Champion of the World (5 page)

Pepper's ears felt very hot. This world never made sense to him—contracts, figures in a ledger. He couldn't make the numbers talk to him the way Moira could. “I know what the contract says,” he said. “But I'm one sixty-one, so there we are.”

“And as I previously iterated,” Markham replied, “you must be mistaken. Being in violation of your performance contract would not be good for you, Mr. Van Dean. It would not be good for Moira. Such a sad state of affairs would entitle your employer to seek
restitution in the form of garnished wages for any amount he felt such a violation would cost the reputation and overall well-being of the world's largest motorized circus.”

Pepper worked his jaw back and forth. “You really going to play hardball with me on this?” he said.

“What other course of redress do I have?” Markham asked sadly. “If you have some bright idea you have yet to elucidate, by all means, please enlighten me.”

“It's your call, boss,” he said. “If you want to scratch the hangman act for tonight, that's all right.”

In a burst of speed surprising for a man of his size, Markham threw his whiskey glass against the sidewall of the trailer. It shattered and the shards flew back at them, forcing Pepper to shield his eyes as glass whipped over his skin like raindrops.

“I know whose call it is,” Markham shouted, “and it is
not
all right! It is not all right, you insipid little dwarf, for one of my most popular attractions to suddenly pull up lame like a goddamn show pony when I've got a packed house sitting out there, I've got two weeks of advance advertising on the books, I've got fliers nailed to every freestanding structure in this awful town. We marched a goddamn
parade
through the streets, for Christ's sake, and now what? I'm supposed to go out there and tell them the master of the hangman's drop is too fat to go on?”

Pepper held up his hands, but a fire was burning in his gut. “Wait a minute, Boyd.”

“What should I do about the people who want refunds?” Markham said. “I'll have no choice but to take that out of your pay as well.”

Pepper took a step forward. “Listen,” he said, but stopped when Markham crossed his legs to show the knife he had strapped over one boot.

“Please,” the carnival barker said, cool as could be again. “I
implore you to see things from my perspective. You remember where you were when I found you? When I
discovered
you?”

Pepper remembered.

“Given the circumstances,” Markham said, “you can't blame me that I feel a certain pride of ownership over you, over your act.”

Pepper nodded, something alive and crawling around in his neck and shoulders. He fidgeted, scratching at the side of his head. “I suppose I might,” he said.

“Then hear me when I say this,” Markham said, his voice taking on its ringmaster boom, that bass tremolo that sounded so good when shouted into a microphone. “You are the most gifted goddamn showman I ever saw in my life and I swear on the lives of my children that I would never do anything to cross you up or put you in unnecessary danger. You understand what I'm saying? The lives of my children. Their very souls. But the simple fact is, we've got people out there who've paid to see a show.”

“I hear you,” Pepper said.

“People,” Markham repeated, “who paid to see a show.”

“I said I heard you.”

“With that in mind,” Markham said. “It occurs to me that perhaps I misunderstood you. Why, I'm sure your weight is just fine. I'm sure you're in the kind of tip-top shape we at the Markham & Markham Overland Carnival have come to depend on from the former world's lightweight champion. If nothing else, perhaps we both merely misinterpreted the parameters of our previous discussion. Yes?”

“Yes,” Pepper said, his tongue dry and stiff in his mouth. “I think we both may have misinterpreted the parameters of our discussion. If I was not clear right off, I apologize. I came here tonight only to confirm with you that my act goes on as scheduled and to release the Markham & Markham outfit of any liability in the unlikely event of a mishap.”

“A mishap,” Markham said, “like you break your fucking neck.”

“Like I break my fucking neck,” Pepper said.

Markham slapped his knees like he'd just wrapped up a tidy little piece of business. They shook on it, and Pepper had one hand on the latch of the door when Markham spoke again.

“I'm told our mutual acquaintance Fritz Mundt came to see you recently,” the carnival barker said.

Pepper turned. “That's right.”

“What did that washed-up meat tosser think he was doing tampering with one of my top draws?” Markham said.

“Nothing,” Pepper said. “Not much. No tampering. He only came by to shoot the breeze.”

Markham looked at him with the eye of a stockman appraising a side of beef. “That's good,” he said. “I'm sure you understand it would be a violation of your exclusive performance contract for you to be consorting with another promoter, in this industry or any other.”

“I do, Boyd,” Pepper said, trying to use his tone to let the carnival barker know exactly how much he hated him at that moment. “I do understand that.”

“Good,” Markham said, a grandfatherly grin spreading across his fat cheeks. “Now, skedaddle on out of here, son. I need to get myself equipped. I'd tell you break a leg, but I understand Mr. Mundt took care of that for you some years ago.”

T
hey packed a good house. The grandstand under the big tent was filled to capacity by the time Markham stepped out from behind the curtain, a small grin playing on his lips. The townspeople were rolling drunk, clapping and catcalling as he strolled to the center of the performance ring and took a low bow. “Timber!” someone shouted from the back. It got a few laughs, but the noise died quickly as he approached the microphone, letting the moment stretch before he dabbed the sweat away from his face with a folded handkerchief and said: “Welcome.”

