Going Fast (7 page)

Scott looked at Theresa and then at Donnie, who was following his chest into the ring. His head seemed to be attached to an invisible string coming from the ceiling.

“He okay now?” Scott asked.

“Oh yeah,” Johnny smirked. “He's an expert on the spin cycle.”

Turmoil stripped to a white cotton T-shirt from Champion Management.

“Champion Management,” Johnny chuckled. “I heard that
they're a bunch of chisellers. I know a waitress who hooked up with their lawyer, Douglas. She says he's cheap as hell.”

Ownie set the timer and the two men moved slowly in the ring, shuffling, touching gloves. Turmoil was half a head taller, but Donnie was, in Ownie's words, “wrapped tighter than a Christmas surprise.” It was well known that Donnie had a weakness for women
and
a nasty disposition. When he had sparred with one of Tootsy's former fighters, he had punched the guy's lights out and then
insulted
him. “You couldn't do nothin' with me,” Donnie had scoffed. “And I had sex twice before I came in here today.”

“Turmoil should be able to handle him easy,” predicted Johnny. “Donnie's only a blown-up cruiser.”

Turmoil raced out, throwing punches.

“Hey, man,” Ownie shouted. “Pace yourself. It's not amateur hour, you're not training for three rounds.”

“Man,” Ownie muttered, trying to process Turmoil's performance in the ring. “You've got amateur written all over you, and not even that good of an amateur. You're not getting the power because you're not delivering right.”

Pop!
Donnie's jab struck Turmoil like a snake. Johnny shrugged surprise while Turmoil shook his head and moved forward.

Pop!
Donnie got through again.

An old man was sitting ringside in a wooden chair. He laughed uproariously, like this was funnier than Fibber McGee and Molly, better than vaudevillian braggarts and blowhards. He slapped his leg and stomped a white leather shoe. He needed no introduction. In his prime, before his hair was as white as his shoes, before Fibber met Throckmorton Gilder-sleeve, Suey Simms had racked up one hundred and thirty fights, starting as a feather and working his way up to welterweight. He had fourteen bouts in Madison Square Garden, the mecca of boxing, the amphitheatre for gladiators such as
Joe Louis, Ali, and Duran. “Suey Simms was in the ring for twenty-five years,” he liked to say. “Long enough to get an indexed government pension.”

“Ice!” Suey hissed each time Donnie's jab connected. “Iiiiice.”

The old man, who was wearing a red scarf and a plaid tam, continued to cackle. Johnny nudged Scott, and Theresa freed her lip, relieved. Turmoil looked at the dirty canvas, eyes wide and disbelieving, as Suey doubled over in a fit of coughing, stomping one leather shoe until he caught his breath and hissed again, “Iiiiice.”

Three minutes ended with a buzz.

Ownie climbed into the ring, showed Turmoil something with his hands, and then climbed out. Puzzled, Turmoil stared at the canvas again. The corners of Donnie's mouth curled into a smirk, like a flower opening to the sun. No one was paying his board, lining up fights, or hiring a trainer, no one was promising him a four-by-four; he was just a local fighter, as common as clay.

“It's all right,” Ownie said to no one in particular, convincing himself. He turned to Scott, who pretended not to notice Donnie's smirk. “It's nothing we can't fix,” Ownie told the reporter. “You see, some fighters soak everything up; they just want to learn, learn, learn. They're hungry for direction, just wanting to be getting better.”

Turmoil blocked a jab and fired off a right.

Suey flashed the patented grin of the Tumblebug, the nickname he'd earned by celebrating each win with a handspring and a spectacular flip across the ring. “Suey Simms fought them all, black, white, yellow, and red,” he'd claim without provocation. “In all them fights, he never kissed the canvas.”

“Others haven't got the self-confidence to admit they don't know it all,” continued Ownie to Scott. “They got to tell
themselves they're great or they can't fight. With them, you've got to
make
them see what they don't know, make them see the hard way. Let them take a few shots to the head.” His voice dropped, and he added improbably, “So this could be good.” Turmoil blocked his first jab and sighed.

