Champion of the World (44 page)

As she spoke, Carol Jean sank back into her rickety folding chair, the bag resting on her lap. Moira wished they had more time together, but she wanted to be back in Pepper's dressing room when he got out of his shower. She couldn't think of anything else to say that wouldn't sound cruel, so she just touched her lightly on the arm one more time before letting herself out. The last she saw of Carol Jean, she was still sitting with her eyes fixed on the near wall, her jaw set proud and false, as though she might never move from the spot.

T
he Fourth of July blossomed into a hard shine. As the sun vaulted over the mountains and across the great blue sky they napped together on the creaking bed in the rental cabin. Moira woke with her hair wilted from the heat, and for an hour they played cards in the feeble breeze of the front porch. After the second time she took every toothpick and bottle cap he had to his name, he announced he wasn't going to play with her anymore. Late afternoon, a clap of rain rushed through, battering down the dust, and with the yellow light of evening filtering through the pines she turned in her chair and asked him what was fast becoming the defining question of their new lives.

“What on earth about dinner, do you suppose?”

Pepper tore himself away from his thoughts and smiled, because they both knew the answer. While she went in to fetch her hat he brought the car around and then they drove the half hour down the mountain into Flagstaff. Their new car was a Cole the color of sandpaper, a few years old but still nice. It was the first car they'd owned since he was lightweight champion, and he drove it as he always had, with a recklessness that made them both squeal with delight. The dirt road unrolled in front of them like a long, dark ribbon, gales of wind filling her ears as he pushed down the accelerator on the
straightaways. They sailed over rolling hills and around bends, flying up off their seats on the bigger bumps. At the base of the hill they sped past a field of freckled cattle and Pepper goosed the horn, sending a few of them scurrying a step or two before they forgot their surprise and went back to nosing the ground with big felt snouts.

Their regular place was open despite the holiday, just as she knew it would be. The restaurant sat a block off Flagstaff's main drag: a tumbledown building of rough wood siding with an actual hitching post out front. As it was the only place cooking, they had to wait for a table and Pepper spelled his name three times for the poor man keeping the list. He was giving his real name a try, just in case Markham or the New York newspaper reporters were still out trying to find them. Moira thought it was cute, but told him if he expected her to call him Zdravko, he had another thing coming.

They'd been staying in the little cabin close to four months and ate at the restaurant most nights. Flagstaff was built into the strange belt of land where the desert met the mountains, and the feeling of the place reminded her a bit of Montana. If anything, it was even more deserted here, since the town was just a few thousand people. But it was neighborly, the locals all acting like they were just getting started on something together. The state highway expansion was all they could talk about, but for now the only way in or out of town were the single-lane dirt tracks that jutted out in all four directions. Moira had picked this place precisely for its smallness, and because she thought the mountains would give Pepper some comfort as he found his bearings. Already, though, the aimless, isolated feeling was starting to wear on her.

They stood in the restaurant's small entryway and watched a group of diners as rough as any she'd ever seen eat sitting down. Gaunt men with dirty fingers guarding their plates like junkyard dogs. Ranchers in overalls treating their wives to a night on the
town. A couple of cowboys wearing fuzzy chaps. The place served meat from the nearby ranches, with sides of root vegetables and not much else. She was sick to death of beef and said as much to Pepper as they finally took a two-top in the very middle of the room. He answered by squinting at his menu for a long time and asking the waiter what he thought about the chicken.

“Big enough to ride,” the waiter beamed. He was a heavy man, with wool pants hitched up almost to his nipples.

Moira stubbed out her cigarette and said in that case she'd better double down on drinks. She didn't bother to tell the waiter what kind. All they had was tequila. When the man was gone, Pepper smiled in a way that reminded her how handsome he could be when he tried.

“Let's make a night of it,” he said, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand.

He'd been squeezing her hand a lot lately, his way of telling her he was slowly coming out of his mood. There was another look tucked in behind his smile, a hopefulness that made her want to look away. She knew what it was and didn't want to think about it.

They'd lingered for a week in New York after the match. The night they returned from Madison Square Garden, Moira snuck Pepper in a side entrance of the hotel so the after-hours crowd gathered in the lobby wouldn't see him. As they climbed the steps she could hear them hooting and laughing at each other—some of them already headed out to catch late trains, but most just blowing off steam. Turning the front desk area into their own personal party. In the morning she went down there herself and used some of O'Shea's cash to upgrade to a suite. After that, Pepper locked himself away in the bedroom and for three days only came out to eat and use the bathroom.

Bored and left to her own devices, Moira started clipping out newspaper stories. The New York reporters were going wild for him.
Lesko may have won their match, but there were just as many articles about Pepper filling the inside pages. One of her favorites had a headline reading “Pint-sized Pepper Pushes Champ to Brink” and even included a small sketch portrait of him between the columns.

She kept them all tucked inside an envelope at the bottom of their old trunk, half for safekeeping, half so he wouldn't find them if he suddenly emerged from the bedroom and commandeered a paper. She suspected the loss would never fully let him be, but hoped the sting would fade in time. She imagined one day it would be a thing he thought of infrequently, like when a man spotted his old bowling trophies in a forgotten corner of the garage. Maybe then she would take the clippings out and let him see all the wonderful purple things the sportswriters had written about him. Until then, she knew he would read each flowery compliment as a slap in the face.

Once it was clear that he was hiding out somewhere, the sportswriters were rabid to find him. They wanted more words from the great man. They wanted to know how it felt, what he thought and what he would do now. Moira wondered what they'd think if they could see him nearly comatose from the pain and depression, not eating, not even letting her open the bedroom curtains. It had been like this after the loss to Windham, too, but this time was worse. At least after losing the lightweight title he had his own righteous anger to fire him back up. This time he'd lost a square match with no strings attached, and she knew it was going to take longer for him to make sense of it.

