Going Fast (20 page)

“No, mon, dohn go talkin like that.”

“Well.”

“Ah know all 'bout clothes.” Turmoil checked the windowless makeup room for an audience, accustomed, by now, to the notoriety that had grown with each triumphant fight, the celebrity that had somehow eluded Hansel Sparks.

In his second year in Halifax, Turmoil had racked up three straight wins. Champion had negotiated a rematch against Art Moore, the man who had handed Turmoil his only loss, and Turmoil had won. There had been names at the Montreal bout: actors, big-time fighters, and mobsters who controlled the local action. Turmoil posed for pictures with the fighting Turner triplets, Lloyd, Floyd, and Boyd, who handed out business cards with three identical headshots. Feeling good after the win, Ownie had got a laugh from the burly Texans when he studied their cards closely and quipped: “I thought maybe you were the McGuire sisters.”

“Mah sister, she a fashion d'signer in New York,” Turmoil announced.

“Really? I love New York. I have a friend who worked on Jerome Robbins's musical
Broadway
. That show had over one hundred wigs and four hundred costumes. How long has she been there?”

“Three-four year. She wahnt me go live with her but ah say, no, ah go to Canada. Some ver-ver importan men got a contrack for me. They be waitin for me to arrive.”

A TV jock appeared in the doorway, smelling of hairspray. “Everything okay in here, big guy?” he asked Turmoil.

“We're fine.” Malcolm made a machinating motion with his mouth as though he had gum hidden inside, then he stroked Turmoil's hair with a star-studded brush that matched
the apron. “It's the Andromeda Galaxy, the object farthest from Earth visible with the naked eye,” he liked to explain. “I like things, honey, that are far out.”

“You shud get this mon to do you,” Turmoil told the jock. “You might end up lookin as good as me.”

“Don't get my hopes up, big guy,” laughed the jock, who believed he was already handsome.

“You want miracles, go to Lourdes,” Malcolm muttered as the jock disappeared from the doorway. “Aristotle believed we share the traits of whatever animal we most resemble.” He met Turmoil's eyes in the mirror. “Is it my imagination or does that man look like a sloth?”

Turmoil laughed and the autographed picture of Roch Voisine joined in.

“I
love
your name!'' Malcolm announced abruptly, as though he had decided to unburden himself of a wicked secret and now couldn't stop. “When I heard you were coming here today, I looked something up.” He paused. “If you don't like it, don't worry about my feelings. Underneath this meek exterior beats the heart of a Roman gladiator.” Malcolm cleared his throat and closed his eyes.

“‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething.'” The words were shooting stars that left a trail of wonder.

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced.

Opening his eyes, he pulled off the Andromeda Galaxy apron. “That's from ‘Kubla Khan.'”

Turmoil nodded, admiring his unlined blazer in the mirror, lifting one hand for a glimpse of a ring that glimmered like something celestial. “Ah like that. It sounds ver-ver pow'ful, like myself.”

“Yes, yes, that's what I thought.”

Turmoil adjusted his wool jacket. He shopped on Spring Garden Road now instead of Gussy's, a trendy downtown strip filled with shops, bars, and eateries. On any given day, you could see ordinary folks and poseurs, primped and coiffed to fit the role: aspiring artiste, passé punk, moneyed matron, powerbroker. Panhandlers and slow-moving tourists filled the corners of the open-air stage like potted plants.

“Ahm a very han'some mon, wohn you say?” He had bought his Italian pants from a store that promised to phone when the next extra longs arrived. “You'll be the first to know,” swore the owner, who carried his schnauzer in a Snugli.

“You know ah get a call from a man in Hollywood.” Turmoil didn't wait for Malcolm's reply, which would have been effusive. “He said he wahnt me to be in the movies like Ahnol Schwarzneg. Ah say: ‘G'won, ah dohn have time for that ole movie stuff.' And he say, ‘No mon, you're much mo' han'some than Ahnol.'”

Malcolm chewed the invisible gum.

“What d'you think? You think ahm moh han'some than Ahnol?”

Malcolm leaned down impulsively and whispered in the powdered ear: “Muuuch.”

Turmoil laughed hard enough to rock the miniature lights. He felt generous. “You know, you got nice hair too.”

