Going Fast (37 page)

The lowlife moved into the grey zone under the window, and Ownie could tell, from the form, it was just one person. I can take this sucker.

And then, in light so low that it barely registered, Ownie
saw the eyes: Turmoil's, as dull as a soap-stained car. “You bastard! Get the hell out of my room!”

“Ohhh mon,” Turmoil moaned. “Whass wrong?”

“What's wrong?” Ownie shouted. “Turn on the goddamn light.” When Turmoil hit the wall switch, Ownie held up the clock that read 3:15 a.m.

“It's the middle of the goddamn night and you're standin' in my room like the Tooth Fairy.” Adrenalin shook Ownie's arms, his heart raced, but he tried to look defiant. He thought about all of the suspicions he'd had about Turmoil: the battles over rubdowns, the unprovoked attack on Suey, and then he wondered: how can I feel vindicated — how can I feel smart — when I put myself here? “Now get out!”

The seconds ticked by interminably until Turmoil yawned and announced: “Ah wahn to do sum roadwork.”

“Roadwork?”

“My wind not as good as it shuhd be.”

“You can run in the morning. It's pitch-black outside.”

“No, mon, iss not.”

Ownie needed time to figure out his next move. How do I argue, he asked himself, with the room shrinking and Turmoil filling up the doorway, sucking up the oxygen like a hydrogen bomb? “Get out until I get my clothes on.” He'd think better with his teeth in.

They stood outside in the night.
Cawww
. The screech came from nowhere, and it felt like an aural switchblade ripping Ownie's flesh. “Holy Mary!” He jumped —
cawww
— as a multi-coloured bird emerged from the cover of a palm.

“How ya gonna do roadwork in this?” Ownie waved at the darkness, his heart racing like an overheated clunker with the choke stuck out.
Boom-boom-boom
. Slow it down —
boom-boom
— take it easy, he urged himself.

“You goin drive mah car,” replied Turmoil. “You'll turn on the lights so ah can see.”

“Car? What car? Greg took it.”

Ownie looked at the heavens for guidance, but all that he saw was the moon, a luminous glass eye that unnerved him, an eerie Cyclops in a tie-dye sky. Even with the moon, the night was so dark that he could barely distinguish the trailer and the painted lions.

“Mah new car.” Ownie followed Turmoil's finger and then spotted, against all reason, in a flat gravel opening, a hundred-thousand-dollar Jaguar sedan with a leaping cat on the hood. Where the hell did that come from? he wondered. How could it arrive here in the middle of the night without me knowing? The ground shifted beneath his feet.

“You know I haven't driven a car in thirty years,” he argued.

“It dohn matter.” Turmoil opened a car door.

“You know I've got no licence.”

“You dohn neeed no licence. We juss go up this ole country
road.” Turmoil gestured into the darkness past the A
LLIGATOR
W
ARNING
sign. “There nobody on it. You juss put the lights on me and ah run. Underrrstannnd?”

Ownie looked unconvinced.

“Juss dohnt look afraid.”

The dash felt foreign, with buttons, knobs, and new-fangled gizmos. The last car Ownie had purchased was a Packard, a broken-down heap that leaked oil and lost its steering just before Ownie crashed into a tree and suffered a concussion. After that, Hildred took the wheel, and Ownie drove a bicycle, which he came to enjoy so much that he never drove again.

“Christ,” Ownie muttered. “If I ever get outta here . . .”

Settle down, he told himself, you're as edgy as a rummy on the cure. He turned the ignition and searched the controls for the headlights.
Urrr
. The leather-and-wood steering wheel tilted like a dentist's chair, up and down.

Ownie stared at the path carved by the headlights, trying not to think about Turmoil in his room, trying not to wonder what was happening. Shaking his arms loose, Turmoil started to run. In behind him, Ownie eased the maroon machine, pleased he could still drive after so many years on a bicycle. “Okay, buddy.” He smiled despite himself. “This
is
a car.”

This might work, he thought, as Turmoil picked up speed, sparring with trees and invisible goblins. If an alligator gets him, Ownie chuckled, then too goddamn bad. Some of those creatures were twelve feet long with armour-coated bodies and lock-cutting jaws. They were so fast that they could dart from a swamp, grab a cow, and vanish before you could say Bugs Bunny. If one got Turmoil, he'd sit here, in the middle of the night, with his shaking nerves and speeding heart, and he wouldn't move! Not a goddamn muscle.

