Ownie approached the office building with Turmoil, knowing everything had changed. A bearded bum was camped on the sidewalk, a Tim’s coffee cup extended for coins. Ownie slipped him a buck, and the old bum smiled a toothless thank you.
When you had a fighter like this, Ownie decided, there was potential that no day job could offer. It was like being in a rock band that could — if the pieces fell into place — tour the world, make millions, and invade the public psyche, leaving reference points for a generation.
“Hey, champ,” a courier driver shouted. “You looked good, man. Who you fighting next?”
“Ah dunno yet,” Turmoil replied. “Someone big, mon, someone big.”
Had it really been two years, Ownie wondered, since Champion had brought Turmoil to Halifax, a stranger in the crowd, as anonymous as the courier, as broke as the bum? Ownie felt as though the months had blurred and melded, the seasons indistinguishable in the ever-present grey.
They rode an elevator to the second floor. The fighter opened a glass door and Ownie spotted a secretary, a woman in her fifties, sitting primly at her desk. She had allowed herself one personal touch, Ownie noticed, a framed photo of three blond children in Irish knit sweaters.
“Ah like your blue dress.” Turmoil tossed the compliment over the blond heads directly at the woman, who responded, “Why thank you.” Eager for praise, however trite, she instinctively glanced at the flaxen children, her legacy of good genes and manners. She had crow’s-feet, Ownie noticed, and tear-damaged eyes.
“That blue remind me of the ocean back home,” Turmoil continued. “It was so nice and wahm, we would take our hosses down every Friday and give them a bath, let them splash ’round and ’round. Ahd say, ‘Come on, hosses, it’s bath day,’ and they would smiiile.”
“It is a soothing shade, isn’t it?” The secretary’s hair was cut in an off-centre wedge that matched the crisp decor. “They call it cornflower,” she said, inching out from underneath the massive egos that overshadowed her existence, the unexpected divorce that had condemned her to this job.
“It looks good on a han’some woman like yourself.”
For the first time, she smiled. The secretary touched her silk scarf, and Turmoil strolled the room, taking inventory of the walls, all cold and mute, a soundproof confessional where you waited with your sins.
“Cahn you tell Douglas that Turmoil Davies is here?” he asked. “Him and his trainah, Mistah Ownie Flan’gan.” And then, to Ownie’s surprise, he added, “We dohn hab time to fool aroun.”
“I’ll buzz him at once.” Her voice was a bone china teacup.
“See, Ownie.” Turmoil’s voice boomed off the circumspect walls. “Ah tole you ’fore we come up here that this woman is a ver-ver smaht woman. She prolly do all the work and that ole Douglas, he juss play around with his sailboat. Ah dohn know why Champion want nothin to do wit that locho. They cahnt get a better lawyer?”
The secretary flushed, shocked but secretly pleased.
Inside the lawyer’s office, Turmoil pointed to a painting on one wall. “Is that your sailboat?”
“My yacht,” Tobin Douglas corrected him.
Douglas had purchased the oil painting from an artist, who had assured him it was de rigueur in the right social circles. From his desk, he could cast an admiring eye over the Margarita’s lines, noting the double-planked mahogany and stainless-steel rigging. The forty-five-foot ketch had a seventy-horsepower Mercedes diesel, a three-kilowatt diesel generator, and the added allure of being from New York State.
“Ah forgot, mon,” Turmoil laughed. “You muss be Arissotle O-nasis. Maybe ahm Jackee O.”
Douglas blushed. At play, in his pink Polo shirt and Ray-Bans, he felt more like a Kennedy than an Onassis, more like a South End scion than a self-made man.
“Would you like to go sailing some day?” Douglas asked disingenuously. On another wall, Douglas had hung the Margarita’s framed plans. “She has a marvellous disposition.”
“With our luck, we be wit you the day you get ’rested!” Turmoil snapped back. “The day the poleese figure out what you doin with that boat and all them little girls. Ah cahn risk nuthin like that, and neither can mah trainah, who’s a vet’rin.”
