Champion of the World (30 page)

“It was you,” she said. “You're the reason he got locked up.”

“They charged him with being a pimp,” Carol Jean said. “Can you imagine? The truth was he didn't care a thing about what the other girls in that house were doing. He only cared about me.”

“So you waited for him,” Moira said.

“Waited and waited,” Carol Jean said, as if it was a feeling they both understood. “I thought the lonesomeness would crush me at first. It took ages to even find out where they'd taken him. I had no rights, you see, since we weren't married yet. But after Judith took off, I suppose I got excited about having him all to myself. It took about two weeks for her to pull up stakes and run, did you know that? I think she'd been waiting for her excuse to go long before he was arrested.”

“It must have felt like a reprieve for you, in a way.”

“Oh, it was all very romantic, the way I imagined it.”

“He did marry you,” Moira said. “That was what you wanted, wasn't it?”

She nodded. “Right there in the prison, as soon as they'd let us, after the judge granted Judith her divorce. It was a rush job, but they wouldn't even let me visit him unless we were married, so it had to be done. I had this purple chiffon dress I wore. I don't think either of us had quite realized how different things were going to be. Garfield thought when it was all over, when he'd served his time, he would be able to go back to doing anything he wanted. Instead we got this.”

She lifted her arms to include the whole place: the room they were in, the half-finished lodge, the garage gym, the horse barn full of liquor, the woods and hills, the city at the base of the mountain with its mines forever spitting out smoke, the railways and roads. This enormous, empty state. This life.

“Just to be clear,” Moira said. “Are you telling me there's nothing physically wrong with your husband?”

Carol Jean's eyes had floated away while she talked, but now they snapped back into focus. She was back to her woman-of-the-house act. Her every movement careful, as if planned out ahead of time. “Of course not,” she said. “How could there be?”

Moira nodded. “Thank you for telling me that story,” she said, because it felt like a necessary thing to say.

“You seem like the kind that can keep a secret,” Carol Jean said. “Don't prove me wrong.”

W
hen Carol Jean finally announced she was turning in, Moira asked to sit there a bit longer to rest her leg. Carol Jean nodded, giving her hand a little squeeze before climbing the staircase.
As she went she kept her chin held high, everything else in her bearing telling Moira she'd be asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Still, she waited an extra fifteen minutes, the quiet of the house roaring in her ears, before she slipped off her other shoe and crept up the stairs after her. Carol Jean had done a good, competent job wrapping her ankle, and Moira found she could move now with considerably less pain. The upstairs hallway was dark and the old wood groaned with every step, but she tiptoed as quietly as she could to the end of the hall where she knew James Eddy kept his room. The doorknob was smooth and cold in her hand, like a stone from a river bottom, and she applied just enough gentle, silent pressure to confirm it was locked.

Give Moira a half hour and a set of hairpins and she could jimmy most locks. A necessary skill, she'd found, when you followed the calling every modern woman dreamed of—from riverboat card girl to carnival shill. Up here in the hush of the hallway, though, there was no way. It would take too long and make too much noise, the sound of a thousand rats working their claws against the metal. Instead, she turned and snuck down the way she'd come, getting all the way to the bottom of the main stairs before a shape loomed out at her.

“May I ask exactly what you're doing?”

Moira caught her breath, putting a hand over her heart, before seeing it was just the hired girl, Eleanor, coming down the gloomy hall from the kitchen. “Goodness,” Moira said. “I didn't know anyone else was still here.”

“I could say the same to you,” said Eleanor. She squinted at Moira for a long moment. “I heard you up there snooping around Mr. Eddy's door. You really think he'd leave his quarters unlocked?”

“I wasn't,” Moira said, starting to protest, but stopped when she read the look on the girl's face. “Yes, I was. I think he's hiding something and I wanted to know what it was.”

Eleanor snorted. “Hiding something?” she said. “Lady, a man like that doesn't know any other way to behave.”

Moira noticed the crackle in her voice. “You know something about it,” she said.

“I know everything,” Eleanor said. “I'm the housekeeper.”

Moira smiled, resting a hand on the glass globe at the bottom of the banister. “So?” she said. “Will you tell him?”

