Champion of the World (12 page)

“They don't seem to mind that Sherry attacked him while he wasn't looking,” Moira said. “Do they?”

Pepper and Fritz were transfixed by the show in the ring. They didn't answer her as Taft walked back to his corner and leaned against it, looking at Sherry like he'd just told a very old joke. Sherry got up from his knees and shook his arms out, working his neck back and forth a few times before coming forward again. This time Taft met him in the center, using one long arm to brace against Sherry's forehead while the other dipped low and plucked his nearest ankle off the mat. The ease of it was startling, and as Sherry toppled over onto his backside, Moira saw Pepper look over at Fritz with his mouth in a silent
Oh
.

Sherry tried to scoot away, but Taft held firm, keeping him cradled on his side by pressing his weight down on top of him. For a moment it appeared they were both stuck. As long as Sherry didn't move, Taft couldn't pin him, and Taft couldn't risk letting go long enough to improve his own position.

“He should be trying to snatch that arm,” Pepper said. “Sherry's practically giving it away.”

The two wrestlers stayed like that, neither looking like he knew what to do, until Sherry began to writhe and stretch, eventually jiggling one of his legs free. When Taft moved to try to recapture it, Sherry sprang backward, coming to his feet as the crowd crowed its approval. Taft was slow getting up, and when he did, Moira saw he was slick with sweat, the smile gone from his face. Suddenly Sherry seemed to be the fresher man. He started to muscle Taft around the ring in a collar-and-elbow tie-up.

Fritz shifted in his seat, the bleacher muttering under his weight. Pepper leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. Moira realized she was holding her breath and inhaled deeply as Sherry backed Taft into a corner. It was clear that Taft's size was giving him trouble. Try as he might, Sherry couldn't get enough leverage to trip the
big man and couldn't get close enough to his body to grab for another tackle. The frustration and exhaustion were plain in both their faces. They might fight to a draw, Moira thought, just before Sherry reared back and thumbed Taft in the eye.

It was a quick, stabbing blow, but still simple enough to make out from their seats in the bleachers. Taft grunted and turned his head to the side, a trickle of blood and a welt already appearing beneath his eyebrow. When the crowd saw him in pain, it only cheered louder.

The referee did nothing, pretending he hadn't seen, and anger rose in Taft's face
.
A curtain dropped behind his eyes. With one quick step, he ducked out of the corner and got behind Sherry, sweeping his legs out from under him with a vicious kick. Sherry fell onto his belly and Taft followed him down. Locking his grip tight around the other man's waist, Taft laid his head in the middle of Sherry's back and rolled. Throwing his hips over to the side, he bridged, forcing Sherry's shoulders to the mat while his legs flailed impotently in the air. The referee went to his knees, pressing his cheek to the canvas to check the pin, and then slapped the mat with an open palm.

Moira thought a riot might break out. As Taft came to one knee, a hailstorm of crumpled programs and popcorn boxes roared down around him. An old man near the front had taken his false teeth out and was trying to decide whether to throw them. Taft used the top rope to pull himself to his feet and prodded at the swelling around his eyes with the tips of his fingers. He gave no indication at all that he noticed the bedlam in the stands. After ducking through the ropes and descending to the floor, his gaze locked on the place where Fritz, Pepper and Moira were sitting, and for a moment she felt glued to her spot. In an instant he looked right through her without seeming to see and then turned to stride down the aisle to the locker room. Not giving anyone in the crowd another glance.

It took close to fifteen minutes for the audience to filter out of the armory into the street, many of them still jostling and shoving
each other in a way that made Moira feel sorry for the town's speakeasies. By the time she, Pepper, and Fritz were able to work their way down off the bleachers and to the locker room door, a man sweeping the floor in a pair of coveralls told them Taft had already left.

“Left?” Fritz said, like it might be a put-on.

“Had me order him a cab before the match even started, sir,” the janitor said. “Told me it wasn't going to take long.”

