CHAPTER TEN
The general fell dead. The echo of the gunshot rang in Sarat’s ears. In a few seconds a wailing siren began to sound from the Blue fortress. Sarat lifted herself from where she lay. She turned in the direction of the Red country. In the darkness, she ran.
Soon she found the entrance to one of the rebels’ tunnels. She scrambled through the underground clearing as the sirens blared above. The tunnel was low and dank and wholly unlit; she crawled blind.
A half-mile south, the tunnel broke at the foot of a steep incline. She emerged from a thatch-camouflaged cover to find the sky streaked with the red of tracer rounds. Something moved near the trees to the west, a mongrel from the border towns in search of food, perhaps. She watched as the gunners in the watchtowers eviscerated the brush.
Unseen, she scrambled over the hillside. She crossed empty creek beds and the rotted cores of bee gum trees. In the weeks before she set out into the forest, Sarat had studied the land: learned its folds and the crevices, the places where the cover was thickest.
In a few hours she reached the hills outside Chatsworth, where she knew the Blues would soon send a raid party. Most of those who remained in places like Chatsworth—the border towns that bore the brunt of the Northerners’ incursions—were holdouts. Everyone else had gone south, mostly to the high-rise slums that circled Atlanta. But it was the last stubborn few in the border towns who moved the street signs every week to confuse the soldiers, who spat on the floor at the very mention of Blues.
She found her old Tik-Tok where she’d left it, by the side of Highway 76. As she traveled southwest into the protective embrace of Georgia, Sarat raised her head to the sky and screamed, victorious.
She took the small backroads home, arriving in the early evening. Alight with adrenaline, she walked east from the edge of the woodshed into the forest. She walked carefully, counting her steps until she counted five hundred. At the last step she stood in a clearing in the woods, near the riverbank. She knelt down and dug into the dirt. She buried her rifle. She left no markings of any kind, and padded the dirt until it was flat and plain. Then she walked back home.
From the edge of the yard she saw the maid Karina in the kitchen, kneading dough and humming “Jacob’s Ladder.” There was something about the woman she found foreign—more than her faraway place of origin in the Bangladeshi Isles, which left no markers on her mannerisms or accent. She smiled too often, carried herself too comfortably in a home and around a family that was not hers. Sarat could see that Simon had started taking a liking to her; she saw how his eyes and smile widened when she was near. She knew the woman had done nothing wrong, and yet Sarat felt a rabid urge to remind her that she was just a maid: that she was not of the Chestnuts, and never would be.
Sarat stepped between the trees and down to the water. She walked into the river. The water felt good against her skin. The night before, when she ran from the edge of Halfway Branch, she’d tripped and stumbled through a thistle bush that left cuts all over her arms and shoulders. Now the places where her skin was broken came alive, burning like flicks of oil against a hot iron pan. But this too, in its own way, felt good.
When she had walked far enough into the river, and the ground swept down and away from her feet, Sarat undressed. She let the river take the soiled clothes. She floated weightless, naked but for Albert Gaines’s charm around her neck. The river smelled of dirt and algae but it also smelled of her: the stink of a week unwashed; a vinegar effluent that grew in the spaces under her arms and between her legs. She loved her scent, carried it like her own newborn child. Now, with her eyes wide open, she sank deep into the water and gave it to the river.
She felt the eyes of the guard in the tower, watching. There was only one tower along the quarantine wall with an unobstructed view of the Chestnuts’ property. Therein sat a young Southern State private, charged with keeping the infected Carolinians from getting out.
When the family had first moved to the Charity House, Sarat refused to sleep another night under the watch of guard towers. Finally Albert Gaines took her to meet the Free Southerner who manned the tower nearest her house. He turned out to be a hopeless little boy from the Georgia coast; a kid one year younger than Sarat who’d lied about his age to volunteer.
It didn’t take long for Sarat to understand that the boy, and all the other boys dispatched to babysit Carolina’s living dead, was both Red-blooded and harmless. And in the months that followed, as she lay flat in the forest eying him through her rifle scope, she learned something else too: the watchtower guards were blind. It was a blindness fed by boredom and fear, by having at once too much and too little to observe. Often, when Sarat lay watching, the sleepy-eyed boy in the tower looked right back at her, and didn’t see a thing.
The river took her smell. It loosened the grime caught in the hairs along her arms and along her legs. When she was very young her father told her that some of her ancestors were once buried near the banks of the Mississippi River, back when it was still corseted with levees. But eventually the river broke loose and took all the nearby houses and the farmland and even the dead in their graves. The river moves, he said, and as it moves it takes.
When she emerged from the water she found a fresh set of clothes waiting on a rock by the bank. Dana sat by the side of the woodshed.
There lay a straight razor and a small bowl of eucalyptus cream set atop a stump. Sarat sat by the river and shaved her head clean. She sat for a while watching the river move, savoring the crisp coolness of the cream against her scalp, the air against her skin. Then she stood up and dressed.
She joined her sister by the woodshed. There was almost a foot of difference in height between them, Sarat pushing six-foot-five and still, a year short of adulthood, not sure if she had another spurt in her.
