Ownie picked up his pen at the sight of a name that he liked: Orestes MacNeil, 91. Orestes was uncommon, he decided, writing it down in a spiral notebook. Last week, among the Johns and Peters, he had spotted a Silvanus and a Holgar, both as rare as hen's teeth. The old names, disappearing from the local landscape like train tracks and lighthouses, were for his daughter, Millie, a schoolteacher who collected curiosities. Millie, who had the good luck to resemble her mother, had her own odd ways that neither he nor Hildred truly understood.
Corrilda, he noted. Kelton.
Ownie thought about the Moncton fight and wondered whether there would be talk of a rematch with Hansel Sparks, Johnny's nemesis. Sparks could be trouble, Ownie acknowledged â more trouble than Johnny, a walking smorgasbord, could handle at this point. The day after the fight, Ownie had received a call from a sports reporter at the
Standard,
a guy named Scott, who had been in Moncton.
“What kind of a future do you see for LeBlanc?” asked the reporter, who seemed, to Ownie, unsure of himself.
“Very bright,” lied Ownie. “He's only twenty-two, and he's talented.”
The reporter then asked Ownie if he could foresee resurgence in the sport. Ownie had only a vague idea of what the reporter was after, but he gave his standard response.
“Anything is possible,” said Ownie. “I've seen the highs and I've seen the lows.”
The sport, which once had packed the Metro Centre with nine thousand fans, which once had a Maritime circuit that included Charlottetown, Sydney, New Glasgow, and Moncton, was pulling in crowds of five hundred or less. Boxing needed a draw, it seemed, a hometown favourite to bring in the hockey fans, the college students, the vainglorious politicians wanting to be seen, the people who might never have followed boxing. That was the reporter's angle.
LeBlanc was a decent kid, Ownie believed, just lazy and content to take life's easy path.
Louie, who, like most firemen, had time to burn, had driven Ownie and Johnny back from Moncton three days ago. It had been raining. Halfway home, they had driven by an illuminated sign â P
REPARE TO
M
EET
Y
OUR
S
AVIOUR
â erected in front of a wanton farmhouse where nobody farmed. At the end of a muddy driveway, the farm had a Dodge pickup, scrub firs, and an unshakeable feeling of doom. Parts of the province seemed so senseless, Ownie noted, houses plopped along the highway like boulders left from the ice age, biodegradable lives slowly breaking down. There were no stores, no discernible jobs, nothing to slow the decay, just two lanes of asphalt, some all-terrain tracks, and a twelve-dollar bus ride to town.
“Can you imagine living out here?” asked Johnny, reading Ownie's thoughts.
“Not really,” conceded the trainer.
“I'd rather be in the cooler. At least in the cooler, you got company and cable.” Louie kept his eyes on the rain-slicked
road as Johnny added quickly, “Not that I ever been in myself.”
Ownie returned to the obituaries, deliberately putting Johnny and Hansel Sparks out of his mind. Years ago, when the game was hot and the town was full of rough tough guys who'd been overseas, when promoters would jam the Armouries with yokels reeking of aftershave and El Producto cigars, Ownie had trained Sparks's uncle Thirsty, who was a bit of a clown but far more likeable than Hansel.
Audley, he wrote down, as a good one caught his eye. Vina.
Millie's kitchen was filled with wooden chairs, all painted in brilliant colours that would have made Thirsty, who loved anything comical, grin. She'd found the chairs, then beige and white, in a fisherman's shed. On her kitchen floor, she had a hand-hooked wool rug with rabbits soaking laundry in a wash-tub. The rabbits were wearing dresses.
One day, to help with Millie's hobby, Ownie had picked up a St. John's, Newfoundland, paper filled with rambling grey stories and obituaries for dearly departeds named Gonzo, Aloysius, and Horatio. The name Horatio reminded him of a strange summer's night when he and Hildred had driven to the Valley for apples.
On the outskirts of a town, a mélange of simple homes and sea captains' mansions, they saw cars parked by a field and people traipsing over tangles of clover, armed with binoculars. Ownie and Hildred joined the crowd at the edge of the field, which overlooked the bay. All around them, people waited, oddly calm, unfettered by time or need. A baby whimpered. Two chubby girls kept saying “ain't.” As the sun dropped, a fisherman named Horatio filled the silence by announcing in a reverential tone: “He is following the herring right now. He can stay underwater for forty-five minutes.”
