Champion of the World (29 page)

“I ought to stay,” Pepper said to them when he went out onto the porch. “You all go on without me.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Fritz said. “I'm sure this all will blow over in a jiffy.”

She could tell from the pleading in his voice that Fritz didn't want to spend the evening alone with Taft. Pepper came back inside and held her hand. She let him but still wouldn't look at him. He told her how awful sorry he was but said that he had to go. It was part of his job, he said, and then added that if his two choices were to sit there and be ignored or go into town for a free meal, he'd take the meal. She might have laughed at that if he'd been talking to someone else. Instead she pulled her hand away.

He sighed as he stood up, exhausted, and after another minute of loitering—when she thought he might say something else—he left. She heard the grunting of the engine as Fritz set the clutch and they all sped off down the road. When her head felt better, she went to the window and looked out at the snow, the camp feeling even more desolate than before the men had returned.

M
oira's ankle had swollen to twice its normal size by the time she knocked on the front door of the lodge. It had been just over an hour since Pepper, Taft and Fritz had gone into town and thirty minutes since she watched James Eddy leave the hunting camp and drive off in the same direction. She had no idea when any of them would return but was feeling rattled, every gambler's instinct in her body telling her it was time to move. Each step sent pain dancing up her side as she climbed the hill, and she was almost glad when Carol Jean jerked the door open and daggered her with her eyes. At least it meant she could just stand there for a minute.

Carol Jean propped one hand on the doorjamb like a model posing for an advertising sketch. “Well, look at you,” she said. “I didn't know we were going to go on being so neighborly.”

“I wanted to apologize,” Moira said. “For the altercation that occurred this afternoon between our husbands.”

Even as she said it she was aware of the way she put her words, deflecting blame away from Pepper. How many years had she been doing that? she wondered. Carol Jean must have read the look on her face and the awkward way Moira was standing, because the hard expression vanished and she reached a hand out to touch her.

“My goodness,” she said. “You're injured.”

A moment later Carol Jean was ushering her into the warm, bright parlor, where a bundle of logs cracked and spit in the fireplace. They moved awkwardly together, the dull ache pounding through Moira's leg, and she tried not to show how glad she was when Carol Jean finally pushed her gently into an armchair, sliding over a low ottoman so Moira could prop up her foot. She lifted the hem of her skirt so Carol Jean could unlace her boot, revealing the ankle fat and purple underneath.

“You just wait here,” Carol Jean said. “I'll only be a minute.”

As the click of her steps disappeared down the hallway, Moira sat and listened to the big, empty house settling around her. With all the men gone to town, the place felt enormous and abandoned, like something being reclaimed by the land. As she cast her eyes down at her lap she was surprised at the state of her own hands. Her wood chopping and back-and-forth trips hauling water from the well had raised blisters on her fingers, and her skin was red and cracked from the cold, dry air.

The sight of them reminded her of her mother. Years of splitting time between the riverboat's kitchens and laundries turned her mother's hands into sharp, callused claws, so that even as a child Moira shuddered and pulled away when her mother tried to touch her. As she got older, she was forced to spend free afternoons in the laundry, helping to wash, sort and fold the crew's silly, bright uniforms. The work burned and irritated her own hands, and on top of the pain she was horrified at the idea it was turning her into her mother.

Frequently, people forgot things in the pockets of their uniforms: coins and paper money, letters, pay stubs, scribbled notes. Her mother kept a stack of envelopes with her as she sorted, and each time she found a lost item she sealed it up in one and wrote the crew member's name on it, making sure each got his belongings back with his laundry bag. How Moira longed to peek at some of those letters,
especially the ones written to crewmen on flowery, scented stationery. She knew there was something she wanted, maybe dreaded to see, in those letters. The only time Moira ever tried to reach for one, her mother slapped her hand away.

“Aren't you curious?” Moira asked.

“People need their secrets,” her mother said. “Sometimes you have to let them have that much.”

It was advice she never learned to take.

