by Chad Dundas
When the woman of the house finally appeared, it was with the special flare common among show people, sweeping onto the porch with a slight curtsy while holding a pinch of her dress away from her legs. In the light of day and free of makeup, Carol Jean Taft was pale and freckled and wore her wild tangle of hair pulled back from her face with a simple gold ribbon.
“I was afraid we all got off on the wrong foot at dinner last night,” Moira said as they sat. She pointed to the tea, saying she’d have to borrow some sugar.
Carol Jean took the top off the teapot and looked inside before telling the hired girl to bring out a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies. “Sugar, too,” she said, giving Moira a quick wink. “Or something stiffer, if that’s more your speed.”
“A bit early for me yet,” Moira said, putting a mental checkmark in Carol Jean’s column for the ease with which she’d parried her meager peace offering. It told her this woman was a more capable and observant player than she’d seemed at the dinner table.
“It’s the one upside of this god-awful place,” Carol Jean said, crossing her legs with an extravagant little kick. “We’re too far away from anywhere for anyone to care what we do or what we drink.”
“The police were here, though,” Moira said. “Yesterday when we arrived they had a look around.”
“The two buffoons in the car?” Carol Jean said. “I’m certain Mr. Mundt and Mr. Eddy can keep a lid on them.”
The hired girl, whom Carol Jean introduced as Eleanor, brought a tray with coffee, cookies, and a smaller version of the glass whiskey snifter Fritz had in his office. Moira guessed the girl and Carol Jean were friends, and made a point of smiling at her and touching her lightly on the elbow as she thanked her.
“Yes, Mr. Eddy,” Moira said as Carol Jean poured coffee and then added slugs of whiskey and spoonfuls of sugar. “What sort of character is he, do you suppose?”
“A peculiar little fellow,” Carol Jean said. “But I don’t pay him any mind.”
“What do you think?” Moira asked the hired girl as she cleared the tea things off the table.
The hired girl blushed, looking like she was embarrassed to say, but was emboldened when Carol Jean gave her a small, encouraging nod. “I think he’s a troublesome man,” she said, the bitterness surprising Moira a bit. “Always looking over my shoulder, telling me I haven’t scrubbed the dishes well enough or I missed a spot on the dining room floor. I’ve never seen a man as interested in cooking and cleaning as that one.”
Moira smiled at her again, and as the hired girl drifted back into the house, Carol Jean offered a toast.
“Aren’t we a couple of hot toddies?” she said. “If there were any gentlemen to pass by, I’m sure we’d turn their heads.”
They touched mugs, and Moira studied her as they took their first sips of coffee—strong and hot and really a lot better than anything she might’ve lugged up from the cabin. From the practiced way she sat with an elbow resting on one knee, holding her mug in the air in front of her, Moira guessed Carol Jean had either been a singer or an actress once. She was beautiful, and there was something desperate in her eyes that made it hard not to look at her.
“You were saying?” Carol Jean said. “About dinner?”
“That my husband and I have only just arrived,” Moira said. “I wanted to assure you we don’t mean to cause any trouble.”
Carol Jean smiled at that. “Sure you do, honey,” she said. “Every person Garfield and I ever met meant us some kind of trouble.”
“What I meant to say is, we’re still getting the lay of things and I hope Pepper’s enthusiasm about training with Mr. Taft didn’t put you off.”
“It was nothing,” Carol Jean said. “At this point it takes more than one little man with poor table manners to get past our defenses.”
Moira didn’t let the insult register on her face. Walking up from the cabin, she’d gambled that if anyone knew what was really going on in this place and would talk about it, it was this woman. Now she made Carol Jean for what her father would’ve called a runner: a person who had a story to tell and came to the gaming table with the express interest of telling it. Maybe they’d had too much to drink, or the game put them on edge. Maybe they were just lonely. It didn’t matter. The only thing to know about a runner, Moira’s father said, was to let them run.
“I was hoping you could help me find my depth,” Moira said. “You know, woman to woman.”