“I can't say I blame him for not wanting to stick around,” Moira said, watching the last and drunkest of the crowd getting shepherded out a side exit by the old woman they'd seen manning the cashbox.

“Mr. Taft shares quite a bond with his new wife,” Fritz said, recovering. “I'm sure he left as soon as possible because he couldn't stand the thought of being without her any longer.” He clapped his hands as if signaling the close of business and then offered to buy Moira and Pepper a late dinner.

The restaurant was not far from the armory. Nothing in Bellingham was far, it seemed, as most of the downtown area was clustered in the same three or four blocks. The place's dining room was dimly lit and featured wildlife stuffed and mounted on all four walls. Their table was directly under a scene showing a mountain lion leaping down to sink its teeth into the neck of a deer, and Moira was proud of herself for not bringing up how apropos that seemed. Fritz ordered roast capon and lima bean salad while Moira chose the broiled imperial squab. Pepper asked for top sirloin steak served bloody under bordelaise sauce.

“What do you make of Taft?” he asked her when Fritz excused himself to go to the restroom. “Him running out like that.”

“I think we ought to follow his lead,” she said, and he scowled at her.

Once Fritz returned, the wrestling match dominated the dinner conversation. Moira said very little, watching Pepper stuff himself while Fritz picked around the edges of his cooked bird. She searched
his face for some glimmer of the man who had betrayed them years ago but didn't see it. All she saw was a guy who looked happy to be back in the company of his old friend.

“Well?” Fritz said once the plates had been cleared and he'd pulled a clay-colored cigar and gold hinge-top lighter out of his jacket pocket. “You think he looked up to scratch?”

Pepper sat back in his chair, hands folded over his belly. He looked a little green around the gills from overeating. Finally he said: “Eh.”

“‘Eh'?” Fritz said, and then laughed. “No, you must've seen the way Taft captivated the crowd.”

Now Moira spoke up. “They really hated his guts,” she said.

Fritz passed the cigar under his nose before firing up his lighter. “I know,” he said. “Wasn't it fantastic?”

“If you say so,” she said.

Fritz repositioned himself in the chair, pointing the cigar at her like it was one of his fingers. “I get the darnedest feeling you have something you want to say to me, Moira,” he said.

She steadied herself a bit. “I just find it curious that you would come back for us after all this time, Freddy,” she said. “Especially since I know the last time we were all together someone paid you five thousand dollars to break my husband's leg during training before he lost the title.”

“Moira,” Pepper said.

Fritz stared at her like she'd accused him of murdering a child. “Now, wait just a minute,” he said.

“Whoever paid you must've known there was no way a rummy like Whip Windham could beat Pepper so long as he had two good legs under him,” she said. “I think it's past time we had the truth.”

“I'm not sure which makes you dumber,” Fritz said, “that you feel you're on stable enough ground to make these accusations in the first place, or that you expect me to sit here and listen to them.”

Pepper stood up, the legs of his chair squeaking across the parquet floor. “Hey, now,” he said.

The two men glared at each other. It might've turned into something if their waiter—a scarecrow wearing thin suspenders—hadn't come to see if there was anything else he could bring them. He slowed when he saw Pepper on his feet and Fritz gripping the edge of the table like he meant to snap it in half.

“I apologize,” Moira said, a little too loudly. “Obviously, I've gotten the wrong impression somehow.”

Pepper sat down, but Fritz wasn't ready to let it drop. “I'll not suffer these accusations against my character,” he said. “As a promoter, my reputation is all I have in this world.”

“In fairness,” Pepper said, “you haven't promoted shit yet.”

The waiter laughed at that—a sudden bubble of a laugh—and they all looked up at him, reminded that he was still standing there. An embarrassed look passed over his face and he asked if they were interested in a nightcap. Pepper said they were. By the time they'd all ordered drinks and sent the waiter on his way, the tension had eased a bit.

“I apologize for my tone just now,” Fritz said, not looking all that sorry. “Surely the thrill of tonight's action is still in all our blood.”

“I'm certain that's it,” Moira said, trying to make it sound genuine.

