Champion of the World (16 page)

It was as far as he ever got. Later he realized that maybe he had startled the barber by turning on him like that. Or maybe he'd just pushed the guy too far. Whatever the reason, the barber jerked his arm up and threw the dustpan full of hair in his face. Eddy was in the middle of saying something when it happened and hair went into his mouth and down the front of his shirt. It clung at the corners of his eyebrows and tickled the inside of his nose as he drew back, the
nervous feeling of being covered in spiderwebs. He gagged, and then his pistol was in his hand.

This should've scared the barber more, but instead the man pulled his scissors from the skinny breast pocket of his smock and lunged at him, stabbing into the flesh of his upper arm. Eddy shot him. The sound of it shook all the glass in the shop, the mirrors and metal-topped jars full of tonics and even the front windows trembling.

The barber's head opened up like a pumpkin as he flipped backward onto the floor, landing in a spreading pool of blood and hair. As soon as the roar of the pistol faded from his ears, Eddy knew he'd made a colossal blunder. He moved quickly, emptying the cash register and using the butt of his gun to smash the keys, doing his best to make it look like an amateur job. He used a hot towel to wipe the hair off his face and shirt before grabbing his jacket off the coatrack and locking the door behind him as he left. They'd already driven a few blocks back toward the apartment before his driver turned, pointing a tentative finger at him, and Eddy realized the barber's scissors were still sticking out of his arm.

It was the worst murder he'd ever done, a spur-of-the-moment hack job, and O'Shea had been cold and deadly when he found out, his pale pie face betraying nothing as he sat Eddy down in their apartment's one armchair. Eddy thought of trying to deny he'd done it, but he knew the driver had heard the shot and would snitch on him for having the barber's scissors stabbed in his shoulder. He knew O'Shea would only be angrier if he heard it from someone else.

“He shouldn't have disrespected me that way,” Eddy said, trying not to make it sound as desperate as he felt.

O'Shea just leaned against the far wall with his chin resting on his chest. “Jesus, Jimmy,” he said. “Jesus.”

For a few days, Eddy walked around half expecting one of their mop-up guys to pop out of an alley and put him out of his misery.
Instead, it was the police who came for him. They'd found his name written in the barber's appointment book. They knew he'd been the last person to see him alive. When Eddy heard that, it made him want to kill the barber all over again. He couldn't believe the man would be so stupid, but the cops dropped the book on the table in front of him and he read it for himself. The barber had spelled his name wrong.

They chained him to the table in a room that was hot and small, everything in it rubbed smooth by worrying hands. It smelled like fear and the stale breath of cops, and at first he thought he'd suffocate in there. After he got some time to relax and breathe, though, he realized the barber's appointment book was all they had. They knew he'd been there and they knew his past, that he was a killer they had never been able to catch. Once he realized they didn't have enough to book him, he hung on through three days of questions and punches to his ribs, saps on his ankles and kicks to his kidneys until they finally dumped him out a rear door into the alley behind the station.

He felt giddy at being free, at the prospect of dragging himself home to take a long hot bath. The panic returned, though, when he didn't see or hear from O'Shea for almost a week. It got to the point that Eddy actually started wondering if something had happened to his friend. The two of them had lived in the apartment together since they first caught on with Market Street, and unless he was on a job or taking in a sporting event, O'Shea was almost always around. Finally a car showed up—the same guy who'd driven Eddy to the barbershop telling him to get in again and then watching him in the mirror like he was a chimp in a zoo cage.

They drove all the way out to Evanston before the guy pulled over. O'Shea was there, sitting by himself at a picnic table in a small roadside park. Eddy got out slowly, one foot at a time, scanning around for the likeliest places to hide an ambush. He nearly jumped
out of his skin when the car roared off behind him, the driver making a U-turn and heading back toward the city. That didn't seem like a good sign. O'Shea sat stock-still as they eyed each other with their hands shoved in their pockets. One of Eddy's fists closed around the butt of his pistol, and then O'Shea said: “Sit down, Jimmy.”

Of course O'Shea knew about the cops and about the appointment book and went over it all again at a slow, easy pace, just to make sure everything he'd heard was right. Eddy sat there nodding, feeling every knot and bruise on his body from his beatings at the station. The cops had never been this close before, O'Shea said. It was making a lot of people nervous.

“I know I messed up,” Eddy said, feeling the desperation settling at the base of his neck, “but they don't have a thing on me, Dion.”

