Champion of the World (26 page)

It was possible she had inherited this inability to sit still from either of her parents. Her father, obviously, had never been good with free time. Her mother told her that at one point she liked boats
but grew to hate them soon after choosing to live on one. After Moira's father's disappearance and during their final weeks together, Moira's mother said many times that she believed boats had ruined her life.

She'd been working as a cook in an all-night diner in East St. Louis when she met Moira's father. Just a girl who had never been outside St. Clair County. He came in on an overnight stopover and waited for her at the counter until her shift ended so he could walk her home. They watched the sun rise over the city and a few hours later he was gone, shipped out again as the
Lady Luck
plowed upriver.

Ninety days later he was back, only to find that the woman whose touch he said he could still feel on his body but whose face he could barely remember was three months pregnant. This was the story her mother told, anyway, though even as a girl Moira wasn't sure she believed it. The light in her mother's eyes was strange when she talked about it, and Moira could never decide if the story was meant to be romantic, tragic or a warning about messing with a certain kind of boy. If it was the latter, Moira thought now with a wry smile, the message didn't take.

It had always been her opinion that her father had done right by her mother. At least as right as he could. He got her a job in the riverboat's kitchen and they were married just a month later with the ship's captain presiding. Five months after that, Moira was born, with the boat in dry dock and the crew scattered until the winter was over. Confined to a tiny one-bedroom apartment in East St. Louis, their relationship had already begun to sour. At least, that's how it seemed as far back as Moira could remember. As she got older, she realized her father was a man whose appetites were too big for him. He drank; he gambled to excess. He had been with half the women on the boat and had steady girls in many of the towns where the
Lady Luck
docked. Despite all this, people liked him. His easy smile and quick wit made him the kind of man women rolled their eyes
over, slapping him playfully on the arm when he said something fresh.

“That's just Jack,” they'd say to each other, sometimes close enough for Moira to hear. A few of them would just blush and shake their heads.

From the time she could push a broom, he arranged for her to have work on the boat. She swept out the grand dance hall and casino room, and the captain, an old man who looked like there was not a single hair anywhere on his body, let her keep the coins she occasionally found. Soon enough, she was promoted to ice duty, hauling buckets back and forth between the ship's massive cold rooms and its many bars. It was mindless and difficult work, but important, since one of the boat's main draws was the large, red-lettered banner hanging between the top and main decks blaring
Free Ice!
to each new town where the
Lady Luck
docked.

Later she worked the floor as a cocktail girl and, finally, at her father's urging, became an apprentice dealer in the casino. She started with the easy games—bunko, three-card poker and blackjack—but eventually worked her way up to faro and even dealt poker in the ship's exclusive private room. Whenever her father could slip away from his own duty—which was often, it seemed—he'd stand quietly behind her table and watch her, later delivering a full report of what she'd done right and wrong, appraising her mechanics, demeanor and posture behind the table.

“Never slouch,” he told her once. “Players need to see the card turner as the most upstanding guy in the house.”

The problem in the end was that her mother could never fall all the way out of love with him. Through all the fights and fleeting estrangements, she never stopped seeing him as the devilish and handsome young man who plucked her out of that greasy spoon in East St. Louis. Her mother's love was the suffocating kind. A couple of times Moira caught her snooping through her father's things while
he was working, looking for clues to who he might be spending time with when his shift was over. Once she'd even tried to enlist Moira to spy on him, but Moira wanted no part of it. Most nights her mother riddled him with questions as soon as he came through the door of their stateroom, and when she got drunk those questions turned to shouts and shoves, the occasional slap. When she was sober there were whispered apologies, tearful apologies, apologies already loaded with the next night's suspicions.

Moira's father was her teacher and confidant and she wouldn't betray him, even to her mother. Of course, he really was a cheat, a drunkard and a cad, but that never mattered to her. She accepted it as part of him, as much as his tranquil table manner or his slow, affected way of talking. Then, when she was fifteen, he disappeared during an overnight run between Vicksburg and Lake Providence. He simply went off to his evening shift in the cardroom and never came back. In the morning the crew searched the boat from stem to stern and discovered one of their sad little lifeboats gone and a young, married cocktail girl also missing. The news just about broke what was left of her mother, as she screamed and thrashed and had to be restrained by two thick-shouldered engine-room workers. A day later they found the lifeboat empty and beached on a sandbar fifty yards from shore, and Moira began to suspect her mother had killed both of them. Probably shoved her father over the railing of the boiler deck in a drunken rage after catching the two of them in the act, then loosed the lifeboat afterward to make it look like they had eloped. Her mother could be clever like that.