Fritz said he understood if they were on edge. They hadn't had an easy couple of days. He said they should drink their drinks and call it a night, that they had an early train in the morning. He said he was sure their moods would improve once they all got to where they were going.

“It's the most picturesque little spot,” he said. “What's the word?
Bucolic
.”

Moira didn't like the way the word sounded on his tongue, like the name of a disease or an ingredient in some chemical formula.
She was done making an issue of things for one night, though, so she just smiled and hoisted a glass when the waiter brought it.

“You've been awfully coy about all this,” Pepper said to Fritz. “You said you had to get Taft out of Chicago. Where are you headquartered now? St. Louis? Louisville?”

Fritz grinned. “Louisville,” he said, like it was the punch line to a joke. “No, no. At the moment, home is much closer than that.”

T
hey caught an eastbound train out of Bellingham before sunrise. Fritz reserved a private sleeper car for them, saying that even after a couple of nights in hotel beds they looked like they could use the rest. Pepper didn't argue. With his busted ribs, the idea of riding crammed into one of the open passenger cars made him feel hungover and sick all over again. There was just a small crowd waiting for the first ride out of town on Sunday morning, most of them too polite to stare much at his black eye and puffy cheek. While Fritz went off to send a telegram, Pepper and Moira used the last of the mill manager's money to buy a soda pop from the station's refreshment window and shared it while sitting on one of the platform's narrow benches. As soon as they got on the train, Moira started pocketing things.

“Can you bring us something?” she asked the steward as he punched their tickets and unlocked the door to the sleeper. “Some chewing gum or hand towels?”

There were mints in a dish and she emptied them into her purse before she started digging around under the washtub for extra soaps. “We're not going to prison,” Pepper said. “Do you have to act like a pack rat building a nest?”

She didn't look up from what she was doing. “After the past few
days,” she said, “I think you'd be best off to suffer through a few of my peculiarities in silence.”

They washed up in the tub, Moira leaning over to cover his eyes with an outstretched hand when she ran a washcloth between her legs. “I do so love a whore's bath,” she said. The clothes they'd gotten cleaned in Bellingham were all they had, so they hung them in the sleeper's tiny closet to air out and sat together at the window seat in their underwear. They watched the close quarters of the city empty into the flat green farmland of central Washington. Eventually she put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

“Montana,” she said. “You don't think
that
seems a little odd?”

“I wasn't about to start asking questions about it,” he said. “I practically had to beg him for the job in the first place.”

Moira sighed. “Now that we've watched each other scrub our privates, though, maybe it's time for a frank assessment of the facts,” she said. “None of this adds up.”

She recounted it all for him in slow, painstaking detail as if he didn't remember: Fritz showing up in San Francisco, Taft's match against Sherry in a crummy little venue still only half full, Fritz paying for dinner, for a hotel, for the train, promising to take them shopping when they got to where they were going. That was the other thing: where they were going. Not Chicago or even some farm out in Wisconsin, Iowa or Indiana, or anywhere inside the territory Fritz took over from Abe Blomfeld. Middle-of-nowhere Montana. More than anything, that didn't track.

“Everybody says it's hard times in the wrestling business,” she said. “Yet Freddy is spending cash like he's got a printing press stashed somewhere.”

“What's that saying about a gift horse?” Pepper said. “Don't kick him in the balls while he's handing out candy? Something like that.”

She opened her eyes. “Why are he and Taft hiding out like a
couple of Wild West outlaws?” she said. “Why isn't Taft traveling with us? You act like you haven't considered any of this.”

“I told you,” Pepper said. “Fritz needed a place where Taft could have his white woman and not make a scene. This is the first lucky break we've caught in God knows how long, Moira, so I'm inclined to take it at face value for the moment.”

“I don't believe in luck,” she said. “Luck is for suckers.”

“You believe in it just fine when it suits you,” he said.

