“You get feelers?” Johnny asked.
“Naaah,” Louie scoffed. “It's entertainment.”
From the doorway, Scott studied Merle, whose jacket sleeves hung over his stumpy fingers. That's a popular look with fat guys, Scott noted: buy a huge jacket to cover the corpulence and then never get it shortened. Merle shifted
sideways in a swivel chair that creaked in protest. C
LASSY
M
ALE
E
NTERTAINERS
, said the sign over his desk, S
UITABLE FOR
A
LL
O
CCASIONS
.
Merle pretended not to notice the four men filling his doorway, continuing with his phone conversation. “Well, darlin',” he drawled. “I'll be there soon enough. You tell Marie to put on one of her lovvvellly boiled dinners and, for God's sake, save me some triple-yolked eggs.”
Louie knocked, but Merle kept gushing. “I had ten the last time I was down home, cooked up lovvvellly, with a little bit of juicy ham, sawwwsidge, a hint of home fries, not too greasy, mind you, and” â his voice was as euphoric as a 1-900 sex line worker â “melt-in-your-mouth oatcakes.”
He gulped, thick with consumptive foreplay, while the caller squeezed in advice. “Ha ha ha.” Mock indignation. “You don't need to worry about me, m'dear, I'll live forever. Ha ha ha. My great-grandfather, Dan Alex MacLean, lived to be one hundred and four, the oldest man in Cape Breton. They erected a granite monument to him, they did. Dan Alex kept his meat in a fifteen-metre well all winter long.”
Glancing up, he finally mouthed to Louie, “Come in.”
“When he was ninety years old, he could hoist up a whole side of lamb and swing a maul hammer like a child's toy, and evvvery morning for breakfast, what do you think he had?” He paused, waiting for the inevitable. “That's right, a plate of triple-yolked eggs!”
All four visitors found metal chairs. In the cramped, windowless room, Merle's skin smelled like saturated fat. He hung up his phone.
“How are you, Louie, my son?”
Merle's capped teeth were too small for his bloated head and stupendous appetite.
“Good, Merle.”
“How did the last one work out?”
“They seemed to like it.” Louie shrugged modestly. “I wore the leopard posing suit, the one I was telling you about, with the wet look. And the name worked well, the Arabian Knight. I think it's better than the last one.”
“Plus, the novelty of something new.” Merle nodded.
“I'm probably going to get the tear-away pants,” Louie added.
“You don't have those yet?” Merle sounded surprised.
“No, but I will.”
“Good, son, good.”
The owner wore his kinky hair straight back, smothered with gel. Under the jacket was a crushed-velour jersey that looked like the hide of an elephant. Merle had been eating like an elephant since he was written up in the
Strait Standard
as the county's biggest newborn forty years ago. He had been eleven pounds, twelve ounces, born during an extended visit from Cape Breton to the mainland.
“Did I ever tell you about Billy Campbell from down home?” Merle asked as he stealthily slid a hand across his desk. Maintaining eye contract, he reeled in a yellow flyer. L
ADIES ILLIMINATE THE STRESS AND FRUSTRATIONS OF LIFE WITH A RELAXING FOOT PEDICURE BY
B
RENT
. D
ONE IN THE
C
OMFURT OF YOUR OWN
H
OME
. “Well, Billy used to hang around the Legion day and night. He never drew a sober breath.”
Merle tucked the incriminating flyer in a drawer.
“They didn't mind him there during the week to play a little darts or tarbish, but they didn't want him at the top-drawer functions, the weddings and such. So, do you know what they did?”
Louie shrugged.
“They put a sign up: N
O
R
UBBER
B
OOTS ON
W
EEKENDS
, and that kept Billy out.”
As Merle laughed a shifty laugh that bared his undersized teeth, Scott felt disgusted. He hated Merle, he decided at that
moment, in the same way that he hated the soft and imperious Smithers.
“So you're a boxer?” Merle turned to Scott as though he had sensors, the acute antennae of the grotesque, finely tuned to slights. “I've seen lots of good fighters down in Cape Breton, all as hard and rugged as Lingan coal.”
“Actually,” Scott muttered, “I'm a reporter.”
