Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  “I knew it,” she said. “I knew from the moment I saw him again that Freddy was in over his head.”

  “You know what your problem is?” Carol Jean said. “You refuse to see the good in people. Even when they’re trying to help you out.”

  “Does Mr. Taft know about this?” Moira asked.

  “Of course he knows,” Carol Jean said. “I mean, there’s no telling what these men understand from one moment to the next. Their whole lives are a giant game of tag, all about who got who last, everybody keeping score in their heads all the time.”

  “Where is he now?” Moira asked. The whole time she’d been sitting in the parlor she hadn’t heard the floorboards creak overhead.

  “He doesn’t sleep,” Carol Jean said. “He walks. Ever since he got out of prison, he just walks and walks and walks.”

  “What do you mean he doesn’t sleep?” Moira said.

  Anger bloomed on Carol Jean’s face. “It doesn’t strike me as a particularly hard concept to grasp,” she said. “He tosses and turns, he gets restless, he goes out. I don’t pry, because, unlike you, I strive for optimism. I just thank my stars he’s home at all and not locked up in some box somewhere.”

  Moira fought back the urge to snap at her—the oblivious sea captain whose ship had set a course for the edge of the earth. This thing they’d both spent so much time pining for. They weren’t going to get it. Moira knew that now. Maybe it had taken hearing it from someone else’s mouth to make her realize there was no going back to their old lives. They could only move forward. But with Pepper off on Fritz Mundt’s Chicago adventure, Carol Jean was the closest thing Moira had to an ally at the hunting camp. So that she wouldn’t tell her how silly it all sounded, she took a deep breath and held it, thinking carefully about what she would say next.

  “I know what it’s like, you know. To have to start over.”

  “Oh,” Carol Jean said, like she didn’t believe it. “What would you know about it?”

  “My father died when I was fairly young,” she said. “After that, I left home and went to St. Louis. I had nothing, I knew no one, maybe like you that first night you wandered into the Olympia Ballroom. But I made it. I made a little life for myself and then I met Pepper and I expect the rest would sound very familiar to you. For a while we had a lot. Now we don’t have a thing.”

  As she talked, Carol Jean put her coffee cup down and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Mine was a saloon owner,” she said. “My daddy. Had a little corner bar down in Lexington. The kind that always kept a picture of John L. Sullivan in one of those little oval frames, like some long-lost member of the family? Well, you can imagine how he reacted when he found out about Garfield. The last time I talked to him, he blamed me for the death of my mother—said I killed her with a broken heart. Really, it was cancer, but I’m not sure he was thinking straight by that point. Thought it was some kind of divine message that he’d been right all along when Gar got sent away.”

  She was running again, so Moira got out of her way.

  “We weren’t married, of course, when he went to prison; but at first I didn’t know how I would survive it,” Carol Jean said. “They took him up to Dayton for the trial and I followed. Those nights alone in the hotel room, the not knowing and the loneliness. Those were probably my lowest points. And then of course the waiting while he served his time. I suppose the silver lining, if there was one, was that I proved capable of hanging around longer than the previous Mrs. Taft could manage.”

  “Three years is a long time,” Moira said.

  “Not for the man you love,” Carol Jean said. “A blink of the eye.”

  “Still,” Moira said. “I suppose anything seems preferable by comparison.”

  “Certainly you can’t expect someone who’s gone through that kind of hardship to come out unchanged,” Carol Jean said. “But I’m hopeful things will get better. Maybe even go back to the way they were before.”

  “Changed how?”

  “He’s a harder man now,” Carol Jean said. “Less interested. He barely rests, just wanders.”

  “What you said that first night at dinner,” Moira said. “You indicated the papers got it wrong about Mr. Taft.”

  Carol Jean laughed, a booming slap of a laugh. “Complete lies, my dear, trumped-up nonsense. My Gar was no more a pimp than he was president of the United States.”

