Going Fast (15 page)

“When the bad weather hit, the fights shut down around here, so we'd head stateside,” Ownie told Louie. “I was up in New York one winter and fought thirteen fights: Park Arena, St. Nicholas Arena. Madison Square Garden was a big feather in your hat, the same as Boston Gardens.”

“Man,” Louie gushed. “I'd love to fight the Garden.”

“Butch was in Toronto for a bit, and he'd drift across the border like acid rain. They were gypsies, those guys; they never had a steady job, a good education, or a trade. A fight would net them a couple hundred bucks and hold them over till the next one. There was no pogey or nothing.”

“Did you know that Marciano had a KO percentage of 0.880?” Louie asked.

Ownie stopped to ponder Louie's fascination with giants from the past. Did he understand his place? Did he know his limitations?

“They said that if you hurt the Rock, all he knew how to do was attack,” Louie continued. “He wouldn't try to protect himself, he would instinctively attack.”

“That's what made him so great,” Ownie allowed, “but that was Marciano, not
you
.”

Louie paused and then lifted his eyes like a man who had just seen the future. “I dunno, but I think I've got that in me.”

It was fight night and Verne was in Louie's corner. He looked like a House of Hu waiter, in a black corner man's jacket with short sleeves, a V-neck, and a red zipper-front. He'd had his name stitched over the heart by a local seamstress, but she'd left out one
N
.

“I was right disappointed,” he admitted to Louie, “but what could you do? She was as sweet as a honeydew melon.”

Louie nodded, unsure of Verne's abilities. Tanner's brother lived in the sticks surrounded by hosers with beaters on their front lawns and starved dogs out back. They started grease fires at night, they drove into clotheslines on snowmobiles. Given that milieu, Verne was thrilled to be in town.

“Holy chain lightnin'!” Verne squawked after he accidentally tipped the water. And then to himself: “Be careful, you!”

Tanner had managed to pull in a small crowd for the event, which was being held in a bingo hall. The promoter was walking around the room, skeletal in a white dress shirt and undershirt. On one calf, hidden by dress pants, was a long-legged pinup, circa 1950. He nodded at Ownie, sitting ringside with Johnny and Turmoil.

When the three men had arrived, Turmoil had boldly strutted past everyone in the lineup to the front, where Tanner was wielding a gigantic stamp that he used to mark paid spectators' hands. Turmoil was in the habit, Ownie had noted, of going wherever he pleased, of strolling into banks, office
buildings, and newspapers, bypassing receptionists and guards. Who, Ownie wondered, was going to stop him?

“Okay, let's settle 'er down.” Verne steadied himself. “It's the old dog for the hard road.” Verne checked his ears for cut sticks and then told himself: “Why even think about the jacket when half these fellas can't spell?”

“He's yours if you want him.” Verne tapped Louie's shoulder and pointed across the ring at the opponent. “He's just sittin' there like a big, bald-headed cabbage.”

Louie nodded, slipping into the lethal form of the Manassa Mauler, loaded and aimed at Jess Willard. Rotating his neck, he recalled Ownie's instructions as he studied his opponent. “Don't go doin' nothin' stupid. Take your time. See if you can feel him out. You're in no rush.”

Louie decided to ignore them, knowing his destiny lay elsewhere. Drawing from boxing lore, Louie recalled that it took Dempsey just three rounds to punish Willard so badly that he couldn't get off his stool. A twenty-punch combination immortalized in a mural on his Broadway restaurant. Dempsey gave Willard a broken jaw, six busted ribs, and missing teeth by taking the fight to him. He could do the same.

Louie smiled at the ring girl, who was smoking a cigar. Coyly, she waved a gloved hand. He thought that maybe she knew his old girlfriend, Sandra, or perhaps she recognized him from the firemen's beefcake calendar, a fundraiser saucily named
Hot Stuff
.

“Here they go, ladies and gents, four rounds of first-rate fistiana.” The cable TV announcer was a community college student, his colour man a former ring judge who spoke only in 1940s slang and generously estimated the crowd at 250. “We've already seen a couple of clever ring generals.”

