Going Fast (36 page)

Ownie wondered if Antonio Stokes, Turmoil's next opponent, the badass who had knocked out twenty-five stiffs, was lying in a poster bed and thinking about the ocean.

“Pretty fancy stuff.”

It was fifteen miles and four tax brackets from Turmoil's beach mansion, in a rough clearing hacked from cypress and swamp. “Who's staying here?” Ownie eyed the corrugated metal trailer. A snarling lion painted in loud strokes stared back, wet teeth bared.

“Jus you 'n' me. Iss mah trainin camp.”

The camp, as Turmoil called it, was a thirty-foot-long trailer with four high windows and two doors, all made of metal. Ownie walked to the back of the trailer, where he saw more furry-headed lions, fiercer than the first, big golden beasts with outstretched arms and claws as sharp as razors. “What's with the cats?”

“Ah bought it from a circus wummin.” Turmoil pointed at the two-tone trailer, which reminded Ownie of an all-night card game. It was the only thing standing on the road, other than mossy trees and an ominous A
LLIGATOR
W
ARNING
sign. “They spent wintah near here.”

“Yeah?”

“Sum'one got eaten by one of them lions, sum trainah name Carlo.” Turmoil stared at Ownie, who refused to react to the story or their isolated lodgings. “The wummin said she cudden stahn to look at this place no mohr. Ah tell her that them lions bring me luck, they cahn hurt me, becuz ahm as pow'ful as them.”

Ownie ignored the last comment. Miles from the ocean
and Turmoil's indulgent house, his surroundings felt too hot; the air was funny. Ownie couldn't get it into his gut; it stopped short in his chest like a piece of steak caught in his windpipe. Out here, the past had not been erased for a shiny vision of American affluence; out here you could imagine homesteaders poling through swamps, fighting mosquitoes thick enough to kill cows, living in palmetto shacks without schools or doctors. You could imagine wildcats and homicidal hurricanes. Ownie wondered why he'd felt ambivalent about Turmoil's pleasure-seeking house when this was the other option.

“Ohhh, mon.” Turmoil sounded disappointed, as though Ownie was ruining something special. “You prob'ly dohn even like lions.”

“Oh, I love them,” said Ownie, who was not going to get tricked into a ridiculous argument. “They're my favourite wild animal. When I was in South Africa with Tommy Coogan, we had one staying in our hotel.” Ownie paused, picturing the beast. “He was so nice and friendly, he used to deliver newspapers in the morning. He'd take them around to the rooms.”

“Yeaaah?”

“Oh, yes. He was a lovely big lion. Kumba, they called him.”

As Turmoil climbed the three metal steps, the trailer sagged like a limp handshake. He opened a door and they stepped directly into the kitchen. It was a small room with indoor-outdoor carpet, a two-burner range, and the feeling that someone had left in a hurry. Turmoil cranked open a window — the air was hot enough to melt butter — and dropped his groceries on an orange Arborite counter.

Training camps were a mixed bag, Ownie reminded himself. Marciano, probably the most disciplined heavyweight ever, used to hole up like a Mexican bandit months before a fight, staying clear of everyone, working on his mind, his body, his will. Ali couldn't stand them. The charismatic champ
needed people. Joe Frazier was somewhere in between; he did eight weeks in a camp before the Thrilla in Manila.

There was only so much they could do out here, Ownie decided, after a quick look around. Greg had driven them to the camp and left with Turmoil's car, promising to return in a couple of days. They would still have to go to town for sparring and ring work, all essential before a fight. Ownie wondered what kind of sparring partners Turmoil had lined up; he wondered where the gym was located.

“What happened to this trainer, this Carlos?” Ownie tried to sound casual.

“Oh, the lion, it get Carlo by the neck and chew his head rite off. Carlo's wife, she try to stop him but the lion wohn let go. Carlo thought he know all about lions, but he didden know nuthin at all.”

Turmoil offered this explanation as he led Ownie down a snug hallway, his vast shoulders brushing the walls. The trailer seemed forlorn, Ownie decided, like a family shattered by divorce, saddled with mixed memories and untrustworthy things. It had a sadness that Ownie found unsettling.

“What happened here?” Ownie asked when the hallway ended abruptly at a wall. The wall had clearly been added, he decided, and it looked artificial, like something that the murderer in a TV cop show had erected to hide a body. What was behind it?

