Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  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.

  Moira forked some chicken into her mouth. “This isn’t bad,” she said.

  Pepper smiled at her, and a moment later he was eating and laughing with his mouth full like nothing had happened. Nothing had happened, she reminded herself. Still, she felt like a gavel had dropped in her mind, a verdict rendered. He had spoken just one word, barely moved, but she suddenly felt slapped in the face by a truth that had been traveling with them since they left New York. They were not normal people. They would not take the money and squirrel it away for a rainy day. They would not live simply in a cabin by the lake, making babies and strolling through the trees. It was not in them.

  A week later she woke in the dark of early morning to find him gone, his side of the bed cold to the touch. She sat up in her nightgown, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and went out to look for him. He was not at the kitchen table or in the front porch rocker, where he sometimes sat when he couldn’t sleep. The outhouse stood empty, its door swinging in the breeze. She was about to pull her boots on and hike up to the lake when he emerged from the woods, shirtless and grinning from a run.

  It gave her a charge to see him moving again, and for a few days she rode it like a hot streak at cards. In the mornings they sat out on the porch and let the sun restore them, watching tiny lizards chase each other across rocks at the edge of the woods. They made love in the afternoons with the windows flung open and took evening dips in the lake, shouting from the cold, Moira feeling the occasional fish brush against her legs.

  Then one evening she caught him doing tackling drills in the backyard, wearing the ridiculous two-tone wrestling shoes Fritz had given him before they left Montana. Leaving little S curves in the dirt with his back foot as he glided across the open space, his brow furrowed and his mouth tight. Looking good and quick and full of life. He didn’t notice her standing in the window and she backed away, sinking into one of their two kitchen chairs.

  He tried to laugh it off when he came in, saying he was just staying fit, knocking the cobwebs out of his muscles after so much time doing nothing. She knew better. Wrestling was back in his blood after the match with Lesko. It was still part of him, and he couldn’t ignore it any more than a horse could ignore the urge to run. He announced he was going to the lake for a soak, and she smoked three cigarettes in fifteen minutes before going after him.

  As she hiked, she wondered if it had been a mistake to tell Pepper about Lesko’s visit. At first she had no intention of sharing it with him, but in those first days he just seemed so low. Finally she came out with it, hoping it might help him spring back to life. She recounted it as they rode the train south from Baltimore, Christmas wreaths hanging in all the windows. She left out the part about Lesko offering him a job, and Pepper listened to her as if he didn’t quite believe any of it. When she was done, he settled back into his seat looking content for the first time since after their match, and for a while she believed she’d done the right thing.

  She reached the lake and found him sunk to his chin, twenty feet from shore, his arms making little circles just beneath the surface. His boots and tights were piled on a rock and she sat next to them to pull off her own shoes. The gravel of the bank was cool under her bare feet and she stayed there a moment, listening to the cackling and knocking of unseen birds.

  “I thought I’d be better at this,” she said, keeping her hands folded on her knees, but saying it loud enough that her voice wasn’t lost in all the wilderness.

  “Better at what?” he said, treading water, tipping his head back a little to keep his mouth above the surface.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Doing nothing? Sitting watching the sunset like a couple of old codgers?”

  He showed her the grin she loved. “Is that what we’re doing?” he said. “Rattling around like a couple of beans in a tin can?”

  She got up and stood with her feet in the shallows. Sand and green moss twisting around her toes. “I know what you’re up to,” she said.

  He took two strokes to a place his feet could touch and crept out of the water, pulling on his tights so he could stand beside her. His skin cold against her arm. “There’s got to be another promoter that would take me on,” he said. “Curly or Pfeffer, somebody. There’s no shortage of guys who want to do Lesko and Stettler harm.”

  It occurred to her that, since she’d kept the news clippings from him, he didn’t even know how right he was. He was more famous now than he’d ever been as champion. All it would take would be for them to drive into town and give some local reporter the scoop of a lifetime. In a couple of days—a week, maybe—the big promoters from New York and Chicago would come calling.

  “Is that what you want?” she said. “Is that what we want?”

  The breeze rippled the water against their legs. Freezing but nice. “You saw me against Lesko,” he said. “I was right there.”

  She tried to smile back at him but didn’t quite make it. She’d watched the match from a balcony seat, a handkerchief crushed in one hand. During the bout, the whole arena roiled and churned like some great animal, and once an usher had to come down the aisle to tell her to please sit down, though she had no memory of getting out of her chair.

  It was electric joy to watch him wrestle again after all those years. Running hard and heavy each step of the way with the world’s heavyweight champion. She was still bursting with pride over it, but she’d also seen enough to know she never wanted to see him wrestle again. Despite the things Lesko had said and the glowing accounts in the papers, Moira knew Pepper wasn’t the same man he was as champion. No one in the world had watched him compete more than she had. She knew his every move
by heart. She understood the easy grace with which he moved around the ring. His bottomless strength and wind. The man she saw in New York that night was good, but he wasn’t Pepper. She could tell his leg had never quite come back after Fritz broke it. He was just a step slower, a second more tentative. He was okay for busting up railroad toughs and fieldworkers in nickel challenge matches, but he wasn’t young or quick enough to compete with the best professionals anymore. If he went back, even to carnival wrestling or the crooked stuff Fritz and Stettler were pitching now, eventually some rough, headstrong kid would come along and hurt him.

  It broke her heart to tell him all that now, but she did, and when she was done she kissed him. They pulled apart and he was quiet for a long time.

  “You talked to O’Shea,” he said finally, “and I bet you made him tell you everything.”

  “I did,” she said.

  At first she couldn’t believe the things the gangster had told her about her gambling debts, but in time she knew it was true. It was she who had broken them. She was a good gambler, one of the best, but nobody won all the time. Those days when Pepper was champion were such a whirlwind, there was nobody keeping track of the ledger. At some point she supposed she’d fallen into the same trap as all the wrestlers, imagining they would all stay young forever and the money would just flow and flow. She wasn’t furious with herself over it anymore, or furious with Pepper for keeping it from her for so long. Now she just felt sorry. For who, she’d couldn’t decide.

  “All that money you lost,” he said, “I never asked you to stop playing.”

  “No,” she said. “But maybe you should have.”

  She felt a tear sprout at the corner of her eye and she touched her face to stop it. He saw it and slipped an arm around her waist, pulling her close. “Hey,” he said. “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. It never did. All I’m asking for is the same treatment. If I’ve got one shot left, I’m just saying we should think about it.”