Louie was wearing white, twelve-inch-high, leather boxing boots with a St. Christopher medal taped inside the laces. Johnny had offered to lend him gear, but Louie had declined.
“The first fight's special. I've paid a guy to videotape it, and it's going in my collection next to
One-Punch Knockouts
,
Mike Tyson's Greatest Hits
, and
Legendary Champs
.”

Louie left the corner flat-footed and parked himself in front of his opponent, who was as tall and as impossibly thin as a barefoot Kenyan who could run highland trails for eight hours straight. His name was Kyte. “Don't be fooled,” Ownie had warned. “Some of them tall guys are made of wire. Tommy Hearns had feet that hardly touched the canvas and a right cross that could send you to the moon.”

Louie let loose with a haymaker. “Height don't mean squat,” Verne shouted. “It's the empty vessel looms largest.”

When Dempsey fought Luis Firpo, there were eleven knockdowns in two rounds, Louie recalled. Firpo was down nine times, Dempsey twice, once clean through the ropes into the laps of the pressmen. Man, that was tough with a capital T.

Verne nodded with excitement when Louie attacked.

“That was a dandy,” noted the announcer. “Lots of spirit in there tonight.”

“Back in the 1930s, there was Panama Al Brown,” Ownie had cautioned Louie, who was now flying solo. “Almost six foot and one-hundred-sixteen pounds, destroying guys nine inches shorter. He was a character; they said he knew Hemingway and could speak seven languages.”

Kyte hit Louie with two shots to the breadbasket. Louie shook his head. “No, man,” he muttered. “Iron abs, Mr. Nova Scotia, you can't hurt me.” Verne nodded; the crowd laughed appreciatively, forcing the ring girl to smile.

Then Louie decided to do the Ali shuffle, to lean away at the last possible moment. He loved it when Ali circled Liston, taunting the Big Ugly Bear, slipping and sliding like a shell game. After he fought the champ, Henry Cooper said Ali could judge the distance of a punch to a quarter-inch just like
radar. The Arabian Knight, a favourite of the ladies, would show them all some steps. Ha. Ha. Louie lowered his arms and stuck out his chin. He felt so good, so confident that he winked.

Pow
. Kyte connected. Bull's eye.

“That's it!” The colour man thumped his desk. “That's the flattener!”

The crowd let out a collective groan and Ownie shook his head. Johnny tried to remain expressionless. Turmoil, who had just returned from a fight in Toronto, a unanimous decision in his favour, laughed out loud. He laughed, Ownie noticed, until tears formed in his eyes.

Louie didn't feel the punch, but he sensed his mouthpiece flying through the air as he toppled backwards. He hit the ropes, mouth open, legs spread, dropping to the canvas. It was a curious sensation that later he could only compare to the time he'd had his wisdom teeth removed and, coming to, sensed bodies nearby, vague and indistinguishable. The ref sent Kyte to his corner and the ring girl covered her face.

“He's gone down the blackout highway and it's a one-way trip.”

“What a way to end your first fight: one minute and twenty-two seconds.”

“A bitter lesson in the sweet science of pugilism.”

Kyte lifted his arms triumphantly and waved to the crowd, flashing metal teeth. His trainer patted his back and handed him his robe, a Quality Inn bath towel with a hole cut out for the head. The fight was over.

“Sweet humpbacked Jesus,” Verne cursed and then started to move across the ring. Verne ran like a cat, legs swinging inward toward his body, perfect for navigating railings but awkward in a human. He went back for his towel and started to run again. Every two years, the
Standard
would carry a story of some rural man, who, while visiting friends at a camp in
the woods, decided, in minus-twenty-degree weather, to walk across a frozen lake but, since it was 3 a.m. and he was completely drunk, became lost and may now lose all his toes. One year, that man was Verne. Louie was still dangling from the ropes as Verne wailed: “Jesus, I hope he ain't dead. I don't care for dead people.”

Verne raced past the ring doctor and the ref and across the canvas to the media pit, where Scott was sitting. “Here you! In here!” He motioned to a photographer, who looked around to make sure Verne meant him. “In here. It's a dandy.” Verne parted the ropes as the kid scrambled through. “Look at him!” Verne pointed as they reached Louie. “Look, he's colder than a whore's heart!”

