Turmoil needed spending money, and Louie had a plan. Driving his Jeep Cherokee through the old streets of Halifax, he looked confident. Johnny was riding shotgun, and Scott, the reporter, was along for the ride.
Louie turned a corner. A garbage bag blew up the narrow street like a tumbleweed, flipping over and over until it snagged on the guts of a discarded couch. The street was empty except for an Orange Crush can, an air of hopelessness, and two boys batting rocks in the air. Ping. Ping. Joe Carter in the cage.
One rock bounced off a three-quarter Georgian cottage tastefully restored in slate blue. The asymmetrical house, circa 1809, had grey trim, a maroon door, and the painful look of someone who had overdressed for a party. Ping. Another rock hit the vain little house, bouncing off a rose trellis. Ping. Hitting a doorknocker shaped like a fox’s head. Ping. Ricocheting off the urban renaissance that had not, to everyone’s dismay, yet arrived.
“I’ve got a new book with a section on ring names,” announced Louie, the self-described student of the game. “See if you know who this guy was.” He pulled a printed page from his pocket and read: “Walker Smith?”
“That’s Sugar Ray Robinson,” snorted Johnny.
“Okay.” Louie brought his Jeep to a near-stop while the boys, slowly and deliberately, shuffled off the street. A mutt ambled by with a ham bone in its mouth and then stopped at a row house with one half sided in green. In the back seat, Scott stared out the window and wondered exactly where Turmoil lived.
“Okay,” Louie said. “How about Archibald Lee Wright?”
In the shadow of Citadel Hill, the neighbourhood had once looked like a developer’s dream, a downtown core ready for revival, a motherlode of history, proximity, and urban chic. For a while, there was talk of heritage properties, rare Georgian designs, and the historical footsteps of Adèle Hugo, Victor’s tragic daughter, hopelessly pursuing a British military man.
“The first name’s a giveaway: Archie the Mongoose Moore.”
They passed a silver Quonset hut harbouring an auto body shop. Leaning against one wall was a mattress plugged with bullet holes and a sign: NO LOITERING. Plastic geraniums sprouted in the cracked window of a house that advertised ROOM FOR RENT, SEE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES.
Scott stared at a double Queen Anne who had let herself go, shabby, melancholy, comforted by a lava lamp and a stuffed cat with glass eyes. A man was sitting on the front step, smoking a cigar. Why, Scott wondered, would you stuff a dead cat?
The buildings, all soggy wood and vinyl, were attached to each other, or separated by mouldy space. Some had boarded-up windows, others the allure of a root cellar, with no front yards, no trees, no room for anything but regrets. Inside, Scott could imagine a soil floor, 90 per cent humidity and ethylene gas. The dark streets reminded Scott of the city’s origins: a garrison town founded two centuries ago by the British, a sinister place full of roaming press gangs, a cold grey port you couldn’t turn your back on.
“When we were in New York, we went into this joint in Little Italy,” Johnny recalled, escaping the dreary surroundings. “The owner had fight pictures on the walls. I looked at them, and the fighter seemed real familiar, so I said ‘Is that him? Is that really Tony Danza?’”
“Was it?” asked Louie.
“Yeah,” Johnny nodded. “The owner said his brother used to train Tony before he got into acting. They were pretty puffed about it.”
“Right on,” Louie responded, like it made perfect sense.
Scott watched a man lurch down the street, sinking under the weight of an enormous backpack. His eyeglasses were strapped to his head with an elastic, and the ankles of his pants were sealed shut with duct tape. Sticking out of the backpack was the head of a chihuahua with round eyes and a sharp nose.
“I think that’s Marcel,” Johnny noted.
“Yeah?” Louie blinked, and looked unnerved.
Before Johnny could get a better view, Marcel, who had a room somewhere, vanished around a corner and Louie parked outside a three-storey building shaped like a cereal box. The fireman hopped out, leaving Scott and Johnny in the Jeep.
Turmoil’s rooming house had a decaying porch and layers of bumpy paint, archaeological evidence of time and changing owners. Wind whipped through windows that had been covered with plastic that could not obscure the view of a drug-dealing corner two blocks away.
Louie mounted the steps muttering, “What a dump.”