A little extra roadwork never hurt anyone, Ownie decided irrationally, especially when you were fighting someone like Stokes, who was bound to go the distance.

Ownie checked the dash. The engine was so quiet that it didn't feel real, it was virtual reality gliding through the night. You could run the rack-and-pinion steering with a finger, he decided, you could trigger the brakes with a toe.

“Pick it up,” he yelled out the window, empowered.

Turmoil turned and ran backwards just like Marciano used to do. For some reason that made Ownie feel better. As long as I don't run the bastard down, Ownie chuckled, as a Firebird appeared from nowhere like a swamp-dwelling alligator, hurtling down the road, spitting stones, all smoked windows and homicidal speed. Turmoil dove for the ditch, screaming as the car brushed his arm. “Pull over! Pull over
now!
''

Ownie hit the brakes with all of his weight and Turmoil charged over, panting. He ripped open the Jaguar door and fumbled for the dash. Ownie wondered what he was doing until he saw the black revolver in his hand. “Did you see the licence plate?” Turmoil demanded. “Did you?”

“Christ! I didn't even see the car.”

Boomer had hired a new assistant, a substantial woman with wiry hair that threatened to consume her head, voracious hair that had to be set into submission. Garth didn't like her. It was the assistant's birthday and all of the secretaries were gathered around her desk in some sort of celebration.

“You can't be forty-five,” one gushed.

“Nooo!” gasped another.

Garth shifted in his chair, impatient. He had been waiting ten minutes to see Boomer. He tried to ignore the assistant, who had just been given a cake and an oversized card, which she had to push back her hair to read.

“You can afford to eat it,” he heard Carla say. “I wish I had your metabolism.”

Forty-five was nothing, Garth decided. Age was only the enemy, he reasoned, if you let yourself slip. Garth had seen ace reporters lose their bearings with age, analyzing events they'd never been to, adrift on the raft of irrelevance, not even aware. Jock Smith was the best spot man he'd seen next to Mobley. Jock wrote the book on hard news, and when a DC-30 crashed, he stayed on the scene for four days while they pulled out bodies, a human teletype running open. Sledgehammer leads, tear-jerking sidebars so riveting the paper had to order an extra run. Garth's thoughts drifted off.

“My sister, Janine, is two years younger than I am, thirty-five,” an accounting clerk named Billy announced. “Last
month, on her birthday, someone planted fifty pink flamingos on her lawn with a sign H
APPY
F
IFTIETH
, J
ANINE
.”

“Nooo?” A shocked chorus.

“It was probably her husband,” someone snickered.

Garth was tired of waiting amid this bunch of cackling hens. Where the hell was Boomer? Here he was — the paper's managing editor — and he was wasting his time, time that could have been spent tracking down office thieves or, failing that, planning his model plane formation, a visual feast of colour and aeronautic history. In the old days, someone would have brought him a coffee.

Hey diddle diddle
. Garth checked his watch, which confirmed that he'd been waiting for fifteen minutes. Carla said she'd heard bitching over Where Are They Now? but it was probably Smithers in Sports, since he did such a lousy job on the bike messenger story. He was nothing but a pain in the ass, that Smithers. Yesterday, Garth overheard him asking that reporter named Marcia to pick up a puck when she went to Prague.

“It's my honeymoon,” Marcia had groaned.

“So what? Like you haven't done it before.”

Garth would find a way to fix Smithers, who could probably, with a little planning, be nailed for sexual harassment. That Books editor, what's her name, was the new shop steward, and, according to Carla, she hated Smithers' guts.

“Good day,” snapped Boomer.

“Good day.” Finally, twenty minutes late.

Boomer had barely given Garth time to sit down. Garth was still mentally debating what to do with the olive drab British Sopwith Camel. Maybe, he decided, it would have to stay on the landing pad next to the black British Sopwith.

“There are going to be some changes,” Boomer announced. Garth froze; he should have seen it coming, but with Boomer, the shrunken eyes were deceptive.

“Katherine Redgrave will be taking over your duties . . .”

