by Chad Dundas
“We don’t even know if Strangler Lesko will agree to wrestle me,” Taft said. “We’ve got no contracts, no bout agreements, nothing we’re even working toward.”
“Well, that’s a fantastic way of looking at things,” Van Dean said. “If that’s the case, then I suppose we all might as well just go on being unbelievable fat-asses.”
This time Taft did swing at him, a right hand aimed for the bridge of the shorter man’s nose. Except, when the punch got there, Van Dean was gone and Taft’s fist collided with the rough wood of the door. A sharp jab of pain bolted up to his elbow as he drew it back. He turned to where Van Dean had slipped a step to the side, still not breathing hard, still not sweating, still holding the hammer.
“To hell with you,” Taft said, shaking the pain out of his hand. “I quit.”
Van Dean gave him that small man’s smirk of his. “Quit what?” he said. “You quit not working hard? You quit taking handouts from Fritz Mundt for a match even you say might not happen? You quit having every physical advantage and none of the heart to make it worth a damn?”
Taft shoved him, sending him skittering backward, his shoulders bouncing off the side of the garage and the hammer clattering to the ground. The surprise that bloomed in Van Dean’s eyes boiled quickly into anger and he took a long, deliberate step forward. He was so short, Taft almost smiled. They stood there staring into each other’s faces, each daring the other to do something until the sound of a door slamming echoed across the hunting camp lawn. The hired girl came out onto the back porch of the lodge and began beating a hallway runner with a long wooden spoon, watching them with the bored eyes of a housewife keeping tabs on the neighborhood. Taft took a step back and Van Dean reset his shoulders, smoothing the front of his shirt with his hands. He gave Taft a long look, ferocious hatred plain on his face, before he stooped to retrieve the hammer.
Ten minutes later they both walked into Fritz Mundt’s office and found him sitting behind his desk, wearing a bathrobe. He rubbed a palm across his face as if still trying to wipe away the sleep and pulled the bell to call for coffee. The toes of his slippers stuck out underneath the front of the desk, playing a quiet drumbeat against the carpet. James Eddy perched in the room’s sitting area looking as put-together as ever, as if he had been up primping since four that morning. Taft and Van Dean took chairs facing them.
“This is a first,” Fritz said. “This is a new one on me.”
“You brought me in,” Van Dean said. “This is my way.”
“We brought you in to train our wrestler,” Fritz said. “Not shut down training camp on your first day.”
“Second day,” Van Dean said. “The first day was the day your wrestler fainted after one of the lighter workouts I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some light ones.”
The way Van Dean twisted his mouth around the word wrestler needled Taft’s gut. “Did you ever think,” he said, turning slightly in his seat, “that you were only hired because nobody else would agree to move out here to play Daniel Boone?”
“Far as I know,” Van Dean said, “they brought me in because I’m one of the best scientific wrestlers in the world, pound for pound, and your technique—even when you’re not unconscious—is lousy.”
Taft appealed to Fritz. “Look,” he said. “You told me to move into the boonies. I did it. You told me to ride out to Washington and whip Jack Sherry. I did it. Now, if you can get me a shot at Strangler Lesko, make it happen. Show me something on paper and I promise you I’ll work as hard as anyone to get ready.”
“Right,” Van Dean said. “Every heavyweight I ever knew was just about to start training hard.”
“So long as our wrestling room is boarded up, no one is working hard,” Fritz said, scowling. “Frankly, I’m as stumped as Mr. Taft. What are you proposing we do here if we’re not wrestling and we’re not working out?”
“I propose we run,” Van Dean said. “I propose we run and run and run and run.”
Taft snorted. “Show me contracts,” he said again. “Until then, I don’t see the point of killing myself chasing the great white whale.”
“I see some logic in it.”
This was Eddy, out of his chair and strolling over to join the group. He lit a cigarette, leaning one hip against the side of Fritz’s desk, a white swirl of smoke curling up into the air around him.
