Champion of the World (10 page)

“Listen,” Pepper said when there was nothing else left to say. “You still need someone to train your
darkie?”

H
e left the lodge at sunup, waiting until he was out on the porch to sit down and put on his shoes because he didn't want to wake Carol Jean. The railing creaked as he hoisted himself up, taking a few experimental steps into the sparse grass to test his balance. He was pleased to find his head unmuddled and free from the pressure that walled up behind his eyes so often now. He felt no dizziness, no flashes of pain. As he made his way down the hill, working the stiffness out of his neck and back, Garfield Taft hoped today would be one of his good days.

Fitch and Prichard waited for him by the row of tiny cottages. Two chubby white boys looking pale and unshaven, a couple of 175-pound guys trapped in sloppy 200-pound bodies.

“All the way down today, champ?” Fitch said, hopeful smiles spreading across their heavy pie faces.

Taft walked past and propped one leg on top of the rail fence, reaching to grab his toe. Summer was still hanging on, but he could feel the mornings getting colder, the deadness of sleep lurking in his body longer and longer.

“Maybe we take it easy today,” said Prichard. “Not shoot our load before Jack Sherry.”

The way Taft curled his lip made the other white boy laugh.
“Don't be such a milksop, Prichard,” Fitch said. He glanced at Taft like
Am I right?

Taft turned and began to run, following the fence to where the main gate of the hunting camp loomed some twenty feet above the road. The gate was an arch fashioned from three huge trees, two of them cut into Y-shaped supports and the third laid across the top, polished and lacquered to a high shine. You could tell the hunting camp had been something once, though the big lodge remained unfinished and the four smaller cottages below had fallen into disrepair. Up the hill from the lodge was an empty barn that once must've housed pack animals, and set off to one side was the automobile garage Fritz Mundt had cleared out and turned into a gym. All of it so grand and proud in spite of being way out here in the middle of nowhere. For Mundt to be able to afford this place, Taft guessed something very bad had happened to the men who built it.

Fitch and Prichard fell in step behind him, the three of them trotting in silence under the archway. In this direction the road twisted six miles down the mountain through deep forest all the way to the outskirts of town. Where it went the opposite way, Taft didn't know. Canada maybe. Alaska. Santa's workshop. He didn't care.

After less than a minute of running, the tightness in his legs and lower back began to bother him. In another five the chill had been run out of him and the sun felt hot on his neck and shoulders. He started sweating, trying to ignore the dull ache in his bad ankle. The hard-packed gravel inflamed his shins so that after the first mile or so his only thought was
Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it,
pounding along with each step.

Putting his chin into his shoulder, he asked what day it was.

“Friday,” one of the white boys said.

“Friday,” he repeated, and from the stupid way they grinned back at him he must have been smiling.

“Tomorrow's the day, champ,” the other one said. “Sherry don't know what's coming for him.”

“Hush, now,” Taft said.

Friday meant the schoolboys would be waiting for him. It was time to lose the chaperones. He picked up the pace as he rounded a bend and started up a rise, his long legs tugging at the ground, and immediately began to pull away. The shorter, dumpier men tried to match him but couldn't keep up. Soon their huffing and puffing faded from his ears, his thighs pounding and arms pumping as he drove up the grade. Gravel went in his shoe and blistered his heel, but he kept running. At the top of the hill he looked back and saw the white boys struggling, barely halfway. After one more switchback, he left the main road, snaking onto an old game trail partially hidden in the brush. He kept his pace up a bit longer, but as soon as he was sure he was far enough into the trees that they wouldn't see him, he stopped to walk.

This place was near the continental divide, Mundt had told him once, and the country out here was strange to him. At times the forest could be so densely packed with needle trees that you couldn't see more than fifty feet. Then, suddenly, it would open up into weed-clustered hollows where deer, foxes and chipmunks darted around boulders as big as cars. Other times the woods would come up short at treacherous, rocky cliffs only mountain goats could climb. It gave him the feeling that this whole place was perched out on the edge of the world.

This is no country for you,
he told himself as he stepped over rocks that sat waiting to break a toe, loose patches of dirt that could twist an ankle if he put his weight down in one. These were not the lush, mossy woods of central Ohio, where they'd sent him to serve his three years at Foxwood, nor was it the high desert of Utah, where he'd met Judith, his first wife, while on a wrestling junket. It
certainly wasn't Cincinnati, with its rolling hills and streets lined with trees that turned golden-apple red this time of year.

It made him feel foolish, how much he missed that town. When they let him out of Foxwood, the first thing he and Carol Jean did was get the Rolls out of storage and drive back to Cincinnati so he could buy ten loaves of his favorite bread from Winton Hill Bakery. She pitched a fuss over it, of course, saying she'd rather celebrate with steak or lobster, pointing out their room at the Hotel Gibson was just a few blocks in any direction from some of the city's best restaurants. He told her to just pack her shit and get in the damn car, and when they got there and filled the Rolls with the smell of fresh bread and drove down to a spot he knew on the banks of the Mississippi to share a piece slathered in soft butter, she didn't have many negative things to say.

