Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  When he threw back the tarp, the first thing he noticed was the empty bottles, that this truck hauled nothing more than a dummy load of open crates and rattling glass.

  Then he saw the Canadian. It was the sour-smelling, dog-faced man he’d threatened that night in the road with Mrs. Van Dean. The crates were stacked around the outside of the flatbed to create a hidden dead space in the middle, and he was crouched there, wearing a winter hat, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His eyes were full of fear, but the mouth of the pistol he held in one outstretched hand yawned wide and bottomless.

  Eddy dove to one side, and the dog-faced man’s first shot hit him in the elbow. Even in his astonishment, he noticed that it didn’t really hurt any worse than a blow from a nightstick, though the force of it spun him in midair and sent his own gun clattering into the underbrush. He landed on his back on the cold ground, his hat tumbling off. As he rolled toward the driver’s side of the truck, his mind whirring, he knew at once that the Italians must’ve betrayed him. They were the only ones who knew his plan. They must’ve settled with O’Shea for more money than he’d offered them. For that, he would find them and kill them all.

  He rolled onto his stomach and, folding his tattered arm across his chest, began to crawl. Blood filled his shirtsleeve and his legs kicked involuntarily against the earth. Eddy had seen enough people shot to know his body was going into shock. He needed to move fast. The truck driver still held a pistol in one dead hand, and if Eddy could get to it before the dog-faced man got to him, he would be all right. He could shoot the man down, clear the road and make his escape. He could still get out of this, if he didn’t bleed to death first. Once he got back to the lodge, he would have to tourniquet the wound, maybe rig up a splint. Did he have any spare shirts? Had the hired girl taken his dry cleaning before he dismissed her? He suddenly didn’t know. No matter, he could get some new clothes before he got to where he was going.

  He cursed himself for having trusted those dagos in the first place. That was the problem with working with amateurs, he thought: You couldn’t count on them. Maybe it was not worth it to try to hunt them down. Maybe he would just let them go, get out of town, get to California and get settled in his new place. He would have to stash the load of liquor someplace where it would be safe until he could come back for it.

  He heard the sounds of the dog-faced man scrambling out of the bed of the truck, but it seemed to be coming from a long way off. He was almost to the truck driver, pulling himself along the ground with his one working arm. Who would buy the liquor now? Best leave that part of the planning for later, when he had a chance to sit down and work it all out. This was all starting to feel very complicated.

  A faint, acrid smell filled his nostrils as he reached the truck driver’s body, and it reminded him of blood and dirt and the stink of Chicago. He discovered he barely had the strength to wrest the gun from the dead man’s hand, but he finally got it free. California would be warm and full of people. It would be a place where a man could sit and not have to worry about his mind running away with him. A place where a guy could get a decent cup of coffee and drink it at a table on the street. Read a newspaper and watch the world go by. What was it Livermore had said? California was for new beginnings? A second chapter? Something like that.

  He was still trying to remember the exact words when he rolled over to find the dog-faced man standing over him, pointing the pistol at his face. The man must’ve been waiting there for a little while, a few seconds at least, watching him crawl along the ground. He was standing to one side, keeping out of the blood trail Eddy had left behind him in the snow. The sky at his back was nearly black and something had changed in his face. Eddy tried to raise the truck driver’s gun but realized it had fallen out of his hand onto the ground. As the dog-faced man took a step closer, Eddy saw what was different about him. The man didn’t look scared anymore.

  For fifteen minutes, Pepper stood in his dank dressing room, staring up at a row of high, narrow windows. The room was just a concrete box with a couple of chairs, a rubdown table, and a rough wooden bench. His one remaining suit hung inside a crude locker. The windows were frosted glass and opened with a single pane that pulled inward. One of them stood slightly ajar, and outside he could see snow falling in the alley between Twenty-seventh and Madison. He was trying to decide, if he dragged a chair over and stood on it, whether he could squeeze through one of the slender openings and escape.

