by Chad Dundas
The bouncing at least seemed to agree with him, despite his small stature and the fact he spoke almost no English. He was proud of the cuts and bruises he sometimes brought home, stooping down so Pepper could poke and prod the spots with tentative fingers until his father winced and pulled away laughing. Later that same year his mother developed facial tics and a tremor in her hands. It got so bad that she had to quit her job as a seamstress for one of the town’s big mining companies. A doctor in Pocatello confirmed a lesion on her spine and said there was nothing to be done.
His father grew more unruly as she withered away. His fights with Pepper got worse and more common. Then early one morning during the fall of 1898, Pepper woke to find his father crouching over him, pressing a gun to his mouth. His father’s clothes stank of the barroom, the barrel of the pistol cutting into Pepper’s lips.
“You think you’re something,” he slurred in their old language, burrowing the gun in past his teeth. “You’re not something.”
Then he was gone, clattering things onto the floor in their tiny kitchen before finally tumbling off to bed. Pepper stayed still until he heard the slow, choked sounds of his father’s snores before he slipped out from under his blanket, gathered a few things into a knapsack and snuck out the back door. Their shotgun house was built into an embankment downhill from the railroad tracks, so he didn’t have far to go before he found a place where the trains slowed around a wide bend. He sat for what seemed like hours in the cold, an old shirt pressed against his lips to stop the bleeding. It was nearly dawn by the time he mustered the courage to race down the small hill of frozen sand and hop into the half-open door of a rickety boxcar as it passed.
It was cold on that train. The kind of cold that cut through his pants and heavy shirt as if he were naked. It froze the hairs of his nose and crept up into the soles of his boots. He was so miserable when the train finally lumbered to a stop the following afternoon that he might’ve snuck into town to find a way home if a rail yard cop hadn’t caught him shimmying out of the car. The guy saw his split lips and the blood all over his shirt and went easy working him over.
Pepper went to jail, where they gave him warm clothes and food. It turned out he was still in Idaho, in a small town in Handsome County near the Canadian border. He refused to tell anyone his name for fear they would send him home, and it quickly became clear that no one knew exactly what to do with him. For three weeks he stayed with the sheriff and his wife, kindly people who fed him pie and let him sleep in the room they’d kept for a son who’d either died or never been born at all. For a while he dreamed the sheriff would adopt him, but soon people got tired of asking him questions he wouldn’t answer, and a watery-eyed judge with blossoms of broken blood vessels in his nose ordered him sent north to the Handsome Academy for Boys. He spent the next five years there.
As he tipped his head back to take a second pull on the marijuana, he could still feel the warm blood and the bits of broken teeth in his mouth from the gun. He could taste the cold, oily metal and picture the sad, desperate look in his father’s face. As he exhaled, he opened his eyes and saw a shadow detach itself from the outer wall of the stadium, just beyond the reach of a streetlamp at the end of the block. He let the smoke trail slowly out of his lungs, a quiver of curiosity stirring as the hulking shape of a man made its way toward him. The figure moved slowly along the sidewalk, pausing once to look back as if he wasn’t sure he knew the way. Hidden in the gloom of the cemetery, Pepper thought the man would pass by without noticing him, but once the dark figure got within twenty-five yards it veered off the concrete and hopped the fence. In order to free both hands, Pepper clamped the rolled smoke in the corner of his mouth, hoping for a mugger, hoping for something more interesting than a beat cop out hassling drunks.
As the figure got nearer he recognized the tilt of the bowler hat, the barrel chest and the curlicue mustache.
“Before you come any closer,” he called out in the dark, “tell me how worried I need to be.”
Fritz Mundt’s laugh was like gravel rattling in a tin can. The big man closed the distance between them in a few long steps, looking as nimble as ever on his feet. “Relax,” he said. “I’m not here to bust anybody up.”
“Lucky,” Pepper said. “I don’t think I could carry your big ass all the way to the hospital if you tried.”