“Only paht of this place is fo peeple.” Turmoil tapped the gyprock. “The back half iss for the lions and their stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“All kinds of stuff, a tramp'leen and a whole bunch of lion toys with teeth marks. Ahm keeping some of mah gear back there now.”

After leaving his bag in the bedroom, Ownie returned to the centre of the trailer. The living room walls were covered with wood panelling painted to look like dark, irregular
boulders. Trying to relax, Ownie climbed inside a hanging bamboo chair with a floral seat. He got out, lifted a newspaper from a smoked glass table, and climbed back in. He felt like a go-go dancer.

The news in the paper was depressing, he decided, a labourer had gunned down his pregnant wife because he suspected she was cheating; a senior citizen had shot a burglar dead. Ownie didn't like the idea of so many guns. In the old days, you had a chance in a street fight, but now you were done. Ownie stretched his legs, seeking the floor, and asked: “How many lions lived out back?”

“Ah dunno,” Turmoil shouted from the kitchen. “Two, maybe three. They dohn need much room. Lions sleep twenty hours a day.”

Ownie never knew when Turmoil was being straight or when he was bluffing. He turned the newspaper page to a story on Florida panthers, which were indigenous to the area. Scientists, who feared that the panthers were endangered, were trying to decide whether to crossbreed them with cougars to strengthen the line.

“You ever see one of those panthers?” Ownie leaned out of the basket and held up a picture of the sleek night predator taken through the bars of a cage. The story said there were only thirty to fifty left in the wilds of southern Florida, which made mating incestuous. As a result, scientists had noticed a crook in the panthers' tail and a cowlick on the back; they were finding heart defects and missing testicles.

“Oh yes, mon. Ah see them many many time. Som time ah see them out here in the nite in the woods. They dohn scare me. No, mon, not at all.”

“Well, I wouldn't want to run into one.”

“Ah wudden care.”

Turmoil entered the living room and sat on a couch. Ownie kept reading, working his way through the story. If the
scientists artificially introduced new blood, it said, the panthers might lose the traits that enabled them to survive in the swamps, but if they didn't, the cats might disappear.

“I had a cat once that could throw his voice,” Ownie said. “He was a biter, an attack cat with black fur like patent leather. You'd sit on the couch and then you'd hear this
meeeooow
across the room. You'd figure it was safe, so you'd stretch your legs out, and that's when he'd get you.
Yeow!
” Ownie shook his leg wildly. “All the time he'd been hiding under the couch. I'd hate to think them panthers was the same.”

“Ha ha,” Turmoil scoffed. “Why you talkin 'bout ventriliquist panthers? They cahnt throw their voice.”

“You a cat expert all of a sudden?” Ownie asked. “You told me before you didn't know nothin' about cats.”

An hour later, Ownie surveyed his bedroom, which was barely big enough for a cot and a night table. It had one window and a newspaper clipping taped to the wall. Ownie stood close and examined the clipping. It was a story about a trainer named Carlos, who must have been the same Carlo who was killed. The story was one of those stock pieces that small-town papers crank out for no real reason. Carlos was descended from a long line of circus performers, the article said. His family spoke four languages, including Russian, which was the mother tongue of his wife, an aerialist who had trained with the Moscow Circus School.

The story included a photo of Carlos surrounded by animals, some resting, some not. On the top rung of a wooden ladder was a polar bear, a squinty-eyed albino with a narrow head and a sooty nose, a cold-blooded carnivore disguised as a Gund. Underneath were four lions. C
IRCUS
C
ATS IN
P
URRFECT
F
ORM
, said the cutline, which identified the mustachioed trainer in riding boots as Carlos Ramirez.

The lions were his favourites, admitted Carlos in the interview, even if they weren't as smart or as fast as the tigers.
He fed them horsemeat and eggs and never used whips. For a reward, Carlos gave the marmalade-coloured cats kisses. Only one in five could master the hard tricks, but Carlos kept them all because they were family, he said, they belonged.

Ownie studied the lions, naked as though they'd been shaved, everything pooled in the outsized paws and heads: the power, the danger, and the beauty. One animal stood out; her hair was electrified like Don King or a troll doll, giving her an unusual air. The air, Ownie decided, out of nothing more than instinct, of a killer.

