Champion of the World (3 page)

His smile dried up when he saw the pistol in her fist. He took it from her and tucked it under his cape. “Jesus, Moira, that's really stupid,” he said quietly. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I might have to shoot that longshoreman,” she said. “He came at me with a knife, in case you didn't notice, so I could really do without the scolding.”

They moved through the alley between the backyard fence and the trailers, the names of the carnival's various acts painted on them in big bright letters.
Hedgweg the Great Colossus! Wayne Munro & His Congress of Performing Hounds!
Beneath the words were full-color portraits of the performers: the Human Projectile streaking across a blue sky; the aerialist Starr DeBelle, her dark hair flying as she turned a flip; and Jupiter, the carnival's sickly old elephant, rearing up on hind legs. When they got clear of the trailers Pepper slipped his arm around her waist.

“Can you imagine the hell Boyd would raise if assholes started getting shot at the gaming tables?” he said.

In spite of herself, she smiled at him. They wound their way past
the animal trucks, where a roustabout rolled two big, claw-marked balance balls out of a prop box while a couple of other men struggled to fit a bear with roller skates and a tiny top hat. Drugged up on something powerful, the bear's eyes tracked them lazily. A few feet away, the animal trainer sat oiling his whip. By the time they got to the outfield wall, a twelve-foot green barrier covered in peeling billboards for cigarettes and safety razors, she was starting to calm down. Her hands were steady as she pitched the butt of her smoke onto the ground.

“How was the drop?” she finally asked him, ready for a new subject.

He tried to hide the tightness in his face. “Fine,” he said.

She stepped back and gave him the once-over. “How's your weight?”

He rolled his eyes, shrugging like a kid forced to model his new Sunday school clothes. “My weight's good, Moira,” he said. It was a lie. He swung his arms at his sides as if trying to get the feeling back in them.

“If you were overweight,” she said, “you'd tell your loving wife the truth about it, wouldn't you?”

“It's just a couple of pounds,” he said.

She shook her head. “But you went ahead and did the act anyway. I suppose this is the part where I ask you what
you
were thinking.”

“It's just a couple of pounds,” he said again. “It's not a big deal.”

His eyes danced up over her shoulder, where a group of clowns had come out of a dressing tent and stood passing a hand-rolled cigarette around in a tight circle. The confrontation with the longshoreman had drained her energy, and now she felt suddenly exhausted. She didn't want to play the nagging wife just then.

“It's fine,” she said. “You'll skip dinner and lose it overnight while we make the jump up the coast.”

“I'm hungry, Moira,” he said, “and I'm tired. I'm going to put this gun back where it belongs. Then I'm going to the pie car and I'm going to buy some hemp from those clowns. Come and get me when it's time.”

She heard the whine in his voice and could barely blame him. They'd been on the road all summer, trouping down the Atlantic coast from the carnival's winter quarters in New York and then cutting a jagged path through the South all the way to the Pacific before marking a course north. From here they would head all the way to the Canadian border before making for home, through either the American Rockies or even Canada if Boyd could get the work permits. It had been a tough trip for Pepper already, starving himself to keep his weight under 155 pounds in order to do the hangman's drop while taking on all comers in nickel challenge matches during the carnival's athletic show. They still had a long way to go.

“Of course,” she said, trying to soothe him. “Where will you be?”

He nodded toward the wall. “Across the street,” he said. “Where it's quiet.”

“Where it's morbid,” she said. She was wearing heels, so she had to lean down to peck him on the cheek. “Thank you for saving me from the bad man.”

His response was to raise a victorious fist above his head as he turned and went.

It surprised her sometimes how attracted to him she still was after all these years. She liked the sharp blade of his wrestler's body and the look he always carried around in his hard walnut eyes, indifferent and challenging at the same time. Like he was daring the world to give him a reason. Other men feared him, and she'd admitted to herself a long time ago that she liked that, too. Still, at times his bullheadedness was a burden. She tried not to be so hard on him, knowing that the way he worked he deserved to treat himself now
and again; but she also knew he was the kind of man who didn't think about the landing until after he'd jumped. The kind of man who'd rather run through a wall than try to find a way over. When the reaper finally came for him, which she hoped with all her might was years from now, she knew Pepper Van Dean would ask him if he wanted to wrestle for it.

