Going Fast (23 page)

This is what you trained for, Scotty, this is all you want.

Scott heard the noise five strokes before he reached the seven-hundred-and-fifty line. One of the Americans on shore had a cowbell, another had a bongo drum, tracking Nash, clamouring, beating when he passed. The cheers were fading by the time Scott hit them, pulling with his teeth, his ears, every muscle in his corded neck, pulling so hard he forgot to breathe.

“Move it, Scotty!” Taylor barked in a hoarse voice that confirmed his every fear. “Don't save nothin'!”

Hit your groove. Make it move.

Scott glanced to his right and saw Nash surge.

He's got to break, Scott thought.

He can't keep it up. He's got to lengthen out.

Relax, relax.

Race your own race.

He caught a glimpse of the American's back as it twisted and pulled, his blade working the water like cogs.
Swish
.
Swish
.
Swish
. Down the course like a phantom he soared, passing the five hundred on a cushion of air, just starting to move.

Scott began to choke up. His boat wobbled. He took a bad stroke.

“C'mon, Scotty!” Taylor shouted, his voice cracking. “Go with him, or it's too fucking late.”

Scott's arms were seizing, shortening his stroke, his body taken over by an insidious form of rigor mortis he could not control.
Slap, slap
. The strokes were too shallow, too short. His knees trembled, and his boat shook uncontrollably; his two-hundred-centimetre-long paddle was an unwieldy lead bar.

Unable to get the reach, his blade was missing the good water, the water that counted. He was Frankenstein's monster, arms frozen in front, flailing at the water, lurching forward in a macabre dance, a herky-jerky motion while Nash got smoother.

The oxygen gone, Scott's lungs were bursting; he could feel the lactic acid poisoning his muscles like sugar in a gas tank. His heart was ready to explode.

Scott knew the race was lost, and the longer it lasted, the more hideous it became. Nash picked it up and the crowd shouted as he shifted gears. Scott could feel Nash's speed as he crossed the two-hundred-and-fifty-metre buoys, he could hear the cheers as lane four surged forward, invincible.

The cowbells were mocking him now. Taylor's voice had faded.

Scott could feel the eyes at the finish; he could see the podium and empty trailers. He could spot people trading T-shirts and looking at fibreglass gear; he could read Nash's name on the Harry “Pop” Knight Trophy, and he could visualize the time.

His hand hit the gunwale, stinging like the truth. He's better, Scott admitted in an epiphany of pain. He's that much better. No matter how hard I try, no matter how badly I want it, I will never be that fast.

Scott wanted to take a freak stroke, to miss the water and
topple in, to sink into the mean black canal and vanish like Jimmy Hoffa.

It would be easier than this.

Taylor was standing on the wharf, arms akimbo, when Scott crashed the dock, too numb to stop. Together, like pallbearers, they carried the boat to a grassy bank, where Scott lay down, silent and spent, praying he was dead. Closing his eyes, he hid the tears.

Suddenly, he was embarrassed by his dreams, ashamed of holding himself up to the brilliance.

3:49. The time drifted through the crowd like the smell of lilacs, and then it started to rain.

Scott closed the scrapbook. He was shocked by the vividness of the memory, having been unable, in the past, to recall the race. Subconsciously, he had blocked it, buried it with the decision to quit paddling. It was the turning point of his life, the moment he swore off sports, the moment he decided he'd been ripped off by God, a capricious God who, on his own, determined greatness. God alone picked a select few, people like Nash and Turmoil Davies. After that, Scott MacDonald hung up his blade and settled into a life of mediocrity, vowing never to expose himself again. The wonder was gone, the promise. Scott MacDonald entered the real world as a disillusioned man, a man who liked to drink.

A legislative page stood in the doorway and yawned. The room, which had a lofty ceiling and velvet chairs, was damp, as though the heating system had been installed by the eighteenth-century despots who graced the walls. Sniffling, Turmoil searched the crowd for Lorraine.

A woman handed the page an empty teacup, which he placed on a table.

“Look out, Junior.” A grizzled man in a torn jogging suit pushed by, wearing a Bruins toque and mittens secured to his jacket by safety pins. The page appeared startled by the force of the arm, which looked as frail as a balsa wood airplane.

