The Manager

  The Manager

  by Caroline Stellings

  The Manager

  by Caroline Stellings

  Cape Breton University Press

  Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Copyright © 2013 Caroline Stellings

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, places and events depicted are used fictitiously or are products of the author’s imagination.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cape Breton University Press recognizes fair dealing exceptions under the copyright act (Canada). Responsibility for the opinions, research and the permissions obtained for this publication rests with the author.

  Cape Breton University Press recognizes the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Block Grants program, and the Province of Nova Scotia, through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, for our publishing program. The author also acknowledges the support of an Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Works in Progress grant. We are pleased to work in partnership with these bodies to develop and promote our cultural resources.

  Cover: Cathy MacLean Design, Chéticamp, NS

  Layout: Mike Hunter, Port Hawkesbury and Sydney, NS

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  First printed in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Stellings, Caroline, 1961-, author

  The manager : a novel / Caroline Stellings.

  ISBN 978-1-927492-47-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-9274492-48-2 (web pdf.)

  ISBN 978-1-927492-49-9 (epub.)

  ISBN 978-1-927492-50-5 (mobi.)

  I. Title.

  PS8587.T4448M35 2013 jC813'.6 C2013-903769-1

  Cape Breton University Press

  PO Box 5300, Sydney, NS B1P 6L2 Canada

  www.cbupress.ca

  For Joe

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  If Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia and a dream,” then Sydney’s Whitney Pier is a tar pond, a coke oven, a million tons of contaminated soil, a broken field of black rubble and wild grass, a yellow mountain of pure sulphur and a long line of underground pipes that carry the deadliest chemicals known to humanity. Instead of sardines and junk heaps and honky tonks, it’s lobsters, toxic sludge and fiddle music.

  That’s how my sister Tina began her English essay. It got worse from there.

  I wouldn’t have to search too far around here to find the kind of folks that lived in Monterey – the whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches that Steinbeck describes. I’m not sure how many pimps and gamblers there are in Sydney, because they keep it under wraps. There are plenty of whores, though, and I do know of one bona fide son of a bitch. My father. He makes up for all of Steinbeck’s put together.

  I didn’t get a chance to read the rest of it; she grabbed it out of my hand when I proposed toning it down a bit. Tina didn’t believe in toning anything down, and my suggestion to do so only prompted her to scribble a bunch of stuff in the margin while mumbling something about naming the whores.

  She’s right about my father though.

  He blames his disposition on the coal mines. But then my father blames everything on the coal mines. Doesn’t matter that he smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, his wheezing is black lung, caused from the years he spent down there. My mother didn’t die from pneumonia, it was living near coal mines that did it. Bad weather? The mines. And my sister’s condition, it was caused by the mines too. That and the fact she was born on the ides of March.

  My father’s been out of the ground for a few years now. But his fear of the mines has become morbid. He’s terrified of having to work in the colliery again, especially now that he’s almost forty-three. His father was forty-three when he died in the Springhill disaster – the so-called bump, which was really an earthquake that took out seventy-four men – and his grandfather was killed in the Sydney Mines accident twenty years before that. Crushed in a wreckage of cars when the haulage cable snapped, two weeks before his forty-third birthday.

  If his business failed, and it was just about to, it would be back into the ground for Dad. Deep under the Atlantic ocean, where he was sure to die from falling rocks, asphyxiation from gas, silicosis or being run over by a coal car. His only hope – the only one who could save him from an early grave – was a young boxer named Ryan Byrne. That’s what he thought. But life had a trick up its sleeve. Not just for my father – for Tina, too.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Saint Patrick’s Day, 1979

  “Time!” hollered my father. “What do you think this is, Byrne, a dancing class?” He banged his fist into the heavy bag. “Snap out that jab, do you hear me? Harder … harder….” He swore a few times. “You’re a weakling. I mean it – a weakling.”

  “Dad,” I said, “I’m leaving now. I’ll be—”

  “From the shoulder … from the shoulder it has to come.” His eyes stayed fixed on Ryan Byrne, his only shot in the professional light-heavyweight division. Win that title, and the gym thrives. Lose it, and it’s game over.

  “Okay, whatever,” he said, shooing me away with his left hand like I was a fly.

  My father’s gym was on the ground floor of a two-storey yellow brick building in Whitney Pier, a neighbourhood in the industrial part of Sydney, and we lived above it – he, my sister and I. He’d trained plenty of boxers, but no real contenders, just a string of palookas. Tenth raters. So when Ryan Byrne came along, it changed everything. My father would have done anything to be his manager – it’s the manager who matters in boxing – but the twenty-year-old already had one of those and wasn’t interested in my father whatsoever. Still, if Byrne could make it to the top, our gym would be a going concern. Young men would be banging on the doors for training, and maybe one of them would be good enough to need a manager. That was my father’s dream. That was Sandy MacKenzie’s dream.