“Oh, honey,” Carol Jean said. “I think you’ll find that out here even the deep end of the pool isn’t terribly deep.”
“Meaning what?”
Carol Jean sighed as if already growing tired of her. “When I met Garfield Taft,” she said, “I was working as a taxi dancer at the Olympia Ballroom in Cincinnati. My first day on the job I showed up and discovered there wasn’t a single dress in the storeroom that would fit me. All the other girls were just these flea-bitten little things, you see. One of the girls brought me up to see the owner, Mr. Herman Cohn, this Jew who’d been in the business heaven knows how long, and he looks at me, kind of squinting, you see, and tells me: ‘Come back when you lose fifteen pounds.’”
She refilled her coffee and Moira gave her an encouraging nod. “Well,” Carol Jean said. “Me, I’m all of twenty-one, twenty-two years old at the time. I guess I had a pretty high opinion of myself, the way young girls have, and going home and losing fifteen pounds wasn’t on my to-do list. I needed money right away, you see. So instead I just walked out of that office, straight down the stairs, and out onto the dance floor and started working. Started working in whatever old thing I had on at the time. At first it was slow and I was nervous, of course, but soon I learned a very strange thing. Those men out there on that dance floor? They loved me. I was the only redhead working in the place, for starters, and the only girl with any meat on her bones. That first night they danced me until I thought my feet would wear down to the ankles. Five hours, no breaks, and when it was over, why, I marched back up to Mr. Cohn’s office and dropped a purse full of dance tickets on his desk and said, ‘Should I take all these with me when I go home to lose that fifteen pounds? Or should I take them up the street to the Barbary Coast and try my luck there?’ I tell you, that little bastard’s eyes just about popped through the panes of his spectacles. Right then and there he gave me all the hours I could ever want. More hours than one girl could ever dance in her lifetime. And the moral of the story is, four months later? They were tailoring dresses for me, not the other way around.”
“I see,” Moira said, though she didn’t at all. “And the Olympia was where you met Mr. Taft?”
“Mr. Taft?” Carol Jean said. “Six months later Garfield Taft pulled up to the Olympia with his Rolls-Royce and his fur coat and his pocket full of hundred-dollar bills and I never danced another night in my life. Meeting Mr. Taft’s not the point of the story, honey. The point of the story is this place. Fritz Mundt’s little business venture? This training camp? You, me, your husband and all the others? We’re just window dressing. This place is all about my Garfield. He’s the big-titty redhead everybody wants a piece of, and that, in terms of finding your depth, is all you really need to know.”
They sat for a moment watching the grass ripple in the breeze. On the opposite side of the clearing, a deer picked its way through the trees on dainty hooves. Halfway across it stopped and looked at them, big ears standing out like gramophone horns. Then, without them moving or saying a word, it turned and bounded into the woods.
“Now,” Carol Jean said, “why don’t you ask what you really came to ask?”
“I wasn’t aware I had ulterior motives.”
“You want to know what it’s like,” she said.
Moira said she didn’t follow, and Carol Jean rolled her eyes. “Being married to a Negro?” she said. “Being, what would they call it? In his thrall? Please, honey. I’ve been around the block enough ti
mes to understand the first things other girls want to hear from me.”
“Is that so?” Thinking: Let her run.
“In a lot of ways I expect it’s no different than being married to any of them,” Carol Jean said. She waved a hand to indicate the men in the garage. “They’re all still children, really, but I don’t have to tell you that. The boys, they all call each other, which is just the funniest thing when you think about it.”
“They have their moments,” Moira said.
She blushed a bit when she said it, thinking of Pepper, but Carol Jean cut her a glance that said she’d taken it a different way. “Believe me, honey, you wouldn’t want the trouble,” she said. “People say the most awful things. Everyone assumes I must be some kind of sex fiend, but it’s not like that at all. Maybe at first. But to stick it out through the things we’ve endured, him and I? It’s more than just the way we are in the bedroom. No, I love Garfield Taft because he’s a wonderful man. A wonderful, sweet man who’s already shouldered more than any one person should be expected to bear. At this point, I can’t imagine anything that could pull us apart.”
