Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  She shook her head. “We were going to tour Ireland once, Pepper and I. When he was champion. We made it to Dublin and stayed in a hotel that was the converted manor of some lord. It was just about the grandest place I ever saw. But someone set off a bomb outside the arena downtown and they put us right back on the boat. He didn’t even get to wrestle.”

  “Italy was my favorite,” Taft said. “The food and the people? The women? It all seemed like a storybook to me. I even learned some of the language.”

  “You do speak very well,” she said. “I mean, not like when they write about blacks in the papers.”

  “You means like this?” he said, bobbing his head and putting on a gibberish accent. “I thinks, Miss Moira, that you’s a-cain’t truss ev’rting you reads in dem papers.”

  She smiled and accepted a cup when he offered.

  “My folks were schoolteachers,” he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling when he thought about it. “My mother worked in the school library. The only black school in Cincinnati. My father taught science and arithmetic.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must think I’m a terrible bigot.”

  “No,” he said, “you seem better than most.”

  He was enjoying himself, so she decided to push a bit. “I’ve been talking with your wife,” she said. “She insists you were sent to prison as an innocent man.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “I believe she loves you,” Moira said. “That she’d say anything for you. I don’t think you can do any wrong in her eyes.”

  His mouth was full of big, straight teeth. “Oh, I did plenty wrong,” he said. “But as far as the law was concerned? I was just the big black demon who was going to take the title off Joe Stecher. Maybe I owned a house in the wrong neighborhood. Maybe I had the wrong color friends.”

  “And just for that they put you away for three years?” she said. “I can’t imagine that’s the whole story.”

  It took him a long moment to say anything else. “No,” he said. “You can’t imagine.”

  “She tells me you’re different now, ever since.”

  He reset his shoulders, muscles moving underneath his soiled shirt. “It stays with you,” he said. “That’s a fact.”

  She was trying to think what to say next when they were interrupted by some fresh commotion up the hill, the sound of car doors opening. They got up and went to the window, Moira still wrapped in the blanket. She recognized the young, good-looking man and his dog-faced companion as they came out of the lodge with James Eddy walking between them. The two bootleggers had their collars turned up against the wind and shotguns draped over their arms. They looked like bird hunters, she thought, as they pulled themselves up into the cab of the truck. The other men piled into the sedan, their engines fired and then they all tottered up the road toward the crest of the hill.

  Eddy stood there watching them go, hands in pockets, every now and then rocking back on his heels as if blowing in the breeze. There was sadness in him, Moira thought, and sadness always turned to rage in men like Eddy. She remembered the look that had come into his eye the night before as he glanced up the hill toward the horse barn. It was the same look a poker player gave his hole cards when he didn’t want you to know he had a pair of aces hidden there. Whatever he was plotting, it was bigger than his business arrangement with Fritz Mundt and the bootleggers.

  “How much liquor you think was on that truck?” she said.

  “Hell if I know,” Taft said. “Figure eighty to a hundred cases, that’s—”

  “Five thousand dollars,” she finished for him.

  “And a lot more than that sitting up there in that barn,” he said.

  She turned to him, but his gaze didn’t register her presence. He was looking past, staring at something out the window.

  “Shit,” he said.

  She followed his eyes, expecting to see the bootleggers coming back for something they’d forgotten, but instead it was Carol Jean cutting across the lawn in her nightgown.

  “Shit,” Taft said again.

  He left her standing there, slamming the door hard behind him. Moira watched through the glass as he marched across the grass to meet his wife, big body moving gracefully with long steps, his chest bent slightly forward with purpose. Carol Jean said something to him as he got close, but Moira couldn’t hear it. She could only see Carol Jean’s mouth wide, her cheeks flushed. Taft put his hands up to meet her, and Carol Jean slapped him hard across the face.

  For an hour after he left, Moira sat at the small table playing five-card poker against herself. The scene she’d witnessed between Carol Jean and Taft made her feel like she needed something to do with her hands. She was worried Carol Jean might come down to the cabin and have it out with her, but as the stillness of the hunting camp settled around her she realized it wasn’t going to happen. When she got bored of poker she performed a hundred practice shuffles and a hundred one-handed cuts, then did the few magic tricks she could manage. Simple, card-up-the-sleeve stuff that all dealers knew.

  As she sat there, the smallness of the cabin started to weigh on her. She thought of going for a walk but didn’t want Carol Jean to see her and didn’t want to be out in the woods by herself. She worried the bootleggers might still be skulking around somewhere. Even if they weren’t, who knew what else was out in the trees off the main road? Until Pepper got back, she was stuck. The feeling of cabin fever began to remind her of the riverboat, when sometimes she got so sick of their stateroom or wandering the deck that she had to resist the urge to toss herself overboard from sheer boredom.

  It was possible she had inherited this inability to sit still from either of her parents. Her father, obviously, had never been good with free time. Her mother told her that at one point she liked boats but grew to hate them soon after choosing to live on one. After Moira’s father’s disappearance and during their final weeks together, Moira’s mother said many times that she believed boats had ruined her life.

