Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  “Finally I let a friend move into one of the spare bedrooms,” Carol Jean said. “I just had to do it for the company, you see. This girl, Liddy, from the Olympia, a little dark-haired stray, all arms and elbows the way some men like.”

  Even though Carol Jean was really doing her a favor, Liddy insisted on paying rent. They settled on a figure substantially less than the girl had been paying at one of Mr. Cohn’s flophouses. It saved her a little bit of money and it felt good for Carol Jean to have some cash of her own coming in.

  “I guess you could say I picked up a few things from old Mr. Cohn after all,” she said.

  Word got around how little she was charging, and before she knew it, she let another girl move in, then another. Eventually she had every bedroom filled with girls from the Olympia. It became like an all-the-time party, Carol Jean said, just a thrill a minute, with people coming and going from the club at all hours.

  Moira asked what Mr. Taft thought of all that, and Carol Jean waved her away.

  “I expect he enjoyed it,” Carol Jean said. “All those girls fawning over him. Always someone to cook him breakfast and hear his stories from the road. It will come as no surprise to you that Garfield Taft likes a party as much as anyone.”

  “It does not,” Moira said.

  “Smart girl like you,” Carol Jean said. “I bet you can guess what happened next.”

  Moira nodded. “The police,” she said.

  “They came down on the place with an army,” Carol Jean said. “Busted down the door with a battering ram, arrested everybody. A black fellow in a house with all those white girls? A house that he owned? They weren’t going to stand for it. Of course, in the papers they said girls had been whoring themselves out of that house.”

  “Had they?” Moira asked.

  “Oh, how should I know?” Carol Jean said. “If they were, I wasn’t going to stop them from earning a little extra on the side. We had the hottest after-hours spot in the city. All the gentlemen in town wanted to be there.”

  Moira sat back. Carol Jean had a sharp tongue and was a good deal smarter than Moira had first thought, but it must have been a lot of weight to carry around those years Taft spent in jail.

  “It was you,” she said. “You’re the reason he got locked up.”

  “They charged him with being a pimp,” Carol Jean said. “Can you imagine? The truth was he didn’t care a thing about what the other girls in that house were doing. He only cared about me.”

  “So you waited for him,” Moira said.

  “Waited and waited,” Carol Jean said, as if it was a feeling they both understood. “I thought the lonesomeness would crush me at first. It took ages to even find out where they’d taken him. I had no rights, you see, since we weren’t married yet. But after Judith took off, I suppose I got excited about having him all to myself. It took about two weeks for her to pull up stakes and run, did you know that? I think she’d been waiting for her excuse to go long before he was arrested.”

  “It must have felt like a reprieve for you, in a way.”

  “Oh, it was all very romantic, the way I imagined it.”

  “He did marry you,” Moira said. “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded. “Right there in the prison, as soon as they’d let us, after the judge granted Judith her divorce. It was a rush job, but they wouldn’t even let me visit him unless we were married, so it had to be done. I had this purple chiffon dress I wore. I don’t think either of us had quite realized how different things were going to be. Garfield thought when it was all over, when he’d served his time, he would be able to go back to doing anything he wanted. Instead we got this.”

  She lifted her arms to include the whole place: the room they were in, the half-finished lodge, the garage gym, the horse barn full of liquor, the woods and hills, the city at the base of the mountain with its mines forever spitting out smoke, the railways and roads. This enormous, empty state. This life.

  “Just to be clear,” Moira said. “Are you telling me there’s nothing physically wrong with your husband?”

  Carol Jean’s eyes had floated away while she talked, but now they snapped back into focus. She was back to her woman-of-the-house act. Her every movement careful, as if planned out ahead of time. “Of course not,” she said. “How could there be?”

  Moira nodded. “Thank you for telling me that story,” she said, because it felt like a necessary thing to say.

  “You seem like the kind that can keep a secret,” Carol Jean said. “Don’t prove me wrong.”

