Going Fast (29 page)

The time clock flashed:

M
AIN
E
VENT

H
ALIFAX
E
XPLOSION
. T
AKE
T
WO
.

“From the city that brought you the
Mont Blanc
and the
Imo
, now Turmoil Davies and Calvin Mackey,” an announcer roared. “Hold on to your seats and prepare for a towering tidal wave of action.”

For a while, until they were banished, the ring was full of TV cameras, microphones, cords, and cellphones, people with notebooks, laminated IDs, and no real reason to be there. The skirl was gone now, displaced by expectancy.

Through the blue haze, Ownie could see Hildred and his son, Pat. His daughter, Millie, wasn't there because she couldn't bear to go to the fights; they always upset her. Lorraine, Turmoil's girlfriend, was sitting next to them, and some guys from the boxing commission. The laundry fetcher was in the good seats, tending to the cabinet minister, whose face looked, on this night, as grey as his hair. Beyond that, everything, including the press box where Scott sat, was a blur.

Ownie did not know that in addition to the regular fight crowd, there were hipsters being camp: filmmakers, artists, and a throat poet. There were colleagues of Lorraine's, friends of the Mi'kmaq professor, and a small group of hairstylists who had come with Malcolm, the effusive makeup artist, who was too nervous to open his eyes.

“Hey, Flanagan, don't go near no microwaves.” The heckler zeroed in on Ownie's T-shirt, metallic grey with T
URMOIL
T
IME
printed over a tornado.

Ownie blocked the noise and told himself: Never listen to the peanut gallery, never lose your focus. Remember what happened to Butch in New Waterford when a brawl broke out in the audience, with chairs flying through the air and heads cracking? Butch turned to see what was going down, and
boom!
he was it.

Mackey spat jabs at the TV lens. He had a flag draped over his shoulders and a black bandana on his head. Tyson did the black duds best, Ownie thought, with no robe or socks, just boots, black trunks, and chill.

Mackey removed the bandana, showing a quarter-inch gully in his hair. His entire corner, even the wishy-washy trainer, was wearing those T-shirts, the ones with the stacked-up bodies. He's got that look all right, Ownie thought, like he wants to hurt someone, like he wants to work from hate, to get another marker on that tally sheet he calls a heart. Oh, baby. You're a bad one.

“C'mon, girls, whaddya waiting for?”

After two rounds, the crowd was impatient. They didn't know nothin' about timing, Ownie cursed, or strategy, or feeling your opponent out; they didn't know that one shot could turn your ears into doorbells, your piss red for weeks.

“I seen better fights at bingo.”

They were the same birds you met in slopshops, he decided, the yahoos who said, “Let's see how tough you are,” then cried assault the moment they found out. Ownie sponged Turmoil clean, one eye was puffed as though he had been crying. When two men this big entered a ring, they were bullet trains heading into a tunnel, the impact imminent, along with the wreckage and the fury that guaranteed that nothing would ever be the same.

“Okay, he's fast, just like we expected, slick, a bobber and a weaver.” Pulling Turmoil's trunks, Ownie kneaded air into his stomach while the Doctor stood by ready. Ownie squinted through the blue haze like a man looking for a seat in a steam bath as Pat held up fingers, round-by-round scores from the overhead TV screen.

“You've got to take his speed away.” Turmoil nodded and sucked in air. “You've got to slow him down.”

“You did some damage,” said Ownie, arming Turmoil for round eight. “But it's not enough. You've got to want it more.” Turmoil was standing, refusing the stool. “It's up to you now.” Ownie stretched to rub Turmoil's neck and his winglike shoulders. “You're the Man, you're the One.”

Ownie knew Turmoil had muscled Mackey around, slammed him with hooks and uppercuts. He could feel the shift in Mackey's corner. The talk was faster, the messages more shrill, running from the doubt that was creeping in, as insidious and unstoppable as the tide. This was the time to dig, to focus, to summon everything into one eruption of lavalike will.

“Listen to me,” Ownie pleaded, a hostage with a gun to his head. It didn't matter what lies he told, because this was life
and death, with no one willing to take his place. “This guy's stealin' your dreams from you, man.”

Turmoil muttered something.

“He's stealing that big car and that pretty painting by LeRoy Newman.” Turmoil flinched as though he had touched a live wire. “They should belong to you, man. You earned it, you are the one with the movie-star face, not that ugly bastard, but it's gonna be him drivin' that car, his Jesus
ugly
face in that Newman painting, not yours.”

Another mutter.

“What?”

“Nei-man.”

“Yeah, that's right.”

As he touched Turmoil's back, Ownie felt the fighter push off like a shot putter, power surging from the soles of his feet straight through to his upper body as it straightened. “Now go out there. Remember the plan.”

Mackey unloaded a right uppercut from outside.

BOOM!
The counter right.

Sweat shot off Mackey's head like exclamation marks.

Ownie leaned forward, moving his shoulders with the punches, willing them through, straining so hard he almost lifted off. That was it! Just like the tape.

When Mackey threw the right uppercut from outside, he left himself open for the counter right. The uppercut is supposed to come from inside, Ownie told himself, you put your whole body into it. Sugar Ray had such good balance that he threw double uppercuts: right left, right left, with his feet perfect.

“Over here! Over here!” The crowd was shouting so loudly, so hysterically, that Ownie turned. Sweet Jesus, Ownie cursed, not now, not when we've got something going! Ownie needed all of his concentration, he needed to be Uri Geller, bending
the outcome of the fight with his mind, twisting the odds like a spoon, driving home punches.

