Champion of the World (11 page)

“I'm accustomed to the bottom,” Fleet said.

Taft put his hands on his hips in a way that swelled his chest a little bit. “Look at me,” he said. “No way will this take my weight. I'll crash straight through and crush your skinny behind while you sleep.”

Fleet fidgeted, his mouth clicking to the side a few times. “Ah, hell,” he finally said. “You can have it.”

“I thank you kindly,” Taft said, stepping back while the smaller man stripped the low bunk and stood on the second rung to fix up his new spot.

Taft sat down, the bed hard as a sack of stones, and fixed his gaze on the chipped, slate-colored wall.

“If you're trying to stare a hole in it,” Fleet said, resuming his position on top of the writing table. “I tried that already.”

With a quick flick of the wrist, he tossed something at him, and Taft snatched it out of the air. A tobacco pouch with a packet of rolling papers tied to it with a piece of string.

“If you ain't a smoking man,” he said, “you best become one.”

That's how it began. “See the whole scene,” Fleet told him during one of their first days on the yard together, making his eyes wide and sweeping one hand in front of him. “That's the best thing I can tell you. See the whole scene, then double-check to make sure you
seen
it right.”

It took a while for Taft to understand what that meant. He had never been what you might call a curious man, but soon enough he began to discover how much you could learn about a place by watching. In time, he could tell which prisoners were hiding blades up their sleeves from the way they held their arms close to their sides. He could pick out which handshakes passed rolls of cash and tiny envelopes of dope. Fleet taught him which men on the yard could be trusted, which couldn't, and which ones to stay away from altogether.

Now Taft opened his eyes. He rolled his back across the face of the boulder a few times to loosen it. “See the whole scene,” he said to himself, blinking and taking big, slow breaths until the trees went back to normal.

Then he remembered: the boys on bicycles. Of course. If he just followed the game trail up the hill he would hit the main road and
eventually the hunting camp. Carol Jean was there waiting for him. He stood still a few minutes longer, making sure his wind was sturdy despite the thudding pain in his head, and then started to walk again. After a while he jogged some more.

Just as they had been before, Fitch and Prichard were standing by the main gate. The two white boys leaned against the fence, red-faced and sweaty after chasing him down and up the mountain without ever finding him.

“You all are some lollygaggers,” Taft said, clapping Prichard on the shoulder as he walked past.

He kept a bottle of Dr. Paulson's All-Purpose Pain Remedy stashed in the weeds behind the outhouse. The thick, dark syrup coated his insides as he chugged it down, and by the time he relieved himself and began carrying buckets of water up from the well, the pain in his head had mellowed and he was feeling good again. There was an old trash bin he'd hauled down from the garage and spent a couple days scrubbing out. It took half a dozen trips up from the well with buckets in each hand to fill it, but it was worth the work. The mountain water was frosty cold and felt like a million tiny pinpricks on his skin as he dunked himself to the armpits. Water sloshed onto the ground and he rested the back of his head against the metal lip of the bin, the freezing, burning pain alerting him to every sore joint, every swollen knot, places he didn't even know hurt until just now. It wasn't as good as the ice baths and rubdowns he used to get at the Chancery Athletic Club in Cincinnati, but it was close.

As he rested there, Carol Jean came out onto the porch in her nightgown. She had a coffee cup pressed in both hands, and her auburn hair fell over her shoulders in a mussed-from-sleep kind of way he liked. He hoped it was coffee in that cup. He hoped she wasn't in one of her moods.

“How you feeling, big smoke?” she said, a little smile telling him she was good.

“Lazy,” he said. “Shiftless. With a yellow streak up my back like a Chinese.”

He stood as she came down the steps and planted a kiss on his neck, leaning into him so he wouldn't drip on her gown. Looking fragile in her bare feet in the middle of all this wilderness.

“Goodness,” he said, sinking back into the water. “That's the best thing to happen to me in at least two hours. Maybe ever.”

“Wait till you taste the bacon,” she said.

She went back up the stairs, putting a little wiggle in her walk for his benefit. “What time's your train?” she said when she had her hand on the doorknob.

