Champion of the World (15 page)

She smiled wider. He felt the warmth of it in his chest. “Come on to bed, baby,” she said. “I can't sleep in this big bed by myself.”

Hours later he lay awake, his mind twisting itself in circles. Carol Jean was curled up next to him chasing ghosts in her sleep, the warmth of her rump pressed against his hip. A feeling of helplessness had dogged him since that morning in the woods, before he'd gone
to Washington. It was nothing, he told himself; he was just tired. He shut his eyes and was almost asleep when the sound of tree branches scraping against a bedroom window jarred him awake. The rustle of the wind and the tiny
creech-creech
of wood dragging across glass.

At first it sounded soft and far away, but as he listened it grew louder. Soon it felt like a loudspeaker blaring in his ear, the sound tinny and crackling when each new gust whistled through the trees.
Creech-creech, creech-creech.
A sudden storm rolling through the valley, though the afternoon had been sunny and still. He turned onto his side and covered one ear with his arm, but it made no difference. He tried putting a pillow over his head but didn't like the way it smothered his breathing and took it off again. The sound still was there, almost all his mind could focus on.

What are you,
he thought,
the princess and the pea?
It was one of the old stories his mother used to teach him to read, back in their tiny little place in Madisonville. He could remember his mother sitting with him in the rocking chair his father had built, spreading the book across his lap, helping him with his letters. Even back then he'd known he was special, as none of the other kids in his neighborhood could read and few of them cared enough to try. It still made him proud to think of it and he tried to hold on to that memory even as he could feel it fading.

Creech-creech, creech-creech.

“How can you sleep with that racket?” he said, his voice loud in the dark.

Carol Jean barely stirred. “I don't hear,” she said. Words she wouldn't remember in the morning.

Annoyed, he sat up, his feet searching out his slippers on the cold floor, the feeling of the freezing wood reminding him of prison. It was funny to him now how the judges and lawyers and normal folks talked about jail, none of them having ever been there for more than a visit. He remembered how, at the end of his five-day trial, after the
bullshit jury had found him guilty and the judge handed down the sentence, his lawyer—who'd made a fortune off Taft, then barely put up a fight on his behalf—looked at him and smiled like three years in Foxwood was some kind of victory. “Could have been a lot worse,” the lawyer had said, loading up his briefcase in the little room off the main court area before going home to his wife and family and his own bed. “You'll still be young,” he said, “you can still have a life.” Then the guards came in and fit him with leg irons that were too small. One of them held him while the other leaned his weight down until the cuffs mashed against his skin and pinched bone enough for the locks to click shut.

A life. Yeah.

Taft pulled his robe on in the dark and crept to the bedroom window, not knowing exactly what he planned to do when he found the offending tree branch. Throw open the window and break it off with his bare hands? Shake his fist and cuss the wind? He cocked his one good eye and peered out, seeing nothing but darkness. Their room looked out on the grassy courtyard between the lodge, the cabins and the wrestling gym they'd built for him. There were no trees growing on this side of the building and the grass of the clearing stood calm and still. There was no storm. The noise must have been coming from somewhere else.

He crept to the door and stuck his head into the hallway.
Creech-creech.
This time the sound seemed like it was coming from the other side of the house. Slipping out, he padded a few feet down the hallway and lit an old oil lamp that sat on the table there. This made him feel more foolish than ever, a big man in his pajamas carrying a lamp through the house to search out mysterious sounds. He might as well be wearing a pointed nightcap. He got to the top of the stairs and balanced himself by resting one hand on the fancy decorative globe that sat atop the banister. He could smell kerosene burning in the lamp, and the shadows cast by its glow made him feel disoriented.

Not again,
he thought, shaking his head to clear it. He was about to put one foot down on the top step, when he paused. Again he shook his head from side to side, then slowly turned it from right to left and back again. Nothing changed, he realized. It didn't matter which way he turned his head, which way he cocked his ears, the
creech-creech
sound was the same. Same volume, same fullness as when he'd been in bed. It didn't seem to be coming from any one direction.

Taft sat down at the top of the stairs and set the lamp to one side, the chill of the floorboards creeping up his back. He took two fingers and stuck them in his ears, feeling the hole in the pit of his stomach deepen when the sound did not change.
Creech-creech, creech-creech.
He turned his head from side to side again. Still no change. The sound was still there. He cursed under his breath. Was it already happening? Was he going crazy? Reaching over to turn off the lamp, he rested the side of his head against the banister and closed his eyes. The sound couldn't go on like this in his head forever. Eventually it would fade.

He would wait this out. That's what he would do.

A
fter Fritz Mundt had finally gone off to bed, James Eddy took the whiskey bottle by the neck and carried it to his room on the second floor of the lodge. His door was at the end of the hallway, past Mundt's bedroom and the room Garfield Taft shared with his whore wife. Inside was a small desk with two chairs, a cot and a long wooden credenza with a washtub, lamp and bar setup. His rifle stood loaded in the corner, half hidden behind a freestanding coatrack. When he'd first arrived at the hunting camp there had been a big, gilt-framed mirror hanging over the sideboard, but Eddy had removed it. Now the room was a cold, practical space, and it reminded him of his days coming up with the Market Street Gang, when the rule was: Don't own anything you can't carry with you if you have to leave in a hurry.

