Champion of the World (31 page)

He was still thinking about it when he rounded the final bend and found Taft leaning against the wood rail fence, his face dappled with sweat, his mouth curled into a funny, puzzled smile.

“So wait,” Taft said. “What you said earlier. You're telling me that all this time you've been using a fake name?”

“It feels pretty real to me by now,” Pepper said, “but it's not the one my mother gave me, if that's what you mean.”

“But your real name?” Taft said, like it was a riddle he needed the answer to. “What is it?”

“Nothing you need to worry about, that's what,” Pepper said.

“What about Mrs. Van Dean?” Taft said.

A stab to the chest, having to say her name. “Of course,” he said. “Moira knows.”

“It feels like a tease,” Taft said, “you bringing it up and then refusing to say.”

“You wouldn't be able to pronounce it anyway,” Pepper said. “Believe me, if you had a name like mine, you'd go with Pepper Van Dean a hundred times out of a hundred.”

Moira was sitting on the front porch of the cabin, a cigarette drooping ash held in her fingers. At first she didn't notice them, and Pepper went up and leaned against the railing before she had the chance to get up and go inside. He kept his distance, waiting as Taft went up the road toward the garage. Seeing her sent him rolling back into the depths of his hangover, his mind scratchy and dull, his lips cracked, something dark and oily boiling in his gut. Even his hair felt limp and damp on his head.

“You don't look well,” she said.

“A little peaked, I guess,” he said.

“Fritz came by. He said your night on the town had quite the dramatic ending.”

Pepper could feel a fresh soreness on his temple where Taft had hit him during their fight, but his ribs were now completely healed and the rest of his face back to normal after his barroom fight in Oregon. “Moira,” he said. “I was angry, but I know nothing happened between you and Taft. That's what he says, at least, and I guess I believe it.”

She blew smoke. “And here I thought my word would be good enough,” she said. “Regardless, I hope you don't think it gives you license to go out at night with your friends and behave stupidly. Do something to hurt yourself, or somebody else.”

“We ran into some trouble,” he said, “but it turned out all right.” She shook her head in a way that told him how dumb that sounded and he pressed on. “Taft showed some sand. I'm starting to think I may have had him all wrong.”

“I'd be inclined to give that more weight,” she said, “if you weren't standing there in the snow in your boots and underclothes.”

He looked down at his feet. What did he have without her? Nothing. They both knew it. “How long do you expect me to sleep out there in that garage?” he said.

“A good long while, I think,” she said. “You know me, I just can't help myself when it comes to my emotions.”

Nearly the same words he'd used with Fritz during their first dinner here. She jutted her chin at the garage, where Taft had disappeared into the dark yawn of the doorway. “So you're as thick as thieves now,” she said. “Nothing like some rosy financial news to make the boys forget that just yesterday they tried to kill each other.”

“The match is fixed,” Pepper said.

“I know that,” she said, and he realized she already had it all
figured out. “Mrs. Taft knows it, too, and she doesn't seem to give a damn.”

“What do you care what she thinks?” Pepper said.

“I guess I like her,” she said. “At first I thought she was living in a fantasy, but now I'm starting to think she's the most realistic person in our whole bunch.”

“I haven't told him yet,” he said. “I'm not sure he's going to go along with it.”

She watched him over the top of her cigarette. “You know as well as I do there's something the matter with him,” she said. “She won't admit it and neither will he, but in his condition I doubt even he believes he could beat Lesko in a fair match.”

“That doesn't make any sense,” he said. “Why would he go through with it at all, then?”

Though as he said it, he remembered a moment at dinner the night before, when Taft's mind seemed to wander on him. When the waiter set the key lime pie he'd ordered for dessert down in front of him, Taft looked at it like it might jump up and bite him. It took him a moment to come back to them—a look on his face saying the needle was finding its place on the record again—and then he laughed it off. For a second, though, there'd been real fear in his eyes.

Moira stood up, grinding out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe. “He's doing it for her, stupid,” she said. “But I suppose that only makes sense when you know what it's like to love someone more than you love yourself.”

