Going Fast (10 page)

“I hate bats.”

The first woman was undeterred. “My sister's boyfriend, Hector, was an amateur taxidermist. He killed the bat and mounted it on an album cover.”

“Can you be an
amateu
r taxidermist?” asked her coworker.

“I think so. It's not like a mortician, is it? Anyway, I think the cover was Jethro Tull.” She squinted, trying to visualize the cover. “Or, uh, Led Zeppelin. I know I wouldn't give them my James Taylor because he was too cute.”

Scott looked across the Athena Restaurant's counter and wondered with the detached interest of an eavesdropper, Who is Jethro Tull? He checked the time on the sunburst clock with rickety arms that stuck on twelve. A collection of handwritten ads, taped to the front window, blocked his view of the street.

V
EGAS
E
LVIS, INCLUDES FLASHING LIGHT AND SOUNDSTAGE
. E
LVIS HAS JUMPSUIT, GOLD-PLATED RING, BELT BUCKEL, SILK SCARF, AND MICKROPHONE
. P
LAYS FULL VERSION OF
H
OUND
D
OG
. P
AID
$340,
CAN SELL FOR
$150. C
ALL
B
ERNICE
.

Scott wasn't interested, he decided, in calling Bernice, but he was glad that the Athena was located on the same block as Tootsy's, kilometres from the industrial park and the managers of Gem. Scott had persuaded Sports to resurrect the boxing beat by predicting a resurgence in the sport. Without warning or explanation, MacKenzie had decided that Sports was a priority and could hire two part-timers, freeing Scott to come and go as he pleased.

Scott liked the Athena's red vinyl booths, cloth carnations, and faded posters of blinding Greek beaches. He liked the rundown clientele. More than anything, he liked to escape. Escaping meant less time around Smithers and Warshick, less time under the capricious eye of MacKenzie. But deep down, Scott knew it was more than that. He was witnessing something singular, he believed, an athlete with the tools, the physiological wiring to perform the magical, the magnificent, something he had seen before, and that he needed, for reasons he could not explain, to observe once again.

Scott recognized a quality in boxers, individual athletes who had chosen a solitary course. The boxers, the swimmers, the paddlers, the runners, all lined up alone and exposed. There was no hiding in a crowd, no substitution. Individual athletes wanted to control their destiny, but, in some, the drive went deeper; they needed, at the core of their being, to beat
everyone,
and that ego rejected team sports.

T
WIN
C
ITIES
D
OG
S
HOW
. P
RIZE FOR OWNER AND DOG WHO LOOK MOST ALIKE
.

A jogger, bundled up against the wind, shuffled by at a laconic nine-minute pace. Scott had recently read that Edwin Moses, the great Olympic hurdler, the winner of 107 consecutive races, had run with Bill Clinton. Afterwards, Moses, a biomechanical miracle, a genetic mutation, a track god unbeaten for ten straight years, was quoted as saying that
he had trouble with the president's seven-forty pace. “He's in surprisingly good shape,” Moses purportedly said. The story and all of its ramifications ate away at Scott like acid and he pleaded, Don't do it, Edwin, remember who you are!

Scott felt no bond with the aerobics followers and softball duffers at work, the spandexed masses of untested flesh. There was no common ground, no spiritual communion. He was like a junkie who had given up smack and found himself surrounded by weekend tokers. Training, like dope, was not something to be trifled with. It was a power unto itself, it was delirium. It was stumbling out of bed at 5 a.m. in a howling wind, freezing his fingers until they turned white and hard. It was pushing his body until his mind entered an afterlife of soft lights and silence; it was the only thing that mattered, and in the end, it was too cruel to care.

Maybe Moses was joking and the reporter was too dumb to know, Scott thought, as the waitress delivered a coffee and Danish. The analytical athlete, who made winning look too easy, was often misread by the public and press. “This should be good,” the waitress said quickly. “It's just out of the oven.”

Scott's face flushed, his personal space invaded. He believed in a professional covenant that covered specific relationships: lawyer/client, priest/sinner, clerk/customer, a covenant that precluded comment on his food as well as his behaviour.

“Thanks.” He acknowledged the gawky redhead in the non-mutilating ear cuff. Scott bit into his Danish as a stripper wobbled to the counter for smokes. Under her coat, she wore a T-shirt that announced: R
IPE WHEN
S
QUEEZED
. The waitress handed the stripper cigarettes and then, to Scott's annoyance, turned back to him. “Why does everyone have something written on their chest, some emotional shorthand that says who you are, where you've been, what you believe in?” she asked rhetorically.

Scott looked at her closely. She was only about twenty, he
figured, thin, in loose black pants and a T-shirt. She had an order pad tucked in a black apron next to a pack of Trident.

“It's human interaction without the humans,” she argued, making her case. “It's faxes, Internet, phone machines, pagers, talking T-shirts, all devices to keep us from talking, to keep us safe, sterile, and remotely untouched.”

Ambushed, Scott nodded dumbly and wondered why she cared. Focusing for the first time, he saw green eyes, a snub nose, and a wide mouth that hiked across her face until it could glance up and see the outer corners of her eyes. The face of a red-headed duck.

“I think we're going to keep going until our vocal chords disappear, shrivel up like that extra toe we used for climbing.” She raised her eyebrows like it made sense. “We will evolve into mutes.”

“Maybe.”

“My name is Sasha.” The delivery was rapid-fire with no time for inflection.

