Going Fast (34 page)

“You juss kiddin me.” The caller laughed as though Ownie was pulling his leg. “There no way you wudden know mah voice.”

Lord dyin' Jesus, strike me dead! Ownie swore he'd never have this conversation, not after how he'd been betrayed, disappointed, and forced to deal with Hildred and her mutilated cake.

“Ah juss wahn to see how you doin, you and your wife.”

“After six months, you're wondering how I'm doing?”

“How you like ta come down for a lit'l visit, get sum sun and relax? Ahll pay all your 'spenses, ahll take care of ebbyting. A mon your age should do a lit'l trav'lin.”

“I've done plenty of travelling.”

Turmoil laughed. “Ah bet you nevah even ben to Flor'da?”

“I've got no need for mobile trailers or Mickey Mouse.”

“Iss nice down here.” And then without a pause, without giving Ownie time to nurse his grudges or listen to reason, it was done. “Ahll have mah secretary send you a ticket. Dohn you worry 'bout nothin. We got a fight comin up, a big one. You'll see. Iss big.”

Ownie was on a stopover in Toronto. A tanned woman in a Club Med T-shirt was handing out tickets to bleary travellers who stumbled through the glass doors, which opened slowly, allowing the wind to dart inside.

Ownie watched a short man in an Aussie outback hat take a timorous step across the salt-stained airport floor. He introduced himself to another lone traveller, who said his name was Bruce. Together, they approached the woman for their tickets.

Both men looked uneasy, but their panic level visibly dropped the more they talked. “No waaay! Garnet Rogers, I looove him!” They marvelled at every inane detail, blowing them up until they formed a collective armour against the social dangers that lay ahead.

“Blue Jays?”

“My mother was born in Toronto!”

Both guys were what Ownie would call debutantes, single dudes in their thirties. Gary, the first guy, was a roofer from the Ottawa Valley, it was revealed during introductions, and Bruce was a postie with environmental illness. Both men were, they admitted awkwardly, making their first trip to Club Med, a hedonistic resort that they believed would change the course of their lives.

“My foreman warned me,” said Gary, who was short even in the outback hat. “Don't go on the Wednesday picnic unless you like to strip naked.”

“Oh, that's good to know,” said Bruce, the postie, who was bald.

Everything was going fine, Ownie noticed, until Gary started asking questions about passports — he didn't have one — and Bruce decided, in the blink of an eye — to cut him loose. “I'm going to try this line,” Bruce snapped as though they were no longer friends. “It's shorter.”

Gary started to blink, and Ownie felt sorry for the roofer, who wasn't much taller than O'Riley's brother, Larry, who had permanently joined the land of the little people. Nothing good would ever come of Larry's situation, Ownie decided. A while back, Larry had heard about the Anna McGoldrick tour of Ireland from Mrs. Carmichael down at the church. On the spot, Larry decided that he had to go, him being a leprechaun and Anna being a major Irish singer. Mrs. Carmichael, who should've known that Larry had no way of getting his hands on three grand, had talked it up good, with Galway Bay, the Blarney Stone, and the medieval banquet. So Larry robbed the priest, and now, O'Riley, his brother, can't even show his face in church.

Ownie sympathized with O'Riley, knowing what it was like to have a brother who got under your skin. Every few months, Butch got his shit going. “The old man liked you best, and here I was a ten-round fighter and you were nothing!” Or throwing up the fact that Ownie had joined the navy without him, ignoring the fact that he was twelve years old at the time. And now, his latest schtick: “I'd tell that two-faced bastard to kiss my ass before I'd go to Florida with him.”

Ownie touched his passport and the one-way ticket that Turmoil had sent him. They had six weeks to go before a twelve-round fight in Vegas with Antonio Stokes, a real talent with a right that could crack cement. At six-three and 235 pounds, Stokes was 30-1-0 with twenty-five KOs, good enough to generate talk of TV rights and a step into the million-dollar circle.

The winner was promised a date with Roy Newton, the WBC champ.