Fritz grinned at him and pulled him down from his perch into an awkward, backslapping hug. They hadn’t seen each other in five years, since the night in Pittsburgh when Pepper lost the world’s lightweight title to a bum named Whip Windham. Before that, they’d been friends and training partners, working as regulars in Abe Blomfeld’s midwestern wrestling operation, forging the bond men shared through killing themselves in the cramped gym the old man kept above his butcher shop on the North Side.
In the ring, Fritz was a hardworking heavyweight—good, not great. Better with a blackjack or a length of pipe, at least in those early days when he padded his pockets collecting Blomfeld’s debts. He was smart, too, the way a bear could be smart once it had you up a tree. The only time the two of them had ever wrestled each other for real was in an openweight match for five hundred people at a Grange Hall outside of Dayton. How long ago had that been, Pepper wondered, nineteen thirteen? They’d gone ninety hard minutes before Pepper finally took the bigger man’s back and rendered him unconscious with a stranglebar choke. Even back then Fritz outweighed him by seventy-five pounds, and from the size of the gut he was carrying around now, it looked like more. The big guy had gone soft, Pepper thought, but he held his tongue about it for now. He decided it was best to wait and see what he wanted. It used to be when Fritz Mundt came to see you, it wasn’t good news.
“I knew I’d find you out here,” Fritz said, holding out two fingers for the hemp. “Give it here.”
“Old habits,” Pepper said.
Fritz produced a flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and they traded. “I’ve been tracking you for a week,” he said. “Just missed you in Bisbee. From there I thought you’d jump to Phoenix, then Los Angeles, but if you did I missed you there, too.”
“Swung down through Mexico,” Pepper said. “Boyd Markham can be a wildcatting son of a bitch when he gets a taste for it.”
Fritz leaned back and squinted at him. “How’s your weight?” he said. “You’re looking a little loose in the cage, you don’t mind me saying.”
“Pot meet kettle,” Pepper said. He smelled the pungent fumes of back alley rotgut before he tipped the flask to his lips. The whiskey burned like acid going down, but he didn’t take his eyes off Fritz, trying to get a read on him. The big man seemed oblivious, sucking on the marijuana with his eyes fixed on its glowing cherry.
“Blomfeld’s dead,” he said finally, holding in a lungful.
“I should hope so,” Pepper said. “What would he be now, a hundred and five?”
Fritz exhaled with a hiss. “I’ve been looking after the gym since he passed. What’s left of it. Tried my hand at booking for a while but had to shut things down. Not enough happening at the box office, as I’m sure you’ve heard.”
“Maybe you don’t have the mind for it,” Pepper said.
He knew it had been hard times in the wrestling business since Frank Gotch retired and kicked the bucket at his farm back in Iowa. Crowds had been getting smaller and the ink in the big city papers harder to come by, but he figured it was just a matter of time before promoters found some new star to prop up in Gotch’s place.
Fritz passed the smoke back. “It got so bad I thought I might have to close down entirely, but guess who showed up out of the blue last winter talking about a comeback?”
Pepper didn’t like to guess and said he couldn’t possibly. Fritz took the flask and killed it, screwing the top on tight before stowing it inside his coat. “Garfield Taft,” he said, spreading his hands like he’d just pulled off an impressive magic trick.
Pepper groaned. “Speaking of the dead and buried. I thought pimping out white girls could get you lynched in Ohio.”
“I assure you Mr. Taft is very much alive, and his comeback is real,” Fritz said, swallowing a frown. “It may interest you to know that I’ve even been talking to certain parties about a shot at the world’s heavyweight title.”
Pepper had to laugh at that. “Bullshit,” he said. “I highly doubt that Billy Stettler and Stanislaw Lesko would give a black man the chance to win the world’s title. Let alone an ex-con. The press would murder them for it.”
