Going Fast (22 page)

It had been twenty years since Scott had picked up a paddle, twenty years since he'd gone a day without a drink. After years of living the abstemious life of an athlete, of honing his body for one narrow purpose, he had decided to party. At first, he drank with strangers, soaking up the sights he had missed in college: fern bars, pubs, and piano players. Pretty soon, he tired of people and set his own routine. He slept all day, worked the night desk, and came home to drink.

One night, before the late scores were in, Smithers had stormed into the
Standard
and demanded that Scott join him on a bar crawl. Scott couldn't leave before the scores were in, and Smithers was already pissed. Smithers locked him in a bear hug from behind. Scott remembered trying to unlock Smithers's fingers and shake him loose. He remembered it all like a slide show: one bright, disconnected moment after the other: being hoisted from his chair, feet losing contact. Scott had no idea how he had landed with enough force to drive the desk spike through his wrist, or how an innocuous office implement stacked with memos could have entered his flesh and surfaced like an armour-piercing bullet. At that moment, his breath stopped like someone had pulled the hose from a central vac, breaking the electrical connection.

Sasha was talking about something, but he wasn't listening.

Stripped of its paisley curtain and matching towels, it looked like a bus station men's room, a threadbare pit stop on the way to someplace better. Gone were the superfluous flowers and Gustav Klimt prints. After Heather left, the bathroom was cold and cruel. Scott liked the feel.

“And now for twenty minutes of uninterrupted Gooolden Oldies.”

Scott flipped the toilet lid open with a plunger. He always checked, ever since Heather had locked eyes with a twelve-inch sewer rat, a pin-headed beast with pipe-cutting teeth and thalidomide legs, swimming, hissing, bent on escape.

“We've got Paul McCartney and Wings and Aretha Franklin, but first . . .” Another Golden Oldie aimed at the fading synapses of middle-aged brains.

Scott had poisoned the invader with Javex, but he always suspected there were more, an army of reserve rodents dogpaddling to the surface, fanatics who multiplied five times a year in litters of fourteen, coarse-coated outlaws who preyed on cats and chickens and carried typhus fever or plague. Flushing the toilet, he slammed the lid closed. Weren't rats in the toilet an urban myth? Like alligators in the sewer and W
ELCOME TO THE
W
ORLD OF
AIDS on the motel mirror?

Heather used to have a cleaner come in on Fridays, an older woman with a flowered apron and emphysema that stopped her in her tracks. Scott was supposed to tell her about the rat but forgot. “An Iowa scientist has worked out a
formula,” Heather had explained. “If you see one rat during daylight, it means there are one to five hundred.” One more sin that no longer mattered. Scott had been surprised that Heather had Javex in the apartment, since she seemed intent on creating as small of an impact on the ecosystem as possible. She used tiny plates at dinner, and instead of turning up the heat, she took a hot water bottle to bed. Scott ate off paper plates and opened the windows whenever he pleased.

Scott adjusted the bathroom scale, moving the gauge from the minus zone to zero. One-eighty-five, unchanged since 1971. After the age of thirty, most people gained weight, one insidious pound a year that appeared from nowhere like dust, but Scott didn't need to worry, rarely eating a solid meal at home.

“Just read David Cassidy's book,
C'mon, Get Happy
,” the radio announcer reported. “Verrry interesting. There is a juicy section involving
L.A. Law
's Susan Dey. Dave says he and Susan tried to get it on, but she wasn't cheap enough for him.” The announcer stuck his tongue in his cheek. “Oookay, Dave.”

Scott stood in front of a full-length mirror with a hairline crack down the middle of his face, separating his good and evil selves. His dirty blond hair had receded but not enough to affect the aesthetics of his face, which had sunspots he feared would turn to melanoma and cheeks that had started to droop like icing in the heat.

“How many of you knew that Dave's nickname is Dong?” The announcer cracked up. “Seriously,” he laughed. “It's right here and we're not talking Avon Lady.”

Ding, Dong. Scott unbuttoned his twill shirt and unzipped his thirty-four chinos as though he was preparing for a medical exam. He peeled off his navy jockeys and socks. Naked, he sucked in his stomach and puffed out his hairless chest.

