Going Fast (39 page)

Garth looked at Mobley again. He
knew
it was him. Normally, he would let them approach him, given his former position, but on this day he needed to touch base with a time he understood, a time when the rules may have been harsh and arbitrary, but they were rules they both understood.

Up close now, Garth took a deep breath and exhaled: “Hi, Frank. Garth MacKenzie.” Frank steadied himself and gave Garth a look that he could not place, a look that Frank must have acquired somewhere else.

After he left the paper, Frank had gone to the wire service as a lead writer, a gunslinger who handled election night returns. It was fast, pressure-packed work, like being a stock trader or a short-order cook. “Hatfield lost his seat,” someone would yell, and Frank would crank out four paragraphs that would fit perfectly onto a typeset page, seamless and filled with facts. With twenty-nine leads in one night, it wasn't writing, it was a mental party trick, like memorizing objects on a plate, a trick that required concentration and the bladder of an elephant. Frank was a master.

Frank put down his Coke — Garth noticed that his hand had a tremor — and stepped forward. “Garth MacKenzie.” Garth extended a hand. “Sparky.”

He was thinking about wire guys who'd covered big stories, stories that had made their careers, and had no memory of the events, no anecdotes or telling asides. The stories had poured through them with such speed, such velocity, that nothing had time to attach itself to their brains. Mobley really was small, wasn't he, Garth decided, waiting for his response. And he looks so damn old with that grey hair and his nose streaked with blood vessels. Frank's cheekbones were rocky cliffs over washed-away flesh.

Frank took another step — he was too close now — their chests almost touching, the Coke exhaust burning Garth's face. “Don't you open your slimy mouth to me.” Mobley poked Garth's chest, pushing him back. “You pathetic snitch, you Benedict Arnold.” Garth stumbled, dizzy and defenseless.

“This is the bastard who gave our names to management when we tried to start a union,” Mobley told the protective woman. “He got me fired.”

The woman looked at Garth with such repulsion that he blinked. Stunned, Garth did not remember what Mobley was accusing him of. What act of betrayal? All of his life, he'd been driven by fear, the fear of losing his job, the fear of disappointing Jean, the fear of growing old. That fear had eaten away at his moral fibre like dry rot and left it flawed. When the chance came to assuage that fear, he simply took it. That's all.

After Garth had been given the news by Boomer, Carla cleared out his office. The following day, she helped move Katherine in. Unlike Garth, the new boss recognized Carla's degree in office administration, her three accounting courses. With Katherine, Carla decided, there would be no overbearing wife, no demeaning errands. There were things that Mr. Boomer should be aware of, Carla explained to Katherine, pulling out a spreadsheet with numbers and dates. “I've kept good records.”

Katherine was on the phone now, engaged in a conversation that Carla could hear through the open door. “Yeah, I miss you too,” she heard the ME sigh.

Carla adjusted her mail tray in an effort to appear busy. There was no one on the phone, Carla knew. There never had been, had there? No Dmitry, no worldly suitor, no glamorous escape from the daily stress. Maybe you just had to define
real
differently, decided Carla, recalling the catechism lessons of her childhood, the incontrovertible teachings of dour nuns who never asked why but knew that everyone needed
something
to get them through life.

Katherine hung up the phone. There were moments in life that are burned in your memory, moments more vivid than time should allow. Katherine recalled being at the top of a hill on her bicycle. She was ten. In the distance was a cluster of runners with numbers on their chests, organized, but unconcerned with speed, loping, straggling away from a clearing with balloons. As the runners drew closer, Katherine noticed that some were wearing masks of Winston Churchill and Beethoven, some carried signs: R
UN FOR
M
ENTAL
I
LLNESS
.

She saw one man trotting up the hill, pulling a child's wagon. Shirt off, he looked exuberant, like someone who had avoided calamity or received unexpected news. Grinning, he seemed free of family obligations, a liberated man in shorts, smiling so hard that his face threatened to eject his dense glasses. A boy stumbled behind him, preternaturally subdued. Katherine recognized the boy as a classmate from her school, a boy she had never spoken to. And then in a moment that stayed with her, a moment that she replayed and analyzed and stored inside her brain, he waved. It was a wave that erased all distance: the wave of an old friend and a kindred spirit. It was as though he knew her and everything about her.

D
ON'T
S
IGN TILL
Y
OU
G
ET
M
E ON THE
L
INE
, the billboard screamed from the side of the highway. M
ARTIN
J
EFFERS
. A
TTORNEY AT
L
AW
. 1-888-SUEFAST.

The road, filled with clamorous signs urging commuters to litigate, reminded Ownie of how far he was from home and how little he understood this place. I
T'S
N
EVER
Y
OUR
F
AULT
, S
KIP
W
ILLIAMS
, P
ERSONAL
I
NJURY
S
PECIALIST
. 1-888-SKIPLAW. S
E
H
ABLA
E
SPANOL
. 24 H
OURS
A D
AY
.

At least, he told himself, Greg was driving, removing the risk of legal troubles of his own. Ownie was sitting in the back seat of the Jaguar, determined to stay calm. From the passenger's seat, Turmoil reached out and fingered Greg's hair, lifting a sun-bleached curl and turning it in the air. “You know ah used to be a hairstylist?” he boasted as Greg twitched in his Hard Rock Café T-shirt.

“Yeah, man?” Greg swallowed, not sure what to say.