On the way home he told her they couldn't stay at the Gibson anymore. At first she thought he was pulling her leg, but he saw a cloud fall over her face as he explained that after paying the trial lawyers, appeals lawyers, tax lawyers and divorce lawyers, the Rolls was about all they had left. After that he thought one morning he'd wake up and find her gone, yet somehow she was still here, still with him. He had to hand it to her for that.

The thought of Carol Jean pushed him to start running again. He kept it up as long as he could but stopped after a few minutes, this time leaning a hand against a tree trunk while he caught his breath. That was the funny thing about quitting. Once you stopped to walk once, it was easier to do it the next time. The trick was to push through the whole run with no breaks, to not even unlock the part of your mind that let you give up. Once you did, you might as well just head back to the lodge.

He thought about Jack Sherry, hoping it would get him mad, but the only thing he felt for Sherry was a vague sort of pity. That old boy must've been pretty desperate to sign up for this shit, riding all
the way out from Reno to Washington State just to take a beating. It was hard to believe Sherry thought he might win—even if their match would be just a single fall—but some men insisted on learning things the hard way. Maybe Sherry was one of those.

The trail was steep and slow going, cutting straight down the grade to the base of the mountain. Even at his crawling pace he reached the bottom well before Fitch and Prichard. As he got close to the spot where the trail met up with the main road, he scooped up a handful of pebbles and dropped into a crouch, waddling along quick and quiet through the weeds. Soon he could see the boys up on the road, four of them straddling bicycles, staring up into the hills, waiting. This gang had been showing up every Friday all summer, getting up long before dawn in order to pedal all the way out here to see him come running down the mountain. How strange he must seem to them, Taft thought, shirtless and dripping sweat, thundering down the hill, grimacing from the pain. Maybe they imagined he was some kind of ghoul or monster. Or maybe, if they were old enough, the boys would know him from the papers and might think of him by the awful names the sportswriters had for him: the Dinge or the Great Ape Man or Cincinnati Smoke. Taft had no children of his own, so he was no good at telling their ages.

After creeping as close as he dared to the road, he sat on his haunches to watch. One of the boys already looked antsy, rocking the wheels of his bicycle back and forth like a jockey trying to keep his horse from busting through the starting gate. Taft sifted through the pebbles until he found a good one and tossed it, pinging it off the front fender of the boy's bicycle. At once they all stopped fidgeting and looked around. When he was sure they still couldn't see him, Taft tossed half a handful up into the sky, sending a shower of rocks skittering around their wheels. It spooked them, and just as they spun around he leapt from the weeds, flailing his arms in the air and howling like a rabid dog.

The boys screamed, fumbling to get their bikes turned around as their feet scrambled for the pedals. They darted off, spraying dirt, squealing with terror and delight as they raced away, little legs pumping like pistons. Taft chased them a few steps and then stopped in the middle of the road to prop his hands on his knees and laugh.

H
e'd gone half a mile back up the old game trail when the pressure started to build at the front of his skull and the ground lurched under his feet. He had to stop to brace himself against the side of a huge boulder, his breath coming in short, shallow huffs and his vision pinching in at the corners. The trees seemed to press down on him, bending from all sides to scold him with long, spindly branches. He doubled over, a flash of pain piercing his head. When he straightened up again he wasn't sure which way he was supposed to be heading. He closed his eyes and tried to steady himself.
Not here,
he thought,
not out here all alone.

As he always did at times like this, he thought of Fleetwood Wallace. Tipping his head back against the rough surface of the boulder, he forced himself to picture the little man's long, wiry arms and his friendly face shaped like an upside-down teardrop. Fleet, as he insisted on being called, was a lifelong con and petty thief who'd been Taft's cellmate for all but the last year of his stay at Foxwood. He claimed to have spent more of his years on earth inside a prison cell than out. He could be surly and sulky and utterly ruthless, and without him Taft wouldn't have survived even the first month in that place. He remembered the moment they met, after two big jailers marched him past what seemed like an endless row of cells before suddenly herding him into an open doorway with the jab of a nightstick. Fleet was sitting on top of the cell's tiny table, smoking a
cigarette with his feet resting on a chair. When he saw Taft, he patted his poof of hair with his free hand and flashed a gold-toothed grin.

“Well, hey,” he said, standing up, his voice lilting and high like one of those jazz singers. “Hey.”

The guards left him without a word and Taft stood in the doorway, a folded stack of bedding and a change of clothes piled in his arms like he was bringing in a birthday cake. The cell was narrow and not too deep, with just enough room for a pair of bunks and a tiny writing table that bolted to the wall. In back, the toilet and sink were set so close you could wash your hands while sitting on the pot. Taft didn't yet fully understand prison—the suffocating loneliness, the inability to ever get comfortable, the terror—but thinking back on it he knew his first look at that cell put the initial crack in the wall he'd built up inside himself. The rest would come with time. In that moment, though, all he saw was a skinny little guy with a home-done haircut standing in the middle of the cell like he didn't know what to do with his hands. Finally, Fleetwood Wallace got up the nerve to offer him one.

“I know who you are,” he said before Taft could tell him.

Taft stooped to set his belongings on the table. “Course you do,” he said.

Fleet's things were spread out on the bottom bunk, a ratty blanket pulled tight over the meager lump of mattress. Taft made a show of inspecting it all. “I'm too damn big for this top bunk,” he said, giving his new roommate a sharp sweep of the eyes. “How about we switch?”