Eleanor tapped the toe of her shoe on the hardwood floor—click, click, click—as if trying to decide something. Moira thought she might give her a scolding, maybe want to go wake Carol Jean, but instead she just said, “Wait here,” and disappeared down the rear hall again.

Moira eyed the door, wondering what would happen if she walked out and went back to the cabin, but in a moment the hired girl was back. She came from the kitchen waving a small bit of stationery in an outstretched hand.

Moira took it and held it up to the light, knowing before she saw the name at the bottom that Eddy had written it. The penmanship was tiny and exact, without so much as a smudge of ink or wavering line to suggest a trembling hand. The note was short and without pretension, just Eddy proposing terms for selling the load of liquor he and Fritz had squirreled away to a group of rival men. The longing and rage she had sensed in him were there, both in the hastily composed words and the sure, straight lines of the letters. There was no mistaking its meaning.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

“He gave it to me to put in the mail,” said Eleanor. “Can you believe it?”

“You opened it?”

They kept their voices low in the quiet house, but now the hired girl straightened up, proud and unafraid. “Steamed it,” she said, “and I'm glad I did. The things in that letter? They could put us all in danger.”

“It was a daring move,” Moira said. “Why risk it?”

Now Eleanor showed a sly grimace. “It was peculiar, him sending something like that. Mr. Eddy never sends anything besides bill payments. Plus, him always trying to tell me my business? Maybe I wanted to know a bit of his.”

“You didn't worry what would happen if he found out?”

“Please,” Eleanor said. “I traced a copy and sent that along in the original envelope. Not like whatever animals he's sending it to are going to know the difference.”

Moira looked at her over the top of the letter and realized she'd misjudged the hired girl from the start. Eleanor's face had gone hard and callous—a woman who had grown up in a town full of two-bit operators and knew what it took to get by. Perhaps her frail body had the heart of a prizefighter beating inside it. Now she seemed to read Moira's expression, asking what she meant to accomplish handing over the letter.

“I'm sure you'll figure out a use for it,” Eleanor said. “In a couple of months I'm getting out of this place. I'll find a job in an office making thirty dollars a week with weekends and holidays off. But it doesn't seem right, a wicked creature like that being allowed to go on, out into the world. Nothing good will ever come from a man like that.”

Moira wasn't sure what to say, so she just nodded and tucked the letter into the pocket of her dress. She retrieved her shoes and let the hired girl walk her out, hearing the heavy door lock behind her as she went back out into the night. Coming down the steps from the porch, she cast her eyes down the road into town, as if she thought Eddy might come driving up at just that moment. Of course the road was deserted, looking forlorn in the dark. Keeping close to the house to avoid blundering off into the weeds, she crept around to the side and then to the unfinished section of the building. Bare wood
striding up out of the foundation, like someone might show up any day to finish the job. Eddy's room was in a rear corner, with a single side window that looked down on the road and an exposed door that opened into the part of the structure left undone. Up the hill were the garage and the horse barn, and the other way she could see the main gate and the line of little guest cabins. Still no one moving anywhere.

The letter should've been the answer she was looking for, but somehow it only piqued her curiosity. She still wanted to see the whole picture. Hoping her ankle wouldn't fail her at exactly the wrong moment, she pulled herself up so she was standing on the lodge's foundation, then found another foothold about three feet up that looked like it was meant to be the base of a window. Then it was the top of a doorframe, bringing her knee up comically high to make the step and keeping her eyes down to make sure the hem of her dress didn't get caught on a loose nail. With another step, she was up inside the unfinished room on the second floor—easier than she expected—having used the exposed planks as a kind of ladder.

The rear door to Eddy's room was locked, just as the other had been, but out here she could have brought a brass band with her and not bothered Carol Jean. She let her hair down and, kneeling in front of the door, she went to work. After a few minutes of scraping and fumbling with the mechanism, the lock popped open.

Stepping into the room gave her a shot of adrenaline. Suddenly she felt wild-eyed and terrified. Eddy's quarters were sparsely furnished and spotless, just as she'd imagined they would be. Not even any smell to them, except the faint chemical punch of disinfectant. In one corner a rifle stood ugly and lurking, but aside from that you might not even know a man slept here. The cot was bare, as was the small desk. The glasses in the bar setup looked clean and new.