“You’re never going to out-muscle Lesko,” he said, “so you better outwork him, isn’t that it?”
Van Dean nodded, though his face said the last thing he wanted to do was agree with Eddy.
“Be that as it may,” Fritz said, going along deliberately as if he was annoyed with the interruption. “I’m not sure how comfortable I feel committing the daily operating funds to a training camp that’s not operating daily.”
“He’s not ready,” Van Dean said. “You put him on the mat with me or anybody else worth spit, it’ll be a lot uglier than things got yesterday. It’ll be a lot uglier than Jack Sherry.”
Taft raised his arms to Fritz as if to show the size of his headache.
“Pepper,” Fritz said, straining for a sensible tone. “Is there anything we can do here?”
Van Dean smiled again. The same smile Taft saw outside the garage that morning. The same look in his eye, contemptuous and chiding. A deeper hurt lurking in there, too, and for the first time he started to wonder if testing wills with this man was an unwise thing to do.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Van Dean said. “I’ll strip those boards off that garage and we can go back to work on wrestling the day the illustrious and celebrated Mister Garfield Taft beats me in a footrace.”
Fritz and Taft both scoffed and Eddy clapped his hands. Van Dean just went on, laying it out. Same as the old routine, he said: they would run from the camp down the road to town and back. If Taft made it back to camp before Van Dean did, he would open up the wrestling room. If not, he said, they do it all over the next day and the day after and the day after, until Taft beat him.
When he was finished, no one spoke. Taft nodded once, definitively, and stood up.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ve already got my gear on.”
“What?” Fritz said. “Now?”
“You sure about that?” Van Dean said. A muscle in his face quivering as it had the moment Taft had shoved him against the garage. It pleased him each time he could do something to knock him off track a bit, and he reminded himself to try it more often.
“Sooner we get this foolishness over with, the sooner we can get back to real business,” he said.
Van Dean stood. Eddy smiled like a man attending a play that turned out to be much funnier than he’d expected.
“All right,” Van Dean said. “Let’s get to it, though please allow me to assure you, Mr. Taft, the day you beat me will not be today.”
“I had a dog like you once,” Taft said. “You remind me a lot of him.”
Fritz pulled the bell again, and when the hired girl showed up apologizing for being late with the coffee, he snapped at her to forget about it. Instead, he asked her to lay him out some proper clothes.
The race began with Eddy standing at the hunting camp’s main gate, shouting, “Mark . . . set . . . go!” and waving a handkerchief. Taft started out at a normal speed, plodding down the dirt road into the trees. He looked back once to see Van Dean clipping at his heels and, behind that, Fritz hurrying down the front steps of the lodge, pulling on a jacket.
During the first hundred yards, Taft was surprised to find that Van Dean kept pace with him, not lagging behind like Fitch and Prichard and not racing ahead like he imagined he might try to do. Van Dean just ran alongside him, talking. This was maybe the biggest shock, since Taft had begun to think of Van Dean as the kind of guy who kept quiet until he had something snide to say. Now he wouldn’t shut up, lecturing Taft about the land around them, about the trees and the animals they saw as they ra
n. Taft realized he knew nothing about Van Dean aside from the fact he’d won the world’s lightweight title while Taft was working his way to contender status among the heavies. He glanced over at the little man, running, smiling at nothing.
“Shut up,” Taft said to him, his voice already sounding a little strained. “Shut up.”
Van Dean didn’t acknowledge him in any way, just kept prattling on about crops that might grow up there. Sugar beets, Van Dean said, would thrive. Taft tucked his chin into his chest and willed himself to go faster.
It was shaping into one of those tricky fall days when mornings went from chilly to uncomfortably hot as soon as the sun had a chance to warm the ground. They were barely out of sight of the hunting camp when sweat popped out on Taft’s arms and forehead and a burning sensation spread through his lungs. Maybe Van Dean was pushing the pace after all, tricking him into running a little bit faster than normal. As an experiment, he slowed a bit and noticed that Van Dean deliberately stayed alongside him, saying something else about beets, sounding like a grammar school lesson book.
