Going Fast (42 page)

“He always wore a dress,” said his mother, who made it sound matter of fact, like he always liked licorice or dogs, like something Ownie should've known.

“Right,” he nodded. “But why?”

“For protection.”

The old lady was cheap with words, as though she was handing out dollar bills or favours. What's she saving for? Ownie would wonder. How could
she
be the daughter of a
shanachie,
a man who went from Irish town to town travelling on stories? She was one of those fair, faraway Irish with high cheekbones and small Slavic eyes, the kind of person who would rather cut peat than talk. Maybe if you'd lived, early on, with blarney and supernatural tales about gentle giants named
Finn McCool, headless horsemen, and malicious fairies, you got your fill.

“From what?”

“The fairies; they steal boy children if they aren't dressed like girls.”

Or maybe the stories of cluricauns and leprechauns went too deep, to an unspeakable part of the melancholy soul, to the same place that harboured Turmoil's spirits, or
jumbies
, forces with power and import that Ownie could not understand.

Ownie remembered rounding the square and seeing Butch, nose bleeding, ginger hair matted, with a rip in his wretched cotton dress. His eyes were drowning in tears, the quick tears of rage. He'd get so mad that you could barely keep him in his skin. The image stuck with Ownie: a four-year-old boy in a raggedy dress stained with red dirt, taking out all the hurt that a four-year-old heart could hold.

Ownie kept walking on the coarse sand behind Turmoil's house, on trampled shells that crunched like macaroni. His mother's answer only went so far. There were five boys in the family. Why just Butch? Had she received a warning? He would have asked her if she hadn't been so tight with words.

“Sit down, Ownie.” Turmoil gestured inside the house. “Sit down.”

Ownie placed his cap on a round table made of swirling insets of wood. Staring at the swirls until they blurred, Ownie let himself drift to a land of red roads and horse trailers that glistened like gum wrappers, to a farmer leading his black-and-whites to graze. He let himself return to a simpler, more normal place.

“How you like the beach?” Turmoil asked as a cow fixed her punch-drunk eyes on Ownie and mooed.

“Huh?” Ownie hadn't been listening. He looked at Turmoil, who was lounging in a chair with flat arms that stuck out like
a sleepwalker. Turmoil swung his leg over one arm, sticking up a sneaker bleached from the sun. Ownie ignored the ill-mannered shoe. It was too bright and modern in Turmoil's big house, too easy. “Uh good,” he offered vaguely.

Ownie remembered, during a trip to the PEI countryside, walking on the road's edge where a coating of dust, fallen from Mars, recorded the nighttime wanderings of dogs and raccoons. On both sides of the road, the fields looked like sample cards in a paint store, rectangles ranging from spinach green to tan. Everything was shadowless. Blemish-free, the sky looked like someone had dipped a brush in cerulean blue and covered a gesso surface.

“I saw some dolphins,” he added, then looked around the room. He didn't know how he'd missed it; it was so big and so inescapable. On one wall was a portrait of Turmoil in a silver robe, with a palette of blues, pinks, and reds mixed like ice cream, and signed by LeRoy Neiman. The same LeRoy Neiman who had painted Babe Ruth and Ali and was called by some the premier sports artist in the world.

Across the room, Turmoil's TV was playing a tape of a talk show interview with Roy Newton, the WBC champ. Newton was the man whom either Turmoil or Antonio Stokes would face depending on the outcome in Vegas, depending on how well Ownie did his job. The interview had a testy start, with the host, a man named Tony Tennyson, suggesting that Roy hadn't won his last fight. Tennyson rattled off numbers like an auctioneer. CompuBox computer analysis, he claimed, showed Tyler landing 341 punches to Newton's 264, including 180 jabs to 36. “And, Roy, what were you doing in round two, lying on your back?”

“I know I won the fight,” said Newton, a simple, slow-talking man. “The good Lord was with me and I know, in my heart, I was the better man that night.”

“Was he throwing any punches?” Tennyson smirked. “The Lord?”

Newton gave him a pained look. “No, he was in my heart and my soul. He wasn't mixing it up none.”

“Good, good.” Tennyson rolled his eyes. “That might be against the rules.”

“They call this a plantah chair.” Turmoil tapped the arm. “At the end of a hard day, the plantah sit in the chair and put his feet up on these looong ahms. Then the servan come 'long and pull off his boots. Ah need me a servan.”

Ownie ignored the implications.