A racehorse, her father told her once, would run itself to death if the jockey let it. This was on one of their first Sunday trips to Jefferson Park in New Orleans. The riverboat was docked on Sundays and Mondays so the crew could go ashore. For her father that meant the racetrack, a cardroom, or a dark saloon with a chalkboard giving odds on the ball games. She had just started helping out in the boat's gambling hall when he began inviting her along, figuring if she was old enough to hold down a job she was old enough to learn how to be good at it. That first day, wearing her best dress in the magnificent, pillared grandstand at Jeff Park, she was thrilled by the teeming crowd and how, atop every gleaming, whitewashed turret and gazebo, flags rippled and popped in the breeze. Eighteen, she'd counted by the time they took their seats.

Before the first race a horse with emerald green diamonds on its hood had panicked in the blocks and thrown its rider. It scared her, and she asked her father if the men were hurting the horses by forcing them to race each other.

“No, honey,” he said to her. That smile, that voice. “It's the thing they love most in the world. It's what they were born to do.”

That day they blew their whole bankroll on doomed bets, but it didn't matter. Her father saved out a dime and bought them both ice creams on their way back to the boat. For years after that the two of them were inseparable during their time off, always seeking out the track or a card game. They earned a reputation as a team, a father-daughter tandem that could empty your pockets as fast as any
stick-up artist. She learned to navigate the world the way only a gambler's daughter could. She loved her father. He was the smartest, most put-together man she ever knew. Then, on an overnight trip during the summer Moira turned sixteen, he left their family's cramped stateroom for a late shift in the riverboat's cardroom and fell into the water, or was thrown.

I
nside the right-field scoreboard was a narrow passageway that smelled of dust and oiled leather. It ran the length of the stadium in either direction, and on the far wall, rows of numbered scorecards dangled from metal hangers. A line of overhead bulbs squatted dead in their sockets, but enough light seeped in through the seams in the wall that Pepper could make out where someone had scrawled
To Hell with You Jimmy Claxton!
in smart little pencil writing next to the door to the street.

The rain stung the back of his neck as he jogged across the cobblestones and vaulted the low fence into the cemetery. Night was coming on moonless and cold and he felt the chill through the seat of his tights as he hoisted himself up and sat on a high headstone. Dangling his boots six inches above the grass, he fired up the hemp cigarette and filled his lungs. His shoulders throbbed from the hangman's drop, but as he blew his first cloud of green-gray smoke up into the tree branches, a calm settled over him. Taking his chin in his palm, he turned his head one way, then the other, until a series of cracks raced down his back. The adrenaline from the performance and then the trouble in the gaming pavilion was starting to ebb, leaving him with a shaky, empty feeling. His belly rumbled and he pulled out the two pickles he'd gotten from the pie car. The
pickles were wrapped in paper and he peeled them like bananas as he ate.

He didn't have high hopes for the athletic show. In his four and a half years wrestling openweight challenge matches for the carnival, this summer's crowds were the worst he'd seen. Tonight, after the evening performance in a city big enough for people to have other things to do, he'd be lucky if a dozen guys stuck around to try their luck against him. He wouldn't argue with making an easy time of it, but it also meant another boring night on a tour full of them. He hoped things would get better as they moved up the coast, especially once they reached the timber camps in the hills of Northern California and Oregon. There would be some tough guys up there, he told himself. He was looking forward to it.

His father had worked as a lumberjack for a short while. At one time or another his father was also a miner, a horse jockey and a barroom bouncer, and had failed at all of them. The summer Pepper turned nine years old, the old man lost his job at a feed store outside Salina, Kansas, and moved their family west to Boise, Idaho, where he'd heard a bunch of big tree-cutting operations were starting up. Of course, the lead was a dead end and by fall he was working early mornings sweeping out neighborhood stores before the shopkeepers opened and nights guarding the door at a local tavern.

The bouncing at least seemed to agree with him, despite his small stature and the fact he spoke almost no English. He was proud of the cuts and bruises he sometimes brought home, stooping down so Pepper could poke and prod the spots with tentative fingers until his father winced and pulled away laughing. Later that same year his mother developed facial tics and a tremor in her hands. It got so bad that she had to quit her job as a seamstress for one of the town's big mining companies. A doctor in Pocatello confirmed a lesion on her spine and said there was nothing to be done.