Moira didn't wait long enough to find out for sure. Even if her mother hadn't done it, Moira couldn't stand the thought of living with her, just the two of them in their hot, overstuffed room. As soon as the
Lady Luck
docked at Lake Providence, she took what little money the family had saved in a tin on the shelf above the bed where now only her mother slept, then left. It was the last she ever
heard of either of them until years later, when a bridge builder's engineering team churned what was left of her father's body up from the bottom of the river, identifying him by the gambler's charm bracelet still looped around one bony wrist.

Now, alone in the cabin with the smell of Garfield Taft still lingering in the air, she thought of her father's face. Not of the paunchy forty-year-old tippler he had become by the time he died, but as a younger man, rakish and handsome and as quick with a line as any man alive. She remembered something he told her during one of their Sunday trips to a gambling hall in St. Louis. She'd been too young to play then, so she spent the day standing at her father's shoulder and had been the only one who saw him slip an ace out of his shirtsleeve in order to take down a big pot just before they headed for home. She'd confronted him about it on the walk back to the boat, while he was still counting and re-counting the money and shuffling it from pocket to pocket like he was looking for a place he wouldn't lose it. She expected him to be angry with her for noticing his cheat, but instead he just laughed. Something like pride flashed across his face as he slipped a dollar bill into the pocket of her jacket and tucked her under his arm.

“One of the main rules to know,” he said. “Only play fair when you've got the best hand.”

T
aft spent an hour locked in the upstairs bedroom hoping Carol Jean would cool down. It didn't work, and when he came down the front staircase carrying a pillow and blanket from their bed, she hurled a glass ashtray at him. It missed by a mile, sailing over his head to shatter high on the wooden archway between the foyer and the parlor. He shielded his eyes from the exploding shards of crystal and then, as a slow shower of ash began to fall around him like confetti, he set his things on the floor and held her down on the red velvet chair by the front window.

He tried to explain to her that nothing had happened between him and the Van Dean woman—that he'd only stayed in the cabin to keep her safe from the Canadians—but Carol Jean wouldn't listen. She smelled like sour mash and her thrashing eventually forced him to turn her loose. For some reason, when she was free she stayed seated in the deep, heavy chair, swearing and writhing as he went and retrieved the bedclothes from where he'd left them.

“I should've figured you'd take a run at that bony little cow,” she hissed at him as he came back down. “I suppose I should be relieved it means you still like girls.”

Hearing that, he put one boot on the side of the chair and, as
gently as he could, tipped it over. Carol Jean went down on her backside, screaming with rage. She tried to chase him but couldn't get to her feet, pinned between the chair and the wall. Taft slammed the door behind him, hauling the blanket and pillow up to the old garage, where he used a rock to knock the padlock off its big swinging doors. He would have to do something about the boards Van Dean had nailed up on the smaller side entrance, too, but there would be time for that. Once inside, he saw that the smaller man had lied to him—that his racks of dumbbells and barbells were all still there. He was stiff from sleeping in the hard wooden chair in the tiny cabin, but felt wound up now.

Instead of lying down to try to rest, he took up some of the weights and worked his way through one of his normal warm-up routines. He went slow, concentrating on precise curls and smooth presses. At first it felt good, like his muscles were waking up from a long sleep, the exercises clearing his head and allowing his mind to wander. He raised sweat on his shoulders and brows and it only made him go harder, moving to heavier weights and liking the feeling of the pressure building up in his arms. After a few minutes he stopped and shook the tightness out of his torso, going outside to look out at the mountains and let the breeze dry his sweat.

Oh, you like girls, all right,
he said to himself as he stood there.
You like every single wrong one you see.