He washed his hands in the tub and then, after inspecting them for specks of grime, washed them again. When he was done the water was a soapy froth, and he thought he saw bits of filth floating in it. He'd have to have the hired girl bring up a new bucket first thing in the morning. She would probably roll her eyes and he'd have to be stern with her. Getting the clean water was something that would be in his thoughts until it was done.

There were eight tumblers on his bar setup and he gave each of
them a half counterclockwise turn with the tips of his fingers before deciding he'd stick with the bottle. Tipping it to his lips, he went out to have the day's last smoke, going through a second interior door, which led out to the unfinished part of the lodge. The room he entered was probably meant to be a rear-facing parlor, but was left undone when the lodge's original owners were forced to abandon it. Now it was just a skeleton of studs, vaulted rafters and open air.

Back in Chicago, Eddy had allowed himself no more than two whiskeys in a night, but Montana drove him to drink. The months before he'd traveled west had been some of the lowest of his life and he'd hoped the change might do him good, give him some peace and quiet to help him collect his thoughts. Instead, the desolation of the place felt like a weight on his chest. Its wide swaths of empty land tightened his throat, the endless skies bearing down on him as if he were an ant waiting to be crushed. It made him long for the close quarters of the city and he wondered if this was how sailors felt when, day after day, they woke to nothing but the boundless black sea churning all around them.

It had been five years since he'd last seen Pepper Van Dean, and when the wrestler appeared at dinner that night with his pretty wife, it took Eddy's thoughts back to when things had been good for him. He first met Van Dean on a chilly late-summer afternoon in 1916 when Eddy and a couple guys went to Abe Blomfeld's gym to convince him he really ought to lose the world's lightweight title to Whip Windham. Eddy had leverage on Van Dean—he knew about the money he owed all over town—but no matter how many times or how many ways he outlined it, Van Dean would listen to everything he said, nod along like he saw his points and then tell him to go fuck himself. Just like that.

Eddy had brought along some big guys, knuckle draggers who looked mean just getting off the bus, but Van Dean was oblivious. They had him surrounded, sitting in a chair against the wall in
Blomfeld's office, towering over him, and from the look on his face you might think they were out for a Sunday drive. Then one of the big fellows put a hand on him and Van Dean broke the guy's wrist without even getting out of his seat, just grabbed it and twisted and the guy dropped like a sack of sugar.

Right there they should've put a beating on him, but through the small, greasy window into the gym Eddy saw some of the other wrestlers stop to stare when they heard the big guy's screams. He was worried one of them would call the cops. Anyway, the dead air inside the gym and the feeling of all the wrestlers rolling and bleeding and dripping all over everything made his skin crawl. He needed to get out of there.

For a day or two maybe Van Dean thought he'd gotten away with it, but then Dion O'Shea decided they just ought to murder the hardheaded little mug. For three days and nights Eddy tailed Van Dean around the city, studying his routine, quickly and glumly realizing the wrestler would be easy to kill. Just pull up next to him on a deserted street while he was out on his early-morning run, poke a 12-gauge out the window—
kaboom!
—and drive off. The thought gave him no satisfaction at all. The more he saw of Van Dean, the more Eddy was convinced asking him to kill a man as proud and careless as this was like asking Henry Ford to build your kid a wagon.

Still, there was something fascinating about the guy. Van Dean seemed to power through life with a special kind of thoughtlessness, a blithe confidence that Eddy couldn't fathom. His own mind never gave him a break, constantly spinning, picking things apart. To navigate the world the way Van Dean managed it seemed like an impossible luxury. Was Van Dean really too stupid to be scared of them? Or did he just not give a damn?

In the end O'Shea decided to give the wrestler one more chance. He went along with Eddy on a second visit to the gym and explained to Van Dean what would happen to his wife if he didn't play ball.
Van Dean heard them out, an expression on his face that would melt the paint off a house, but this time he didn't tell them to go fuck themselves. A few weeks later Windham won the title and everybody made a nice payday on it.

Those years just before the war had been lean times for Eddy and O'Shea. There was a lot that needed doing. They had just begun slugging it out with the Italians for control of the city. A month after the job with Van Dean, Eddy intimidated the head of a large machinist's union into dropping a grievance against one of O'Shea's trucking companies. A few weeks after that he murdered a low-level soldier named John Duffy, who they suspected was double-crossing them with Jim Colosimo and John Torrio. After that there was a North Side club owner who wouldn't pay tribute, a couple of unruly stickup artists down in Cragin and a showgirl who kept bothering O'Shea about paying for an abortion. He'd gone right along living his life without thinking much at all about the business with the wrestlers until much later, after Eddy ended up doing the killing that spoiled everything for him.

I
t started with a haircut.