  Behind him, Moira sat with her legs crossed at the knees, staring at her fingernails with the cold poker face she used to try to hide her fear. She’d been distant since Boyd Markham had returned, and Pepper knew he’d let her down. She’d been right about all of this, of course. Now, underneath her pretend boredom and the nerves of tonight, she was still waiting for him to apologize. He promised himself he would, just as soon as they were clear of all this mess.

  “You’re going to kill him,” she said when she looked up. “You’ll be the world’s heavyweight champion and then we’ll charge them a mint for the rematch.”

  “I know,” he said, though it sounded like a lie.

  It was always like this just before a match. No matter how much training he’d done or how prepared he’d convinced himself he was, suddenly the idea of walking out into a ballroom full of people and fighting another man in his underclothes filled him with unspeakable terror. As bell time drew nearer, every fiber of muscle in his body would be screaming to run. Just bolt, chuck it all, get out of there and never look back. It would be cowardly, yes, but shame was no match for what might happen to him if he actually went through with it and tried to wrestle Strangler Lesko.

  He knew it would be deserted in the alley behind the arena, and he wanted to grab Moira and whisper to her that they could just go. If they made it through the window and out to the street in either direction, there would be cabs. He could hail one and take it to the train station. They would make an odd pair walking through Grand Central Terminal, Moira in her evening gown and him wearing only his purple cape, wrestling tights and boots, but he didn’t care. Let people stare, he thought. Anything to get out of here.

  His every instinct begged him to make a break for it, knowing he would do no such thing. His body hummed like a tuning fork. Skin prickling in the cool air, his fingers worrying the rough cut of the stitches at the hem of the cape. It was foolhardy to still be there, with Stettler, O’Shea, Markham and maybe even Fritz all scheming against them. He hadn’t fully realized the ramifications of Markham’s return until they’d met with the lawyers. It was too late to change course now. There was nothing to do but go through with it. He could hear the slow grinding of what looked like an old schoolhouse clock, but beyond the metal door were the sounds of the crowd filling up the arena above. It was all as it should’ve been, he told himself, all normal. If you didn’t feel out of your mind with nerves just before a match, you’d already lost.

  When the door to his dressing room cracked open and Fritz stuck his head in, Pepper was almost glad to see him. Anything for a distraction.

  “We’d like a word,” Fritz said. He was not smiling.

  “Now?”

  Fritz stood aside to let Billy Stettler into the room before he locked the door behind them. Both were wearing their best suits and Stettler had his blue-black hair plastered hard to one side. He was patting his forehead with a houndstooth handkerchief, grinning at Pepper as he propped himself up on the high padded rubdown table.

  “The granddaddy of them all,” he said, spreading his arms to indicate he meant the Garden itself. “How do you like it?”

  “It could use a coat of paint,” Pepper said. “The dressing rooms are bigger at the Coliseum.”

  Stettler’s smile was wax on his face as he picked an imaginary piece of lint off his shirt cuff and blew it into the air. “You’re really starting to become one of the more tiresome people I’ve ever met, you know that?” he said.

  Fr
itz had pulled off his jacket to drape it on a chair. “You say the word right now, we can go across the hall and square things with Lesko,” he said. “We can start promoting Philadelphia tonight. It could be a new life for all of us.”

  “Once we walk out that door, you’re on your own,” Stettler added.

  “We’ve been on our own this whole time,” Moira said.

  Stettler paid her the scarcest glance. “What I’m saying is, as of right now? This moment? We can all still be friends. But you tell us to go fuck ourselves now and it’ll be the last time. We’ll walk over there and tell Stan to take you apart limb by limb. I still think it seems like a fairly easy choice.”

  Pepper flashed back to the athletic tent, the exhibition of holds he performed nightly with Gun Boat Walters before the challenge matches began. The two of them working together to make it look good for the audience—the big man going easy with his weight, leaning into his throws and tackles so they would look effortless. In a way, working a fixed match with Lesko wouldn’t be so different, he thought. He’d been a carnival huckster for so long, maybe there was no point in trying to make a stand now. Maybe it would be better if he just went along, shook hands with Stettler and Fritz, and let Lesko go out there and lie down for him.

