Going Fast (21 page)

Who, Katherine wondered, after seeing Billy's seductive greeting, had given her a licence to be so free?

“Oh, hi,” Katherine answered her phone.

“I was thinking of you,” said the caller.

“Ummm,” Katherine muttered.

“It's November 25, St. Catherine's Day, patron saint of spinsters.”

Katherine laughed. “Thanks.”

“I'm looking at a picture of you from that bed and breakfast, and I am feeling the loneliness. Pack a bag; I'll meet you in the morning.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Geneva, and the weather reminds me of you. The phones are shitty, but the weather is beautiful.”

“Geneva?”

“Yeah.”

“Not tonight.”

“C'mon, I'm celebrating.
The Times
has a new guy here,
and he can't get his pictures out. He thought he had the world by the nuts, but he can't move a thing.”

“Isn't he the guy who won a Pulitzer?”

“Yeah, but it was like Moses and the Ten Commandments. He has no idea how he did it or where it came from. For once in his life, he was shooting with the finger of God.”

“And you're enjoying it?”

“Not really. I'm a comrade, so I said, ‘Dynamite stuff, Cal, maybe you can mail them home to your mother for a retrospective.'”

“I can't come.”

“Remember how much fun we had in Amsterdam, hanging out in the brown cafés, sneaking into dirty shows. Remember that dancer, the Korean girl, who tried to get you on stage, and that little hotel in Leiden? Well, this is way better.”

“Give me your number and I'll call you in the morning.”

“Okay, gorgeous, sleep on it.”

Scott stood in the airport with his parents, one eye on the baggage carousel. “I hear that Heather's class is trying.” His mother's voice sounded strained, as though she was forcing her words through a filter of sadness. “I heard,” she offered, “that one boy keeps, ah, keeps setting fires in the washroom.”

Scott shrugged a noncommittal shrug. He was watching a gangly teen with a surfboard lope across the lobby to retrieve his dog, still in a travel cage. Terrified, the collie had foam on its lips. The teen clapped his hands in greeting, and the dog yapped, relieved.

“A US airline cooked a dog,” Scott's father announced.

“Why would you tell a story like that, Rusty?” his mother demanded.

“It's true!” Rusty was indignant. “When the case went to court, they said the temperature in the hold of the plane went up to one hundred and forty degrees Celsius.”

Scott watched the boy free his dog, which celebrated by chasing its tail. The surfer then hugged his mother, a tall woman straddling the line between gaunt and glorious. Time had erased the softness from her face, leaving it chiselled and angular, her teeth and nose larger, her smile more feral, more like the boy and his dog. They seemed at ease in the world, he decided, still open to adventures.

“Is Heather at school today?” his mother asked.

“I dunno, Mom. She's gone.”

His mother swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, she's gone.”

His mother looked distressed. She liked Heather, who was attractive and good with children. But she knew better than to press Scott. When it came to women, Scott was like a man walking through a sandstorm, she decided, the wind filling in each step as soon as it was formed, so when Heather left, she was gone, his mother realized, just gone.

Scott darted forward as his mother's suitcase rolled down the belt. When he returned, his mother asked, in lieu of anything important: “Did she take the Wyeth print?” Scott shrugged a yes.

Raindrops were hitting the windshield, spreading like poached eggs, fat, clear circles of unpredictable size. Scott was driving his parents home.

“How was Cora's funeral?” he finally asked.

“Oh, it was fine.” His mother sighed. “It was a long trip.
. . . That's all.”

“I'd give it a four,” snapped Rusty. “A two for artistic impression.”

In the rear-view mirror, Scott saw his mother staring at the white-grey sky, which had, on this day, no clouds or gradation in colour. It was a flat, finite sky, without mystery or joy. It had been years since Scott had seen Aunt Cora, a widow who had moved to Florida. Once there, Cora joined an order of Wallis wannabes, older women who fashioned themselves after the late duchess. Anorexic, they chain-smoked Camels and lived in discount loungewear. Liberated from family by death or design, they drank heavily and made a point of boasting that they dressed for dinner.