Men nodded and a boy nonsensically asked, “Did the whale
eat all the raccoons?” Then it happened. A humpback whale, thirty tons of dorsal fins and flippers, leapt into the air, spinning, lobtailing, waving.
“Ahhh, there he is.” Fingers poked the air and binoculars dropped. The whale vanished and then surfaced, an arc of black and white, thirty metres ahead, and then he was gone, like the Loch Ness monster or a penny dropped in a well.
Ownie thought about that whale, about how he had stilled an entire town, erasing urgency with his God-given magnificence. He thought, both then and later, about the power that some creatures, larger and more mystical than others, had to turn people's lives.
Ownie jotted down today's disappearing names, along with the hometowns of their owners: Azade, Volney. Unlike the ghouls who attacked the notices like vultures, sucking the bones for sorrow, Ownie got no satisfaction from the daily toll.
Clyke, Henry James, 88, born in Weymouth Falls. Ownie laid down his pen for a moment's remembrance. A member of First Light Baptist Church, Henry is survived by his loving wife, Sophie, seven sons, and three daughters.
“Hildred,” he called to the kitchen.“Hildred.”
“What?” she shouted back.
“Bobcat's gone.”
By the time that Ownie met Bobcat Clyke back in the 1950s, he was a tired old fighter who sauntered into the ring like a mangy bear. He had a taste for the hooch so he ran hot and cold. Bobcat was married to a fire plug just over four feet tall, a despot with a kewpie-doll face and the iron will of a claims adjuster. The Little General, they called her. Any time a promoter wanted Bobcat, they had to go through her. “There were days,” moaned Bobcat, a mere foot soldier in the General's army, “that I'd be down in the cellar with a keg and
the devil and she'd be upstairs with the Lord and I'd know to stay put.”
Once, Ownie recalled, Harry Fitzgerald was putting on a fight in Glace Bay with Bobcat as his headliner. Before the fight, Fitzgerald went looking for Bobcat but found only the Little General. “Bobcat is not coming out,” she announced. “Bobcat does what I tell him and he is not going to fight.”
Fitzgerald was screwed because this was Cape Breton and a pissed-off crowd could tire-iron him, so he pleaded, “What would it take to get the Bobcat out?”
“Another fifty bucks,'' replied the General, and that was that. Bobcat, Ownie realized, was just like him: a sucker for a pretty face, which, in the long run, wasn't so bad. “Okay, Bobcat,” ordered the Little General, who had the biggest eyes Ownie had ever seen. “Get in that ring!”
Bobcat climbed in, Ownie recalled, barely moving. In the third round, he went down like the
Lusitania
. The ref â it was Gil Doucette, and he only had one eye â knew there'd be a riot if the fight ended early, so he started counting slowly. Gil stopped at eight and pleaded under his breath, “Come on, Bobcat,
please
get up.”
The crowd, mostly miners and steelworkers, was ready to rip apart both Gil and Fitzgerald if they didn't get more. Another eight. “Get up, Bobcat,” Gil begged, fearing for his good eye. “Pleeease, I know you can do it.” On the third eight, Bobcat growled, “What wrong with you, man, you got no schoolin'? That's your third eight.”
Thinking about Bobcat and the Little General made Ownie sad, and he wondered if the best had passed, if he was doomed, despite his skill, to spend his days reliving history, enjoying the glory days with dead men. Was this it?
Ownie was jolted out of his thoughts.
Hildred had appeared in the dining room, wearing an
apron over a cotton turtleneck decorated with snowflakes. On the apron, in silver letters, were the words
Sweet Dreams
, the name of the cake-decorating business that she ran from their kitchen.
“Did you use one of my bowls for the dog?” she demanded.
“Naaahhh.” Ownie was indignant. “Don't be so foolish.”
“If the health department ever found out . . .” Hildred snapped.
“G'won.”
Hildred couldn't stand to see him relaxing, Ownie decided, but at least she still was pretty. There was something to be said for that. He thought about poor Tootsy's wife, who had a big rubber belly that hung down to her knees. She wore Tootsy's old T-shirts and sweatpants stained with grease, but she had a kind nature, according to Tootsy. Last year, he had told Ownie with more than a touch of pride, she rescued a baby robin and nursed it back to health, feeding it with an eye-dropper.