“It doesn't matter, my son, it doesn't matter. I had a doctor work for me once, a neurosurgeon.” He paused in the lie, twisting a sapphire ring to unleash his oral powers. “He just liked to get out a bit. He was in demand all right, as popular as Amphora pipe tobacco.”
Louie cut in, blinking. “No, it's not him. It's him.” He pointed at Turmoil, who was nervously rubbing the leg of his knit pants patterned in a subtle check. Behind Turmoil was a poster of step-dancers in curly bobs and plaid, airborne.
Merle stared and then smiled lamely. “Ah, yes, I'm afraid I can't use him.”
“You said you needed someone,” Louie protested.
“Yes, my son. But I can't use
him
.”
“Why not?”
“I'm going to be honest with you, Louie. I've always been an honest man. Mention the MacLeans any place, any time, and people say, âDamn honest buggers all of them. As honest as a Sally Ann matron with a Christmas kettle.' ”
“Okay.”
“I'll tell you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He'd scare the women. He's too big.”
“He looks great.” Louie's voice rose an outraged octave. “This man was in the Olympics.” Turmoil nodded confirmation.
“I don't care if he was in the Ice Capades, my son, he's too big.” Merle caught his breath. “And he's too bloody . . .”
“What did you say?” demanded Louie.
Scott dropped his head.
“I said, Try coming back. Maybe if he gets smaller.”
Katherine Redgrave nodded at a forty-ish woman with dreary hair and the pinched face of a disillusioned nun, an aging ascetic who shopped for day-old bread and walked her blind little terrier in rainstorms.
The woman stopped to collect herself as she entered Katherine's office at the end of the newsroom. Her faded paisley blouse was buttoned to the collar, drooping on birdlike shoulders, and then tucked into a wool skirt with front pockets. Oddly enough, for someone who appeared unaccustomed to any self-indulgence, she was smoking.
“How are things going, Glenda?” Katherine asked.
Katherine had been cautious since she'd arrived at the
Standard
, sensing that it had cliques and customs and unwritten rules. Land mines. Glenda drew and exhaled nervously on her cigarette, each puff etching a line in her smocked mouth. The wrinkles reminded Katherine of the cushions her mother used to make as Christmas gifts, pleated accessories in corduroy or velvet, occasionally red, but usually the yellow of sunflowers. Mother made the cushions, bright and hopeful, until the time that everything changed, until their lives were irreversibly altered by a darkness they could not stop.
Glenda was the type of person who could disappear off the face of the Earth without a trace, Katherine thought with a pang of regret, a person you would describe in a feature story as “unremarkable.” As she looked at Glenda, she had the uneasy feeling that Glenda knew exactly what she was thinking.
“Fine, Katherine.”
“How is the series on cellphones?”
In her career, Katherine had been happiest as a feature writer, describing people and places, issues and lives more complicated than they appeared on the surface. But Gem had needed to meet its self-set quota of female bosses, and Katherine, had seemed like a safe choice. First came the editor's job on the Hill, and then, after a curious interview in Toronto with two other female candidates, the transfer to Halifax, a foggy city full of strangers. Katherine knew she was an interloper at the
Standard
, a paper with habit and history; until proven otherwise, she was a suspicious agent from Gem.
Glenda's face relaxed as they talked about projects in Lifestyles, which was staffed by three middle-aged women with modest ambitions. Glenda studied Katherine's short black hair and European nose, features that Glenda's coworkers had, on a generous day, compared to those of Isabella Rossellini.
“Anything else new?” Katherine asked.
Glenda froze like she was about to be struck, girding herself with prayer and the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. “Nooo.” Glenda looked at Katherine and seemed to weigh the risks. It was a look Katherine was familiar with: the glare of women who expected her to waive the rules of the workplace and rise to the call of sisterhood.
“Well, I'm engaged,” blurted Glenda.
“Congratulations.”
Glenda looked at Katherine defensively. Glenda knew she belonged to another species, a family of hunched women in flat shoes and hats with chin straps, women whose faces had been reshaped by disappointment. None resembled Rossellini or her glamorous mother. Few were, like Katherine, six feet tall.