“I heard you had trouble in Chicago.”
“Oh?” Carol Jean said. “I quite enjoy the big city, myself. I’m sort of a metropolitan girl, I suppose. But then one day Fritz Mundt calls up and says, ‘Go west, young man.’ Not exactly my idea of a fun vacation, but I’d live in an igloo in Antarctica if that’s what it took to be with my husband.”
“You seem very happy,” Moira said, even though it wasn’t true.
“I’d better be,” Carol Jean said. “I gave up everything I had for that man.”
“Do you think they’ll let him win?” Moira said. “If Fritz lands a match with Strangler Lesko, do you believe they’ll really give Mr. Taft a fair shake?”
“Mr. Mundt says so,” Carol Jean said, “and Garfield believes him.”
“Do you?” Moira said.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Carol Jean said, though she made no effort to lower her voice. “Despite what your husband might think, my Garfield will tear this man Lesko limb from limb if they let them in the same wrestling ring. Once he’s heavyweight champion, well, we’ll just sit back and let the world come to us.”
There was something hollow about her words, and Moira realized they sounded very much like what she’d been telling herself the past five years while they were trouping around the country with Boyd Markham’s carnival. Now hearing them from the opposite side of the conversation, she realized how foolish they sounded.
“I admire your confidence,” she said, before her mind could wander too far down that path. “If there’s one thing Pepper knows, though, it’s wrestling. As nothing more than an interested observer, my advice would be that Mr. Taft heeds what he has to say. There could be no harm in it.”
Carol Jean gave her another icy glance. “We’re lucky, then,” she said, “that nobody asked for your advice.”
Moira set her coffee cup down and was about to say her good-byes when Garfield Taft emerged from the darkness of the garage a couple hundred yards up the hill. He walked unsteadily, wearing wrestling trunks and carrying a jacket under his arm, making his way down the hill and across the grass toward them. He was stoop-shouldered and stiff-legged, his head bowed as if he’d just suffered a great hardship. When he got close enough, they saw that someone had done a poor job wiping a mess of blood and dirt off his face. Carol Jean dropped her cup on the table and ran out to meet him. Moira stood up, watching as Carol Jean fit herself underneath Taft’s arm and brought him up the steps. His eyes were bloodshot and his teeth clenched against the effort, but when they got to the top, he turned his head and nodded to Moira.
“Ma’am,” he said.
Carol Jean’s surprise turned to anger as she helped Taft limp across the wide porch. “No harm?” she said over her shoulder. “Is this what no harm looks like to you?”
Then the two of them went through the door into the lodge, closing it behind them, not quite a slam. Moira picked up the tea tray and carried it across the grass to the little cabin where, feeling day drunk and unsure what to do with herself, she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. Fifteen minutes later she woke with a start to the sound of the orange cat clawing at the closed door. The beast wouldn’t stop until she got up and let him inside.
The morning air smelled of pine needles and sang against Taft’s black eye as he made his way down toward the main gate. He was sporting a fresh gash in his chin from the fall he’d taken the previous day, and the way it seemed to buzz in the chill made him think winter was nearly upon them. He had not slept well, and about halfway down the trail he stopped suddenly in his tracks as he became aware of a distant banging sound. More phantom noises, he thought, closing his eyes, whispering a silent prayer he hoped would banish this new racket from his mind. When he opened them, the sound was still there, mirroring the shame and terror that were thudding along in the darkest parts of his heart.
As if God is going to help you, he thought. You don’t think God reads the papers?
He knew this was Foxwood coming home to roost, and it made him feel as scared and vulnerable as a child standing there in the middle of the trail. He hoped a morning jog would take his mind off things. Maybe the phantom sounds would fade if he could distract himself with some hard work. Perhaps he could run his mind into shape the same way he could his body.