His father grew more unruly as she withered away. His fights
with Pepper got worse and more common. Then early one morning during the fall of 1898, Pepper woke to find his father crouching over him, pressing a gun to his mouth. His father's clothes stank of the barroom, the barrel of the pistol cutting into Pepper's lips.

“You think you're something,” he slurred in their old language, burrowing the gun in past his teeth. “You're not something.”

Then he was gone, clattering things onto the floor in their tiny kitchen before finally tumbling off to bed. Pepper stayed still until he heard the slow, choked sounds of his father's snores before he slipped out from under his blanket, gathered a few things into a knapsack and snuck out the back door. Their shotgun house was built into an embankment downhill from the railroad tracks, so he didn't have far to go before he found a place where the trains slowed around a wide bend. He sat for what seemed like hours in the cold, an old shirt pressed against his lips to stop the bleeding. It was nearly dawn by the time he mustered the courage to race down the small hill of frozen sand and hop into the half-open door of a rickety boxcar as it passed.

It was cold on that train. The kind of cold that cut through his pants and heavy shirt as if he were naked. It froze the hairs of his nose and crept up into the soles of his boots. He was so miserable when the train finally lumbered to a stop the following afternoon that he might've snuck into town to find a way home if a rail yard cop hadn't caught him shimmying out of the car. The guy saw his split lips and the blood all over his shirt and went easy working him over.

Pepper went to jail, where they gave him warm clothes and food. It turned out he was still in Idaho, in a small town in Handsome County near the Canadian border. He refused to tell anyone his name for fear they would send him home, and it quickly became clear that no one knew exactly what to do with him. For three weeks he stayed with the sheriff and his wife, kindly people who fed him pie and let
him sleep in the room they'd kept for a son who'd either died or never been born at all. For a while he dreamed the sheriff would adopt him, but soon people got tired of asking him questions he wouldn't answer, and a watery-eyed judge with blossoms of broken blood vessels in his nose ordered him sent north to the Handsome Academy for Boys. He spent the next five years there.

As he tipped his head back to take a second pull on the marijuana, he could still feel the warm blood and the bits of broken teeth in his mouth from the gun. He could taste the cold, oily metal and picture the sad, desperate look in his father's face. As he exhaled, he opened his eyes and saw a shadow detach itself from the outer wall of the stadium, just beyond the reach of a streetlamp at the end of the block. He let the smoke trail slowly out of his lungs, a quiver of curiosity stirring as the hulking shape of a man made its way toward him. The figure moved slowly along the sidewalk, pausing once to look back as if he wasn't sure he knew the way. Hidden in the gloom of the cemetery, Pepper thought the man would pass by without noticing him, but once the dark figure got within twenty-five yards it veered off the concrete and hopped the fence. In order to free both hands, Pepper clamped the rolled smoke in the corner of his mouth, hoping for a mugger, hoping for something more interesting than a beat cop out hassling drunks.

As the figure got nearer he recognized the tilt of the bowler hat, the barrel chest and the curlicue mustache.

“Before you come any closer,” he called out in the dark, “tell me how worried I need to be.”

Fritz Mundt's laugh was like gravel rattling in a tin can. The big man closed the distance between them in a few long steps, looking as nimble as ever on his feet. “Relax,” he said. “I'm not here to bust anybody up.”

“Lucky,” Pepper said. “I don't think I could carry your big ass all the way to the hospital if you tried.”

Fritz grinned at him and pulled him down from his perch into an awkward, backslapping hug. They hadn't seen each other in five years, since the night in Pittsburgh when Pepper lost the world's lightweight title to a bum named Whip Windham. Before that, they'd been friends and training partners, working as regulars in Abe Blomfeld's midwestern wrestling operation, forging the bond men shared through killing themselves in the cramped gym the old man kept above his butcher shop on the North Side.

In the ring, Fritz was a hardworking heavyweight—good, not great. Better with a blackjack or a length of pipe, at least in those early days when he padded his pockets collecting Blomfeld's debts. He was smart, too, the way a bear could be smart once it had you up a tree. The only time the two of them had ever wrestled each other for real was in an openweight match for five hundred people at a Grange Hall outside of Dayton. How long ago had that been, Pepper wondered, nineteen thirteen? They'd gone ninety hard minutes before Pepper finally took the bigger man's back and rendered him unconscious with a stranglebar choke. Even back then Fritz outweighed him by seventy-five pounds, and from the size of the gut he was carrying around now, it looked like more. The big guy had gone soft, Pepper thought, but he held his tongue about it for now. He decided it was best to wait and see what he wanted. It used to be when Fritz Mundt came to see you, it wasn't good news.

