Going Fast (43 page)

“This is serious shit,” warned Sonny. “Those maggots had a shootout with the cops last month. One guy took a bullet to the hip.” Exhilaration was creeping into Sonny's voice. “When they're on the pipe, they don't care about nothing, they got Saturday night specials, they got . . .”

Ownie waited for Sonny to finish, for the part about the gang war and the armour-piercing bullets, the dead grandma, and the howling dog. Ownie waited for Sonny's danger-induced rush to end, then asked, “Could you have told me this a little sooner?”

Bent trees were dusting the sidewalk while sheets of lightning lit the horizon, groundstrokes of one hundred million volts. Water swept the road like a massive carwash, and a bicycle hurtled by, doing spastic cartwheels.

R
EVELATION
16:16

Just stay cool, Ownie thought, and deal with this situation. So what if Turmoil says he wasn't at the Olympics? He also said he played pro hockey and was a professional hairstylist. But if this is true, it means
you
made him something,
you
made it work, not voodoo or magic. You can still take him into that fight with Stokes, you can still be a part of something great, something that Charley Goldman, if he were alive, might admire.

“He bedda not think he ever gettin 'nuther cent from me.” Turmoil cast the warning at the door. “Ahm thru widt fools like that. Ahm thru.”

Just shut up, Ownie thought, as Washington's car eased into the storm. Just let me get through this life without seeing another set of dead eyes, another corpse laid out too soon. The war was bad enough, but then he had to be in Montreal when they carried out Cleveland Denny, he had to be on the waterfront when his buddy Aubrey Mills was crushed by a paper bale on his first stevedoring shift.

“Peewee, get down.” Sonny pushed the kid under the table.

A piece of siding flew by on wings of sand as a shock wave of thunder boomed. Sonny unhooked a heavy bag and rolled it over, a sandbag for Peewee's makeshift bunker. Oh Jesus, Ownie thought, looking at the kid, he's going to end up like that little homeboy, Murray, dead and barely missed.

“I'm gonna try to get him out of here.” Sonny, drawing on his military training, had the manoeuvre planned. “If those guys come back with reinforcements, and I expect they will, he could get it.”

T
HERE IS NONE OTHER THAN THE HOUSE OF
G
OD, AND THIS IS THE GATE OF
H
EAVEN
. G
ENESIS
C
HAP
. 28, V. 17.

Sonny had turned up the radio, which was relaying storm updates. Stay off the roads, warned an announcer, who said a bridge had been wiped out and the airport highway closed by forty-mile-per-hour winds. A Japanese tourist videotaping the storm had been killed by the spar of a boat.

“It's too late,” said Sonny as the car returned, driver in the gangsta lean.

“You cowards wahn me, you stan up like a mon.” Turmoil
charged through the door as thunder roared an ear-splitting clap. The dented door blew off its hinges, inviting the chaos inside. “There no mon down here scarin me; there's no mon ever lived who scare me.” Through the wind, Turmoil struggled, arms outstretched, head back like a runner crossing the finish line. A bench flipped at his feet, landing on an advertisement for C
ARING
H
ANDS, THE
M
EDICAL
C
LINIC FOR
C
ANADIANS
while Sonny pinned Peewee to the floor.

“Nobody scare me.” Turmoil's voice wailed. “Ahm scared of nobody.” The wind scrambled Turmoil's words and lightning flashed about him, forked bolts of doom that heated the air to fifty thousand degrees.

“When ah was a boy, a powahful bolt of lightnin strike me down. Ah be standin under the pimento tree holdin mah mongoose. The lightnin kill the mongoose, but the powah go from the lightnin to
me
, and ah know right there, it's a contrack with the Gods, mah mongoose for the powah. So now ah
cahnt
be killed.” His voice had reached a mad pitch. “Ah cahnt die, mon, because ahm sign'd up widt God, he own me, lock, stock, and barrel.”

Smithers shuffled through News brandishing a magazine. “Now someone's onto something here,” he read, louder than necessary. “Genetic altering and selective breeding have created turkeys with breasts so
large
that it is almost impossible for them to mate in the traditional way. Imagine the
human
ramifications.”