  She’d been working as a cook in an all-night diner in East St. Louis when she met Moira’s father. Just a girl who had never been outside St. Clair County. He came in on an overnight stopover and waited for her at the counter until her shift ended so he could walk her home. They watched the sun rise over the city and a few hours later he was gone, shipped out again as the Lady Luck plowed upriver.

  Ninety days later he was back, only to find that the woman whose touch he said he could still feel on his body but whose face he could barely remember was three months pregnant. This was the story her mother told, anyway, though even as a girl Moira wasn’t sure she believed it. The light in her mother’s eyes was strange when she talked about it, and Moira could never decide if the story was meant to be romantic, tragic or a warning about messing with a certain kind of boy. If it was the latter, Moira thought now with a wry smile, the message didn’t take.

  It had always been her opinion that her father had done right by her mother. At least as right as he could. He got her a job in the riverboat’s kitchen and they were married just a month later with the ship’s captain presiding. Five months after that, Moira was born, with the boat in dry dock and the crew scattered until the winter was over. Confined to a tiny one-bedroom apartment in East St. Louis, their relationship had already begun to sour. At least, that’s how it seemed as far back as Moira could remember. As she got older, she realized her father was a man whose appetites were too big for him. He drank; he gambled to excess. He had been with half the women on the boat and had steady girls in many of the towns where the Lady Luck docked. Despite all this, people liked him. His easy smile and quick wit made him the kind of man women rolled their eyes over, slapping him playfully on the arm when he said something fresh.

  “That’s just Jack,” they’d say to each other, sometimes close enough for Moira to hear. A few of them would just blush and shake their heads.

&
nbsp; From the time she could push a broom, he arranged for her to have work on the boat. She swept out the grand dance hall and casino room, and the captain, an old man who looked like there was not a single hair anywhere on his body, let her keep the coins she occasionally found. Soon enough, she was promoted to ice duty, hauling buckets back and forth between the ship’s massive cold rooms and its many bars. It was mindless and difficult work, but important, since one of the boat’s main draws was the large, red-lettered banner hanging between the top and main decks blaring Free Ice! to each new town where the Lady Luck docked.

  Later she worked the floor as a cocktail girl and, finally, at her father’s urging, became an apprentice dealer in the casino. She started with the easy games—bunko, three-card poker and blackjack—but eventually worked her way up to faro and even dealt poker in the ship’s exclusive private room. Whenever her father could slip away from his own duty—which was often, it seemed—he’d stand quietly behind her table and watch her, later delivering a full report of what she’d done right and wrong, appraising her mechanics, demeanor and posture behind the table.

  “Never slouch,” he told her once. “Players need to see the card turner as the most upstanding guy in the house.”

  The problem in the end was that her mother could never fall all the way out of love with him. Through all the fights and fleeting estrangements, she never stopped seeing him as the devilish and handsome young man who plucked her out of that greasy spoon in East St. Louis. Her mother’s love was the suffocating kind. A couple of times Moira caught her snooping through her father’s things while he was working, looking for clues to who he might be spending time with when his shift was over. Once she’d even tried to enlist Moira to spy on him, but Moira wanted no part of it. Most nights her mother riddled him with questions as soon as he came through the door of their stateroom, and when she got drunk those questions turned to shouts and shoves, the occasional slap. When she was sober there were whispered apologies, tearful apologies, apologies already loaded with the next night’s suspicions.

  Moira’s father was her teacher and confidant and she wouldn’t betray him, even to her mother. Of course, he really was a cheat, a drunkard and a cad, but that never mattered to her. She accepted it as part of him, as much as his tranquil table manner or his slow, affected way of talking. Then, when she was fifteen, he disappeared during an overnight run between Vicksburg and Lake Providence. He simply went off to his evening shift in the cardroom and never came back. In the morning the crew searched the boat from stem to stern and discovered one of their sad little lifeboats gone and a young, married cocktail girl also missing. The news just about broke what was left of her mother, as she screamed and thrashed and had to be restrained by two thick-shouldered engine-room workers. A day later they found the lifeboat empty and beached on a sandbar fifty yards from shore, and Moira began to suspect her mother had killed both of them. Probably shoved her father over the railing of the boiler deck in a drunken rage after catching the two of them in the act, then loosed the lifeboat afterward to make it look like they had eloped. Her mother could be clever like that.

  Moira didn’t wait long enough to find out for sure. Even if her mother hadn’t done it, Moira couldn’t stand the thought of living with her, just the two of them in their hot, overstuffed room. As soon as the Lady Luck docked at Lake Providence, she took what little money the family had saved in a tin on the shelf above the bed where now only her mother slept, then left. It was the last she ever heard of either of them until years later, when a bridge builder’s engineering team churned what was left of her father’s body up from the bottom of the river, identifying him by the gambler’s charm bracelet still looped around one bony wrist.