The jogger ran four steps in a Kip Keino victory jog and then loaded a Best Buy bag with sandwiches. The page could smell the cold in the man's bleached beard, in his tattered Reeboks, and deep in his balsa wood bones. Surprised, Turmoil watched the old man lift an egg sandwich, sniff it, and return it to the tray.

“That old man is snatching all of the food,” noted a woman in a choir robe.

“Is nobody going to stop him?” asked another.

The page took an assertive step forward and then reconsidered. Pages were the lowest form of legislature life, a social amoeba that spent its days fetching water, delivering Hansard, and ducking the passes of higher life forms. Threatened and bored, they sought refuge in the basement, a dark pool of reefer madness, and avoided confrontations.

Ownie had no idea why he was attending the reception with Turmoil, who had been ignoring him since they arrived. Turmoil, who was making no effort to ingratiate himself with anyone at the gathering. On good days, the big man could win over a room as soon as he entered; on bad ones, he was so arrogant and dismissive that it was almost sinful.

Like most occupants of the room, the choir members were African Canadian, men and women in suits, robes, and vivid African clothes made from
kente
or
shedda
. Ownie recognized a legal aid lawyer and a pastor with a gift for inspirational sermons. The gathering had a strange mood, he decided. Most of the guests, while proud of their accomplishments, kept their emotions in check, doubting, it seemed, the sincerity of their hosts, mindful, still, of the segregated schools of the 1960s, the not-so-distant movie theatres with Negro sections.

B
LACK
H
ISTORY
M
ONTH
. ERACISM, announced a poster.

His bag full, the jogger bounced on his toes as though he was waiting for a light to change. He sipped on a coffee. The steam melted the ice crystals on his beard. A local character, as well known as the drifter who dressed like Pavarotti, he lived in a men's shelter and called himself, with an odd mix of madness and bravado, the Running Joke.

“How long is this going to last?” a politician in a white wig asked a colleague. Alex Francis MacDougall was shaped like the Fruit of the Loom apple character, with stick legs protruding from a round torso. Unlike the singing apple who sometimes chirped about loving your underwear, MacDougall was pompous and a bore. He had a minor portfolio.

“Who knows?” replied his cabinet colleague.

Stepping forward, MacDougall squeezed a woman's hand as though he was testing a melon. The hand belonged to Lavinia Crawford, an elderly artist who had been featured in an NFB documentary on basket weaving. Her intricate maple designs were now in galleries, exhibits, and the National
Museum in Ottawa. Lavinia told the filmmaker that the craft had been passed on by ancestors, former slaves who had walked to Halifax from Preston selling baskets, blueberries, and mayflowers. “The talent was a gift from the Lord.” With talk of an imminent Order of Canada, there was a mad rush among the in crowd for Lavinia baskets, a rush fuelled by the Maud Lewis craze and the buzz: What if Lavinia was the next folk art genius?

Ownie studied a poster of a map shaped like Nova Scotia.

BLACK FIRSTS IN NOVA SCOTIA:
L
AWYER
J
AMES
R
OBERTSON
J
OHNSTON
1895.
P
OLICE
P
ERSON
R
OSE
F
ORTUNE CIRCA
1885.
V
ICTORIA
C
ROSS
W
INNER
W
ILLIAM
H
ALL
1859.

“I'm Alex Francis MacDougall from Pick-tou Cen-ter.” Done with Lavinia, the politician sidled up to Turmoil. “Highest majority in the province. And who are you?”

“Ebbyone know me.” Turmoil took a piece of pineapple from a tray.

“Oh?” MacDougall scoffed.

“Ahm the mon they all wahn to meet.” Turmoil looked over MacDougall's head as though he was trying to locate someone important. He saw a government photographer snapping Lavinia, posed with one politician after another.

“Who?” MacDougall challenged him.

“Ebbyone.” Then, after a moment's silence the fighter added, “Ahm Turmoil Davies.”

“I see,” MacDougall smirked.

Turmoil kept searching the room, skimming the tops of heads like a lighthouse beacon, ignoring Ownie, who, used to fending for himself, was now having a pleasant conversation with two of the choir women.

“When you leabe here, you be tellin your little ole wife you met me,” Turmoil told MacDougall.

“Oh?”