  He wondered suddenly where Taft was: if his body was still lying on a slab somewhere in some anonymous government building. If nobody claimed him, would they take him out to a potter’s field and dump him in some unmarked grave? A small stab of guilt needled him when he thought of how Taft had gone through the motions for weeks in training, even though he must have been in tremendous pain and even after the last flicker of hope in him had been stomped out.

  Pepper thought of Taft’s words the night of their ski trip: They’re scared of me? and when he looked at Stettler, he knew it was true. The stress was starting to show in the hollows beneath his eyes. Everything about him seemed pulled tight, like he was about to burst. Fritz, too, looked like a man who was down to his last roll of the dice. He almost laughed now to realize how right Taft had been. They were terrified. They knew Stanislaw Lesko was out of shape. They knew if the match was on the level, Pepper had a real chance to win. If he did, and refused to back their scheme, they had nothing. They would lose all control of the wrestling business. Their plan would be as dead as Pepper’s career had been the night he lost the lightweight title to Whip Windham.

  “Where’s Markham?” Pepper said.

  “Is that really what you’re worried about right now?” Fritz said.

  “I’m not worried about anything,” Pepper snapped. “I just want to see him.”

  It turned out the carnival barker was just outside. He came into the dressing room glowing with confidence, giddy with the knowledge he’d schemed his way to victory. He shook all their hands brightly and even gave Moira a polite little bow. He’d gotten a fresh haircut and a manicure, maybe already living it up on credit from his future windfall. Carol Jean was not with him.

  “The agreement was that I would get my money before the match,” Pepper said, once they all were settled in the room.

  “That’s right,” said Stettler, annoyed, but pulling his checkbook out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

  “I want you to just make the check directly to Mr. Markham,” Pepper said. Even Moira stopped staring at her fingers to look at him. “He’s got me dead to rights and we all know it. I’m not going to fight him on this.”

  Markham seemed to grow an extra inch on hearing that. Pepper turned to face him. “This is why you came back, right?” he said. “This is why you tricked that poor woman. For money? Fine, fuck you, take it. But I want you to know that this is the only dime you’ll ever get from us. You’ll take this and then we’ll never see you again. If you ever come sniffing around us again, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

  As Pepper got close to him, Markham stepped back, tripping over a chair that was pushed against a wall. He tumbled to the floor, going down flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him, his lungs making the sound of water being dumped from a bucket all at once. Pepper turned away from him.

  “I don’t want to see him here when I get back,” he said to Fritz and Stettler, and for once they all seemed to be on the same team.

  “I think we can handle that,” Fritz said.

  As they helped Markham off the floor and guided him into the hall, Pepper did some warm-up exercises, bending at the waist to stretch his back and legs. He made big circles with his arms until he felt the heat in his shoulders and then stretched each one across his chest, the stress slowly working its way out of his muscles. His right leg clicked as he did a few deep knee bends, but he could live with it. He’d be fine, he told himself. He’d be great.

  Stettler came back in and folded his arms across his chest. “Well?” he said.

  Pepper was bouncing from foot to foot in front of the full-length mirror, but now he stopped. “You hear that?” he said. The clock on the wall groaned as the minute hand crawled one more tick toward the top of the hour. Underneath it was the murmuring sound of the crowd filing into the theater. “There’s a crowd full of hardworking people up there who paid to see a fight. I think tonight your man Lesko and I will give them one they’ll remember for quite a while.”

  Stettler started to speak, but stopped when a man Pepper had never seen before stepped into the room wearing the dark uniform of one of the Garden’s ushers. He had the longest gray whiskers Pepper had ever seen. The man didn’t smile or move or even seem to look at them at all. “Time to go,” he said.

  Pepper hugged Moira, the knowledge that she would be watching him cranking the vise a little tighter on his heart, but also making him feel buoyant, like his feet were barely touching the floor. She kissed him on the cheek.

