by Chad Dundas
“There’s a carnival owner there I’d like to kill,” Pepper said. “Other than that, not really.”
“I suppose I’ll have to find a way to bet on myself,” Taft said.
Pepper turned away, rolling onto his side, a hundred needles prickling the back of his skull. He knew he would have to tell Taft the truth about the match sooner or later. The train ride back from Chicago had not been pleasant. He and Fritz had gone back and forth the whole way about the fix and getting in bed with Stettler and O’Shea. In the end, Pepper had given up, telling himself it didn’t matter, since Taft could never beat Strangler Lesko either way. After their fight in the garage, though, he wasn’t so sure anymore. The thing that had surprised him the most was Taft’s strength. Pepper had expected him to be fast for a heavyweight, but Taft’s lanky body had turned to iron the moment they got their hands on each other. His punch was like getting kicked by a mule, and the effortlessness with which Taft threw him off made him feel sheepish and small.
“Listen,” he said. “There’s something we need to talk about.”
“I already know,” Taft said. “You don’t think I can beat Strangler Lesko, but I promise you, I will. You’ll see.”
“Even if we could give him thirty rough minutes,” he said, “it’d be nothing to hang our heads over.”
Another rustling sound as Taft sat up. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
“Nothing,” Pepper said. “Go to sleep.”
He closed his eyes and must’ve drifted right off, because he never heard Taft lie back down on the mat.
Sometime later, he woke to Taft shaking him roughly by the shoulder. He rolled over, the rank surface of the wrestling mat scratching his face, and groaned. His body was full of hot poison, and as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, he tried to remember exactly how many beers he’d drunk at the restaurant. He could not.
“Van Dean,” he heard Taft say. “Hey, Van Dean.”
He rolled over, the glare of the sun like knives in his eyes, and saw Taft towering over him—a thousand feet tall if he was an inch—in his wrestling trunks and boots.
“Mark . . . set . . . go!” Taft said, and then he was gone, dashing out the door of the garage into the day.
It took a second for Pepper’s wounded animal brain to catch up with what was happening, but then he cursed and jumped up. His first few steps were on the clumsy feet of a dead man, his head tossing like a ship, pulsing to the beating of his heart. He was wearing only his skivvies, but slipped into his boots and sprinted out the door without bothering to tie them.
Taft was already to the guest cabins, gliding along with those long strides. Pepper barely made it out of the garage before he had to stop and vomit, a watery rush clogged with chunks of steak. It filled his nose, and as he started running again he plugged each nostril and blew the other clear, turning his head to look at the cabin where Moira was surely still sleeping.
It was a cold morning, and once he was through the gate and on the road the breeze chilled his back and chest. Taft still loped along up ahead, and for a while it seemed like Pepper might be able to catch him. Soon, though, he had to stop and retch again, a string of frothy spit clinging to his chin. He tried to push on, but his tongue was an old dry sock in his mouth and he had to stop and walk to ease a cramp in one of his calves. If he thought he could find a stream to drink from, he might have gone off the trail to look for one, but instead kept moving down the hill as a light snow fell around him. He could smell booze in his sweat. Swallowing back the burning in his throat, he lifted his face to the sky, taking deep breaths to ease the light-headed, dizzy feeling.
He caught up with Taft at the base of the mountain, finding him on a flat rock at the side of the road. The big man’s knees were tucked up around his chest, sweat making little clots in the dirt between his feet.
“I told you,” Taft said, finding his breath. “I told you one day I’d beat you.”
Pepper trotted over and stood with his hands on his hips. He stared at the ground for a long time, looking at his own shadow in the light dusting of snow.
“What kind of sorry son of a bitch preys on a decrepit man?” he said.
Taft stared off down the road as if waiting for something. “They stopped coming,” he said. “It must’ve got too cold for them.”
“Who?” Pepper said.
“Nobody,” he said. “Just some boys. They used to come out here and wait for me on their bicycles. I would chase them.”