  When Carol Jean finally announced she was turning in, Moira asked to sit there a bit longer to rest her leg. Carol Jean nodded, giving her hand a little squeeze before climbing the staircase. As she went she kept her chin held high, everything else in her bearing telling Moira she’d be asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

  Still, she waited an extra fifteen minutes, the quiet of the house roaring in her ears, before she slipped off her other shoe and crept up the stairs after her. Carol Jean had done a good, competent job wrapping her ankle, and Moira found she could move now with considerably less pain. The upstairs hallway was dark and the old wood groaned with every step, but she tiptoed as quietly as she could to the end of the hall where she knew James Eddy kept his room. The doorknob was smooth and cold in her hand, like a stone from a river bottom, and she applied just enough gentle, silent pressure to confirm it was locked.

  Give Moira a half hour and a set of hairpins and she could jimmy most locks. A necessary skill, she’d found, when you followed the calling every modern woman dreamed of—from riverboat card girl to carnival shill. Up here in the hush of the hallway, though, there was no way. It would take too long and make too much noise, the sound of a thousand rats working their claws against the metal. Instead, she turned and snuck down the way she’d come, getting all the way to the bottom of the main stairs before a shape loomed out at her.

  “May I ask exactly what you’re doing?”

  Moira caught her breath, putting a hand over her heart, before seeing it was just the hired girl, Eleanor, coming down the gloomy hall from the kitchen. “Goodness,” Moira said. “I didn’t know anyone else was still here.”

  “I could say the same to you,” said Eleanor. She squinted at Moira for a long moment. “I heard you up there snooping around Mr. Eddy’s door. You really think he’d leave his quarters unlocked?”

  “I wasn’t,” Moira said, starting to protest, but stopped when she read the look on the girl’s face. “Yes, I was. I think he’s hiding something and I wanted to know what it was.”

  Eleanor snorted. “Hiding something?” she said. “Lady, a man like that doesn’t know any other way to behave.”

  Moira noticed the crackle in her voice. “You know something about it,” she said.

  “I know everything,” Eleanor said. “I’m the housekeeper.”

  Moira smiled, resting a hand on the glass globe at the bottom of the banister. “So?” she said. “Will you tell him?”

  Eleanor tapped the toe of her shoe on the hardwood floor—click, click, click—as if trying to decide something. Moira thought she might give her a scolding, maybe want to go wake Carol Jean, but instead she just said, “Wait here,” and disappeared down the rear hall again.

  Moira eyed the door, wondering what would happen if she walked out and went back to the cabin, but in a moment the hired girl was back. She came from the kitchen waving a small bit of stationery in an outstretched hand.

  Moira took it and held it up to the light, knowing before she saw the name at the bottom that Eddy had written it. The penmanship was tiny and exact, without so much as a smudge of ink or wavering line to suggest a trembling hand. The note was short and without pretension, just Eddy proposing terms for selling the load of liquor he and Fritz had squirreled away to a group of rival men. The longing and rage she had sensed in h
im were there, both in the hastily composed words and the sure, straight lines of the letters. There was no mistaking its meaning.

  “Where did you get this?” she said.

  “He gave it to me to put in the mail,” said Eleanor. “Can you believe it?”

  “You opened it?”

  They kept their voices low in the quiet house, but now the hired girl straightened up, proud and unafraid. “Steamed it,” she said, “and I’m glad I did. The things in that letter? They could put us all in danger.”

  “It was a daring move,” Moira said. “Why risk it?”

  Now Eleanor showed a sly grimace. “It was peculiar, him sending something like that. Mr. Eddy never sends anything besides bill payments. Plus, him always trying to tell me my business? Maybe I wanted to know a bit of his.”

  “You didn’t worry what would happen if he found out?”

  “Please,” Eleanor said. “I traced a copy and sent that along in the original envelope. Not like whatever animals he’s sending it to are going to know the difference.”

