“How you doin’?”
“Good,” Suey allowed. “I’m gonna be in a movie. That movie man, he’s makin’ a picture ’bout Sam Langford. Me and Sam related way back.”
“That right?” Ownie asked.
“My mother from down them parts. Weymouth.”
“I thought all Sam’s people were gone.”
“Maybe, the close-close relations.”
“Oh.”
“My mother had pictures of Sam, some took before he fought Jack Johnson.” Suey paused to let Sam catch up, to amble past the battle royals, the Great White Hopes, and colour-coded crowns. He let the great man linger on the gay streets of France. “Sam, he weren’t much taller than me. All my mother’s side is squat. Sam was broad, though, and his arms was long.”
For the uninformed, it was all in the Coles Notes on Boxing: how Sam, who moved to Boston at age fourteen, gave up six inches and thirty pounds to Johnson; how the Boston Tar Baby, the greatest fighter never given a world title shot, was mugged by a time and a place.
“I did a visitation on Sam when I was fighting down in Beantown,” Suey said. “He was blind by then. The books give him four hundred pro fights and one hundred KOs, but Sam said no one knowed for sure. He fought all over, Down Under, Mexico, every coupla weeks. He seen more rings than a Times Square fence. Since they wouldn’t let him fight the white boys, he had to keep at the same black guys over and over, they travelled together; some dude called it the chitlin trail. Sam fought Harry Wills twenty-five times, Sam McVea fifteen. He said he got so sicka lookin’ at Harry’s face, they might as well been married.”
Ownie laughed and finished taping a split glove.
“Once,” Suey recalled, “Sam said Joe Jeanette and McVea knocked each other down thirty-eight times in one fight. He said he didn’t know what those boys was doin’ wrong that night.”
“Who won?”
“I ast Sam, and he said, ‘Who cares? After thirty-eight knockdowns, you bess forget about the whole thing. You bess forget it ever happened.’”
“Sam was in our house in Charlottetown once. He was travellin’ around, fighting exhibitions. He came looking for the old man, since he needed someone to come in the ring with him. The old man wasn’t home, just my mother. She looked at his ear. It was all puffed up. She’d never seen a cauliflower ear before, so she said, ‘Mr. Langford, what happened to your ear?’ Sam, who talked with a lisp, said, ‘I forgot to duck.’ He had a real good sense of humour.”
“Yeah,” said Suey. “He did.”
“Not everybody knows that.”
“Sam was all that and a box of Moirs chocolates.” Suey eased his bones off the bench. “See you ’round.”
“Let me know when your movie comes out.”
Suey nodded, then turned back slowly as though he’d forgotten something. “I seen that ole sidewinder. You know that ole guy —”
“Slugger?”
“Yeah.” Suey coughed and spit. “He was playing crib at the seniors’ complex. He says some wise guy in his forties come in, a real John Wayne. Slugger says this man starts using filthy language. Slugger don’t abide by that with wimmin there, so he tole the man: ‘Out, out, you go. You’re not welcome here!’” Suey laughed. “Oh yeeeaaah.” The thought amused him. “Slugger wanted to put the run onto him. Well, Wayne, he turn to Slugger and says, ‘Come outside, we’ll settle this.’”
“The rotten bastard,” Ownie swore. “The man’s eighty-four.”
“Slugger said he wudden go outside becuz he knowed Wayne was a dirty fighter. If they went outside, he’d go straight to the boots. Slugger could have ended up in the body shop, so Slugger tole him: ‘No, man, I fight you here but not outside.’”
“Slugger’s no fool.”
“So then Slugger, he look at me, and he say, ‘Suey, I was in a no-win situation. Since I use to be a pro-feshnul boxer, I coulda been charged if I hit the man.’” Suey laughed. “I said ‘yeah, we ole guys got it tough.’”
“You ever see this dude, this Wayne?”
“No, but I tole Slugger, if he go jammin’ you, come round me up. I go down there sometimes to visit some of the ladies, you know. If Wayne get too bad for us, I’ll get a couple of the brothers to come by.”
“Owww, you could handle him,” Ownie scoffed. “Drop a slider in on him.”
“I know.” Suey pulled a blackjack from his jacket and bounced it in his palm. “I carry insurance these days.”
“Way to travel, brother.”
By the time Suey left, Ownie was in an unsettled mood. Listening to Suey talk about Sam, the epitome of class, had made the trainer angry with LeBlanc, who, at this point, shouldn’t even call himself a fighter. Ownie was too old, he decided, to be made a fool of by LeBlanc who, according to Louie, hadn’t run in weeks.
The welterweight had taken an easy fight a few months back. LeBlanc was so fat he had to cut weight for a week, dehydrating with pills, garbage bags, and a sauna. At the weigh-in, Johnny stepped on the scale and held his breath until his weight popped up. And then, in a moment that still made Ownie livid, Johnny collapsed unconscious in the old trainer’s arms, eyes closed, wearing only a pair of black bikini underwear. The ignominious moment, captured by a Standard photographer, was proof, Ownie believed, of how ridiculous the fighter had become.
Ownie summoned Johnny across the room and squared a scale on the hardwood floor. According to Suey, the photo was posted at Hansel’s gym along with insulting comments. “Get on,” Ownie ordered. “Let’s see if you’re even close to fighting Sparks.”
