by Chad Dundas
In the daylight, they went on as they had before, going back to backgammon and telling jokes, Fleet explaining the story of the book he was reading, bargaining with the prison cops to get them the special things they wanted. He no longer gave Taft the silent treatment. After lights out, they stayed mostly in their own bunks except for certain nights when Fleet would appear at the side of his bed as he did that first time and Taft would make room for him. They carried on like that for another year or so—Taft doing what it took to keep Fleet happy, whatever it took to keep from being alone—until Fleet was transferred out of Foxwood to a lower-security place downstate. Taft never knew for sure if the transfer had simply been part of the normal shifting and reshuffling of the state’s sprawling prisons or if Fleet had made it happen. They said good-bye as men, with a quick handshake while two bored guards leaned against the railing, waiting for Fleet to collect his things. After he was gone, Taft found a letter hidden in his bunk so full of sticky sweet declarations of love and oily apologies that he used Fleet’s last tin can candle setup to burn it to ash. Days later, he got a new cellmate, a burglar with a round, soft body and pitch-black skin, whose name he could no longer remember.
He never saw or heard from Fleet again and didn’t know now if he was dead or alive. A few weeks after his transfer, Taft was in the shower when he discovered the raw, burning sore on his privates. It filled him with such shame that he never said anything to the guards or prison doctors or anyone else, not that they would have done anything about it if he had. Even after it spread to his legs and back he kept quiet, just hoping it would go away, and eventually it did.
For a good long while he thought he was cured.
In quiet moments, which were few, Taft kept pestering Van Dean about his real name. The two of them were still sleeping side by side on the wrestling mat in the garage, wrapped up in their old tattered blankets. He didn’t know exactly why he couldn’t let the thing with Van Dean’s name go. Growing up in Madisonville, he’d known lots of guys with nicknames, funny-sounding handles they called out to each other in front yards and on street corners. Somehow, though, Van Dean seemed different. He never hid his feelings, never hesitated to get right up in your face and tell you what he thought. The fact that at the most basic level he was passing himself off as someone he wasn’t nagged at Taft’s thoughts.
Finally, after approximately the one millionth time he brought it up, Van Dean told him. It was late and the garage frigid, just the flickering light of their small fire. They were lying there talking, keeping their voices low like they were afraid a camp counselor might stroll by and catch them up after curfew. At first Taft thought he heard it wrong and asked Van Dean to repeat it. Then he tried to say it himself, and bungled it so badly that Van Dean insisted on writing it down. He tore the corner off a page from the little travel Bible Taft kept with him and scribbled the words on it with a nub of pencil. Taft took the paper and read it, sounding out the words.
“I guess that’s about as close as it’s going to get,” Van Dean said, grimacing at his pronunciation. “Now you know more about me than almost anyone in the world.”
Taft snorted. “I told you some things, too,” he said. “Maybe we make this a keeping-it-between-us–type situation.”
“What did Carol Jean say,” Van Dean asked, “when you told her about your losing time, or whatever you call it?”
Taft stuck the piece of paper with Van Dean’s name on it in his pants pocket. He hadn’t said a word to him about Fleetwood Wallace and never would, so he assumed the little man was just asking about his condition.
“We haven’t talked about it,” Taft said. “She knows something is different. I suspect she thinks I’ve lost interest in her.”
“I don’t see how she couldn’t know.”
Taft thought about that. He settled back under his blanket and listened to the last of their fire crackling itself out. That day Carol Jean had come down and watched some of their training. Seeing her had put a lift in his step and he’d given those boys all they could handle for an hour or so. Afterward he had to sneak out to the outhouse and chug two bottles of Dr. Paulson’s All-Purpose, but it still made him proud. He knew it would only be a short time now before she invited him back into her bed. He wondered if Van Dean’s wife would do the same for him. He hoped so. He didn’t like to think about him staying in the garage by himself. It was only going to get colder.
“You ever wonder where you’d be if you weren’t here?” Taft asked in the settling dark. “If you’d done something different along the way?”
“You mean gone left somewhere instead of right?”
“That’s it.”
“No,” Van Dean said. “I never have.”
“Maybe if just one thing changed, something that seemed tiny and insignificant at the time, you’d be a whole different person,” Taft said.
Nearby he could hear the chattering of some bird and he wondered what birds would still be doing out there in all that cold. Wouldn’t they know to fly south before the winter came? He was about to ask about it when Van Dean spoke up.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “At first I didn’t think you could beat Strangler Lesko, but, anymore, I’m not so sure. You’re big and you’re quick and you’ve been doing a good job staying out of concession holds the past few weeks. I think it’s possible you could outlast him.”
Taft sat up on an elbow. “Did you just pay me a compliment?” he said.
“I’m asking you a question.”
“Which is?”
“Do you believe you could beat him?” Van Dean said. “If we buckled down this last month and worked, really worked, could you go to New York and win the world’s heavyweight championship?”