  “How can you be sure?” Moira asked. She found herself fascinated, in a strange way, by this woman. She seemed at once the boss of the house and also a fraud, every pose and facial expression studied, as if she had spent considerable time learning where to place her words, her arms, her breasts. Her energy bordered on manic, a look in her eyes that said if she ever stopped swimming, she would drown.

  “I know my husband,” Carol Jean said, leaning over to lay a hand across Moira’s arm. “The truth is, the whole thing had nothing to do with prostitution or whatever else they said in court. It was wrestling, plain and simple. A group of promoters got together and decided not to let Garfield Taft win the world’s heavyweight championship. They knew if they let that happen, a white man would never lay hands on it again. It was just a couple of months out from when he was supposed to wrestle Joe Stecher at Comiskey Park, you see. It took more than a year for Gar to get Stecher to sign the contract, and, well, the whole wrestling world was just terrified. So they had him arrested and Stecher went to Omaha and wrestled Stanislaw Lesko instead. They fought to a five-hour draw in front of thirty thousand people. Not as big a crowd as they would’ve drawn with Garfield on the bill, but still, the gate was almost two hundred thousand dollars. Can you imagine?”

  “It sounds like quite a conspiracy.”

  “My dear,” Carol Jean said. “When all you need is one Negro locked up in a cell somewhere, it’s not like murdering Caesar. It’s just a matter of which bagman leaves which bag in whose hotel room. Remember, there was a lot more money to be made in wrestling back then.”

  This brought Moira back to Eddy, who was of course one of the main reasons she’d walked up here in the first place. She asked Carol Jean about him again, if he was the kind of man who might leave a suitcase full of cash in some important man’s hotel room. “My husband said he’s a gangster,” Moira said, trying not to feel like she was betraying a trust by saying it.

  Carol Jean drank and chuckled. “A pitiful one, maybe. To nab a cherry assignment like this? He can’t be anyone’s favorite, whoever is the boss of him.”

  “It’s so strange,” Moira said. “All of it.”

  “Any stranger than anything else we’ve done?” Carol Jean said.

  Moira pointed her coffee cup at the window. “These creatures. How long will they be in our midst?”

  Carol Jean said the mountain roads would be too dangerous for the men to travel after dark. They’d stay the night to guard their treasure and leave in the morning.

  “Wonderful,” Moira said, and again Carol Jean sighed.

  “Sweetheart,” she said. “I’m going to tell you what Mr. Herman Cohn told me when I asked what to do the first time a customer at the Olympia Ballroom put his hand up my dress.”

  “Which was?”

  “Hold your nose and hope the check clears.”

  She intended to go straight back to the cabin, but after leaving Carol Jean to finish the dregs of the coffee, Moira circled around the far end of the lodge and crept up the hill toward the horse barn. It was even colder out than she had first thought, a stiff wind biting into her ankles, blowing up under the hem of her jacket. She wrapped herself tighter as she went, picking her way to the boarded-up gym where the men were supposed to spend their days training. In the shadows there she stopped to let her eyes adjust to the gloom, hoping to get a better look at what was happening. The doors to the horse barn were flung open and the truck was already backed up close, the sedan hunkering nearby with its motor still running. S
he counted six men working to unload wooden crates, the sound of their voices carrying in the dark, but the words washed out by the wind. She could no longer see Eddy up there with them and wondered if he’d gone off to settle some other business.

  Before long she saw figures coming through the darkness toward her. At first she thought they were carrying shovels or axes, but as they got closer she saw each man had a shotgun propped against his hip. A surge of panic seized her, the urge to run, to scurry off and hide in the underbrush. She fought it down and immediately regretted it, wondering how many people got themselves killed for fear of looking foolish. By then it was too late. There were four of them, the lead man big and round-faced, his collar turned up to his ears. He was the only one not carrying a shotgun but instead had a large lamp, like something a miner might use, hanging from one fist. As his light fell on her, she could tell they were surprised to find she was a woman.