The first girl he'd ever kissed was white, back when his family was living in Madisonville, outside of Cincinnati. At sixteen Taft got a job working in the kitchen of a little neighborhood diner, the only job he ever had that wasn't wrestling. The diner served oily coffee and passable food, and its location up the street from city hall made it a favorite of local politicians and off-duty cops. Madisonville was one of the only places in the city where whites and blacks lived and worked together, so the diner's kitchen staff was
all black, while the waitresses and most of the customers were white.

Waitresses were not supposed to come back into the kitchen to talk to the men working there, so of course they did it all the time. They were live-wire girls who held their hair back from their faces with paper hats and wore their aprons pulled tight over gray uniforms, white piping on the shoulders and sleeves. When the manager was at work they would flirt with the cooks, busboys and dishwashers through the small window that separated the dining room from the kitchen, and when he wasn't there, they'd come into the kitchen to chat while they smoked their cigarettes in a small alcove near the back door.

Taft didn't remember the name of the girl he kissed, just that she was one of the prettiest. Small and raven-haired, with bright blue eyes, the top of her head barely came to his shoulders, so he had to stoop way down to press his lips on hers. Clumsy, when he thought of it now, doing it in a rush in the alley out back, both of them on a smoke break and neither of them smoking. She knew of him from his wrestling, of course. In Cincinnati, white boys and black boys were not allowed to wrestle each other in competition, so they arranged special meet-ups and challenge matches whenever either group had a boy they thought was particularly tough. As the best in the city, Taft was the one the white boys wanted to wrestle most of all. The pretty waitress said her brother had been among his opponents, though Taft didn't remember him. Just some boy he'd beaten.

“No more of that now,” he said after he kissed her. “You want to get me killed.”

“You won't get in any trouble at all,” she teased. “You're too special.”

Then they kissed again.

He had gotten into trouble, though. He'd lost his job, and the
diner's manager threatened to tell the authorities if Taft ever came back there. He wasn't sure he ever saw the dark-haired girl again. If he did, he didn't remember that, either. He did remember her words, though, as clearly as if she had just said them, even now when much of his memory was retreating to a dark place beyond his reach:
You're too special
.

As a boy, when Taft first became interested in physical culture, he'd tried to attend a few of the black sports clubs on the outskirts of Madisonville but found them too rough. Because he was already big for his age, the older men and boys there were always keen to try him in a fight. When he started coming home with black eyes and bloody noses, his parents, the kind of deeply religious folks other people rolled their eyes at behind their backs, forbade him to go back. Instead, his father pinched together as much money as he could and paid for him to join one of the downtown white clubs.

It wasn't easy, because blacks were barred from all of Cincinnati's better sporting associations. But the owner of the Chancery Athletic Club, an elderly white man named Adolph Fell, must have been intrigued after listening to Taft's father beg and plead and brag on the prowess of his son, because he demanded to see the boy in the flesh. So on a Saturday morning his father loaded him on a streetcar and shuttled him downtown to the club, as big and impressive a place as he had ever seen at that time, and ordered him through a series of jumps, sprints and weight-lifting feats for this strange old white man. Fell stood back the whole while against one of the gym's sweat-stained walls with his arms folded over a bare chest of scraggly gray hairs. It was unsettling, the first time in his life Taft felt like a show animal, paraded around, poked and jostled while Fell nodded and made small humming sounds as if cataloging every move in his mind.

Whatever Taft accomplished that day, the old man must have
been impressed, because with his father's money pocketed he said the boy could come in and do his work after hours, after the white members had gone home for the day. Taft was delighted. For him it was the perfect arrangement, as it allowed him to do his workouts in private, without having to worry about other guys testing him. Soon Adolph Fell himself began to take an interest in his progress, designing routines he said would maximize his unique physical gifts and helping him perfect the movements of each exercise.

It didn't dawn on Taft until much later that Fell was a homosexual. At the time he just thought of him as a peculiar old man. He never presented himself to Taft in any inappropriate way. There were no secret gropings or come-ons like you sometimes heard about in seedier gyms. Still, years later, when he finally realized what Fell was, it bothered him. Was the old man secretly lusting after him during those private sessions? Was that the reason Fell let him join the gym in the first place? Taft loved women, and as he grew older it was obvious that women loved him back, but he often wondered now if that early relationship with Adolph Fell had opened some tiny door inside him, one that made him consider possibilities that might otherwise have been unthinkable to him. He guessed now he would never know. He had been with all kinds of women, of course, but the two he'd pledged major parts of his life to were both white. He wondered now if Fell was somehow responsible for that, too.

