Scott's apartment was sparsely furnished, the walls bare.
On a side table, Scott had a square photo of himself as a paddler, drenched and boyish after a downpour. His hair was blond, his shoulders endless. Wearing a red Canada singlet, he was holding a wooden Liminat paddle upright like the iconic pitchfork in
American Gothic
. If he looked closely, he could see veins that resembled earthworms extending from his bicep all the way to his hand, clutching a medal. In the picture, he had skin that you expected to smell like Scandinavian furniture and feel like the back of a horse, powerful, yet vulnerable and exposed.
He lay on the couch with the stereo playing, an archaeologist combing the cultural ruins, picking through the broken pottery and cave drawings of the 1960s. He'd picked up
Rolling Stone
but couldn't focus on a college fashion layout. Was this the counterculture?
In the winter, they used to run and lift heavy weights. They did chin-ups and circuit training, abs. In the spring, at the hint of thaw, they dragged an aluminum pleasure canoe onto the ice and hacked out a path with an axe. Taylor couldn't swim, so they had a deal in the event that Taylor tipped: if he wore a lifejacket on one ankle, Scott would try to reach him before he drowned. If he didn't . . . well . . . fuck it.
When you're eighteen, there are no consequences, just endless possibilities and dreams you have to dream. On the water at five-thirty, back before supper, sleep racing by ten. If he tried, he could see himself in sweats and a Maple Leafs toque hauling open the boat bay door, flooding his Cave of Wonders with early-morning light, filling his soul with longing and dread. He could smell the mouldy towels and feel the cold cement floor stinging his feet.
He had to reach up to touch it: twenty-seven pounds of cracker-thin wood, as finely crafted as a violin, as smooth as a dolphin. His magic carpet, his ride to the stars.
Scott could see mist rising from the lake in a mass resurrection as he lowered her into the water, fixed the footboard with pins, placed a towel on the seat, heightening the excitement, prolonging the work. He took off his shoes, and when he eased into the cockpit, gently, like a mother laying down an infant, he shivered from the touch of wood.
He took a tentative stroke on the right, then the left, pushing off into another world of pain, hope, and nirvana. Swish. Swish . . . swish . . . swish . . . . Set the rhythm from the start.
Champion Management had not placed Turmoil in an apartment as promised, but in a musty Halifax rooming house with a shared bath and crackheads.
After Ownie had seen it, he had invited Turmoil for dinner, and now, with the meal over, he was waiting for an opportune time. His grandson, Millie's boy, had given him a list of phrases in Turmoil's ancestral language. “Show him that you're interested in his culture,” Jacob had urged. “Display some linguistic latitude. Make it clear you're a man with international scope.”
Ownie had listened to the teenager, who was, according to his mother, an honours student and a computer genius. Privately, he had his doubts about Jacob, who was also, according to Millie, going to become rich from his extensive comic book collection, which they had stored in a vault and insured for two thousand dollars. Jacob was always, if you listened to Millie, making some amazing deal that collectors around the world would envy. He was the only person who appreciated the potential value of Prince Namor, the SubMariner, she said, and was hoarding books based on the Marvel character. Jacob had one friend, a
Star Trek
fanatic, who claimed to be a world-class computer hacker.
“Eyd toer d'eyd kotore.” Ownie read the first phrase from Jacob's list.
Turmoil stared back blankly.
“Eyd to-er d'eyd ko-tore,” Ownie spoke slowly, over-modulating
like a hockey announcer with a Czech roster full of consonants. “Kooooo-tore.” A noncommittal shrug from Turmoil. “Don't you know what I'm saying?” asked the trainer.
“No, mon.” Turmoil tilted his neatly trimmed head sideways as though a better view might help him navigate through the linguistic dilemma. “No, ah dohn.” His knee beat a self-conscious
rat-a-tat-tat
on the underside of Ownie's dining room table.
“It means, âAre you well?'” Ownie was starting to feel foolish, like that time he had approached an Eaton's mannequin and asked for help finding ties, thinking it was a clerk. Leave it to Jacob, he figured, to get him in a mess. “In
your
language, your ancestral language.”
Ownie handed Turmoil the list of phrases and pretended to admire the view from his window, which overlooked the duck pond.
