Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (17 page)

Rooted, however, through all those years, tendrilled around his heart, was Morag, just the sound of her name set her apart, always. All this with women began with her, she was at the peak of his life, yet part of the slide of it too, as if they’d been put on a path together, attended by love and passion, but when his boxing was ruined it ruined them too, maimed them in some infuriating, stupid, impossible way. They could never move forward, never take that next step since it seemed to have been obliterated, deformed, but their mutual past still claimed them, and they fell back briefly into its arms. Or they had.

HE HURRIED TO CLOSE UP
, locking the gas pumps before another car showed. He wanted badly to drink, an urge that came on him once in a while and it was on him now. When he heard footsteps behind him, he clamped his teeth to keep from swearing. But it was only Malcolm, gimping along under the thin yellow ray of the streetlight.

“Malkie, I’m after forgetting what night it is, boy!”

“I thinks to meself, Lauchie’s barring the door pretty damn early for Thursday.” He sucked in a breath and bore down on his cane. Pain creased his lean face. “Goddamn gout couldn’t keep me away.”

“Maybe you’d better skip the drink then.”

“Red wine, that’s the worst for it, they say.”

“No problem, Malk, we’ll steer clear of the wine cellar. And whisky?”

“Lead the way, my son, they don’t call it
uisge beagh
for nothing.”

With a glance at the empty road, Lauchlin shut off the outside light and flipped the sign to “closed.” He thought of Tena on the road that night, how single-minded, focused on her destination. How had she known that she’d reached the store? “Into the backroom, Malk, we don’t want latecomers.”

He pulled up another chair near the desk and slid a case of noodle soup in front of it. Malcolm thanked him for the footstool and sat,
cradled his knee in both hands and lifted his leg, setting his foot down gingerly on the box. Comfortable now, he rubbed his hands briskly at the sight of Lauchlin removing from a bottom drawer a bottle of whisky. He turned its label toward the desk lamp.

“Single malt,” Lauchlin said. “Birthday present from my brother. Lord knows what it costs.”

“A doctor can buy what he likes.”

Frank belonged to the St. Andrew’s Society and a chapter of Clan MacLean, and he sent Lauchlin and Johanna photos of New Year’s celebrations and Robert Burns Days, with their bringing in of the haggis, a piper puff-cheeked in the background, to a long table of kilted men smoking cigars. Frank liked that sort of thing, dinners and toasts, the camaraderie, the full Highland dress-up. In his Toronto house he had photographs of such gatherings framed on the walls of his den. Lauchlin had never gone in for that, and sometimes he thought that maybe his brother was ambivalent about it himself, immersed in it but examining it at the same time. Yet suddenly he was taking a trip to Scotland alone.

“Not always.” Lauchlin unfolded a letter from his shirt pocket, tilted it toward the light. “Anyway, this is the work he does. Frank says,
A couple weeks ago a man came into the ER with his arm severed above the elbow, he tried to jump a boxcar and his timing was off just that little bit, I did it a million times, he said. Ten minutes later someone else arrived with his limb wrapped in newspaper, like a cod left behind at the fishmarket. I stopped the bleeding and put the arm on ice, and a team of surgeons did reattach it later, though he won’t be jumping anything that moves ever again. Once, I was one of those surgeons, but too often my head was fumed with whisky and your mind has to be as clear and cold as an old spring, or you hit that one time over a million.
”

“He writes with a fine pen,” Malcolm said. “No thick nibs in that man.”

“He’s going to the Hebrides, you know, soon,” Lauchlin said, folding the letter away. “Might make a stop here.” He wouldn’t tell
Malcolm that his brother had asked him to come along, or that his refusal had mostly to do with Tena, fearing as he did now that someone might step in and replace him, another man might come to her door and delight her with talk, read her books better, relieve a long afternoon and drive her to old points, keep her from the edges of cliffs, from whatever and whoever might threaten her. At the same time, he wondered if she would have missed him, or what missed about him.

“Never been to the old country, myself,” Malcolm said. “I never felt the lack of it.”

“You don’t know what’s over there then.”

“I’ve heard plenty about it, bullshit and all, and read as much more.”

“Not the same as seeing the place though, is it, as being there.”

“All that matters to me is right here, under my feet.” He thumped his cane on the floor.

“Frank’s on an ancestral kick. Was always keen on that stuff.”