“Things have changed more than you know,” Fritz said, muscles in his jaw flaring. “Point of fact, I’ve already got a tune-up match arranged ten days from now. If Taft wins, Stettler and Strangler Lesko are willing to sign on for a championship bout at Christmastime.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, then,” Pepper said, thinking every word of it had to be a lie. “What does any of it have to do with me?”
Fritz rearranged his feet in the soft earth. “Actually,” he said, “I hoped you might consider joining up with us. What would you say to becoming Taft’s trainer?”
That got his attention. He’d given up on the idea of ever getting back into the wrestling business, and now he laughed to cover the bloom of hope he felt in his chest. The serious look in the big man’s eyes didn’t change.
“Jesus,” Pepper said. “You’re not joking.”
When Fritz spoke again, there was an added weight to his voice. “Do you think it’s accurate to say we know things about each other that no one else on this earth knows?”
Pepper glanced across the street at the ballpark. “I know I never said anything,” he said. “I can’t speak for you.”
Fritz nodded. “Then you might believe me when I tell you this,” he said. “When we get our title match—and we will get it—we’re going to need a hell of a scientific wrestler to get Taft ready for Lesko. Given the situation, there’s only one name on my list. If there’s a man alive who knows his way around the catch-as-catch-can style better than you, I never met him.”
“You got that right, anyway,” Pepper said. “Consider me interested. Now tell me the part you’re not telling me.”
“Taft is married to a white woman,” Fritz said. “It caused no end of trouble in Chicago. We’ve had to move our operation out west. Where we are now, it’s not as if people are falling all over themselves to sign on to train him.”
Pepper let out a low whistle at hearing this news. “Where?”
“Join up with us and I’ll draw you a map,” Fritz said. “Until then, you’ll forgive me if I keep the particulars to myself.”
He held up a hand, rubbing the thumb against his index finger. “What are we talking?”
“A hundred and fifty dollars a week,” Fritz said. “Meals, lodging, everything included. Plus, if we get Lesko to sign on, ten percent of the purse.”
“Plus five of the gate?”
Fritz smiled at him. It was not a nice smile. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “The fact that you allowed a snake like Boyd Markham to turn you into a circus performer is one of the great tragedies in our business, but I’m not here offering to grab my ankles. You want to go on taking the hangman’s drop every night, twice on Sunday, for twenty-five dollars a week? Making every rinky-dink town, wrestling every cattleman and miner who has a nickel to spare? Fine. I’m offering you a chance at something different, that’s all.”
Across the street, the door in the stadium wall opened and Moira appeared. In the night mist and the electric buzz of the streetlamps she was stunning: tall and slender, walking with easy grace, her blonde hair bobbed around the ears. Bunching a handful of cloth so the hem of her dress wouldn’t drag on the cobblestones, she picked her way across to the graveyard fence. When she saw Fritz Mundt standing with Pepper, her face dropped and her voice was cold.
“It’s time,” she said.
Fritz doffed his hat. “Moira.”
“Hello, Freddy,” she said. “Please don’t talk to me.” Then to Pepper: “It’s time.” She gestured toward the stadium in a way that said she would only stand out there as long as he made her.
He pinched out the hemp and tucked it away. As they shook hands, Fritz passed him a folded scrap of paper with a phone number scribbled across the bottom.
“I’m at the New Palace Hotel for another week or so,” he said. “Come with me to see Taft in that challenge match I mentioned. No strings.”
“Whatever it is, we’re not in the market,” Moira said. “If Boyd Markham catches you out here trying to shanghai one of his top drawing cards, he’ll cut your throat with that little pigsticker he always has on him.”
Fritz dug a cigar out from inside his suit. “Only to be saved by the grace of God and my own catlike reflexes,” he said.
Pepper vaulted back over the fence and stood waiting for Moira, who suddenly seemed like she wasn’t ready to go. He could feel tension radiating off her, her spine straight, shoulders back, with one hand still on the top rung. “Box office is around front,” she said to Fritz. “You want to see us again, buy a ticket.”