She didn't even know what she was looking for as she began
pulling open the cupboards of the credenza. Eddy's clothes were folded neatly in one of the drawers, a couple of jackets hanging from a coatrack to one side. She patted the pockets of the coats, finding nothing, before she ran her fingers around the inside edges of the drawer without disturbing the garments.

The floor creaked terribly as she moved across the room, but she forced herself to keep going. On the desk was a blotter calendar with several dates marked with a single horizontal line beneath the number of the day. She guessed these were the nights when the men brought in new shipments, and she quickly memorized them. She noted a load came in once every three weeks and that they were scheduled to keep arriving through the end of the year. The long middle drawer held only pens, and the wastepaper basket on the floor next to the chair looked as if it had never been used.

She was about to give up when she pulled open one of the desk's lower drawers and found a heavy kitchen pot sitting there. A small tickle worked its way down her back. The pot was the first out-of-place thing she'd found in the room. Carefully she lifted the stout lid and saw a small package inside, wrapped up in one of the white silk handkerchiefs Eddy always kept with him. The package was light, just a bundle of paper, but she took it out and replaced the lid before sliding the drawer closed again.

This was what she was looking for. It had to be, since it was the only thing there was to find. It was a reckless, stupid move to take something from a man as obviously paranoid as Eddy, but right then she didn't care. Holding the papers in one hand, she went back out the way she'd come, making sure the door was locked behind her.

Out in the open, a gale of wind brushed her back against the side of the lodge, threatening to rip the papers from her grasp. She huddled there until it passed, getting her breath, steadying herself, before creeping back to the place where she'd climbed up the network of boards and studs. One painful twinge in her ankle made her grit
her teeth as she straddled the exposed wall. The way down was slower, more difficult than the way up. In the dark, she couldn't find the final foothold—dangling there, cursing, with her coat flapping in the breeze and one hand still clutching the package. Before she dropped the last four feet to the ground, she took a moment to close her eyes and prepare herself for how much it was going to hurt.

T
here was trouble at the restaurant. The steakhouse Fritz guided them to was a ramshackle little place at the center of Butte's tightening maze of streets, its front door set three steps below sidewalk level. Some of the other men there didn't appreciate Taft being seated in the dining room, and Pepper imagined a hundred eyes on them as they ate. He drank too many of the restaurant's bitter homemade beers, and by the time three guys cornered him inside the cramped restroom, he could feel the alcohol sloshing around in his stomach. He was tired and drunk, already beat up, and trying to decide which one of them to hit first when Fritz and Taft burst in with their napkins still tucked into their collars.

By the time they returned to the hunting camp, dawn lurked in the hills. Fritz dropped him in the road in front of the cabin, and as the car roared away Pepper found a little pile of his clothes waiting on the porch. He pounded on the door until his knuckles hurt, but eventually he scooped up the meager stack of his belongings and stumbled through the settling dust to the garage. Taft was sitting on the lowest row of the bleachers, pulling off his shoes when he came in.

“So we're going to be bunkmates,” Taft said, nodding at the things he carried.

Aside from the brawl in the restroom, their evening in town hadn't been a complete disaster. Pepper was surprised to find Fritz and Taft were both good company. The food was decent and they spent most of the meal chatting about wrestling and high times back in Chicago. Their fight in the garage from earlier in the day was not forgotten exactly, but at least it had slipped into the background, letting them all carry on as men.

“I don't expect a long stay,” Pepper said now. “Just until she gets her wits about her.”

“If I had a nickel for every night I spent waiting on a woman to decide she still loved me,” Taft said, taking his time folding his clothes and laying them flat, “I wouldn't have to worry about wrestling Strangler Lesko, I can tell you that.”

Pepper set his load down on the edge of the wrestling mat and sat. “It'll blow over,” he said. “We've been through worse spots than this.”

Taft retrieved his blankets from a high shelf and padded over in his slacks and socks. Before stretching out, he tossed one of them to Pepper, saying it got cold out there at night.

“You know I was just trying to help her,” he said to the rafters. “I promise you I never laid a hand on her.”

At dinner he'd told Pepper the story about the bootleggers and James Eddy and the old tomcat Moira had adopted getting killed. “I guess I believe it,” Pepper said, surprised to find it was true. “I won't apologize to you, but it's possible I had the wrong idea.”