Turmoil needed spending money, and Louie had a plan. Driving his Jeep Cherokee through the old streets of Halifax, he looked confident. Johnny was riding shotgun, and Scott, the reporter, was along for the ride.

Louie turned a corner. A garbage bag blew up the narrow street like a tumbleweed, flipping over and over until it snagged on the guts of a discarded couch. The street was empty except for an Orange Crush can, an air of hopelessness, and two boys batting rocks in the air.
Ping
.
Ping
. Joe Carter in the cage.

One rock bounced off a three-quarter Georgian cottage tastefully restored in slate blue. The asymmetrical house, circa 1809, had grey trim, a maroon door, and the painful look of someone who had overdressed for a party.
Ping
. Another rock hit the vain little house, bouncing off a rose trellis.
Ping
. Hitting a doorknocker shaped like a fox's head.
Ping
. Ricocheting off the urban renaissance that had not, to everyone's dismay, yet arrived.

“I've got a new book with a section on ring names,” announced Louie, the self-described student of the game. “See if you know who this guy was.” He pulled a printed page from his pocket and read: “Walker Smith?”

“That's Sugar Ray Robinson,” snorted Johnny.

“Okay.” Louie brought his Jeep to a near-stop while the boys, slowly and deliberately, shuffled off the street. A mutt ambled by with a ham bone in its mouth and then stopped at
a row house with one half sided in green. In the back seat, Scott stared out the window and wondered exactly where Turmoil lived.

“Okay,” Louie said. “How about Archibald Lee Wright?”

In the shadow of Citadel Hill, the neighbourhood had once looked like a developer's dream, a downtown core ready for revival, a motherlode of history, proximity, and urban chic. For a while, there was talk of heritage properties, rare Georgian designs, and the historical footsteps of Adèle Hugo, Victor's tragic daughter, hopelessly pursuing a British military man.

“The first name's a giveaway: Archie the Mongoose Moore.”

They passed a silver Quonset hut harbouring an auto body shop. Leaning against one wall was a mattress plugged with bullet holes and a sign: N
O
L
OITERING
. Plastic geraniums sprouted in the cracked window of a house that advertised R
OOM FOR
R
ENT
, S
EE
D
EPARTMENT OF
S
OCIAL
S
ERVICES
.

Scott stared at a double Queen Anne who had let herself go, shabby, melancholy, comforted by a lava lamp and a stuffed cat with glass eyes. A man was sitting on the front step, smoking a cigar. Why, Scott wondered, would you stuff a dead cat?

The buildings, all soggy wood and vinyl, were attached to each other, or separated by mouldy space. Some had boarded-up windows, others the allure of a root cellar, with no front yards, no trees, no room for anything but regrets. Inside, Scott could imagine a soil floor, 90 per cent humidity and ethylene gas. The dark streets reminded Scott of the city's origins: a garrison town founded two centuries ago by the British, a sinister place full of roaming press gangs, a cold grey port you couldn't turn your back on.

“When we were in New York, we went into this joint in Little Italy,” Johnny recalled, escaping the dreary surroundings. “The owner had fight pictures on the walls. I looked at them,
and the fighter seemed real familiar, so I said ‘Is that him? Is that really Tony Danza?'”

“Was it?” asked Louie.

“Yeah,” Johnny nodded. “The owner said his brother used to train Tony before he got into acting. They were pretty puffed about it.”

“Right on,” Louie responded, like it made perfect sense.

Scott watched a man lurch down the street, sinking under the weight of an enormous backpack. His eyeglasses were strapped to his head with an elastic, and the ankles of his pants were sealed shut with duct tape. Sticking out of the backpack was the head of a chihuahua with round eyes and a sharp nose.

“I think that's Marcel,” Johnny noted.