Ownie had seen the tapes of Stokes, a class above Turmoil's last opponent. Even still, he did not know what to expect. With Turmoil, it was all in his head, a place inhabited by a multitude of characters who could change everything.

Ownie knew why Turmoil had called him. In his last fight, he had two Civil War veterans working his corner, and in between rounds, you could hear them on the tape, slow, and confused as slaughterhouse pigs. One kept saying, “Give him watuh, giiive him watuh,” but no one was doing a thing. The other mumbled, “Do the same thang, boy, do the same thang.”

Nobody was wiping Turmoil's face or giving him hope. In round four, Turmoil returned to his corner, tired and stung, and found one guy asleep. “Whass wrong with you, mon?” Turmoil's screams carried through the corner mike. “You crazeee?”

When you work the corner, Ownie knew, you have to give the fighter thirty seconds to suck in wind, to settle him down, and then give him one thing to concentrate on, one thing only. “Move to your right. Step up the pace.” You can't overload it, Ownie had learned, you can't go playing to the mikes. You have to keep it as simple as mopping a floor. Baxter, Ownie mumbled to himself, that was the name of the old corner man on the tape. Ownie had met him twenty years ago when he was already ninety.

Arms crossed, a surly flight attendant guarded the plane's doorway. Down the aisle, Ownie saw a man fumbling with a cardboard box. His hair stood up like it had been dipped in glue and his clothes were Eastern Bloc black. The attendant stormed toward him.

“What's in it?” she demanded.

“A breadmaker,” replied the man, as though he always travelled with small appliances. The attendant rolled her eyes and shoved in the box.

All around Ownie, doughy people were stuffing heavy coats into bins, slamming the door on winter, coughing and hacking up bronchial phlegm. Then, strangely mute, they settled into their seats, hope tucked under their tongues like a key, eyes fixed on escape.

“Excuse me.” A man climbed over Ownie, then fussed with the overhead light.

“May I have a pillow?” he asked the cranky attendant.

“You'll have to wait,” she snapped without a glance in his direction.

Hours later, the man — his name was Paul — pointed to an egg that had fused with his plate. “This was in the microwave too long,” he pronounced. “We should write a letter, you know.” Some time after takeoff, Paul had appointed himself row spokesman for Ownie and the woman in the middle seat, who never spoke, just shrugged. “It's deregulation.” Paul pointed at the threadbare carpets and stained upholstery as evidence.

While Paul fussed, two divorcees across the aisle were drinking margaritas, celebrating US airspace with toasts to Jimmy Buffet and the sun gods. Both were wearing low-cut T-shirts, push-up bras, and tiny gold chains.

Paul had peculiar eyes, Ownie noticed, that made him look as though he was deep in prayer or the middle of a convulsion. Never at a loss for words, he was a lawyer from Bathurst, he explained, a late bloomer admitted to the bar after a few indecisive years.

“Are you going to eat this?” Paul asked, eying the woman's untouched roll.

“No,” she mumbled. “You can have it.”

Taking a bite of the roll, he washed it down with a sip of his double rum, his third drink, even though he had made it clear that he was far from satisfied with the service. When he'd asked for a beer glass and the attendant told him she didn't have any, he'd sighed in exasperation, “See, deregulation!”

“Are you going to play golf?” Paul asked the woman, who wasn't in the mood for conversation. “Do you have hole-in-one insurance?”

“Pardon me?” She frowned.

“Insurance in case you get a hole in one. In most of these clubs, you have to buy the whole clubhouse a round of drinks if you get one. It could set you back a couple of grand, you know. That's a lot of money.”

“I didn't know that.”

“You should check it out.” Paul sipped his rum again, secure that he had made contact, one of those people who developed lifelong friendships on five-hour flights. Ownie opened his eyes, refreshed from his nap.

“My biggest regret is that my mother died before I could pay her back.” After two more rums, Paul was as soppy as a bread pudding.