“Evening time,” he said.

She scrunched her face into a pout. “I wish you'd let me be there,” she said. “I want to see you whip Jack Sherry like a stagecoach horse.”

He snorted, flicking some water out of the tub to show his patience was running out. “We talked about this,” he said. “I can't afford to have my attentions divided, not right now.”

“But when you wrestle Strangler Lesko?” she said. “When you win the world's heavyweight championship?”

He tried to smile. “They'd have to lock me up again to keep me from taking you to that one.”

He held his breath and plunged his head under the water, a frozen rush across his cheeks and over his scalp, the cold buzzing against the base of his skull. It hurt, but he stayed under as long as he could, a school of bubbles slowly trickling from his nose and mouth. He reminded himself to tell Carol Jean about the schoolboys, betting she would get a kick out of it; but when he came up for air, she was already gone.

T
he mill manager took a cash draw of twenty-five dollars from the safe in his office and sent them out of New Vermillion on a pump trolley hauling a skiff of freshly cut boards. Their pilots were two sour-smelling men in the wide, soft hats of hill people who spat at each other in some coarse language Moira didn't know. There were no seats on the pump trolley, so she and Pepper hunkered down on the floor of the car, trying to keep out of the wind and sun and rain until the men let them off at a lonely station in the middle of the forest. The first train to arrive was headed south to Portland, so they bought tickets from the conductor and fell instantly to sleep in the deserted passenger car, waking only to change trains for a daylong trip in the opposite direction to Bellingham, Washington. They arrived at dusk, Pepper telephoned Fritz Mundt from the station and he showed up five minutes later to collect them, making little effort to hide a self-satisfied smile.

“Sakes alive,” Fritz said, fanning himself with his hat. “You smell like a carload of railroad tramps.”

It curdled her guts to see him again. He was thicker around the middle than the young man she remembered knowing in Chicago, and with his hat in his hand she noticed he'd gone bald on top of his head. He was probably barely into his thirties, but the years had put
deep creases in his forehead and turned his mouth into a hard little line. When he clapped Pepper on the back and offered to carry their trunk, she felt a twinge of guilt for hating him so much.

As they left the train yard, Pepper remarked he was anxious to meet Garfield Taft, but Fritz said Taft wouldn't arrive until the following day, just a few hours before his match against Alaskan Jack Sherry.

“Wait until you lay eyes on him,” he said to Pepper, the two of them walking along like grammar school friends who'd never shared an unfriendly word. “I have no doubt you'll see exactly what I see.”

“A meal ticket?” Moira asked, and they both looked at her.

“Quite possibly the most naturally skilled mat man I've ever seen,” Fritz said. “And if you don't mind my saying, Moira, the only meal ticket I know of in this scenario is me.”

“I'm sorry to be the fly in your soup, Freddy,” she sneered back at him. “My feelings are just a little tender at the moment.”

Fritz put them up at a hotel downtown, small but nice. The only thing Moira wanted to do was have a bath, and when a crusty old railroad worker at first refused to give up the tub at the end of the hall, she sent Pepper down there to run him off. Afterward, she locked the bathroom door and sat in the water until it turned ice-cold, ignoring a series of knocks at the door as she scrubbed and soaked. It felt like rubbing off an extra layer of skin. They sent their clothes down to be laundered and found them already delivered the following day, hanging on hooks outside their door.

They'd slept through breakfast service, but it felt like a great luxury to put on clean clothes and wander around the corner to a diner for lunch. She ate bacon, lettuce and tomato while Pepper ordered two entrées: a cheeseburger and a baked ham and Swiss sandwich on rye bread. His smile was alive with mischief at the idea he could eat whatever he wanted without worrying about his weight. She felt a little sorry for him, sitting there with his face still swollen and
discolored from losing his fight to the huge mill worker. But his mood had lifted so much—even pointing out a couple of amusing entries from the local paper's police blotter—that for the moment she kept her feelings about seeing Fritz Mundt to herself. They both drank cups of strong coffee and her sandwich really was pretty good.