Soon Taft started to feel woozy and heavy, a kind of drunken dizziness spinning behind his eyes. He tried not to think about sounds that were not there or about fainting spells or the cold, dark hallways of Foxwood Prison, where the night after his arrival the guards hauled him down to a small exercise room and locked him in with five other prisoners. He knocked two of them down before their numbers overwhelmed him, with the guards watching from a catwalk above the room. He struggled to keep his mind in the moment, concentrating on the ground in front of him, making sure to step over the chunky, jagged rocks that scattered across the road.
He planned to lose Van Dean at the hill. If it was wind he wanted to see, Taft would show him he had it pretty good for a big guy. When the grade of the road began to increase, he lengthened his stride and dug in, pumping his arms, feeling the pressure in his ankles and shins as he picked up the pace. A funny, metallic taste rose in the back of his throat, and whereas before his legs had felt leaden and stiff, they now turned rubbery and unresponsive. Van Dean acted like he hadn’t noticed. He just ran and talked, not sounding the slightest bit out of breath. These bushes might sprout edible berries come spring, he said. Those trees would smell like vanilla if you pressed your nose close to the bark.
When he started in about snow—about different kinds of snow—Taft felt like shouting at him to leave him alone. But he could not shout: He was out of breath from the charge up the hill, nearing the top now with Van Dean asking him if he’d ever been skiing or snowshoeing.
“I highly doubt that you have,” he was saying, voice pleasant. “I know your people aren’t much for cold weather, but the winter sports are some of the best for strengthening the lungs. Good for the blood, too. Why, after we get a couple months training at this altitude in some good, cold weather, Strangler Lesko won’t be able to keep pace with you for more than five or ten minutes.”
That’s when Taft stopped running. He doubled over, hands on hips. “Enough,” he said, wiping away a string of spit. “Goddamn it. Enough.”
He felt like he could barely keep his feet. Bracing the fingertips of one hand on the ground, he steadied himself and tried to breathe. Van Dean turned around and walked over, squatting in the dirt next to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. Taft wanted to shake him off—he wanted to slug him again—but he didn’t have the energy.
“You want to know why we’re really doing this?” Van Dean said. “Why we’re going to keep doing this until you’re ready to start real training? Because what I saw in that wrestling room yesterday was offensive to me. I don’t care if you want to walk around like some kind of nightclub star with your white wife and your fancy outfits, thinking the world has a blank check waiting for you because you used to be somebody, because at one time in your life sharpies and the after-hours crowd found you amusing. If that’s how you want to play this, I couldn’t care less. But let me tell you something. There’s a million guys who would kill their own mothers to be in your position right now. For you to get out of prison, Johnny-come-lately, and luck your way into a shot at the world’s heavyweight title? You took somebody’s spot, Mr. Taft. There’s a guy in Iowa or Pennsylvania or Ohio right now murdering himself in some wrestling gym, trying to get where you are, and you spend your time lollygagging? Like you don’t give a shit? That’s sickening to me. You’re standing on somebody’s dream. You stole it and you don’t even care enough to try hard. That makes you about the lowest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. I won’t stand for it.”
Taft blinked at the ground. When Van Dean finally stopped talking, all he could hear was his own breathing. “A million guys,” he said. “You mean guys like you?”
Van Dean didn’t answer him, and now it was Taft’s turn to smile. Lifting his hands out of the dirt, putting them on his hips. “News flash, asshole,” he said. “Those million guys? They aren’t here, and they’ll never be. Just one. Just me. Just me, because I deserve it. You hear me?”
Again Van Dean didn’t answer, and when he turned around, the little man wasn’t there. He was fifty yards down the trail, still running, facing straight ahead, his arms and legs driving away.