Malcolm leaned so close that his mouth almost touched Turmoil's ear: “It's a weeeeaaave. We aren't all blessed.”

A middle-aged woman appeared at the door wearing lemon-shaped glasses and a belted girls' school tunic. She had been sent to pick up Turmoil and deposit a frumpy woman who had been promised anonymity in a piece on welfare fraud and needed to be disguised.

“You done a good job,” Turmoil told Malcolm.

“My pleasure, dear.” Malcolm swiped his lips with strawberry balm and stroked his apron. And then, as if to stall the welfare woman and her vulgar story, he gave Turmoil a parting tap of powder. “I don't want you getting shiny!”

Ownie found himself in a university runoff of slim Victorian houses with cramped gardens and gauzy curtains. Some had stained-glass windows and ornate trim; others bore the temporary indignity of flats. He could overhear two students chatting at a bus stop.

“I'm thinking of switching my major to psych,” revealed the boy.

“Did you know that doctors once thought that you could tell a crazy person by his smell?” asked the girl, who was wearing a nose ring. “They also believed in physiology, that certain body types were predisposed to certain ailments. They made plaster casts of faces and measured people's skulls.”

The boy wobbled under the weight of so much information. “I'm still drunk,” he confessed, and the girl shrugged.

Ownie stood on the front step of a tan two-storey and admired the paint job. The trim on the windows and panels was darker tan and the accents plum. You had to do these old places right or they looked like hell, he thought. Scrape them down, soak them with linseed oil. Ownie concluded that the whole block had shopped at the same Colonial paint store, picking complementary shades of Comfrey Green and Empire Grey, accents of Tansy Button and Elderberry. Skewering the effect was a turquoise infidel, inhabited by a fraternity of beer-guzzling party animals and shunned by the neighbours.

When the door opened, Ownie felt like he had entered a
tropical fruit factory, lush and ripe. In contrast to the muted facade, which resembled the dried flowers of the dead, the interior walls of the house were cantaloupe, the floor pimento red. Everything throbbed with colour.

He noticed two paintings hung over a white piano. So alive, the paintings tugged at Ownie's senses like the smell from a bakery. Come closer, they invited, and he took a step toward them. They seemed to be depicting someplace hot, a place with orange tigers slinking through grass under a sky of feathers. A market bustling with vendors and dogs, a busload of shoppers, faces pressed to the windows. Ownie looked harder, sensing something different, like the time Hildred dyed her hair red and it took him a week to figure it out. That's it: everyone was black, from the bus driver to the vendors.

“They're by a Haitian artist.” The voice came from a woman with airbrushed skin and pulled-back hair.

“Nice,” Ownie observed. “They're full of life.”

The woman's chin tilted up slightly so that the light caught the broad planes of her cheeks. Her brows arched in a look that seemed to say: So? Her look drew you in, and then shut you out, a curious mix of warmth and inaccessibility. She was about thirty, Ownie figured, and stood around five-six. Her eyes were topaz.

“It's amazing that a country so poor and troubled produces such wonderful art,” she said. “It's an escape from the insanity, I guess, an insistence on doing something life affirming.”

“They are nice.”

The woman offered him coffee.

“Ah, sure,” Ownie said. “If it's not too much trouble.”

“Not at all. Sugar?”

“Just one.” Ownie could feel the energy of the room; he could hear people laughing on the walls, eating fresh fruit, soaking up sun, and swimming in waters as blue and clean as
mouthwash. He thought about his elusive dream with the gro-lamp and the yellow roses. He thought about being happy and warm.

“You shunn eat that junk.” Turmoil was lolling on a plump lemon couch, TV remote in one hand, an apple in the other. “Sugah is the devil food. It will kill you like it kill all mah peeple.”

“Uh-huh.”

“When they bring mah peeple ovah from Africa, they put them to work on the sugah plahntayshins.” Turmoil raised a hand. “They dohn let them live with their famlies, they dohn feed them right, they work them to death. By the time they finish, more than half is dead!” He lowered the hand in a curse: “Sugah!”

“I hear ya.” Ownie nodded thanks for the coffee he was handed. “I've got the same bad feeling about potatoes.”