On the fifth day she answered a knock at the door to find Stanislaw Lesko standing there, looking as massive as if someone had rolled a boulder into the hallway. He stood a little cockeyed, as if one of his legs was troubling him, and had one arm riding in a sling. It was early evening and Pepper was already asleep, dead to the world in the other room.

“I'd like to have a word with the mister,” Lesko said, all custom
tailoring and expensive hair tonic. His eyes were glassy, and she wondered if he'd been drinking.

Moira told him the mister wasn't feeling up to accepting visitors at the moment. “Why are you here?” she said. “I thought you'd skipped town with the rest.”

“I do what I like,” he said, not sounding angry or boastful. Merely stating facts. “I had some business to look after in the city and I wanted to see a show.”

“High times for you,” she said, and could see the world's heavyweight champion wasn't used to this sort of reception.

“He gave it to me pretty good out there,” Lesko said, his tone suggesting she might invite him in for a place to sit. She did not, and he moved his feet around in the hallway carpet. Small feet, she noticed, packed tight inside soft leather shoes.

“I wrestled with Gotch once,” he said, after what felt like a long time. “Only in training, you understand, exhibition stuff. I was very green back then, but I could tell it was true what everybody said. He had a special way about him. Sometimes he didn't seem like a man at all.”

Moira looked up the hall, where a porter was bringing a tray out of one of the other suites. The man was tall and barrel-chested, and his elegant stride reminded her all over again that Taft was dead. Lesko cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable, as if it were difficult for him to be there, saying these things.

“Being in the ring with your husband,” he said, “it brought me back to that feeling. Maybe for only the second time in my life.”

Moira asked if that was the extent of the message he wanted her to pass along, and Lesko scowled. “I don't know, damn it,” he said. “I wanted to tell him it was quite a battle, that's all.”

“I know,” she said. “I watched it. He should've won. He almost had you in the third.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose I may have been undertrained.” He
turned as if to go but then didn't. He lingered. “I take it you know all about Billy's new show?”

“I know that it's a fake, if that's what you mean,” she said.

A short clapping sound as he coughed into his fist. “
Fake
's not completely the word I would use,” he said. “But, look, if I'm really going to let Billy and Fritz turn me into the world's biggest ballet dancer, I could do a lot worse than to have Mr. Van Dean as a partner. We could have some fun, he and I. We could make a lot of money.”

She told him they'd already made a lot of money and no one seemed much better off for it. She thanked him for coming and made to close the door when he spoke again, announcing to the hallway: “I heard you slapped him,” he said. “Billy, I mean.”

It didn't sound like a threat, but she stood her ground just in case. “Not as hard as he deserved,” she said.

Lesko allowed a brief smile to pass over his face. “I would've liked to see that,” he said.

After shutting the door she stood holding on to the handle for a few seconds so it wouldn't make a sound when she carefully let go. The next night she got Pepper out of the crush and cold of the city. He needed space and quiet, she knew, so his body could heal and his thoughts could run themselves dry. As soon as their late train rattled out of New York, his mood lifted. He still spent most of the ride brooding, staring at nothing, but smiled at her jokes about the train staff. When a kid recognized him in the dining car, Pepper even signed a napkin for him.

At first they just drifted, spending Christmas in Baltimore and New Year's in Washington, D.C., after taking a week to see the sights. She enjoyed it, being the only one in charge for once, deciding where to go and what to do. On a chilly January day in Charlotte they bought the new car from a wide little pug of a salesman who pumped their hands like he was trying to draw water as soon as he saw the cash. They drove west slowly, taking their time, with a little
less than nine thousand dollars stowed in a hard-shell suitcase on the backseat, buried under the shopping bags and tailor's boxes full of things they bought to restart their lives.

They arrived in Flagstaff in early March and rented the cabin outside of town. It was a tidy little place hemmed in by trees, a short hike from a mountain lake. You could stand on the bank and watch trout dart around in water as clear as glass. The first night Pepper pried up the floorboards in the bedroom and hid the money in the dead space down there.

Now it felt as if they'd been in Arizona the exact wrong amount of time—too long for a vacation, too short to put down roots. They had no appointments, weren't needed anywhere. One day became the next, the two of them creeping around the cabin, not sure what to do with themselves after breakfast and coffee. In moments she was able to pretend it was all just some weird, spur-of-the-moment holiday. It had been years since they'd gone anywhere by themselves, and it was a nice, romantic idea—just the two of them alone with their car and box full of cash. It really was quite a lot of money. It should've been enough to last them a few years, maybe more if they pinched their pennies. Of course, she had to keep reminding herself, this was them she was thinking about.

When the waiter came back with their plates, Pepper tucked his napkin into his collar and Moira pulled a chalky chicken breast around her plate. Before either of them could take their first bites, they were interrupted by a sharp bark of laughter from another table. A group of men had built a pyramid out of empty highball glasses and now one of them was out of his chair, holding the hem of the tablecloth like a magician about to whip it free. The waiter rushed over to stop them and one of the men stuck out a foot, sending him sprawling on his face. They all began chanting the name of the guy with the tablecloth in his hands, scooting their own chairs back in anticipation.

“Hey,” Pepper said, just loud enough to be heard over the noise.

They turned to look at him and the smiles died on their faces. They were all big men, round guys with the doughy bodies of salesmen, but they saw his eyes, his ears, the way his hands gripped the side of the table as if he was ready to launch himself at them like a cannonball. Their expressions became those of children caught at some naughtiness. The man who was standing let go of the tablecloth and lowered back into his seat. A couple of the others mumbled things and held up their hands to say they wanted no trouble as the waiter picked himself up, red with anger, and began loading the empty glasses onto a tray.