie informed the Runner in a pleased voice that he was going to Canastota, New York, to visit the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Take a tape of your fight, Ownie thought, for World's Biggest Bum, and then felt guilty. He shouldn't be so hard on Louie, he admitted, since none of this Davies business was his fault. Besides, the poor fool was doing all right considering
what he came from. Louie's father was long gone and his mother was no good. Every three or four months, she would phone him and tell him that she was moving. It was always something: “These neighbours are a bunch of stiff necks. The seagulls are keeping me awake. I know those tight-asses are spying on me.”

And each time, Louie had to drop everything, including his job, to haul her stuff. The mother moved more times than Pretty Boy Floyd on the lam and always sent Louie back for the deposit. The worst part was, it was one of her old boyfriends who got Louie on the fire department, so she owned him. “At least Lester was a real man,” she'd throw it up, drunk and dirty.

“Rocco Mar . . . uhmmm . . . Mar-chegiano?” Louie was now playing the name game with the Runner.

“Is that a joke?” the Runner asked.

The world is full of crazy bastards, Ownie thought. That morning, he'd seen two shakos shuffling down the street, the same two, always together. Out of the blue, like someone had flipped his remote control to ballistic, one started yelling in the other's face, in an awful, spit-flying attack. On and on, while buddy stood there, blank. Suddenly, the screamer stopped as abruptly as he had started, and off they went, Hope and Crosby on the Road to Nowhere.

Over the drifting music, Ownie heard someone climbing the stairs. It was probably Sandra, that ugly little girlfriend of Louie's. They were back tighter than a jam jar since Louie's fight disaster. Sandra, whom Johnny generously described as a four, had even persuaded Louie to retire his alter ego, the Arabian Knight.

A muscular man with puffy supermodel lips stood in the doorway, dressed like he had a court appearance. Hepped, bouncing on hot metal, it was Roddy Nason. He glanced about and then looked confused, like he didn't know what came next.

“Hey, Roddy.” Ownie signalled him over. Roddy crossed the room, hands in the pockets of his dress pants. It was the same spring-toed walk that carried him into amateur fight nights, deaf to everything but the faded cheers and the long-ago chants of “Roddy,” guided by phantom arms, inaudible jokes, always too big for the room.

When Roddy reached him, Ownie gave himself a slapstick punch to the head and staggered, suckered by Roddy's invisible left. They laughed.

“Lookin' good, you old bugger.” Roddy rubbed Ownie's bald head.

“You still got the hammer, Roddy.”

“How ya been, brother?” Roddy's words were as thick as molasses, which made Ownie believe the rumours, the ones about dope.

“Like Little Mary Sunshine,” Ownie boasted.

“You sure?” They both knew what he was talking about.

“Yeah. That stuff don't bother me. I don't need guys like Davies; I'm on a full pension.”

“Good, good.”

“Roddy, this is Louie Fader,” said Ownie as the fireman trotted over in sweats.

“Louie got arrested this year for impersonating a fighter.”

“Too bad, man.” Roddy missed the joke.

“Louie, this is
the
Roddy Nason. He beat Nigel Baxter for the Commonwealth title. The writers said that fighting Roddy was like facing the Amazing Kreskin. He knew your next move before you did. Every block had radar, every counter punch was a Stealth bomber. It's too bad you never saw him fight.”

For years, Ownie recalled, Roddy had been something. He had driven around town with a Newfoundland dog, a lovely big animal that rode shotgun. It was black, with webbed feet and a soft, understanding face. The dog weighed one hundred
and fifty pounds. “We fight in the same class,” Roddy would joke, proud of that dog. “Toby's a hero. He earned a citation in New Brunswick for saving a three-year-old boy who fell off a wharf. He jumped in and swam him ashore, and they ran his picture in the paper.”

One night, Toby escaped from Roddy's house and fell into a swimming pool. In a sad twist of irony, the heroic dog swan round and round until he drowned, exhausted, three blocks from home. In denial, Roddy couldn't believe that the dead dog was his. “Toby would've never drowned,” he'd argue, pointing to the citation and the newspaper picture from New Brunswick, so he kidnapped another Newf. When the owner found him and the dog, Roddy slugged the man, got charged with assault, and pulled thirty days, which seemed to spell the end of it, really.

“This Ownie here, he's A-1.”

Ownie nodded, humouring him.

“You going to that surprise dinner they're holding for Darren?” Ownie walked Roddy to the door. “He'd like to see you there.”

“When is it?” Roddy squinted.

“The tenth,” Ownie said. “I'll write it down for you.”

Roddy pocketed the paper. He'd been in and out of jail a couple of times since Toby died, and then he fell down a flight of stairs, rupturing an eardrum and doing damage to his head.

“Good, good, but don't tell Darren I'm coming.”

“It's a
surprise
.”

“I know, I know, but don't tell him I'm coming. Me and Darren go way back.”

A black Mustang rolled by, a mobile boom box of jive.

