Champion of the World (4 page)

Pepper let out a low whistle at hearing this news. “Where?”

“Join up with us and I'll draw you a map,” Fritz said. “Until then, you'll forgive me if I keep the particulars to myself.”

He held up a hand, rubbing the thumb against his index finger. “What are we talking?”

“A hundred and fifty dollars a week,” Fritz said. “Meals, lodging, everything included. Plus, if we get Lesko to sign on, ten percent of the purse.”

“Plus five of the gate?”

Fritz smiled at him. It was not a nice smile. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “The fact that you allowed a snake like Boyd Markham to turn you into a circus performer is one of the great tragedies in our business, but I'm not here offering to grab my ankles. You want to go on taking the hangman's drop every night, twice on Sunday, for twenty-five dollars a week? Making every rinky-dink town, wrestling every cattleman and miner who has a nickel to spare? Fine. I'm offering you a chance at something different, that's all.”

Across the street, the door in the stadium wall opened and Moira appeared. In the night mist and the electric buzz of the streetlamps she was stunning: tall and slender, walking with easy grace, her blonde hair bobbed around the ears. Bunching a handful of cloth so the hem of her dress wouldn't drag on the cobblestones, she picked her way across to the graveyard fence. When she saw Fritz Mundt standing with Pepper, her face dropped and her voice was cold.

“It's time,” she said.

Fritz doffed his hat. “Moira.”

“Hello, Freddy,” she said. “Please don't talk to me.” Then to Pepper: “It's time.” She gestured toward the stadium in a way that said she would only stand out there as long as he made her.

He pinched out the hemp and tucked it away. As they shook hands, Fritz passed him a folded scrap of paper with a phone number scribbled across the bottom.

“I'm at the New Palace Hotel for another week or so,” he said. “Come with me to see Taft in that challenge match I mentioned. No strings.”

“Whatever it is, we're not in the market,” Moira said. “If Boyd Markham catches you out here trying to shanghai one of his top drawing cards, he'll cut your throat with that little pigsticker he always has on him.”

Fritz dug a cigar out from inside his suit. “Only to be saved by the grace of God and my own catlike reflexes,” he said.

Pepper vaulted back over the fence and stood waiting for Moira, who suddenly seemed like she wasn't ready to go. He could feel tension radiating off her, her spine straight, shoulders back, with one hand still on the top rung. “Box office is around front,” she said to Fritz. “You want to see us again, buy a ticket.”

The flame of Fritz's lighter flashed across his face. “Funny thing about the hangman's drop,” he said. “I've never known anyone to survive it so long. We all know you're tough—don't get me wrong—but a man can only press his luck so far before—” He dragged a thumb across his throat.

Pepper had to catch her by the wrist to keep her from going over the fence. “C'mon,” he said. “He's just messing with you.”

Reluctantly she came away. He fit his palm into the small of her back and guided her off the curb, the clicking of her heels on the stones echoing in the deserted street.

A
week later, when the carnival arrived in New Vermillion, Oregon, the scale in the Guess Your Weight tent said Pepper weighed 161 pounds in his socks and tights. The scale was a seven-foot Toledo with a peeling candy-cane paint job and a sturdy red arrow mounted inside an oval viewing window. Black embossed lettering around the inside said:
No Springs! Honest Weight!
and there were two giant footprints on the platform to show you where to stand. Twice he climbed off and back on, just to be sure. After the third time, he spat into the dirt and cursed, slapping his palm hard against the glass. The arrow quivered but didn't budge.

He hopped down and bent to stretch, listening to his back pop and whimper as he reached for his toes. Between his legs and out the open mouth of the tent he could see the roustabouts making their final preparations for the evening show. Two of them were unrolling a giant spool of cable from the powerhouse trucks, while behind them a team checked and rechecked the support wires on the big tent. A man in overalls with a flaming-red beard trucked by with a long-handled maul over his shoulder, running like whatever he had to do needed to be done five minutes ago. Close on his heels a seamstress in a denim apron trundled along carrying a studded leather saddle.

When he was sure no one was watching, Pepper peeled out of his
tights and tossed them in a pile on top of his discarded boots. He closed his eyes, tipping his face back, lifted his arms above his head, and huffed all the air out of his lungs.
Please,
he thought.
Please, please, please.
He stepped slowly back onto the scale, rubbed his hands over the prickly stubble on his cheeks and opened one eye.

One sixty-one.

