Boomerang's son, Sonny, sauntered over wearing a Stars and Stripes ballcap and the added pressure of running the gym while his father was in hospital. Ownie sized up Sonny, who appeared oddly out of date, one of those people who'd look better in another decade, stepping off a potato boat or chasing Jimmy Cagney.
Sonny reminded Ownie of his old friend Ronnie Jackson.
When he and Ronnie were kids on the Island, fox farming was bigger than the Gold Rush. Business was so flush that farmers hired armed guards, and the Queen of England wore a silver-fox stole. A pair of breeders could bring in thirty grand, enough to build a mansion, a PEI plantation with a marble fireplace, central heating, and pillars. Fox Homes, they called them. In the spring, the rich farmers came to town, down to the tubercular shacks of the poor folk, and offered to rent your cat if she'd just had kittens. Ronnie decided to go for it, since his old man hadn't worked in months. “I'll bring her back in a week once the pups are fattened up,” promised the farmer. After a week, Ronnie was missing his cat, out on that farm by herself. As Ronnie later discovered, one day, when the fox pups' eyes were opened and they were strong enough, the foxes turned on that poor mother cat and ripped her to shreds. The cat wouldn't fight because that wasn't her instinct, her instinct was to nurture. “I should never have let her go,” Ronnie cried. “I killed my cat.”
Anyway, Sonny reminded Ownie of Ronnie, a hard-luck case who had learned, early on, that people are like silver foxes. Even when you're trying to help, they can turn on you just like that and rip you apart.
With Turmoil in the dressing room, Ownie decided that he would rather talk to Sonny than Greg, who was useless. “Are you a veteran by any chance?” Ownie asked, noting the hat with the inscription: T
HESE
C
OLORS
D
ON'T
R
UN
.
“Ah yes, sir.” When Sonny spoke, he sounded crisp, unlike Ronnie, who was sawny, and said haych for
h
, chimley for chimney, and bodado for potato.
“So am I.”
“Oh,” said Sonny, softening. “What branch?”
“Navy.”
Sonny nodded, which is when Ownie noticed the shiny pink skin, unnaturally smooth in places, like Silly Putty, and
bumpy in others, ending with a stump where one thumb should have been.
“I joined up when I was sixteen,” Ownie said. “I spent five years on boats. We used to make the run back and forth between Newfoundland and Derry.”
“I was air force. Paratrooper.”
“No picnic, I guess.”
A fan blasted air from the corner and Sonny swallowed. He looked at Ownie, who noticed, with surprise, that his eyes were cock-eyed, just like the painting of Boomerang. Maybe, he told himself, he had sold the portrait artist short.
“No sir, it wasn't.”
“Paratroopers got guts though.”
A fighter with a flat top turned on a boom box and started dancing next to the preacher curls and presses. Ownie saw two guys arrive together, a featherweight named Julio from Brazil and a lightweight from San Juan, Puerto Rico. They both looked hard. Boomerang used to charge a buck for the show, but the audience was gone now, scared off by stabbings and drive-bys, so now the curious went to a safer part of Florida, to slick gyms with chrome and leather decor.
Sonny swallowed again and his hands clenched tight, as though he was holding something in, a snared mosquito or a heart full of hurt. “I got burned pretty badly.” Slowly, he stuck out his arms. “Ahhh.” Ownie pretended he hadn't noticed the pink skin, and Sonny choked up as though he couldn't bear to explain any more.
“I had a double-fractured skull,” Ownie volunteered.
“Is that right?” Sonny's hands unclenched.
“I was unconscious for fourteen days.”
A fighter in a prison-style jacket handed Sonny a key.
“How you doing, Earl?” asked Sonny.
“Everythang is everythang,” Earl shrugged. His hair was
an exercise in crop rotation: a shaved fallow strip on the bottom, then a thin strip, followed by a rich, thicker one on top.
“I didn't remember nothin' about it,” said Ownie as Earl shuffled off. “Then four years ago, they had a reunion for my ship in Halifax. I walked in and one of the guys looked at me funny and said, âTiger! It's Tiger!' I laughed. Nobody calls me that, but that's how he remembered me because of this.” Ownie opened his shirt and exposed a droopy, faded tiger that made Sonny smile. He had his own tattoo â G
OD
I
S
M
Y
J
UMPMASTER
â above the pink skin.