Moira didn't know if she'd closed her eyes as she sat waiting, but the next thing she knew, Carol Jean was back, squatting in front of the chair with a fat bandage rolled in one hand. Moira tried to tell her it wasn't necessary, but Carol Jean just told her to be still, her fingers feeling strange and cool on Moira's leg.

“I'd be a sorry excuse for a wrestler's wife,” Carol Jean said, “if I didn't know how to wrap an ankle or splint a finger when I needed to.”

“The other thing I wanted to make perfectly clear to you,” Moira said, “is that nothing happened between Mr. Taft and myself.”

Carol Jean started at the heel and gently but firmly wrapped the bandage up and around. “I know, honey,” she said at last. “I believe you.”

“You do?” Moira said. “I thought you put him out of the house.”

“I did no such thing,” Carol Jean said. “He's out there of his own accord, pouting. Waiting for me to apologize to him, probably. Maybe I owe him one, too, though he'll be waiting a long time if he thinks I'm going to crawl up there with my hat in my hand.”

“Why?”

Another funny little Carol Jean smile. “You know why. You're married to one of them, same as me.”

Carol Jean was a big woman with big hands, but she went about her work quick and deftly. Moira could feel the ankle throbbing under the thick material and for a moment it made her head spin.

“So,” she said, closing her eyes and then opening them. “The match is all set.”

“None of you thought it would happen, did you?” Carol Jean said. “But I always kept the faith.”

Looking down on her, sitting childlike on the floor, Moira felt a pang of sadness for Carol Jean. This was her moment of victory, the triumphant cap on those years she waited for Taft to be released from prison. All the time she spent playing the doting wife after his first wife filed for divorce. She had been shuffled from Ohio to Chicago to the woods of Montana, and for what? For love, certainly, but also for this.

“You must know they'll never let him beat Lesko,” Moira said. “They'll never let him win the world's heavyweight championship.”

Carol Jean finished her wrap job with a little snap of the bandage and sat back on her heels. “Of course not,” she said, eyes fierce. “I'm not a complete fool.”

“I didn't say you were,” Moira said. She thought back to a moment in the garage when Taft learned his contract didn't include a win bonus. Fritz and Pepper had moved the conversation along in a hurry when he asked about it. In her dazed state, Moira hadn't caught it, but now she recognized the careful steering of a lie. “But Mr. Taft doesn't know, does he?”

Carol Jean turned away as she stood, then set herself slowly on the adjacent seat. “Mr. Taft,” she said, “is a man, and a wrestler besides. They'll believe almost anything so long as it gets them through the day.”

“It seems cruel,” Moira said. “Why let him go through all this thinking he'll get a square deal if you know the truth?”

Carol Jean nearly laughed. “Because he wouldn't have done it otherwise,” she said. “His precious pride would've had us on the poor farm before long.”

“Pepper will have to tell him eventually,” Moira said. “What do you think he'll do when he finds out?”

“I have no earthly idea,” Carol Jean said. “But I hope to God both of those fools are up to their tasks.”

“Which are?”

“For your husband to convince him,” Carol Jean said, “and for mine to make a better decision than he did the last time.”

“I see,” Moira said. “What was it you told me before? Hold your nose and hope the check clears, was that it?”

“Go ahead, make jokes,” Carol Jean said. “You never saw what he was like before we found Mr. Mundt. He was a ghost, dragging us from one fleabag to another, moping around with this look in his eyes like some kind of neutered puppy. It's given him such a lift just being here, getting to wrestle again. Finally, the man I fell in love with is back in my life.”

“Is he?” Moira said, meaning to leave it at that. But there was more she wanted to say, the words bubbling up in her with an intensity she no longer had the strength to fight down. “Because I'm not certain Mr. Taft will even make it to New York, or be well enough to wrestle the match.”

“I beg your pardon?” Carol Jean said.

“The last time I came up here to see you, you said things had been different since he got out of prison. I asked how and you said Mr. Taft was disinterested. At first I thought you were speaking generally, but today he said some things to make me believe I hadn't caught your whole meaning. He said you haven't made love since he got out.”