O'Shea said Eddy didn't need to worry about that. He was going to take care of it. As they talked, a bus appeared in the distance, coming down the road from the city. O'Shea stood up. Eddy put his hands in his pockets again and O'Shea shook his head.

“Give me the gun, Jimmy,” he said.

Every fiber of Eddy's being told him not to give up that pistol, but he took it out of his jacket and set it on the table. O'Shea snatched it up and hid it away. Together they walked out to the curb, Eddy feeling confused but blank now, as if this were all happening to someone else.

He expected the bus to drive right by, but it didn't. It slowed to a stop in front of them and Eddy saw men inside. Guys about his age and younger, wearing regular clothes and looking like they were as confused as he was about stopping way out here. The bus was dull green and had no markings on it at all, so Eddy didn't fully understand what was happening until the side door opened and a guy in a brown army coat stepped off.

Eddy took a step back, but O'Shea had a hand on his elbow.

“Are you crazy?” Eddy said.

The guy in the uniform was skinny, with a thin mustache that ended abruptly at the corners of his lips. O'Shea introduced him as Sergeant So-and-so from the National Guard. The sergeant had a clipboard tucked under his arm that had already been filled in and marked with
X
's to indicate the places Eddy needed to sign. As he took it he looked over his shoulder, scanning the bushes for shooters again. He felt panicked—thought of making a break for it—but O'Shea was still standing there, holding his arm. Not squeezing, exactly, but putting enough pressure on it that he knew nobody was asking for his opinion.

In a low voice he explained that this was what Eddy needed to do to save all their asses. They both knew that the cops weren't going to give up on him, he said, not on the out-of-the-blue murder of an honest citizen. They would come back and keep hammering him, keep poking their beaks in until they found something they could use. O'Shea said they couldn't take that chance.

Besides, he said, this wasn't forever. Eddy just needed to get out of town for a little while, and when the heat died down he would come back and everything would be like it was before. Eddy wanted to scream, but he kept it together and reminded the two of them, as calmly as he could, that there was a war on. O'Shea said he fully understood that. Eddy looked into his eyes and knew he would be dead by the end of the week if he said no. Probably he should have said no anyway, but at that moment he was so sore and tired from the beatings and the worry and the shame that he just nodded and held a hand out for the sergeant's pen.

N
ow, as he slipped his jacket on over his shoulder holster and set out on his nightly rounds of the hunting camp, he could feel the old scar from the barber's scissors itching. He took the bottle
with him, noting the finger of light still showing under Garfield Taft's bedroom door. Eddy reminded himself to talk to the druggist about getting Taft a few more bottles of his pain remedy the next time he went into town. The stuff was the doctor's own concoction and hard to get. Last time he hadn't bought enough and then had to spend the better part of two weeks listening to Taft toss and turn and complain about the pain in his back and head.

Eddy was no expert on physical culture, but it had been a long time since he'd met a man he considered worse suited for his job than Taft. The big baby was always griping about something, and the way he'd approached Eddy about the medicine was pathetic. Taft had shrugged and said, “These old joints ain't what they used to be,” like he wasn't even embarrassed about admitting it. Eddy suggested they have the hired girl add the tonic to the camp's regular grocery orders, since she came and went from town every day, but Taft said he wanted to keep the arrangement between the two of them. Eddy thought it over—considered the responsibility he had to keep Mundt and O'Shea informed but in the end figured
What the hell
and told Taft how much it would cost him. After that, Eddy was picking up Taft's special orders on his regular trips to town every couple of weeks.

The smell of frost greeted him as he exited the lodge's front door. They'd be lucky if they didn't all get snowed in up here, he thought, icy roads cutting them off from the hired girl's supply runs. Eddy unable to get to town for his regular telephone conversations with O'Shea. Their weird little group stranded, fending for themselves. Eddy didn't know much of what to expect from winter in this part of the country, aside from the fact there would be snow and the vague notion that high in the mountains was not the place to be when it started. He wondered if it would be as cold as winter in Chicago, where the freezing air hung on you like an extra set of clothes, the roads and sidewalks treacherous with ice.

Even in the dark he had the camp's nighttime routine down by heart, trudging up the hill to check the locks on the doors to the horse barn before walking the perimeter fence down to the main gate, making sure that was locked, too. He crept along behind the dark row of cabins, seeing nothing except trees and hills, hearing nothing but wind and the occasional grunt of an owl. As he stepped carefully through the weeds he wondered for the thousandth time exactly what he was supposed to be looking and listening for out here. A campfire in the woods? The sound of a motor? A secret camp of federal agents ready to storm out and take them in a rush of fire and brimstone? There was none of that. Nothing was amiss. No one was coming to get them.