Moira had her eye pressed to the rear wall of the tent. She'd paid another girl a dime to cover her spot at the poker table so she could sneak away from the gaming pavilion to watch. If Pepper was going to go out and kill himself doing the hangman's drop, she wasn't about to sit idly by at the tables only to hear about it later from some roustabout. She was still fuming over Markham's insistence that he go on with the show, imagining the feeling of getting her fingers around the ringmaster's thick neck, but now she had to hand it to him. He might've been a snake and a tyrant, but he was the best she'd ever seen at working an audience. He could grind on a set patter, but was also quick with ad libs and improvisation, a master of reading a room and then taking a crowd wherever he wanted to go. As he started in
on his standard opening for the show, he had the entire population of New Vermillion rapt.

“Skilled performers who have thrilled crowds as far away as New York City!” he said, the mention of New York eliciting some murmured boos. “Chicago!” he cried, and the boos picked up speed. “San Francisco!” The grandstand trembled as the people crowed, starting to feel they were in on some kind of joke. “Even,” he announced with a mischievous glint in his eye, “the lush green hills of Oregon!”

The place went crazy.

In the backyard area, a half dozen horn players loafed around with their instruments propped on their shoulders. They all wore maroon jackets with matching stovepipe hats, and one man in their group stood holding hands with a monkey. The monkey didn't wear a jacket but had a hat to match the rest and waved a toy trombone in his free hand. Just as Markham was reaching the crescendo of his speech, the horn players suddenly struck up a warbling tune, stumbling through the curtain into the performance ring.

Their melody was scattered and messy at first, but came together as they neared the center, their clumsy walk turning into a kind of haphazard choreographed dance. Markham stepped back from the microphone and stared. The crowd was caught off guard, too, the music snapping them out of the spell he'd been building. The lead musician waggled his hat in one hand and turned a little pirouette as they strutted across the ring. Markham stomped over, hands on his wide, womanly hips, and caught the bandleader by the collar. The two of them started a pantomimed argument while the other musicians stood shrugging, holding their hats and horns in their hands. Markham turned a deep shade of purple as he and the lead horn player got in each other's faces. When their row reached its fever pitch, one of the roustabouts ducked his head into the tent and yelled: “Let them play!”

The crowd picked up on it. “Yeah, let 'em play!” someone called out.

Hearing that, Markham reared back and bumped the bandleader with his enormous belly, sending him tumbling into the sawdust. The townspeople, suddenly realizing this was all part of the show, erupted in laughter. Wood chips flew as the bandleader hopped up and gave chase, followed by the rest of the horn players all tooting an angry fugue. Markham ran a long circle around the ring, making sure every section of the grandstand got a front-row view of the pursuit. As he came back through the center of the tent he stopped and shouted into the microphone: “We've got a great show for you tonight! First up, the aerialist Star DeBelle and her team of lady acrobats! Give them a hand!” Then he sprinted for the exit with the horn players still on his tail. The crowd roared as he left the tent and the lady acrobats tumbled in, a few of them turning handsprings while the rest waved a rippling rainbow of five-foot flags.

Moira pulled her eye away from the sidewall and she saw Pepper ambling down from the trailer in his cape and tights, flanked by his escort of clowns. From the look on his face, you'd never guess there was anything the matter with him. He kept his eyes straight ahead, his shoulders back, his walk steady. He looked confused for a moment when their eyes met, not expecting to see her there, and then he smiled as if he understood. The smile was cocky and dangerous and filled her to the point of bursting with love for him. He had smiled at her just that way the first time they'd met, years ago now, before either of them had ever heard of Boyd Markham, his traveling carnival, or the hangman's drop.

T
he first wrestler to show up at The Green Sheet that night in 1912 was Aldous Hawthorne, a strutting fireplug with a sandy mustache who wore no jacket over a blazing pink shirt with white French cuffs. Moira didn't know he was the world's lightweight
champion until one of the waitresses told her, but from the way he breezed into the club without paying the cover charge—two toadies following him like they were sewn to his elbows—she knew he was somebody.

Being somebody didn't necessarily distinguish Aldous Hawthorne from the rest of the clientele at The Green Sheet. The club belonged to Jellyroll Hogan, a St. Louis alderman and part-time gangster, and everyone who drank, gambled and danced there did so with an unqualified belief in their own specialness. On a Saturday night, it was typical for ballplayers and tycoons to rub elbows with politicians and hoodlums. If a man didn't at least bring a stage actress as his date, he could count on being mocked behind his back, all of them competing at an unspoken game of who was most important, who was most dapper, who would live forever and never grow old.

This night the staff had been warned of a wrestling program at the Coliseum downtown and expected most of the mat men to drop by for a party afterward. Hawthorne had only been at his table near the dance floor for fifteen minutes before he dismissed his waitress and asked for Moira to be sent over. She was the floor manager of the club's casino room, not a waitress, and told him as much as she stood over his table with a clipboard in her arms and pencil tucked behind her ear. Hawthorne sat and listened with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. When she was finished he said he'd been watching her and thought she might like to have a drink with him. Up close she could see he had gray hairs around his temples and in his mustache. His British accent was thick and briny, his frankness disarming. His eyes said he knew what he wanted and saw no reason to hide it. In a room full of people acting out vaudeville parts, she thought he might be the only one just being himself, and she liked him for it immediately. Later, she would come to associate these qualities with
wrestlers in general, but at the time she was just a few years off the riverboat and The Green Sheet was her first real job. She accepted his offer and sat at his table.