For a moment, Scott was tempted to tell his parents about Tootsy's, about Turmoil Davies. He was tempted to tell them he had sparred with Johnny LeBlanc, an actual fighter with thirteen wins. He was tempted to tell them about Ownie. And then he decided against it, remembering how his parents had
lived for his paddling, and how he'd crushed them when he quit. If he told them about the gym, they would latch on to it, they would make too much of it, trying to reclaim the relationship between parents and athlete, the exhilaration and the hope. They would try too hard.

“It was the headstone,” said Rusty. “It started off okay. It said, ‘Cora Henneberry, wife of Bernie.' And then it said, ‘You Reap What You Sow.'”

“It was Cousin Bryce,” his mother whispered. “Cora had wanted angels.”

“He got into drugs when he was a teenager,” Rusty offered for his wife's sake. “It wasn't anyone's fault.”

They arrived in Dartmouth. Smithers called the city Darkness, but he and Scott were not talking about the same place. Dartmouth wasn't a high-rise, a shopping mall, or an industrial park. That was the extraneous backdrop, but that wasn't it. Dartmouth was water, one pivotal piece in the jigsaw of life. That's all Scott saw when he crossed the bridge from Halifax; that's all that mattered.

“Oh, I saw Timmy.” Rusty was hoping to salvage the outing. “He was driving the bus to bingo.”

The lakes, the essence of Dartmouth, were a gift from the ice age, left by glaciers on their slow retreat, twelve-thousand-year-old craters filled with meltwater and purpose. Dartmouth had two dozen lakes, but Scott only cared about one, the world's greatest flatwater course. Scott called it the Lake, but there were really two, connected at a narrow point, and part of a longer, broken chain. The course, with lanes for one thousand metres, was on the lower lake, but paddlers trained on both. Rowers shared the space.

Historians waxed about the beauty of a pristine waterway in the heart of a city, they described the thrill of seeing an otter or a crane, the joy of passing under a stream of commuters while communing with secrets of the past. When alone, you
could imagine porcupines in hemlock stands, bears in bogs. Scott never thought about deer or birchbark canoes, but he knew how many strokes it was from the overpass to a scraggly spruce. He knew which lane got wash.

“Tim always liked to drive,” Rusty added. “Remember he used to drive the boats up to nationals?”

“I went with him once,” Scott reminded Rusty.

His mother attempted a conciliatory smile, drawn from happier times. Going to Nationals had been a ritual, like putting up Christmas lights, a ritual that peaked on a summer night when the boats departed. Anything, it was understood, could happen after that.

“Do you remember when he slept under the boat trailer outside Montreal with a Swiss Army knife?” Rusty asked.

“The Quebec police wanted to arrest him,” his mother added.

Taylor was a safe subject. If Scott's parents were not allowed to talk about paddling, a sport that had once consumed the family, they could, they had discovered over time, still talk about Tim. Tim was raw and rough with a deformed finger and a mangled ear. He was outrageous. Charging down the course, Tim exemplified fearlessness and ferocity. Scott's parents had loved to watch Tim race, and in their minds, that's all there had been: the glorious, death-defying drive. They had not seen the setbacks, the heartache and pain, and Scott had, in some form of kindness, allowed them that much. After Scott quit paddling, Taylor stayed in the sport, reaching, driving, lurching, with every step forward fighting for his life. That's all, Scott believed, that he knew how to do.

“I remember he wore that T-shirt: S
ECOND
P
LACE
I
S THE
F
IRST
L
OSER
.” Rusty chuckled. “And the other one: R
EAL
M
EN
P
ADDLE
C-B
OATS
.”

Scott's mother smiled. Scott laughed and everyone, it seemed, felt better.

A drained woman in support hose and a Burger Dog visor sank into the Athena's number-three booth, sucking in nicotine, blowing out rings of despair.

“Awww, who's gonna know?” She shrugged to a man in a quilted vest sitting across from her, who was hunkered over a job application, inventing, through creative details, a potential Employee of the Month.

Scott heard the woman's legs creak as she eased them onto the Naugahyde seat and blew an empty ring. “If he thinks he can pinch my ass for four bucks an hour . . .” Her trailing voice carried across the near empty restaurant. “I told him . . .” She seemed too tired to finish. “I told him I'd make a deal: he keeps his paws to himself and I keep my old man from crushing his nuts with a ball-peen hammer.” She tilted back her head and blew.