“It's possible?” Taft said. Without looking at him, Pepper could tell he was grinning.

He settled back on the mat, feeling Taft's presence big and heavy next to him. Through the garage's thin walls he could hear all the night sounds of the forest. Just as they'd arrived back at the camp that evening, a raccoon dashed out of the brush, its eyes glowing in
the flare of their headlamps, and Fritz stomped on the brake, sending them all lurching forward in their seats. Pepper imagined the raccoon still out there, creeping though the weeds and falling snow. It made him fold his arms across his chest for warmth.

In the dark, Taft's voice seemed unnaturally loud. “You got anyone in New York?” he said. “Friends? People you trust?”

“There's a carnival owner there I'd like to kill,” Pepper said. “Other than that, not really.”

“I suppose I'll have to find a way to bet on myself,” Taft said.

Pepper turned away, rolling onto his side, a hundred needles prickling the back of his skull. He knew he would have to tell Taft the truth about the match sooner or later. The train ride back from Chicago had not been pleasant. He and Fritz had gone back and forth the whole way about the fix and getting in bed with Stettler and O'Shea. In the end, Pepper had given up, telling himself it didn't matter, since Taft could never beat Strangler Lesko either way. After their fight in the garage, though, he wasn't so sure anymore. The thing that had surprised him the most was Taft's strength. Pepper had expected him to be fast for a heavyweight, but Taft's lanky body had turned to iron the moment they got their hands on each other. His punch was like getting kicked by a mule, and the effortlessness with which Taft threw him off made him feel sheepish and small.

“Listen,” he said. “There's something we need to talk about.”

“I already know,” Taft said. “You don't think I can beat Strangler Lesko, but I promise you, I will. You'll see.”

“Even if we could give him thirty rough minutes,” he said, “it'd be nothing to hang our heads over.”

Another rustling sound as Taft sat up. “What's that supposed to mean?” he said.

“Nothing,” Pepper said. “Go to sleep.”

He closed his eyes and must've drifted right off, because he never heard Taft lie back down on the mat.

S
ometime later, he woke to Taft shaking him roughly by the shoulder. He rolled over, the rank surface of the wrestling mat scratching his face, and groaned. His body was full of hot poison, and as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, he tried to remember exactly how many beers he'd drunk at the restaurant. He could not.

“Van Dean,” he heard Taft say. “Hey, Van Dean.”

He rolled over, the glare of the sun like knives in his eyes, and saw Taft towering over him—a thousand feet tall if he was an inch—in his wrestling trunks and boots.

“Mark . . . set . . . go!” Taft said, and then he was gone, dashing out the door of the garage into the day.

It took a second for Pepper's wounded animal brain to catch up with what was happening, but then he cursed and jumped up. His first few steps were on the clumsy feet of a dead man, his head tossing like a ship, pulsing to the beating of his heart. He was wearing only his skivvies, but slipped into his boots and sprinted out the door without bothering to tie them.

Taft was already to the guest cabins, gliding along with those long strides. Pepper barely made it out of the garage before he had to stop and vomit, a watery rush clogged with chunks of steak. It filled his nose, and as he started running again he plugged each nostril and blew the other clear, turning his head to look at the cabin where Moira was surely still sleeping.

It was a cold morning, and once he was through the gate and on the road the breeze chilled his back and chest. Taft still loped along up ahead, and for a while it seemed like Pepper might be able to catch him. Soon, though, he had to stop and retch again, a string of frothy spit clinging to his chin. He tried to push on, but his tongue was an old dry sock in his mouth and he had to stop and walk to ease a cramp in one of his calves. If he thought he could find a stream to
drink from, he might have gone off the trail to look for one, but instead kept moving down the hill as a light snow fell around him. He could smell booze in his sweat. Swallowing back the burning in his throat, he lifted his face to the sky, taking deep breaths to ease the light-headed, dizzy feeling.

He caught up with Taft at the base of the mountain, finding him on a flat rock at the side of the road. The big man's knees were tucked up around his chest, sweat making little clots in the dirt between his feet.

“I told you,” Taft said, finding his breath. “I told you one day I'd beat you.”

Pepper trotted over and stood with his hands on his hips. He stared at the ground for a long time, looking at his own shadow in the light dusting of snow.

