Champion of the World (6 page)

“This is outrageous,” he said.

The bouncers paid him no mind. They looked to Moira, who stood with her hands on the bar and her heart flapping like a bird against her rib cage. She gave a quick sideways nod at the door, and even as a team of bouncers hustled him off with his toadies, the lightweight champion of the world was trying to explain to them who he was.

“What about ‘Tiny' here?” another bouncer asked Moira.

It took her a moment to realize he meant the young guy, who had somehow avoided the worst of the fracas and was scouting around underneath the tables for his cap. His hair was a deep brown brush cut, which made him look even more like a schoolboy. “Say that again,” he said to the bouncer as he located his hat beneath a chair and reset it on his head, aiming for a little tilt. “I'll pull your tongue out and step on it.”

The bouncer simmered, but Moira sent him away with a slight shake of her head. His lips twisted in a way that said letting the kid stay was a mistake, but a moment later he moved back to his spot at the door to the casino room. The wrestlers retreated to the bar, and music filled the air as the band struck up again. Maybe they'd never stopped playing; Moira didn't know.

For the record, she told the guy as he took a stool across from her, she wasn't a whore. Secondly, the club had a two-drink minimum, so he'd have to order something if he wanted to stay. The guy looked around and then asked what Aldous Hawthorne had been drinking. Moira brought him a scotch and soda and told the bar manager to put it on her tab.

“He got the message,” the guy said, staring at the closed back door through which the bouncers had deposited the Englishman, “but I'd say the meaning was lost on him.”

Moira hid her grin. “A man takes off his hat when he speaks to a lady,” she said.

He stared at her a long time before pulling off his cap. “Sorry for queering your evening,” he said, leaning forward to offer her a warm, dry handshake across the bar. “I'm Pepper Van Dean.”

That night she took a bottle of red from the club's back room and they stayed up late sitting on a bench, watching the river, sipping out of paper cups. She was delighted to find he couldn't hold his liquor. After just a few drinks he told her about running away from home when he was twelve years old, winding up at a religious school for boys in the Idaho mountains. The older boys there made things tough on him, he said, until one of the brothers saved his life by forcing him to join the wrestling team. She left him with a handshake as dawn broke over the city, knowing she would see him again. Sure enough, a month later he was back, and then every few months after that, as part of Abe Blomfeld's stable of wrestlers, which toured the midwest in an endless loop. They went on two proper dates and then he started showing up at The Green Sheet unannounced, confessing he had no match in town, that he'd taken the train down from Chicago just to see her.

The night he proposed, they went to dinner at the Cottage and then roller-skating through Jackson Park. At the steps in front of the Palace of Fine Arts building, he got down on one knee and presented her with a ring so big and tacky, she had to ask if he had stolen it. He laughed but stayed down there, looking at her with those confident eyes of his. Like he already knew the answer. She said she wasn't going to marry him until he told her his real name.

That set him back. “How did you know?” he said.

“Please,” she said. “Nobody's named Pepper Van Dean. It makes you sound like a comic-strip character.”

He still had the ring in his hand. Shifting from side to side on one knee. “Zdravko Milenkovic,” he said after a bit, looking as sheepish as she'd ever seen him. “There. Nobody else knows that.”

She whistled, the sound of it echoing off the stone front of the building. “Let's just stick with Van Dean when we go see the judge.”

A year and a half later, she sat ringside at Convention Hall in Kansas City as a crowd of three thousand people watched him take the lightweight title from Aldous Hawthorne in straight falls. For months the two men feuded in the press, and by the time Pepper stood in the ring while Blomfeld strapped the title belt around his waist, he was maybe the most famous wrestler in the world not named Frank Gotch. For almost a full minute after he'd been beaten, Hawthorne slumped in a corner with his forearms braced on the top rope and his face pressed into the turnbuckle. When he'd finally collected himself, just a glint of tears in his eyes, he limped out and shook Pepper's hand. She had to give him credit for that much.