That evening Fritz came to collect them for the match and the three of them walked down to the water, where she could see the town curling around the bay like the jaws of a serpent. A mist hung over the breaks, so thick she couldn't make out the ends of the long docks that thrust out from the shore. They had visited so many towns during their time with the carnival that it was difficult for Moira to tell how any of them were special, but as night came on she could feel Bellingham pulsing with the raw energy of the west. These were places built on rushes for gold, timber and coal, and even as they grew from tent camps into brick-and-mortar cities, they never lost their wildness. There was a time when a place like this would've made her feel homesick for the sweaty, electric buzz of a steamboat cardroom. Now the only thing it stirred in her was a kind of thirst. This town itself had once been just a gamble. She liked to think the men who built it were of her feather.

As they turned in to the center of town, she listened to Pepper and Fritz going on about Garfield Taft. It was a name she'd heard a great deal during the past forty-eight hours, but she didn't recall if she'd ever met the man during Pepper's wrestling days. On the pump trolley out of New Vermillion, he had told her that Taft was once the most famous black grappler in the world. A heavyweight, an undefeated one, and after he'd beaten the rest of the best black wrestlers in the country he'd campaigned in the press for a shot at the world's championship. Frank Gotch had retired by the time Taft came into his own, but new champion Joe Stecher was holding firm to wrestling's color bar. Taft publicly called him a coward for it, even following Stecher on a tour of Australia during the summer of 1916.
He sat in the front row of all the champion's matches and openly mocked him as Stecher easily defeated a string of lesser talent.

The papers murdered Taft for his insolence, writing that he was an affront to the sport, yet another sign of our unraveling culture. Still, they gleefully printed all of his taunts about the champion, writing that the audacity of the modern Negro was without limit. By the following fall, Stecher's resolve never to grant a black man a chance at his title might've been crumbling. He told his friends and training partners that, if the money was right, he might not mind giving Taft the whipping he deserved. Before the two could arrange a match, however, Taft was arrested and sent to prison for operating a whorehouse out of a property he owned in Cincinnati. Nobody had heard from him since.

At the top of a small hill they made a right and approached a stone building with the bulbous flared corners and narrow vaulted windows of a castle. The Bellingham National Guard Armory loomed dark and sturdy over the intersection, where a bored-looking traffic cop stood waiting for traffic. His eyes tracked them as they crossed the street. She smiled and the cop looked away, waving a lonely Studebaker through on a left-hand turn. Inside the armory an old woman sat at a table with her waxy purple hands folded on top of a metal cashbox. The woman nodded at Fritz, looking impressed with herself for remembering him, and allowed them to push through the double doors behind her without paying the cover charge.

Moira was surprised to find the armory's gymnasium less than half full. Most of the audience sat in rows of folding chairs set up on the floor, while the bleachers that had been pulled out from the walls stood all but empty. The majority of the men were white and looked like slightly more citified versions of the loggers and mill workers they'd encountered in New Vermillion, in sagging overalls and sweat-ringed caps. There were a few blacks clustered around the back row of chairs and she saw one group of Indians, whose braids hung
past the shoulders of their denim shirts. Fritz led them up an aisle and picked out seats in the center of the bleachers. She estimated there couldn't be more than two hundred people in all.

When Pepper had told her they were going to a wrestling match, she imagined it would be held in the town's best theater—men in suits and silk hats, girls going around serving refreshments—but the armory gym was dusty and dank. Threadbare tapestries hung from the walls, boasting of the achievements of the local National Guard reserves and the young officer training corps. The closest thing to a concession stand was an old man in short sleeves selling popcorn from a pushcart.

“This is a paltry affair,” she said as they settled into their places.

“It's a decent little crowd for a bout like this,” Fritz said. “Between you and me, we were lucky to find a recognizable opponent for Taft in this area. Alaskan Jack was already out in Reno to face Chris Sorensen when we contacted him.”

The timekeeper tolled the bell to quiet the crowd. The ring announcer, a man with a shaggy beard and an ill-fitting blazer, held up a paper megaphone emblazoned with the blue and gray logo of the Washington State Normal School and reminded the crowd that the evening's main bout would be one fall to a finish.