Pepper didn’t know what to say to that, so he closed his eyes and wiped the sweat from his face, his hands going up and down in a washing motion. Taft asked if he wanted to race back up the hill to the camp and Pepper showed him his middle finger. Instead, they walked, Taft flexing his one swollen hand.
“I think I damn near killed one of those old boys in that bathroom,” he said. “Be lucky if I didn’t break this.”
Pepper had to admit, it showed tremendous courage for Taft to barge into that restroom along with Fritz. All it would have taken was one of those men to have a gun and for them to dig three holes somewhere deep in the woods. For a guy he’d had his own problem with earlier in the day? Pepper couldn’t say for sure he would’ve done the same.
“I guess I owe you my thanks,” he said. “I would’ve been in some trouble if you fellows hadn’t come in when you did.”
Just then a massive shadow passed across the road. They both looked up to see a huge, dark shape alight in a nearby tree. Its wings were brown with white tips, its beak hooked, the powerful neck of a gladiator. If they’d stood next to each other, the bird’s head might’ve come to Pepper’s hip.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Golden eagle.”
Taft gave him a funny one-eyed squint. “You are a strange man, you know that? How come you know so much about this place?”
“I grew up near here,” Pepper said. “When I was twelve years old I went into an orphanage in Idaho, up near the Canadian border. Stayed until I was seventeen.”
Taft fixed him with a look out the corner of his eyes. “You serious?” he said; then, seeing he was: “Your parents died?”
Pepper felt his forehead with the back of his hand. The worst part of his hangover was lifting. He couldn’t think of one reason why he should tell Taft about his past, things that he had never told anyone besides Moira . . . except that now Moira had him locked out of their cabin and when he thought about it—about the fight in the garage and then Taft and Fritz storming into the bathroom to save him—he felt a lurch of guilt and fear. He wondered if there might be a certain joy in telling Taft, a kind of daring in trusting this person no one else trusted. This person who right now was one of the only people in the world speaking to him.
“They didn’t die,” he said. “Maybe they’re dead now, I don’t know. I just ran off. Hopped a train, trying to make it to the coast. Seattle, San Francisco, someplace like that. It was stupid.”
“You never made it?”
“No. A railroad bull pulled me off before I even got out of the state,” Pepper said. “Beat the shit out of me.”
Taft chuckled and Pepper thought to hell with it and told him the whole story. About how the cops didn’t know what to do with him. How he refused to tell them his name, even after the sheriff took him in.
“I just didn’t want them to send me back,” Pepper said.
“Things were that bad for you growing up, huh?”
He felt the color rise in his face. “They weren’t so rough,” he said. “I just wanted something different.”
He told him about the Handsome Academy, about Professor Willem Van Dien. “He’s the one who taught me to wrestle,” Pepper said. “He gave me my nickname. When I was old enough, I left. I needed a last name, so I took his. Once I turned pro, Abe Blomfeld changed the spelling. Americanized it, so crowds wouldn’t boo me for being an immigrant. And here we
are.”
Pepper asked Taft if the hired girl had any ice at the hunting camp. If they could find some, it would help bring the swelling down in his hand. Taft shrugged and said not to worry about it.
“I’ll be right as rain by match time,” he said. “Lesko’s got a surprise coming. A big one.”
The look Taft gave him was enough to break his heart. He knew from watching his workouts with Fitch and Prichard and from the Jack Sherry bout that Taft didn’t like to push himself. That could mean he had no heart, or it might just mean he was used to being the biggest, roughest guy in his own wrestling room. That happened to a lot of heavyweights, guys who had no one in their own clubs who could test them and therefore never found out what they could really do. Now, though, there was a new intensity in the big man’s face. It was a look Pepper knew well. Here was a guy who thought his dream had come back to life. Taft started running again. Pepper tried to summon the urge to trot after him, but he felt too sick. He walked most of the rest of the way back to the hunting camp, turning the whole thing over in his mind.
He was still thinking about it when he rounded the final bend and found Taft leaning against the wood rail fence, his face dappled with sweat, his mouth curled into a funny, puzzled smile.