They dozed, but Pepper couldn't get all the way to sleep. He knew she had a point. He was shocked when Fritz said they were bound for Butte, Montana, on the Milwaukee Road Line. It didn't exactly seem like the most convenient place to have a training camp. Even if Fritz had to get Taft and his wife out of Chicago, why not set them up somewhere closer? Someplace where it would be easy to find gym space and training partners. Pepper had never spent any time in Montana, but it was near enough to Idaho and the orphanage to remind him of the old creeping fear.

Close to midnight they began the long, slow climb into the Rockies. As they passed through Coeur d'Alene, he crooked his neck against the glass to see the tops of the mountains, the moonlight shimmering off the surface of the lake. He imagined if he got off the train and drove almost a full day south he'd arrive in Boise and could look up his old man. Surely his father would be dead by now, he thought, if not knifed by some barroom drunk then from the rotgut he drank. He wondered if there would be a grave somewhere. At some point he must've drifted off to sleep, because the next thing he knew the sun was coming up. They rolled through a couple of mining camps, blowing the horn as the miners went about their business without looking up. He and Moira ate breakfast in their compartment and then sat smoking cigarettes on the divan as the train rattled over trestles and through little towns whose names they'd never know.

The ride didn't last as long as Pepper wanted. He would've liked to sit by the window watching the world glide by for days, weeks, the rest of his life, but a little after two o'clock that afternoon they clicked and chugged up one final hill and emerged on the high, flat tabletop of land he guessed gave Butte, Montana, its name. The town sat out there like a coiled snake sunning itself on a rock, a murky industrial haze scuffing up the sky.

The air struck him as they shuffled off the train. He knew they'd climbed almost six thousand feet into the mountains, and the breeze sang with prickly, sulfurous smells. They met Fritz on the platform and he led them out to the street, where lines of cars hogged the curb and the sidewalks were flush with people. Their car was a brand-new Oldsmobile sedan parked half a block down, easy to spot by the dumpy, potato-faced wrestler leaning against it. There was no mistaking the heavy brow and the cauliflower ears, though the man also had red-rimmed eyes and a roll of flab hanging over his belt. He lit up when he saw Fritz and Pepper, grinning as he helped them get their trunks loaded into the car. As he opened the door for them, the guy stuck out a fleshy hand.

“Steve Prichard,” he said. “You remember me?”

“Sure,” Pepper said, though he didn't think they'd met before. “Of course.”

He let Moira take the front seat and scrambled onto the back bench beside Fritz. Prichard wheeled them out into traffic, half watching where they were going while telling them his life story over one shoulder. It seemed like a tale he was used to telling and he looked excited to have a new audience for it. Pepper listened long enough to hear the parts about a promising wrestling career derailed by injury and Prichard joining the army, and then tuned the guy out. He wanted a look at this place.

The roads of Butte were a wide jumble of odd corners and sudden slopes, built wide but never quite flat. Even in the light of day,
storefronts and rooming houses glowed with electric lights. There were so many mines—some of them built square in the middle of neighborhoods—that tailings bled out into the streets, giving the town itself the look of being dug into the earth. On the bald hill north of the city, he could see the surface works of bigger digging operations, the spider shapes of a thousand steel headframes standing out black against the horizon. A jumbled network of dirt tracks connected them, and trucks huffed and puffed as they crawled along between sagging wooden buildings. Smokestacks smoked and lifts went down and up, dropping the men miles into the ground and pulling up ore to be shipped off to the smelters. They passed a streetcar stop where a group of miners stood waiting for the train to take them up to work. They were unshaven, several of them still dirty from the previous shift. Their eyes followed the car as it rolled by, Moira's blonde hair trailing in the breeze and Pepper sitting behind her with his arm hanging out the window.

“We're making one stop,” Fritz said. “Get you gypsies some presentable clothes.”

Their destination turned out to be a department store on the ground floor of a huge redbrick building with copper arches over every doorway. Inside there were high vaulted ceilings and deep carpets, the trim on the walls and the fixtures of the water fountains done in the same copper metalwork as outside. Fritz bought three new suits for Pepper and three dresses for Moira, slapping down his checkbook and scrawling out a note for a hundred dollars without blinking, then breezing them out as quickly as they'd gone in.