Rat-a-tat-tat
. The knee tapped faster. Give the man time, thought Ownie, as he focused past the impasse and the off-white sheers, listening to the muted voice of night.
Ownie had lived in the same house for thirty years, a two-storey with three bedrooms and a bay window. It was modest compared to the ambitious labyrinths that filled the suburbs, mazes with swimming pools and basketball nets, but it had a rose garden and a shed, and the walls were made of plaster and the doors real wood. Nearby houses were of similar construction. A few had succumbed to siding or flats; others had been gentrified by yuppies who painted them with period colours. Real estate agents, foreseeing a downtown revival, cruised the streets armed with condo flyers.
Turmoil cleared his throat as water splashed under the tires of a rumbling bus. Ownie tried to stay calm, but suddenly, adding to his discomfort, he felt smothered by the room's knick-knacks: Russian dancers and fat-faced Hummels, squirrels and merry mandolins, gifts from the kids, Pat and
Millie. All this junk, Ownie cursed, and Hildred had made him throw out forty years of hand tapes, archival records of every fight he'd worked. Jesus. Jesus. Lord, forgive me for swearing.
“Take your time,” Hildred told Turmoil as she cleared the remains of dessert. “My goodness, he was hungry,” she whispered in Ownie's ear.
Ownie heard a goose honk. The pond, an undulating oval, was home to ducks, geese, and four pairs of whistling swans, which mated for life. It had been dredged in the 1800s during construction of a canal that would stretch from Halifax Harbour through lakes and rivers to the Bay of Fundy. Only the ruins of the canal remained, but the pond had endured, with a bandstand, an island, and a totem pole donated by West Coast natives. In the spring, the city planted flowers, forming a backdrop for wedding parties and graduation photos. Middle-aged men launched remote-control aircraft carriers that occasionally, to everyone's amusement, escaped.
“This is going to be heavy sledding,” Ownie whispered back.
“Shhh!” Hildred said to him as she smiled awkwardly at Turmoil. “It's not important.”
“Maybe he ant-kay eed-ray,” said Ownie, this time too loud.
Ownie had known guys who couldn't read, guys who got robbed on percentages and ripped off on gates. They approached strangers in the grocery store, pretending they'd forgotten their glasses, and asked for the price on a can of beans. They waited for hours at night under signs that said N
O
B
US
S
ERVICE AFTER
4:00
P
.
M
., and after a while it made them angry, hiding a secret that big.
“Cesa ge apeg.” He tried a different phrase from the list.
Ownie's uncle Dew Drop could read, but only barely. Every few months, Dew Drop would set off like a prehistoric beast,
lumbering down a red Island road, rubber boots stuffed with paper, carrying a coat and a towel and soap. Dew Drop knew how to pace himself â some people would start off fast, then burn out, but not Dew Drop. When night came, he'd find a haystack, pull out his towel, and wake up fresh and covered with dew. On one trip, he made it as far as the Great White Hope fight-off in Madison Square Garden, where he fought three times in one night with six-ounce leather gloves stuffed with horsehair that turned sodden and as heavy as death.
“Forget it,” Ownie said as rain dribbled down the double-paned windows. “It don't matter.”
“This a nice howse.” Turmoil smiled relief.
He's wearing that same no-name sweatsuit, Ownie observed, and those vinyl sneakers that give you a rash. I can't believe they'd send an Olympian up here with nothing, Ownie thought, no shoes, no foul cup, no headgear. On his first day at Tootsy's Gym, Turmoil had pulled out a cheap plastic mouthpiece that was so new it didn't have a tooth mark. Ownie took Turmoil to a dentist and got him fitted properly.
“Mah mooma live in the same howse all her life.”
You can tell he's never had a
really
tough fight, Ownie figured, as the linguistic standoff came to a merciful end. Nothing is patched up or pieced together; everything is from the original dye lot. Some guys were so ugly that you did them a favour when you got them scrambled, mangy dogs with missing brows and pitted skin. With Turmoil, everything was smooth, his face so clean that he hadn't started dropping his head to hide the damage. He had the prim hair of a Baptist preacher.
He was big though, Ownie reminded himself, and still young for a heavyweight. “The whole world loves to see the heavies,” Ownie had told Scott, the reporter. “They are the kings, the top of the food chain. If they are any good at all, there is money to be made.” Ownie had thought about money
â he didn't have much â when Champion Management had phoned him at home.
