Champion of the World (23 page)

“Come out from there, now,” the lead man said. In his voice she recognized the long, rounded vowels of Canada.

“What's the meaning of this?” Moira said, straining to be heard over the wind, trying to sound like she was the one being wronged. “I want to know what's going on here.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” the man with the lantern said. “I'm going to have to ask you to clear out of here.”

Up close she could see he was too young to really be the one in charge. He was barely into his thirties, lips pressed tight against the cold. Under different circumstances he might have been handsome, and she wondered if he'd been chosen as lantern bearer precisely because he had a friendly, evenhanded way about him. She smiled at him.

“You can't come out here at this hour, make all this racket,” she said, “and expect a girl to get her beauty rest, can you?”

One of the others, a dog-faced man wearing little round spectacles, prodded her with the barrel of his shotgun. “You bitch,” he growled. “Do what the man says.”

She felt the warm, watery feeling of having a gun pointed at her, but before she could move the lead man nudged the barrel away. “No sense in you being up here in this cold, ma'am,” he told her in his easy voice. “Go on, now.”

She looked over his shoulder to where a couple of men were still unloading the truck. The sedan belching white smoke into the sky. When she spoke again, it was with her father's calm.

“I apologize for being curious,” she said, “but I won't abide by such rough talk. I'm a guest here of Fritz Mundt. Does he need to hear about this?”

The lead man's face turned so hard she knew she had misjudged
him. She'd pushed it too far. He turned and, in a voice as deadly as a hot wire, told the dog-faced man and a couple of the others to escort her back to wherever she came from. As he strode back up the hill, he gave her a last look, pity plain on his face, as if he'd tried to help her but now she'd fouled it up. A nervous jitter quivered in her legs as the other men marched her down the road toward the cabins. She could still feel the sharp barrel of the shotgun burning against her ribs, even though the dog-faced man had only placed it there for a second.

“Naughty girl,” he said to her now. “Trying to make me look bad in front of our young Mr. Templeton. That was a stupid thing to do.”

When they got to the place where the road widened in front of the cabins, he used the shotgun to lift the back of her skirt, and she wheeled to slap it away. The men laughed and catcalled at her and the dog-faced man caught her by the wrist with a grip tight enough that she couldn't wrench free. His eyes were small and dumb, and she knew he was going to hurt her. Maybe he thought she was just some camp prostitute, or maybe he didn't care. As he backed her up, he tightened the squeeze on her wrist and a small whimpering sound escaped her lips.

On the porch of the cabin something moved, and they all turned their heads to look. Moira's first thought was of Pepper, a silly hope that he'd come back early from Chicago and was waiting for her. Her heart dropped when she saw it was just the old orange tomcat. It had been snoozing in front of the cabin's door, anticipating the bowl of food she might bring down from the lodge. Now it uncurled itself and slunk off the porch into the road, curious about the noise. When it saw Moira, the cat dipped its head and trotted toward them. All the men stood and gaped at it until the dog-faced man released his grip on her wrist, shouldered his shotgun, and fired.

Moira covered her face against the blast, and when she looked again the cat was down in the middle of the road. The dog-faced
man stooped and hoisted it into the air by the stump of its tail, making sure to hold it at arm's length. It was gut shot, and ropes of blood and stringy entrails hung from its body. Half of one of its back legs was missing and thick gashes were ripped through its hindquarters by the heavy load of the shotgun. The cat was still alive, screaming and scratching, which made the dog-faced man laugh.

“Damn thing practically ran right up to me,” he said, a grin full of brown, broken teeth slithering across his face.

One of the others whistled low. “That's some good shooting,” he teased. “Bagged yourself a real trophy.”

They all laughed, and Moira swallowed back a rush of bile. “Let it go,” she said.

“I think I'll make a hat out of it,” the dog-faced man said. “A nice fur hat.”

“Let it go,” she said again, louder, spinning and hitting the dog-faced man on top of the shoulder with her fist. It was a stupid, worthless blow, but the surprise of being hit by a woman made him drop the cat. The animal landed with a sickening flop, and as it tried to scurry off into the underbrush, she saw its one remaining hind leg wasn't working. It dragged itself a few feet with its front paws, leaving a trail of thick blood behind. The dog-faced man knocked Moira back a step with the flat of his shotgun, a snapping blow that felt like it had almost caved in her chest.

