Going Fast (3 page)

With Warshick occupied, Smithers trotted by an older man hunkered over an Underwood typewriter. Buzz Bailey had heart palpitations, high blood pressure, and diverticulitis, but he kept his troubles under his hat. Buzz, who had been given the title senior sports columnist, wrote about goalies and shortstops from the 1940s, nonentities called Curly, Muckle, and Gee Gee. Talking to Buzz about sports was like visiting the twilight zone, Scott thought, a parallel universe of postwar euphoria and yesterday's youth, icons who could never be matched.

“Don't let her sell you any lessons,” Buzz barked at Smithers.

“What?” Smithers stopped mid-
pointe
, cheeks ripe.

“You heard me. Don't let her sell you any lessons.” Buzz adjusted a straw hat topped with a green fairway. “I had a friend in Red Deer who started going out with a dancer. She sold him four hundred dollars' worth of lessons at Arthur Murray, and he never learned a step.”

“That's different,” said Smithers, who looked like a pornographic cherub, round and lascivious. “This is very avant-garde.”

Buzz was unmoved, knowing that Smithers's avant-garde
world revolved around hockey and cartoons. When he wasn't chasing underage hockey groupies or bar waitresses, he refereed hockey games and collected pucks from the OHL, NHL, AHL, CHL, IHL, along with arcane leagues from glacial towns. The pucks were indexed and mounted on his bedroom wall. He still lived at home.

“That's what my friend said.” Buzz was back in the debate. “The poor sap took out a three-hundred-dollar loan — two hundred for the Big Apple, an extra C for the Turkey Trot. That's all those dancers are after, some big stiff to sell their lessons to.” As Smithers grumbled, Buzz tapped his straw hat and lobbed a parting shot. “He couldn't Turkey Trot worth spit.”

Smithers peeled off his jacket, revealing a T-shirt that the dancer had sold him: C
ULTURAL
C
ARNIVORE
printed over an image of four Japanese hanging from ropes, upside down, like tuna. Outside, a truck backfired and Buzz jumped.

On the advice of a productivity consultant, everything in the newsroom, from phones to filing cabinets, had been dipped in green. Gem Newspapers had moved the
Standard
from its original location in downtown Halifax near the courts, cops, and lawmakers to an industrial mall in Dartmouth, kilometres from anything that smelled like news. It was easier, the new owner explained, for the trucks that left at 1 a.m. for Port Mouton or Necum Teuch bearing papers stuffed with flyers. And the rent was cheap. The industrial park was filled with warehouses and banished workers who toiled without the comfort of chip wagons, without architecture or trees, leaving the sterile grid on weekends to driver-ed cars and biker hit men.

Smithers touched his leg. To protest Sports' location at the back of the newsroom, he had taken to wearing a pedometer, which he used to track his daily mileage to the lunchroom and the can. “At this rate, Buzz will need a hip replacement by
Christmas,” he liked to say. Scott frowned. He could barely hear his interview over Smithers and the clatter of trucks.

“You know, Doughboy,” Buzz growled at Smithers, “ever since you took that puck to the head . . .” One year earlier, Smithers had been hit by a puck he had dropped for a faceoff, a freak accident that shattered two teeth and left him with caps, which made him sound like he had ice cubes in his mouth.

Hating the sight of the hockey reporter in his tights, Scott kept his head down, refusing to acknowledge Smithers' indignant response to Buzz. Sometimes, Scott envied people like Smithers, who had never really competed, people who believed that a brisk walk was as good as a run, people who could dabble in tennis or golf, happy to let their bodies move through unobstructed, never needing the pain. People who had never been to the emptiest, cruellest point of existence, knowing through hurt and triumph that there is no such place as a comfort zone.

Abruptly abandoning Buzz and their argument over dance lessons, Smithers shouted at Scott, “Hey MacDonald, are you expecting some friends from church?”

“Huhhh?” Scott finished his phone call.

“There!” Smithers gestured across the newsroom. Scott lifted his head.

At a table in front of the elevator door, Ownie was signing the visitors' book with his left hand, forming each letter slowly, earnestly, like a man whose signature still meant something. Scott studied the trainer, confused, like the time he had seen his dentist in a bar and could not, for the life of him, place the genial stranger outside the whirl of drills.