By shipping him out to Montana, Eddy knew O'Shea was delivering a message. He'd fucked up when he killed the barber and now, as if sending him to war hadn't been enough, he was serving out more time. Like a kid who'd been put to bed without supper, O'Shea wanted him to march around in the dark like a fool, thinking about how sorry he was for what he'd done. He'd be lucky if he didn't fall and break his neck. Or maybe luckier if he did; he honestly couldn't decide.

Of course, hidden inside O'Shea's message was another one:
Don't fuck this up
. If Eddy ever wanted to be welcomed back into the fold—if he ever wanted things between him and O'Shea to go back to how they'd been before the war—he needed to impress Dion with how he handled this Montana assignment even if it tasted like a shit sandwich. For that reason he was doing his best to take his job as glorified night watchman seriously.

Before he started back up the hill toward the lodge, he stopped for a moment to survey the camp, looking for the weakest places in the perimeter, searching out the blind spots. On either side of the fence, steep tree-covered hills sprinted upward into the darkness. Eddy grinned at the notion that—if somebody really did mean to do
them harm—it wouldn't be too difficult to find a secluded spot and sit up there with a rifle and telescope. Pick them all off without breaking a sweat. He put the likelihood of that happening at approximately seventy million to one but thought maybe the next morning he'd go on a little hike around the camp, look for signs that anybody had been poking around.

As he got to the crest of the hill he reared back and threw the empty whiskey bottle into the woods, hoping to hear it shatter against a tree trunk. He missed his mark and instead watched as the bottle sailed wide between the branches. When it hit somewhere out in the dark, it didn't make a sound. He turned and looked out at the surrounding valley, surprisingly bright in the moonlight. Not a man-made structure to be seen. Not an electric glow. So big and empty. A man could get away with anything out here, Eddy thought, if only he could find something worth getting away with.

T
he next morning, Pepper arrived thirty minutes early for his first training session with Garfield Taft. He'd set the bedside clock for five-thirty, but switched off the alarm and slipped out of bed with ten minutes to spare.
First to show, last to leave,
he repeated to himself as he trotted up the road in the dark, the impact of every step throbbing through his rib cage. It would be important to set a proper tone for the new camp, not just so Taft would know who was in charge, but for Fritz and the training partners, too. Let them all know that playtime was over.

The lodge was dark as he jogged by, and that made him smile. Banking left at the fork in the road, he followed the rocky path up to the old automobile garage that had been converted into a gym. The opposite fork led to the horse barn, where they'd seen Fritz take the police captain when they arrived, but Pepper barely glanced at it as he passed. He was trying not to speculate about James Eddy, whose presence made him choke on his own spit when they saw him at dinner. Eddy skulking around wasn't good, but Pepper tried to tell himself he didn't care why the man was there, so long as it didn't interfere with his own efforts to get Taft ready to wrestle Strangler Lesko. He imagined what they'd say when the other men showed up to find him already there, standing with his arms folded, maybe with one
foot up on a bench and his lips set in a hard, unreadable frown. It would send a message.

Compared to the lushness of the lodge, the garage was out of place in its straightforwardness: just a windowless heap of drooping clapboard built at the edge of the tree line. Inside it was surprisingly roomy—quiet and cold enough to make him wish he'd brought a jacket. On the side nearest the main entrance a small wooden bleacher stood on the gravel floor overlooking a spread of brown canvas wrestling mat. The other half of the garage held racks of cannonball dumbbells and a couple of low wooden benches. A thick climbing rope sank from the ceiling. Along one wall he found artifacts from when the building was a working garage: a gas can with a few drops still sloshing around inside, a large metal funnel that smelled like motor oil, a toolbox full of greasy wrenches.

For nearly twenty minutes he stood and stared at the open doorway. Eventually he dragged one of the benches over and straddled it. He was only in shirtsleeves and after another ten minutes began to tremble. The bench turned to ice under his behind and he stood up. A shaft of sunlight played in the dirt near the door, and he knew it must be after six. Where were they? The wind picked up, rattling the clapboard siding on its studs. Finally he couldn't take it anymore and jogged down to the cabin to get his coat. By the time he got back, Prichard and Fitch were there, limbering up against the garage's far wall.

“About time,” said Fitch.