Taft started to laugh but then caught the seriousness in Van Dean’s voice. There was something else buried in there, too. Was it hope? Was it fear? Taft couldn’t tell. A couple of times during training he’d caught Van Dean and Mundt looking at him in ways he didn’t like, but now he knew Van Dean was just as wrapped up in it all as he was. It felt like a betrayal, suddenly, not to admit to him how much pain he was in, about the doubts that dogged him.
Instead he said, “I know I can. I’m sure of it,” and wondered if it sounded as false to Van Dean as it did to him.
Van Dean said nothing, just lay there breathing as if that wasn’t the answer he was looking for. The quiet made Taft think of Adolph Fell and Fleetwood Wallace and how it must’ve made his parents feel when they read in the papers that he’d been operating a whorehouse out of a building he owned. They had never come to visit him in prison. He wrote them letters but heard nothing back. When he got out, he’d gone down to Madisonville to see them, found them living in the same house, a coat of red paint on it less than a year old.
He’d worn a nice suit and brought a chicken from one of the city’s best butchers. He hadn’t brought Carol Jean. His mother cooked the chicken in the same little stove he remembered from childhood and then they all sat around the table and had a nice meal, talking about everything except prison, his parents grinning and telling him they were sure he’d do fine, whatever he decided to make of himself now. Before he left, he hugged his father and kissed his mother on the cheek. As he climbed in the Rolls they both wished him well, the message delivered loud and clear: Don’t come back.
It embarrassed him now to think that Van Dean might be treating him the same way, filling him with false confidence. Or maybe just now Van Dean had heard the lie in his voice and it had spoiled his belief in him. The little man was hard to read, lying there quiet, as if lost in his own thoughts.
“My first wrestling coach was an old queer,” Taft said then, up into the empty air of the garage. “I ever tell you that?”
“You didn’t,” Van Dean said. “But now I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I’m saying you should feel lucky you had a coach,�
�� Taft said. “A good person who put you on the right path. I never did.”
“Is that what we’re doing now?” Van Dean said. “Blaming what happened when we were kids because we’re both lying here scared of our own shadows?”
Taft didn’t understand what that meant. “I’m merely saying . . .” he said, but trailed off.
“Let me tell you a story about the man who taught me to wrestle,” Van Dean said. “The good guy who, like you say, put me on the right path.”
Taft heard the rustling of Van Dean’s blankets, and even though it was too dark now to see, he imagined him sitting up on the mat. Van Dean started by telling him that on his first day of wrestling practice at the orphanage in Idaho, one of the older boys broke his arm on purpose and it took a while for him to heal up from it. After he did, the man Van Dean kept calling “Professor” took all the boys down to a wrestling tournament at one of the nearby towns. This was one of the main draws of being on the team, Van Dean said, since the boys weren’t allowed to leave the orphanage grounds except for school trips chaperoned by one of the brothers.
“We whipped a bunch of boys from a local athletic club that day,” Van Dean said. “Well, everybody but me. I pretty much got trounced by the first kid I wrestled.”
“You lost?” Taft said. He’d never heard Van Dean willingly admit to losing a wrestling match.
“I lost a lot in those days,” Van Dean said. “Mostly, though, the Professor was happy with the way we’d wrestled. A week or so later he called us all together and announced he was taking us out, like as a reward. The church from the next town over was hosting a big boxing smoker and he arranged to have all us boys attend for free. Well, that was just about the greatest news we ever heard. It seemed too good to be true, I guess. Like Christmas for a bunch of boys who never had Christmas. We all just about went crazy waiting for it.
“The morning of the smoker, we all rode over in the academy’s wagons, with the Professor and a couple of the other brothers driving. A big convoy of us. The smoker was set up in a big pavilion tent behind this little brick church. I was just a greenhorn at the orphanage still—I’d been there less than a year—but, God, it thrilled me to be out in the world again. The smoker turned out to be one of the biggest annual events in the county. The backyard of the church was already full of people when we got there. We felt wild for it, like any bunch of boys would, but the Professor warned there’d be hell to pay if we weren’t on our best behavior. There was set to be a bunch of different boxing bouts involving something like forty local men. Anybody could fight, really. Mostly it was big farmhands and fur trappers, street toughs and bullies. There was a men’s division where the top prize was fifteen dollars and a few dozen eggs donated by some neighbor’s farm. There was also a youth division and even a few women who were going to fight.
“After we found out about the women, we made sure we got seats right up front. It was a big, blue fall day and I remember thinking summer might still have a few good swings left in it before it got cold again. The church had a little refreshment table set up and I’d already had two cups of lemon punch by the time the Professor sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulder. The second he did that, I knew something was wrong. I don’t know how, but I did.
“He asks me, ‘Did you bring your boots and tights?’ and I’m just a kid, dumb, and I don’t get what he’s driving after, so I’m confused and I just look at him and say, ‘No, Professor,’ and he gets this little smile on his face. This mean look I’d never seen from him before. ‘You better start limbering up,’ he tells me, ‘you’re fighting today.’