“Oh, maaan.” Johnny tried to look betrayed. For support, he glanced around the gym but saw only the Dog doing push-ups and Louie, hiding the guilty face of a mole. “I just ate.”
“You give me a time, a particular hour, when you haven’t just ate.” Ownie was getting crankier the more that Johnny protested. “I said, get on!”
Slowly, looking for time and a way to drop five pounds, Johnny peeled off his red jacket and his Ironman watch. He hawked into a spittoon and stepped on the scale, claiming, “These cheap ones aren’t that reliable.” His eyes widened like Charlie Chaplin as the needle raced past one-fifty, then one fifty-five, every notch an indictment, every pound a lie.
“Ouch,” Johnny winced as the scale stopped at one sixty-five, twenty pounds over weight. He pulled a disbelieving face that reminded Ownie of a woman he’d seen at customs after officers hauled a two-foot Polish sausage from her suitcase. “I don’t know,” she had stammered, pulling the same counterfeit face. “I don’t know how.”
“Look at that,” Ownie ordered. “Twenty pounds of blubber. You are as fat as a lactating seal.”
“Aw, I can get it off. I’m in the grind now.”
“Bullshit!”
Johnny’s face was making Ownie as sick as that sausage woman, who had mugged with her mouth open, incredulous, as though the sausages had climbed in by themselves. Hearing the commotion, the Runner and little Ricky wandered across the room.
“You can get it off, but what’ll you have left?” Ownie barked.
“There’s a lot of muscle.”
“You’ll have an empty tank. You should be ready to rock and roll for ten rounds, ready to drop the Fancy Dan, ready to charge in and tear Sparks’s head off. That man’s case-hardened by now; he been fighting world-ranked fighters Stateside while you’ve been hanging around like an old washerwoman eating jelly doughnuts.”
“But —”
“You are flabby, your reflexes are slow, and you’re out of shape. You make me look like a bigger fool than I already am.” While Ownie paused for breath, Johnny gave the scale a hateful look. “You’ve got no bounce, no spring. Forget it, man, you are done.”
“I gotta fight him.” Johnny lowered his brows, shifting from shock to determination. “I gotta bad hate on for him, that gasbag, I gotta get it outta my system.”
“You hate him that bad, you fight him on the street. But don’t go draggin’ me in there to watch you get your head beat off.”
“I gotta, man. He’s so much talk, him and that mother, Girlie. I hate her.”
Ownie could understand why Johnny didn’t care for Hansel, who trash-talked non-stop, most of it for show. Hansel liked to keep busy, and LeBlanc, with his weight problem, would make an easy tune-up. Hansel’s handlers weren’t stupid; they weren’t like the idiots who took fighters to hotbeds like Philadelphia to train and got them punched to pieces in the gym, every session more damaging than a real fight. They weren’t that dumb.
Disgusted, Ownie walked across the room while Johnny mumbled something about cheap bathroom scales from China that could never be trusted.
Ownie stared out the window at a taxi stand. Tootsy worked there sometimes, but he preferred the airport route, which was safer. The drivers at this stand looked like truckers, middle-aged men in failing health. Except for a midget and a grandmother whose licence plate said Hot Mama, they were interchangeable.
A month ago, two new guys showed up, both with long, bleached hair like that band, Nelson. Somehow, they managed to park together as though they were planning a gig, even though the line was supposed to be random. One day, while heading to the gym, Ownie glanced through one of their windows and saw instead of a sweet-faced teen a fifty-year-old man with a pitted face, Charles Bronson in a blond wig, which is how you deceive yourself, Ownie figured, how you end up in a mess like this.
Johnny was surprised to see the trainer back before him. But then again, Johnny figured, they were too tight to end things this way.
“Okay, up to now, we’ve been working on the honour system,” Ownie said, and Johnny sucked pounds from his cheeks. “That doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere, right?”
“Right.” Johnny was prepared to agree with anything.
“Now, if we’re going to go through with this, if we’re actually going to fight Sparks, we’re going to have to do things my way.”
Johnny nodded willingness.
“This gentleman here” — Ownie pointed to the Runner, who was hovering in black tights and a long-sleeved jersey, a resistance-free mass of hollow bones and weightless muscle — “he is going to help us out. From now on, you’ll be running with him.”
“But I . . .” Johnny stared at the Runner, a helium-filled fanatic with grasshopper legs. The Runner sniffed his orange nose, and Johnny thought he looked anemic or like someone in chemotherapy, with his eyes too large, his face too drawn. The Runner’s body always seemed to be in a state of recovery, rebuilding cells and replenishing glycogen.
The man is so crazy, Johnny wanted to tell Ownie, that he would rather run than watch the Stanley Cup on TV, he would rather run than have sex with two women. Johnny looked at the greedy teeth, the narrows hands shaped like claws, and he wanted to set Ownie straight.
“You two start tomorrow,” Ownie ordered. “I’ll be expectin’ reports, because this man” — he pointed again at the Runner, who seemed more surprised than anyone — “this man is an intelligent man. This man wants to make something of his life. This man is not a big, fat, good-for-nothin’ washerwoman.”