  “Come out from there, now,” the lead man said. In his voice she recognized the long, rounded vowels of Canada.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Moira said, straining to be heard over the wind, trying to sound like she was the one being wronged. “I want to know what’s going on here.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the man with the lantern said. “I’m going to have to ask you to clear out of here.”

  Up close she could see he was too young to really be the one in charge. He was barely into his thirties, lips pressed tight against the cold. Under different circumstances he might have been handsome, and she wondered if he’d been chosen as lantern bearer precisely because he had a friendly, evenhanded way about him. She smiled at him.

  “You can’t come out here at this hour, make all this racket,” she said, “and expect a girl to get her beauty rest, can you?”

  One of the others, a dog-faced man wearing little round spectacles, prodded her with the barrel of his shotgun. “You bitch,” he growled. “Do what the man says.”

  She felt the warm, watery feeling of having a gun pointed at her, but before she could move the lead man nudged the barrel away. “No sense in you being up here in this cold, ma’am,” he told her in his easy voice. “Go on, now.”

  She looked over his shoulder to where a couple of men were still unloading the truck. The sedan belching white smoke into the sky. When she spoke again, it was with her father’s calm.

  “I apologize for being curious,” she said, “but I won’t abide by such rough talk. I’m a guest here of Fritz Mundt. Does he need to hear about this?”

  The lead man’s face turned so hard she knew she had misjudged him. She’d pushed it too far. He turned and, in a voice as deadly as a hot wire, told the dog-faced man and a couple of the others to escort her back to wherever she came from. As he strode back up the hill, he gave her a last look, pity plain on his face, as if he’d tried to help her but now she’d fouled it up. A nervous jitter quivered in her legs as the other men marched her down the road toward the cabins. She could still feel the sharp barrel of the shotgun burning against her ribs, even though the dog-faced man had only placed it there for a second.

  “Naughty girl,” he said to her now. “Trying to make me look bad in front of our young Mr. Templeton. That was a stupid thing to do.”

  When they got to the place where the road widened in front of the cabins, he used the shotgun to lift the back of her skirt, and she wheeled to slap it away. The men laughed and catcalled at her and the dog-faced man caught her by the wrist with a grip tight enough that she couldn’t wrench free. His eyes were small and dumb, and she knew he was going to hurt her. Maybe he thought she was just some camp prostitute, or maybe he didn’t care. As he backed her up, he tightened the squeeze on her wrist and a small whimpering sound escaped her lips.

  On the porch of the cabin something moved, and they all turned their heads to look. Moira’s first thought was of Pepper, a silly hope that he’d come back early from Chicago and was waiting for her. Her heart dropped when she saw it was just the old orange tomcat. It had been snoozing in front of the cabin’s door, anticipating the bowl of food she might bring down from the lodge. Now it uncurled itself and slunk off the porch into the road, curious about the noise. When it saw Moira, the cat dipped its head and trotted toward them. All the men stood and gaped at it until the dog-faced man released his grip on her wrist, shouldered his shotgun, and fired.

  Moira covered her face against the blast, and when she looked again the cat was down in the middle of the road. The dog-faced man stooped and hoisted it into the air by the stump of its tail, making sure to hold it at arm’s length. It was gut shot, and ropes of blood and stringy entrails hung from its body. Half of one of its back legs was missing and thick gashes were ripped through its hindquarters by the heavy load of the shotgun. The cat was still alive, screaming and scratching, which made the dog-faced man laugh.

  “Damn thing practically ran right up to me,” he said, a grin full of brown, broken teeth slithering across his face.

  One of the others whistled low. “That’s some good shooting,” he teased. “Bagged yourself a real trophy.”

  They all laughed, and Moira swallowed back a rush of bile. “Let it go,” she said.

  “I think I’ll make a hat out of it,” the dog-faced man said. “A nice fur hat.”