At first Pepper thought they might be headed for one of the big hotels he could see on the outskirts of downtown, but a couple blocks after leaving the department store Prichard steered them off the paved road onto a dirt track as rough as an old wagon trail. The car tipped and dipped on its axles as it blew through a neighborhood of tightly packed shacks where children chased balls on dead lawns and
men sat shirtless on wooden steps. A woman in a ragged housedress burned trash in a can at the curb. The last they saw of the city was its immense brick slaughterhouse, where they had to stop while a couple of boys urged a crowd of fat hogs across the road.

While they waited, Prichard said: “I was at Fort Omaha when I read about you losing the title to that fellow Windham.”

“Were you,” Pepper said. He thought he saw the muscles in Fritz's neck stiffen.

Prichard's big pumpkin head bobbed up and down. “Mother mailed me the press clipping,” he said, then whistled low. “Whip Windham. No one saw that one coming, am I right?”

He said it like it was supposed to be some great compliment. Pepper leaned forward and rested his forearms on the seatback. “I wrestled that match with a broken leg,” he said. “Did you know that? Did Mother write that in her letter?”

The corners of Prichard's lips turned down. “The newspaper account focused mostly on the winner,” he said. “There was a war going on overseas and we were worried we were headed for it. Nobody wanted to read a guy's excuses.”

Pepper started going over things he might say to that as they rounded a tight bend in the road, but Prichard pushed down on the accelerator, shooting them through a stand of trees and filling the car with the growl of the engine. The momentum sent him rocking back in his seat, clutching his side, cradling his injured ribs.

Fifteen minutes later they were crawling along the washboard switchbacks, going up and up into the craggy mountains, where the breeze was sweet on his bruised face. Finally they drove under an enormous wooden gate and onto a tight gravel drive where a run of small cabins sat at the fringe of the tree line. Pepper's gaze followed the road up a low hill to where a large hunting lodge loomed. To one side sat a low-slung but sizable building that might have been a garage, and up the hill a big red barn was melting into the earth. He
could see that the lodge stood unfinished, half of the upper floor just framing studs.

As they crept farther up the road they came upon a dark-colored car parked at the edge of the woods. From the drab brown uniform and mulish build of the man who stood by the back bumper, Pepper could tell it was the police. Prichard stopped and the cop came and stuck his head in the driver's-side window. He had white-blond hair and a lantern jaw, and his cap was pushed back on his head in a way that made him look like a simpleton.

“Who among you is Fredrick Raymond Mundt?” the cop said, reading the name off a folded piece of paper he had in his fist.

“What's it to you?” Pepper said.

“I'm Fritz Mundt,” Fritz Mundt said.

The cop gave Pepper a long, disinterested frown. “Captain wants to see you,” he said to Fritz.

They all piled out of the car and Fritz followed the hulking cop up the gravel drive toward the lodge. Pepper, Moira and Prichard waited in front of the row of smaller cabins.

“Who
among
us,” Pepper said, shaking his head and spitting a string of tobacco.

Up the hill, a hawk-faced man with a push-broom mustache had come out of the lodge. He was slimmer than his underling and wore a dark suit under his smoke-colored overcoat. He shook hands with Fritz and then the two of them walked off in the direction of the outbuildings. The uniformed cop was left alone and stood in the grass, looking down at the cabins with his hands in his pockets.

“What manner of beast is this?” Moira said.

At first Pepper thought she meant the cop, but then he noticed that a small creature was creeping out from the trees. It was a plump ball of orange fur, and as it got closer he saw that it was an old, limping tomcat. It slid along toward them with its ears flat and its nose
close to the ground. One of the cat's eyes was missing, its tail just a hairless stump. Its fur was matted and crosshatched with scars, but when Moira knelt it trotted over and presented its back to her.

“Brave little fellow,” she said. “How do you think he gets by out here?”