Going Fast (33 page)

Johnny and Scott heard a slow clumping noise on the stairs, a noise that lasted too long. The door finally opened and Johnny's brother, Marcel, hobbled in. Using a metal walker, it had taken him five arduous minutes to navigate the stairs, so when he appeared inside, bent and heaving, Johnny believed the visit must be important.

“What's up, Marcel?” he asked, uneasy.

“I'm going to Norway.”

Scott dropped his eyes, pretending he hadn't heard.

“No seriously, man, what's up?”

“I'm leaving on Tuesday.” Marcel produced a passport that, when carefully opened, showed him grim-faced, glasses secured with elastic. Johnny studied it and handed it back.

The trip, Marcel explained, had arisen from his work as a grief counsellor. A retired music teacher named Twyla had lost her closest companion, a spectacular Norwegian forest cat named Thor. The orange cat had great tufts of fur between his toes and in his ears, plus two layers of fur that enabled him and others of his breed to survive harsh Nordic winters. He was the kind of cat you couldn't take your eyes off, Marcel explained with an enthusiasm that Johnny had rarely seen. When the sun hit him, he looked like a fireball. “Thor weighed thirty pounds,” Marcel added. “And he had eyes the colour of Sultan's gold. They glowed.”

As grief counsellor, Marcel had helped Twyla through her loss, accompanying her to the cremation and making a scrap book of Thor. A big cat, he didn't go too far from home, but he did, like all Norwegian forest cats, seek high places: lampposts, Christmas trees, and bridges, climbing down head first. Johnny listened, taken aback by his brother's knowledge. One day, after the funeral, Twyla turned to Marcel and said, “Marcel, let's take Thor back where he belongs. Life is too short, let's not waste it.”

“We are going to spread his ashes near a fjord,” said Marcel, who wanted Johnny to check on his own pets during his absence. “Many of the Norwegian forest cats came over with the Vikings on the longboats. Their job was to protect the food from rats. They're descended from the Siberian cat of Russia and the Turkish angora.''

“Really,” said Johnny. “And how do you know all that?”

“You'd be surprised,” sniffed Marcel, pocketing his passport, “by how much I know.”

Johnny looked at Scott and shrugged.

In his parents' spare room, now freshly painted, Scott opened a high-school yearbook, a hard-covered collage of typos, ironed hair, and puerile insights into life.

“Hi and Freak Out!”

“Forget the Glass. Give Me the Bottle.”

Scott stared at a groover with wire-rimmed glasses and mutton-chop sideburns that lifted him above the throng. Gary Carson was wearing a Nehru jacket and a smile that celebrated his coolness.
“I bequeath my Hendrix hat to Gus and my Acid Indigestion to Duke.”
Scott stared, trying to age the face by twenty years, wondering if Gary was the guy who'd installed his cable last year. He heard the basement door open with a creak.

John Miller had no picture, just a nihilistic space. “
John enjoys reading counter-revolutionary literature. His pet peeve is petty Bourgeois Dilitants. ‘Without a people's army, the people have nothing. I bequeth my guns to Quebec Liberation.'”

Scott scanned the sayings that dated each page like the rings of a tree.

“O Wow How Prime!”

“Smash Capitalism.”

“Can You Dig It?”

“The future sees pretty Cindy as a stewardess visiting Hawaii and California. Cindy plans to sleep till noon when a train will come through her bedroom with orange juice and French toast.”

Scott rubbed his aching eyes and tried to remember when orange juice tasted good. Beer was his beverage of choice, the fuel his personal mechanic recommended for a race car that idled, stopped and started, gummed up on city miles. After four beers, Scott was on the Autobahn, blasting through carbon.

“I was talking to Bert out back.” Upstairs, Scott's father was talking about their neighbour. “He's going in for the triple next week. He's scared to death.”

“No wonder,” his mother said.

“It's his own fault! He stayed up half the night watching the medical channel on TV. They showed an open-heart surgery, the entire five-hour procedure. Bert watched them saw through the guy's chest and then stop his heart. So now Bert's convinced
his
heart won't restart, that it doesn't have enough juice.”

“Madeleine shouldn't have let him watch it.”

Scott turned to the General classes, a depository for have-nots plucked from the university stream and forced into a pool of non-academic math and typing. Mickey Church had slicked-back hair and the good sense to know what was happening to him in life.

“Mickey's activities are girls, fighting, and drinking. His pet peeves are Communists, stuck-up girls, and phonies. He plans to join the Army.”

Scott remembered seeing Mickey running in the early morning in two-stripe sneakers, driven by red devils and conceited girls like Cindy.

Verna Johnson looked sadly middle-aged, with bleached hair pulled into a cascade of artificial ringlets. “
Verna detests long-haired boys, enjoys working at the Best Boy, going out with a certain Ralph. She plans to be an efficient secretary and to be happily married.”

Scott had no quote, just a picture in back with the retakes. Under his name, an officious editor had inserted the word “Paddler,” as if there was nothing more to say.

Scott thought about paddling, about how the pain of failure had been eased by quitting, how it had banished that loss to another life. Gradually, after the thrill of that absolute gesture
had faded, the pain returned, a malaise that greeted him each morning with a wave of doubts and what-ifs.

Scott closed the yearbook and dug deeper in the box. He found a birthday card from his parents when he turned twenty-one, a school ring he had never worn, a driver's licence, and a coaster from a strip club that sold Harvey Wall-bangers.