“What kind of sorry son of a bitch preys on a decrepit man?” he said.

Taft stared off down the road as if waiting for something. “They stopped coming,” he said. “It must've got too cold for them.”

“Who?” Pepper said.

“Nobody,” he said. “Just some boys. They used to come out here and wait for me on their bicycles. I would chase them.”

Pepper didn't know what to say to that, so he closed his eyes and wiped the sweat from his face, his hands going up and down in a washing motion. Taft asked if he wanted to race back up the hill to the camp and Pepper showed him his middle finger. Instead, they walked, Taft flexing his one swollen hand.

“I think I damn near killed one of those old boys in that bathroom,” he said. “Be lucky if I didn't break this.”

Pepper had to admit, it showed tremendous courage for Taft to barge into that restroom along with Fritz. All it would have taken was one of those men to have a gun and for them to dig three holes
somewhere deep in the woods. For a guy he'd had his own problem with earlier in the day? Pepper couldn't say for sure he would've done the same.

“I guess I owe you my thanks,” he said. “I would've been in some trouble if you fellows hadn't come in when you did.”

Just then a massive shadow passed across the road. They both looked up to see a huge, dark shape alight in a nearby tree. Its wings were brown with white tips, its beak hooked, the powerful neck of a gladiator. If they'd stood next to each other, the bird's head might've come to Pepper's hip.

“I'll be damned,” he said. “Golden eagle.”

Taft gave him a funny one-eyed squint. “You are a strange man, you know that? How come you know so much about this place?”

“I grew up near here,” Pepper said. “When I was twelve years old I went into an orphanage in Idaho, up near the Canadian border. Stayed until I was seventeen.”

Taft fixed him with a look out the corner of his eyes. “You serious?” he said; then, seeing he was: “Your parents died?”

Pepper felt his forehead with the back of his hand. The worst part of his hangover was lifting. He couldn't think of one reason why he should tell Taft about his past, things that he had never told anyone besides Moira . . . except that now Moira had him locked out of their cabin and when he thought about it—about the fight in the garage and then Taft and Fritz storming into the bathroom to save him—he felt a lurch of guilt and fear. He wondered if there might be a certain joy in telling Taft, a kind of daring in trusting this person no one else trusted. This person who right now was one of the only people in the world speaking to him.

“They didn't die,” he said. “Maybe they're dead now, I don't know. I just ran off. Hopped a train, trying to make it to the coast. Seattle, San Francisco, someplace like that. It was stupid.”

“You never made it?”

“No. A railroad bull pulled me off before I even got out of the state,” Pepper said. “Beat the shit out of me.”

Taft chuckled and Pepper thought to hell with it and told him the whole story. About how the cops didn't know what to do with him. How he refused to tell them his name, even after the sheriff took him in.

“I just didn't want them to send me back,” Pepper said.

“Things were that bad for you growing up, huh?”

He felt the color rise in his face. “They weren't so rough,” he said. “I just wanted something different.”

He told him about the Handsome Academy, about Professor Willem Van Dien. “He's the one who taught me to wrestle,” Pepper said. “He gave me my nickname. When I was old enough, I left. I needed a last name, so I took his. Once I turned pro, Abe Blomfeld changed the spelling. Americanized it, so crowds wouldn't boo me for being an immigrant. And here we are.”

Pepper asked Taft if the hired girl had any ice at the hunting camp. If they could find some, it would help bring the swelling down in his hand. Taft shrugged and said not to worry about it.

“I'll be right as rain by match time,” he said. “Lesko's got a surprise coming. A big one.”

The look Taft gave him was enough to break his heart. He knew from watching his workouts with Fitch and Prichard and from the Jack Sherry bout that Taft didn't like to push himself. That could mean he had no heart, or it might just mean he was used to being the biggest, roughest guy in his own wrestling room. That happened to a lot of heavyweights, guys who had no one in their own clubs who could test them and therefore never found out what they could really do
.
Now, though, there was a new intensity in the big man's face. It was a look Pepper knew well. Here was a guy who thought his dream
had come back to life. Taft started running again. Pepper tried to summon the urge to trot after him, but he felt too sick. He walked most of the rest of the way back to the hunting camp, turning the whole thing over in his mind.