Hawthorne said he'd had an easy night of work, taking two straight falls off some local boy in under forty-five minutes. He'd barely got a sweat going and now he couldn't recall the kid's name.

“Riffraff, mostly,” he said when she asked which of the other wrestlers might turn up at the club. He mentioned again that he was the lightweight champion, and when she didn't seem impressed enough for his liking, he sipped his scotch and added: “That means I'm the best in the world.”

“I gathered that from context,” she said.

He told her that in his younger days he'd traveled around England taking on all comers. The place he was from was called Lancashire, and from the way he talked about it, it seemed all the men there were wrestlers. At first his stories thrilled her, but after an hour of listening she started to wonder if he enjoyed the sound of his own voice more than she did. Still, she couldn't stop herself from feeling envious of the life he described: staying in the finest hotels and moving from one town to the next in expensive private train cars. From what she could tell, it sounded as though Hawthorne spent less than an hour in the wrestling ring each night and the rest of his time carousing. When she said so, he scoffed.

“There's a good deal more to it than that,” he said.

When the other wrestlers began to show up, her first thought was that they all looked like slightly different versions of the same man. They all stood a little bowlegged, with wide, flat chests, heavy brows, and the impassive, deep-set eyes of apes. They didn't have the show-off muscles of strongmen or body sculptors, but they had big shoulders and blunt, scarred hands like fieldworkers. The club regulars gave them a wide berth, which only made it easier for the shills,
cocktail girls, and prostitutes to get to them. The wrestlers didn't seem to mind.

Moira could tell Hawthorne was warming up to ask her back to his hotel, when another wrestler in a floppy newsboy cap appeared at their table. At first she didn't notice anything special about him, just a guy with the same face as the others, one pounded flat and rubbed smooth by the wrestling mat. His nose was still mostly straight, which made him look younger than some of the others, and his suit didn't fit him, his shirt collar left open around a tree-trunk neck. It was his ears that set him apart. Shriveled and misshapen, they stuck out from the sides of his head like clenched fists: the left one just a bubble of scar tissue with no discernible hole or lobe, the right a dying flower, wilting in on itself.

She felt an itching at the back of her neck and turned her head just enough to see that the wrestlers crowded around the bar had stopped what they were doing and were watching them.

“Mr. Hawthorne?” the young man said.

“In the flesh, my boy,” Hawthorne said, giving Moira an amused wink. “What can I do for you?”

The young man stuck out his hand and Hawthorne shook it lustily. “I knew it was you,” the guy said, grinning. “I saw you backstage at the Coliseum, but you cut out before I could catch you.”

“Sounds like you've been hot on my tail,” Hawthorne said, enjoying the chance to parade his fame in front of her.

“Yes, sir,” the guy said. “I wanted to introduce myself and give you the chance to meet the man who is going to take your title.”

Hawthorne's smile turned to tin on his face. “I beg your pardon?” he said. His two toadies, who'd been sulking at a nearby table since Moira sat down, caught the scent of trouble and scooted closer.

“It's nothing to get hot about,” the young man said. “I've seen you wrestle a hundred times. You're a fine champion, sir, but you're just not me.”

In an instant Hawthorne was up out of his seat, his face flushed, a sheen of sweat on his brow. Moira felt a tightness building in her chest and flashed a signal to the bouncers standing in the doorway to the casino. They frowned back at her, clearly in no hurry to get involved. Some of the wrestlers hooted at them from the bar.

“I'll not sit here and be disrespected by the likes of you,” Hawthorne said. He was taller than the new man and used his bulk to brush him back.

“You've got the wrong idea,” the guy said. “I didn't come over to make threats. I thought I might buy you and your lovely wife a drink. A kind of passing of the torch, if you will.”

Hawthorne sucked his chin deep into his chest. “You strike me as a crazy person,” he said. “I assure you that you are no threat to me. As for this whore, I've only just met her.”

Moira saw disgust flutter across Hawthorne's face and was immediately angry with herself for sitting with him for so long. She lit a cigarette and said to the guy: “If you're buying, I'll have a gin rickey.”

The guy smiled but didn't look at her. “You haven't even got my name yet,” he said to Hawthorne.

“Nor do I care to,” the champion said. He shoved the man, and suddenly they were all in a tangle on the dance floor—Hawthorne's toadies and the bouncers and even a few of the wrestlers who'd hopped the rail from the bar. Everyone pulling and swearing and knocking over tables. It took the bouncers a few minutes to pry them all loose while Moira retreated to the safety of the bar. The wrestlers looked amused at the efforts of the bouncers, but they backed off, some of them holding up their hands like they were being held at gunpoint. The last man off the floor was Aldous Hawthorne, yanked up and hanging from where the bouncers had him by the shoulders. Blood was running down his chin, his pink shirt dotted with it.