It's him, he decided, Ownie Flanagan, but why is he here? And why does he look so small? Maybe it's the tweed jacket he's wearing, Scott reasoned, or the fact that here, outside Tootsy's, in this green terrarium of flickering lights and murky
people, he's no longer in charge. Or maybe it's an optical illusion, like water running uphill or two lines joined in an upside-down T. Although they're the same length, the vertical seems longer. Maybe it's something like that, Scott reasoned, an illusion created by the giant to Ownie's left.

Tall, dark, and overshadowing, the giant was wearing a no-name grey sweatsuit filled with boulders. Stretched across his back, which flared like muscle-bound wings, was his calling card: T
URMOIL
D
AVIES
, H
EAVYWEIGHT
.

The heavyweight kept his hands folded like a coiled chain while Ownie finished signing in. As they started to move, light-footed as cats on crusty snow, Scott was again struck by the disparity in their size. The giant could have picked up Ownie, tucked him under one arm, and carried him. Only their walks were alike: straight, upright, stretching for the beam of success. The giant was ramrod, unlike many tall men who went through life slouched down and apologetic, straining for the dialogue of man. Ownie had the perpendicular gait of the Short Man, the heliotrope reaching for the sun.

“Must be Sports,” someone mumbled as the pair passed. Across the room, Scott saw Garth MacKenzie, the paper's managing editor, staring as though he was not sure what he was seeing.

“This is Turmoil Davies, a heavyweight prospect.” Ownie introduced the giant to Scott. “We brought the story to you first because we figure he's going places.”

Scott took a reflex step back as the giant approached, his size and energy sucking up the space around him. Looking up, Scott felt eclipsed, shaken, as though the visitor had single-handedly shifted the bell curve of men so that he, Scott MacDonald, was in with the middling masses. Scott extended a hand, which the giant absorbed. “Pleased to meet you,” Scott offered.

The reporter looked for something to disqualify the giant
from the curve: a freak-like flaw or hints of an unnatural aid, like the fertility drugs that led to outbreaks of quadruplets. A buried tumour, a gargantuan head, the mythical tail of a dragon. Like a basketball trainer in a marsh of slam-dunking storks, Scott checked for Marfan's syndrome: spidery fingers, a deformed chest, weak double-joints, and a flawed heart that would fail by fifty. At a loss, he asked, “Is Turmoil your ring name?”

“Iss the name mah mooma give me.” The voice was surprisingly high and melodious. “When ah was born, there was much trouble in the eye-lands. She say ‘Ah will call you Turmoil and there will come a day when ebbyt'ing will be quiet but you.'”

Scott had never seen a tall man so solid and perfectly proportioned. Turmoil Davies had bowling-ball biceps, a GI Joe waist, and hands as wide as family Bibles. As Scott fumbled his pen, he surreptitiously sniffed the air for steroids, for the constipated bulk and angry skin of a juicer. No, the giant was smooth and symmetrical.

“Ahhh.” Scott nodded like it made sense. It had to be natural and inherited, he decided. Louis Cyr, the famed strongman, had lifted five hundred pounds with one finger. Writers said his mother could climb a barn ladder with a one-hundred-pound sack on each shoulder. It had to be something like that.

The giant, Ownie explained, was from Trinidad and had heard about Halifax at a pre-Olympic tourney. “They made it sound like a good place to live.” Ownie was going to train him. “This got sprung on me pretty sudden.” A group of businessmen had drawn up a two-year contract and, in return for exclusive services, Champion Management would provide an apartment and living expenses.

“He's six-foot-five and weighs two-forty,” boasted Ownie. “And he's fast as a cheetah. He can press three-sixty and run
six miles in twenty-nine minutes. He's got power and speed. It's worth twenty bucks just to watch him walk in the ring.”

As Turmoil nodded, his face radiated from a hidden spotlight while everyone else looked algae green, shot without the fluorescent filter. Scott felt excited about the story, sensing that Turmoil Davies was, indeed, different.

“He's Ben Johnson, Magic Johnson, and Jackie Chan all rolled into one,” said Ownie, the newsroom surprisingly still. “This man is a natural wonder; you don't get to see this type of athlete very often. Take a very good look.”

In his frugal kitchen, Scott MacDonald buried the remains of a frozen dinner and tried not to think about work. He tried not to dwell on the giant who had invaded his psyche and would, it seemed, be impossible to ignore.