He had been in the ring half a dozen times by now. He was
learning to hit the speed bag. Maybe, he told himself, he would cut back on his drinking and eat better food. He had been an athlete, he reminded himself, every bit as dedicated as Turmoil Davies, every bit as tough. Maybe, he decided, he would run.

Mercilessly, Scott stared at his reflection for the first time in years, moving past the hazel eyes, conventional nose, and loose, expectant mouth. He stared with the mercenary eye of a horse breeder, with the dehumanizing gaze of a casting agent, and he stepped back in shock. Part of him was gone! How could a layer of flesh have melted like ice: cells, neurons, and blood vessels dripping into a gutter of idleness? How could his eighteen-inch biceps, his tumescent shoulders, his rippling back, have dissolved? Where were the shadows, the definition?

Scott turned sideways, then back to his shrunken self. The overhead light was glaring on his triceps, which seemed as empty as a depleted udder. What had happened to his granite abs, his swollen pecs, his substance? There was a time when every ounce of his body was tuned and purposeful, with no waste or confusion. How could he have lost it all and not even noticed? He could hear Turmoil laughing.

Killing the radio, Scott headed for the bedroom. At one time he enjoyed walking; with every step, he felt a taut muscle flex. Picking up a book, raking the lawn, every fibre was relevant and connected, while now he felt nothing. His brain was moving his limbs like a puppetmaster, right, left, right, left.

Scott felt a stab of neuropathic pain. The impotent body in the mirror couldn't be his. It belonged to a middle-aged loser who had never tasted greatness, to an endomorph like Smithers. It was too undersized, too insignificant. Scott MacDonald was big, goddamn it, he was mighty; he was a fucking powerhouse. That couldn't change, that's who he was!

He finished his beer and crawled into his closet. Panic was moving his arms, the disorienting fear that follows a nightmare when reality and horror merge. He needed reassurance, he needed something more substantial than his shadowy memory.

Scott opened a scrapbook with a rocketship on the cover.
Scott MacDonald. Shubenacadie Canoe Club
printed in inch-high letters. There! The time he won Juvenile K-1, a euphoric teen with shaggy hair and a smile. He turned the page gently, protecting the faded clippings held in place with dried tape. He stared at six young men in Canada Games uniforms, a Lawrence Welk chorus in blue blazers, open shirts, and white bell-bottoms.

A plane ticket from his first international trip. A training log for 1971. Junior K-1. First place. Canadian championships. One thousand metres in 4:14.1. A crest: N
ATIONAL
R
ACES
C
ANOE
K
AYAK
C
HAMPIONSHIP
S
ALT
F
ORK
S
TATE
L
AKE
.

A receipt for green Gazelles.

A quote by running guru Dr. George Sheehan: “Racing is the lovemaking of the runner. It is an excitement in the blood. There is the same agitation, the same stirring of the pulse, the same feeling in the chest, the same delightful apprehension you feel when nearing the one you love.”

He thought about the two-hour workouts, about the time Taylor blacked out and sank, sucking in weeds and water, about the day he ruptured a disc. Water so cold that his hands ached for days, wind so mean it ripped his skin like a grater, blisters that bled and healed, then bled again. Fartlek training and wind sprints uphill. Brewer's yeast, a shell slicing a K-4 in two. He remembered standing in his boat for balance, paddling the perimeter of the lake on one side to even his stroke, the first time he broke four minutes, and the time he paddled at midnight with a light on his bow.

He remembered pushing so hard that everything went
black except for a white-gold horizontal line, a floating chin-up bar, from which his body hung, arms, legs, and soul. It was all so complete.

He opened another beer and looked at a quote from Roger Bannister describing his historic mile. “I felt the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. The world seemed to stand still, or did not exist.”

He closed his eyes.

A judge's boat roared up the course, whipping up wash. Scott steered his frail boat into the surf, alone and adrift as an ancient burial fifty feet from shore.

“Three minutes to start!”

He laid his blade on the water surface, sucked in air, and stared down lane five, a vertiginous shaft of swirling buoys, hot pain, and otherworldly doubts. Fear stared back and Scott felt a hand on his back.

“Mr. Starter, you have the race!”