BAM!
An angry Gouda round shot through the air, hitting Smithers's libidinous head. “Aaah.” The hockey reporter dropped to the carpet, where he felt for blood, checking his hands like a street mime and moaning, “That is assault! There's a dangerous criminal in here!”

Scott didn't care about Smithers or the overdue cheese attack, which may have come from Books. He was sitting at his desk with Ownie, sorting through a pile of Florida pictures, forming a visual timeline to the catastrophic end. Outside, snow was falling from the grey sky, burying hope, light, and the hapless tulips that had reared their heads. Children shivered in spring coats, shut-ins turned up the heat.

“I talked to the state police this morning,” said Scott, scanning his notes. “An Officer Petrie says they still don't have a suspect.” A collective sigh rose from the street, then fell under the weight of resignation. “They said Washington checked out.”

Ownie nodded in his army surplus jacket, hands folded, stilled by truth. When you get into the fast lane, he decided, it was only a matter of time before everything shattered in a
wreck of big dreams and easy money. Ownie had not repeated the improbable story Turmoil had told him in Florida, the one about the Olympics. What difference did it make at this point?

“They talked to me for four hours before I left,” Ownie explained. “They asked me if I knew anyone who might want to kill him.” Ownie smiled a joyless smile. “‘Other than me?' I asked.”

In the distance, Scott saw MacKenzie approaching Sports, green sweater inside out. His face was flushed and his eyes were uncertain behind his glasses. He's probably looking for Smithers, Scott assured himself; following his outburst, the hockey reporter had waddled to his desk where he now sat, subdued.

MacKenzie was rubbing his thumb and fingers together like he was trying to start a fire. He ignored Smithers and stopped in front of Scott. What does he want? Scott wondered, annoyed, as MacKenzie wobbled, stomach stuck out, butt collapsed like a dented football.

“This is Garth MacKenzie, the paper's senior editor.” Scott felt compelled to make the introduction. “This is Ownie Flanagan, the boxing trainer.”

“Ownie Flanagan.” MacKenzie held out the same hand he had extended to Frank Mobley. “You've been around the fight game for a long time.”

Scott hoped that MacKenzie would not, in the midst of something grave, bring up School Boy.

“Sixty years.”

“What are you here for today?”

“We're talking about Turmoil Davies,” Scott interrupted.

The two men were less than ten years apart in age, Scott realized, but they had nothing in common. MacKenzie, the younger of the two, seemed far older, trapped in a boozy haze of stand-up bars and levees, guys with press hats and cigars.
Retirement parties with Swedish meatballs and fruit salads made with marshmallows. He was one of those people, Scott realized, who had so embodied and so embraced his generation that he could never transcend it.

“I never saw Davies fight.” MacKenzie was bombed, Scott realized. “But I'll give you my opinion. He reminds me of a great fighter I once saw, Johnny Jacobs, a super fighter with a dandy left hand. I covered him at the Forum when he faced Ricky Roper.”

“Yes, Johnny Jacobs was a good fighter,” Ownie agreed flatly. “An ‘A' fighter, we'd call him. He fought some of the best in the world.”

“How long do you think Davies would have lasted against Jacobs?”

Why get into this now? Ownie thought. What did it matter? He had no time for talk like this, especially from a man with liquor in him. “I couldn't say.” Ownie narrowed his eyes.

Turmoil was dead, gunned down outside Boomerang's Gym, which, despite all of its devotion and faith, had not been able save him. The bullet had ripped through his rib cage and landed in a lung. Like the sweet nurse from Virginia, Sonny held Turmoil's head in his bumpy pink arms, telling him not to quit while Peewee phoned for help. As Turmoil struggled, Sonny prayed: “‘Even when I walk through a dark valley, I fear no harm for you are at my side,'” over and over again. When the ambulance arrived in a blur of fear and confusion, Peewee was shivering, and Sonny's arms were crimson.

“I don't think Davies would have lasted a round.” MacKenzie ignored the unspoken warning.

Ownie twisted his hat in his hands. Ownie had felt the stunned silence after Turmoil's death, the numbness. And then there were the questions from people who did not understand who you were or where you came from, people
who expected you to defend it or explain it, as though something like that had a logical explanation.

