Going Fast (38 page)

“No, I want to call her.” Ownie tried to sound unshakeable.

“We'll see,” Turmoil repeated. “Ah got lot of bisnis to tek care of.”

Turmoil threw a Bible-sized hand in front of Ownie's face, just missing his nose.

“What the hell are you doin' that for?”

“Mon, ah got ebbyting.” Turmoil was defiant. “Ah got ebbyting and ebbyone fooled. Ah dohn need nuthin.” Out went the arm again.

“I am telling you, that is ignorant. Stop it.”

T
HE
P
ROSTATE
P
ROFESSIONALS
. R
ETINA
V
ILLAGE
. They were driving down a medical strip, a supermarket of surgeons and
quacks competing for business. I T
HINK
I'
M
H
AVING A
H
EART
A
TTACK
, a billboard screamed at Ownie. T
HE
P
AIN
I
S
K
ILLING
M
E
, a competitor yelled back.

“You dohn know nuthin, mon. Ah know all about you, but you are mah trainah and you dohn know nuthin.”

Ownie stretched his legs for the floor pedals, the twelve-position seat was back too far, and the sun was in his eyes. Distracted, he swung in too close to a Buick, and his heart did a jig. “Make sure you tell me where this turn-off is.”

“You dohn know nothin,” Turmoil repeated the charge.

“I know all about guys like you.” He tried to catch Turmoil's eye to show that he was serious, and when he turned back to the road, he saw two pasty sunbathers, stunned by their surroundings, wading into traffic with a manatee kite. Holy Sweet Jesus! Ownie twisted the leather wheel, avoiding the sunbathers but sending the car into a fishtail.

Bring her back.
Swiiish
.

That damn power steering!
Swiiish
.

“Jumpin' Joey Giardello!”

“What you doin?” Turmoil screamed. “You gohn crazee?”

M
EN
W
ORKING
. The car skimmed the side of a tar bucket and slammed into an orange pylon. Ownie clung to the wheel as the car grazed the curb, the pylon spiralling through the air, round and round, as though it had been shot from a circus cannon.

Still shaken, Ownie picked a fuchsia chair across from a deeply tanned man and his tiny tanned wife. The man — his name was Chad — was a motorcycle cop, he explained over the noisy restaurant decor, and a third-degree black belt. Bonnie — “She's not athletic” — was a banquet manager who had made
their matching shirts. Without explaining the connection, Chad said they were friends of Turmoil.

Turmoil was sitting at the end of the table next to Lorraine and Greg, who had just arrived. All of the fighter's guests, two women and three men, were now seated for a meal that Turmoil had promised would be special.

Ownie studied the couple's matching shirts, which were maroon with a pattern of gold horse's heads. “The place I grew up on, Prince Edward Island, is horse crazy,” he said after the introductions. “They have horses everywhere, tucked away like crazy uncles. If you look inside any little barn or shed, some place in the middle of nowhere, you're liable to find a horse.”

“Really?” Bonnie smiled.

“Either a horse or a still.”

She laughed, tickled by the thought of something so quaint. “We should go there sometime.” Bonnie tapped Chad's arm, which seemed tense. Chad smiled a thin smile, as though he was almost tempted, almost weary of the scorching sun, almost tired of silencers and sawed-off guns.

“When cars first came out, they had them banned on the Island, on accounta the horses.” Ownie sensed this was a safe topic. “People were afraid they'd replace them or spook them. You could get six months in jail or a five-hundred-dollar fine just for driving a car.”

“Oh my!” Bonnie's eyes widened.

Chad, who had a scrub-brush moustache, nodded his approval. Ownie wondered if it was the idea of horses or jail that he liked. “Did you ever own horses, yourself?” asked Chad.

“Nah,” Ownie scoffed. “We could barely afford a rabbit.”

“Well, you can still love them.” Bonnie smiled again, the nervous smile of a woman always trying to make things better.

“I grew up in Charlottetown.” Enjoying company for the
first time in days, Ownie glanced at Turmoil, hoping he had noticed. “They call it a city, even though there's ball stadiums down here with more people. The main square was called Dizzy Block because people could go around it so fast that it made them dizzy.”