  I looked out through the dusty plate glass to the store across the street and waved to Azalea Lester. She’s Black, and not Irish, but she’d taped up so many four-leaf clovers on her door and window, all I could see was her hand waving back. On the seventeenth of March, everyone around the Pier, Irish or not, managed to find something green to wear and drank beer and talked about luck. Except for my father. The only luck he believed in was the bad kind.

  I walked past two half-naked Italians, sparring with their reflections in the full-length mirror, their moves quick, almost mechanical. Other young men jumped rope – jump, jump, jump, stiff as boards – or strained at sit-ups on floor mats. In the ring, two fighters bounced on and off the q
uivering ropes. Behind them, the peanut bag went smacka-smacka-smacka like a machine gun. And in the middle of it all stood my sister Tina, slamming a medicine ball into a welterweight’s stomach and hollering louder than our father.

  “Not good enough. Gotta be twice that fast or they’ll have you for lunch out there. And don’t look at me like that. You’re not working on combinations. You’ve been throwing one punch at a time. No good. Jab, jab, hook. Got it?”

  Dan Campbell was a couple years older than Tina. He was a university student and loved boxing, but he wasn’t likely to make it far professionally. Life had been decent to him, so he didn’t have the required chip on his shoulder; he lacked that need-to-make-somebody-pay attitude that will take an ordinary fighter and turn him into a winner. To get to the top in this sport, you’ve got to have a cold-blooded killer instinct – you have to sense where the other guy is weak, then belt him into next week with an uppercut to the jaw.

  Flyin’ Ryan Byrne was a good fighter, all right. But he wasn’t hungry enough either, at least not according to Tina. My father exploded at the suggestion, but I think inside he knew she was right. After all, Dad had boxed during the late fifties and early sixties, when Cape Breton was a breeding ground for champions. Back when young men from New Waterford and Sydney Mines and the Pier spent long days working underground or the mill and tried to fight their way out of the grind by entering the ring. They had their eyebrows torn off and their jaws broken, but they kept on fighting because they needed to.

  Still, Byrne was good and had a chance at a title, so my father spent every minute on him; the amateurs, like Dan, were last on his list. He got around to them eventually, but more often than not, it was my sister who taped their hands, rubbed Vaseline on their faces and showed them how to duck and bob.

  “Tina,” I said, “I’m going now. I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah, okay.” She tossed the ball against the wall. “Take a break,” she told Dan, “and don’t forget the water. Every drop of it. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Boss,” he replied, giving her a dirty look. Then he turned to me and winked. “How do you stand her?” He sauntered off, shaking his head and mopping his brow.

  Tina liked Dan Campbell. A lot. Of course she’d never admit it. She just worked him hard and hollered at him all the time. I think if she’d been a normal girl, she would have used my perfume and maybe a bit of mascara on the nights he was training at the gym. She did wear her pink sweats, though, and always washed her hair.

  “I wish you’d change your mind,” I said, hoping she’d come with me to the dance at the high school. But I knew she wouldn’t. It was hard enough to get her to attend classes let alone social events. She hated the teachers. She hated the students. She hated the classrooms. She probably even hated the janitor.

  “I could stay home, you know,” I mumbled. “Maybe we could watch a movie or something. I don’t care that much about the dance.”

  Tina narrowed her eyes.

  “Damn it all, Ellie. Why the … why would I want to go to a dance? You know I never dance. And you know why I never dance. And please, stop acting so guilty. You look like you just ate the last cupcake. For God’s sake, go to the dance. Go, go, go. I’ll survive it.”

  “Why … why don’t you ask Dan to come with you?” I forced out the words, swallowed hard and took two steps backward.

  “Oh, crap. That’s such crap, Ellie, and you know it is.” Acid spilled off every word. “I pity the poor bastard that winds up at a dance with me.” She fired three left hooks into the bottom of the closest punching bag.

  “Maybe Dan would like to go.” Another two steps back.

  Tina didn’t reply.

  “Well, he might,” I said.

  She spelled something out with her lips, and it wasn’t very nice. Then she turned away from me. “Nobody wants to dance with a midget.” She made it sound like touring the morgue or being boiled in oil.

  A young flyweight walked past us, bleeding from the forehead. Tina pulled a role of white adhesive tape out of the first-aid cabinet and tossed it to him. “Keep your chin tucked in,” she told him. “You’re leaving yourself wide open.”

  My sister had just turned eighteen. She’s a year older than me, but whereas I was going to graduate in a year, she had miles to go. Miles to go and she’d probably never get there. Part of it was her own fault, and part of it was having to miss classes when the pain got bad. Her legs and spine gave her a lot of trouble.

  Tina suffers from achondroplasia, a genetic mutation otherwise known as dwarfism. She never uses the word dwarf or midget, unless she’s really mad at someone. And while most people born with the condition refer to themselves as little people, Tina hates that label too. She says she’s four feet tall, but the last time we checked she was three foot eleven and a half. Which isn’t bad for a dwarf. And she is beautiful. Her long reddish-blonde hair and big blue eyes, if they were pasted onto a young woman of normal height, would turn heads. My sister turns heads all right, but for the wrong reason.