Scott flipped through the manual of the Sony CD player he had just bought. He liked the machine. Easy to operate, it held six discs at a time. It was only the second stereo he had owned. He hadn't bought his first until he was twenty-five. He was thirty before he had attended a rock concert, thirty-five before he'd bought an album by the Stones. Scott MacDonald may have been the only man his age who had never played air guitar or mouthed the words to “I'm Eighteen.”

At forty-two, he was a baby boomer. A member of the rock 'n' roll generation.

Woodstock.

Moody Blues.

Procol Harum.

Bill Clinton hunkered over a sax on
Arsenio Hall
, wearing Blues Brothers shades like a 1960s service badge, reaching out to millions of balding, pot-bellied flower children who had almost forgotten he was theirs.

Power to the people, Mr. President.

Rock on.

It all left Scott unmoved, as distant as the Fug.

Had the 1960s really touched down in Hope, Arkansas, with enough force to change the course of America, but missed
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia? Or had Scott MacDonald, the Kayak King, been out for a paddle?

Earlier that day, before Turmoil Davies had affected his equilibrium, Scott had bought Eric Clapton's
Unplugged
and then picked up a
Rolling Stone
with the icon on the cover. Inside, Clapton talked about “Layla,” heroin, booze, and the death of his four-year-old son. To Scott, it was like reading about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald or watching Lena Wertmüller movies. If Clapton was the Guitar God, who were his disciples? What was his spiritual legacy?

The only old song implanted in Scott's brain was one that his former training partner, Taylor, used to sing about a guy named Patches. No, there was another one about Timothy and cannibals, and Taylor liked it because his name was Tim. Tim Taylor was a thick, power-driven beast who thundered down the lake in his canoe like he was caught in the path of a forest fire, reaching, driving, lurching with every stroke, fighting for his life. He wore an Afro that bobbed like an impermeable mass of cotton candy, never melting in the rain. A demented road warrior made from salvaged parts, he had teeth divided by a thumb-sized space, one finger bent at forty-five degrees, one ear mangled by a dog.

Scott had a picture of him grinning at the camera one year at Nationals. Under Taylor's arm was the head of René Cartier, a kayak paddler from Montreal who wore wooden clogs and drove a TR6. Cartier seemed stunned by the headlock, Taylor delighted.

Scott plugged in a laptop with failing power. He felt like he was running through shallow water, fighting the undertow of ennui. Fatigued, he stared in a mirror for signs of cancer. He had deep hazel eyes, a straight nose, and a mouth that hung loose, expectant like a volleyball player waiting for the spike. When Scott smiled, one tooth hid behind the other.
He'd grown a moustache once, but it looked ridiculous, as though he'd soon start smoking a pipe or wearing a cravat.

Scott thought about Turmoil, who fit his theme of a boxing resurgence. He felt good, he decided, that Ownie had come to him first, especially since he had been off the street for so long. After the interview, Scott had, in a show of faith, found a
Standard
photographer who had taken Turmoil to the studio and shot him in front of a sky-blue backdrop.

Scott stared at the empty wall, ignoring his ringing phone.

Last week, his mother had called and told him with a curious blend of horror and exhilaration that she had seen Tim Taylor driving a bingo bus. “He pulled out in front of a Chevette and nearly caused a horrible crash. I was so upset when I saw it was him and the bus was full of seniors.”

Taylor only had one speed: full-out. While others glided to the wharf for a flawless side-on landing, Taylor charged until the last spectacular second, breaking the impact with one leg lifted like a dog. Never bothering with a warm-up, he left the wharf pumped. “Give me fifty metres,” he would shout, trying to erase the advantage that a kayak naturally had. It was never enough, not with Scott in the sleek, winged kayak and Taylor fighting the wind in a rudderless C-boat that rode through the water on the point of a V. Taylor called kayaks “women's boats”; Scott called him Joe Freak. One side of Taylor's torso was larger than the other, pumped from the uneven motion of paddling C-1, steering the diamond-shaped boat with his paddle, teetering on one knee, straining his hamstring until it snapped like an old rubber band.

After practice, while Taylor's knee was still white and dented as cottage cheese, they would stop at a corner store to refuel. Without fail, Scott bought a dark Vachon cake, the Joe Louis, while Taylor asked for the “the half lune moon.” Scott tried to tell him that
lune
was French for “
moon
” and he didn't
need to say it, but Taylor wouldn't listen. He liked the sound of “half lune moon.”