The shabby grocery store reeked of indifference. Located four blocks from Tootsy’s, it had eternal lines, dented cans, and registers that broke down just as your exhausted lettuce landed in range. The meat section was stocked with overpriced bologna, produce with deformed turnips.
Marj, the head cashier, was talking to a couple paying for their order with a welfare cheque. “No, you have to spend it all. We aren’t allowed to give you change.” The woman grumbled as Marj patiently explained: “You can’t get cigarettes.”
Marj had been at the same cash for twenty years, working split shifts and weekends for minimum wage, a pro in tinted glasses and freshly set hair. She looked at the man, who was ominous in a grey Confederate hat and pile-lined vest, and she sympathized. “It’s not right, is it?”
Scott thumbed a Time magazine with Bill Clinton, the new president, on the cover. Unlike Clinton, who rose from modest beginnings, these were the people who would never escape, Scott thought, the people who looked out of place at beaches, skin too pallid, hair too long. Clad in cut-off jeans, the men churned up the water in furious imitations of the overhead crawl, pulled up exhausted, then performed raucous dives, the kind that led to spinal injuries. Scott always felt uneasy around them, convinced one of them would drown in a feat of aqua-machismo.
He had gone to the store with Johnny and Louie to pick up water for the gym. He was feeling good. He had been given two weeks to research a series of boxing flashbacks ordered by MacKenzie, who said that Boomer had commended his interest in the Sports section.
“Did you hear about Edwin Moses running with Clinton?” Scott asked Johnny.
“Ah no,” admitted the fighter, puzzled.
They had left Louie in the express lane holding two jugs of sparkling water. A crone in red sneakers had eased in beside him. Staring into space and holding a mackerel and a six-pack of bingo markers, she had positioned herself at Louie’s elbow, moving forward every time he took a step, her breath on his neck.
“Well, you see, Moses ran with Clinton, and then some magazine quoted him as saying he had trouble keeping up,” Scott explained.
“Maybe he got paid.” Johnny shrugged.
Louie and the woman stepped over a broken jam jar. Her breathing sounded like the short, startled gasps of a bicycle pump. Trying to ignore her, Louie blinked at Scott and joined the conversation. “That reminds me of when they had Joe Louis refereeing rasslin’ or Jesse Owens racing a horse in Cuba,” he said. “Personally, I don’t think it’s right.”
“I read a book about Jesse Owens,” said Scott. “A teammate said he was the most coordinated person he had ever seen. When he ran, it was like water flowing downhill.”
Louie shuffled forward, the woman clinging to his arm. It was clear that she was not going to give in. He gestured for her to go ahead. “Thanks.” She smiled a gummy smile of mock surprise and then yelled louder than expected: “Sadie, just put those there.”
Sadie, who seemed in no hurry, ambled past Louie and dropped two bags of sour-cream chips, dip, and a mini magazine offering 100 Easy Ways to Lose Weight on the counter. An angora cat the colour of peach ice cream coyly but unconvincingly purred from Sadie’s sweatshirt: I’M NOT FAT, I’M FLUFFY.
The express cash had frozen.
Johnny and Scott left Louie and walked to an outside wall lined with boxes soliciting grocery tapes for homeless cats and bowel disease. Nearby were two mechanical rides: a blue elephant and a race car. A distraught toddler was sitting on the elephant, which had one chipped ear, and he was crying.
“Let me try again.” The boy’s mother kicked the elephant’s coin box and rattled the wall plug to no avail. The elephant was dead.
Johnny reached into his pocket and produced a folded sheet of looseleaf, which he handed to Scott. “I’m thinking of running this ad in the newspaper.”
Scott read:
Wanted: Investors and Manager for unique singer/songwriter/sports personality to finance high-quality recording for recording career. Have over 24 original songs with more coming. All investors will realize excellent return within one year. Don’t miss this opportunity. Phone J. L.
“Whaddya think it would cost?” Johnny asked.
“Leave it with me. I’ll find out.”
Scott had always believed that the athletes he interviewed, the hockey players in blazers, the point guards in sweatbands, could not see that he had once been one of them, an elite athlete. And then one day at Tootsy’s, Ownie told him to put on the gloves and try the speed bag. On another day, he asked him to go a round with Johnny, who, he reassured him, was “only a welter and won’t do any damage to a man your size.” Scott left the ring in a semi-euphoric haze. Anxious, protective, and thrilled by the simple knowledge it was there, Scott harboured the feeling in his chest, buried where no one could touch it. What motivated Ownie, Scott did not know, but after a while, it didn’t matter because it made him feel alive, it made him feel, for the second time in his life, part of a self-contained world with its own language, values, and worth. He could probably, he decided, get Johnny a deal on the ad.
Scott saw a woman in a white pantsuit stop at the broken-down elephant. He had seen her in line with two porterhouse steaks and a Camembert clutched to her chest like they might be snatched from her. The woman stared at the mother and the tow-headed boy, apparently about to speak. Why would she talk to them, after ignoring Marj, who had wished her a good day?
“Do you do anything to his hair?” she demanded.
“Huh?” responded the mother, confused.
“His hair. Do you do anything?”
“Here.” The mother handed the boy a box of Nerds, hoping to stop the sobs that were heaving through a shirt that said, MY DAD IS IN THE PERSIAN GULF.
“Do you dye it?”
“No!”
Johnny poked Scott and with misplaced confidence named the woman’s celebrity lookalike: “Angie Dickinson.” Scott could see a faint resemblance, but the real Angie, TV’s Police Woman, immortalized in reruns, had a much better figure.
“He’s only two,” the mother added, but Angie was no longer listening. She was teetering through the exit on purple pumps, clutching her cheese and her overpriced steaks. Outside, she climbed into a Mercury driven by a man whose face graced bus stop benches across the city, a man in a pumpkin blazer and a name tag. Harvey Rich, a member of the Platinum Club and a Registered Relocation Specialist, had twenty years of award-winning sales experience. As Harvey pulled away, leaving the shabby shoppers to their predestined futures, Scott realized where he had seen the woman. In MacKenzie’s office. It was Jean, the wife.