Ownie cleared a space for his cup, nudging a stack of texts and papers.
Toward an Africadian Renaissance
. He tried to read a cover upside down:
How to Encourage the Rejuvenation of Nova Scotia's Black Neighbourhoods
, written by Lorraine Waters. Could that, he wondered, be her?

Where is he meeting all of these people? People I've never met in fifty years. Ownie stared at Turmoil for an answer. The week before, Ownie recalled, Turmoil had come into Tootsy's with a tall Mi'kmaq in wire-rimmed glasses. The stranger's skin was smooth and even as if he'd been under a sun lamp. Next to the blanched locals, sun-deprived and spotty, covered with zits and angry patches, he looked like he was wearing body makeup. He looked like natives would have looked, before the white man poisoned their blood with booze and reservations. The man — Ownie had forgotten his name — was wearing a singlet. On one shoulder was a tattoo the size of a kiwi, a pawprint of something: a badger or a bobcat? It
looked meaningful, left by an animal spirit or a native god, not by a cheap tattoo artist who branded bikers. Turmoil said the man was a professor.

The fighter finished his apple and threw the core on the pimento floor.

“What did you do that for?” Ownie snapped. “Don't you have no manners?” Ownie checked to see whether the handsome woman had seen. “Keep that up and you'll be back living in that dump, that boarding house.”

Stretching his legs, Turmoil yawned dismissively. “When ah was fourteen year old a spir't come to mah house in Trinidad.”

Ownie tapped the arm of a flowered chair and asked, despite himself, “What kind of spirit?”

“Ohhh it was a bad spir't. It could put curse on your famly or on your howse.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The spir't try to get me. Ah be in my room. It try pull me out a window. It say ‘Come wid me, boy.' But ah too strong. Ah held on to both sides till my fingers sore. Ah wudden let it tek me 'way.”

“What was this spirit going to do?”

“It could keep you in the jungle for a long-long time. It might let you go, it might nevva let you go. It ver-ver searyus bisnis.”

As they were leaving, the woman, all fine skin and searching eyes, pecked Turmoil's cheek goodbye.

“She's a smart woman, Ownie,” Turmoil said as the bevelled glass door closed behind her. “She a politishun.”

“That right?”

“You shud know who she is: the first black wummin in the Nova Scotia guv'men. You shud know her name if you payin attenshun at all.”

The phone awoke Katherine with the fear that something big was breaking. On top of the daily logistics of news gathering, there were labour issues at the paper. Scott MacDonald was probably the only staffer who had been given less work, the unsuspecting beneficiary of MacKenzie's misguided interest in Sports.

A consultant had recommended surveillance cameras. Unbeknownst to workers, Gem was planning a “rationalization of staff,” and Katherine had been called as a witness in Glenda's unfair-dismissal suit. During the day, moving from crisis to crisis, Katherine was tight, controlled, never stopping to reflect. At night, she felt adrift and in pain, fearful of what could happen.

Earlier that evening, Katherine had been standing outside the paper, waiting for a cab, when a black Camaro approached slowly, unsure of its surroundings. In the still night air, the gravel driveway crunched. The Camaro stopped and the driver wound down a window.

“Is this the newspaper?” asked a slight man with a diamond stud in one ear.

Before Katherine could reply, she smelled the heady scent of musk oil and felt a rotund woman with red hair and boy-senberry lips sashay past her.
Swish swish swish
, the woman headed for the car, swinging her hips with rhythm.
Swish swish swish
. She placed her pointy-toed boots with tantalizing precision.

“Helooo, sweetie,” she greeted the driver, breathy. The woman's lips parted, forming a slight line in a face as pale as a porcelain doll. She patted her munificent chest, making her words vibrate.

Katherine recognized the temptress as Billy DeVan, a clerk from Accounting. She had heard (but had never truly believed) the stories about Billy, who reportedly thrived on sailors, raw, interchangeable, barely in their twenties, all named Pierre or Mario. Most were submariners, whose squadron had the motto W
E
C
OME
U
NSEEN
. Their returns from sea, from a claustrophobic cell of oil and sweat, were celebrated with food, drink, and sex. One celebrant brought Billy a silver spur, it had been whispered, another a copper ring that she wore on a matching chain around her neck, bouncing off her ample buxom, and suggesting something daring and indecent.