The photographer got off a flurry of shots, kneeling for a close-up, then changing his lens. The ring doctor peered into Louie's eyes with a pen flashlight, one, then the other. The photographer turned the camera horizontal. Click. Click. Then vertical. Satisfied, he nodded thanks and scurried off.

Louie squinted as his stretcher slid into the ambulance. “Thanks,” Louie muttered as Verne clambered up to join him. “I'm flattened and you're telling a photographer to get in close.”

Verne's face split in two as he leaned down and whispered, as though he had a right to be indignant. “I couldn't do nothin' for you, he'd already darkened your lights. I thought maybe this would be the kid's break, that maybe the picture would make him famous or something.”

Louie tried to shake his head but couldn't.

“Yooou,” Verne said accusingly. “Yooou'd a been paht of it too!”

Scott watched the girl turn around, a moving Monet of white hair, pink cheeks, and pastel flowers. She had blueberry eyes and hair so clean you could smell it.

“Would you like an ice cream?” asked her mother at the Athena counter.

“Can Barney have one too?” the girl inquired coyly.

“Dinosaurs don't like ice cream.” The fat mother shared a manic smile with Scott, convinced he was as enchanted as she was. The mother was wearing a grease-stained anorak and sweats. She belonged to a sect of middle-aged women who had sacrificed themselves on the altar of Motherhood, laid down their youth and sex in a heap, hacked off their hair, stuffed their flaccid thighs into Northern Nights sweatsuits, and grown unplucked whiskers. Why? Scott wondered. So the gods would be good to their children?

A three-foot urchin with Billy Ray Cyrus hair approached the girl, bouncing in rubber boots, keeping time to something in his head. Behind him, a big man had ordered takeout fries with gravy.

“Say hi to the little boy.” The mother's eyes were commas, typed deep into the pages of her swollen face.
Bounce. Bounce
. “Her name is Logan.” The mother beamed. “She is named after the highest mountain in Canada, fifty-seven hundred metres, in Kluane National Park.”

As Logan opened her rosebud mouth, the boy kicked a rubber boot into the air in a modified martial arts manoeuvre
copied from TV. “Ohhh Ohhh Poweeer Raaangers,” he chanted, spinning in a circle, leg extended. “Do do do do Mighty Morphin . . .” head bobbing trancelike, arm reaching for Barney.

“Waaah,” Logan yelped as he snatched the dinosaur from her hand. “Waaaaah.”

“Jordan!” A bored voice drifted across the Athena past an ancient wooden highchair. “Give it back.” A woman wearing eyeliner and a Mixed Dart League jacket had one hand on her hip. Jordan ignored her. “Hey, bud.” She smiled a what-can-you-do smile. “I said, give it back.” Then she cackled to Scott, “He's tough as nails,” as a regular named Bert took a counter seat and ordered the Big Breakfast. “He's only four, but he ain't afraid of nothin'.”

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“Kids are under so much pressure today,” Sasha decided after the two families left. “I was in a school and the walls were plastered with warnings against the evils of the Earth: Halloween, fur, perfume, rap music, chocolate, bicycles, unwashed fruit, Barbie, and pogs. It's as though the yuppies, the peace-love-and-pot generation, had their fun and now they want to put their kids in a sensory deprivation tank, to never smell, feel, or touch, to never challenge what they had.”

Scott nodded, wondering what a pog was.

He watched a squat man trudge down the street pigeon-toed. He had a blue duffel bag on one shoulder and a purposeful look on his bearded face. He was heading somewhere — a place that must have been worth walking to — in full goalie gear.

“My friend Pru worked as a nanny for a couple with four kids. The mother was a doctor who ran marathons, the father a stockbroker. Do you know the type of people I'm talking
about, the ones who mail in updates of themselves to
Alumni News
to make sure they're real?”

Patrick Roy. Scott read the signature on the guy's hockey helmet. The man had an orange metal net slung on his shoulder, and Scott, to his own surprise, felt an urge to follow him wherever he was going. The hockey net made him think of Smithers, whom he rarely saw, since he was spending most of his time out of the office. Scott had a laptop in his apartment and a list of stories to complete.