The flame of Fritz’s lighter flashed across his face. “Funny thing about the hangman’s drop,” he said. “I’ve never known anyone to survive it so long. We all know you’re tough—don’t get me wrong—but a man can only press his luck so far before—” He dragged a thumb across his throat.
Pepper had to catch her by the wrist to keep her from going over the fence. “C’mon,” he said. “He’s just messing with you.”
Reluctantly she came away. He fit his palm into the small of her back and guided her off the curb, the clicking of her heels on the stones echoing in the deserted street.
A week later, when the carnival arrived in New Vermillion, Oregon, the scale in the Guess Your Weight tent said Pepper weighed 161 pounds in his socks and tights. The scale was a seven-foot Toledo with a peeling candy-cane paint job and a sturdy red arrow mounted inside an oval viewing window. Black embossed lettering around the inside said: No Springs! Honest Weight! and there were two giant footprints on the platform to show you where to stand. Twice he climbed off and back on, just to be sure. After the third time, he spat into the dirt and cursed, slapping his palm hard against the glass. The arrow quivered but didn’t budge.
He hopped down and bent to stretch, listening to his back pop and whimper as he reached for his toes. Between his legs and out the open mouth of the tent he could see the roustabouts making their final preparations for the evening show. Two of them were unrolling a giant spool of cable from the powerhouse trucks, while behind them a team checked and rechecked the support wires on the big tent. A man in overalls with a flaming-red beard trucked by with a long-handled maul over his shoulder, running like whatever he had to do needed to be done five minutes ago. Close on his heels a seamstress in a denim apron trundled along carrying a studded leather saddle.
When he was sure no one was watching, Pepper peeled out of his tights and tossed them in a pile on top of his discarded boots. He closed his eyes, tipping his face back, lifted his arms above his head, and huffed all the air out of his lungs. Please, he thought. Please, please, please. He stepped slowly back onto the scale, rubbed his hands over the prickly stubble on his cheeks and opened one eye.
One sixty-one.
He found Moira in the trailer shimmying into a silver dress. Her face was done up, a little too much mascara clumping in her lashes as she watched him in the mirror. The trailer was a teardrop-shaped single-axle, decorated on the outside with a picture of Pepper dangling from a rope, a wide smile on his face, the words Master of the Hangman’s Drop! arching over his head. Even for a short guy there was barely enough room inside to stand up straight. He turned to look at himself in the glass next to her, letting the shoulders of his tights fall loose around his waist.
His chest was flat and a
shen, knotted with yellowing bruises, his ribs like xylophones up and down his sides. A crescent-shaped scar zagged over one nipple and another stitched out from a hip, inching its way toward his belly button. Just below his sternum a hard, bony knob jutted out where something had broken years ago and hadn’t healed right. His cheeks were so sunken that when he smiled he could see the bones in his face. He tried to fix the mirror with a tough-guy stare and didn’t like the way it looked.
Moira patted her lipstick with the tip of a finger. “Say the word if you want me to leave you two alone,” she said.
“You might want to think about sleeves,” he said. “A bunch of these towners are already barking drunk.”
She leaned over and kissed him. “Wish me luck,” she said. “I’m off to bread-and-butter the natives.” As she turned around she saw him from a distance for the first time and stopped short.
“You’re still overweight,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”
He tried to turn away from her, but she caught him and pushed him back in front of the mirror. Standing behind him, she ran her fingertips down his chest, feeling the way the skin slipped easy over his stomach muscles. You couldn’t lie to Moira.
“You’re fat,” she said. “You’re one sixty if you’re a pound.”
“It’s going to be fine, I said.”
She bit a lip. “You should run,” she said. “You want me to get your coat?”
He turned around, bracing his hands on her shoulders. “Stop it,” he said. “Just cut it out, what you’re doing.”
“You should spit in a cup,” she said, starting to paw around in her tiny purse for her cigarettes. “Anything.”