“What's it to you?” he said. “That old cat was half-dead already.”

Tears welled in her eyes and she felt angry with herself for it. She'd seen the cat only a handful of times. She cleared her throat, determined not to give the bootleggers the satisfaction.

The sound of footsteps coming up the road made them all stop, readying their guns as Garfield Taft appeared out of the shadows. He was wearing his knee-length coat with wide fur lapels open over a white shirt buttoned to the collar with no tie. It was the first time Moira had seen him so close since the first afternoon she'd gone to
see Carol Jean. His face was healing nicely and he looked even taller now than she'd thought during his match with Jack Sherry. The line of men moved aside for him as he passed, his steps long and confident. He didn't bother looking at them.

“What's all this?” he said, his voice a steady baritone, softer than she expected.

“It's none of your concern, nigger,” the dog-faced man said. “You get on inside before you cause any trouble.”

If the words aroused any anger in Taft, he didn't show it. “I wasn't speaking to you,” he said, turning only his chin at the dog-faced man while keeping his eyes on Moira. This close she could see they were flecked with gold and green. “Are you all right?”

“These men shot that old tomcat,” she said, as if that explained everything. “For no reason at all—just shot it.”

Taft faced the bootleggers for the first time, studying each one of them in turn as he stepped between them and Moira. The dog-faced man lifted his gun slightly and grinned at them again. “What are you going to do about it, boy?” he asked. As his last word hung in the air it was unclear what the dog-faced man thought would happen next. Whatever it was, Moira guessed he probably didn't expect Taft to stroll over and shove him down on his ass in the dirt.

E
ddy couldn't sleep, and so he lay awake on his small cot, trying to keep from thinking about California by making a map of the hunting camp in his head. For this kind of work, he imagined he was using a good, inky pen, and he drew from memory in thick, perfect strokes. Sketching out the distances from the lodge to the horse barn, from the horse barn to the rear gate. From there his thoughts followed the road up to the place where it disappeared about a half mile north of the camp. Marking out the terrain, the surrounding hills, and the place where a stream cut underneath a little wooden bridge.

On his drive back to the camp, he'd kept the papers Howard Livermore had given him wrapped in a handkerchief on the passenger seat. He tried his best to forget the man's wet cough and not to think about the germs that might at that moment be creeping from the pages to the upholstery, inching toward him as he drove. First thing, he snuck into the kitchen and stole a small cast-iron pot with a heavy lid. In his room he'd folded the papers inside and stowed it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He felt better about it now. He felt no tickle in the back of his throat. No sniffles coming on.

He'd missed dinner in the dining room and had the hired girl bring his food to him on a tray. She didn't like it but did as she was
told. With Mundt and Van Dean gone, it had just been Mr. and Mrs. Taft at the table, she told him when he asked. The Van Dean woman stayed down in the guest cabins, and the girl had taken her down a sandwich.

“Running food all over,” she said to him. “And me, with a certificate from the Silver Bow County Secretarial School.”

She had a way of talking that set his teeth on edge. “What is this?” he'd said, using a fork to paw through some of the dry, colorless stuff on his plate. “Gruel?”

Afterward he'd gone out to meet the trucks and get the Canadians started unloading their shipment. As soon as he was able, he left them to their business. They were grimy, small-minded men and he doubted any of them had ever fired a shot in anger. Forty-five minutes ago he'd extinguished the lamp in his room and ever since he'd been lying in the dark, brooding over how he had wound up in this place. At some point he'd begun to wonder if O'Shea would send someone to kill him when this was all over and whether his little house in California ought to be more than just a backup plan.

That's when he started trying to still his mind with mapmaking. It was a trick he'd learned as a sharpshooter. By day he'd lie hidden for hours in front of some bush or along the wall of a gully, memorizing the zagging lines of the enemy's trenches, the ant-like movements of the men. At night he'd sit awake under the stars, mapping it in his head, looking for weak spots, trying to locate the most likely places for officers' quarters and where he might catch them unaware. It had a calming effect, the mapmaking, and came with the knowledge that he'd be well prepared for whatever happened. Now he'd almost finished sketching the hunting camp in his head and had just started to feel a peaceful, drowsy calm settling over him, when he was jarred awake by the unmistakable sound of a gunshot.

