Going Fast (14 page)

It had not been lost on Boomer that Conrad and Garth
were the same age. Both had started in the business as copy boys, although Garth had insisted, for days after the funeral, that they “had nothing in common.”

“Now, this business with who's it from Lifestyles,” Boomer said.

“Glenda?” volunteered Katherine.

“Is she still visiting that murderer in Dorchester?” Boomer asked.

“Yes. I talked to her. I explained the paper's position.”

“Did she mention his press releases?”

“No, although it's pretty clear she's writing them . . . And . . . ah . . . ” Katherine was reluctant. “She says they're getting married.”

“Happy honeymoon. She gets one more warning.”

“She says she has a lawyer.”

“Good. He can find her a job. When we fire her, she'll be blackballed from Heart's Content to Squamish. Make sure she understands that.” He shook his gigantic head in disbelief. “How did these people ever get hired?” he asked, apparently not expecting an answer. He ended the meeting before Garth could speak. “That's all.”

The shabby grocery store reeked of indifference. Located four blocks from Tootsy's, it had eternal lines, dented cans, and registers that broke down just as your exhausted lettuce landed in range. The meat section was stocked with overpriced bologna, produce with deformed turnips.

Marj, the head cashier, was talking to a couple paying for their order with a welfare cheque. “No, you have to spend it all. We aren't allowed to give you change.” The woman grumbled as Marj patiently explained: “You can't get cigarettes.”

Marj had been at the same cash for twenty years, working split shifts and weekends for minimum wage, a pro in tinted glasses and freshly set hair. She looked at the man, who was ominous in a grey Confederate hat and pile-lined vest, and she sympathized. “It's not right, is it?”

Scott thumbed a
Time
magazine with Bill Clinton, the new president, on the cover. Unlike Clinton, who rose from modest beginnings, these were the people who would never escape, Scott thought, the people who looked out of place at beaches, skin too pallid, hair too long. Clad in cut-off jeans, the men churned up the water in furious imitations of the overhead crawl, pulled up exhausted, then performed raucous dives, the kind that led to spinal injuries. Scott always felt uneasy around them, convinced one of them would drown in a feat of aqua-machismo.

He had gone to the store with Johnny and Louie to pick up water for the gym. He was feeling good. He had been given two weeks to research a series of boxing flashbacks ordered by MacKenzie, who said that Boomer had commended his interest in the Sports section.

“Did you hear about Edwin Moses running with Clinton?” Scott asked Johnny.

“Ah no,” admitted the fighter, puzzled.

They had left Louie in the express lane holding two jugs of sparkling water. A crone in red sneakers had eased in beside him. Staring into space and holding a mackerel and a six-pack of bingo markers, she had positioned herself at Louie's elbow, moving forward every time he took a step, her breath on his neck.

“Well, you see, Moses ran with Clinton, and then some magazine quoted him as saying he had trouble keeping up,” Scott explained.

“Maybe he got paid.” Johnny shrugged.

Louie and the woman stepped over a broken jam jar. Her breathing sounded like the short, startled gasps of a bicycle pump. Trying to ignore her, Louie blinked at Scott and joined the conversation. “That reminds me of when they had Joe Louis refereeing rasslin' or Jesse Owens racing a horse in Cuba,” he said. “Personally, I don't think it's right.”

“I read a book about Jesse Owens,” said Scott. “A teammate said he was the most coordinated person he had ever seen. When he ran, it was like water flowing downhill.”

Louie shuffled forward, the woman clinging to his arm. It was clear that she was not going to give in. He gestured for her to go ahead. “Thanks.” She smiled a gummy smile of mock surprise and then yelled louder than expected: “Sadie, just put those there.”

Sadie, who seemed in no hurry, ambled past Louie and dropped two bags of sour-cream chips, dip, and a mini
magazine offering 100 Easy Ways to Lose Weight on the counter. An angora cat the colour of peach ice cream coyly but unconvincingly purred from Sadie's sweatshirt: I'
M NOT
F
AT
, I'
M
F
LUFFY
.

The express cash had frozen.

Johnny and Scott left Louie and walked to an outside wall lined with boxes soliciting grocery tapes for homeless cats and bowel disease. Nearby were two mechanical rides: a blue elephant and a race car. A distraught toddler was sitting on the elephant, which had one chipped ear, and he was crying.