He found Moira in the trailer shimmying into a silver dress. Her face was done up, a little too much mascara clumping in her lashes as she watched him in the mirror. The trailer was a teardrop-shaped single-axle, decorated on the outside with a picture of Pepper dangling from a rope, a wide smile on his face, the words
Master of the Hangman's Drop!
arching over his head. Even for a short guy there was barely enough room inside to stand up straight. He turned to look at himself in the glass next to her, letting the shoulders of his tights fall loose around his waist.

His chest was flat and ashen, knotted with yellowing bruises, his ribs like xylophones up and down his sides. A crescent-shaped scar zagged over one nipple and another stitched out from a hip, inching its way toward his belly button. Just below his sternum a hard, bony knob jutted out where something had broken years ago and hadn't healed right. His cheeks were so sunken that when he smiled he could see the bones in his face. He tried to fix the mirror with a tough-guy stare and didn't like the way it looked.

Moira patted her lipstick with the tip of a finger. “Say the word if you want me to leave you two alone,” she said.

“You might want to think about sleeves,” he said. “A bunch of these towners are already barking drunk.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “Wish me luck,” she said. “I'm off to bread-and-butter the natives.” As she turned around she saw him from a distance for the first time and stopped short.

“You're still overweight,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I'm fine.”

He tried to turn away from her, but she caught him and pushed him back in front of the mirror. Standing behind him, she ran her fingertips down his chest, feeling the way the skin slipped easy over his stomach muscles. You couldn't lie to Moira.

“You're fat,” she said. “You're one sixty if you're a pound.”

“It's going to be fine, I said.”

She bit a lip. “You should run,” she said. “You want me to get your coat?”

He turned around, bracing his hands on her shoulders. “Stop it,” he said. “Just cut it out, what you're doing.”

“You should spit in a cup,” she said, starting to paw around in her tiny purse for her cigarettes. “Anything.”

“It wouldn't do any good,” he said. “I'm all sucked up.”

Something in his voice must have given him away. “What did you eat?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just water since yesterday afternoon.”

He fumbled his tights back up. That morning the gals at the pie car had fixed him a meat loaf sandwich and a side of leftover slaw. He didn't regret it, but four pounds? Definitely he hadn't eaten four pounds.

“How far over?” she asked.

“Just a few.”

“You said a
couple
just a minute ago,” she said. “How far?”

He sighed. “One sixty one.”

The look on her face scared even him. “That's crazy,” she said. “You can't go on like that. You have to talk to Markham.”

“What's he going to do,” he said, “besides get angry over nothing?”

She squinted at him, a probing look he didn't care for. “How long do you think we can keep this up?” she said.

“What?” he said.

“Letting Boyd Markham drag us all over hell and back every
summer,” she said. “You risking your life every night. We used to be on our own. We used to have fifteen rooms. Now we're just counting down the days until they have to take you out on a stretcher for real.”

He was trying to put together a response to that when somewhere outside a crier yelled, “Doors!”

It was time for her to go.

“Fine,” he said. “I'll go see Boyd. I'll throw myself at his feet and grovel for forgiveness.”

That seemed to satisfy her. Her face softened a bit and she kissed him hard on the mouth. “You want the gun?” she said.

He thought about the snub-nosed .38, still where he'd stashed it under a stack of blankets in their steamer trunk. “Nah,” he said. “If the fat bastard tries anything I'll just strangle him.”

O
utside the trailer it was almost full dark and he had to wait while a traction engine crawled by dragging a load of logs. New Vermillion wasn't much more than a shotgun blast of rough weatherboard shacks lost in the hills fifty miles from anywhere. To the east, thick stands of fir and pine crowded up against the banks of a muddy, stagnant river. To the west somewhere was the ocean, though he couldn't smell it on the evening breeze. All he could smell was tree sap, a tingle of sawdust, and the faint taste of motor oil greasy on his tongue. The mill sat on a rise at the edge of town, the saw house towering above everything else, dirty smoke drooling from a series of stacks. A run of smaller iron-roofed buildings trailed behind, and from them a spiderweb of narrow dirt roads bled out into uneven rows of houses and shops, all built from the same blonde wood they were cutting out of the hills.