“Is he? We all love tales of the misty old days in the Highlands and Islands, but we wouldn’t want to live them, would we. We’d never owned a handful of dirt till we came over here, my son. I don’t think many of us would sleep well with cows in the next room, and your chief or your laird or whatever, he’d still turn you out to fight his feuds or his battles, or give you up for gambling debts, when that time came. He’d put sheep in your croft and everyone else’s, drive you away somewhere else, over on the rocky side of the island or ship you over the sea, you had no say in it. If Frank’s forebears hadn’t been turfed out by the Clearances, they’d still be landless, the most of them, maybe have a little croft if they’d hung on for another hundred years. Here you could get what, a hundred, two hundred acres from the Crown, clear two or three and work it for a year, show you had the stuff to make a life that way, and it was yours, a land grant. In Scotland you wouldn’t have had a patch. You know? So let’s
not get all soft and woolly about the old Highlands. We lost some of the old things, in coming over, after a while, true enough, but we gained others we’d have never had. We came out all right, over here. We don’t owe them a goddamn thing back in Scotland, as far as I’m concerned. They could’ve kept us, if they’d wanted us, that’s the way I look at it.”

“I bet they’re sorry they didn’t keep you. Here, try this whisky, it’s better than you’re used to, Malcolm my man, and more than you deserve.”

Malcolm reached for the bottle and examined it through his bifocals. “Made by the Sixteen Men of Tain, says here, and there they are, by God. I had some ‘shine last week made by the One Man of Black Brook.”

“Good was it?”

“Not this good. Smooth or raw, same results.”

“
Slainte mhath.
”

They took the whisky quickly, its taste raced across their tongues. Malcolm conceded that maybe it was fifteen men better than what he was used to. The backroom dimmed away beyond the light of the desk lamp. It carried the smell of ripped cardboard, of potatoes and onions and the earth that had clung to them. If you sniffed, there was from some corner a whiff of kerosene, and the faint odour of the heavy bag, like wet gloves. In the rectangle of the rear window there was a bar of mountain darkness, a slightly lighter night sky above it. They didn’t talk, they just sat, settling themselves. Lauchlin poured them another one. There was no hurry. As soon as the whisky warmed him, Malcolm would turn their talk, as he always did, toward the ring, toward Lauchlin. Before Malcolm retired in Sydney and returned to St. Aubin, Lauchlin kept the boxing to himself. He did his bag in the backroom, hidden away, when the store was empty. But Malcolm had got him talking again, and the fights Malcolm had seen came back with a strange freshness,
Lauchlin’s own angle, satisfying flashes of his boxing past, its world, the people who were part of it. But tonight Lauchlin wasn’t as ready as he’d hoped, a mood had hold of him and maybe whisky couldn’t drive it off.

“Malkie, you seen anything of that Cooper fella around here, up and down the road or wherever?” he said.

“Not in my walks, but somebody saw his shiny pickup. He wasn’t in it.”

“Where?”

“Church Road, the Southside end.”

“What the hell was he doing there?”

“I don’t know a soul who could tell you. He’s got no roots in this place anyway. He’s just a truck and it’s usually empty.”

“I heard he’s into surviving in the woods.”

“We all survived in the woods in the old days, we didn’t have to work at it.”

“I’d like to have a word with him anyway.”

“Oh he’d love that, my son, that’s a man who wants words with somebody. You want to tell me about that?” Malcolm pointed to Lauchlin’s brow, the cut a dark scab against a patch of fading yellow skin.

“No, I don’t. He was a just a gym boxer, I think, if he was a boxer at all.”

“He’d get you one way or another, he wouldn’t need fists. Fists is what we used to use, eh? That’s how you showed you were a man, a better man. Now it’s weapons. Killing.”

“Not much of that here, Malk. Big cities, sure.”

“I mean the kid who gets a hold of a big gun, machine gun, and blasts another man to pieces out a car window, driving by. That’s manhood?”

“In a twisted way. Have another, Malkie.”

“I just might.”

Two lengths of cotton tape, yellowed and stained, were draped on a coat hook. Lauchlin only used them when his hands got sore. Prepare your hands. Like a sumo tossing salt. Taping up—more than the gloves, the trunks, the high-laced shoes, the robe, it had said, you are a boxer. He remembered the white tape weaving smoothly around his knuckles, between his fingers, Hank Powicki, his second, chattering advice as he did it. His first big bout, a four-rounder. Watching the tape wind fresh and white around his fists had calmed him, that solemn ritual.

