Champion of the World (33 page)

“The morning of the smoker, we all rode over in the academy's wagons, with the Professor and a couple of the other brothers driving. A big convoy of us. The smoker was set up in a big pavilion tent behind this little brick church. I was just a greenhorn at the orphanage still—I'd been there less than a year—but, God, it thrilled me to be out in the world again. The smoker turned out to be one of the
biggest annual events in the county. The backyard of the church was already full of people when we got there. We felt wild for it, like any bunch of boys would, but the Professor warned there'd be hell to pay if we weren't on our best behavior. There was set to be a bunch of different boxing bouts involving something like forty local men. Anybody could fight, really. Mostly it was big farmhands and fur trappers, street toughs and bullies. There was a men's division where the top prize was fifteen dollars and a few dozen eggs donated by some neighbor's farm. There was also a youth division and even a few women who were going to fight.

“After we found out about the women, we made sure we got seats right up front. It was a big, blue fall day and I remember thinking summer might still have a few good swings left in it before it got cold again. The church had a little refreshment table set up and I'd already had two cups of lemon punch by the time the Professor sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulder. The second he did that, I knew something was wrong. I don't know how, but I did.

“He asks me, ‘Did you bring your boots and tights?' and I'm just a kid, dumb, and I don't get what he's driving after, so I'm confused and I just look at him and say, ‘No, Professor,' and he gets this little smile on his face. This mean look I'd never seen from him before. ‘You better start limbering up,' he tells me, ‘you're fighting today.'

“The weird thing I remember, when he told me that, I still had one of the little wax cups from the refreshment table in my hand, and I remember crushing it in my fist and throwing it on the ground. I remember exactly what that felt like. It turned out he'd signed me up for the smoker without telling me. I didn't need to be told why. It was punishment for my bad showing at the wrestling tournament. I don't know, maybe there was a lesson buried in it, too, and a test of my toughness in front of all those boys who were supposed to be my teammates.”

Taft said: “What lesson?”

“Not to lose, I guess,” Van Dean said. “Anyway, I was the youngest kid in the youth division. Smallest, too. I don't think the church people much liked the idea of me fighting, but the Professor talked them into it. He could be persuasive like that.”

“What'd you do?” Taft asked. Despite Van Dean's grave tone, he felt a smile spreading across his face.

“What the hell
could
I do?” Van Dean said. “I got beat up. I got beat up bad. The next day I tried to run away again, but they caught me. They whipped me and put me on kitchen duty for six months. You ever scrub dishes for two hundred grubby orphan boys? I'd take a whipping from a couple of high school kids a hundred times before I did that again.”

His voice sounded far away and deadly serious, but Taft couldn't stop himself from laughing. He had been lying on his side, listening to the story, but now he slumped onto his back. The sound of his laughter dry and wheezing. He still couldn't see anything, but felt Van Dean stretch out beside him on the mat. There was a pause in which he could tell Van Dean was trying to stifle it, but then he started laughing, too.

“Christ,” Van Dean said. “What a terrible thing.”

This set Taft into a new fit of giggles and Van Dean joined him. They twisted in their blankets, trying to catch their breath. It went on like that for a long time, the two of them laughing in the dark like fools.

O
n Thanksgiving, Fritz planned another evening out in town, but Pepper forbade Taft to go. He was finally starting to look in decent shape, and the last thing Pepper needed was Taft filling himself up on buttery restaurant food, too much drink and cigars with his training partners. Fritz didn't like it, but when Pepper asked him if he wanted a repeat of their trip to the steakhouse, he relented. Instead, early in the evening he loaded Eddy and the other wrestlers into one of his big touring sedans and drove them into town, leaving Pepper, Taft, Moira and Carol Jean alone at the hunting camp.

It was Moira's idea to have them all for dinner at the cabin. She even fixed it with the hired girl to add a chicken and some vegetables to the camp's weekly grocery order. She wanted to do mashed potatoes, but Pepper nixed it. Too starchy, he said, and starch thickened the blood. He and Taft were both still spending nights out in the old garage, but he and Moira were on more regular speaking terms again and he felt good about that. She cooked it all on the wood-burning stove, with pots and pans she'd stolen from the lodge, and Pepper even found a leaf for their table so they could all sit around it at the same time.

The Tafts came down dressed to the nines, as ever, and they ate
early while the sun was still up. The food was delicious, like something cooked over a campfire. Carol Jean brought a bottle of wine and Moira served it in the cabin's small enamel coffee mugs, moving with no limp, her ankle looking slim and healed. Pepper felt glad of that, too.

“I'll be Lewis and you be Clark,” Carol Jean said, offering her husband a toast. “Like a couple of frontiersmen riding the range.”

Taft laughed. “I've never been camping,” he said, like looking back on it he was trying to figure how that was possible.