DOBERMAN BITES, warned the adjoining house, which had cardboard boxes stacked to the windows, the unclaimed assets of tenants who had returned to the street like runoff. RODNEY SNOOKS HAS MOVED DOWN THE STREET. HE DON’T LIVE HERE NO MORE.
Louie knocked and then dropped to the sidewalk, looking up. The porch window, covered with red nylon curtains, was filled with a chain gang of baby teddy bears, hanging from their necks in a mass lynching. Eight altogether, one with red hearts on his feet pads, another in a jaunty Christmas cap, victims of a pagan ritual or Druid sacrifice. No wonder Rodney Snooks had moved.
Louie opened the door and mould assaulted his nose like smelling salts. Before he could go any farther, he heard footsteps. When Turmoil appeared, too bright, too formidable for his shabby surroundings, he looked like he’d been asleep. After a few words with Louie, he followed the firefighter to the sidewalk. As he cimbed in the back of the Jeep where Scott was sitting, Turmoil rubbed his eyes and pointed to a library book clutched in one hand. “Ah been readin bout the Eskimos, how they keep wahm.”
Two blocks later, Louie stopped the Jeep for a daycare crossing the street single file. The children were walking in the same controlled fashion as the Soviet seamen who marched the streets during port calls, mute, drab men trailed by an omnipresent keeper. They all seemed depressed.
“Now, the secret is to start off slow. Don’t expect too much from yourself off the start,” Louie cautioned Turmoil. “I been doing this for, ahhh,” he said, checking his mental datebook, “ten months.”
“Okay, mon.” Turmoil nodded.
“I can give you some direction after we line things up with Merle. He and I are tight.”
In the front seat, Johnny had fallen asleep. Three nights a week, he worked at a bar named the Dory Shop, a marshalling yard for faded women and wayward men. It had an oyster bar made from a buff wooden dory. LITTLE SISTER, the sign said, for the benefit of tourists, who were then informed that this was the smallest dory the old shops made, ninety-five pounds of pine and oak. Johnny filled in for Ken, the regular barkeep. Ken was a pro. He’d worked in Seattle and on a cruise ship. “A good bartender is hard to find,” waxed Ken. “Too green and you can’t cut it, too seasoned and you are probably a thief.” Johnny figured that Ken stole, just not enough to get caught.
“Now, the pay’s decent, seventy-five to one hundred bucks depending on the gig,” Louie informed Turmoil. “You don’t have to report it, which would be perfect since you’re not allowed to work anyway.”
“Ah could use the money, since ah’m been freezin to death.”
Through the window, Scott noticed a comatose bum still clutching a bread bag and a can of lilac air freshener. His coat was open.
“I told Merle that I had a friend,” Louie added, “someone who looked after himself, a boxer. He was very interested.”
“Where do they have these things?” Johnny asked, struggling up the stairs of a low-rent office tower, home to a cleaning service and a telemarketer.
“Generally at someone’s house or an office,” said Louie, attacking the stairs with his usual vigour. “It’s mainly showers, going-away parties.”
Scott saw Turmoil shiver in a leather car coat purchased for ten dollars at Gussy’s, a used clothing emporium with a pipeline to New England. Gussy had generously described the coat as a “garment for all seasons with slash pockets and a zip-out Orlon pile lining.” The lining was missing.
“You get feelers?” Johnny asked.
“Naaah,” Louie scoffed. “It’s entertainment.”
From the doorway, Scott studied Merle, whose jacket sleeves hung over his stumpy fingers. That’s a popular look with fat guys, Scott noted: buy a huge jacket to cover the corpulence and then never get it shortened. Merle shifted sideways in a swivel chair that creaked in protest. CLASSY MALE ENTERTAINERS, said the sign over his desk, SUITABLE FOR ALL OCCASIONS.
Merle pretended not to notice the four men filling his doorway, continuing with his phone conversation. “Well, darlin’,” he drawled. “I’ll be there soon enough. You tell Marie to put on one of her lovvvellly boiled dinners and, for God’s sake, save me some triple-yolked eggs.”
Louie knocked, but Merle kept gushing. “I had ten the last time I was down home, cooked up lovvvellly, with a little bit of juicy ham, sawwwsidge, a hint of home fries, not too greasy, mind you, and” — his voice was as euphoric as a 1-900 sex line worker — “melt-in-your-mouth oatcakes.”
