Champion of the World (32 page)

A year and a half into Taft's sentence, Fleet sank into his longest silence ever. Taft didn't remember how it started now, surely some thoughtless breach of manners that he had barely noticed but that Fleet took as a great offense. They went two months without talking and the isolation tore Taft in half. Each day he woke hoping that his friend would forget whatever it had been that had sent him into his brooding quiet, when he ignored all of Taft's efforts to win back his attention. He just stayed on his bunk reading books all day. Taft tried to do the same, but books didn't hold the same kind of magic
for him as they did for some people. His parents made sure he'd been educated, but he'd never been an easy reader and could not trick his brain into the place where he stopped seeing the words and started imagining the story behind them.

He smuggled stale biscuits from the chow hall to leave as peace offerings, but each morning he found them hardening and untouched where he had set them on the tiny table. He tried different ways to apologize, starting at the top and working his way down to straight-up begging. As time passed he began to feel like he was appealing to a boulder. Day after day the only sound in their cell was the quiet
flick, flick, flick
of Fleet flipping the pages of the book he'd borrowed from the library. Finally, it had been getting on toward Christmas like it was now, Taft caught him alone in the dank hallway between the dining hall and the small, caged exercise area and slammed him roughly against the wall. Making fists out of the loose material under his armpits, Taft shook him, cracking his skull off the stones and screaming at him to say something. He felt tears brimming in his eyes, but Fleet's face did not change. He gave him a fearless stare that seemed to sap his strength, making him suddenly feel like a child, or a dog left barking at the locked back door, and Taft kissed him.

He pulled their faces together and worked his tongue into the little man's mouth. Fleet's lips parting, letting him do it. He smelled Fleet's sweat and the tobacco on his breath, churning with a mix of sickness and excitement. He still didn't know why he did it. He guessed the urge must've always been in him and now it came pouring through the hundred little cracks that Fleet and Foxwood Prison had pounded into his soul.

It lasted barely three seconds. “Let me go,” Fleet said quietly when it was over. They were the first words he'd spoken since their falling-out and Taft did as he was told.

That night, as he lay awake on his hard sleeping pad in a panic
over what he'd done, wondering if his friend would disown him, leave him to the other men in the prison who wanted to do him harm, the shadow of Fleetwood Wallace's head poked over the lip of the top bunk. His hoarse whisper filled the freezing cell and seemed to burst it open from the inside out. “Gar,” he said. “Gar, you awake?” After that, he was on his knees beside the bunk, his hands on Taft's chest, fingers slipping between the buttons to touch his skin. Taft felt the same car-crash lurch in his gut, but he did nothing besides slide over toward the wall, making room for him to crawl up into the bed. For a long time they just lay there together, Fleet's back pushing warm against his chest. Then Taft worked his hands down Fleet's torso and undid his trousers. The little man bent forward, letting him do it, whispering things Taft couldn't hear. He wanted to shout at himself to stop, but instead he just leaned his back against the cold, frost-covered wall, pushing his hips forward, and did what he wanted to do.

In the daylight, they went on as they had before, going back to backgammon and telling jokes, Fleet explaining the story of the book he was reading, bargaining with the prison cops to get them the special things they wanted. He no longer gave Taft the silent treatment. After lights out, they stayed mostly in their own bunks except for certain nights when Fleet would appear at the side of his bed as he did that first time and Taft would make room for him. They carried on like that for another year or so—Taft doing what it took to keep Fleet happy, whatever it took to keep from being alone—until Fleet was transferred out of Foxwood to a lower-security place downstate. Taft never knew for sure if the transfer had simply been part of the normal shifting and reshuffling of the state's sprawling prisons or if Fleet had made it happen. They said good-bye as men, with a quick handshake while two bored guards leaned against the railing, waiting for Fleet to collect his things. After he was gone, Taft found a letter hidden in his bunk so full of
sticky sweet declarations of love and oily apologies that he used Fleet's last tin can candle setup to burn it to ash. Days later, he got a new cellmate, a burglar with a round, soft body and pitch-black skin, whose name he could no longer remember.

He never saw or heard from Fleet again and didn't know now if he was dead or alive. A few weeks after his transfer, Taft was in the shower when he discovered the raw, burning sore on his privates. It filled him with such shame that he never said anything to the guards or prison doctors or anyone else, not that they would have done anything about it if he had. Even after it spread to his legs and back he kept quiet, just hoping it would go away, and eventually it did.

For a good long while he thought he was cured.

I
n quiet moments, which were few, Taft kept pestering Van Dean about his real name. The two of them were still sleeping side by side on the wrestling mat in the garage, wrapped up in their old tattered blankets. He didn't know exactly why he couldn't let the thing with Van Dean's name go. Growing up in Madisonville, he'd known lots of guys with nicknames, funny-sounding handles they called out to each other in front yards and on street corners. Somehow, though, Van Dean seemed different. He never hid his feelings, never hesitated to get right up in your face and tell you what he thought. The fact that at the most basic level he was passing himself off as someone he wasn't nagged at Taft's thoughts.

Finally, after approximately the one millionth time he brought it up, Van Dean told him. It was late and the garage frigid, just the flickering light of their small fire. They were lying there talking, keeping their voices low like they were afraid a camp counselor might stroll by and catch them up after curfew. At first Taft thought he heard it wrong and asked Van Dean to repeat it. Then he tried to say
it himself, and bungled it so badly that Van Dean insisted on writing it down. He tore the corner off a page from the little travel Bible Taft kept with him and scribbled the words on it with a nub of pencil. Taft took the paper and read it, sounding out the words.

“I guess that's about as close as it's going to get,” Van Dean said, grimacing at his pronunciation. “Now you know more about me than almost anyone in the world.”