When he got to the gate, Fitch and Prichard weren’t there. He kicked dirt and waited a couple of minutes, but the quiet, deserted feeling told him that they weren’t going to show. As he bent to stretch he noticed that the hammering sound had changed: it seemed closer now. He followed the noise up a short rise through a stand of trees to the garage. Pepper Van Dean was up there, nailing heavy boards across the building’s side door. As Taft came up out of the trees, Van Dean stopped hammering and smiled at him like a cat that had a secret.
Taft was used to being despised by white men. Before he was even a teenager, grown adults began looking at him with loathing and fear. Quick to threaten him, put their hands on him, tell him to know his place. As he got bigger, they stopped touching him, but the sidelong glances grew more murderous. Their mouths pressed into hard frowns, eyes shining with something more than rage. At the height of his fame as a wrestler, he knew very well his lifestyle was a thumb in the eye of so-called good, decent folks. He lived that way on purpose, with his fast cars and white mistresses. It only got worse when they put him in the papers as a whoremonger. Worse even than that when he married Carol Jean.
The way Van Dean looked at him was different, though. There wasn’t a scrap of worry or nervousness in his eyes. Taft could tell right away Van Dean didn’t hate him out of dumb cowardice. The little man was not afraid. This was something else.
He walked to the end of the garage and looked around the corner, where the big doors had also been shackled with a hefty chain. Heat rose in his face and he spun around, asking just what the hell Van Dean thought he was doing.
“Day one stuff,” Van Dean said through tight lips. He was holding a nail between his teeth. The bruises on his face were yellowing as they healed. “You can’t be the boss of your own training camp. In fifteen years, I’ve never seen that work out. Not once.”
Taft’s head was still buzzing, and just as Van Dean began to speak, he experienced a moment of vertigo. He took a step back, bracing one arm against the garage.
“This is Wednesday,” he said, sounding shaken and weak even to himself. “Wednesday is for my roadwork and weights.”
“Not anymore,” Van Dean said, taking the nail out of his mouth and plunking it into a coffee can he had sitting next to his toolbox. The hammer swung loosely in his hand. He didn’t seem to be sweating or struggling with the work he’d been doing. “As head coach, I’ll be implementing a new training regimen of my own design. You’re a wrestler, not a strongman, and you’re carrying around too mu
ch muscle as it is. All that bulk takes blood and wind to make it run, and after your little display yesterday, wind looks to be in pretty short supply around here. We aim to lose pounds, not pack them on. As a result, no more weights.”
“You don’t understand,” Taft said, finding his legs now, feeling steadier. “My agreement with Mr. Mundt gives me final authority over my own person and workouts.”
“Right,” Van Dean said, “and that’s why you look like a baked potato with muscleman arms.”
Taft swallowed the urge to knock the little guy’s teeth out. He cleared his throat. “Where are Fitch and Prich?” he said. “Where’s Mr. Mundt?”
“I fired those two ham-and-eggers,” Van Dean said. “As for Fritzie, I figure he’s asleep. It’s still pretty early in the morning.”
Taft did not like the way Van Dean had of pointing out the obvious, as if everyone around him was stupid. He told him this and informed him that he was not stupid.
“Now,” Taft said, trying to get it under control. Trying not to sound hysterical. “Maybe you mean to tell me how I’m supposed to train with no training partners? How I’m supposed to train at all with my wrestling gym all boarded up?”
“That’s the other thing,” Van Dean said. “No more wrestling. Not until you build up a constitution that can handle it without, you know, further episodes.”
Taft’s jaw felt as tight as if he’d spent the last week chewing tire rubber. He put his hands on his hips, then behind his back. “This won’t do,” he said.
Van Dean seemed to only be getting calmer. “Are you really that simple?” he asked. “Are you really dumb enough to believe you can go on curling your little dumbbells and rolling with your chubby training pals and it’ll get you anywhere besides having Stanislaw Lesko whip your ass in front of ten thousand people? Ten thousand white people who all paid their money for the express purpose of seeing you get your big black ass whipped? Would you like that? Is that the end result we’re aiming for here?”