“So wait,” Taft said. “What you said earlier. You’re telling me that all this time you’ve been using a fake name?”
“It feels pretty real to me by now,” Pepper said, “but it’s not the one my mother gave me, if that’s what you mean.”
“But your real name?” Taft said, like it was a riddle he needed the answer to. “What is it?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, that’s what,” Pepper said.
“What about Mrs. Van Dean?” Taft said.
A stab to the chest, having to say her name. “Of course,” he said. “Moira knows.”
“It feels like a tease,” Taft said, “you bringing it up and then refusing to say.”
“You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it anyway,” Pepper said. “Believe me, if you had a name like mine, you’d go with Pepper Van Dean a hundred times out of a hundred.”
Moira was sitting on the front porch of the cabin, a cigarette drooping ash held in her fingers. At first she didn’t notice them, and Pepper went up and leaned against the railing before she had the chance to get up and go inside. He kept his distance, waiting as Taft went up the road toward the garage. Seeing her sent him rolling back into the depths of his hangover, his mind scratchy and dull, his lips cracked, something dark and oily boiling in his gut. Even his hair felt limp and damp on his head.
“You don’t look well,” she said.
“A little peaked, I guess,” he said.
“Fritz came by. He said your night on the town had quite the dramatic ending.”
Pepper could feel a fresh soreness on his temple where Taft had hit him during their fight, but his ribs were now completely healed and the rest of his face back to normal after his barroom fight in Oregon. “Moira,” he said. “I was angry, but I know nothing happened between you and Taft. That’s what he says, at least, and I guess I believe it.”
She blew smoke. “And here I thought my word would be good enough,” she said. “Regardless, I hope you don’t think it gives you license to go out at night with your friends and behave stupidly. Do something to hurt yourself, or somebody else.”
“We ran into some trouble,” he said, “but it turned out all right.” She shook her head in a way that told him how dumb that sounded and he pressed on. “Taft showed some sand. I’m starting to think I may have had him all wrong.”
“I’d be inclined to give that more weight,” she said, “if you weren’t standing there in the snow in your boots and underclothes.”
He looked down at his feet. What did he have without her? Nothing. They both knew it. “How long do you expect me to sleep out there in that garage?” he said.
“A good long while, I think,” she said. “You know me, I just can’t help myself when it comes to my emotions.”
Nearly the same words he’d used with Fritz during their first dinner here. She jutted her chin at the garage, where Taft had disappeared into the dark yawn of the doorway. “So you’re as thick as thieves now,” she said. “Nothing like some rosy financial news to make the boys forget that just yesterday they tried to kill each other.”
“The match is fixed,” Pepper said.
“I know that,” she said, and he realized she already had it all figured out. “Mrs. Taft knows it, too, and she doesn’t seem to give a damn.”
“What do you care what she thinks?” Pepper said.
“I guess I like her,” she said. “At first I thought she was living in a fantasy, but now I’m starting to think she’s the most realistic person in our whole bunch.”
“I haven’t told him yet,” he said. “I’m not sure he’s going to go along with it.”
She watched him over the top of her cigarette. “You know as well as I do there’s something the matter with him,” she said. “She won’t admit it and neither will he, but in his condition I doubt even he believes he could beat Lesko in a fair match.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why would he go through with it at all, then?”
Though as he said it, he remembered a moment at dinner the night before, when Taft’s mind seemed to wander on him. When the waiter set the key lime pie he’d ordered for dessert down in front of him, Taft looked at it like it might jump up and bite him. It took him a moment to come back to them—a look on his face saying the needle was finding its place on the record again—and then he laughed it off. For a second, though, there’d been real fear in his eyes.
Moira stood up, grinding out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe. “He’s doing it for her, stupid,” she said. “But I suppose that only makes sense when you know what it’s like to love someone more than you love yourself.”