Even now, she couldn't make sense of the giddiness she felt seeing Pepper win the championship. Perhaps the biggest surprise to her had been the sudden realization that he might actually be as great as he said he was. Before winning the title, he'd been a darling of the press for his quick wit and sharp tongue, but she'd always assumed it was mostly puffery. Sure, he was tough and clever, but the best in the world? It seemed too much to hope for by half.

After he became champion, they moved out of their cramped rear-facing room on Chicago's South Side to a sprawling two-story house outside the city. The backyard, with its stone patio and enough grass for a ball field, was perfect for entertaining. Nearly every weekend they hosted the wrestlers of Blomfeld's troupe, along with any other sporting types who happened to be passing through town.

The wrestlers were odd men, as different from each other as they were the same. A surprising number of them had done at least some college and could talk about art, books and food in ways she'd never heard before. Others were nothing more than street toughs, with scars like fat earthworms burrowed in their eyebrows and under
their chins. Some were gifted scientific wrestlers, with encyclopedic knowledge of holds and escapes and a hard-won understanding of angles and leverage. Others were just mean. Some, like her new husband, were both.

Moira suspected they imagined themselves to be immortal. None of them spared a thought for tomorrow, spending money without counting it, unable to conceive of a day when they might wish they'd stashed it away. The longer they all wrestled, the more they looked alike as their faces grew shiny with scar tissue, their ears calcified hard, and the corners of their eyes drooped from nerve damage.

One of their backyard parties was where she first encountered Fritz Mundt, a rookie wrestler who seemed to have a new girlfriend every week and was always talking about how life would be after he became heavyweight champion. In those early days Fritz was one of her favorites, a fact that now burned especially badly. He had a funny way of pretending to be dumber than he really was, when in truth he was always playing some angle.

It took her a little while to get used to being rich and having friends. As soon as they moved out of their apartment, Pepper insisted she stop working, and even though it gave her an uneasy feeling, she agreed. She was not a person who dealt well with spare time, and after a month of sitting around the house, trying to plan dinners and hovering over the cleaning lady, she asked him what he would have her do. He just handed her a wad of bills and told her to go find out what she loved.

First she tried shopping, following the women who were now her peers around the streets, watching them get gooey at the sight of sale signs in shop windows. The new house had closets bigger than the riverboat stateroom she'd grown up in, and she did her best to fill them with hats and shoes and dresses. When she discovered that
buying wasn't her talent, she tried joining. She went to meetings of the Women's Peace Party, the Women's League for Peace and Freedom, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Women's Auxiliary to the Republican Party. She met suffragists, patriots, pacifists, Bolsheviks and anarchists. She had tea with women who were outraged at the expansion of what they called the “
American Empire
,” women who seemed to care more about the Philippines and Latin America than their own children. She met women who decried alcohol as a tool of Satan, the ruination of the modern family; rich women who buried themselves in orphans, and wet-eyed, earnest women who filled their mansions with stray dogs and cats. Then there were women who just wanted her to read
Frankenstein
so they would have someone to talk with about it. They had petitions for her to sign, newsletter subscriptions to push, donation plates to pass after the coffee was served. Nine times out of ten there was a sales pitch hidden somewhere in the slogans, the hymns and all the sisterhood.

These women embarrassed her, and she sensed the feeling was mutual. Her membership in groups quickly assumed a recognizable pattern. She would go to a few luncheons or sewing circles and at one of them she would drink too much or whisper too many jokes to the lady next to her and would not be invited back. That was fine with her, she told herself, and it was this acceptance of herself as a loner that eventually led her to admit there was nowhere she felt more at home than at a gambling table.