“Iss time we had a talk.” Turmoil stood up and started toward Ownie, a storm cloud blocking the sun, a mass of contradictions. Ownie wished the house wasn't so hard and rootless, a hydroponic building with no history or heart. He wished that he could see the sweet pink face on the Pope plate; he wished he could borrow his wisdom and draw from dumb blind faith. He missed Hildred, his house, and his poor little dog.

All this emptiness, Ownie squinted; it felt like a place without boundaries, a place without a conscience. Turmoil slammed his fist on a table, knocking a book to the floor with a crack that echoed off the white walls.

“Mon, you dohn know nuthin 'bout me!” Turmoil stuck his face in Ownie's, so close that Ownie could see broken blood vessels that looked like water-seeking roots. Don't flinch, he told himself, don't flinch.

“Did you see Madonna ringside?” Tennyson asked Roy on TV. “I hear she was there, along with Jack Nicholson.”

“I only know one Madonna,” Newton mumbled. “The Holy Virgin Mary.”

“Ahhh, correct me if I'm wrong.” Tennyson mugged. “I don't think we're talking about the same woman. What do you
think, Miguel?” Tennyson turned to the bandleader, who shook his head mournfully.

“I know as much as I
want
to know,” said Ownie, who believed that people were too quick to spill their guts. He never wanted to know about the medic and his friends; he never wanted to contemplate Greg, Lorraine, or the basketball player with the crinkly hair. “I don't care nothin' about your personal life
or
your hang-ups.”

“Who talkin 'bout hang-ups?”

“You, man!”

“No, ahm not.” Turmoil seemed enraged.

“So what are you goin' on about then? What's your beef today?”

“Ah juss wanted to tell you something since you're my trainah and all, and you dohn know nuthin 'bout me. You dohn even know that ah nebba fought in no 'lympics.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ah nebba.”

In the background, Tennyson rose like he was ready to announce an amazing, if predictably ridiculous, stunt. One week earlier, the show had challenged a Heisman Trophy winner to throw a football from one office tower to another, hitting an open window, twelve floors above a bustling street of traffic. “Do you think you could teach me how to box?” he asked Newton.

“Sure,” shrugged Roy. “If you want to.”

“Nebba nebba.” Turmoil started to laugh, and Ownie, in a paralyzing realization, knew that the fighter was laughing at him: at his unsolvable fractions, his pathetic stable of fighters, his fears about growing old and leaving nothing real behind. “All you white peeple are crazeee. Your lawyers and your bisnismon.”

Tennyson grinned a gap-toothed grin at the camera; Roy responded with a short right jab as solid as a piston.
Vaaarroom
.
A drum rolled as Tennyson toppled backwards, dazed. Another drum roll,
varroom,
as a tooth pierced his lip.

“They order themselves a fightah, but the mon they wahnt he gohn. So a mon come to me and say, ‘How would you like to move to Canada?' And ah say, ‘Okay, mon,' ah got no job. Ah been sick for a while from spirits and danjurous demons. But the mon — he a wise mon — he know that ah got som'tin special, some powah you peeple dohn understahnd.”

“Don't give me that bullshit.” Ownie denied it, but, in his heart, he
knew
that nothing had seemed quite right. Not the mouthpiece, the clumsiness with the speed bag, or the trouble with Donnie in the ring. What power? Ownie wanted to know. What demons? The entire crazy story, as improbable as dullahans, was flashing like a slide show through his brain, and he couldn't keep up.

“Juss think, mon, ahm goin to be the next heavyweight champeen of the world,” Turmoil spat. “Ah got powahs that no one understahnd. Ah fooled ebbyone, ebbyone, but that bad Suey Simms. He a
jab jan
.”

“He never cared much for you neither.” Ownie took a breath, trying to steady himself. He wanted to say something defiant, but the words wouldn't form. The TV had gone to commercial, and when Tennyson returned, Roy wore a pained, puzzled look.

If all of this was true, Ownie struggled with his thoughts, then Turmoil Davies was his greatest achievement, but who would believe it? Did he want to believe it himself, or did it shift things so drastically that his game plan was flawed? Maybe Turmoil wasn't even from Trinidad. Ownie's brain was rushing now, stopping at random questions, all disconnected and likely to prove nothing of value. “Did you ever meet Yolande Pompey?” he heard himself blurt, as though that would settle something, as though the mystery would be solved if Turmoil could tell him something about Pompey, who had
been celebrated in Trinidad even after he was knocked out in the tenth round by Archie Moore. “Did you?”