For the good news, Garth knew, you went to lunch; for the bad you stayed in the office and took it like a man, and when you walked back into that newsroom, stunned and near tears, no longer worth a lousy twelve-buck lunch, wondering how it had happened, why it had to be you, everyone already knew.

“You will be given the title of senior editor. If that's not acceptable, there is early retirement.” Boomer gave him a mean smirk. “That is
your
choice.”

Ownie pulled the Jaguar into the wake of a Monte Carlo. He had to concentrate, here on this deathtrap, this four-lane freeway dotted with work crews.

In the passenger's seat, Turmoil was singing strange words that Ownie didn't know. Once, when they had met another man from the Islands, Turmoil claimed that they shared an underground language. “When the slaves arrive, they come from all ovah Afreeka speaking diffr'nt languages, so they invent their own, Tower of Babel, mon, eye-land-style.”

Eyes fixed on the road, Ownie no longer knew what to believe. It was like looking at life and seeing ghost images, he decided, orange instead of blue, red instead of green. He refused to contemplate the dash, the revolver, or the homicidal Firebird near the camp.

Their maroon car and its alloy wheels drew a covetous stare from the M
OTHER OF A
C
APASKAT
H
ONOUR
S
TUDENT
, who had no idea Ownie swore to himself, no idea. They were going to a restaurant for dinner. Turmoil said he couldn't drive because he had lost his licence for speeding; if caught, he could be deported. “What about me?” Ownie had shouted. “What the hell about me?”

“Pass this jalopy,” Turmoil now ordered.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Ownie felt the Jaguar, supercharged to go from zero to one hundred in seven seconds, overtake a Jimmy that liked to D
IVE
N
AKED
. A spectral wave of heat shimmered from the highway. “I've got to phone my wife.”

Turmoil's singing was getting on Ownie's nerves. He was already antsy enough stuck out in the woods, incommunicado, held hostage by Turmoil, the alligators, and a travel bag of doubts. He couldn't stop thinking about Carlos and his fatal betrayal. That morning, Ownie had found a stick outside the trailer, which he had stashed for protection under his bed near a framed picture of Carlos he had found in a drawer. The animal trainer had posed with a sinuous cat draped around his neck like a feather boa. In the newspaper story, Carlos told the reporter that he modelled his act on the masters of the Golden Era. He taught a tiger to ride an elephant — even though they were natural enemies — and he put his head in the mouth of a full-grown Bengal. Lions wore their mood on their faces, he explained with insight earned through the years, unlike poker-faced polar bears that could surprise you with their anger.

“We'll see.” Turmoil didn't even shrug

“I haven't talked to her in a week.”

Ownie had also promised Scott, the reporter, that he would phone him with periodic reports, but Scott had become, quite frankly, low on his list of priorities. Ownie still felt bad about what had happened to the man, but he had his own problems now. One night, before Turmoil had pulled up stakes and headed south, when things were still upbeat and encouraging, Ownie had arrived at the gym and found Tootsy wide-eyed.

“F-f-f-uckin' Turmoil,” Tootsy stuttered. “He knocked out Scott.”

“Whadya mean?” asked Ownie, confused.

“He tuh-tuh-told him he wanted to spar, and then he knocked him out.”

“That crazy bastard,” cursed Ownie.

When the heavyweight arrived back at the gym, Ownie confronted him. “What the hell did you do that for?” demanded Ownie. “That man has been good to us.”

“Oh myyy.” Turmoil smiled. “He a big strong white boy. He shuhd be able to tek it.”

“Who you gonna knock out next?” Ownie demanded. “My wife?”

At least Scott was home in his own bed, Ownie figured, while he had not had a decent sleep in days, not since Turmoil had started chasing demons in the night, rattling the metal walls of the trailer like a windstorm, disturbing the ghost of Carlos. What was he doing? Ownie wondered. How could they be ready for Stokes if the man didn't sleep?

“We'll see.” Turmoil stared out the window while conducting himself with swoops of his left arm that cut into Ownie's space.

Poor Carlos, Ownie thought, defending those lions. In the end, it was probably something stupid, a loud noise or a runaway horse, that spooked the cat and broke the bond that Carlos had established. Ownie knew that Carlos wouldn't go around the lions drinking; he was too much of a pro for that, and he certainly wouldn't hurt them on purpose. Carlos had given those animals everything he had, Ownie believed. Was it ever enough?