The report, a powerful slapping bang, rattled everything in the room. In his haste to grab his rifle from the corner, he toppled the
coatrack and sent a glass paperweight to shatter on the floor. Cursing, he flung open a window, a gust of freezing wind slamming into his face. He dropped to one knee to rest the rifle against the sill and held his breath, straining his ears for roaring engines, scanning the perimeter for bursts of floodlights, shadows creeping through the underbrush with guns drawn. He saw nothing and he heard nothing, none of the chaos that would accompany an invading army of government agents. The hunting camp was still and quiet except for Moira Van Dean out in the road with the idiot Canadians.

He watched as one of the Canadians lifted something limp and wet off the ground, raising it to shoulder level. Before Eddy could make out what it was, the Van Dean woman rushed at him, flailing, and the man shoved her with the flat side of his shotgun, dropping the thing back into the dirt. Sighing, Eddy eased the rifle off safety with a flick of his thumb.

He hadn't fired a gun during his six months in Montana, but he trusted his aim would still be true from this distance, so long as the rifle was up to the task. It was a standard M1917 Enfield, an American knockoff of the original used by the British during the war, and Eddy hadn't yet had the chance to properly sight it in. The gun had been sporterized for civilian use, altered to take heavier .30-06 hunting cartridges. He'd bought it from an out-of-work miner, a foreigner who placed a classified ad in the newspaper and answered the door to his one-room shack bootless and trembling from hunger when Eddy came calling. He thought the man might actually break down in tears when he handed over the rifle, making him promise to take good care of it. Something about his accent reminded Eddy of the barber.

Eddy had never been what you might call a haunted man, but he thought a lot about the barber these days. If he had been able to keep himself from killing that man, he wouldn't have had to go away. Maybe O'Shea wouldn't have shuffled him to the side. Even as he
thought it, though, he knew it wasn't true. He knew at some point O'Shea would've cut him out regardless. There was too much money in it now.

Maybe it was always meant to be that way. Maybe at some point, without even realizing it, Eddy had knocked his head against the upper limits of what was possible for him. At best he was a talented and methodical killer. At worst he was a babysitter, dispatched to the middle of nowhere to stand watch over things that didn't need watching, keeping tabs on O'Shea's least valuable possessions.

Now, as he rested the gun's open sights on the slim figure of Moira Van Dean, he thought about the way she'd stood up to Mundt during their first dinner at the hunting camp, needling him for a cut of the promoter's fees if a match against Lesko was signed. He had to admit he admired her for it a little bit. He was thinking it would be a shame to have to kill her over a dispute with the Canadians, when the figure of Garfield Taft appeared farther down the road wearing his ridiculous fur-lined jacket. Surrounded by the shorter men, he looked even more enormous than usual, and Eddy cursed under his breath. Words were exchanged with the Canadians, but he couldn't make them out. Taft approached the man Mrs. Van Dean had been fighting with and without any preamble sent him sprawling on the ground with one mighty shove.

Eddy didn't wait to see what happened next. He left the rifle on the floor under the window and grabbed his pistol, leaping over the upended coatrack as he ran for the door. He didn't stop to put on his coat, and the shock of sprinting out into the night was like plunging into an icy lake. He slipped once in the frost-covered grass as he charged down the hill, the wet spot soaking through his pants to the knee. By the time he got to the run of cabins, the ugly, dog-faced Canadian was up on his feet, holding Taft off with his shotgun. The rest of them stood with their own guns ready, watching the Van
Dean woman try to pull Taft away by the arm. For now, the big fellow was standing his ground. As he got closer Eddy saw that the thing in the road was the old cat Mrs. Van Dean had been feeding. It had been skulking around the property since Eddy had arrived, maybe an old barn cat or somebody's pet that had run away or been forgotten when the previous owners sold the place. Now it was suffering, nearly dead.

The dash down the hill left him out of breath and it took him a moment to get his bearings. “You cowards,” Mrs. Van Dean screamed. “For no reason, you killed it. The least you can do is put it out of its misery.”

The ugly Canadian's lips twitched. He acknowledged Eddy with a sideways glance and then looked at the cat, which was trying to drag itself along by its front paws. “I won't, either,” he said, suddenly nervous, maybe because of Eddy, maybe because he'd pointed his gun at Taft without first figuring out if he really wanted to shoot the man. “I changed my mind. Let the damn thing go.”