Turmoil laughed as Ownie stared at him stupidly.

“Oh mon, you were so glad to get yourself a big ole fightah. Mon, you wanted it so bad. You wudda done an'ting, even try to hipmotize me. Mon, ah got to tell you, you are one crazy ole mon.” Turmoil leaned close. “But dohn worry, mon, ah got ebbyting under control. Ahm takin care of you now, your mind, your future. Ah took some things from your howse, some socks, that balla-rina, and now, mon, ah got the good voodoo workin on you. Is all for the bess.”

“What you doin?” Turmoil shrieked.

“I'm doing a ghost.” Washington, the sparring partner, kept moving across the ring, lifting the blue rope with one mitt, waving off Turmoil with the other. This is done, he signalled, and Ownie, sitting ringside, nodded.

“No, mon, you not!” Turmoil shrieked.

“I did foh.” Sweat dripped into the sparring partner's dead eyes, down his bulky neck, onto a Spiderman singlet that smelled like defeat. “That's it, man.”

“You only sparred three!”

Washington climbed out of the ring, unbuckling his headgear. A deep ravine ran above his nose; razor-scarred lids were falling on the outer wings of his eyes, heavy and foreboding, like an early curtain.

“Get back in,” Turmoil ordered. “Get, get, get!”

Confusion flooded Washington's face, but he kept moving, driven by something deep and primal, something that told him he couldn't stop now. A half-hearted goatee sputtered on his chin. “Fuck you, mutha!” Washington exploded, the rage of four generations purified and ignited by junk. “I say, Fuck you!”

Outside Boomerang's gym, nature's lights had dimmed, Ownie noted with an uneasiness that had been growing. Sonny had turned on a radio, which was carrying a weather warning: a hurricane was ripping up the coast, closing in. Maybe it will clear the air, Ownie hoped, make it easier to
breathe, easier to live with all this craziness and noise. Turmoil turned ringside to Greg who, being an idiot, signalled back three rounds. Ownie cursed.

“No way, man,” Washington shook his head, knowing he was right. On one shoulder, above a skull-and-crossbones tattoo, was a scar the colour of ham. “Don't you go making me have to prove my point, muthafuckas.”

“Pay the man for four,” Ownie instructed Turmoil. “If you're not happy, report him to the Better Business Bureau.”

Ownie tried to sound offhand, and Washington nodded, relieved. Despite the dope and his own failed career, Washington had been useful, so why was Turmoil challenging him, pushing a guy who was barely, by a thread of pride and memory, hanging on?

“You gettin threee rounds.” Turmoil tapped his glove three times. “And thass it.”

“Foh.” Washington was stripping.

“Three!” Another tap.

“Foh. And I had enough of your bitch talk. Your mouth is too big, man, and I want what's coming to me! I earned it.”

The rain had started, great sheets of water driven sideways by a wind that had come from nowhere, bearing furniture and peril. A lawn chair flew past the gym, then a cardboard box and a road sign. In ten minutes, the ocean had gone from blue-green to angry grey. Whitecaps hurled themselves forward like slam dancers, rabid foam lined the beach. Nature's colour tube had been pulled, leaving only black and white.

W
HAT SHALL IT PROFIT A MAN, IF HE GAIN THE WHOLE WORLD AND LOSE HIS OWN SOUL
? S
T
. M
ARK
C
HAP
. 8, V. 36.

Opening the gym door, Washington pushed his way through the wind to an elongated car with smoked windows and dalmatian seat covers. Inside, Ownie could see the driver rocking back and forth like he had a toothache, a third form huddled in the back. If I get out of this alive, I'll take up golf,
Ownie vowed, just like Joe Louis. I'll keep this whole crazy story to myself and live a quiet life like Dew Drop when he finished roaming. He found a house in the country, a woman, and never once spoke of the past, never felt the desire to spill family secrets that no one needed to hear.

What was truth anyway, Ownie reminded himself, how many versions of life — laundered, censored, or rewritten for survival — existed in people's minds?

“Don't go out there.” Sonny pointed at the car.

If you play golf, Ownie decided, you don't have to deal with fools like this, telling you they stole a china ballerina from your house — the house you lived in for thirty years — and put the voodoo on you. How could he, a man who barely understood fairies and sheep-stealing ghosts, deal with voodoo and zombies, with spells and hexes and poisonous secretions?