“Anyway, as it turns out, this guy was the medic who looked after me in sick bay,” Ownie said. “He told me how they brought in a priest and anointed me for death.” Ownie paused. “I never knew that.”
“That's pretty serious.”
“All I remembered was coming to. When I opened my eyes, it was like someone had stuck a knife through my forehead. I had to lie still for weeks; I couldn't move for fear of a blood clot. There was a guy in the bed next to me off a British ship who kept talking about how glad he was to be going home to see his family. Finally, they let him out, and he dropped dead the next day.”
B
LESSED BE HE THAT COMETH IN THE NAME OF THE
L
ORD
. H
OLY
B
IBLE
. P
SALMS
C
HAP
. 118, V. 26.
Ownie noticed a boy tapping a miniature bag, following step-by-step posters of T
HE
L
EFT
J
AB
and T
HE
L
EFT
H
OOK
taped to the wall. He was as skinny as a foal, all legs and arms, and he reminded Ownie of little Ricky back at Tootsy's.
“Hey, Peewee,” Sonny said. “Come here.” Sonny had a few words with the boy, who kept his head down to hide a missing tooth.
“He don't go to school?” Ownie asked.
“No, his mother don't send him. I figure he's not missing
much down here. Last week, some kid put rat poison in his teacher's coffee.”
Ownie shook his head, knowing that some kids never got a break. When he was growing up, the Coolens had a little homeboy, a mentally handicapped son who couldn't get a job. Back then, there was nothing for them, no schools or workshops. They called them homeboys because they never left home. One day, this boy â his name was Murray, and he was as gentle as a lamb â wandered onto the railway tracks and got killed. The worst part was, Ownie always thought that the family was relieved he was gone, that the mother knew she wouldn't have to worry about how he'd live when she was dead.
“There he is, Washington.” Sonny pointed to the door, which opened for a big man with reservoir eyes and a high forehead. Washington had a fade do with orange dreads on top, and these days he went for thirty bucks a round.
“He used to be good,” Sonny confided. “Golden Gloves, the works. Then he got into the yah-yo too heavy. That finished him.”
Ownie figured the man ran about six-three, two twenty, close enough to Stokes. “Is he the best we can get?”
“Yeah, he's worked with some good ones.”
“Will he go hard?”
“Yeah, deep down he's still got something to prove. And you don't need to worry about him telling Stokes's camp nothing,” Sonny added. “He don't have no head for the he-say-she-say. That boy can barely remember his name when he leaves here. You got to flip him a quarter once in a while so he don't forget.”
“That's me.” Ownie pulled out a photo of a young sailor with black hair.
“Great pipes,” said Sonny.
Ownie shrugged and picked up a laundry bag. It was one day after the first sparring session with Washington, and they were sorting towels in the locker room, an echo chamber of heat and stink. G
ANGSTA
R
AP
R
ULES
was scrawled on a buckled door, then amended to G
ANGSTA
R
AP
A
ND
R
EEBOK
R
ULE
.
“My wife tells the kids that when she met me I was standing on a corner, sleeves rolled up, showing off my arms like Popeye.” Ownie chuckled at the vanity of youth. “Look at me now.”
“You don't look so bad.”
“Compared to what: a corpse?”
Sonny smiled and handed back the picture.
“My wife was only seventeen when she met me. She came to town on a bus and the driver told her â I'm not kidding â whatever you do, don't get mixed up with one of those Flanagan boys. She got a job at a luncheonette and met me one week later.”
They laughed, the only sane people in this whole screwy place.
“I had a nurse look after me when I got hurt,” Sonny said softly, like a man who wasn't used to having people listen. “Sweet thing from Virginia, she held my head and told me not to look at my arms. When I got real scared, she sang to me,
that James Taylor song, âSweet Baby James.' I always meant to write her and thank her for being so kind.”
“You should,” Ownie advised. “You'd never regret it.”