Taft snorted. “I told you some things, too,” he said. “Maybe we make this a keeping-it-between-us–type situation.”

“What did Carol Jean say,” Van Dean asked, “when you told her about your losing time, or whatever you call it?”

Taft stuck the piece of paper with Van Dean's name on it in his pants pocket. He hadn't said a word to him about Fleetwood Wallace and never would, so he assumed the little man was just asking about his condition.

“We haven't talked about it,” Taft said. “She knows something is different. I suspect she thinks I've lost interest in her.”

“I don't see how she couldn't know.”

Taft thought about that. He settled back under his blanket and listened to the last of their fire crackling itself out. That day Carol Jean had come down and watched some of their training. Seeing her had put a lift in his step and he'd given those boys all they could handle for an hour or so. Afterward he had to sneak out to the outhouse and chug two bottles of Dr. Paulson's All-Purpose, but it still made him proud. He knew it would only be a short time now before she invited him back into her bed. He wondered if Van Dean's wife would do the same for him. He hoped so. He didn't like to think about him staying in the garage by himself. It was only going to get colder.

“You ever wonder where you'd be if you weren't here?” Taft asked in the settling dark. “If you'd done something different along the way?”

“You mean gone left somewhere instead of right?”

“That's it.”

“No,” Van Dean said. “I never have.”

“Maybe if just one thing changed, something that seemed tiny and insignificant at the time, you'd be a whole different person,” Taft said.

Nearby he could hear the chattering of some bird and he wondered what birds would still be doing out there in all that cold. Wouldn't they know to fly south before the winter came? He was about to ask about it when Van Dean spoke up.

“I'm not going to lie to you,” he said. “At first I didn't think you could beat Strangler Lesko, but, anymore, I'm not so sure. You're big and you're quick and you've been doing a good job staying out of concession holds the past few weeks. I think it's possible you could outlast him.”

Taft sat up on an elbow. “Did you just pay me a compliment?” he said.

“I'm asking you a question.”

“Which is?”

“Do you believe you could beat him?” Van Dean said. “If we buckled down this last month and worked, really worked, could you go to New York and win the world's heavyweight championship?”

Taft started to laugh but then caught the seriousness in Van Dean's voice. There was something else buried in there, too. Was it hope? Was it fear? Taft couldn't tell. A couple of times during training he'd caught Van Dean and Mundt looking at him in ways he didn't like, but now he knew Van Dean was just as wrapped up in it all as he was. It felt like a betrayal, suddenly, not to admit to him how much pain he was in, about the doubts that dogged him.

Instead he said, “I know I can. I'm sure of it,” and wondered if it sounded as false to Van Dean as it did to him.

Van Dean said nothing, just lay there breathing as if that wasn't
the answer he was looking for. The quiet made Taft think of Adolph Fell and Fleetwood Wallace and how it must've made his parents feel when they read in the papers that he'd been operating a whorehouse out of a building he owned. They had never come to visit him in prison. He wrote them letters but heard nothing back. When he got out, he'd gone down to Madisonville to see them, found them living in the same house, a coat of red paint on it less than a year old.

He'd worn a nice suit and brought a chicken from one of the city's best butchers. He hadn't brought Carol Jean. His mother cooked the chicken in the same little stove he remembered from childhood and then they all sat around the table and had a nice meal, talking about everything except prison, his parents grinning and telling him they were sure he'd do fine, whatever he decided to make of himself now. Before he left, he hugged his father and kissed his mother on the cheek. As he climbed in the Rolls they both wished him well, the message delivered loud and clear: Don't come back.

It embarrassed him now to think that Van Dean might be treating him the same way, filling him with false confidence. Or maybe just now Van Dean had heard the lie in his voice and it had spoiled his belief in him. The little man was hard to read, lying there quiet, as if lost in his own thoughts.

“My first wrestling coach was an old queer,” Taft said then, up into the empty air of the garage. “I ever tell you that?”

“You didn't,” Van Dean said. “But now I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.”

“I'm saying you should feel lucky you had a coach,” Taft said. “A good person who put you on the right path. I never did.”

“Is that what we're doing now?” Van Dean said. “Blaming what happened when we were kids because we're both lying here scared of our own shadows?”

Taft didn't understand what that meant. “I'm merely saying . . .” he said, but trailed off.

“Let me tell you a story about the man who taught me to wrestle,” Van Dean said. “The good guy who, like you say, put me on the right path.”

Taft heard the rustling of Van Dean's blankets, and even though it was too dark now to see, he imagined him sitting up on the mat. Van Dean started by telling him that on his first day of wrestling practice at the orphanage in Idaho, one of the older boys broke his arm on purpose and it took a while for him to heal up from it. After he did, the man Van Dean kept calling “Professor” took all the boys down to a wrestling tournament at one of the nearby towns. This was one of the main draws of being on the team, Van Dean said, since the boys weren't allowed to leave the orphanage grounds except for school trips chaperoned by one of the brothers.

“We whipped a bunch of boys from a local athletic club that day,” Van Dean said. “Well, everybody but me. I pretty much got trounced by the first kid I wrestled.”

“You lost?” Taft said. He'd never heard Van Dean willingly admit to losing a wrestling match.

“I lost a lot in those days,” Van Dean said. “Mostly, though, the Professor was happy with the way we'd wrestled. A week or so later he called us all together and announced he was taking us out, like as a reward. The church from the next town over was hosting a big boxing smoker and he arranged to have all us boys attend for free. Well, that was just about the greatest news we ever heard. It seemed too good to be true, I guess. Like Christmas for a bunch of boys who never had Christmas. We all just about went crazy waiting for it.