The three dozen trucks and trailers of the Markham & Markham Overland Carnival had arrived after midnight the night before,
coming up from Ashland in the rainy dark, running late because one of the trailers blew a tire. They set up the yard at the south end of the valley, circling up to give the towners a good look at the colorful trucks. Markham liked to brag he ran the fastest, most agile carnival in North America. While most of the other big operators like Ringling and Sells-Floto were still tied to the rails, he'd switched to gasoline years ago. Hence the word
Overland
and the slogan printed over the wheels of every truck in his fleet:
World's Largest Motorized Circus!
The trucks allowed the carnival to go places the bigger shows couldn't touch, places deep in the woods and swamps. Markham's game was to target the small towns, mining camps, and timber ventures, where they drew crowds of rough men and women who came out looking for dice games, peep shows and the occasional fight.

As Pepper stood waiting, a shift whistle blew and a group of guys in wood-flecked overalls came down from the mill to join the crowd drifting into the evening performance, a bunch of them with their lunch buckets still swinging in their hands. The roustabouts had just opened the main gate and were doing their best to scout for weapons and liquor as the towners streamed under the twenty-foot banner blaring the Markham & Markham name in bright red letters. Smaller flags lined the path to the big tent, waving with the names of featured acts and promising
Spectacular Performance! Games! Menagerie! Athletic & Side Show!
One of them was his:
The Immortal Pepper Van Dean! Master of the Hangman's Drop! Meeting All Comers in Timed Challenge Bouts!

The townsmen were mostly hatless, dressed in what passed for evening wear in these hills: plaid and checkered shirts tucked into denim or old wool. The few that wore jackets and ties did a poor job matching them. Overcoats were old and shiny, and most everyone wore work boots or cracked brogans. A couple of big sawyers had pulled off their boots and now walked barefoot in the damp, their feet oozing from ugly blisters. The women were hard and bright as
stones, their dresses home-stitched and fraying, their children running wild, whooping at the prospect of something to do. He saw a couple of toddlers rumbling along in the nude as the hot, stinking mass of them moved across the midway toward the tent.

None of them paid him any mind as he crossed the road behind them and knocked on the door of Boyd Markham's double-sized trailer. Receiving only a low grunt in response, he clicked the latch and stepped inside, where the smell of man was thick in the air. Clothes were everywhere, thrown over chairs and piled high atop a matching pair of Saratoga trunks. The only light came from a small wall-mounted sconce, but in the gloom he saw that a Chinese girl stood in the middle of the room, naked except for a pair of black slippers. She had a solemn, pretty face and spared him only the quickest glance as he came in. The girl was balanced on top of Boyd Markham, who lay on his belly wearing a light-colored vest, matching pants, and thin brown socks. Pepper couldn't see his face, only the pink roll of his neck beneath his razor-cropped mane of silver hair, but he could hear him fat-man breathing into the carpet. Putting her feet between his shoulder blades, the girl wiggled from side to side, doing a little dance. Markham groaned. She turned and toe-crawled back down to his waist, repeating the dance. Markham groaned again.

Pepper cleared his throat. He said, “If you want me to come back . . .”

The carnival barker sighed and lifted both his hands off the floor as if to say,
You're here now
. The girl jumped down, slipping wordlessly into her robe. As she went past he caught a whiff of her, some flowery scent tickling his nose. When the trailer door banged shut behind her he waited while Markham hefted himself up off the floor, feeling a twinge of disgust at the sight of the enormous, soft ball of him.

“We are in the high grass now,” Markham said, peering briefly out a window. “It feels like a whiskey kind of night. I'd offer you one,
but I know you're trying to watch your figure.” He gave Pepper a squint-eyed grin, then seemed to notice something was wrong. “What is it, son?”

Markham poured himself a rye and sat heavily in one of the chairs. The other chair was full of laundry, so Pepper couldn't join him.

“I got on the scale today,” he said.

“As I'm sure you do every day,” Markham said, like he already knew what was coming.

Pepper folded his arms. It had only been a few minutes since he'd weighed himself. Markham was as wily as any carnival man alive, with eyes and ears everywhere inside his own troupe, but not even he could have gotten word that Pepper was overweight. Not this fast.

“I'm one sixty-one,” he said.

Markham grinned at the amber slosh in his glass. “I know that can't be true,” he said. “One hundred sixty-one pounds would put you a full six pounds over the limit for performing the hangman's drop trick. You would be in violation of your contractual agreement with the Markham & Markham Overland Carnival. A contractual agreement that in no uncertain terms dictates that you, as the humble servant of your employer, and the dumb-as-dirt redneck grappler who signed it in the first damn place, shall perform the hangman's drop trick while weighing no more than one hundred
fifty-five
pounds.”