She began scouting out every racetrack, gaming hall, and card game in the city. Thinking back on it, the memory of those carefree days filled her with longing but also a sense of dread. It had been the best time of her life, but now it seemed like she'd known all along that something was lacking. It was undeniably less exhilarating to bet on the ponies or the ball game when there was no risk
involved. If she dropped five or ten dollars on a race or a boxing fight one week and then won it back the next, it didn't really matter. The triumphant lift she felt from winning and the stab of regret she got from losing were both dulled. They had so much money, the money became meaningless. To compensate, she bet bigger and bigger, but it still didn't give her the same thrill as the nickel and dime bets she'd made with her father as a girl, when every penny seemed like a fortune. She typically won more than she lost, but the times she went back to Pepper needing more, he always had it for her.

Toward the end, something changed. During what turned out to be the last six months of his title reign, Pepper was withdrawn and quiet. With newspaper reporters or in public he was boisterous, full of jokes and brags. At home she could hardly squeeze a word out of him. At first she assumed Blomfeld was having trouble finding worthy opponents for him. The general consensus in the press was that Pepper had already bested every lightweight worth his salt and now promoters were resorting to booking him opposite bigger and bigger men or against two-bit bums on the undercard of more important bouts. She knew his reputation as a drawing card and his salary were suffering because of it. Over time she realized something deeper was troubling him. She asked him over and over what was the matter, but he refused to say.

When they booked him to face Whip Windham in Pittsburgh during the fall of 1916, everything fell apart on them. To prepare for the match, Pepper spent days and sometimes nights in the private gym above Blomfeld's butcher shop. He became choosy about who he allowed around him, training only with his closest, most trusted friends. A week before the match, he called her late at night from the hospital to say his leg had been broken by Fritz Mundt during one of their regular grappling sessions. Everyone swore up and down it was an accident, but Moira felt Fritz must have betrayed them. Nothing
like it had happened before, and the only way she could make sense of it was to assume someone had gotten into the big man's ear, and into his pocketbook.

She begged Pepper to pull out of the match, but he wouldn't hear of it. He said there wouldn't be enough time for Blomfeld to find a replacement—that he'd have to cancel the whole show, which would only mean hard times and lost money for everybody, including the undercard wrestlers who were counting on making a payday. Real men and champions didn't pull out of matches, he said, and that was that.

He could barely walk from the dressing room to the ring on the night of the match, but he climbed up the stairs, limped through the ropes, and lasted nearly an hour before Windham pinned him in straight falls. The whole thing stunk to high heaven, but he wouldn't tell her what it meant or why it happened. Not then, not now, not ever; he just kept giving her the same sad smile and telling her that Fritz hadn't intended to do it. It had been a mix-up, that's all.

It was an obvious lie, and she became more convinced of it after the bout when Blomfeld refused to let Windham wait for Pepper to recover so they could have an immediate rematch. Instead, he sent the new champion on the road. A few months later, when Windham had already lost the title to someone else and it was clear Pepper's leg wasn't healing as fast as they'd hoped, Blomfeld released him from his contract. Moira was sure some other promoter would snap them up, but none did. Month after month they waited for a new contract offer, a comeback match. By the time they realized it wasn't coming, it was too late. Too many bills and mortgage payments had piled up around them. To pay off their creditors, they sold the house and the car and, eventually, everything else. The day the new owners turned them out of the house was one of the saddest of her life, yet she'd still had no idea how much she'd grow to miss it all.

When they got to the end of the long driveway carrying their suitcases in their hands, they found Boyd Markham chewing on a cigar, one shoe propped up on the bumper of a Model T Ford. The carnival barker put them up in a swanky downtown hotel for two nights while he wooed them and, once Pepper's contract with the circus was signed, loaded them on a train back east. The finality of it didn't hit her until she saw their new apartment at the Hotel St. Agnes in Brooklyn. It was a shabby, small space with cracking plaster walls and grit-streaked windows—the kind of place where even on the brightest summer day it was impossible to get enough light inside. The upside was, they were barely there. Even after she got used to the greasy snow-blind feeling of the road, she never forgot the view from the bay window in their big house in Chicago. She never forgot what it was like to slip under the covers of their king-sized bed and feel every muscle and joint in her body relax.