This was a year or so after the job with Van Dean, and President Wilson had just gone back on his promise to keep America out of the war. On the scheduled day and time of his monthly haircut appointment, Eddy walked up to his regular barbershop on North Kedzie Street to find it shuttered and a sign on the door saying the barber had shipped out with his naval reserve unit.
DATE OF RETURN UNKNOWN
, it said across the bottom in hasty block letters.

Eddy didn't like that one bit. He'd been using the same barber for nearly three years and the thought of trying to find a new one sent ants creeping down the collar of his shirt. Haircuts were
particularly tough for him. He hated being forced to sit still in the muck of the barbershop while a stranger smeared him with oils and made small talk. It had taken a few disastrous trials before he finally settled on a regular barber, a man who kept his shop impeccably clean, was quick and capable at his work and above all else did not talk. Now the man was gone and the words
RETURN UNKNOWN
jangled in Eddy's head.

He hurried back to the apartment he shared with O'Shea and refused to come out of his room for almost two days. Finally he went and sat in front of the mirror in the bathroom, imagining he could see his hair growing by the minute. Clicking open an old folding knife he sometimes stuffed into one boot, he began hacking. Clumps fell heavy on the tiles, and when he got the nerve to show himself the finished product, he almost screamed. His hair was sawed and gutted as if a child had done it, in some places sticking out straight from his head, piling in on itself like a bird's nest. He ripped the bathroom mirror from the wall and in his haste he dropped it on the floor. After taking some time to bandage the cuts he got cleaning it up, he found O'Shea studying a racing form in the front room.

“Calm down,” O'Shea said, tucking a pencil behind his ear. He was an easygoing man and had a way of making everything a joke—until suddenly it wasn't. “It doesn't look that bad. Listen, I'll get you an appointment with my own man. He'll fix you right up. This fellow is a tonsorial master artist.”

O'Shea called around for someone to drive him, and by the time the car showed up Eddy felt like a hideous ape. Luckily, the guy behind the wheel barely glanced at him as he huddled in the backseat with his hat pulled low. The barbershop was an upscale place with a view of the water, but as soon as he walked in, Eddy knew it was all wrong. It just didn't feel the same as his normal place. The air was too cool, the lights too bright. He saw scraps of hair on the floor as O'Shea's barber, a husky man with a waxed mustache and a beard
that pointed neatly from his chin, walked him back and sat him in the chair.

The apron he threw over him smelled faintly of body odor, but at least it kept the man from seeing Eddy's knuckles go white as he gripped the armrests. The barber curled his lips when he pulled off the hat, like it physically pained him to look at the ruin Eddy had made of himself. He asked what he was supposed to do with this, his voice full of some accent Eddy couldn't place. Eddy managed to say he just needed it nice and short, nothing fancy. He told the barber to crop the sides close above the ears and to bring the top into respectable shape so he didn't look like some heathen. He watched the man's eyes in the mirror as he talked and thought he saw contempt lurking there.

“Could we maybe do without the mirror?” Eddy asked. “Is that possible?”

The barber spun him around so he couldn't see himself and went to work. Perhaps O'Shea had called ahead, because the man didn't say a word, just whistled some tuneless song that made Eddy dig his fingernails into his own thighs to distract himself. The whole process probably took only a few minutes, but to Eddy it felt like hours, and when the barber finally set his tools down and spun him around to see his handiwork, he blinked at his own reflection.

“It looks the same,” he said. “It doesn't look any different.”

“Sir,” the barber said, “I do exactly what you say. I take off half an inch.”

Eddy looked again at the mirror, squinting. He still looked shaggy, his wet hair drooping around his face, and when he tried out a smile it came off as a frightening grimace. “Shorter,” he said.

The barber folded his arms over his chest, his white jacket puffing at the shoulders, his face slack with the smug look of a craftsman who knows his trade. “I refuse,” he said. “This cut, you have all the women in the neighborhood after you. You'll see.”

Eddy gave him a look in the glass. Though he didn't consider himself an intimidating person, he had an expression he could put on when he needed to do it, flat and menacing. The barber stared at it for a few moments and then sighed, reaching for his scissors and a straight black comb. Again he went to work, still whistling, and when he was done Eddy still saw no change in the mirror. He demanded the man go back and cut it shorter still, and this time the barber turned a deep shade of red. His fingers seemed to move with more purpose now, each snip like an angry shout in Eddy's ears. Again he turned to face the mirror and again he shook his head.

“No,” Eddy said. “Start again.”

“You are almost bald,” the barber said.

“Shorter,” he said, trying to keep the quaver out of his voice. “You don't understand. We have to go shorter.”

The man reached for a hand mirror as if to show him the back, but Eddy grabbed it from him with such ferocity that the barber jumped back, a few strands of his mustache hanging loose.

“You get out,” the barber said, pointing. “I'm going to tell Mr. O'Shea about this.”

Eddy set the mirror in the seat of the chair as he turned to go, the barber stooping with a short broom and dustpan to begin sweeping piles of hair from the floor. He'd taken a few steps toward the door before the desperation that lurked in his chest turned to rage. He spun back around and was suddenly standing very close to the barber when he said, “Now you listen—”