C
INDERELLA WEDDING DRESS
. S
IZE
17. S
HORT PUFFED SLEEVES WITH BOWS
. L
OW NECKLINE
. T
WO-LAYERED BOTTOM
. T
OP LAYER LOOPED WITH BOWS
. V
ALUED AT
$1,200. W
ILL NEGOTIATE
. N
EVER WORN
. D
ON'T ASK
.

Scott looked out the window past the posters. He saw a couple pushing a shopping cart stuffed with shabby toddlers, arms tangled, faces pressed against the cold metal squares. As the parents exchanged a smoke in an effortless handoff, a fourth child clung to the side of the cart. The family was so close now that he could see the mother's swollen belly, the father's tic-tac-toe tattoo. He could spot open seams in the
overworked clothes and count, in his mind, the previous owners.

M
OOSE HEAD SHOULDER MOUNT WITH PLAQUE
. 48”
SPREAD
. 8
PTS
. M
OOSE DIED OF NATURAL CAUSES
. W
AS NEVER SHOT
. A
SK FOR
S
HERMAN
.

After Scott had arrived at his parents' house, his father had announced that he was going to paint the guest room. Whenever Scott slept in the room, during holidays or breakups, he awoke from habit at 5 a.m., ear cocked to the wind, reading the signals that told him whether the lake was calm or choppy, flat or bristling.

Scott watched a gull raid a garbage dumpster, tearing open bags. One day, he had told Sasha about the lake and his training, and now, as though she had read his mind, she lobbed him a challenge. “Wasn't it ever just fun?” she asked. “Paddling?” He looked at her face, framed by frizzy tendrils. “You know, fun?”

“Well, yeah.” He remembered, with satisfaction, sitting on the rough wharf with Taylor, eyes closed, senses channelled to the perfect mental race. Down the thousand-metre course they paddled, every stroke precise.

“Yeah, what?”

When everything was exact, the blade sliced the water cleanly, leaving no ragged edges or fray. With each sublime cut, Scott felt a tingle that started in his arms and moved to his gut: the thrill of the ultimate backhand, the delight of driving a metal shovel into a mound of glutinous snow.

“I remember my first big trip, when I made the Canadian team racing in the North Americans. We took a bus from Cleveland to a town in Ohio.”

It had been a freakishly hot summer scented with Bain de Soleil and the sweat from Taylor's torso. Scott remembered dipping one hand in the water and feeling the tug, tug, tug as his boat drifted forward, as he formed a cup with his fingers.
One day, an invasion of flying ants, a biblical pestilence, lasted eight hours, leaving a grotesque blanket on the water. Whenever Scott took a stroke, his curved blade flung their corpses through the air.

“They put us up in a YMCA in Ohio. There were cots set up in the gym, with a divider — sheets hung over a badminton net — separating the guys from the girls. At bedtime, people started carrying on, throwing pillows, tipping cots.” It had been years since he'd thought about this. “That went on for a while, and then everyone settled down. There were two Hungarians on our team who'd been stars in the old country. By then, they were past their peak. Well, first thing, they climbed the ropes — you know the ones they have in a gym — and swung over the net like Tarzan. The girls looked up and screamed. They were both naked.”

During the bus trip, a blonde girl from Toronto had climbed on his lap, smelling like baby oil.

“How did you like Ohio?”

“Ohio?” Scott was thinking about the girl, who paddled for Mississauga, or was it Balmy Beach? That night, back at the Y, he saw her in a babydoll nightie, clutching her heart in horror and waiting for him to come to her rescue.

“Hmmm, I dunno. I remember we all played water polo in the Y pool. Some of the Quebec guys knew how to play. Taylor, my training partner, couldn't swim, so he borrowed a life jacket. He jumped in and nearly drowned a paddler named Picard.”

Gwen. That's it. She brushed up against him in the pool and said she wanted him to be on Scott's team. He told her it was full.

“I don't understand how you just quit everything.” Sasha bit a breaded zucchini. “If it was that much a part of you, it must be painful not to even watch.”

This part Scott could not explain. There was a time when
everything seemed simple, when working stiffs triumphed over right-wing bullies, when Locke stomped Hobbes, before life had a chance to kick the shit out of your idealism. Sasha was too young to understand the vagaries of life, and in a way, that was good.