“That's your opinion.”

Ownie kept his head down, wise to birds like this. They'd missed the war by a few years but sucked up all of the rewards: the cushy jobs, the indexed pensions, and thirty-five hour weeks. They never had to wash a man's blood off their clothes; they never had to beg, in the depths of the Depression, for food. They had never stood on a Halifax pier and watched the
Lady Nelson
dock with a cargo of five hundred men, some in wounded stripes, some without arms or legs, young men in hospital blues crowding the rails, waving, men cut down by snipers, land mines, and mortars. They'd never searched the deck of a merchant ship for a boy named Butch with ginger hair.

“Who else did you train?”

Big phony four-flusher! Ownie decided. Like the birds who got rich during the war by gouging military families, the same people who had closed the Ajax Club and put up signs N
O
D
OGS OR
S
AILORS
, and then wondered why the sailors went rabid on V-E Day. Ownie pursed his lips. “Well, Tommy Coogan . . .”

“Kid Coogan.” MacKenzie snorted. “I saw him in the Derby twenty years ago and he could barely talk.”

“Tommy was a very shy man.”

“Shy?” MacKenzie snickered.

“He didn't particularly care for strangers.”

“I'd call it punch drunk.”

Scott dropped his eyes and wondered why MacKenzie, threatened, and emasculated by his own weak will, was choosing
this
moment to take
this
stand. He looked at the editor, whose eyes were vacant.

Garth had scorned the aged, the infirmed, and the afflicted, fearing, it seemed, to see himself in them. Their obsolescence,
their weakness. He hated the nursing home, he despised the armless woman from the library, he mocked Albert Conrad. That indiscriminate loathing made him feel both safe and superior, and now Ownie was in his newsroom — Garth was panicking — this wise guy from the wrong side of town who didn't give a damn about anything Garth thought.

Ownie picked up his coat and started to rise. He was here as a favour to Scott, who had given them good press and had, after all, been knocked out by Turmoil, but he didn't have to tolerate this. Stay calm, he told himself. Don't let this bastard get the best of you.

“I just realized, Scott, I've got an appointment.”

Scott nodded. And Ownie felt like he could cry, thinking of Tommy and his little boy and his broken wife and his bad nerves and all those death-dance fights. He didn't want to be reminded, not today, not with everything else he was carrying in his head, not by this drunken bastard!

“Call me if you need something.” Ownie waved to Scott.

As MacKenzie clutched the trainer's shoulder and said, as though he had a right, as though his grand house in the South End and his fading position had entitled him — “I'm not finished with you” — Ownie drove his left fist, the one with the dented knuckles, the one that cracked Pinky Parker's jaw in round two, into the editor's slack face.
THUMP!
The force of the blow, which came from down low, sent MacKenzie tumbling backwards.
THUMP!
Straight from the crouch, a good one for Tommy.

MacKenzie's bifocals flew off, hitting a desk, as he crashed onto a swivel chair and slid to the floor. His leg caught a phone cord, toppling the green machine. Someone gasped as blood trickled out to a dial tone.

The senior editor started to move. “You want more?” Ownie held his fist in MacKenzie's face. “Just get up off that floor.” Ownie picked up his pictures, nodded at Scott, and
walked to the elevator. He pushed the down button without signing out, and nobody tried to stop him.

It was all over, realized Scott, as he watched the elevator door close, as he looked at his quotes from Officer Petrie. Turmoil Davies had possessed the gifts, the God-given qualities that Scott had coveted, the magic, the exquisite, breathtaking
it
, and he was dead. Why, Scott wondered, did I think that life was supposed to be fair? Why did I think that
I
had been cheated?

And then, as an afterthought, he looked at Garth MacKenzie, drunk and bleeding, still on the floor, hours before he would stagger back into the
Standard
and set fire to the Accounting department.

Johnny LeBlanc climbed two flights of creaking stairs. He leaned into a door. Tootsy's still smelled musty, he decided, as though it was shaking off dust and depression. Laminated newspaper clippings were tacked to the wall.

T
URMOIL
D
AVIES
D
IES IN
F
LORIDA

H
EAVYWEIGHT CONTENDER GOT HIS START IN