Champion of the World (18 page)

“Ma'am,” he said.

Carol Jean's surprise turned to anger as she helped Taft limp across the wide porch. “No harm?” she said over her shoulder. “Is this what no harm looks like to you?”

Then the two of them went through the door into the lodge, closing it behind them, not quite a slam. Moira picked up the tea tray and carried it across the grass to the little cabin where, feeling day drunk and unsure what to do with herself, she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. Fifteen minutes later she woke with a start to the sound of the orange cat clawing at the closed door. The beast wouldn't stop until she got up and let him inside.

T
he morning air smelled of pine needles and sang against Taft's black eye as he made his way down toward the main gate. He was sporting a fresh gash in his chin from the fall he'd taken the previous day, and the way it seemed to buzz in the chill made him think winter was nearly upon them. He had not slept well, and about halfway down the trail he stopped suddenly in his tracks as he became aware of a distant banging sound. More phantom noises, he thought, closing his eyes, whispering a silent prayer he hoped would banish this new racket from his mind. When he opened them, the sound was still there, mirroring the shame and terror that were thudding along in the darkest parts of his heart.

As if God is going to help you,
he thought.
You don't think God reads the papers?

He knew this was Foxwood coming home to roost, and it made him feel as scared and vulnerable as a child standing there in the middle of the trail. He hoped a morning jog would take his mind off things. Maybe the phantom sounds would fade if he could distract himself with some hard work. Perhaps he could run his mind into shape the same way he could his body.

When he got to the gate, Fitch and Prichard weren't there. He kicked dirt and waited a couple of minutes, but the quiet, deserted
feeling told him that they weren't going to show. As he bent to stretch he noticed that the hammering sound had changed: it seemed closer now. He followed the noise up a short rise through a stand of trees to the garage. Pepper Van Dean was up there, nailing heavy boards across the building's side door. As Taft came up out of the trees, Van Dean stopped hammering and smiled at him like a cat that had a secret.

Taft was used to being despised by white men. Before he was even a teenager, grown adults began looking at him with loathing and fear. Quick to threaten him, put their hands on him, tell him to know his place. As he got bigger, they stopped touching him, but the sidelong glances grew more murderous. Their mouths pressed into hard frowns, eyes shining with something more than rage. At the height of his fame as a wrestler, he knew very well his lifestyle was a thumb in the eye of so-called good, decent folks. He lived that way on purpose, with his fast cars and white mistresses. It only got worse when they put him in the papers as a whoremonger. Worse even than that when he married Carol Jean.

The way Van Dean looked at him was different, though. There wasn't a scrap of worry or nervousness in his eyes. Taft could tell right away Van Dean didn't hate him out of dumb cowardice. The little man was not afraid. This was something else.

He walked to the end of the garage and looked around the corner, where the big doors had also been shackled with a hefty chain. Heat rose in his face and he spun around, asking just what the hell Van Dean thought he was doing.

“Day one stuff,” Van Dean said through tight lips. He was holding a nail between his teeth. The bruises on his face were yellowing as they healed. “You can't be the boss of your own training camp. In fifteen years, I've never seen that work out. Not once.”

Taft's head was still buzzing, and just as Van Dean began to
speak, he experienced a moment of vertigo. He took a step back, bracing one arm against the garage.

“This is Wednesday,” he said, sounding shaken and weak even to himself. “Wednesday is for my roadwork and weights.”

“Not anymore,” Van Dean said, taking the nail out of his mouth and plunking it into a coffee can he had sitting next to his toolbox. The hammer swung loosely in his hand. He didn't seem to be sweating or struggling with the work he'd been doing. “As head coach, I'll be implementing a new training regimen of my own design. You're a wrestler, not a strongman, and you're carrying around too much muscle as it is. All that bulk takes blood and wind to make it run, and after your little display yesterday, wind looks to be in pretty short supply around here. We aim to lose pounds, not pack them on. As a result, no more weights.”

“You don't understand,” Taft said, finding his legs now, feeling steadier. “My agreement with Mr. Mundt gives me final authority over my own person and workouts.”

“Right,” Van Dean said, “and that's why you look like a baked potato with muscleman arms.”

Taft swallowed the urge to knock the little guy's teeth out. He cleared his throat. “Where are Fitch and Prich?” he said. “Where's Mr. Mundt?”

“I fired those two ham-and-eggers,” Van Dean said. “As for Fritzie, I figure he's asleep. It's still pretty early in the morning.”

Taft did not like the way Van Dean had of pointing out the obvious, as if everyone around him was stupid. He told him this and informed him that he was not stupid.

“Now,” Taft said, trying to get it under control. Trying not to sound hysterical. “Maybe you mean to tell me how I'm supposed to train with no training partners? How I'm supposed to train at all with my wrestling gym all boarded up?”

“That's the other thing,” Van Dean said. “No more wrestling. Not until you build up a constitution that can handle it without, you know, further episodes.”

Taft's jaw felt as tight as if he'd spent the last week chewing tire rubber. He put his hands on his hips, then behind his back. “This won't do,” he said.

Van Dean seemed to only be getting calmer. “Are you really that simple?” he asked. “Are you really dumb enough to believe you can go on curling your little dumbbells and rolling with your chubby training pals and it'll get you anywhere besides having Stanislaw Lesko whip your ass in front of ten thousand people? Ten thousand
white
people who all paid their money for the
express
purpose
of seeing you get your big black ass whipped? Would you like that? Is that the end result we're aiming for here?”