“You know, there’s women in the ring now?” Malcolm said. He seemed to sense that more alcohol might be needed to revive that Thursday-night spirit. “Jesus, I can’t watch them pummelling each other. A few years of that and what would a woman look like? Eh? Scar tissue, monkey eyes, busted nose.”

“No, thanks. They don’t hit that hard though, do they?”

“They hurt each other, yes they do. There’s no cosmetics for that either.”

Lauchlin touched his throat. He had his dad’s Adam’s apple. He’d been punched in the throat, rare in the ring, but it almost cost him that fight, an early one, clumsy, Malkie wouldn’t have seen it, what he had looked like under the ring lights, hanging on to finish the round, wheezing for air, his esophagus sore for days, his voice raspy as a gangster’s. Training didn’t prepare you for everything, men fought any way they could sometimes and it wasn’t pretty. Working laces into your face, stomping on your feet to foul up your footwork, taunting you in clinches, filthy words, fouling up your style, your tactics. Anything to break you down.

“Listen, Malk. You think you’re something of an authority on women, and I know you aren’t, but I need a second opinion, like the doctors say.”

“What leads you to suppose I don’t know anything about women?”

“You know
something,
that’s why I’m asking you. My mother has opinions on this, but I’d rather not go into them.”

“She’s never shy that way.”

Lauchlin drained his glass. “There is a woman I’ve got some close to. But that’s wrong, so I’m told.”

“You’ve been there before, if I’m not mistaken.”

“This is different. It’s complicated.”

“The wrong is complicated, or she is? An uncomplicated woman is not interesting.”

“There’s no lack of interest, Malk. I’m not sure how she feels about me. Or how I should feel about her.”

“She’s already let you know, one way or another, I suppose. Hasn’t she?”

“A little. There’s a husband in it too.”

“Well. That’s a tighter situation, Lauchlin. As you’ve known in the past, if you don’t mind the mention. Trouble there maybe. And let’s admit it’s Tena MacTavish we’re talking about.”

“Jesus. Can anything stay a secret here?”

“I didn’t know there was a secret.”

“What have we done? Nothing friends don’t do. Clement knows, it’s all above board. He likes to see her happy.”

“But maybe not
too
happy. She enjoys you, doesn’t she?”

“So?”

“No harm in that, Lauch, not in my book. When a woman doesn’t enjoy you anymore, it’s all over, my son. But see how deep the water is before you jump.”

“I’m not jumping anywhere, I’m too old for that.”

“Good, you’re a sensible man, you’ll do the right thing. I don’t know any more than I’ve told you. Now boxing? Yes. Cape Bretoners in the ring, the champions on your wall there? Lightning Lauchlin MacLean? Yes. Pour me another
dileag,
I’ve taken a liking to the Sixteen
Men of Tain, a talented gang, those fellas. What about Morag, she still home to Inverness?”

“She’s away to Greece, but she’ll be back for a little, in some way. I saw her off at a dance up there.”

“You danced with her, I suppose?”

“You could say I did, yes. I didn’t get the last waltz, but yes.”

“She’d better watch those Greeks, she’s a fine-looking woman,” Malcolm said. “You must be a sharp dancer, boy. Eh?” His eyes were bright from the whisky and the pain of his foot. “You always had good legs under you, good footwork.”

“I’m going to need it and more, I think.”

In the shadows the bag seemed to sway ever so slightly. The most primitive of boxing equipment, the trunk of a man, hung to be hit. There was a long, narrow mirror on the far wall, cracked where a crate had hit it, too obscured by boxes now to reflect his moves. Not for vanity anyway, not for posing but a kinetic study of himself jabbing, crossing, hooking, bobbing, weaving, slipping side to side, those years he tried to stay in some kind of shape, here, secretly, to keep his punching sharp, a rough sort of timing at least, working within the limitations of his heart. For something. What that something was he had forgotten, a vestige of hope, desire, strength.

Lauchlin swivelled his chair so he could see the photograph on the wall, Blair Richardson in profile, driving a right hand into a heavy bag, training for his second fight with Gomeo Brennan. Blair’s time of power in the world. British Empire middleweight champion. Yet he quit in his prime. He wanted to work for God, to study for the ministry. Had Lauchlin been champion he would have hung on to that glory until a better man beat him, not even God could have called him away from it.