Read Online Champion of the World by Chad Dundas - Free Book Online Page B

match, but he climbed up the stairs, limped through the ropes, and lasted nearly an hour before Windham pinned him in straight falls. The whole thing stunk to high heaven, but he wouldn’t tell her what it meant or why it happened. Not then, not now, not ever; he just kept giving her the same sad smile and telling her that Fritz hadn’t intended to do it. It had been a mix-up, that’s all.
    It was an obvious lie, and she became more convinced of it after the bout when Blomfeld refused to let Windham wait for Pepper to recover so they could have an immediate rematch. Instead, he sent the new champion on the road. A few months later, when Windham had already lost the title to someone else and it was clear Pepper’s leg wasn’t healing as fast as they’d hoped, Blomfeld released him from his contract. Moira was sure some other promoter would snap them up, but none did. Month after month they waited for a new contract offer, a comeback match. By the time they realized it wasn’t coming, it was too late. Too many bills and mortgage payments had piled up around them. To pay off their creditors, they sold the house and the car and, eventually, everything else. The day the new owners turned them out of the house was one of the saddest of her life, yet she’d still had no idea how much she’d grow to miss it all.
    When they got to the end of the long driveway carrying their suitcases in their hands, they found Boyd Markham chewing on a cigar, one shoe propped up on the bumper of a Model T Ford. The carnival barker put them up in a swanky downtown hotel for two nights while he wooed them and, once Pepper’s contract with the circus was signed, loaded them on a train back east. The finality of it didn’t hit her until she saw their new apartment at the Hotel St. Agnes in Brooklyn. It was a shabby, small space with cracking plaster walls and grit-streaked windows—the kind of place where even on the brightest summer day it was impossible to get enough light inside. The upside was, they were barely there. Even after she got used to the greasy snow-blind feeling of the road, she never forgot the view from the bay window in their big house in Chicago. She never forgot what it was like to slip under the covers of their king-sized bed and feel every muscle and joint in her body relax.
    She even missed the boredom and the awkwardness of trying to fit in with people who ultimately wanted no part of her. At the time, she’d felt belittled by it—and disturbed by the fact her gambling no longer seemed to satisfy her in the same way—but now she knew it was just the feeling of security, strange and distressing to her because she’d never felt it before. Now she understood that if trying to make friends with rich women and betting against the Cubs was what passed for trouble in your life, you had no troubles at all.
    She wanted it back. She wanted all of it back.

    P epper went on just before intermission, the stagehands wheeling the rigging for the gallows frame out into the main ring. She watched him stand with the clowns in the dark, his chin tucked and his chest heaving as he took a few deep breaths, hands groping his stomach underneath the furls of fabric. A scratchy anticipationcrept under her skin, putting a watery creak in her knees. Still, she willed herself not to look away. Maybe she imagined that simply by being there, just by watching, she could will him to survive the cruel physics of the trick, which said he was supposed to break his neck if he tried to do the drop weighing as much as he did.
    The stagehands brought out the torches and planted them in the dirt on either side of the gallows, a somber silence filling the tent as people saw the noose. She was vaguely aware of Markham going through his normal spiel, but didn’t catch the words. When the ringmaster reached his cue, Pepper and the clowns shuffled through the curtain, blinking out of the darkness as the band