“You've roughed it pretty good the last few weeks,” Pepper said.

Taft nodded. “It is getting rank out in that old garage,” he said. “These new men are good wrestlers, but together they put off an incredible funk.”

“What's the first thing you'll do when you get the money?” Moira asked. “When this is all over.”

Taft was slow to answer, but Carol Jean knew right away. “We'll buy our own home,” she said. “Enough of this staying in hotel suites and living off other people's kindnesses. We'll get a house outside Cincinnati, maybe in Madisonville near Garfield's family. Something with a whole lot of bedrooms, isn't that right?”

She leaned over, bumping Taft with her shoulder. His eyes crinkled in a grin. “Of course,” he said, then added: “I suppose I'd like to own a good, fast car again. Something where I could feel the wind in my face on a summer evening. How about you all?”

Pepper drummed his fingers on the rough wood of the table. He didn't like talking about money. It made him itchy and anxious. “I don't know,” he said. “Whatever Moira wants, I guess.”

She smiled. “I'd like a new bed,” she said. “Sleeping on this old thing will make me a cripple before long.”

They all looked for a moment at the cabin's drooping brass bed and the feeling in his chest deepened. The stove was going and it was warm in the little room, the windows fogged over. They were all
flushed and had drunk just enough wine to be giddy. He hoped this would be the night she would let him sleep there again.

“That's it?” Taft said. “If you'll forgive me for saying so, Mrs. Van Dean, I thought you'd set your sights higher than that.”

Some extra color appeared in her cheeks as she refilled their mugs. “What can I say?” she said. “I'm a simple girl.”

They all had a good laugh at that.

When the plates were cleared, Pepper finally told them about his surprise. It had been burning a hole in his pocket throughout dinner, but he'd forced himself to wait, to gauge how things were going. Now he figured they were all in such good humor, it was worth a shot.

They gave him strange and suspicious looks as he dressed them in the leftover winter garb from a small chest by the cabin's front door. Moira had the quilted hunting jacket she'd taken when they first arrived at the camp, and they found one like it for Carol Jean. The women's boots were a little too big for them, and the only thing that would fit Taft was his long, fur-lined jacket, but Pepper said it would do as they marched up the hill toward the lodge.

“I don't like the look on your face,” Taft said as they went. “I do hope this is a nice surprise.”

Pepper just smiled and said Moira wasn't the only one who'd put in an order from town when they found out they'd be spending the evening together.

He'd set the skis out behind the lodge where they wouldn't be discovered, wedging them into the deep snowdrift that had piled up next to the porch. The skis were of good quality, handmade of laminated wood, with matching poles. Except for Taft—who'd surely need the longest anyone had—he'd made a guess on the lengths. Still, he had enough experience to know they would do.

“Where did you get these?” asked Moira, not sounding entirely happy.

“I bribed the hired girl,” he said, still feeling a little proud of it.

“With what money?”

“Well,” he said, “I told her to put a nice tip for herself on top of the tab.”

“Fritz Mundt paid for this?” said Taft, and then he chuckled. “He's not going to like that.”

Pepper said he doubted Fritz would even check the total on the monthly ledger, let alone look close enough to notice a hundred-dollar difference. Besides, he said, he was thinking of trying to return them after they'd had some fun.

“So be careful,” he said. “Last thing we need is one of you going ass over teakettle.”

“It'll be dark soon,” Taft said. “I'm not sure this is my sort of pursuit. Not at all.”

“A bit ago you were talking about feeling the wind in your face,” Pepper said. “Why, the Nordic sports are some of the best for—”

“It does wonders for the constitution,” Taft said. “I know, you've told me. Still . . .”

As they were talking, Carol Jean had pulled a pair of skis out of the snow and was working to tighten the straps around her boots. “Don't be such a nervous Nellie,” she said to Taft. “The moon is full, it will be plenty bright. So long as we stay on the main road, we'll be fine.”

“Absolutely right,” Pepper said, laying out the rest of the skis. “Our biggest worry will be getting run over by a drunk Fritz Mundt.”

“That still counts for me,” Taft said.

They all fell at least once trying to get the skis fastened to their boots, and everyone but Pepper fell again while navigating the hill toward the main gate. By the time they got to the flat part of the road in front of the cabins, they had to stop so he could beat the snow off Taft's jacket with one gloved hand.

“So far so good,” Pepper said.

“I really wish you'd told me you were planning this,” Moira said. “A cooler head may have prevailed.”

It was easy once you got the hang of it, he told her. Pepper and Taft took the lead as they shuffled through the gate. Darkness was coming on, but Carol Jean was right about the moon. It rose big and bright, casting everything in the soft purple shade of morning, the light reflecting off the snow enough for them to see their way. It had been years since Pepper had been on skis, but the fundamentals of it came back quickly enough. At first the motion was difficult and awkward, but soon he was kicking and gliding over the top of the fresh snow. There was one steep uphill grade just beyond the gate where they all had to stop and duck-walk up, but afterward the road was mostly a gentle downward slope all the way to town. The going was not difficult.