Ownie had heard the whole story by now: how the father died when Paul was eight, leaving seven kids and a widow's pension. Five became teachers, and Paul, after drifting, had landed in law. Ownie didn't mind listening because it kept his mind off Baxter, the old corner man, whose face kept popping up, confused and sleepy, with hair like cumulus clouds. Ownie wondered if Baxter felt bad about the snooze or if it had all just drifted by like the clouds.

“Seeing how you all turned out was probably good enough for her,” said Ownie, alone with Paul while the woman was in the washroom changing into summer clothes.

“I know, but she worked so hard.” Paul eased his anguish
with another drink. “She never thought of herself. No, no, all of her energy went to us or to St. Pius. She was a self-taught expert on nun's habits.” He raised his brows for emphasis.

“Is that right?”

“Oh yes, she made close to fifty different habits, all to fit on a Barbie doll. They had a display once of all her dolls and habits in the church basement. All of the priests from the diocese were there, and one man came all the way from Shediac.”

“That's a fair piece,” Ownie conceded. He'd never seen a nun shaped like Barbie, and he'd seen a few nuns in his day. When Ownie was a boy, his school put out a breakfast for the hungriest kids. An old nun would walk into the classroom like a death-camp guard, searching for starvation and signs of rickets. Never once did she pick him. She passed him by like his stomach wasn't growling and his head wasn't aching so bad that he couldn't see the page. Too healthy, she decided. Healthy. Lord jumpin' Jesus! Forgive me for swearing. How can you be healthy when you have no food, when the last thing you ate was a bowl of cabbage soup on Friday? Never once, not until Lucy Miller was home in bed, feet wrapped in fish to bring down the fever that eventually left her deaf. “Okay, Ownie, this morning you will go in Lucy's place.” Before the nun could change her mind, Ownie jumped from his chair and joined the line of sickly wretches. Don't change your mind, he tried to get inside the old nun's head. That command drove him all the way to the basement, where the nuns had laid out twenty glasses of milk and three stacks of bread. While the others lined up, humble, Ownie marched to the table and grabbed the first glass. Gulp. Down in one swallow. Then another. Gulp. The nuns were yelling, but he didn't hear them. Beating his back with a wooden ruler as he reached for more, but he didn't stop. He didn't stop until he'd
finished five glasses, ending his only trip to the breakfast basement.

“That was probably the proudest day of her life,” recalled Paul. “Christmas would be coming, and you'd say, ‘What would you like, Mama?' And she would say: ‘A Barbie,' like that would make her the happiest woman in the world. And what could you do?” Paul shrugged. “They were her lifework.” He wiped a tear. “It had to be a Barbie, that's all she asked. They're made of a thicker, more rubbery vinyl than the cheap dolls, and they're exactly eleven and a half inches tall. Skipper and Skooter, they are no good, they are too small, and Ken, Ken he is one foot. Not that Mama would want a Ken.”

Paul closed his eyes, and Ownie thought the lawyer was asleep, dreaming of Ken or Barbie. “I told my . . .” Paul sprang to life, and Ownie jumped in shock. “I told my sister Genevieve that I will find a home for those dolls and their habits where everyone can see them. That will be my homage to Mama. That is the least I can do after all she did for us.”

Ownie folded his jacket and stood on the curb, soaking up the sun. He watched a porter heaving bags onto a metal cart, her stringy hair drooping under a hat that could have belonged to a 1950s sea captain. On one wrist, she had a skittish tattoo that looked like a panther.

“You have a nice stay.” Paul squeezed Ownie's arm.

“Yeah.” Ownie was still getting his bearings after the lengthy flight. “And good luck with those dolls. It sounds like they're in the right hands.”

“They are.” Paul smiled a drunken smile that melted, like old memories, into melancholy. “It is not a big price to pay.”

A pink Cadillac, as thick and smooth as a hotel Jacuzzi, stopped to deposit a woman in golf gear, raising the ire of an airport cop, who shouted angrily: “Move, move!” As the car eased away, Ownie saw the bumper sticker, W
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