“Let it go?” Mrs. Van Dean said. “It could take hours to die like this. If you are any kind of man at all, you'll do the right thing and kill it now.”

“I'll kill
you
in a minute if you don't stop that screeching,” the Canadian said, shifting the barrel of his shotgun in her direction before settling it again on Taft.

For the life of him, Eddy couldn't remember the dog-faced Canadian's name as he stepped up and pressed his pistol to the man's temple. “I can't let you do that,” he said.

The Canadian didn't even try to hide the look of hatred that filled his face. One of his partners, a small hatless man with a horseshoe hairline and a roll of fat underneath his chin, stepped forward and pointed his own gun at Eddy. Aside from a quick look that he hoped said
Don't be stupid,
Eddy paid him no mind but felt a slick of
sweat bloom under his clothes. It was dangerous to have a gun held on you by a man who wasn't used to doing it. He hoped the little bald guy didn't shoot him out of pure nervousness.

“Where's Templeton?” Eddy said, talking only to the dog-faced man.

“How should I know?” the Canadian spat back. “Probably snug in his ruck with one of his books. What's that got to do with me? What's that got to do with this?”

“Listen,” he said, pacing himself, nice and easy, his voice clear and strong. “Everybody out here has a job to do, and right now not a single one of you is doing it. It's time for you to take your men back up to the barn where you belong.”

“That's rich,” the Canadian said. “I'll be damned if I ever had a white man side with a Negro and a whore over me.”

Eddy pushed the pistol a little harder into his head. “Right now there are only two sides,” he said, “one that gets you paid and one that gets you shot. I'm on the side that pays you, but I'm giving serious thought to crossing over.”

Slowly and with what Eddy imagined was secret relief, the Canadian lifted the barrel of his gun so it no longer pointed at Taft. He gave his bald partner a curt nod and that man raised his gun as well. The rest of them stood in the road not making a sound, waiting for a cue from Eddy. He let that feeling linger a moment before he lowered his pistol and walked over to where the tomcat was lying in the road. Its chest was heaving like a bellows with each panicked breath, and before he could think about it he pointed his gun and shot it, the report deafening in the quiet. The blast split the cat's body open. Innards flopping, its neck twisting unnaturally to one side. Eddy made the mistake of staring at it a second too long, and all at once his thoughts filled with the idea of rabies and squishy white maggots. He gagged, covering his mouth with the palm of his free hand,
then turned away from the others, taking a few steps to let his stomach settle before swinging around.

“Get rid of it,” he said to the dog-faced Canadian, hoping he didn't look as green as he felt. The Canadian sneered like he might say something smart, but then went to poke around in the brush until he found a long stick. He dragged the cat out of the road, leaving a smear of blood, and stomped back, refusing to meet anyone's eyes. “Now go on,” Eddy said, waving his gun in the direction of the barn.

“We won't forget about you,” the dog-faced man said to Taft and the Van Dean woman as his men started back up the road.

She laughed. “Now you're just trying to flatter us,” she said, some of the pluck returning to her voice.

Eddy had half a mind to follow the Canadians up and order them to drive back to the border that night instead of waiting for the morning. He wouldn't want to have to explain to Mundt and O'Shea why one of their trucks got lost trying to make the trip in the dark, so he stood his ground until they were out of earshot.

“Don't mention it,” he said to Taft and Mrs. Van Dean once the men were gone. “You're very welcome.”

The woman squinted at him. “I wouldn't have thought you'd go weak at the knees at the sight of a little blood,” she said. “And to think I was worried you might be dangerous.”

“What I am is not your business,” he said. His knee was freezing where he'd slipped, and it was possible his slacks were ruined. His hands felt dirty again, and in order to wash them he'd have to make a special trip down from his room to refill his bucket from the well. It would be worth it.

“I don't appreciate this,” she said, as if announcing it to the world. “Being lied to, being led on.”

He knew she meant the liquor, and for a split second his eyes
strayed away from the group, up the hill to the horse barn. In a sudden flash Eddy understood what he was going to do. He realized the answer to all his troubles had been sitting right there, a hundred yards from his bedroom this whole time. His ticket out of Montana. His ticket out of everything. When he looked back at the woman, she was still staring at him, a queer look on her face like she could read his thoughts. He blinked his eyes and forced his face to go blank again.