  Now, alone in the cabin with the smell of Garfield Taft still lingering in the air, she thought of her father’s face. Not of the paunchy forty-year-old tippler he had become by the time he died, but as a younger man, rakish and handsome and as quick with a line as any man alive. She remembered something he told her during one of their Sunday trips to a gambling hall in St. Louis. She’d been too young to play then, so she spent the day standing at her father’s shoulder and had been the only one who saw him slip an ace out of his shirtsleeve in order to take down a big pot just before they headed for home. She’d confronted him about it on the walk back to the boat, while he was still counting and re-counting the money and shuffling it from pocket to pocket like he was looking for a place he wouldn’t lose it. She expected him to be angry with her for noticing his cheat, but instead he just laughed. Something like pride flashed across his face as he slipped a dollar bill into the pocket of her jacket and tucked her under his arm.

  “One of the main rules to know,” he said. “Only play fair when you’ve got the best hand.”

  Taft spent an hour locked in the upstairs bedroom hoping Carol Jean would cool down. It didn’t work, and when he came down the front staircase carrying a pillow and blanket from their bed, she hurled a glass ashtray at him. It missed by a mile, sailing over his head to shatter high on the wooden archway between the foyer and the parlor. He shielded his eyes from the exploding shards of crystal and then, as a slow shower of ash began to fall around him like confetti, he set his things on the floor and held her down on the red velvet chair by the front window.

  He tried to explain to her that nothing had happened between him and the Van Dean woman—that he’d only stayed in the cabin to keep her safe from the Canadians—but Carol Jean wouldn’t listen. She smelled like sour mash and her thrashing eventually forced him to turn her loose. For some reason, when she was free she stayed seated in the deep, heavy chair, swearing and writhing as he went and retrieved the bedclothes from where he’d left them.

  “I should’ve figured you’d take a run at that bony little cow,” she hissed at him as he came back down. “I suppose I should be relieved it means you still like girls.”

  Hearing that, he put one boot on the side of the chair and, as gently as he could, tipped it over. Carol Jean went down on her backside, screaming with rage. She tried to chase him but couldn’t get to her feet, pinned between the chair and the wall. Taft slammed the door behind him, hauling the blanket and pillow up to the old garage, where he used a rock to knock the padlock off its big swinging doors. He would have to do something about the boards Van Dean had nailed up on the smaller side entrance, too, but there would be time for that. Once inside, he saw that the smaller man had lied to him—that his racks of dumbbells and barbells were all still there. He was stiff from sleeping in the hard wooden chair in the tiny cabin, but felt wound up now.

  Instead of lying down to try to rest, he took up some of the weights and worked his way through one of his normal warm-up routines. He went slow, concentrating on precise curls and smooth presses. At first it felt good, like his muscles were waking up from a long sleep, the exercises clearing his head and allowing his mind to wander. He raised sweat on his shoulders and brows and it only made him go harder, moving to heavier weights and liking the feeling of the pressure building up in his arms. After a few minutes he stopped and shook the tightness out of his torso, going outside to look out at the mountains and let the breeze dry his sweat.

  Oh, you like girls, all right, he said to himself as he stood there. You like every single wrong one you see.

  The first girl he’d ever kissed was white, back when his family was living in Madisonville, outside of Cincinnati. At sixteen Taft got a job working in the kitchen of a little neighborhood diner, the only job he ever had that wasn’t wrestling. The diner served oily coffee and passable food, and its location up the street from city hall made it a favorite of local politicians and off-duty cops. Madisonville was one of the only places in the city where whites and blacks lived and worked together, so the diner’s kitchen staff was all black, while the waitresses and most of the customers were white.

  Waitresses were not supposed to come back into the kitchen to talk to the men working there, so o
f course they did it all the time. They were live-wire girls who held their hair back from their faces with paper hats and wore their aprons pulled tight over gray uniforms, white piping on the shoulders and sleeves. When the manager was at work they would flirt with the cooks, busboys and dishwashers through the small window that separated the dining room from the kitchen, and when he wasn’t there, they’d come into the kitchen to chat while they smoked their cigarettes in a small alcove near the back door.

  Taft didn’t remember the name of the girl he kissed, just that she was one of the prettiest. Small and raven-haired, with bright blue eyes, the top of her head barely came to his shoulders, so he had to stoop way down to press his lips on hers. Clumsy, when he thought of it now, doing it in a rush in the alley out back, both of them on a smoke break and neither of them smoking. She knew of him from his wrestling, of course. In Cincinnati, white boys and black boys were not allowed to wrestle each other in competition, so they arranged special meet-ups and challenge matches whenever either group had a boy they thought was particularly tough. As the best in the city, Taft was the one the white boys wanted to wrestle most of all. The pretty waitress said her brother had been among his opponents, though Taft didn’t remember him. Just some boy he’d beaten.

  “No more of that now,” he said after he kissed her. “You want to get me killed.”

  “You won’t get in any trouble at all,” she teased. “You’re too special.”

  Then they kissed again.

  He had gotten into trouble, though. He’d lost his job, and the diner’s manager threatened to tell the authorities if Taft ever came back there. He wasn’t sure he ever saw the dark-haired girl again. If he did, he didn’t remember that, either. He did remember her words, though, as clearly as if she had just said them, even now when much of his memory was retreating to a dark place beyond his reach: You’re too special.