“Is that Russian?” Small talk stuck in Scott's mouth.

“Ah ha, it is the familiar form of Alexandra, which, of course, was the name of the tragic
tsaritsa
whose execution in that horrible half-cellar in Yekaterinburg is too monstrous to envision.” She stopped briefly before plunging forward. “I changed my name, actually. It used to be Darlene, which is Old French for ‘little darling.'” She laughed. “I liked Sasha better.”

Scott shrugged. “Yeah, sure, my name is Scott. Maybe I should change that.”

“Scott is a good name, Old English.” She seemed confident. “Scott Glenn, Scott Fitzgerald, Scott Baio.”

When she laughed, Scott was relieved to see good teeth and a sense of humour. Since he had started frequenting the Athena, Scott had often seen her coming to work, dragging a tapestry bag containing her past, her future, and her peccadilloes. She stuffed them under the counter with the industrialsize
vats of ketchup. I wonder if she's one of those women who totes around a favourite book, he thought, like his sister, who'd been consumed in her teens by
Marjorie Morningstar
.

Sasha checked the six-burner Bunn-o-Matic. She sprayed disinfectant on the milkshake machine with the satisfied movements of a kid playing dress-up.

“Just don't call yourself Scotty.” Sasha was back. “That has some strange connotations for me.”

“How come?”

Inside the coat rack by the door, Scott noticed a forlorn sweater with a metal hanger poking through the knit. Underneath was one winter boot.

“When I was growing up, we had a squirrel monkey named Scotty.” Her voice was guileless. “He used to sit in the kitchen all day, eating orange slices and pears like a sultan from the movies.” She glanced to see if he was listening. “One day he bolted out the back door when Mom was hanging out the laundry. He ran across the clothesline —
Whooooosh!
— like he had suction cups on his feet. From the clothesline, he leapt to a tree infested with caterpillars. Then he started peeling off the caterpillars' skins and popping the bodies into his mouth. It took us two hours to get him back inside with bribery and negotiations.”

“How did you ever get a monkey?”

“My uncle phoned one Christmas Eve and I was the one who answered. I was about six. He said, ‘How would you like something cute and furry for Christmas?' and I said: ‘Yeeeaaah, great,' thinking, I dunno, a stuffed bear. The next day he showed up with a monkey. My uncle had been to Indonesia on an oil rig; I think he won Scotty in a card game.”

“Was he a good pet?”

“He was duplicitous. My grandmother lived with us. When she and Scotty were home alone during the day, he was friendly, but only because he needed her. When other people were
around, he would pull her support stockings when she walked by him and pinch her legs with his fingers, which were as sharp as tweezers.”

“I guess he had it in for her.”

“He knew she was vulnerable. He knew she had little power in the household. He had established the hierarchy.” With that, she smiled a toothy smile and walked away with the straight, controlled walk of someone who had studied dance. “I gotta go.”

“Where's the shop steward?” Scott heard Smithers shout across the newsroom. “I've got proof that it's two kilometres a day to the can and the staff room.”

Smithers craned his neck to see whether Blaise had heard him, but the Entertainment writer was on the phone, juggling two prescription bottles and a host of neuroses.

“The walk will do you good,” sniped Warshick, who was wearing his favourite T-shirt, the one with the warning on the chest: D
ANGER
, E
XPLOSIVE
G
AS IN
R
EAR
. While Warshick tossed out insults, he used one hand to open an electric cooler that he kept by his desk stocked with frozen Revellos.

It was a good time to pick on Smithers. The reporter had become visibly agitated since the hockey season had started and he'd discovered that, when refereeing, he had a personal heckler. Francis Lundrigan was forty-five years old, short, and partial to Moe Howard haircuts. Two years ago, the junior team had made Francis an honorary stickboy. Then, cementing his celebrity status, he had appeared on The Christmas Hope Telethon, singing “I'm a Little Teapot Short and Stout.” Every time Smithers reffed, Francis was there, three rows back, clamorous and relentless. “Hey, forty-four,” he would say, pointing at Smithers's number, “is that your IQ?”

And the crowd would laugh. “That's Francis,” they'd chuckle, a one-name persona like Cher or Sting, a celebrity in wool hats and mukluks. “Remember he was on Christmas Hope.”

“Knucklehead.” That always got Francis rows of laughs. “Smithers, you are a bum head, an oofus. Dummy, dummy, dummy.” More laughs.

The
Standard
's book page editor, who was as small and angry looking as Squeaky Fromme, walked by, gave Smithers a deadly look, and muttered something that sounded to Scott like
cockroach
. Squeaky's desk faced a corner and a faded tall ships poster that she bowed to each morning. It was her shrine to ten heady days of brigadoons and puffy sails that had billowed and creaked over the skyline like a canopy bed, a cocoon of romance and laughter. A rare streak of sunshine had heightened the abandon and the exotic tans of sailors, and for a while, as though the dashing visitors and their swashbuckling ships would never leave, the whole city had smiled.

Months after the tall ships had sailed and the smiles had faded, a photographer had found Smithers and Squeaky in the darkroom sprawled over the enlarger. Smithers swore that he'd passed out from the Christmas punch and that she'd undressed him against his will. “They could use her at Baker's Funeral Parlour. For her size, she's surprisingly strong when lifting bodies.”

“Squirrel monkeys are very small.”

“Uh-huh.” In under an hour, Scott had found his way back to the Athena and a counter seat. Some days he hated Smithers with an intensity that surprised him.