He swallowed, but when he glanced up at her, she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring up toward the lodge, where James Eddy had come out onto the porch and stood watching them. “I don’t like that look on your face,” Pepper said, finding his voice but hearing how small it sounded. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It just suddenly seems like everyone has a fallback plan except us. What about you? Do you care what happens at the end of all this?”
“It’s not like I had any choice, you know,” he said. “Stettler, O’Shea and Fritz already had the whole thing settled before I even got there. You should have heard them when they were cutting the deal, Moira. They might’ve been talking about what to order for lunch.”
She considered that for a long moment. The wind was in her hair and she was beautiful standing up there, just a few feet away from him, her blue eyes shining with something not quite tears. She let them settle on him and it made him feel like an even bigger fool for thinking she might have cheated on him with Taft, and mad at Mrs. Taft for feeding him lies. He wanted to run to her, grab her in his arms and tell her how sorry he was, but he felt rooted to the spot.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said, closing the door to the cabin behind her as she went.
During the next few weeks they started bringing in training partners. At first Fritz balked at the expense, but Pepper reminded him how important it was that everything looked aboveboard. The truth was, he wanted to bury himself in wrestling. He knew the only way to make himself feel better about training Taft for a fixed match was to scour himself clean with hard work. They got Clem Wallhead out of South Dakota, Frank Gundy from Iowa, and a big Swede named Lundin, who had once been European champion. Pepper insisted on handpicking each of them, making sure they were serious, hard men who all physically resembled Strangler Lesko—built as wide as they were tall, with cannonball shoulders and short, powerful limbs.
Wallhead—who might’ve been world’s champion if he hadn�
��t torn his Achilles tendon early in his career—was the quickest of the three and in the best shape. Gundy was the toughest, though off the mat he wore a pair of delicate wire-rimmed spectacles that made him look like a dandy. Lundin, though, was the prize. He had the full complement of size, strength and basic meanness to wrestle like Lesko. He had a headlock takeover that was almost as good as the world champion’s and a grip you couldn’t break with a sledgehammer.
There was a drill Pepper liked to run where he sent all three men at Taft one after another in ten-minute intervals with no breaks between. It was a trick he’d picked up in the orphanage, in which a boy who was preparing for a particularly tough match would battle against a ceaseless wave of other boys launched by Professor Van Dien as he paraded at the side of the mat with a whistle clenched in his teeth. It was a smothering feeling, with a fresh man coming at you all the time, on and on, with no rest and no water.
At first it looked like the drill would swallow Taft whole, but after a few days the wrestler started to emerge. Gradually he began winning some small victories. During the third week he surprised Wallhead with a clean double-leg tackle and, dumping him on his back with a satisfying whump, forced him into a pinning combination by cradling his leg and grinding a forearm across his face. Once, he got behind Gundy during a scramble, and for a second Pepper thought he was going to put a choke on the big man. He might’ve, too, but Gundy was saved by the bell at the end of ten minutes. When Pepper blew the whistle, Gundy rolled off the mat, red-faced, and Lundin charged in to clean up the arm-weary Taft. He couldn’t yet get the best of the Swede, but Taft was trying, going longer and longer into the sessions before he had to call for a rest, go over to the door and ladle water out of the bucket. The others kept their own water bucket, but otherwise they appeared to have no issues training with a black man so long as the money was good.
Pepper would often take a turn with them on the mat, and being back out there with the other men made him feel as though the years were falling away. The wrestling cleared away his troublesome thoughts and his body was coming back to life a little bit at a time. He would have been pleased overall with the progress of the camp if Taft’s strange spells weren’t coming over him more and more. Even as his wind, timing and confidence improved, he seemed to be slipping further into some distant corner of his mind. Little things started to confuse him. When Pepper would call out for him to pick an ankle or attack his opponent’s right leg, Taft would have to stop a second to think about it, hesitating, his eyes practically spinning like the reels of a slot machine, his hands pawing lightly at the air. Other times he would become aloof, quiet, and they would have to tell him things three or four times before he acknowledged them. He would go to the outhouse and not come back for half an hour.