Think about the perfect one thousand, he told himself, shrugging off the hand, steadying his boat, as fine as pecan shells, seamlessly joined and gleaming. Follow the blueprint in your brain. With mental acupuncture, he blocked out the waves, the roaring freeway, and the shrill jabs of a jackhammer on shore.

Focus. Focus. The course was cold and dispassionate: a man-made canal of ten lanes, each nine metres wide, a sterile trench in the gut of a concrete city that owed him nothing. Unlike his lake, this course had no trees, no gently sloping beaches to soften the landscape. It was, by design and fate, an aquatic bowling alley with the ambience of a shooting range, and, Christ, it looked so long.

“Okay, gentlemen, bring your boats up. Let's not have a misstart.”

During warm-up, Scott had noted the landmarks: wooden
bleachers at the five-hundred-metre mark, a navy blue tent at the seven-fifty. He picked out joggers, he fiddled with his taped grip, he watched boys on bicycles race beside the course like thieves. After twenty minutes, his consciousness shifted, his body lightened, his eyes focused on that narrow point in space: the point where the 3-D picture takes shape and everything around it disappears. He entered the anaesthetized state that told him to go, to push, push, push into the danger zone, past the warning pains, past lucidity and reason.

“Slow now,” warned the starter. “There's a tailwind . . . evvverybody mooove forward.”

He had to hit that point before a race. He had to know the feeling and where to find it; he couldn't be searching, he had to know.

“Move up, now.”

Scott spotted Nash, a kamikaze blond with azure eyes and a print bandana on his head. The American was in lane four, but he stood apart, longer and leaner than the prototypical paddler. Scott stared ahead, timing his approach, while Nash hung back twenty metres, where Scott could feel him.

He had a clean face with white brows, spare, angular features, and the chlorine-ravaged hair of a competitive swimmer, frizz-dried under the bandana in spiky tufts. Nash looked like a man who had seen more, done more, heard more of life's conflicting secrets. He came from a country that put men on the moon, a land of two hundred million people filled with bold boasts and cold-beer stores with pretzels.

He probably owned a VW van and a dog named Biff, played the flute, visited Morocco, and hiked through Spain. He probably had a girlfriend who looked like Cher and a cousin named Bo who had been to Vietnam.

“Stay back, gentlemen.”

He was Dwight Stone and Jackson Brown, brash and brazen, sensitive and disarming, more audacious and alive
than anyone Scott knew, as foreign as burritos, as exotic as a weekend in New York City.

“Back, number three!”

But was he fast?

“Back it up, four!”

That's all that mattered.

Scott held his boat on the line, bow on, not over.

You are strong, you are omnipotent. When you pull through that water, you could move a train, a bus, a shopping mall.

He heard someone shout “good luck,” and then the wind stopped, as if a door had slammed. Everything was still: the water, the flags, a canvas tent on the right side of the course, filled with food, clothes, and essential boat parts.

Block out everything and listen, he told himself. Listen. It takes a hundred and twenty thousandths of a second to respond to sound.

“Back, seven.”

The rapid-fire commands sent shockwaves through his body.

“Over, five.”

Jesus, that's me! He took a sideways stroke.

Scott blew out the tension that clung to the walls of his chest like blackened creosote. Remember, it's four short hard ones, then twenty fast, then break. Hit top speed, lengthen it out, move into your race, stay with the rhythm, hope to hell you're in the lead.

“Up, three.” He's going to do it.

“Paddles ready.” Okay, baby.

BANG!

Go!
Off the line 1-2-3-4. Quick!

The water flew from an invisible blender, a paroxysm of noise and confusion. The start was an arm wrestle, a dead lift, a crude test of brute strength that picked the boat off the line
and thrust it into motion. Alll righhht, Scott thought, we're moving.

Forty strokes out, he could feel his position. It was just him and Nash, head tilted forward like a sniper taking aim at an invisible target. They had open water, and the pack was fading like fireworks in a black night.

Pump with the legs. Pull with the lats.

At seventy metres, he hit maximum speed.

Scott could feel the oxygen-charged blood rushing to his screaming arms, racing through arteries that had opened like the mouth of a trout, arteries as big and elastic as a wind tunnel. Pump. Pump. Pump. Tearing past stop signs, driven by a turbo-charged heart the size of a cantaloupe.