“Let me try again.” The boy's mother kicked the elephant's coin box and rattled the wall plug to no avail. The elephant was dead.

Johnny reached into his pocket and produced a folded sheet of looseleaf, which he handed to Scott. “I'm thinking of running this ad in the newspaper.”

Scott read:

Wanted: Investors and Manager for unique singer/songwriter/sports personality to finance high-quality recording for recording career. Have over 24 original songs with more coming. All investors will realize excellent return within one year. Don't miss this opportunity. Phone J. L.

“Whaddya think it would cost?” Johnny asked.

“Leave it with me. I'll find out.”

Scott had always believed that the athletes he interviewed, the hockey players in blazers, the point guards in sweatbands, could not see that he had once been one of them, an elite athlete. And then one day at Tootsy's, Ownie told him to put on the gloves and try the speed bag. On another day, he asked him to go a round with Johnny, who, he reassured him, was “only a welter and won't do any damage to a man your size.”
Scott left the ring in a semi-euphoric haze. Anxious, protective, and thrilled by the simple knowledge it was there, Scott harboured the feeling in his chest, buried where no one could touch it. What motivated Ownie, Scott did not know, but after a while, it didn't matter because it made him feel alive, it made him feel, for the second time in his life, part of a self-contained world with its own language, values, and worth. He could probably, he decided, get Johnny a deal on the ad.

Scott saw a woman in a white pantsuit stop at the broken-down elephant. He had seen her in line with two porterhouse steaks and a Camembert clutched to her chest like they might be snatched from her. The woman stared at the mother and the tow-headed boy, apparently about to speak. Why would she talk to them, after ignoring Marj, who had wished her a good day?

“Do you do anything to his hair?” she demanded.

“Huh?” responded the mother, confused.

“His hair. Do you do anything?”

“Here.” The mother handed the boy a box of Nerds, hoping to stop the sobs that were heaving through a shirt that said, M
Y
D
AD
I
S IN THE
P
ERSIAN
G
ULF
.

“Do you dye it?”

“No!”

Johnny poked Scott and with misplaced confidence named the woman's celebrity lookalike: “Angie Dickinson.” Scott could see a faint resemblance, but the real Angie, TV's
Police Woman
, immortalized in reruns, had a much better figure.

“He's only two,” the mother added, but Angie was no longer listening. She was teetering through the exit on purple pumps, clutching her cheese and her overpriced steaks. Outside, she climbed into a Mercury driven by a man whose face graced bus stop benches across the city, a man in a pumpkin blazer and a name tag. Harvey Rich, a member of the Platinum Club and a Registered Relocation Specialist, had twenty years
of award-winning sales experience. As Harvey pulled away, leaving the shabby shoppers to their predestined futures, Scott realized where he had seen the woman. In MacKenzie's office. It was Jean, the wife.

Ruff
.
Ruff
. The barking startled Ownie, because Arguello was usually as quiet as a blindman's snow, the soft spring cover that could, according to Island folklore, cure cataracts.
Ruff
.
Ruff
. Ownie crept down the stairs and peered into his rec room. Good God! Tanner, the promoter, was on his knees staring at the little dog.

“Meow.” Tanner mimicked a cat.

Ruff
. Arguello arched her back.

“Meeeooow.” The crazy bastard was tormenting Arguello.
Ruff
.
Ruff
.
Ruff
.

“Ow-nee,” Tanner yelled innocently over his shoulder. “Thayres somethin' wrong with your dowg. She's a bit of a flutterbug, you.”

Tanner had slicked-back hair and a South Shore accent that seemed stuck at sixteen rpms. Ten years ago, the promoter claimed that someone — he didn't know who — had drugged him, and that he'd walked sixty miles to Truro before landing in a greenbelt and taking off all his clothes.

Ownie waited until Tanner was on his feet before he rounded the corner and stated, “There's nothin' wrong with my dog!” Imagine this fool teasing Arguello after all she'd been through!

“How's Louie's weight?” Tanner asked in a false voice. “They'll be some savage if there's problems there.”

“His weight is A-1,” Ownie snapped, holding a notepad crammed with coded names, weights, and records.

“Good, I don't want no trouble, you.”