Douglas, who wore a gold scrollwork bracelet and a tan, smiled his patronizing smile, one of many in his repertoire, letting the dig fly by. He believed there was always a point in a conversation where someone tried to take control by being disagreeable. If you smiled through it, acted like you enjoyed it, you were back in charge.
“What about a workout in a mall?” Douglas had already suggested a bachelor auction and an open-line radio show as ways of promoting Turmoil.
“No.” Turmoil sounded bored, with a headache coming on. Right then, before things got worse, before Douglas got smarmy and Turmoil enraged, Ownie moved himself to a neutral corner in his head. “Ah dohn hab time for that. The peeple wahn to see me, they can come to mah gym, charge admishun, show them it worth somethin, not go hangin arown some ole mall.”
Douglas smiled, the charming look he’d perfected on nubile eighteen-year-olds as he whispered, as though they had a choice, “Only if you want to.”
“You cahn sen someone over to colleck the money,” Turmoil added.
“We’ll see.”
On Douglas’s desk, five men in slickers grinned. Ownie looked at the men and then back at Douglas. This guy was as phony as a whitewashed Islander, he decided, one of those poor fools who went to the Boston States, got a job as a maid or a truck driver and came back talking like Ethel Kennedy. “Cah,” the biddies would snort behind their back. “What is a cah?”
“We lost money on the last three fighters we brought in.” Douglas sounded sombre, as though he was laying out a client’s limited options. He had a wooden dory compass at his elbow, an antique sextant on the wall, nautical aids for sinners who had lost their way.
“Thass too bad.” Turmoil knew that it was Douglas who had rented him that room in a crack house when he had been promised an apartment. He had almost frozen to death in that dump, he recalled, with those lynched teddy bears that had to be a sign of something evil. “You should be a better bisnismon.”
“I guess I should.” Douglas smiled.
“Afta my lass fight, the premier stop all the bisnis in the legislature, juss to mention my name, Turmoil Davies, champeen of the whole Commonwealth.”
“Really?” Douglas smirked. “I missed that.”
“Oh yes. They talkin ’bout havin a Turmoil Davies Day.”
Ownie squinted, knowing that Turmoil was telling the truth and that Douglas was being a smart ass. But then again, every day was Tobin Douglas Day now that he drove a Mercedes convertible purchased with the spoils of bankruptcy law. A guest lecturer at Dalhousie, he had appeared on As It Happens, and every morning, after installing his green contact lenses, he gave thanks for casinos and VLTs, the scourge of the poor.
“Those peeple, they aftah me all the time, all the time.” Turmoil stared out a floor-length window. He studied Georges Island, the drumlin in the centre of the harbour, but it seemed to make him weary. “From, now on, ah goi to say, ‘G’won, you go talk to Douglas.’” He spoke quickly as though he had solved his own problem. “Ahll tell them to phone you and work it out. Ah dohn hab time for all that foolish stuff.”
“Sure, I’ll talk to them.”
“Nebber mind, you cahn talk to nobody. Ah menshun your name and ebbybuddy think ahm a crim’nil. Mah trainah here can take the calls if ahm too bizzy. He got a lot of my stuff on comp’t’r.”
Ownie, who had never operated a computer in his life, nodded, and Douglas flashed the smile that greased the skids for the young girl’s panties, before the interminable row back to shore, ignoring the sight of her high heels soaked in salt.
Turmoil looked at Douglas’s cluttered desk, at the dory compass and the stack of files. “No wonder you losin money, with this mess. Dohn you know nothin about comp’t’rs?”
“I guess I’m a bit of a Luddite.”
“Whass that? A freak or a teef?”
Tilting back in his chair, Douglas stroked his highlighted hair, which was thinning on top and too long in the back. Ownie saw a business suit duck into the adjacent office, and realized with a start that it was the bikers’ lawyer, the fixer with the prune eyes from the strip club near Tootsy’s, the guy who had once run for office.
“We have no guarantee you’re going to sign with us again even after all the money we have invested in the last two years.” Douglas smiled. “All the work we have done.”
“Pa pa yo!” Turmoil leaned forward, and Douglas blinked. “You juss hab to wait and see.”