by Chad Dundas
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.”
“I’m not following you.”
“It’s possible,” Pepper said, “that maybe I’m not as much in their pocket as you think.”
“Are you saying, if I refused to go along with this plan, that you’d back my play?”
Pepper thought about that. Was that what he meant? He decided that it was. “We’d have to keep it between us,” he said.
He could see Taft turning it over in his mind. A minute ago he’d been bursting at the seams to get to New York and wrestle Lesko, but now he seemed grim, unsure what to say. “What do you think would happen to us if we crossed those Chicago boys?” he said after a second.
“Kill us, probably,” Pepper said. “But I did their bidding once before and it feels about the same.”
“Is there more money in it?” Taft asked. “For taking the dive?”
“Is that all you care about?” he said. “The money?”
“Yes,” Taft said, like that was a stupid question, “that’s all I care about. Were you even listening back there? When our wives sat around the dinner table talking about the future?”
“But if you won,” Pepper said, “they’d crawl back to you with their hats in their hands.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Taft said. “It’s Joe Stecher all over again, except this time they’d do worse than prison. They could murder me and say I fell out of bed. People would laugh about it over their morning papers.”
“I think it’d be worth it just to see the looks on their faces,” he said. “A second ago you were—”
“That was before,” Taft snapped, hanging the last word out there loud and long, putting all his hurt into it. “Before I knew this whole thing has all been a joke on me.”
“You’re coming into this match in great shape,” Pepper said, suddenly desperate to make him see. “If I had to guess, I’d wager Lesko isn’t exactly killing himself in training, thinking he’s going to have an easy night. That you’re just going to go out there and lie down for him. We could do this. We could pull it off.”
“You don’t get it,” Taft said. “Even when I win, I don’t get to win. It’s the story of my life: white folks messing with me.”
He took one wide step, turning on his skis. He almost fell but didn’t, and then was moving away, his shoulders hunched and his head down as he drove his legs in front of him. Pepper turned and went after him, the cold creeping under his jacket. A couple of times he called Taft’s name but couldn’t tell if the big man heard him. He was frustrated and angry and had to remind himself not to pull a shoulder out of joint from hacking at the ground with his poles.
They had gone a half mile back toward the hunting camp before they started worrying about the girls. Pepper was watching the snow for tracks but saw none. Moira and Carol Jean had been padding along in the grooves laid by Pepper’s and Taft’s skis, so it was hard to find signs of them. Taft pulled up short and pushed his stocking cap a little higher on his forehead.
“We should have found them by now,” he said.
“Maybe they turned around,” Pepper said, “went back to the cabin.”
It felt strange to be talking to him about other things, as if their conversation farther up the road hadn’t happened at all. For now, he put it out of his mind, telling himself there was still time to have everything out. The idea that Taft could want to beat Strangler Lesko one minute and then back down from it the next confused and upset him. He pushed it out of his mind as they kicked back up the road, hurrying now to make it back to the hunting camp.
Fresh snow began to fall as they sailed under the main gate. Up the hill the cabin was dark and quiet, but they skied right up the porch and called out for Moira and Carol Jean, just to make sure. Getting no answer, they turned back, Pepper starting to feel a bit of panic now that it was getting late, the temperature really dropping, small, hard snowflakes buzzing around him.
He and Taft were both huffing and puffing, Pepper’s thighs burning, twenty minutes out of the camp again before they noticed the spot where a single line of tracks slipped off the road and onto a small game trail. The angle made it so they hadn’t noticed it from the other direction, but now Pepper and Taft plunged down the trail, the going much tougher compared to the flat grade of the road. In another ten minutes they found them, coming up the trail single file, struggling through the snow in boots but no skis, both of them shivering and matted with snow. Carol Jean had fallen and broken a ski, she said, and they’d tried to turn back. Without their skis, though, they kept sinking up to their knees in the powder.
“What were you doing off the road in the first place?” Pepper said. His worry had turned to irritation now that they’d found them. He was worn-out and cold, ready for rest.
“You left us,” Moira said. “We thought we’d try to catch you with a shortcut.”
Snow clung to the strands of hair that stuck out of her hat. She strode past Pepper’s offered hand, wading through the snow back up a short rise to the road.
“What about the skis?” Carol Jean asked.
“Don’t worry about that,” Taft said, taking her by the elbow. “We’ll come down and get them tomorrow.”
They struggled back to the road—moving slowly now, with Pepper and Taft each carrying their skis slung over one shoulder—and hadn’t gone far when headlights appeared behind them. It was Fritz and the others returning from town. There wasn’t room in the car for all of them, but Carol Jean and Moira climbed in the back, collapsing onto the laps of Taft’s training partners. The wrestlers didn’t seem to mind.
“You all look like you’ve made a night of it,” said Fritz from the driver’s seat, eyeing the skis like he wanted to know where they came from.
Pepper thought of mentioning he could say the same of them, all the men except James Eddy looking drunk and stinking of cigars. The car moved slowly through the snow ahead of them and Pepper and Taft took a few minutes to get their skis back on before they started out again. There was no joy in it for them now, and they arrived back at the camp after everyone else had gone inside. His heart dropped as he tried the door to the dark cabin and found it locked. He thought about knocking but couldn’t bring himself to do it with Taft standing there watching. Except when he turned around, Taft was already halfway up the hill. He was still on his skis, head down, arms pumping, a small, lonely figure slowly working his way back toward the garage.
The day before they left for New York, Fritz brought a group of reporters to the hunting camp to have a look at Taft. Everyone told him this was a terrible ide
a, but he wouldn’t listen. Moira had noticed a change in him since they’d gotten the contracts signed for the match with Strangler Lesko. He was jollier now, but more like the hardheaded young man she remembered from their Chicago years: the hardscrabble miner’s son who had come from nothing and had been so sure of his own talents. No one could tell him a thing. He informed them of his plan over a dinner he’d called at the lodge, and afterward he and Pepper argued about it behind the locked door of his office. Moira could hear the muffled sounds of their voices all the way from downstairs. When they emerged, both men were sweaty and red-faced but Fritz held on to a small smile that told her he wouldn’t be swayed.
A cold morning a week later, she watched from the window of the cabin as they arrived: four husky men piling out of a car with typewriter boxes knocking against their knees. The wide-open wilderness seemed to unnerve the reporters and they clustered around the car, smoking and stretching, pulling their overcoats tighter against the wind. Fritz had driven them from the train station and he stood making dramatic gestures with his hands as he pointed out landmarks. All at once their eyes fell on the road. One of them said something and they all flipped out skinny notebooks. Half a minute later Taft and Pepper jogged through the main gate wearing undershirts and long pants. They didn’t acknowledge the reporters, but Pepper turned his head and saw Moira in the window of the cabin. He waved to her as they trotted up the path toward the garage. Once they were gone, one of the reporters said something out the side of his mouth and they all laughed, turning away from the wind like a gaggle of nervous geese.
Moira had barely talked to Pepper since their Thanksgiving ski trip. At least once a day he walked up from the garage to knock on the door and ask to be let in. When he did, Moira would light a cigarette and sit down at the small table, concentrating on being very still. A couple of times she thought he was going to break the door down, and even more often she had to shush the tiny voice inside herself telling her to open it. The times they had been to dinner in the lodge they sat stiffly across from each other and made polite conversation, passing the potatoes and all that. When it was over, she went back to the cabin and he walked with Taft up to the garage.