Tanner was putting on a rinky-dink card and had agreed to give Louie his ring debut. As a favour to Louie, Ownie had arranged for the fireman to meet Tanner at his house, where he could keep a critical eye on the promoter. Ownie was surprised that Louie, who had been pulling down a twelve-hour shift at the fire station, had not arrived by now.

Ownie could only take so much of Tanner. The promoter had grown up on Big Tancook, a South Shore island adrift between Then and Now, an eerie oblong roamed by hybrid cars and the odd birdwatcher. Once a car made the fifteen-minute boat ride to Tancook, it never looked back. It lived out its days without insurance or plates, free of service stations and streetlights. Ownie had taken the ferry to Tancook once after the glory days of schooners and fish, when a special trip for the doctor was five bucks, for the undertaker, ten. In the general store, he had met a skinny kid named Percy, who told him that he had made contact with a church that recruited members on the radio and was planning his break any day.

“We got a lot of money tied up in phone calls,” Tanner claimed.

“Yeah, you and Donald Trump.”

Relieved, Ownie could hear Louie upstairs talking to Hildred, who had been in the kitchen with a client. “Rocky Marciano is my idol,” he was telling her. “He was only five-eleven, you know. When he fought Joe Louis, he had a sixty-eight-inch reach, while Louis was seventy-six.” Hildred, Ownie knew, had no interest in anything he was saying.

And why would she? Ownie asked himself. Louie wasn't even one of Ownie's fighters. Louie hung around Tootsy's and paid his weekly dues. And in return for drives and other favours, Ownie helped him when he could, knowing nothing serious would ever come of it.

Louie trotted down the stairs and held out his hand. “How
are ya, Tan?” Ownie winced, refusing to call the promoter — whose full name was Tan Norman Tanner — by his redundant first name.

“Finest kind.” Tanner's eyes had raccoon circles.

The promoter laid out the terms of the contract, squeezing his lips as though they were chapped. “I'll be looking for you to get weighed three days before the fight. Three pounds either way. At the last card, some boy from Shediac ended up in hospital dried up like a Digby chick,” said Tanner. “He waited until the day of the weigh-in to lose eight pounds.”

Louie frowned, evidence, he hoped, that he would never do anything so foolish.

“Don't tell me his trainer was payin' heed. Now the commission's right owly with me.”

Ownie knew that the real reason the commission was owly was that Tanner had staged a tough guys' fight-off that ended when a kick-boxer beat the bejesus out of a long-haul trucker in a new definition of tough.

“He wants his pay up front,” Ownie said.

“No problem.” Solemnly, Tanner pulled the contract from his attaché, his bony hand drooping under the weight of a sapphire ring. He handed Louie a gold pen, engraved, not surprisingly, with his initials, TNT.

To save Louie money, Tanner had arranged, he said, to get his brother, who'd been in corners before, to do the job for free. “He's rock steady,” Tanner said. “His name is Verne.”

With Tanner gone, Ownie and Louie settled into the rec room chairs. Ownie liked to tell old stories, he admitted to himself, and Louie, who was in need of something, liked to listen. Louie was an emotional orphan, Ownie concluded, in search of a surrogate family. He had joined the fire department, Amway, the gym — he had even done a stint with the Jehovah's Witnesses — seeking the familial bond that he lacked.

“Years ago, whenever we fought in New Glasgow, half the
town would show up for the weigh-in,” Ownie told the fireman. “I remember once, it was so crowded that you couldn't breathe. I had Thirsty — Girlie's brother — fighting, and he was worse than LeBlanc in terms of laziness.”

Louie, the mole, laughed with him.

“When Thirsty got on the scale, I stood behind him and slipped my hand in the waist of his trunks. Butch started a little noise across the room: ‘Your guy's a yokel,' that kind of bullshit, just enough to get everybody watching, hoping for a brawl, while I held up Thirsty until he made weight.”

They chuckled.

Ownie could hear voices upstairs, which meant that Hildred's client was being escorted to the door. Hildred's cake designs were becoming more intricate, he noticed, requiring blueprints and a calculator. Sometimes Hildred reminded Ownie of a diamond cutter, the way she handled the fine detail, hunkered over a Byzantine plan of colour-coded blocks.