Ruff. Ruff. The barking startled Ownie, because Arguello was usually as quiet as a blindman’s snow, the soft spring cover that could, according to Island folklore, cure cataracts. Ruff. Ruff. Ownie crept down the stairs and peered into his rec room. Good God! Tanner, the promoter, was on his knees staring at the little dog.
“Meow.” Tanner mimicked a cat.
Ruff. Arguello arched her back.
“Meeeooow.” The crazy bastard was tormenting Arguello. Ruff. Ruff. Ruff.
“Ow-nee,” Tanner yelled innocently over his shoulder. “Thayres somethin’ wrong with your dowg. She’s a bit of a flutterbug, you.”
Tanner had slicked-back hair and a South Shore accent that seemed stuck at sixteen rpms. Ten years ago, the promoter claimed that someone — he didn’t know who — had drugged him, and that he’d walked sixty miles to Truro before landing in a greenbelt and taking off all his clothes.
Ownie waited until Tanner was on his feet before he rounded the corner and stated, “There’s nothin’ wrong with my dog!” Imagine this fool teasing Arguello after all she’d been through!
“How’s Louie’s weight?” Tanner asked in a false voice. “They’ll be some savage if there’s problems there.”
“His weight is A-1,” Ownie snapped, holding a notepad crammed with coded names, weights, and records.
“Good, I don’t want no trouble, you.”
Tanner was putting on a rinky-dink card and had agreed to give Louie his ring debut. As a favour to Louie, Ownie had arranged for the fireman to meet Tanner at his house, where he could keep a critical eye on the promoter. Ownie was surprised that Louie, who had been pulling down a twelve-hour shift at the fire station, had not arrived by now.
Ownie could only take so much of Tanner. The promoter had grown up on Big Tancook, a South Shore island adrift between Then and Now, an eerie oblong roamed by hybrid cars and the odd birdwatcher. Once a car made the fifteen-minute boat ride to Tancook, it never looked back. It lived out its days without insurance or plates, free of service stations and streetlights. Ownie had taken the ferry to Tancook once after the glory days of schooners and fish, when a special trip for the doctor was five bucks, for the undertaker, ten. In the general store, he had met a skinny kid named Percy, who told him that he had made contact with a church that recruited members on the radio and was planning his break any day.
“We got a lot of money tied up in phone calls,” Tanner claimed.
“Yeah, you and Donald Trump.”
Relieved, Ownie could hear Louie upstairs talking to Hildred, who had been in the kitchen with a client. “Rocky Marciano is my idol,” he was telling her. “He was only five-eleven, you know. When he fought Joe Louis, he had a sixty-eight-inch reach, while Louis was seventy-six.” Hildred, Ownie knew, had no interest in anything he was saying.
And why would she? Ownie asked himself. Louie wasn’t even one of Ownie’s fighters. Louie hung around Tootsy’s and paid his weekly dues. And in return for drives and other favours, Ownie helped him when he could, knowing nothing serious would ever come of it.
Louie trotted down the stairs and held out his hand. “How are ya, Tan?” Ownie winced, refusing to call the promoter — whose full name was Tan Norman Tanner — by his redundant first name.
“Finest kind.” Tanner’s eyes had raccoon circles.
The promoter laid out the terms of the contract, squeezing his lips as though they were chapped. “I’ll be looking for you to get weighed three days before the fight. Three pounds either way. At the last card, some boy from Shediac ended up in hospital dried up like a Digby chick,” said Tanner. “He waited until the day of the weigh-in to lose eight pounds.”
Louie frowned, evidence, he hoped, that he would never do anything so foolish.
“Don’t tell me his trainer was payin’ heed. Now the commission’s right owly with me.”
Ownie knew that the real reason the commission was owly was that Tanner had staged a tough guys’ fight-off that ended when a kick-boxer beat the bejesus out of a long-haul trucker in a new definition of tough.
“He wants his pay up front,” Ownie said.
“No problem.” Solemnly, Tanner pulled the contract from his attaché, his bony hand drooping under the weight of a sapphire ring. He handed Louie a gold pen, engraved, not surprisingly, with his initials, TNT.
To save Louie money, Tanner had arranged, he said, to get his brother, who’d been in corners before, to do the job for free. “He’s rock steady,” Tanner said. “His name is Verne.”
With Tanner gone, Ownie and Louie settled into the rec room chairs. Ownie liked to tell old stories, he admitted to himself, and Louie, who was in need of something, liked to listen. Louie was an emotional orphan, Ownie concluded, in search of a surrogate family. He had joined the fire department, Amway, the gym — he had even done a stint with the Jehovah’s Witnesses — seeking the familial bond that he lacked.
“Years ago, whenever we fought in New Glasgow, half the town would show up for the weigh-in,” Ownie told the fireman. “I remember once, it was so crowded that you couldn’t breathe. I had Thirsty — Girlie’s brother — fighting, and he was worse than LeBlanc in terms of laziness.”
Louie, the mole, laughed with him.
“When Thirsty got on the scale, I stood behind him and slipped my hand in the waist of his trunks. Butch started a little noise across the room: ‘Your guy’s a yokel,’ that kind of bullshit, just enough to get everybody watching, hoping for a brawl, while I held up Thirsty until he made weight.”
They chuckled.
Ownie could hear voices upstairs, which meant that Hildred’s client was being escorted to the door. Hildred’s cake designs were becoming more intricate, he noticed, requiring blueprints and a calculator. Sometimes Hildred reminded Ownie of a diamond cutter, the way she handled the fine detail, hunkered over a Byzantine plan of colour-coded blocks.
“When the bad weather hit, the fights shut down around here, so we’d head stateside,” Ownie told Louie. “I was up in New York one winter and fought thirteen fights: Park Arena, St. Nicholas Arena. Madison Square Garden was a big feather in your hat, the same as Boston Gardens.”
“Man,” Louie gushed. “I’d love to fight the Garden.”
“Butch was in Toronto for a bit, and he’d drift across the border like acid rain. They were gypsies, those guys; they never had a steady job, a good education, or a trade. A fight would net them a couple hundred bucks and hold them over till the next one. There was no pogey or nothing.”
“Did you know that Marciano had a KO percentage of 0.880?” Louie asked.
Ownie stopped to ponder Louie’s fascination with giants from the past. Did he understand his place? Did he know his limitations?
“They said that if you hurt the Rock, all he knew how to do was attack,” Louie continued. “He wouldn’t try to protect himself, he would instinctively attack.”
“That’s what made him so great,” Ownie allowed, “but that was Marciano, not you.”
Louie paused and then lifted his eyes like a man who had just seen the future. “I dunno, but I think I’ve got that in me.”