“After we get our cut of the show money,” Prichard said, “I'm buying everybody in this camp a watch.”

Pepper asked if Taft had arrived.

“I'm sure he'll be along,” Fitch said.

“Are you it?” Pepper said, miffed that his plan had been spoiled, but glad he'd got back before Taft showed up. “There are no other training partners?”

Prichard and Fitch said they guessed they were and he nodded slowly in a way he hoped both found meaningful.

“Fine, just fine,” he said. “I'll leave you to it, then.”

He saw confusion on their faces as he stepped away, walking down to a pair of big barn doors at the far end of the building. He threw up the wooden crossbar and pushed out into the low brush beyond, finding some of it still rutted with old tire tracks. This part of the grounds looked out over a slope of trees and down into a wide, empty valley. On the horizon a line of mountain peaks muscled out of the earth.

The landscape reminded him of Idaho and the Handsome Academy, which also sat nestled in a valley, hidden from the world except to the woodsmen who might stop on one of the surrounding peaks to look down on it while they ate lunch. A hulking three-story dormitory and schoolhouse built of weathered gray brick dominated the orphanage grounds. Behind it, a group of smaller wooden buildings trailed behind like baby ducks waddling after their mother. The sheriff drove him up there in a buckboard wagon, and the first time he saw the school a coldness crept into Pepper's chest. All these years later he could still feel it if he closed his eyes and remembered hard enough.

One of the first things he noticed about the orphanage was the mud: fields of it, yellow and thick as mustard; it sucked at his boots as he stepped down from the wagon and followed the sheriff across the lot toward the brick building. He didn't know yet that the mud would soon be part of him. Like sand in the desert, water in the ocean, it was an ever-present part of life in the orphanage, especially when the seasons changed. It clogged the treads of his shoes and clumped on the cuffs of his pants, weighing him down. It got into everything, so that after a while his clothes weren't really even considered dirty if all they had on them was mud.

The sheriff left him with a firm handshake and a punch on the
shoulder for luck. Pepper went to the window of the admittance office and watched the man climb the hill again in his wagon, growing smaller and smaller until he was out of sight. Another kid brought him a pair of sand-colored denim pants and a matching shirt and showed him his cot in the big, open sleeping quarters.

Early on, because he was small, the other boys tried to test him. This was something he expected. It almost made him glad of his father, to know that he could handle himself in a fight. Still, he spent a lot of that first year limping, easing around trying to hide the sore spots as the brothers herded them from their beds to the classrooms in the mornings, then to the surrounding fields in the afternoons. The boys were responsible for the orphanage's annual crops of potatoes and sugar beets. They kept small herb gardens and a few rows of plum trees. Sometimes he spent entire days lying on his cot with a broken nose or swollen ankle while the other boys were out working or attending the school's simple trade classes.

He was by himself in the dormitory hall, resting a set of broken ribs, the first time Willem Van Dien came to see him. Van Dien ran the academy's wrestling team and he was one of the older brothers, into his early fifties by the time Pepper arrived—ancient in the eyes of a twelve-year-old. The boys all called him “Professor,” though Van Dien freely admitted never graduating past grammar school in his native Denmark. Later, when they became better acquainted, Pepper discovered Van Dien had been arrested at age nineteen for stealing a pair of women's shoes from a fashionable shop in Copenhagen. Somehow, instead of jail, he wound up on a boat to America, where he enlisted in the Union army to win his citizenship. It was in the army camps of the Civil War that Van Dien learned the brutal style of catch-as-catch-can wrestling he would eventually teach the boys at the orphanage. That day, though, Pepper didn't know a thing about him as he squatted next to him and talked to Pepper in a low, kindly voice.

“Do you know why you bit that boy?” Van Dien asked him, and Pepper twisted on his cot. He was nervous in the presence of this man, with his cool blue eyes and stale coffee breath. “No?” Van Dien said when Pepper didn't answer him. “Well, I do. You wanted him to remember you. Even though you lost that fight, you wanted to leave your mark on him.”

“How's that, sir?” Pepper said. Had this man come there to punish him?

“You took a piece out of him. There's no shame in admitting it,” he said. “You wanted those boys to think twice the next time.”

“It was a mistake, sir.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But it showed me you'll do what it takes to survive. Have you ever thought about wrestling?”