Ownie could only imagine the stunned silence that would have followed Carlos's death. He had seen a man die in the ring and he knew the numbness that went with that. He knew what it was like when people would bring it up, people who didn't understand who you were or where you came from, and they would expect you to defend it or explain it, as though it had a logical explanation, as though you could tell them something they didn't already know. It was your world, in the same way that they had their world, it was what you did.

The trainer stripped to his T-shirt and underwear, he put his false teeth in a cup. Kneeling by his bed, he clasped his rosary while Turmoil rattled around in the kitchen. “Dear God, please watch out for me. I know I haven't always done the right thing in my life, but I'm tryin' and that's all I can do. Amen.”

God doesn't make it easy, does He? Ownie sighed. He tests your faith every step of the way and sometimes you stumble. No wonder with some of the shots He throws. Imagine being eaten by a lion. Jesus! Ownie shuddered and wondered if Carlos had become overconfident, if he had overestimated his bond with the animals. Had he really, as Turmoil claimed, had his head chewed off?

Ownie suddenly felt tired, worn down by the strange surroundings and the troubles that life hurls at people. He
could only imagine how different things might have been if Tommy's son hadn't died at the age of five from an allergic reaction to penicillin. Tommy lost everything that night: his heart, his fear, his reason to live. How do you get over something like that, something so cruel that it couldn't be real? Tommy started taking nerve pills, and his wife, Darlene, fell apart. “Why would God give you someone to love that much and then take him away?” Darlene sobbed. Who had an answer to that?

Ownie tried to talk Tommy out of fighting. There were nights when Ownie thought that Tommy wanted to be killed, walking into a chopper blade of blows, numb and wounded, offering himself up to a God who had already done the unthinkable. Just take me, you bastard, what more can you do? And him, in the corner as helpless as Carlos, patching up cuts that seemed inconsequential in a world that let little boys die.

“Maybe, God, I've wanted the wrong things. Maybe I'm after too much glory, too much fame.” Ownie uttered the words, knowing, in his heart, that he and God were on closer terms than that, knowing that God accepted his need to prove himself, to use the skills he'd been given in place of others. God, despite everything else He did, was fair enough for that.

Ownie walked, as quietly as he could, to the bedroom door and inserted two plastic knives into the upper corners, two midway down. At least, he told himself, he would get a warning if a deformed panther broke through.

In the middle of a dream about red fields and Island tractors, the plastic knives shattered like icicles. Ownie sat up in his bed and blinked, not believing it had actually happened. Everything in the bedroom was black, except for a grey zone under the window where a murmur of light had entered.

Swishhh.
Through the dark, he could feel something
dangerous, something still and malignant, breathing near his narrow cot. He strained his eyes, trying to break through the blackness, pushing so hard he saw cataract spots.

Creaaak!
The floor buckled.

Panthers and lions rumbled in Ownie's brain, muscular thugs with switchblade claws and blackjack paws, low to the ground. Slowly, out of instinct, like a tourist touching his wallet, Ownie reached for a clock by his bed. On TV, he had seen a lion kill a wildebeest, biting the victim's neck until it smothered and then shredding the flesh like overdone pasta. What would it do to an old man with a clock?

I can't see nothin', he cursed as the thugs moved forward, closing in with night vision, cutting off his escapes. He heard his flimsy sheet rustle, his mattress creak, deafening signals that led to him. Were cats like bears, he wondered in his disbelieving state, were you supposed to run or not? He had seen a story about a man who'd been killed by a cougar. Afterwards, experts said he would have lived if he had run, or did they say
didn't
run? Ownie heard a cough. Holy Carlos Monzoon!

It wasn't a lion, it was human, and God knows what kind of lowlife lived in these parts: jammers, freaks, two-bit spiders who'd kill you for a buck, hepped-up kids taking orders from Satan! Maybe it was a hit man sent by Stokes, who didn't want to risk a payday that big.

And then a motion to his left.

I gotta make my move, Ownie told himself, I gotta go for the door. One more step, and they mean trouble. If they block me, I'll drive my head into their guts; I'll use this clock as a weapon. If they've got a gun, I'm dead. If not, I've got a chance.