It was a push toward the truth, maybe a clumsy one, but one Moira felt she needed to make. She couldn't say exactly why, only that she wanted an answer to the mystery that Taft had become in her life. Carol Jean smiled in a way she first thought was patronizing,
but then something cracked in it and it turned into the saddest smile she'd ever seen. Moira imagined she could go cascading down into it and never emerge.

“You remember I told you about the time I first met my husband?” Carol Jean said.

Moira said she did, and Carol Jean explained that at the time she first encountered Garfield Taft at the Olympia Ballroom in Cincinnati, she'd been living in a downtown flophouse owned by the club owner, Herman Cohn.

“He had trash apartments all over the city,” she said. “The girls all lived there and he took the rent money out of our pay, which wasn't much to begin with, since we mostly worked for tips.”

She said that after things became serious with Taft, he bought a rooming house in a nice part of town and installed her on the upper floor. It had an attached garage facing the alley, so he could park one of his cars there and come up through a back stairway without being seen. At first he started showing up weekly, and soon his visits became even more frequent.

“It gave me such a feeling,” Carol Jean said, “this big, beautiful man spending all that money, going through all sorts of trouble, just to see me. I knew he was married, which naturally bothered me; but the way things turned out with Judith, I don't beat myself up much over it anymore.”

“It sounds exciting,” Moira said. She felt like the audience at a stage play, content to see what Carol Jean would talk herself into admitting.

“I suppose so,” she said, “but everything gets boring if it goes on long enough.”

It was lonely, Carol Jean explained, living hidden away in that big house. She had to walk six blocks to the nearest grocery and eight to find a liquor store. She teased Taft that she would need her own car
and driver if she was going to go on being his kept woman. His travel schedule was hectic at the time, and even though he came to see her as often as he could, Carol Jean spent most of her time by herself. Taft said he didn't want her working, which left her nothing to do most days. Even though he gave her more money than she could spend, she didn't like the feeling of it. She had always been a girl who provided for herself, so suddenly depending on this man was difficult for her, no matter how much she loved him.

“Finally I let a friend move into one of the spare bedrooms,” Carol Jean said. “I just had to do it for the company, you see. This girl, Liddy, from the Olympia, a little dark-haired stray, all arms and elbows the way some men like.”

Even though Carol Jean was really doing her a favor, Liddy insisted on paying rent. They settled on a figure substantially less than the girl had been paying at one of Mr. Cohn's flophouses. It saved her a little bit of money and it felt good for Carol Jean to have some cash of her own coming in.

“I guess you could say I picked up a few things from old Mr. Cohn after all,” she said.

Word got around how little she was charging, and before she knew it, she let another girl move in, then another. Eventually she had every bedroom filled with girls from the Olympia. It became like an all-the-time party, Carol Jean said, just a thrill a minute, with people coming and going from the club at all hours.

Moira asked what Mr. Taft thought of all that, and Carol Jean waved her away.

“I expect he enjoyed it,” Carol Jean said. “All those girls fawning over him. Always someone to cook him breakfast and hear his stories from the road. It will come as no surprise to you that Garfield Taft likes a party as much as anyone.”

“It does not,” Moira said.

“Smart girl like you,” Carol Jean said. “I bet you can guess what happened next.”

Moira nodded. “The police,” she said.

“They came down on the place with an army,” Carol Jean said. “Busted down the door with a battering ram, arrested everybody. A black fellow in a house with all those white girls? A house that he owned? They weren't going to stand for it. Of course, in the papers they said girls had been whoring themselves out of that house.”

“Had they?” Moira asked.

“Oh, how should I know?” Carol Jean said. “If they were, I wasn't going to stop them from earning a little extra on the side. We had the hottest after-hours spot in the city. All the gentlemen in town wanted to be there.”

Moira sat back. Carol Jean had a sharp tongue and was a good deal smarter than Moira had first thought, but it must have been a lot of weight to carry around those years Taft spent in jail.