“That's nice for a change,” said Bonnie, who was wearing heavy foundation and dark lipstick. The look surprised Ownie, who thought everyone in Florida would look natural, ready for tennis or golf, like people who spent their days lying on the beach, noticing that when the tide crept out, it left the rippled footprint of an orthopedic sandal.

“I had a cousin in the country. Every summer, the old man would take us out there. He had this saucy little pacer named Limerick Lou that would nip at your ankles like a rooster. He liked rolling in the dirt and eating it. He was the sauciest little horse I ever saw.”

Chad smiled. “There is nothing like horses.”

Ownie studied the menu, which offered a tantalizing selection of stuffed flounder, crab cakes, gumbo, smoked mullet, grouper, pompano amandine, conch chowder, gator tail. Ravioli stuffed with shrimp. There was much to choose from, he decided, there were so many different flavours.

Poor old Limerick Lou — his mind flashed back to the horse — ended up as fox meat. Twenty bucks the farmer gave his cousin, twenty lousy bucks. Back then, he recalled, those bloody foxes were like Aztec gods, and the farmers would do anything to keep them happy even if it meant fertilizing the land with warm blood and lame horses. In those days, the stink of fox was like Chanel No. 5; they both smelled like money.

“My son, Coy, was all-state football,” Chad announced abruptly. “A natural athlete.” Bonnie turned to a window overlooking a marina scented with salt spray and orange blossoms. “I say that honestly, even if he was my boy.”

Ownie glanced at Turmoil and yawned deliberately. You're
not rattling me with your “You don't know me” bullshit, he wanted to say. If you think you are going to shock me with an outrageous revelation, Ownie vowed, then you are wrong, because I have seen all the craziness this world has to offer.

“I worked my guts out with Coy.”

Ownie nodded, giving Chad his due.

“I did everything possible and he did too. He had moves, speed, and a heart as big as Texas. In the end, the scouts said he was too short.”

“No?” Ownie shook his head.

“He was five-foot-eight and one-ninety with a career total of fifteen one-hundred-yard games and forty-one TDs. He did the forty once in four point seven and I think there was a headwind. No, I
know
there was a headwind. All that, and they said he was too short.”

“That's an awful shame.”

“He could press four hundred pounds before breakfast. I know that because we did it together. Every time I'd add an extra ten pounds to the bar, he'd look at me and he'd say: ‘Okay, Dad-Chad,' and he'd do it! I'd say ‘How to beat, Coy-Boy.'” Chad choked up as though Coy-Boy had been sacrificed to the God of Spring, as though he'd been shot through the chest with arrows. “Just like that!”

“He would,” Bonnie added as though it made a difference.

“Four hundred pounds ain't shabby,” Ownie agreed.

“What can you do?” asked Chad, suggesting the futility of it all.

“Life ain't fair.” Ownie looked around for a phone.

“I don't know if you ever noticed it.” Chad swallowed his regrets and proceeded. “But all of the top athletes get their height from their mothers. It's her genes that determine it.”

“Is that so?” Ownie figured Chad for five-eight tops.

“Oh yeah.” Chad squeezed his hand white and blinked. He looks like the kind of cop who would rough you up a bit,
Ownie decided, clip you with a sapstick when your back was turned. His uncle Dew Drop spent three months in a Maine jug after a ram-pasture brawl, but luckily for him, the screws wanted boxing lessons. Some of the others guys weren't so fortunate.

“I've seen a number of NBA players with their mothers,” explained Chad. “They are all tall women. Shaq O'Neal's mother is six-foot-one.”

“But his father,” Bonnie said timidly, “his
real
father, he's tall too. I saw him on TV when he was trying to get in touch with Shaq, but Shaq won't have anything to do with him.”

Chad bit his roll with authority. “In
most
cases, it comes from the woman.” Bonnie stared at her plate.

“Turmoil.” Greg grinned after a few moments silence. “How tall is your mother?”

“Oh she a biiig wummin,” said Turmoil, who had been admiring his reflection in a shell-crusted mirror. “She as big as me.”