He gave Taft a bit of instruction to start off, telling him not to go too hard with his arms and poles, to let his legs do the work. The big man took to it easily enough, just as Pepper suspected he might, and then the two of them were slipping along side by side, hearing laughter from Moira and Carol Jean behind.

The sky was wide and full of stars, the sort of sky you never saw in the city. This was a mountain sky, and it took Pepper back to the early mornings he spent outdoors with Professor Van Dien. The skis and snowshoes the boys used at the orphanage were beat-up old clunkers that took a few tries before you got used to them. At first Pepper hated it, but there was an effortlessness once your body grew accustomed to the movements. Whisking across snow that would suck you in chest-deep if you fell or stepped off your skis, you didn't notice how hard you were working until you were flushed with sweat underneath your winter clothes and you had to stop to rest.

Now he and Taft raced along, as they would on any morning out for their runs. If the snow got much deeper, the skis would start to come in handy for more than recreation, Pepper thought. Taft's long
strides made it difficult to keep pace with him once he really got cruising, but Pepper caught him at every bend in the road, chuckling at the way the big fellow teetered like a scarecrow as he negotiated the turns. A couple of times he fell, but Taft didn't complain. He seemed to be enjoying himself. On a long, flat stretch of road they stopped to wait for Carol Jean and Moira, realizing they'd left the women so far behind they were now out of sight. Pepper's skis and poles were starting to feel heavy from the exertion, but Taft was smiling as he rooted his poles in the snow and pushed back the silly knit stocking cap they'd found for him to wear.

“You weren't lying,” he said. “Another month of exercise like this and Strangler Lesko won't know what hit him.”

Seeing him like this, smiling and rosy in the cold, all of them happy for the first time in months, Pepper again felt the weight of the secret he'd kept from Taft since they returned from Chicago. He decided it would be better to give him the truth now, before he built himself up any more on the idea that he might be world heavyweight champion. Before he bargained too much on the promise that he could get his old life back.

“There's something I need to tell you.”

Taft held up a gloved hand. “Let me stop you right there,” he said. “I know I haven't done a good job staying out of the chokeholds. That Mr. Lundin is a rough customer, but I'm gaining on him. I'll be ready by Christmastime, you can believe that.”

For a moment Pepper's resolve faltered, but he leaned on his poles, squeezing his gloved hands around them, feeling how cold his fingers had gotten now that they'd stopped to rest. “It's not that,” he said. “Listen. To get the bout on paper we had to tell Billy Stettler you'd do business for Lesko. You have to take a dive.”

Taft's smile fell apart piece by piece. He looked off into the trees, as if searching for something out in the dark, and when his eyes came back he'd blinked the sting away, replacing it with something
harder but just as bright. “Yes,” he said, almost to himself. “I suppose that's the truth. Who would be dumb enough to believe otherwise, right?”

“Lesko's scared of you,” Pepper said. “They all are, and they won't take the chance of the world's heavyweight title falling into the hands of a black man. Not after the mess boxing had with Johnson.”

Taft shuffled his feet, picking up one ski and shaking some snow off the top of it. “Lesko's supposed to be the toughest guy around,” he said. “They say maybe the best wrestler ever, and he's scared of me?”

“I just need to know if you'll do it,” Pepper said. “If you'll sign off on the arrangement.”

Taft shook his head. “Do I have a choice?” he said. “Should I raise hell? Howl at the moon about all the lies Fritz Mundt told me the day since I first met him in Chicago?”

“If I go back to Fritz saying you balked, they'll call the whole thing off,” he said. “Or worse.”

“They can do what they want,” Taft said. “You can all go to hell, as far as I care.”

“You know it's not that easy,” he said. “Even if they don't cancel the match, they'll have me injure you in training. Break your ankle or tear up a knee. Then they'll send you out there as a cripple and Lesko will clean your clock in under a minute.”

“I'd like to see you try something like that,” Taft said, but even as he did, Pepper could see the fire flickering out inside him. As if he'd just been waiting for them to find a way to cheat him and now was crushed at being proven right. The proud look that had been there just moments before dissolved, whatever small thing that had been pushing him forward finally snuffed out for good. It was like watching as a drowning man lost his grip on the piece of wreckage that had been keeping him afloat and it drifted out of reach.

“I'm not saying I'd do it,” Pepper said. “I'm just saying we need to think carefully about what we do next.”

“‘We'?” Taft said, looking offended by the suggestion.

“You should've seen them at O'Shea's place in Chicago,” he said. “Like a bunch of matinee villains twirling their mustaches.”