“Are you interested?” the lawyer had asked.
“I'll give it some thought,” Ownie said, feigning misgivings.
Ownie called the lawyer back that night. They negotiated a percentage, they talked about dates, and three weeks later, the heavyweight arrived, as big and young as promised. He could probably, Ownie decided, after sizing up his frame, carry another ten pounds. Ownie could feel the possibilities, vast and heady, but he tried to mute his excitement, believing, in the dark way of his Irish ancestors, that too much joy â childish, unbridled joy â is ripped from your heart by tragedy. Keep it quiet, keep it under the radar, and maybe, his fatalism had taught him, you can slip through unpunished.
“You said it was in the country, didn't you?” Hildred asked.
“Oh yes, it hef a big v'r'ndah where you cahn eat or play cards. Mah mooma mek dresses to sell off our v'r'ndah. One day she sell three dresses to the same wummin, all diffr'nt colour.”
Ownie stared past Turmoil's head at a mounted Pope plate. So what if Tumoil couldn't read? Why the hell should he care? Ownie had a friend named Squid who was street-smart and cagey as hell. Squid drove a bus for challenged kids, and they loved him because he joked with them and made faces behind their teachers' backs until one day some biddy told the boss that Squid couldn't read. He got fired, the kids cried, and Squid, exposed and unemployed, moved to Toronto, where he ended up boosting rings from the Eaton Centre.
“Turmoil's got no problem with his weight,” Ownie told Hildred in an attempt to shift to a comfortable subject and put the language issue behind them. “His body fat is just 10 per cent. Some heavies run as high as 22 per cent.”
The Pope smiled a wise smile with his eyes. He had been hanging on the wall since 1984, the year that he had come to town, blessing everything that moved. In Ownie's mind's eye, he could still see a mother shoving a dying boy through a break in the frenzied crowd, eyes closed, hoping that one holy touch from the Polish Pope would cure him. Every time Ownie looked at that plate, he could feel the pain of that mother and her poor little boy; he could feel it in his gut like an ulcer.
“Ah used to play soccer,” Turmoil explained, ending the meal on an upbeat note. “Ebbyone in Trinidad play soccer.”
The dinner, Ownie decided, had been a moderate success, so two days later he invited Turmoil back to watch a title fight on TV. Johnny and Louie were in the downstairs rec room when Ownie heard a knock at the door.
When he first met Turmoil in the Champion office, his mood was tempered by the unfamiliar: the lilt in Turmoil's voice, the way he moved his head and his hands, the strange words he used. Words like
basa basa
,
chupid
, and
pesh
. Turmoil was unlike any of the local fighters he had trained. Ownie had no reference point, and Jacob's linguistic exercise had only widened the cultural chasm.
Who cares? Ownie abruptly decided as he opened the door. He was a trainer, not the Welcome Wagon. Besides, something terrible had happened on the street last night; one of those bastard geese from the duck pond had killed his neighbour O'Riley's cat, and
that
was a problem.
“Come on in. See those damn geese over there?” Ownie gestured at the pond through an opaque curtain of fog and drizzle. “One of those bastards killed a cat, a nice one too.”
“Really?” Turmoil squinted. “They dohn look so bad.”
“Baaad?” Ownie scoffed. “They're like rattlesnakes; they're pit bulls with wings. I saw them swarm a kid with a bread bag last week with the mother standing right there. That kid let out a scream that I ain't heard since the war.”
Turmoil threw back his head and laughed.
As they headed to the rec room, Ownie thought about the
drizzle, about the eternal damp that ran through life like a virus, rotting underpads and warping young souls. Ownie couldn't decide what he hated more: the dampness or the attack geese. One night, in a dream that he tried to relive for days, the roof of his house peeled back like a sardine can. Overhead, someone had set up a giant grow lamp that the dopers used for weed. Ownie turned the switch to high and baked everything dry, zapping dust mites, futility, and mould. When he sank into his armchair, it felt as warm as a hug, and then Hildred came home and found yellow roses growing in the bedroom.
Turmoil picked an armchair next to Johnny. Ownie sat beside Louie on the couch, thinking about the geese.