He gulped, thick with consumptive foreplay, while the caller squeezed in advice. “Ha ha ha.” Mock indignation. “You don’t need to worry about me, m’dear, I’ll live forever. Ha ha ha. My great-grandfather, Dan Alex MacLean, lived to be one hundred and four, the oldest man in Cape Breton. They erected a granite monument to him, they did. Dan Alex kept his meat in a fifteen-metre well all winter long.”
Glancing up, he finally mouthed to Louie, “Come in.”
“When he was ninety years old, he could hoist up a whole side of lamb and swing a maul hammer like a child’s toy, and evvvery morning for breakfast, what do you think he had?” He paused, waiting for the inevitable. “That’s right, a plate of triple-yolked eggs!”
All four visitors found metal chairs. In the cramped, windowless room, Merle’s skin smelled like saturated fat. He hung up his phone.
“How are you, Louie, my son?”
Merle’s capped teeth were too small for his bloated head and stupendous appetite.
“Good, Merle.”
“How did the last one work out?”
“They seemed to like it.” Louie shrugged modestly. “I wore the leopard posing suit, the one I was telling you about, with the wet look. And the name worked well, the Arabian Knight. I think it’s better than the last one.”
“Plus, the novelty of something new.” Merle nodded.
“I’m probably going to get the tear-away pants,” Louie added.
“You don’t have those yet?” Merle sounded surprised.
“No, but I will.”
“Good, son, good.”
The owner wore his kinky hair straight back, smothered with gel. Under the jacket was a crushed-velour jersey that looked like the hide of an elephant. Merle had been eating like an elephant since he was written up in the Strait Standard as the county’s biggest newborn forty years ago. He had been eleven pounds, twelve ounces, born during an extended visit from Cape Breton to the mainland.
“Did I ever tell you about Billy Campbell from down home?” Merle asked as he stealthily slid a hand across his desk. Maintaining eye contract, he reeled in a yellow flyer. LADIES ILLIMINATE THE STRESS AND FRUSTRATIONS OF LIFE WITH A RELAXING FOOT PEDICURE BY BRENT. DONE IN THE COMFURT OF YOUR OWN HOME. “Well, Billy used to hang around the Legion day and night. He never drew a sober breath.”
Merle tucked the incriminating flyer in a drawer.
“They didn’t mind him there during the week to play a little darts or tarbish, but they didn’t want him at the top-drawer functions, the weddings and such. So, do you know what they did?”
Louie shrugged.
“They put a sign up: NO RUBBER BOOTS ON WEEKENDS, and that kept Billy out.”
As Merle laughed a shifty laugh that bared his undersized teeth, Scott felt disgusted. He hated Merle, he decided at that moment, in the same way that he hated the soft and imperious Smithers.
“So you’re a boxer?” Merle turned to Scott as though he had sensors, the acute antennae of the grotesque, finely tuned to slights. “I’ve seen lots of good fighters down in Cape Breton, all as hard and rugged as Lingan coal.”
“Actually,” Scott muttered, “I’m a reporter.”
“It doesn’t matter, my son, it doesn’t matter. I had a doctor work for me once, a neurosurgeon.” He paused in the lie, twisting a sapphire ring to unleash his oral powers. “He just liked to get out a bit. He was in demand all right, as popular as Amphora pipe tobacco.”
Louie cut in, blinking. “No, it’s not him. It’s him.” He pointed at Turmoil, who was nervously rubbing the leg of his knit pants patterned in a subtle check. Behind Turmoil was a poster of step-dancers in curly bobs and plaid, airborne.
Merle stared and then smiled lamely. “Ah, yes, I’m afraid I can’t use him.”
“You said you needed someone,” Louie protested.
“Yes, my son. But I can’t use him.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going to be honest with you, Louie. I’ve always been an honest man. Mention the MacLeans any place, any time, and people say, ‘Damn honest buggers all of them. As honest as a Sally Ann matron with a Christmas kettle.’ ”
“Okay.”
“I’ll tell you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’d scare the women. He’s too big.”
“He looks great.” Louie’s voice rose an outraged octave. “This man was in the Olympics.” Turmoil nodded confirmation.
“I don’t care if he was in the Ice Capades, my son, he’s too big.” Merle caught his breath. “And he’s too bloody . . .”
“What did you say?” demanded Louie.
Scott dropped his head.
“I said, Try coming back. Maybe if he gets smaller.”