“Ahll cut your hair some day,” Turmoil declared. “Ahll fix it all up for you.”

Ownie looked out the window. The houses were growing shabbier the farther they drove, with front yards yielding to discarded washers and crippled lawn chairs. A one-eared cat sat on an overturned Pepsi machine that had failed the taste test. How much farther? he wondered.

Chinese lanterns, orange and green, decorated the sagging porch of a shack. A man was attempting to drag a Honda 750 with a sissy bar through the front door. The man turned, and
he looked, to Ownie, like a Hispanic werewolf in metamorphosis, with coarse hair creeping up his cheeks, gushing from his ears and nose. He had a tuft on his forehead and bestial eyes, blank and untouchable, eyes that could snap the spine of a rabbit or run a blade through your gut. Ownie shuddered.

It was another hot day, Ownie decided, heavy and close as a neoprene wetsuit. He saw a woman shuffle by in slippers followed by a man in a rubber cap. The man banged on the door of a defeated trailer, which had two Dobermans fenced in its yard. In the trailer's cracked driveway, a french fry wagon, once blue, smouldered.

“This the place.” Turmoil pointed at the trailer. The grass was scorched, Ownie noticed, as though someone had spilled acid in the yard.

“How long you gonna be?” asked Ownie, anxious.

“Not long.” Turmoil shrugged as though it didn't matter.

“Make it snappy.” Ownie tried to sound offhand. “I don't like hanging around a dump like this.”

Ten minutes later, Turmoil hopped back in the car without explaining the stop. Ownie was not about to ask; they were going to the gym, a place where he could get his bearings, and that was all that mattered.

After five kilometres, Greg parked the Jaguar on a dungy street. The sidewalk was covered with bottles, empty bags, and two bums who had set up housekeeping in a GE refrigerator box. The bums were sleeping. At the end of the block, Ownie saw a discount liquor store named Party Hearty, which offered guns for rent. Outside the store, appearing like an apparition through the squalour and haze, was a sapphire-blue Lincoln Town Car.

None of this matters, Ownie assured himself, knowing that once they reached the gym, he would know the ropes, he would speak the language. As they stepped over garbage, Greg tilted his head. “What's that noise?” he asked. They were
almost in front of Party Hearty, which sold shot glasses and Elvis bar towels.

“What noise?” replied Ownie.

And then, he heard it —
thump, thump, thump
— coming from the back of the fully loaded Town Car.
Thump
. Up close, with a new-found interest in cars, he studied the machine, which seemed to have more legroom than a frigate.
Thump, thump
. There was a beat, a rhythm. Swinging a metal bat was a spindly boy who seemed as detached as an hourly labourer.
Thump, thump
. Hammering the car, wearing a T-shirt that said: S
KATE OR
B
E
S
TUPID
.

Ownie saw a woman trudge by, observe the automotive carnage, and keep walking. W
E'RE
S
PENDING
O
UR
G
RANDCHILDREN'S
I
NHERITANCE
, boasted a sticker on the greedy car, now being punished, it seemed, for its shameless indolence.

Ownie wiped his face as they passed the boy, who didn't seem to care who saw him. It was so hot that Ownie believed his skin was melting. He wondered if the boy, when bored by the Town Car, would move on to the Jaguar. Turmoil didn't seem worried. “Here! This is it!” The fighter stopped at a low stucco structure shaped like a garage. Painted black were two front windows. The steel door was dented by knee-high buckles. There was no sign, Ownie noted, just a street number and a cross. “Here the gym,” Turmoil announced, “where we be trainin.”

The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. Holy Bible. Proverbs Chap. 15, V. 3.

Inside, Ownie squeezed the heavy bag, lifted it, and took aim.
Pah
.
Pah
. The overhand left — his bailsman, the punch that got him out of more jams than a smart bribe — still had stuff.
Pah
. Testing the bag was the first thing you did in any
new gym, instinctively, it was like bouncing on a motel bed after check-in.

Ownie surveyed the gym, which resembled a whitewashed service bay. Ownie liked to tell Hildred that one imaginary person, a failed set designer he named Barry, had decorated every gym on Earth for sixty years. Barry made everything look like a cliché, cut from cardboard. He had an ageless photo selection: the trainer with the mattress on his gut, Marciano holding his baby girl like Beauty and the Beast, the leopard on a chain. If it was an ethnic gym, he threw in some soul; for the whities, the good old shamrock.

This gym had five heavy bags, two rings, a Stairmaster, and biblical references that located it somewhere in the southern USA. G
OD
I
S IN
M
Y
C
ORNER
, one declared hopefully. J
ESUS
I
S
M
Y
S
ECOND
. Two men with cigars were plopped in theatre seats. Over their heads, which were covered by hats, was an oil painting of a wiry old fighter named Boomerang posing in the crouch.

I
HAVE FOUGHT A GOOD FIGHT
, I
HAVE FINISHED MY COURSE
, I
HAVE KEPT THE FAITH
. H
OLY
B
IBLE
. 2 T
IMOTHY
C
HAP
. 4, V. 7.

Boomerang must have found religion, Ownie figured, since it was his gym and his likeness up there. His real name was Jackie McCready, but everyone called him the Boomerang because he always came back, through the Dirty Thirties and one hundred fights, the Flinty Flyweight with the granite right. Ownie studied the painting and decided it wasn't bad, except for the eyes.