Jesus! He couldn't help but see two paramedics rushing to the good seats, clambering over legs and beer cups, clutching a medical case. Ownie strained to see what was happening, hoping, for Turmoil's sake, that it wasn't a rumble. No, it was the fancy suit, the cabinet minister with his laundry fetcher. Even clutching his chest, in the throes of a heart attack or a seizure, the man had the polished face of money. His mouth was open, showing fine gold work that raised him above the dentured masses.

“Get in there, you muthafucka!” Mackey's corner was hurling bags of trash that scattered in the air. Another right uppercut from Mackey. “You no good . . .”

Another counter right.

Yesss! Turmoil nodded, his plays in place.

“Is it him?” A murmur spread through the crowd like the Wave as the paramedics hovered over the fallen politician, lifting his hand for a pulse and then removing his glasses. “Is he dead?” The crowd demanded, and then in the direction of the stricken man: “How do you like your health system now?”

The panicky fetcher, the same man who had given Archie Dibbs fifty bucks for posing naked, tapped the ring doctor's shoulder.

“No, no, I can't leave now.” The doctor pointed at the fight.

“Go, Turmoil!” A hard right sent the Brit down to one knee. “Yeaaah.” The hyenas laughed their demented laugh. Nocturnal scavengers waiting to feast on a random kill, oversized wolves with Freddy Krueger claws.

Mackey scampered up. Don't worry, he's hurt more than he's letting on, Ownie reassured himself, just look at his feet, they're slower, he's souped up and he knows it.

“Down in front!” the mob bellowed at the fetcher. “Get out of the fucking way!”

The cabinet minister had been loaded onto a stretcher, a mask on his motionless, ashen face. One manicured hand trailed on the ground, through dust and cigarette butts.

“They gave my father a pacemaker and sent him home thirty minutes later.” A hyena standing nearby pointed at the stretcher. “He died the next day, you bastard.”

“I paid sixty bucks for this seat.”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

Mackey unloaded a right uppercut from outside.

BOOM!
The counter right.

Turmoil rushed forward, throwing rights and lefts. Open it up, open it up, Ownie urged. Take whatever strength I have left, drain it from my body, through my eyes, my heart, just take it. Turmoil shoved Mackey to the ropes where he could go to work: upstairs, downstairs, on an open target with no leverage.

A photographer, the same kid who had won a prize for the shot of Louie unconscious, chased the paramedics up the aisle just as Turmoil landed a series of rib-crushing hooks, numbing blows that short-circuited Mackey's brain.
Boom
.
Boom
. Mackey tried to save himself with a pawing right and a jab that had gone soft as a spring breeze, but down he went.

He's not through, Ownie thought, and Mackey staggered up. Turmoil greeted him with a body hook, then a right that snapped Mackey's head.

“Now! Now! Now!” Ownie shouted.

The photographer was tearing back, holding his flapping cameras to his body, cursing the fallen minister for forcing him out of position.
“Now!”
Turmoil dug the body. Slowly, like a kite that had lost the draft, Mackey collapsed and sank, deflated. This time, he's done, Ownie thought, he's done. Mackey tried to get up, but one leg gave way. He tried again,
but it buckled. He lay on the canvas, his eyes clouded by a sorrowful mix of hate and disbelief, as a tattooed dragon stared blindly from his chest to the ceiling.

H
ALIFAX
E
XPLOSION
. T
AKE
T
WO
.

The sign had frozen, and debris rained from above like airborne anchors and shattered hulls.

“When ah saw him stagger, ah knew he was mine,” Turmoil's voice cracked over the bedlam. “Ah was going to go all out until he drop or ah drop.”

Reporters, shooters, and frenzied fans swarmed the ring, adrenalin junkies on a hallucinogenic rush, jumping, jostling, surging closer to the source, arms, cords, and misplaced dreams convulsing on the canvas. Ownie was hanging from Turmoil's neck, two miles from Earth. “Turmoil, Turmoil, Turmoil.” The name was a drumbeat. A maladroit cameraman smashed his elbow in a woman's face as Turmoil raised the ornate belt high, as though it was the head of a vanquished warrior.

“That was the plan, to start slow and then go head to head, toe to toe,” Ownie sputtered to the press. “We did it, and it worked.”

“Did you know Mackey broke his ankle in there?” asked Scott, holding out a tape recorder.

Blood was dripping from the injured woman's nose; strangers were breaking into the inner circle, surging closer to something they couldn't explain. Someone tried to haul the piper and his skunk sporran into the ring, where he could add to the staggering noise.

“No, ah didden know.” Turmoil pushed away the shades offered to him to hide his swollen eyes. “The mon was brave, he fought like a wounded wolf.”

“This is definitely the biggest night of our career,” Ownie shouted. The tension had left his body, lifting like a fever, rendering him young and weightless. “This moves us into the
top-ten ratings, it puts us in position.” His eyes were wet with tears. “This man might as well be the son of Muhammad Ali.” The tape recorders whirred. “I don't care who hears me say it.” Reckless, drunk with success. “He has something special, he has powers that come from someplace else. I know it in my heart.”

Ownie approached the office building with Turmoil, knowing everything had changed. A bearded bum was camped on the sidewalk, a Tim's coffee cup extended for coins. Ownie slipped him a buck, and the old bum smiled a toothless thank you.