  “Let it go,” she said again, louder, spinning and hitting the dog-faced man on top of the shoulder with her fist. It was a stupid, worthless blow, but the surprise of being hit by a woman made him drop the cat. The animal landed with a sickening flop, and as it tried to scurry off into the underbrush, she saw its one remaining hind leg wasn’t working. It dragged itself a few feet with its front paws, leaving a trail of thick blood behind. The dog-faced man knocked Moira back a step with the flat of his shotgun, a snapping blow that felt like it had almost caved in her chest.

  “What’s it to you?” he said. “That old cat was half-dead already.”

  Tears welled in her eyes and she felt angry with herself for it. She’d seen the cat only a handful of times. She cleared her throat, determined not to give the bootleggers the satisfaction.

  The sound of footsteps coming up the road made them all stop, readying their guns as Garfield Taft appeared out of the shadows. He was wearing his knee-length coat with wide fur lapels open over a white shirt buttoned to the collar with no tie. It was the first time Moira had seen him so close since the first afternoon she’d gone to see Carol Jean. His face was healing nicely and he looked even taller now than she’d thought during his match with Jack Sherry. The line of men moved aside for him as he passed, his steps long and confident. He didn’t bother looking at them.

  “What’s all this?” he said, his voice a steady baritone, softer than she expected.

  “It’s none of your concern, nigger,” the dog-faced man said. “You get on inside before you cause any trouble.”

  If the words aroused any anger in Taft, he didn’t show it. “I wasn’t speaking to you,” he said, turning only his chin at the dog-faced man while keeping his eyes on Moira. This close she could see they were flecked with gold and green. “Are you all right?”

  “These men shot that old tomcat,” she said, as if that explained everything. “For no reason at all—just shot it.”

  Taft faced the bootleggers for the first time, studying each one of them in turn as he stepped between them and Moira. The dog-faced man lifted his gun slightly and grinned at them again. “What are you going to do about it, boy?” he asked. As his last word hung in the air it was unclear what the dog-faced man thought would happen next. Whatever it was, Moira guessed he probably didn’t expect Taft to stroll over and shove him down on his ass in the dirt.

  Eddy couldn’t sleep, and so he lay awake on his small cot, trying to keep from thinking about California by making a map of the hunting camp in his head. For this kind of work, he imagined he was using a good, inky pen, and he drew from memory in thick, perfect strokes. Sketching
out the distances from the lodge to the horse barn, from the horse barn to the rear gate. From there his thoughts followed the road up to the place where it disappeared about a half mile north of the camp. Marking out the terrain, the surrounding hills, and the place where a stream cut underneath a little wooden bridge.

  On his drive back to the camp, he’d kept the papers Howard Livermore had given him wrapped in a handkerchief on the passenger seat. He tried his best to forget the man’s wet cough and not to think about the germs that might at that moment be creeping from the pages to the upholstery, inching toward him as he drove. First thing, he snuck into the kitchen and stole a small cast-iron pot with a heavy lid. In his room he’d folded the papers inside and stowed it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He felt better about it now. He felt no tickle in the back of his throat. No sniffles coming on.

  He’d missed dinner in the dining room and had the hired girl bring his food to him on a tray. She didn’t like it but did as she was told. With Mundt and Van Dean gone, it had just been Mr. and Mrs. Taft at the table, she told him when he asked. The Van Dean woman stayed down in the guest cabins, and the girl had taken her down a sandwich.

  “Running food all over,” she said to him. “And me, with a certificate from the Silver Bow County Secretarial School.”

  She had a way of talking that set his teeth on edge. “What is this?” he’d said, using a fork to paw through some of the dry, colorless stuff on his plate. “Gruel?”

  Afterward he’d gone out to meet the trucks and get the Canadians started unloading their shipment. As soon as he was able, he left them to their business. They were grimy, small-minded men and he doubted any of them had ever fired a shot in anger. Forty-five minutes ago he’d extinguished the lamp in his room and ever since he’d been lying in the dark, brooding over how he had wound up in this place. At some point he’d begun to wonder if O’Shea would send someone to kill him when this was all over and whether his little house in California ought to be more than just a backup plan.