  “This is your moment,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “The next time I see you, you’ll be world’s heavyweight champion,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, pausing in the doorway to slap himself twice in the face as hard as he could.

  The usher led him into the corridor, the way crowded with the debris of the arena. They passed a pair of old dressing tables sporting cracked mirrors and dead bulbs, heaps of discarded pipes, racks of empty seats and piles of costume clothing. He let the usher walk in front of him, turning sharply around a corner and going up a short flight of steps. The overhead lights here were old and shoddy, giving parts of the walk a weird, quivering feeling. The only other person they passed was a bored-looking cigarette girl leaning in a doorway, smoking, an empty display tray strapped cross the flat belly of her sequined suit. She raised her eyebrows at them, unimpressed, and Pepper stared right through her.

  The man in the uniform pulled back a curtain and Pepper stopped to bounce on his toes once more. Beyond the curtain was the white-hot cone of a spotlight, and beyond that, darkness. He could hear the strange hush of the arena. It was like standing at the edge of a high cliff, knowing he was about to jump. He nodded to himself, slapped the man in the uniform on the shoulder to say thanks, and stepped through. After that, all he could feel was the blinding glow of the spot, the heat of the crowd and concrete under his boots.

  Lesko made him wait.

  It was an old trick, something Pepper liked to do himself when he was champion. Lingering an extra few minutes in the dressing room while his opponent stood alone in the ring, listening to the jeers from the crowd. The sweat from his pre-match warm-up cooling on his skin. The enormity of the moment putting all its weight on him. As calm as he might look on the outside, any man about to wrestle for a world’s title was a hurricane of emotion inside. Most could barely keep a lid on it. For some, just the waiting was enough to break them. It didn’t always work, but it was worth a shot.

  If Lesko thought it would do the trick on Pepper, he was a fool. All it accomplished was to give him time to test out the ring, pacing back and forth acro
ss the mat, pretending to be oblivious of the thousands of men watching him. The ropes were nice and tight and covered in sleeves of new white canvas. That was good: Tight ropes would make it more difficult for Lesko to bully him against them or trap him in a corner. For the bigger man, it would have been better to keep the ropes loose. The footing was a different story. The mat was rough enough to discourage prolonged ground grappling, and the padding underneath was deep and soft. This would favor Lesko, mitigating Pepper’s speed and allowing the heavyweight champion to dig in and get his hips into his throws and tackles. On a mat like this it would be best not to let the big guy get ahold of him, he decided as he took a couple of experimental shots across the ring to gauge the surface.

  He couldn’t feel the heat from the lights but was already sweating. The referee kept his distance, leaning in a far corner with his elbows propped on the top rope. Pepper didn’t recognize the man, but while his white shirt and black slacks looked brand-new, his recently polished boots were worn and soft. As Pepper circled around the ring to where he was standing, he saw that one of the man’s ears was hard and cauliflowered.

  “Hey,” Pepper said, smiling in a way he hoped would make the fans at ringside think he wasn’t nervous. “What’s the best steak you ever had?”

  The referee’s head jerked up as if he’d been interrupted from a nap. “What?” he said.

  Pepper repeated the question, and the referee gaped at him for a moment. “Fillipelli’s,” he said finally, “in Chicago.”

  He smirked as he circled back to his corner, knowing Stettler and Lesko had the referee in their pocket. He’d have to watch out for the man.

  A blooming spotlight and a sudden rush of fans toward the rail alerted him to the champion’s arrival. Lesko moved steadily up the aisle in a simple black cape and matching singlet, his eyes never straying from the ring. Like Pepper, he came alone, pausing in his corner to whip off the cape and send it sailing casually over the top rope. His body looked a bit harder than Pepper might have hoped for, but he still had a small roll of flab around his belly. His shoulders were hairy cannonballs, a bit sloped but powerful, and his thinning hair was plastered down on his skull. His face betrayed nothing as he squatted in his corner and tugged at the ropes to stretch his back.