“The weird thing I remember, when he told me that, I still had one of the little wax cups from the refreshment table in my hand, and I remember crushing it in my fist and throwing it on the ground. I remember exactly what that felt like. It turned out he’d signed me up for the smoker without telling me. I didn’t need to be told why. It was punishment for my bad showing at the wrestling tournament. I don’t know, maybe there was a lesson buried in it, too, and a test of my toughness in front of all those boys who were supposed to be my teammates.”
Taft said: “What lesson?”
“Not to lose, I guess,” Van Dean said. “Anyway, I was the youngest kid in the youth division. Smallest, too. I don’t think the church people much liked the idea of me fighting, but the Professor talked them into it. He could be persuasive like that.”
“What’d you do?” Taft asked. Despite Van Dean’s grave tone, he felt a smile spreading across his face.
“What the hell could I do?” Van Dean said. “I got beat up. I got beat up bad. The next day I tried to run away again, but they caught me. They whipped me and put me on kitchen duty for six months. You ever scrub dishes for two hundred grubby orphan boys? I’d take a whipping from a couple of high school kids a hundred times before I did that again.”
His voice sounded far away and deadly serious, but Taft couldn’t stop himself from laughing. He had been lying on his side, listening to the story, but now he slumped onto his back. The sound of his laughter dry and wheezing. He still couldn’t see anything, but felt Van Dean stretch out beside him on the mat. There was a pause in which he could tell Van Dean was trying to stifle it, but then he started laughing, too.
“Christ,” Van Dean said. “What a terrible thing.”
This set Taft into a new fit of giggles and Van Dean joined him. They twisted in their blankets, trying to catch their breath. It went on like that for a long time, the two of them laughing in the dark like fools.
On Thanksgiving, Fritz planned another evening out in town, but Pepper forbade Taft to go. He was finally starting to look in decent shape, and the last thing Pepper needed was Taft filling himself up on buttery restaurant food, too much drink and cigars with his training partners. Fritz didn’t like it, but when Pepper asked him if he wanted a repeat of their trip to the steakhouse, he relented. Instead, early in the evening he loaded Eddy and the other wrestlers into one of his big touring sedans and drove them into town, leaving Pepper, Taft, Moira and Carol Jean alone at the hunting camp.
It was Moira’s idea to have them all for dinner at the cabin. She even fixed it with the hired girl to add a chicken and some vegetables to the camp’s weekly grocery order. She wanted to do mashed potatoes, but Pepper nixed it. Too starchy, he said, and starch thickened the blood. He and Taft were both still spending nights out in the old garage, but he and Moira were on more regular speaking terms again and he felt good about that. She cooked it all on the wood-burning stove, with pots and pans she’d stolen from the lodge, and Pepper even found a leaf for their table so they could all sit around it at the same time.
The Tafts came down dressed to the nines, as ever, and they ate early while the sun was still up. The food was delicious, like something cooked over a campfire. Carol Jean brought a bottle of wine and Moira served it in the cabin’s small enamel coffee mugs, moving with no limp, her ankle looking slim and healed. Pepper felt glad of that, too.
“I’ll be Lewis and you be Clark,” Carol Jean said, offering her husband a toast. “Like a couple of frontiersmen riding the range.”
Taft laughed. “I’ve never been camping,” he said, like looking back on it he was trying to figure how that was possible.
“You’ve roughed it pretty good the last few weeks,” Pepper said.
Taft nodded. “It is getting rank out in that old garage,” he said. “These new men are good wrestlers, but together they put off an incredible funk.”
“What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get the money?” Moira asked. “When this is all over.”
Taft was slow to answer, but Carol Jean knew right away. “We’ll buy our own home,” she said. “Enough of this staying in hotel suites and living off other people’s kindnesses. We’ll get a house outside Cincinnati, maybe in Madisonville near Garfield’s family. Something with a whole lot of bedrooms, isn’t that right?�
��
She leaned over, bumping Taft with her shoulder. His eyes crinkled in a grin. “Of course,” he said, then added: “I suppose I’d like to own a good, fast car again. Something where I could feel the wind in my face on a summer evening. How about you all?”
Pepper drummed his fingers on the rough wood of the table. He didn’t like talking about money. It made him itchy and anxious. “I don’t know,” he said. “Whatever Moira wants, I guess.”
She smiled. “I’d like a new bed,” she said. “Sleeping on this old thing will make me a cripple before long.”
They all looked for a moment at the cabin’s drooping brass bed and the feeling in his chest deepened. The stove was going and it was warm in the little room, the windows fogged over. They were all flushed and had drunk just enough wine to be giddy. He hoped this would be the night she would let him sleep there again.
“That’s it?” Taft said. “If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Mrs. Van Dean, I thought you’d set your sights higher than that.”
Some extra color appeared in her cheeks as she refilled their mugs. “What can I say?” she said. “I’m a simple girl.”