  So I marched solemnly out the door, went to the dance (which was one long sweep of mediocrity), and reminded myself every third song or so that I did have a right to have fun, even though I wasn’t having any. The music committee, which was made up of boys from the audio/visual club (all of whom were also in the chess club), chose songs with the predictability of cost accountants. By the time “Stairway to Heaven” finished off the night, the girls were slumped over their boyfriends like seaweed on a rock, and I was ready to go home.

  Anyway, I was glad Tina didn’t come; whoever put up the decorations had an obvious penchant for paper leprechauns – they were glued to the walls, strung from the ceiling, used as centrepieces for every table and even stuck on the washroom doors. And if there was anything my sister hated more than teachers, it was leprechauns.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Living over a gym and surrounded constantly by men and the smell of sweat, Tina and I were used to all kinds of unsavoury things. We were accustomed to spit buckets and unflushed toilets and language that would make a sailor blush. We’d shared our meals with shady managers and crooked promoters, men with mashed-in faces whose eyes shifted back and forth like a metronome when you asked them to pass the ketchup. So when Tina told me she’d met a big shot from the world of boxing while I was at the dance, I kept on brushing my teeth and didn’t pay much attention.

  When she said it was Mickey O’Shea who had come by, the toothbrush fell out of my hand and bounced right out of the sink.

  O’Shea, a racketeer from the west end of Montréal and kingpin of the Irish mob, made Al Capone look like Winnie the Pooh. I’d read about how he fenced stolen jewelry and brokered liquor and laundered money. And I knew that he fixed boxing matches in Montréal and Boston. But those activities were just hobbies for O’Shea. The big bucks were in illicit drugs. And the newspapers were rife with pieces about guys who got on O’Shea’s bad side and ended up at the bottom of the St. Lawrence chained to a block of concrete.

  I pictured him in a pinstriped suit and fedora, with thin yellow lips and a cigar hanging from one side of his down-turned mouth. Beside him, I saw two henchmen with close-set eyes and a gorgeous blonde who, when she removed her fur coat, looked underdressed for the swimming pool. I figured he had slammed through our front door, said “Outta my way, sister,” when Tina asked for his autograph (since I know she’s fascinated by organized crime), then held a gun to my father’s head and told him there was no point in arguing, Ryan Byrne was boxing for the mob now.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Tina, snipping off the strands of my imagination like spaghetti between her teeth. “You’ve been watching those crap gangster movies again.” Although she did admit that when O’Shea sat down, she noticed a handgun in an ankle holster. And it was indeed Ryan Byrne he’d come to watch.

  “Mickey had on a dark blue cashmere sweater and jeans,” she said casua
lly. She pulled down her bed sheets and climbed in.

  “Mickey?” I said. “You called him Mickey?”

  “Not until we’d had a couple of beers.”

  “Beer?” I said. “You drank beer with a mobster?”

  “I always have beer on St. Patrick’s.” She shut out the light. “They dye it green.”

  O’Shea’s favourite colour, I thought. The colour of money.

  “You went to the pub?” I turned the lamp back on. “And they didn’t ask for ID?”

  Tina looked at me with half-shut cobra eyes.

  “You know why I don’t get asked for ID don’t you, Ellie? Waitresses are afraid to ask my age. They can’t decide if I’m eleven or thirty-five.”

  “Oh, Tina,” I sighed. “Come on, tell me more about O’Shea.”

  “He wanted to get a bite to eat. So what.” She clicked the light off again, this time decisively. “Nobody else would go with him, so I offered. Besides, they have a great pool table over there.” She grinned. “And I won twenty bucks.”

  I turned the light back on. “I can’t believe Dad let you go.”

  Tina rolled over to face me. “Sandy doesn’t give a damn what I do.” She got out of bed, grabbed a shirt and unscrewed the hot light bulb. Then she stuck it in her bedside drawer and slammed it shut. Moonlight streamed through the window behind her.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked. Really I wanted to know if he paid the waitress with a crisp fifty.

  “Boxing,” she replied.

  “What else?”

  “What else is there?”

  I never understood what Tina saw in boxing. I kept thinking that one day, the magic of two men pummelling each other in the face would be revealed to me all of a sudden, like the contents of a letter written in lemon juice then held over a candle. But my sister was just as mystified when, on the first day of every month, I raced over to Azalea’s and grabbed the new issue of Seventeen magazine out of her hand before she could put it on the shelf. Even more than leprechauns and teachers, Tina hated the articles in Seventeen – stuff like “Ex-boyfriends: Can You Still be Friends?,” “What You Can Tell From Your Boyfriend’s Palm,” and “How to Make a Macramé Purse in One Afternoon.” She said it was crap.