“What you doin?” Turmoil shrieked.
“I’m doing a ghost.” Washington, the sparring partner, kept moving across the ring, lifting the blue rope with one mitt, waving off Turmoil with the other. This is done, he signalled, and Ownie, sitting ringside, nodded.
“No, mon, you not!” Turmoil shrieked.
“I did foh.” Sweat dripped into the sparring partner’s dead eyes, down his bulky neck, onto a Spiderman singlet that smelled like defeat. “That’s it, man.”
“You only sparred three!”
Washington climbed out of the ring, unbuckling his headgear. A deep ravine ran above his nose; razor-scarred lids were falling on the outer wings of his eyes, heavy and foreboding, like an early curtain.
“Get back in,” Turmoil ordered. “Get, get, get!”
Confusion flooded Washington’s face, but he kept moving, driven by something deep and primal, something that told him he couldn’t stop now. A half-hearted goatee sputtered on his chin. “Fuck you, mutha!” Washington exploded, the rage of four generations purified and ignited by junk. “I say, Fuck you!”
Outside Boomerang’s gym, nature’s lights had dimmed, Ownie noted with an uneasiness that had been growing. Sonny had turned on a radio, which was carrying a weather warning: a hurricane was ripping up the coast, closing in. Maybe it will clear the air, Ownie hoped, make it easier to breathe, easier to live with all this craziness and noise. Turmoil turned ringside to Greg who, being an idiot, signalled back three rounds. Ownie cursed.
“No way, man,” Washington shook his head, knowing he was right. On one shoulder, above a skull-and-crossbones tattoo, was a scar the colour of ham. “Don’t you go making me have to prove my point, muthafuckas.”
“Pay the man for four,” Ownie instructed Turmoil. “If you’re not happy, report him to the Better Business Bureau.”
Ownie tried to sound offhand, and Washington nodded, relieved. Despite the dope and his own failed career, Washington had been useful, so why was Turmoil challenging him, pushing a guy who was barely, by a thread of pride and memory, hanging on?
“You gettin threee rounds.” Turmoil tapped his glove three times. “And thass it.”
“Foh.” Washington was stripping.
“Three!” Another tap.
“Foh. And I had enough of your bitch talk. Your mouth is too big, man, and I want what’s coming to me! I earned it.”
The rain had started, great sheets of water driven sideways by a wind that had come from nowhere, bearing furniture and peril. A lawn chair flew past the gym, then a cardboard box and a road sign. In ten minutes, the ocean had gone from blue-green to angry grey. Whitecaps hurled themselves forward like slam dancers, rabid foam lined the beach. Nature’s colour tube had been pulled, leaving only black and white.
WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT A MAN, IF HE GAIN THE WHOLE WORLD AND LOSE HIS OWN SOUL? ST. MARK CHAP. 8, V. 36.
Opening the gym door, Washington pushed his way through the wind to an elongated car with smoked windows and dalmatian seat covers. Inside, Ownie could see the driver rocking back and forth like he had a toothache, a third form huddled in the back. If I get out of this alive, I’ll take up golf, Ownie vowed, just like Joe Louis. I’ll keep this whole crazy story to myself and live a quiet life like Dew Drop when he finished roaming. He found a house in the country, a woman, and never once spoke of the past, never felt the desire to spill family secrets that no one needed to hear.
What was truth anyway, Ownie reminded himself, how many versions of life — laundered, censored, or rewritten for survival — existed in people’s minds?
“Don’t go out there.” Sonny pointed at the car.
If you play golf, Ownie decided, you don’t have to deal with fools like this, telling you they stole a china ballerina from your house — the house you lived in for thirty years — and put the voodoo on you. How could he, a man who barely understood fairies and sheep-stealing ghosts, deal with voodoo and zombies, with spells and hexes and poisonous secretions?
“This is serious shit,” warned Sonny. “Those maggots had a shootout with the cops last month. One guy took a bullet to the hip.” Exhilaration was creeping into Sonny’s voice. “When they’re on the pipe, they don’t care about nothing, they got Saturday night specials, they got . . .”
Ownie waited for Sonny to finish, for the part about the gang war and the armour-piercing bullets, the dead grandma, and the howling dog. Ownie waited for Sonny’s danger-induced rush to end, then asked, “Could you have told me this a little sooner?”
Bent trees were dusting the sidewalk while sheets of lightning lit the horizon, groundstrokes of one hundred million volts. Water swept the road like a massive carwash, and a bicycle hurtled by, doing spastic cartwheels.
REVELATION 16:16
Just stay cool, Ownie thought, and deal with this situation. So what if Turmoil says he wasn’t at the Olympics? He also said he played pro hockey and was a professional hairstylist. But if this is true, it means you made him something, you made it work, not voodoo or magic. You can still take him into that fight with Stokes, you can still be a part of something great, something that Charley Goldman, if he were alive, might admire.
“He bedda not think he ever gettin ’nuther cent from me.” Turmoil cast the warning at the door. “Ahm thru widt fools like that. Ahm thru.”
Just shut up, Ownie thought, as Washington’s car eased into the storm. Just let me get through this life without seeing another set of dead eyes, another corpse laid out too soon. The war was bad enough, but then he had to be in Montreal when they carried out Cleveland Denny, he had to be on the waterfront when his buddy Aubrey Mills was crushed by a paper bale on his first stevedoring shift.
“Peewee, get down.” Sonny pushed the kid under the table.
A piece of siding flew by on wings of sand as a shock wave of thunder boomed. Sonny unhooked a heavy bag and rolled it over, a sandbag for Peewee’s makeshift bunker. Oh Jesus, Ownie thought, looking at the kid, he’s going to end up like that little homeboy, Murray, dead and barely missed.
“I’m gonna try to get him out of here.” Sonny, drawing on his military training, had the manoeuvre planned. “If those guys come back with reinforcements, and I expect they will, he could get it.”
THERE IS NONE OTHER THAN THE HOUSE OF GOD, AND THIS IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN. GENESIS CHAP. 28, V. 17.
Sonny had turned up the radio, which was relaying storm updates. Stay off the roads, warned an announcer, who said a bridge had been wiped out and the airport highway closed by forty-mile-per-hour winds. A Japanese tourist videotaping the storm had been killed by the spar of a boat.
“It’s too late,” said Sonny as the car returned, driver in the gangsta lean.
“You cowards wahn me, you stan up like a mon.” Turmoil charged through the door as thunder roared an ear-splitting clap. The dented door blew off its hinges, inviting the chaos inside. “There no mon down here scarin me; there’s no mon ever lived who scare me.” Through the wind, Turmoil struggled, arms outstretched, head back like a runner crossing the finish line. A bench flipped at his feet, landing on an advertisement for CARING HANDS, THE MEDICAL CLINIC FOR CANADIANS while Sonny pinned Peewee to the floor.
“Nobody scare me.” Turmoil’s voice wailed. “Ahm scared of nobody.” The wind scrambled Turmoil’s words and lightning flashed about him, forked bolts of doom that heated the air to fifty thousand degrees.
“When ah was a boy, a powahful bolt of lightnin strike me down. Ah be standin under the pimento tree holdin mah mongoose. The lightnin kill the mongoose, but the powah go from the lightnin to me, and ah know right there, it’s a contrack with the Gods, mah mongoose for the powah. So now ah cahnt be killed.” His voice had reached a mad pitch. “Ah cahnt die, mon, because ahm sign’d up widt God, he own me, lock, stock, and barrel.”