Katherine was silent. While Glenda stared, daring Katherine to judge her, the editor was, unbeknownst to Glenda,
engaged in her own internal struggle, one that the bosses at Gem could hardly imagine. Katherine was writing letters to people who had ill-treated her in the past, in an attempt to address the most grievous wrongs against her and thus remove their impact from her soul. Since moving to Halifax, she had written four. Her plan was to neutralize each outstanding trauma, each act of cruelty, and then move on with life unencumbered. The fourth one, composed the night before, she had sent to her grade three teacher.
Dear Mrs. Carew:
I was in your class at Rocky Brook School, a tall girl with curly hair and glasses. One day, you made me stand in the corner while my class performed a square-dancing display. I was not allowed to participate because, according to you, my skirt did not meet your specifications. Mine had unauthorized poodles near the hem, embroidered by my mother
.
“What is wrong with your mother?” you demanded. “Why couldn't she make it the way I asked?”
Your attack set off weeks of taunting on the playground, a refrain of “What's wrong with your mother?” It was relentless, and you encouraged it. At the time, I attributed your cruelty to the fact that your husband was having an affair with Mrs. Uxbridge, the gym teacher. Often, I saw them leaving the Holiday Inn bar, then parking by Grand Lake.
Now, I realize that was no excuse. You were simply a bad person with an evil heart
.
Katherine Redgrave
Glenda's stare turned petulant. “We're working on the arrangements now,” she told Katherine. “It's complicated.”
“Okay.”
“I may have to take some vacation.”
You don't believe me, do you?
Glenda's look bore the rage of involuntary spinsterdom.
You think that only women like you find men
.
Katherine sighed, knowing that Ottawa had been full of thirty-ish career women who had dated too many men from too small a circle. Katherine had seen them walking home in Mad Bomber hats, chi-chi glasses, and jogging shoes. Some decided to surrender, to immerse themselves in work and a close circle of friends who met for Sunday brunch, Gatineau weekends, and skating parties for the lonely. Some turned to booze, ultra-marathons, or the sanctum of fringe feminism. Some carried on hopeless affairs with hopelessly married men; others married the first man who asked them and, to everyone's surprise, blossomed into motherhood with such brilliance that others found them painful to be around.
“You don't see any problems?” Katherine asked.
“No.” Glenda's eyes were as hard as a strap.
“We are not attempting to interfere in your personal life, Glenda, but the
Standard
is a concerned about how this reflects on us, on our being objective in our news coverage. It is not a normal situation.”
Glenda's face froze at the word “normal” and her jaw jutted with defiance. “I am well within my rights. All my personal affairs are being conducted on my own time.”
“I am just pointing out how the personal lives of journalists are sometimes hampered by their professional obligations. It's like running for a political party or being involved in â”
“My lawyer is prepared to make a Charter case out of this.”
For thirty minutes there had been a stream of visitors into Turmoil's dressing room. Fight night brought out the has-beens, the wannabes, and the distant relations, the kind of people who drifted to funerals and testimonials for folks they barely knew.
Ownie saw an ex-champ named Darren make his way across the room. Darren grabbed the arm of his friend, a pony-tailed goliath with feet too small for his body. “Hey, Ownie, this is my buddy Zach,” Darren shouted in a voice like a broken muffler. “Ownie here had me for twelve fights. He wrote the master plan when I took the Canadian title off Losier in Montreal.”
Ownie nodded. “Losier quit after that and took up window dressing.”
Darren laughed. His body was so tumid, Ownie noticed, that he could have been wearing a padded suit. His face was irregular, as though it had been patched with fibreglass and then painted flesh-tone. He had a fibreglass patch on one brow, another on his cheek. On his head, which looked like it was covered with bee stings, was a blue seafarer's hat.
“Darren.” Ownie pulled the ex-champ close. “You know me, man.” Ownie paused and Darren nodded his rebuilt head. “You know I always give it to you straight.”
“Never steered me wrong.” Darren looked anxious.
“You look great,” Ownie declared. “Tops!”
“Yeah?” Darren blew out relief. “I'm feeling healthy, Ownie. I'm feelin' good.”