Chad nodded, vindicated.

Greg laughed sarcastically. “Not as big as you.”

“Not as heavy!” Turmoil spat the word. “Ah didden say she as heavy as me. She has fine bones . . .” His voice trailed off. “More delikit.”

“That's still pretty big.”

“Why you arguing widt me? Why you so
basa basa
?”

Greg's head dropped and Ownie thought, now look what he's got going.

“Is she your mooma?” Turmoil demanded, his voice rising. “Maybee you come up on ah banana boat and ah dohn know it. Maybee you mah long loss brutha. Maybe you the mos wanted mon in the eye-lands and you got the M-16 in your car, juss waitin for trubble.”

“Yes, sir?” Rescuing Greg, the waiter arrived and everyone became quiet.

Ownie examined his menu and decided that just for spite, he was going to order the most expensive items he could find, the conch chowder and the twenty-dollar ravioli. He'd never had conch that he knew of, but he'd earned it after days in that trailer.

Greg started the ordering. “I'll have —''

“White fish.” Turmoil cut him off. “Ebbyone hab plain fish. Six. Fish is a healthy food.”

Bonnie stared at the window and Chad squeezed his wrist.

Garth saw two PR men holding up the Press Club bar: a compulsive kisser who indiscriminately smacked both men and women and an alcoholic named Eric who, at some point every night, toppled off his stool.

They were paying court to the dragons, three fifty-ish women who smoked incessantly and stared down newcomers. Every year, there was a move to bar the PR men and the dragons, to limit Press Club membership to working media, but every year, the motion died as quickly as a moth. Garth moved by the flacks, who were shouting nonsense. For years, Jean had wanted him to leave the paper and get a job in PR, which she believed was glamorous and well-paying, relenting only when Garth became the ME with a salary that bought her dream house.

Eric, the alcoholic, was shouting now. “‘It was a woman who drove me to drink. And you know, I never even thanked her.' That's W.C. Fields.”

“How about this one?” the kisser countered. “‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.' Winston Churchill.”

“Ahhh, good old Winnie.” Eric saluted Churchill, and the dragons chuckled.

Garth worked his way past frozen flash points on the Press Club walls — clippings from the Halifax Explosion, D-Day — past a petition to free journalists in South America, his head spinning like he'd stepped off a midway ride. He'd had
a great idea for Where Are They Now?, a drummer who'd played with Wilf Carter before Montana Slim thrilled the world with his trademark echo yodel. The drummer had been in Halifax for bypass surgery, but why bother now? As senior editor, he was still on the payroll, but he was a ghost really, with no duties or clout.

“Maaame.”

Garth ignored a man sitting at a piano, belting out show tunes not worthy of his attention.

Garth thought instead about Carter, whom he'd seen in 1950, the year the singer set an attendance record at the CNE. Boomer, that Upper Canadian bean-counter, that big-headed freak, wouldn't appreciate the magnitude of the story. He wouldn't know a legend if it bit him on the ass. He wouldn't know that Carter, a native of Hilford, Nova Scotia, had written more than five hundred songs.

He hadn't told Jean about the pay cut.

Garth tried to steady himself, to fight off the nausea that kept coming back. He stared down the length of the bar until his eyes settled on an older man with watery eyes. In his worn tweed jacket, the man looked like someone who'd been shipwrecked on the sea of self-destruction and crawled ashore, exhausted but saved. Protectively, as though she knew what he'd been though, a woman gripped his arm.

Hey diddle diddle
. Christ, it was Frank Mobley, Garth realized, but the woman wasn't his wife. Maybe he was divorced from — what was her name — Garth searched his brain. Nancy! That's it, a nurse from New Brunswick. She'd probably had enough of Frank's antics, Garth decided, amazed to see his old colleague after so many years. He recalled, with a nostalgic chuckle, the year that the
Standard
had sent Frank to Providence to cover the New England governors and Eastern premiers, a vacation, since nothing ever happened at those things. Frank rented a black Caddie, stuck a Nova Scotia
flag in the hood, and told security he was the lieutenant-governor. All week long, he drove around drinking Coors and waving out the window.