Ownie counted a stack of ten towels, then another ten, relieved to be away from Turmoil, who had gone into town with Greg to meet his banker. Ownie put one towel inside a grey locker belonging to Billy (Pit Bull) Tait, who wasn't, he believed, doing the dog any favours, not with a face like a gravel pit. Washington had worked out well, Ownie decided; he was big enough and hard enough, even though they'd only gone four rounds.
“I never saw the medic until that reunion,” said Ownie.
“Yeah?”
“I shouldn't tell you this, but . . .” â he thought for a minute â “. . . awww, it's kind of comical.” Sonny, he figured, could stand a laugh at someone else's expense. “When I first came to in sick bay, he started talking, telling me how glad he was I'd made it. I appreciated what he'd been doing for me, and after a couple of days, we became good friends.”
Sonny nodded.
“See, I still couldn't move my head.” Ownie steadied his head with both hands. “I had to stare straight ahead; they were afraid of a hemorrhage. On the fourth day, he brought in pictures of him and his friends in a club in St. John's and held them in front of my face. Close, so no one else would see. They were all as naked as skinned rabbits. I just about died. Then he whispered, âWhen you get out of here, Ownie, I'll take you there. We can all have a good time.' And there I was unable to move.”
Sonny shook his head and laughed as they headed back into the gym.
“Did Boomerang write that?” Ownie asked, pointing to a framed prayer behind the ring.
The Boxer's Prayer
Oh Lord
Protect us from the low blow of crime, the sucker punch of drugs, the TKO of jealousy and greed.
Make us fair and honest in everything we do.
Moral heavyweights, true sportsmen, humble servants of you, O Lord.
Watch over us as we step into the ring of life.
Guide us through each round.
“Yeah,” Sonny nodded. “He thinks he's a bit of a poet.”
Ownie looked up, surprised. In the entrance, near the water cooler and a hamper of bloody towels, was a lanky young woman in jeans and a cotton shirt. It was strange to see a woman in here, he decided, especially one who didn't look like a hooker or a mule.
Like a deer waiting to cross the highway, she stood in the doorway and then darted across the gym. Everything about her was vertical, Ownie noted, from her stride to her teeth. She had a mane of shiny black hair that looked like it had just been released from braids, hair you wanted to reach out and squeeze just to feel it spring back. Brushed off her oval face, it was held in place by barrettes. Maybe she's with the government, Ownie thought, a health inspector or someone from the licence board. On the Stairmaster, a dog gawked.
“Are you Ownie Flanagan, sir?” She must be six feet, Ownie figured, but graceful as a wind chime. Her nose led to an explosion of teeth, and her voice was southern like lawn swings and lemonade. “I heard you could help me.”
I
AM THE ALMIGHTY
G
OD, WALK BEFORE ME AND BE THOU PERFECT
. G
ENESIS
C
HAP
. 17, V. 1.
All of a sudden Ownie had a funny feeling about the place, something that told him nothing good would ever come from
all of this, one of those feelings. The night before Ray Robinson fought Jimmy Doyle, the story went, he had a dream that he hit Doyle in the ring and Doyle died. It bothered Ray so much he went to the commission and said he couldn't fight because he'd had this dream. Ray said they brought in a priest or a minister who convinced him it was all right, and then he hit Doyle with a left, and Doyle died just the way Ray had seen it.
The woman was a member of the US basketball team, she said, and had met Turmoil in New York. She was studying kinesiology. “He started phoning me from Halifax every couple of months,” she explained. “Now, it's every second day, usually at night.” She had decided to come to see him, but now she was uncertain. “I'd like you to tell me what kind of person he is before I go any further.”
Ownie looked away, trying to hide his surprise, trying to keep the questions from slipping to his tongue. How was Turmoil making calls from the trailer in the middle of nowhere? When? What about Lorraine?
“I'm not going to get into what he's all about or what he's not all about.” Ownie wondered if
this
was Turmoil's secret. “But I'm looking at you and you look like an intelligent person.” Ownie liked the way she stood her ground; he liked the way her crinkly hair was pulled back. “You're an Olympic athlete and that's nothing to be taken lightly.” She squinted as though she was figuring out a difficult play. “I'm only going to say one thing to you. Do you have a return ticket back to where you came from?”