He swallowed, but when he glanced up at her, she wasn't looking at him. She was staring up toward the lodge, where James Eddy had come out onto the porch and stood watching them. “I don't like that look on your face,” Pepper said, finding his voice but hearing how small it sounded. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It just suddenly seems like everyone has a
fallback plan except us. What about you? Do you care what happens at the end of all this?”

“It's not like I had any choice, you know,” he said. “Stettler, O'Shea and Fritz already had the whole thing settled before I even got there. You should have heard them when they were cutting the deal, Moira. They might've been talking about what to order for lunch.”

She considered that for a long moment. The wind was in her hair and she was beautiful standing up there, just a few feet away from him, her blue eyes shining with something not quite tears. She let them settle on him and it made him feel like an even bigger fool for thinking she might have cheated on him with Taft, and mad at Mrs. Taft for feeding him lies. He wanted to run to her, grab her in his arms and tell her how sorry he was, but he felt rooted to the spot.

“That's not what I meant,” she said, closing the door to the cabin behind her as she went.

D
uring the next few weeks they started bringing in training partners. At first Fritz balked at the expense, but Pepper reminded him how important it was that everything looked aboveboard. The truth was, he wanted to bury himself in wrestling. He knew the only way to make himself feel better about training Taft for a fixed match was to scour himself clean with hard work. They got Clem Wallhead out of South Dakota, Frank Gundy from Iowa, and a big Swede named Lundin, who had once been European champion. Pepper insisted on handpicking each of them, making sure they were serious, hard men who all physically resembled Strangler Lesko—built as wide as they were tall, with cannonball shoulders and short, powerful limbs.

Wallhead—who might've been world's champion if he hadn't torn
his Achilles tendon early in his career—was the quickest of the three and in the best shape. Gundy was the toughest, though off the mat he wore a pair of delicate wire-rimmed spectacles that made him look like a dandy. Lundin, though, was the prize. He had the full complement of size, strength and basic meanness to wrestle like Lesko. He had a headlock takeover that was almost as good as the world champion's and a grip you couldn't break with a sledgehammer.

There was a drill Pepper liked to run where he sent all three men at Taft one after another in ten-minute intervals with no breaks between. It was a trick he'd picked up in the orphanage, in which a boy who was preparing for a particularly tough match would battle against a ceaseless wave of other boys launched by Professor Van Dien as he paraded at the side of the mat with a whistle clenched in his teeth. It was a smothering feeling, with a fresh man coming at you all the time, on and on, with no rest and no water.

At first it looked like the drill would swallow Taft whole, but after a few days the wrestler started to emerge. Gradually he began winning some small victories. During the third week he surprised Wallhead with a clean double-leg tackle and, dumping him on his back with a satisfying whump, forced him into a pinning combination by cradling his leg and grinding a forearm across his face. Once, he got behind Gundy during a scramble, and for a second Pepper thought he was going to put a choke on the big man. He might've, too, but Gundy was saved by the bell at the end of ten minutes. When Pepper blew the whistle, Gundy rolled off the mat, red-faced, and Lundin charged in to clean up the arm-weary Taft. He couldn't yet get the best of the Swede, but Taft was trying, going longer and longer into the sessions before he had to call for a rest, go over to the door and ladle water out of the bucket. The others kept their own water bucket, but otherwise they appeared to have no issues training with a black man so long as the money was good.

Pepper would often take a turn with them on the mat, and being
back out there with the other men made him feel as though the years were falling away. The wrestling cleared away his troublesome thoughts and his body was coming back to life a little bit at a time. He would have been pleased overall with the progress of the camp if Taft's strange spells weren't coming over him more and more. Even as his wind, timing and confidence improved, he seemed to be slipping further into some distant corner of his mind. Little things started to confuse him. When Pepper would call out for him to pick an ankle or attack his opponent's right leg, Taft would have to stop a second to think about it, hesitating, his eyes practically spinning like the reels of a slot machine, his hands pawing lightly at the air. Other times he would become aloof, quiet, and they would have to tell him things three or four times before he acknowledged them. He would go to the outhouse and not come back for half an hour.

Moira's words still buzzed in Pepper's ears. Every time he thought of the look on her face when she'd turned away and gone back inside their cabin, he felt a rush of shame so great that he forced himself to focus on something else. He kept telling himself he was there to do a job, to get Taft ready to make a good show of things against Lesko. He was there to get his money and get out, he thought, just like everyone else.