  Moira looked at her over the top of the letter and realized she’d misjudged the hired girl from the start. Eleanor’s face had gone hard and callous—a woman who had grown up in a town full of two-bit operators and knew what it took to get by. Perhaps her frail body had the heart of a prizefighter beating inside it. Now she seemed to read Moira’s expression, asking what she meant to accomplish handing over the letter.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out a use for it,” Eleanor said. “In a couple of months I’m getting out of this place. I’ll find a job in an office making thirty dollars a week with weekends and holidays off. But it doesn’t seem right, a wicked creature like that being allowed to go on, out into the world. Nothing good will ever come from a man like that.”

  Moira wasn’t sure what to say, so she just nodded and tucked the letter into the pocket of her dress. She retrieved her shoes and let the hired girl walk her out, hearing the heavy door lock behind her as she went back out into the night. Coming down the steps from the porch, she cast her eyes down the road into town, as if she thought Eddy might come driving up at just that moment. Of course the road was deserted, looking forlorn in the dark. Keeping close to the house to avoid blundering off into the weeds, she crept around to the side and then to the unfinished section of the building. Bare wood striding up out of the foundation, like someone might show up any day to finish the job. Eddy’s room was in a rear corner, with a single side window that looked down on the road and an exposed door that opened into the part of the structure left undone. Up the hill were the garage and the horse barn, and the other way she could see the main gate and the line of little guest cabins. Still no one moving anywhere.

  The letter should’ve been the answer she was looking for, but somehow it only piqued her curiosity. She still wanted to see the whole picture. Hoping her ankle wouldn’t fail her at exactly the wrong moment, she pulled herself up so she was standing on the lodge’s foundation, then found another foothold about three feet up that looked like it was meant to be the base of a window. Then it was the top of a doorframe, bringing her knee up comically high to make the step and keeping her eyes down to make sure the hem of her dress didn’t get caught on a loose nail. With another step, she was up inside the unfinished room on the second floor—easier than she expected—having used the exposed planks as a kind of ladder.

  The rear door to Eddy’s room was locked, just as the other had been, but out here she could have brought a brass band with her and not bothered Carol Jean. She let her hair down and, kneeling in front of the door, she went to work. After a few minutes of scraping and fumbling with the mechanism, the lock popped open.

  Stepping into the room gave her a shot of adrenaline. Suddenly she felt wild-eyed and terrified. Eddy’s quarters were sparsely furnished and spotless, just as she’d imagined they would be. Not even any smell to them, except the faint chemical punch of disinfectant. In one corner a rifle stood ugly and lurking, but aside from that you might not even know a man slept here. The cot was bare, as was the small desk. The glasses in the bar setup looked clean and new.

  She didn’t even know what she was looking for as she began pulling open the cupboards of the credenza. Eddy’s clothes were folded neatly in one of the drawers, a couple of jackets hanging from a coatrack to one side. She patted the pockets of the coats, finding nothing, before she ran her fingers around the inside edges of the drawer without disturbing the garments.

  The floor creaked terribly as she moved across the room, but she forced herself to keep going. On the desk was a blotter calendar with several dates marked with a single horizontal line beneath the number of the day. She guessed these were the nights when the men brought in new shipments, and she quickly memorized them. She noted a load came in once every three weeks and that they were scheduled to keep arriving through the end of the year. The long middle drawer held only pens, and the wastepaper basket on the floor next to the chair looked as if it had never been used.

  She was about to give up when she pulled open one of the desk’s lower drawers and found a heavy kitchen pot sitting there. A small tickle worked its way down her back. The pot was the first out-of-place thing she’d found in the room. Carefully she lifted the stout lid and saw a small package inside, wrapped up in one of the white silk handkerchiefs Eddy always kept with him. The package was light, just a bundle of paper, but she took it out and replaced the lid before sliding the drawer closed again.