“We don't even know if Strangler Lesko will agree to wrestle me,” Taft said. “We've got no contracts, no bout agreements, nothing we're even working toward.”

“Well, that's a fantastic way of looking at things,” Van Dean said. “If that's the case, then I suppose we all might as well just go on being unbelievable fat-asses.”

This time Taft did swing at him, a right hand aimed for the bridge of the shorter man's nose. Except, when the punch got there, Van Dean was gone and Taft's fist collided with the rough wood of the door. A sharp jab of pain bolted up to his elbow as he drew it back. He turned to where Van Dean had slipped a step to the side, still not breathing hard, still not sweating, still holding the hammer.

“To hell with you,” Taft said, shaking the pain out of his hand. “I quit.”

Van Dean gave him that small man's smirk of his. “Quit what?” he said. “You quit not working hard? You quit taking handouts from Fritz Mundt for a match even you say might not happen? You quit
having every physical advantage and none of the heart to make it worth a damn?”

Taft shoved him, sending him skittering backward, his shoulders bouncing off the side of the garage and the hammer clattering to the ground. The surprise that bloomed in Van Dean's eyes boiled quickly into anger and he took a long, deliberate step forward. He was so short, Taft almost smiled. They stood there staring into each other's faces, each daring the other to do something until the sound of a door slamming echoed across the hunting camp lawn. The hired girl came out onto the back porch of the lodge and began beating a hallway runner with a long wooden spoon, watching them with the bored eyes of a housewife keeping tabs on the neighborhood. Taft took a step back and Van Dean reset his shoulders, smoothing the front of his shirt with his hands. He gave Taft a long look, ferocious hatred plain on his face, before he stooped to retrieve the hammer.

T
en minutes later they both walked into Fritz Mundt's office and found him sitting behind his desk, wearing a bathrobe. He rubbed a palm across his face as if still trying to wipe away the sleep and pulled the bell to call for coffee. The toes of his slippers stuck out underneath the front of the desk, playing a quiet drumbeat against the carpet. James Eddy perched in the room's sitting area looking as put-together as ever, as if he had been up primping since four that morning. Taft and Van Dean took chairs facing them.

“This is a first,” Fritz said. “This is a new one on me.”

“You brought me in,” Van Dean said. “This is my way.”

“We brought you in to train our wrestler,” Fritz said. “Not shut down training camp on your first day.”

“Second day,” Van Dean said. “The first day was the day your
wrestler
fainted after one of the lighter workouts I've ever seen. And I've seen some light ones.”

The way Van Dean twisted his mouth around the word
wrestler
needled Taft's gut. “Did you ever think,” he said, turning slightly in his seat, “that you were only hired because nobody else would agree to move out here to play Daniel Boone?”

“Far as I know,” Van Dean said, “they brought me in because I'm one of the best scientific wrestlers in the world, pound for pound, and your technique—even when you're not unconscious—is lousy.”

Taft appealed to Fritz. “Look,” he said. “You told me to move into the boonies. I did it. You told me to ride out to Washington and whip Jack Sherry. I did it. Now, if you can get me a shot at Strangler Lesko, make it happen. Show me something on paper and I promise you I'll work as hard as anyone to get ready.”

“Right,” Van Dean said. “Every heavyweight I ever knew was just
about
to start training hard.”

“So long as our wrestling room is boarded up, no one is working hard,” Fritz said, scowling. “Frankly, I'm as stumped as Mr. Taft. What are you proposing we do here if we're not wrestling and we're not working out?”

“I propose we run,” Van Dean said. “I propose we run and run and run and run.”

Taft snorted. “Show me contracts,” he said again. “Until then, I don't see the point of killing myself chasing the great white whale.”

“I see some logic in it.”

This was Eddy, out of his chair and strolling over to join the group. He lit a cigarette, leaning one hip against the side of Fritz's desk, a white swirl of smoke curling up into the air around him.

“You're never going to out-muscle Lesko,” he said, “so you better outwork him, isn't that it?”

Van Dean nodded, though his face said the last thing he wanted to do was agree with Eddy.

“Be that as it may,” Fritz said, going along deliberately as if he was annoyed with the interruption. “I'm not sure how comfortable I feel committing the daily operating funds to a training camp that's not operating daily.”

“He's not ready,” Van Dean said. “You put him on the mat with me or anybody else worth spit, it'll be a lot uglier than things got yesterday. It'll be a lot uglier than Jack Sherry.”

Taft raised his arms to Fritz as if to show the size of his headache.

“Pepper,” Fritz said, straining for a sensible tone. “Is there anything we can do here?”

Van Dean smiled again. The same smile Taft saw outside the garage that morning. The same look in his eye, contemptuous and chiding. A deeper hurt lurking in there, too, and for the first time he started to wonder if testing wills with this man was an unwise thing to do.

“I'll make you a deal,” Van Dean said. “I'll strip those boards off that garage and we can go back to work on wrestling the day the illustrious and celebrated
Mister
Garfield Taft beats me in a footrace.”

Fritz and Taft both scoffed and Eddy clapped his hands. Van Dean just went on, laying it out. Same as the old routine, he said: they would run from the camp down the road to town and back. If Taft made it back to camp before Van Dean did, he would open up the wrestling room. If not, he said, they do it all over the next day and the day after and the day after, until Taft beat him.

When he was finished, no one spoke. Taft nodded once, definitively, and stood up.