His admittance into the Chancery Athletic Club was also the first time in his life he realized the rules didn't apply to him. He went places black men weren't supposed to go, did things they weren't supposed to do. He stayed in the best hotels, made extravagant requests of waiters and bandleaders, shot his mouth off to white men and did things with white women that would've gotten any other black man lynched. For him, though, it was allowed. At least for a while. And why not? He
was
special, wasn't he? He was, in his own
opinion, the greatest natural wrestler who had ever lived. He had never been beaten and, had he not been arrested, he would've gone to Chicago and beat Joe Stecher for the world's heavyweight title. It would have been easy. Stecher was good, but he was no Frank Gotch. He was no Garfield Taft.

He had to laugh at himself a little bit, thinking this way.
Spilled milk,
his mother would have said, flashing the broad-minded but exasperated look she used when she thought her son was being ridiculous. Yet here he was, thinking that maybe he could still be champion.

I'm still ridiculous, Mama,
he thought.
I'm the most ridiculous man alive.

It had been a shock to him, once he was arrested, tried and sentenced to actual prison, to learn that he was not bigger than the rules after all. All of the special treatment he'd gotten as a famous wrestler had just been an illusion. In the only way that really counted, he was still just a black man, and if the whites decided they wanted to lock him up somewhere, they would. Simple as that. Even after the trial, in the days leading up to his sentencing, he half expected to be set free. As he lay awake at night in his holding cell in the county courthouse, he imagined he would be out and driving his race cars and eating at his favorite restaurants before he knew it. Sleeping in his big house with Carol Jean or Judith or whoever else he wanted. Thinking back on it, he wasn't sure what he thought might happen. Did he think old Adolph Fell was going to come around wearing one of his outlandish outfits and explain to the judge and jury that, no, no, this particular Negro had too much potential, was just too pretty to be treated like the rest? Did a lifetime spent being told nothing but yes, yes, yes make him believe his own specialness would trump it all? Maybe it did.

Well, that was all gone now, wasn't it?

He set the dumbbells down and went to the wrestling mat and did a series of push-ups and then, because he was still feeling good, some deep knee bends, hearing his joints creak and whimper under his weight. When that was over he did an exaggerated duck walk around the edge of the canvas, lunging forward with his front leg and trying to keep his torso as straight up and down as he could. Sweat dripped on the mat but he kept going, feeling the rush of it now after so much time off, so much doing nothing. He might not be special anymore, but he was still quick and strong. Carol Jean would come around, he told himself; she would sober up and see how stupid she had been to throw the ashtray at him and say those hurtful things. She would realize how silly it was to think he would have betrayed her with the Van Dean woman.

With his legs tiring, he stood up straight at the middle of the mat and was struck suddenly with a wave of dizziness that dropped him to one knee. The dirt floor spun around his head, the weight rack catapulting along with it, the whole garage twisting. He closed his eyes, feeling a tingling in the tips of his fingers. Shaking them out, he heard a strange fluttering sound whistling in his ears and he willed it to stop. He tried to concentrate on the physical things around him, the rough texture of the weight rack when he rested his hands there for balance, the coolness of the canvas under him, the smell of dirt and the faint tang of old motor oil.

He stayed down until he felt his balance come back to him and then stood slowly. Just as he got to his feet, a fit of coughing seized him and something came up in the back of his throat, a coppery taste, and he swallowed it down. His mouth was dry and he wished he'd thought to bring a bucket of water up from the pump. He'd have to go back to fetch one after a while. Maybe try again to talk some sense into Carol Jean.

He padded down to the far end of the wrestling mat, where he could see out the open doors. Pulling off his boots, he gathered his
blanket around him, holding the pillow on his lap, still breathing a little heavy from the exercise. Being still now with just the view, the isolation of this place struck him all over again. He looked around the garage, knowing what he would do next was lie down on the wrestling mat and hope for sleep. Like a hobo curling up in a doorway. Like an animal looking for a place to die.