“You'll say, ‘Wife, you wohn believe wha happen to me today. Ah met Turmoil Davies, the next heavyweight champeen of the world.' And she will say: ‘G'won, dohn go foolin me.'”

“So you're a pugilist?”

“No mon, ahm the next heavyweight champeen of the world. Ahm the mon ebbyone here to see.”

“My wife isn't much of a boxing fan.” MacDougall rolled his eyes.

“That wha you think, mon.”

“I think I can safely say —”

“Wha she goin tell a little ole fat mon like you?” Turmoil cut him off. “With a white wig on your head.” He shook his head in amusement. “Little fat belly and ahms like a baby girl. She goin tell you she wohn to meet a big mon like me?” Turmoil laughed loud enough to turn heads.

“Excuse me.” MacDougall bolted. “I have some urgent government business.”

Once across the room, MacDougall draped his arm around Ducky Blades, a country boy who had just been elected by the good people of Lower East Pubnico and was now skipping down the Road to Ruin like Pinocchio on Pleasure Island. “We're cutting a deal, now,” MacDougall told the new back-bencher, making it sound important. “Make sure you're there for the vote.”

“Uh-huh.” Ducky nodded. In Halifax, far from home during the legislative session, boys like Ducky could play pool, smoke cigars, and stay up late. There were no rules, no nagging wives, no Jiminy Cricket to tell them they were turning into donkeys, just crooked old men like Alex Francis MacDougall.

“It's that damn NDP,” MacDougall confided. “Fruit merchants, you know.”

MacDougall summoned the page with a flick of the finger. Pages hated MacDougall, who lunched at the Thirsty Beaver and returned to the house a drunken windmill, waving for water, sending obscene notes across the floor. What did he want now?

“Ahm thinkin of goin into politics myself.” Turmoil was back at MacDougall's side. “The peeple wuhd love me.”

“Oh really?” This was an affront.

The people had elected Alex Francis MacDougall in four straight elections because he delivered at the same predictable rate: fifty bucks for a worker's compensation form, one hundred for a veteran's disability hearing. A letter of reference cost twenty-five dollars, free if you worked on Alex Francis's campaign.

“Oh yes, the smart peeple.” Then Turmoil dismissed the red room with a wave. “Some these peeple, they jes chupid.” Turmoil reached for a pineapple chunk. “They dohn know nothin 'bou nothin; they nebba been nowhere.”

And then, Turmoil gave MacDougall a wide-eyed warning: “You bes be careful; ah might get your jawb.”

Ownie saw Lorraine talking to the director of the choir. Emmett Grouse had started piano at the age of five and had attended Berklee College of Music. In addition to directing the choir and playing the organ at church, he produced radio programs and volunteered with youth groups. The choir women had told Ownie about the director and he, in turn, had given them the lowdown on Hildred's cake business.

Ducky, the backbencher, was cornered by a zealot who regularly crashed legislature events. Alasdair MacIsaac, a wild-eyed crusader for Gaelic rights, was resplendent in a grey ponytail and plaid vest, and he was waving a stack of papers, all related, he claimed, to “systemic racism.”

“It's the same ethnocide.” He painted the room with an ink-stained hand. “Denying people disclosure of the lineage of a significant cultural progenitor. The oppression must cease.”

Ducky nodded, suddenly feeling oppressed himself. As Alasdair placed a hand on his shoulder, Ducky visualized his table back home at the Legion. If he closed his eyes, he was smelt fishing. How long, he wondered, would the session last?

As Ducky pulled away from Alasdair, Turmoil spotted Lorraine in a CBC circle. She was a newsroom favourite: young, a visible minority, left, a quotable female, who had worked with the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition and volunteered in Zimbabwe under Canadian Crossroads International.

A bloated reporter inched closer to Lorraine, feet seemingly not moving. Last month, Natalie Marr had filed a grievance against a sports announcer who had sworn in the newsroom. For re-education, the announcer was sent to a sensitivity seminar run by an actor in a Big Bird costume who asked, in a session on gender stereotyping: “Am I a male or a female, and does it matter?”

“I bought a wonderful book at Kwanzaa,” said Natalie. “It's by a Jamaican author who writes all of her work in Creole, very powerful.”

“Oh.” Lorraine tried to look interested. “Do you know Creole?”

“Ah, no.” Natalie's teeth stuck to her lips.