“Yeah?” Louie blinked, and looked unnerved.

Before Johnny could get a better view, Marcel, who had a room somewhere, vanished around a corner and Louie parked outside a three-storey building shaped like a cereal box. The fireman hopped out, leaving Scott and Johnny in the Jeep.

Turmoil's rooming house had a decaying porch and layers of bumpy paint, archaeological evidence of time and changing owners. Wind whipped through windows that had been covered with plastic that could not obscure the view of a drug-dealing corner two blocks away.

Louie mounted the steps muttering, “What a dump.”

D
OBERMAN
B
ITES
, warned the adjoining house, which had cardboard boxes stacked to the windows, the unclaimed assets of tenants who had returned to the street like runoff. R
ODNEY
S
NOOKS
H
AS
M
OVED
D
OWN
T
HE
S
TREET
. H
E
D
ON'T
L
IVE
H
ERE
N
O
M
ORE
.

Louie knocked and then dropped to the sidewalk, looking up. The porch window, covered with red nylon curtains, was filled with a chain gang of baby teddy bears, hanging from their necks in a mass lynching. Eight altogether, one with red
hearts on his feet pads, another in a jaunty Christmas cap, victims of a pagan ritual or Druid sacrifice. No wonder Rodney Snooks had moved.

Louie opened the door and mould assaulted his nose like smelling salts. Before he could go any farther, he heard footsteps. When Turmoil appeared, too bright, too formidable for his shabby surroundings, he looked like he'd been asleep. After a few words with Louie, he followed the firefighter to the sidewalk. As he cimbed in the back of the Jeep where Scott was sitting, Turmoil rubbed his eyes and pointed to a library book clutched in one hand. “Ah been readin bout the Eskimos, how they keep wahm.”

Two blocks later, Louie stopped the Jeep for a daycare crossing the street single file. The children were walking in the same controlled fashion as the Soviet seamen who marched the streets during port calls, mute, drab men trailed by an omnipresent keeper. They all seemed depressed.

“Now, the secret is to start off slow. Don't expect too much from yourself off the start,” Louie cautioned Turmoil. “I been doing this for, ahhh,” he said, checking his mental datebook, “ten months.”

“Okay, mon.” Turmoil nodded.

“I can give you some direction after we line things up with Merle. He and I are tight.”

In the front seat, Johnny had fallen asleep. Three nights a week, he worked at a bar named the Dory Shop, a marshalling yard for faded women and wayward men. It had an oyster bar made from a buff wooden dory. L
ITTLE
S
ISTER
, the sign said, for the benefit of tourists, who were then informed that this was the smallest dory the old shops made, ninety-five pounds of pine and oak. Johnny filled in for Ken, the regular barkeep. Ken was a pro. He'd worked in Seattle and on a cruise ship. “A good bartender is hard to find,” waxed Ken. “Too green
and you can't cut it, too seasoned and you are probably a thief.” Johnny figured that Ken stole, just not enough to get caught.

“Now, the pay's decent, seventy-five to one hundred bucks depending on the gig,” Louie informed Turmoil. “You don't have to report it, which would be perfect since you're not allowed to work anyway.”

“Ah could use the money, since ah'm been freezin to death.”

Through the window, Scott noticed a comatose bum still clutching a bread bag and a can of lilac air freshener. His coat was open.

“I told Merle that I had a friend,” Louie added, “someone who looked after himself, a boxer. He was
very
interested.”

“Where do they have these things?” Johnny asked, struggling up the stairs of a low-rent office tower, home to a cleaning service and a telemarketer.

“Generally at someone's house or an office,” said Louie, attacking the stairs with his usual vigour. “It's mainly showers, going-away parties.”

Scott saw Turmoil shiver in a leather car coat purchased for ten dollars at Gussy's, a used clothing emporium with a pipeline to New England. Gussy had generously described the coat as a “garment for all seasons with slash pockets and a zip-out Orlon pile lining.” The lining was missing.