The gym Van Dien had constructed was a simple rectangular room that smelled of varnished pine. There were no mats, and the boys wrestled on the bare wooden planks. The room's only decoration was a large canvas mural depicting a yellow sun rising over a dark mountain, and underneath in unpretentious script, a quote from Ephesians:
Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Professor Van Dien became the first and only real wrestling coach Pepper ever had. As he stood in the weeds outside the hunting camp's garage, he decided that if he could muster half the old man's knowledge and poise, things would be all right with Taft. The air was sharp and fresh, and for the first time since the big sawmiller had knocked him out on the floor of that barroom back in Oregon, he felt a rush of hope.

After a few minutes he began to hear the slapping and grunting noises of Fitch and Prichard warming up. He walked back inside, finding the two men pushing each other around the mat in a collar-and-elbow tie.

“Easy, boys,” he called out to them. “Don't spend it all in one place.”

Fritz showed up an hour later, looking pale and tired in just a pair of light slacks and an undershirt beneath his jacket. He didn't seem surprised to find training not yet under way for the day—that it was just Pepper sitting on one of the benches, watching Fitch and Prichard take turns trying to climb the rope.

“All these weights,” Pepper said as he came over and sat down. “You'd think we were getting ready for a beauty contest.”

“Don't start,” Fritz said. “I drank too much and now I'm going to die.”

“No Taft yet,” Pepper said.

“He'll be along,” Fritz nodded. “Taft's all right. He's one of the boys, just like you and me.”

“I'm not sure he would see that as a favorable comparison,” Pepper said. “So far he doesn't seem particularly taken with me.”

“He isn't accustomed to being pushed,” Fritz said. “He likes getting his way.”

“Don't we all,” Pepper said.

On the other side of the room, Fitch had managed to get himself halfway up the rope before he let go and crashed back to his feet, shaking his hands like the thing had bit him.

“You think we need to have a talk here?” Pepper said. “Me and you?”

“A talk about what?”

“You know what. About last night.”

“About your wife trying to bilk me out of a cut of the promoter fees, you mean?”

“Not that,” he said.

Fritz sighed the sigh of the terribly hungover and pinched the bridge of his nose with two sausage fingers. “I know everybody
wants it to be a perfect world,” he said. “Like big-money wrestling matches just fall out of the sky and we all get rich. But you know it doesn't work like that.”

“If you're getting into hock with people like James Eddy, I just hope you know what you're doing.”

“I should take advice from you?” Fritz said. “Because you handled that part of your life so well when you had the chance?”

He was trying to think of something smart to say to that when Prichard—himself now nearing the top of the rope—cried out and fell, landing flat on his back in a puff of dirt a few feet from the weight racks. He groaned and rolled onto his side and lay there wheezing while Fitch came and stood over him.

“Ker-clunk,” Fitch said.

Pepper grimaced. “You got an extra set of tights lying around?” he said to Fritz. “I might need you here.”

That made Fritz laugh. “Not me,” he said. “Not today.”

They had just gotten Prichard up onto one of the benches and sitting with a towel draped over his head when Taft came in wearing a long winter overcoat with fur on the lapels. Pepper and Fritz both stood up, but, instead of coming over to them, Taft walked to the other side of the gym and shrugged out of the coat, taking care to lay it flat across a row of bleachers.

If he stood shy of six and a half feet, it was only by an inch or so, and his shoulders were piled high with muscle. He easily slung one leg up onto the top step of the bleachers and reached to grab his toe, pressing his great bald head close to his knee. His only obvious weaknesses were his long, skinny limbs and the slight pooch of gut that hung over the waist of his trunks. As he straightened up he turned, and Pepper saw the scars again, the mottled pink mass that made it look like his back was boiling.

Taft took his sweet time limbering up, and when he finally made
his way over to Fritz and Pepper, he seemed to gaze over the tops of their heads out the open end of the garage.

“Here's how this'll work,” he said. “Tuesday and Thursday are my grappling days. I roll for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, with an hour break between for lunch. Monday and Wednesday are for my strength and wind training. Mornings we do roadwork, down the hill to the edge of town and back. Then we break for lunch. Afternoons or evenings I lift weights and do drills if I choose. I don't do squat thrusts on account of my knees and I don't do pull-ups after one of these”—he pointed out Fitch and Prichard like there was no word for them—“messed up my shoulder. Fridays, I run and then drive into town to get my rubdown at the Chinaman place. If we have to meet at all that day for business, what have you, it'll be after I return. Saturdays and Sundays I reserve for my wife. That's our private time together and I won't be disturbed. Monday morning we go again with weights and wind, see? It's a good schedule, and if we can stick to it, we won't have any troubles.”