One bright afternoon Fritz came bearing gifts. He'd gotten Taft a new red sash to wear with his wrestling trunks and for Pepper a new pair of fancy black-and-white boots that would need some breaking in before he could wear them. It raised the spirits of all the men to have Fritz sitting in one corner of the garage, smoking cigars and swapping jokes. Once they even got him out there in his slacks and thin socks for a couple of one-minute rounds against Wallhead. Fritz showed off the surprising strength and cunning that had made him a decent attraction for Blomfeld, though soon enough his head had turned a shade of deep purple and he was leaning his hands on
his knees. Wallhead got inside on him and tipped him over in a fireman's carry.

“That's enough for this old goat,” Fritz said, chuckling from the pain as he limped off the mat.

Despite the increasing cold, the garage stayed hot and dank with sweat during training sessions, so they kept the big doors at the end of the building open. As the men all broke for lunch and Fritz pulled his shoes back on, Pepper caught his eye and motioned him outside.

“I'm starting to get worried here,” he said, using a hand towel to mop the sweat off his face.

“Worried?” Fritz said. “I think we're making splendid progress.”

“We're getting him in shape, sure,” he said. “It's his focus that troubles me.”

They both looked over their shoulders to where Taft was sitting on the edge of the mat with his boots off, massaging his feet and saying something to Wallhead, Gundy and Lundin. All the men laughed and then Taft saw Fritz and Pepper staring and smiled at them.

“He appears in high spirits to me,” Fritz said. “When do you think you'll let him in on the arrangement?”

A new wave of guilt rippled through him. “Not yet,” he said. “Nothing in the world is worse than an obvious fix. I say we let him go on training hard for a few more weeks. Can you imagine what the papers will say if we send him out there half-cocked, looking like a walking corpse?”

“Let me worry about the papers,” Fritz said, picking a piece of tobacco off his tongue. He was still flushed from the workout, and for the first time in a long time Pepper saw the hardness of his gaze. The wind kicked up from the east, blowing a few straggling dead leaves across the snow, and together they turned their backs on it.

T
he snow started to become a problem the first week of November, coming down in sheets for three days and nights. When it finally let up they had to wade through mounds up to their knees to the outhouse and water pump, the air so cold that Taft could feel the ache in his bones no matter how many layers he piled on. He and Van Dean dug out big half-moons around the doors to the garage so they wouldn't be snowed in, and at night they kept a fire burning as close as they dared to the wrestling mat. Still they woke shivering and clawing at their limbs in the dark. The hired girl brought their meals from the lodge, tromping down in tall boots, balancing a tray and looking at them like this wasn't something she considered part of her job. They hunkered over their steaming plates and didn't speak until the food was gone.

Taft felt he was making a good show of it in training. He liked the new men Van Dean had brought in, and suspected even if they weren't being paid to be there they'd still work themselves to exhaustion for the sheer love of it. Their energy seemed to rub off on Van Dean, too, and he trained alongside them more often than not now, sweating and bleeding and laughing with the rest. The first couple of weeks were misery for Taft, but then all the old feelings started to come back, the sense of being tired and hollowed out from hard
work. It was enough to let him forget his troubles for a few days, but soon the pain in his head returned, this time worse than before. The harder he worked, the more his condition declined. He ached all over at the end of each workout, often finding he couldn't remember much about what had happened. The gaps in his memory were getting wider, making him feel like he was running in sand, burying himself deeper and deeper the faster he tried to go.

His head and neck got so tender that he wanted to scream every time one of his training partners touched him. He was doubling his doses of Dr. Paulson's pain tonic now, drinking a full bottle before and another after training. It numbed the pain but also dulled his wits. He kept making the same mistakes over and over, and he knew Van Dean noticed every one. At one point he let the big Swede put him on his back three times with the same move, each thud to the mat sending a jolt of electricity through his entire body, and Van Dean got so mad he kicked an empty oil can. The sound of it was like a gun going off inside the garage. They all turned to watch as it rattled out the big doors at the far end of the building.