“Only one fall?” Pepper said.

“It's all we could get Sherry to do,” Fritz said. “I wager he thinks he can walk out of here with a fluke win.”

Alaskan Jack Sherry was announced as weighing 210 pounds and wrestling out of the central fire station in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He appeared to little fanfare, coming out of one of the locker rooms on the far side of the gymnasium. He was a weather-beaten man with jet-black whiskers and a thick crop of hair that hung almost to his ears. He wore a pair of knee-length wrestling tights; short socks rolled down to the tops of his black boots; and a towel that may once have been white slung over his shoulder. He kept his
eyes on his feet as he strolled to the ring, not acknowledging the smattering of applause, his jaw fixed, his expression flat.
Steadfast
, Moira decided was the word for him.

“If no white man will wrestle Taft,” she said to Pepper as Alaskan Jack ducked through the ropes and into the ring, “then why is Sherry game?”

“Sherry's a half-breed,” Fritz said, leaning around to look at her, “and he'd like to earn a shot at Strangler Lesko himself. A win here lifts either man's standing.”

“Theoretically,” Pepper said.

When Garfield Taft stepped out of his locker room and into the light, it felt as though every man in the room stopped talking at once. Even Fritz forgot what he'd been saying, trailing off in mid-sentence. Taft wore a crimson robe with a towel rolled underneath the collar. He was tall, his bald head nearly reaching the top of the locker room doorway, and his body lacked the stocky bulk carried by some heavyweights. Instead he was built straight up and down, with impossibly broad shoulders, long limbs and calves thick with muscle. He was announced at 240 pounds and hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio. As he walked to the ring he surveyed the crowd, a small smile on his round face. He paused to wipe the soles of his boots on the ring apron before stepping over the ropes and into a corner opposite Sherry. The audience sat transfixed as he shrugged out of his robe and began to loosen up, swinging his arms lazily over his head and across his chest. A natural showman, Moira thought. She'd seen very few men who could hold a room by just standing in the ring. Pepper was one. Frank Gotch was another, the one time she'd seen him wrestle in front of a packed arena in Indianapolis.

The crowd came out of its spell when Taft stepped forward to shake Sherry's hand, and a man in the front row who held a pair of spectacles in a tight fist yelled: “Kill that nigger!”

Taft's smile only gleamed wider in response. He wore a black
singlet, the trunks tied with a sash matching the color of his robe. When he turned to hand his towel to a ring attendant, Moira caught sight of a scattering of pockmarked scars bubbling pink across his back.

Pepper saw them, too. “What's that about?”

Fritz shrugged. “Negroes have scars,” he said. “All the boys have scars.”

The referee gave them their final instructions, and Moira noticed one of Pepper's legs was jittering. She put her hand on his knee to stop it. Men in the front rows were cupping their hands around their mouths to shout things at Taft, but their voices were lost to the din in the room. A scuffle broke out, two Indians clawing at each other's faces as they tumbled to the floor, knocking over a row of chairs. Their friends pulled them apart, both men coming up bloody and winded, and Moira noticed for the first time that there wasn't any security here. The men just went back to their seats still grumbling and glaring at each other.

The referee stood in the center of the ring clapping his hands to begin the match, and Sherry came out of his corner in a low crouch. Taft strolled around the edge of the ring, casually trailing a hand along the top rope. Sherry's face remained blank as he followed him with his eyes, but neither man was in a rush to engage with the other.

“Get on with it!” a man shouted from the front row before a full minute had passed.

It was loud enough that Taft stopped to glare down at him, and Sherry took that as his cue, gliding forward to shoot in for a tackle. Taft turned as if noticing Sherry for the first time and, putting one hand on the back of his neck, pushed him down onto the mat face-first. Stepping out of his grasp, Taft walked away, giving his opponent a full view of his back as he crossed the ring. The arrogance of it rankled the crowd even more, and a man moved the ringside barrier a foot forward as he sprang out of his seat to jeer at him.