Going Fast Read Free Page B

and Smithers, the hockey reporter, was jogging on the spot near Scott’s desk, refusing to stop despite glares inhis direction. Smithers then announced, as though anyone believed him, that his new and much-younger girlfriend was a dancer.
    â€œA table dancer?” Warshick, the sports agate editor, took the bait.
    â€œPostmodern, you idiot, like that dude, Mark Morris. They have a studio, performance events,
muscle control!
” Leering, Smithers lapped the sports desk, straining the tights he had squeezed into for his lunchtime jog. “It’s called mixed media, and it’s very cutting edge.”
    A phone rang, and Warshick, who was fat, sloppy, and pleased about it, answered.
    With Warshick occupied, Smithers trotted by an older man hunkered over an Underwood typewriter. Buzz Bailey had heart palpitations, high blood pressure, and diverticulitis, but he kept his troubles under his hat. Buzz, who had been given the title senior sports columnist, wrote about goalies and shortstops from the 1940s, nonentities called Curly, Muckle, and Gee Gee. Talking to Buzz about sports was like visiting the twilight zone, Scott thought, a parallel universe of postwar euphoria and yesterday’s youth, icons who could never be matched.
    â€œDon’t let her sell you any lessons,” Buzz barked at Smithers.
    â€œWhat?” Smithers stopped mid-
pointe
, cheeks ripe.
    â€œYou heard me. Don’t let her sell you any lessons.” Buzz adjusted a straw hat topped with a green fairway. “I had a friend in Red Deer who started going out with a dancer. She sold him four hundred dollars’ worth of lessons at Arthur Murray, and he never learned a step.”
    â€œThat’s different,” said Smithers, who looked like a pornographic cherub, round and lascivious. “This is very avant-garde.”
    Buzz was unmoved, knowing that Smithers’s avant-gardeworld revolved around hockey and cartoons. When he wasn’t chasing underage hockey groupies or bar waitresses, he refereed hockey games and collected pucks from the OHL, NHL, AHL, CHL, IHL, along with arcane leagues from glacial towns. The pucks were indexed and mounted on his bedroom wall. He still lived at home.
    â€œThat’s what my friend said.” Buzz was back in the debate. “The poor sap took out a three-hundred-dollar loan — two hundred for the Big Apple, an extra C for the Turkey Trot. That’s all those dancers are after, some big stiff to sell their lessons to.” As Smithers grumbled, Buzz tapped his straw hat and lobbed a parting shot. “He couldn’t Turkey Trot worth spit.”
    Smithers peeled off his jacket, revealing a T-shirt that the dancer had sold him: C ULTURAL C ARNIVORE printed over an image of four Japanese hanging from ropes, upside down, like tuna. Outside, a truck backfired and Buzz jumped.
    On the advice of a productivity consultant, everything in the newsroom, from phones to filing cabinets, had been dipped in green. Gem Newspapers had moved the
Standard
from its original location in downtown Halifax near the courts, cops, and lawmakers to an industrial mall in Dartmouth, kilometres from anything that smelled like news. It was easier, the new owner explained, for the trucks that left at 1 a.m. for Port Mouton or Necum Teuch bearing papers stuffed with flyers. And the rent was cheap. The industrial park was filled with warehouses and banished workers who toiled without the comfort of chip wagons, without architecture or trees, leaving the sterile grid on weekends to driver-ed cars and biker hit men.
    Smithers touched his leg. To protest Sports’ location at the back of the newsroom, he had taken to wearing a pedometer, which he used to track his daily mileage to the lunchroom and the can. “At this rate, Buzz will need a hip replacement byChristmas,” he liked to say. Scott frowned. He could barely hear his interview over Smithers and the clatter of trucks.
    â€œYou