He started losing weight, and the lightness made him feel frail, like he had the bones of a bird. It was from the training, he told himself, and asked the hired girl if she would start bringing him double helpings at dinnertime.

“You think we have an endless supply of this stuff?” she said as she set his tray down on the old wooden bleachers, looking at him like he'd asked her to personally grow the vegetables and slaughter the animals.

“You wouldn't have any of it if it wasn't for me,” Taft snapped. He swept his arm in a full circle. “All this, it's because of me.”

The way the girl's face cracked, he knew he'd scared her, and instantly he felt sorry for it.

“And what a kingdom it is,” Van Dean said. He was flat on his back on the wrestling mat, loosening his ankle by making small
circles with the toes of one boot, his lip puffed full of tobacco. “Bring him what he wants, sweetheart.”

With all the snow, Taft thought Van Dean might have no choice but to abandon their morning runs. Instead, he insisted they change directions, jogging up the hill to the crown of the mountain instead of down toward town. The snow up there was even deeper, covering the network of trails that snaked out of the hunting camp like frosting on a layer cake. The first couple of days they could barely make the trek, but after a week or so they got the snow tromped down enough that it was passable. It was cold and miserable and Taft probably should've thought of it as punishment, but he was starting to enjoy this time with Van Dean. These days, it was when he felt his best, striding along quick and surefooted, hopping over big rocks in places where they protruded from the snow. His wind was finally getting to where it needed to be, and after a few sessions of the uphill running, he began leaving Van Dean behind on the steepest stretches.

On one of those days the sun appeared from behind the gray steel of the clouds and lit the snow like a field of sparkling diamonds. It filled Taft with a giddy delight and he pushed himself hard on the final stretch of the run, reaching the top first and sitting down on a fallen log to catch his breath. He must have slipped away someplace while he sat there, because the next thing he knew, Van Dean was standing over him, saying words he couldn't quite hear. Repeating it, his voice growing louder and louder, the sun in the sky behind him making him an immense dark shape.

“What?” Taft finally said, shading his eyes with his hand.

“I said your nose is bleeding.”

He felt the wetness on his lips with the tips of his fingers and then rubbed them together in front of his face. Sticky. He looked down and found a puddle of his blood thickening in the snow.

“You really dogged it today,” Taft said. “How long have I been sitting here waiting on you?”

Van Dean sat down on the log, some of the old bark turning to dust underneath him. “You're going to have to level with me,” he said. “What's wrong with you?”

“I'll race you,” Taft said. “First one back to camp gets to sleep closest to the fire.”

“Look at you, you're sick,” Van Dean said. “Moira thinks so, too, but says not even your wife knows what it is. Either that, or she's covering for you.”

“Leave Carol Jean out of this,” Taft said. “It's got nothing to do with her.”

“What, then?” Van Dean said.

Taft spat onto the ground, something inside him scraping bottom. “I didn't love her, you know,” he said. “Not at first. She was just my little bit on the side. She's a goodhearted girl, but a little light in the practical skills department. She was twenty-six when I went away. Never in a million years did I think she'd stay, but she did. You know anybody you'd wait
three years
for?”

“Sure,” Van Dean said. “For Moira, I'd do it standing on my head.”

“How could I not fall for a person like that?” Taft said. “She deserves something for her trouble. Don't you think?”

“Tell me what's going on with you,” Van Dean said.

Taft looked at his own blood. Everything was whirling inside him now, trying to force its way out. “You ever paint something?” he said finally. “I mean, like a room or anything?”

“Sure,” Van Dean said. “The year I turned twelve they made us whitewash the dining hall at the orphanage. It was terrible.”

“My daddy was the type that liked to put a fresh coat on the house every summer,” Taft said. “The same color red, every goddamned time.” He winced now thinking about it: paint on his skin, under his nails, the burn of the turpentine it took to get it out. “Our house was big for our neighborhood and Daddy was proud of that.
He'd get me up on this tall ladder to help him. After a few days staring at all that red, you'd lose track of what you'd done. You couldn't see where the last coat ended and where the new one started. Like, you'd get dizzy, kind of snow-blind. You understand what I mean?” Van Dean nodded. Taft could tell he did. “That's what it's like for me these days,” he said. “I lose track. Have headaches, this ringing in my ears that never quite goes away. I get confused, lose time.”