From the dashboard crown to the chain-link steering wheel, the whole car shook. Ownie was walking down a Halifax drag with attitude: badasses bumping into cars, drug dealers with calculators, big fat mamas pushing strollers. What a joke, he thought, small-time losers going nowhere.

Ownie had gone to Halifax to sign papers for Douglas. The lawyer had given Ownie a tax slip and a pissy look as though it was Ownie's fault that Turmoil had left, as though the lawyer hadn't been the one who put Davies in a crack house. If Douglas was so smart, Ownie thought, why hadn't he written a better contract, one that lasted more than two years?

“Hey, bitch.” A boy with FRESH tattooed on his neck jumped in the face of a legal aid lawyer, trailing her past a theatre that had closed with
Jurassic Park
. “I thought you had titties, but you don't have none,” FRESH sneered, and the woman fled through a door.

Ownie thought about the street fights he'd had down here with cats a hell of lot tougher than that, all with a built-in crowd. “Go find Butch,” he'd yell when the odds started shrinking. Butch was easy to find; he worked in the Outrigger Tavern cracking heads for a living. Butch and Suey's brother, Percy, were a regular attraction on the streets, squaring off more times than Jack Britton and Kid Lewis. Percy was okay
when he wasn't rolling sailors, he was good in the clinches, and he had a way with cars. Percy's home base was a dance hall up a side street, a smoky CANEX of soft girls and hard liquor, and that's where they found him with a New Jersey knife still in his gut.

Cutlass
, said a car that was the colour of Orange Crush and boldly claimed: I
MITATED BUT NOT
D
UPLICATED
. Even the gaudy car, with windows that glittered like sequins, looked dull and insignificant in the fog.

It's this bloody weather that's making me so mad, Ownie decided, not this street, not Turmoil, not cats like FRESH. It's the months of darkness hanging over your head like a bell tent. What's that do to your soul, to never see sunlight, to never feel warmth? Ownie had read about a fogbound village in Hungary where people were lining up to commit suicide. Ownie bet nobody killed themselves like that in sunny Mexico. He'd seen pictures of poor people in Mexico, kicking dusty soccer balls and wearing sombreros, gathered in squares. Here, the poor were scattered like litter on the sides of the road, empty coffee cups that would blow away or dissolve like the mounds of dirty snow that stood each spring in odd corners.

“Hi, Slugger.” Ownie had almost missed him. “Heading back to Dartmouth?

“Yes, I'm waiting for the Number Eleven.” Slugger was sensibly dressed in a duffel coat and thermal boots.

Winter was longer than a Russian novel, Hildred liked to say, and just as bleak. When spring came, you saw neighbours you thought were dead. When the sun broke through, it felt like the liberation of Holland, with people running into the streets, holding their faces to the sky, buying ice cream cones and patio furniture that would soon turn mouldy and wet.

“How's the swimming? Any problem with them women?”

“No. They've switched to ah, ah, aqua . . . whadya call it?
Aerobics.” He looked at Ownie quizzically. “Have you ever seen one of those?”

“No, I don't keep up with that stuff.”

“Weeeeell,” Slugger started. “They stand in the shallow end and the instructor puts on music. She likes that song about someone named Gloria. It gets them worked up and they wave their hands in the air.” He demonstrated, hoping to make himself clear. “It's the strangest thing. There's always one man.” He held up a finger. “Every class, and it's never the same one.” He looked at Ownie to see if he had an answer.

“Different guy, eh?”

“Twenty, thirty women and always one man!”

“Maybe he reports back to the other guys.”

Slugger shrugged, and Ownie noticed the sling. “Hurt your arm?”

“I had a fall off my roof.”

“How'd that happen?”

“Well, my blood pressure's down,” Slugger explained. “It makes me dizzy sometimes. I find that I weave a bit when I walk.”

“What were you doing on the roof?”

“My wife likes things clean, so last week she noticed that the roof was dirty. You can see it, you know, when you're driving up the hill. She got me to run the vacuum hose up through our chimney. Then I had to get up on the roof to vacuum it off.”

“How'd that go?”

“Perfect except for the fall. It's very clean now.”

Ownie said his goodbyes to Slugger. He passed a cluster of sad schizophrenics on the Sally Ann wall, delusional drifters with sagebrush beards and Thermoses hooked to their belts, guys with thousands of miles and no destination on their tattered shoes. He turned around as a bus arrived and a
woman appeared from nowhere. As the door opened, she shoved in front of Slugger like a bridesmaid fighting for the tossed bouquet. The old man stumbled. “What's wrong with people these days?” Ownie muttered. “What's making them so ugly?”

Scott felt guilty coming to Tootsy's, as though he was reminding everyone that something was missing. When he entered the gym, Johnny was sitting on a bench.

“Has anyone heard from Turmoil?” Scott asked in a low voice.

“Nah,” Johnny scoffed. “We seen one of his fights on TV. That's it.”

“Oh well,” Scott replied nonsensically.

He was still on the boxing beat, which had been reduced to part-time with Turmoil gone. He rode the desk two shifts per week, and had finally finished MacKenzie's Where Are They Now? on School Boy, who had, he discovered, died three years earlier from congestive heart failure.