Ownie heard Hildred shout something, which he ignored. It was no wonder, he decided, that after he'd retired from the dockyard he'd returned to the gym full-time. Undisturbed, he could pass his time at Tootsy's, helping with a few up-and-comers and dreaming, as only an old man could, of having one real fighter.
Being a top trainer without a
real
fighter was like being a jockey without a mount. How could he ever prove, Ownie pondered, in the time he had left, how great he really was?
Getting on his feet, Ownie opened the door to the backyard and muttered, “C'mon in. I'm the only one around here who looks after you,” as a dog scampered in. Ownie patted the comely mongrel with a copper coat and a wounded heart worn on one sleeve. Arguello, Ownie had named the dog, after the handsome Nicaraguan with the shattering right and three world titles, a five-ten feather with class. Like Alexis, who'd
been born into poverty and war, the dog had had a rough start in life, beaten and abandoned on the side of a road.
Before long, Ownie realized that the dog was, in fact, female, but he kept the name because it was foreign and none of the morons he associated with would know the difference. Jumpy, with the bad nerves of a hard beginning, Arguello had chewed up Ownie's false teeth when he left them on a table. Ownie fixed the teeth with Krazy Glue but, like most things in life broken or bruised by carelessness, they never felt quite right.
Arguello hid under a chair as Ownie stared at one of Hildred's knick-knacks, a leggy ballerina with a blonde chignon. The ballerina smiled an empathetic smile as though she'd known him when the game was different, when Halifax was pumped up from the war, full of troopships and Russian brown squirrel stoles, crazy with the hope that life could start again. Back when Ownie had A Fighter with a capital
A
, a prince named Tommy Coogan.
Louie, the mole, had informed him that Johnny wasn't doing his roadwork as ordered. “Keep the reports coming,” Ownie urged the fireman. “I'll like you better that way.” LeBlanc's career was going nowhere, Ownie believed, and guys like Louie were nothing but tourists, helping Tootsy keep the gym lights on.
Maybe you get
that
kind of chance only once, in that extraordinary time and place, Ownie thought. Maybe, that's
it
.
Arguello whimpered as the phone rang, and Hildred shouted, louder this time: “It's for you. Some man sounding businesslike.”
Ownie patted the dog's back as he shuffled to the kitchen. “It's all right,” he assured her, pleased that he had kept the name Arguello, a classy name that sounded as strong and fearless as the photogenic champ, a warrior who had KO'd Boom Boom Mancini in the fourteenth round. “It's all right.”
Sports had five phones and six computer terminals in the back of the
Standard
's newsroom, which sprawled open and endless like a gymnasium. The newsroom was on the second floor of a nondescript building in an industrial park.
Scott MacDonald was on the phone conducting an interview, one ear plugged to block out the invading noise. Scott, who had worked at the
Standard
for fifteen years, was back reporting after a decade on the desk. Three weeks earlier, he had driven to Moncton for the four-fight Maritime Extravaganza, his first road trip in years, prompted by the presence of one local, Johnny LeBlanc.
Scott liked LeBlanc, who didn't look like a punk, a hood, or a two-bit pimp. At five-nine, Scott decided, Johnny could pass for a junior hockey player, intact, with only the rumour of scar tissue, only a sniff of desperation. When Johnny walked into a bar, he carried himself erect like a ballroom dancer in pressed jeans and a crisp T-shirt. He greeted the doorman, shook hands with the barkeep, and nodded charitably to patrons who had no idea who he was.
Johnny was smaller than Scott, who in his day had been a sprint kayak paddler. Not just any paddler, he liked to remind himself, but a good one: a 185-pound paddling machine, a cardiovascular genius with a resting pulse rate of thirty-eight.
It was noon, and Smithers, the hockey reporter, was jogging on the spot near Scott's desk, refusing to stop despite glares in
his direction. Smithers then announced, as though anyone believed him, that his new and much-younger girlfriend was a dancer.
“A table dancer?” Warshick, the sports agate editor, took the bait.
“Postmodern, you idiot, like that dude, Mark Morris. They have a studio, performance events,
muscle control!
” Leering, Smithers lapped the sports desk, straining the tights he had squeezed into for his lunchtime jog. “It's called mixed media, and it's very cutting edge.”
A phone rang, and Warshick, who was fat, sloppy, and pleased about it, answered.