Van Dean asked how long it had been going on, but Taft just shrugged.
Button it up now,
he thought,
before you go spilling all the beans.
Van Dean said they could talk to Fritz and have him bring a doctor up from town. They could keep it quiet, he said.

“Nah, we couldn't, either.” Taft said. He stood up, the conversation over. “Come on, it's getting cold and those guys will be waiting for us.”

T
he truth was, he couldn't say for sure when or how he'd gotten sick. Those years when he was at the height of his powers as a wrestler, there were a lot of girls. It could have been one of those friends Carol Jean let move into the house in Cincinnati. It could have even been Carol Jean. It could have been anyone, he told himself, knowing it wasn't true. For one thing, his first wife Judith had never gotten sick, and neither had Carol Jean or any of the others. At least, none ever let on that they did. No, Taft knew deep down it was Fleetwood Wallace who had given him the bug, even though Fleet himself had never showed a single symptom, had never appeared to be anything besides the slipperiest, most self-satisfied motherfucker Taft had ever met in his life. Maybe it was Fleet's cool persistence, that air of always being in control, even in prison, that made Taft so sure it had to be him.

Of course, he had been too slow to realize that every single thing
about Fleetwood Wallace was an act. He'd been too dense, too full of himself, to know that from the moment he'd walked into that cell in Foxwood, Fleet had played him for a fool. Oh, he practically groveled at Taft's feet those first few weeks, cowed by the presence of such a famous man. A colored man so dangerous that society had to lock him up just to teach him a lesson. Fleet had let him have the bottom bunk and let him roll cigarettes from the pouch of tobacco he kept wedged between his bedroll and the wall. He sat close and listened to Taft tell stories about his freewheeling days as a wrestler, about his cars and his women, smiling and laughing his strange high-pitched laugh, egging him on. Now Taft felt stupid for having been so blind.

Not even when three lifer convicts worked him over in a basement hallway with knuckle-dusters made from braided shoe leather and lengths of hose stuffed with sand did he guess it might all be part of Fleet's plan. He'd already been in the infirmary for two days when the three men who attacked him were brought in foaming bright red blood from purple lips and coughing up bits of their insides. Rat poison in their food, the blind old doctor told him. Two of them died; the third survived after an ambulance ride to the nearest hospital, where surgeons removed a full foot of his intestines. He came back to the prison in a wheelchair, with a canvas bag sewed onto him to catch his own shit. After that, life was hard for him.

As soon as he got back to the cell, still a little sore and limping from the beating, Taft knew Fleet had poisoned those men. There was no mistaking the cocky smile or the extra wiggle in his walk when he jumped up to catch him in a hug, telling how glad he was that he was okay.

The little man knew how to make a candle out of an old tin can, a scoop of kitchen lard and a piece of thread, and that night they sat up reading to each other after lights out. It wasn't until much later that Taft began to wonder if Fleet had paid those men to attack him
just so he could poison them and earn his trust. It seemed impossible. What kind of mind even conceived of a plan like that? Even years later he didn't know whether to believe it.

There were times when, without warning, Fleet would go days without speaking to him. He'd lapse into a funk, curling up in his bunk, pouting over some careless word or perceived insult, until Taft practically begged him to say something, thinking he might burst from loneliness. When Fleet finally did speak to him again, he rationed out his kindnesses like there was a shortage on. Maybe that was the biggest trick of all, Taft reckoned now. Fleet didn't even have to lift a finger to draw Taft to him, he just had to sit back and let the time do its work.

Then again, maybe Fleet had needed Taft just as badly as Taft needed him. After all, wasn't the feeling of those walls bearing down just as smothering to Fleet? Hadn't he been stripped away from his life just the way Taft had? He had, but looking back on it he knew that Fleet had found ways to get by better than he ever could. Savvy to every trick a convict ever invented, he was friendly with all the prison cops, knew them by name and even looked a few of them in the eyes when he was feeling bold. Fleet taught Taft how to play backgammon using a set of child's marbles and a board drawn on a piece of paper. They passed long hours playing the game together during the periods when they were on speaking terms.