For the next two weeks Taft didn’t show up for their runs. In fact, Pepper didn’t see him at all. Part of him was glad for it, since the break gave the swelling in his face a chance to go down and his ribs the opportunity to rest to the point where he didn’t have to think about them every time he took a deep breath. The first couple of mornings that Taft didn’t meet him at the gate, he’d gone up to the lodge and pounded on the door until Taft’s wife—the big-bosomed redhead whose name he couldn’t remember—came to the door and said the mister wasn’t feeling well. Used those words, like Taft was the lord of the manor. Both days the woman ended the conversations by reminding him to say hello to Moira for her, a hopeful tone in her voice that put him off his guard. It offset his annoyance with a pang of sympathy for her, so he just nodded and said yes, ma’am, he’d be sure to do that.
The tenth night he sat up by the cabin window, watching lights go on and off in the lodge. The unfinished part of the house was spooky in the moonlight, the open rooms and bare studs sticking out in a way that made it look like a decaying corpse. A couple of times he saw a shadow too big to be anybody but Taft moving behind the shades. Moira eventually dragged him away from his perch and they played cards by candlelight at the enamel-topped table. The mangy old cat she was intent on adopting resting on the windowsill, pressing its nose against the glass, looking for ghouls in the dark. They played two-handed poker and she won every time. Then they played go fish and she won every time. When she suggested they start in on rummy, he went to find his tobacco pouch.
“Are we a threesome now?” he said, leaning against the sink, jutting his chin at the cat.
“It’s just a cat,” she said. “He comes and goes as he pleases. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“I need you to go up to the lodge tomorrow and find out what he’s doing over there,” he said.
She dealt another hand to his empty chair. “Who do I look like?” she said. “The Scarlet Pimpernel?”
He had no idea what that meant. “If I could just put my brain in that body, we might have the greatest scientific wrestler the world has ever known,” he said.
“Isn’t that the idea?”
“The woman likes you,” he said. “She’ll talk to you.”
They played, and Moira made gin while Pepper was trying to decide between hearts and spades. He grinned at her and said she must be just about the smartest woman alive. She didn’t fall for that. She told him what was going on up at the lodge was none of their business, and besides, she felt too sorry for that woman to use her like that.
“If I’m being honest, she reminds me a little of myself.”
“Look who’s sprouted a conscience all the sudden,” he said. “I’ll have you know it is my busine
ss so long as I’m in charge around here.”
“You know exactly what’s going on,” she said. “Taft gets out of jail and he and Carol Jean need money, just like another man-and-wife team I could mention. They find Fritz Mundt and James Eddy, and for a while the setup probably seems pretty sweet. Then along comes you, Mr. Hard-Charger, and in the very first two days you run him damn near to death. I might stay in the house, too, if that’s what happened to me when I went to work.”
“Work,” he said. “That’s what it’s supposed to be. I’m getting paid to do a job, and it’s not to traipse around picking wildflowers.”
“As far as I’ve heard, the getting paid part is still theoretical,” she said. “As is the match you’re supposed to be training for.”
“You taking his side on this?”
“I’m just saying, try to see it from their shoes. It must be quite a shock,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand. “Now, tell me what else is bothering you.”
He sighed, tossing his cards in, and told her about Taft collapsing in the garage that first day. Pepper had been in a million wrestling gyms. He’d seen a million bad things happen. He’d seen guys grind off the bottoms of their feet on horsehair mats. He saw a guy lose an eye after taking a thumb during tie-up drills. Once he even saw a guy break his own neck on a takedown gone wrong. He’d seen guys pass out from exhaustion, and what happened to Taft in the garage didn’t look anything like that. It looked like something else. He just didn’t know what.
“I tried to ask her about the trouble in Chicago,” Moira said. “She acted like she didn’t know what I meant. You think there’s something else going on with them?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is, if I keep letting Taft do the old soft-shoe around the gym with his yes-men, he’ll get himself murdered by Strangler Lesko. Then we’ll all look like laughingstocks.”