“I knew I'd find you out here,” Fritz said, holding out two fingers for the hemp. “Give it here.”

“Old habits,” Pepper said.

Fritz produced a flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and they traded. “I've been tracking you for a week,” he said. “Just missed you in Bisbee. From there I thought you'd jump to Phoenix, then Los Angeles, but if you did I missed you there, too.”

“Swung down through Mexico,” Pepper said. “Boyd Markham can be a wildcatting son of a bitch when he gets a taste for it.”

Fritz leaned back and squinted at him. “How's your weight?” he said. “You're looking a little loose in the cage, you don't mind me saying.”

“Pot meet kettle,” Pepper said. He smelled the pungent fumes of back alley rotgut before he tipped the flask to his lips. The whiskey burned like acid going down, but he didn't take his eyes off Fritz, trying to get a read on him. The big man seemed oblivious, sucking on the marijuana with his eyes fixed on its glowing cherry.

“Blomfeld's dead,” he said finally, holding in a lungful.

“I should hope so,” Pepper said. “What would he be now, a hundred and five?”

Fritz exhaled with a hiss. “I've been looking after the gym since he passed. What's left of it. Tried my hand at booking for a while but had to shut things down. Not enough happening at the box office, as I'm sure you've heard.”

“Maybe you don't have the mind for it,” Pepper said.

He knew it had been hard times in the wrestling business since Frank Gotch retired and kicked the bucket at his farm back in Iowa. Crowds had been getting smaller and the ink in the big city papers harder to come by, but he figured it was just a matter of time before promoters found some new star to prop up in Gotch's place.

Fritz passed the smoke back. “It got so bad I thought I might have to close down entirely, but guess who showed up out of the blue last winter talking about a comeback?”

Pepper didn't like to guess and said he couldn't possibly. Fritz took the flask and killed it, screwing the top on tight before stowing it inside his coat. “Garfield Taft,” he said, spreading his hands like he'd just pulled off an impressive magic trick.

Pepper groaned. “Speaking of the dead and buried. I thought pimping out white girls could get you lynched in Ohio.”

“I assure you Mr. Taft is very much alive, and his comeback is real,” Fritz said, swallowing a frown. “It may interest you to know that
I've even been talking to certain parties about a shot at the world's heavyweight title.”

Pepper had to laugh at that. “Bullshit,” he said. “I highly doubt that Billy Stettler and Stanislaw Lesko would give a black man the chance to win the world's title. Let alone an ex-con. The press would murder them for it.”

“Things have changed more than you know,” Fritz said, muscles in his jaw flaring. “Point of fact, I've already got a tune-up match arranged ten days from now. If Taft wins, Stettler and Strangler Lesko are willing to sign on for a championship bout at Christmastime.”

“Sounds like you've got it all figured out, then,” Pepper said, thinking every word of it had to be a lie. “What does any of it have to do with me?”

Fritz rearranged his feet in the soft earth. “Actually,” he said, “I hoped you might consider joining up with us. What would you say to becoming Taft's trainer?”

That got his attention. He'd given up on the idea of ever getting back into the wrestling business, and now he laughed to cover the bloom of hope he felt in his chest. The serious look in the big man's eyes didn't change.

“Jesus,” Pepper said. “You're not joking.”

When Fritz spoke again, there was an added weight to his voice. “Do you think it's accurate to say we know things about each other that no one else on this earth knows?”

Pepper glanced across the street at the ballpark. “I know I never said anything,” he said. “I can't speak for you.”

Fritz nodded. “Then you might believe me when I tell you this,” he said. “When we get our title match—and we will get it—we're going to need a hell of a scientific wrestler to get Taft ready for Lesko. Given the situation, there's only one name on my list. If there's a man alive who knows his way around the catch-as-catch-can style better than you, I never met him.”

“You got that right, anyway,” Pepper said. “Consider me interested. Now tell me the part you're not telling me.”

“Taft is married to a white woman,” Fritz said. “It caused no end of trouble in Chicago. We've had to move our operation out west. Where we are now, it's not as if people are falling all over themselves to sign on to train him.”