  This was what she was looking for. It had to be, since it was the only thing there was to find. It was a reckless, stupid move to take something from a man as obviously paranoid as Eddy, but right then she didn’t care. Holding the papers in one hand, she went back out the way she’d come, making sure the door was locked behind her.

  Out in the open, a gale of wind brushed her back against the side of the lodge, threatening to rip the papers from her grasp. She huddled there until it passed, getting her breath, steadying herself, before creeping back to the place where she’d climbed up the network of boards and studs. One painful twinge in her ankle made her grit her teeth as she straddled the exposed wall. The way down was slower, more difficult than the way up. In the dark, she couldn’t find the final foothold—dangling there, cursing, with her coat flapping in the breeze and one hand still clutching the package. Before she dropped the last four feet to the ground, she took a moment to close her eyes and prepare herself for how much it was going to hurt.

  There was trouble at the restaurant. The steakhouse Fritz guided them to was a ramshackle little place at the center of Butte’s tightening maze of streets, its front door set three steps below sidewalk level. Some of the other men there didn’t appreciate Taft being seated in the dining room, and Pepper imagined a hundred eyes on them as they ate. He drank too many of the restaurant’s bitter homemade beers, and by the time three guys cornered him inside the cramped restroom, he could feel the alcohol sloshing around in his stomach. He was tired and drunk, already beat up, and trying to decide which one of them to hit first when Fritz and Taft burst in with their napkins still tucked into their collars.

  By the time they returned to the hunting camp, dawn lurked in the hills. Fritz dropped him in the road in front of the cabin, and as the car roared away Pepper found a little pile of his clothes waiting on the porch. He pounded on the door until his knuckles hurt, but eventually he scooped up the meager stack of his belongings and stumbled through the settling dust to the garage. Taft was sitting on the lowest row of the bleachers, pulling off his shoes when he came in.

  “So we’re going to be bunkmates,” Taft said, nodding at the things he carried.

  Aside from the brawl in the restroom, their evening in town hadn’t been a complete disaster. Pepper was surprised to find Fritz and Taft were both good company. The food was decent and they spent most of the meal chatting about wrestling and high times back in Chicago. Their fight in the garage from earlier in
the day was not forgotten exactly, but at least it had slipped into the background, letting them all carry on as men.

  “I don’t expect a long stay,” Pepper said now. “Just until she gets her wits about her.”

  “If I had a nickel for every night I spent waiting on a woman to decide she still loved me,” Taft said, taking his time folding his clothes and laying them flat, “I wouldn’t have to worry about wrestling Strangler Lesko, I can tell you that.”

  Pepper set his load down on the edge of the wrestling mat and sat. “It’ll blow over,” he said. “We’ve been through worse spots than this.”

  Taft retrieved his blankets from a high shelf and padded over in his slacks and socks. Before stretching out, he tossed one of them to Pepper, saying it got cold out there at night.

  “You know I was just trying to help her,” he said to the rafters. “I promise you I never laid a hand on her.”

  At dinner he’d told Pepper the story about the bootleggers and James Eddy and the old tomcat Moira had adopted getting killed. “I guess I believe it,” Pepper said, surprised to find it was true. “I won’t apologize to you, but it’s possible I had the wrong idea.”

  “It’s possible?” Taft said. Without looking at him, Pepper could tell he was grinning.

  He settled back on the mat, feeling Taft’s presence big and heavy next to him. Through the garage’s thin walls he could hear all the night sounds of the forest. Just as they’d arrived back at the camp that evening, a raccoon dashed out of the brush, its eyes glowing in the flare of their headlamps, and Fritz stomped on the brake, sending them all lurching forward in their seats. Pepper imagined the raccoon still out there, creeping though the weeds and falling snow. It made him fold his arms across his chest for warmth.

  In the dark, Taft’s voice seemed unnaturally loud. “You got anyone in New York?” he said. “Friends? People you trust?”