He lifted out a postcard with a crack down the middle and a pinhole near the top where it had been posted on a bulletin board. He studied the picture: a bleak sunset over a snowy field of frozen firs. Everything was blue, from the gelid snow to the sky. There was an intense feeling of cold, emptiness, and isolation; it was the kind of place where you could freeze to death and never be found. Curious, he turned the card over. Where had it come from? Four stamps and a Par Avion Luft-post sticker. Then in the upper left corner:

Vinterstemning

Winter in Norway

Winter in Norwegen

L'hiver en Norvège

Scott thought about Marcel and Thor, and in the frozen firs, he saw double-coated cats, muscular felines with dense undercoats and almond-shaped eyes,
skogkatts
. He saw an old lady and a disabled man celebrating life with a zeal that he envied.

Dec. 27, 1972
Dear Scott:

Skiing is great over here by Nova Scotia standards but it is the mildest winter since 1936
.

Hope you are staying in shape. I know I am. The food is delightful and the people are cool.See you on the lake this summer. Watch out for those
crazy shells. Remember, we're like lobsters, always scurrying backwards
.

Your pal, Karen

Karen? He scanned the files in his brain. Was it the rower, the blonde with the crooked smile, the girl who had shared the storm with him one morning on the lake? Had she really gone to Norway to cross-country ski that long ago and sent him a postcard? How could he have filed this away and lost it?

Scott descended the stairs, clutching the cracked postcard from Norway. “Look.” He handed it to his mother and waited.

“Karen Burns,” she said.

“Yeah?” Scott sounded like he expected more.

“You know, that blonde girl whose parents lived on Rigby. She started cross-country skiing one winter to train for rowing. I saw her mother in the grocery store, and she wasn't very happy about it. She was always afraid of avalanches, she said. It was just something she couldn't get over.”

“Uh-huh?”

“I always thought Karen liked you. She moved to Australia, didn't she?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, she was
your
friend,” his father snapped.

“I don't remember.”

“Maybe you were abducted by aliens,” Rusty suggested, “and they performed ghastly experiments on your brain. It's on all the talk shows now. If you're having problems, and I guess complete memory loss would qualify as a problem, you may have been abducted. You don't have to blame your poor old parents any more.”

Scott sat down and bit into an apple. It tasted good, like real food, like something he should eat more often. He felt the
vitamins coursing through his body and wondered, was his take on life this skewed?

“When I was young, I had a best friend named Celine,” his mother said. “We were as inseparable as twins. One night, we were at a dance, and a girl walked by, and Celine said, ‘She shouldn't wear that dress; she's too short.' And I said, ‘What do you mean, Celine? She's taller than you.' And Celine said, ‘No she's not. You and I are the same height.' I made her stand in front of a window so she could see our reflections. I was four inches taller, but all that time, she thought of herself as a tall person.”

Scott finished his apple.

“Sometimes, it's all in your own mind.”

Maybe it wasn't all physiology and fate, Scott allowed in a blasphemous admission. Maybe the chances had been there all along, and he just wasn't man enough to take them. Scott's decision to quit had been his alone. He had not been forced out by injury or money; he was not one of the walking wounded who'd been shafted by a committee or a coach. Scott had not been like Taylor, who had, on a hunch, driven to another lake one day, a secluded spot with a wharf and a motor boat, and seen his coach, the man who had trained him for five years, the man who had written his program and critiqued his style, explaining, stroke by stroke, metre by metre, to a young new star exactly how to beat him.

Maybe, just maybe, there was more to life than going fast.

Riiing
. The phone was ringing, but Ownie was not in the mood for conversation. The caller was probably a client ordering a cake, or a telemarketer, or, God forbid, Tanner the promoter nagging him about LeBlanc and a fight that Ownie hoped would never happen.
Riiing
.

Right now, Girlie's boy, Hansel, would take LeBlanc apart like a Lego village, piece by plastic piece. Hansel even had a new name, the Maroon Harpoon, and fresh duds, all in shades of crimson. Even without the threat of Hansel, Tanner was wearing thin for Ownie. Forty years of his crap was plenty, the trainer decided: that drugging story he'd made up, Louie's ring disaster with Verne, and now Tanner saying he's found out he's adopted and expecting people to care.

“What difference does it make at your age?” Ownie had asked him. “Everyone connected to you is dead and you've got one foot in the grave yourself.”

“I's got to know, you.”

“If you got to know, you got to know.”

Tanner headed back to Tancook Island like the Maroons drawn to Sierra Leone, looking for his roots in a compost of sauerkraut and schooners. “There's only two-hundred people on the Island, half of them never been past Halifax,” Ownie noted, “so it shouldn't take long.”

Riiing
.
Riiing
.

Tanner started going door to door and they stonewalled him, the way those old fishermen do. “No, son, I can't help
you.” “No. Don't try pullin' my mouth.” The truth had been covered up, Tanner said, painted black as a rum-runner slipping through fog. Finally, he found an old woman who said she'd known his father. “He was a Portuguese sailor named Rui, a little fella with hair like a French poodle and one gold tooth. He had eyes like a husky dog: bright blue, which kinda put a spell on the women, with him being so dark. I remember him because I never seen them dog eyes before.”

“So what are you going to do now?” Ownie had asked Tanner.

“I's got to live with it, that's all. I got to live with the God's truth.”

A week later, Tanner showed up with a guitar that resembled an oversized banjo.

“What do you have there?” Ownie asked.

“It's Portuguese; I'm learning to sing a
fado
.”

“A what?”

“It's a sad eerie ballad from the Old Country, you,” he explained. “It's the song of Portuguese seamen missing their loved ones.”

“I suppose you're the loved one.”

Tanner shrugged.

“Hello.” Ownie picked up the phone, worried that Hildred might miss a cake order and he would be blamed.

“Hiii, Ownie.”

“Who's this?”