She sat by her sister’s side. Dana’s hair smelled of coconuts and jasmine; it curled the way waves curl, tinting the sunlight chocolate. Sarat could already see the boys in Augusta leering.
“You should go inside and say hello,” Dana said. “Simon’s in a good mood today.”
“He saying much?” Sarat asked.
“Echoes what you tell him. But it’s not nothing.”
Sarat shook her head. “Give me a minute,” she said. “I still got lightning inside me.” She held up her right hand, which shivered like a picked string.
Dana wrapped her arm around her sister’s shoulder. Sarat leaned over and curled up like a child with her head on her sister’s lap.
“Beautiful girl,” said Dana. “I’m so glad you’re home.”
The sisters saw Karina in the garden. They watched her hang clothes out on the line by the riverbank. She pretended not to see them sitting by the woodshed. She sang as she worked: the same old hymn she always sang, playing her own choir, echoing each line—We are we are, climbing climbing.
“She’s taking good care of him,” Dana said.
“I don’t trust her,” Sarat replied.
“What’s she done?”
“Nothing she’s done, just something about her. I don’t know what she really thinks of us. What she really wants.”
“What do you care what she thinks of us?” asked Dana. “She’s just working here, nothing more.”
“She’s in our home, isn’t she? Anyway, she keeps talking to Simon and anyone else who’ll listen about how she doesn’t care who wins, North or South, just as long as there’s no more war. Like she’d be happy if the Blues marched on Atlanta tomorrow. You know her parents live up in the North? Moved there right before the war started.”
“So? Wouldn’t you, if you had no stake in it?”
“Nobody has no stake in it,” said Sarat.
NIGHT FELL. A humid film spread over the air. Sarat awoke from a fitful nap with her sister’s hand still caressing her head. She heard the sound of a motorboat engine in the distance, a rebel skiff from further inland.
“Why’d you let me sleep?” said Sarat.
“Wasn’t long,” Dana replied. “You were barely out an hour.”
As the skiff landed, the sisters went to the woodshed and retrieved the most recent shipment of locked boxes. They carried them to the waiting boat.
The boy at the helm of the boat, a New Zouave from southern Alabama, thanked them. He took the boxes without checking their contents, knowing the arms promised him would be there, knowing from experience that the Chestnuts were as reliable a conduit as any along the Savannah smugglers’ trail.
They watched him leave upriver. When he was gone and the grogginess of interrupted sleep had left her, Sarat became aware of the hunger eating at her stomach. The last of the apricot mush she ate in the forest had gone through her. She yearned for okra swimming in oil; pigeon grilled over charcoal; the cinnamon burn of tub-brewed Joyful.
“Let’s go to Augusta,” she said.
DURING THE WAR Atlanta was the heart of the South but Augusta supplied the blood. Ever since the storms and rising seas swallowed much of the eastern coast, it was this place that functioned as the Red country’s most vital port. Toward the end of every month, a hundred and fifty miles to the southeast, the foreign shipping vessels arrived from the far side of the world. The ships’ captains waited there for reef pilots to come and guide the hulking freighters around the remains of the submerged coastal cities and into the Augusta docks.
In anticipation of the ships’ monthly bounty, an assortment of opportunists descended on the city: ship hands, smugglers, rebels, reef pilots, foreign captains and their crews. They were joined by sailors on leave from the impotent Southern navy, whose skeleton fleet had long ago surrendered the ocean to the Blues. For a few days every month, the port’s riverside bars and brothels and boardinghouses hummed.
At dusk the dockmaster flipped a switch and a string of Christmas lights hung along the boardwalk came to life. The boardwalk sat atop the flattened head of the Reynolds Street levee, which rose twenty feet high. The river-facing side of the levee was sheer, except in the places where stairs led to the reef pilots’ house and the wharf. On the city-facing side, the concrete slope was of a gentle gradient, and it was on this side where, in the early morning, many of the passed-out drunks could be found sleeping.
BY THE TIME Sarat and Dana arrived in Augusta, the bars overflowed—not only with those waiting on the aid ships but also with tourists from all over the Mag, in town to watch the Yuffsy.
The sisters went first to the Hotel D’Grub near 12th Street. There was a gaggle of dockhands and Atlanta boys gathered on the lawn of the repurposed Baptist church, drunk and cheerful. In the center of the lawn there stood an ancient Chevy fossil truck, mounted on bricks. The truck was brown with rust, its hood sheared off, a charcoal grill in the place where the engine used to be.
Billows of smoke rose from the grill. The retired freight captain Isaac, who ran the Hotel D’Grub, stood between the truck’s lightless eye sockets, a palmetto fan in his hand. He was a large man, shirtless, sweaty but serene under his skipper hat despite the barrage of orange embers the truck spat in his direction. The smoke climbed from the blackened trays and made of the redbrick church behind it a distant dream.
“How are you, old man?” said Sarat.
The captain turned. “Well now, if it isn’t the only real goddamn men in Augusta. Make way, for Christ’s sake!” he said, kicking at two Atlanta college boys slumped on garden recliners near the grill. “It’s a zoo around this time of the month—you know how it gets when there’s money to be had.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dana. “We’re gonna go inside and clean you out anyway. Haven’t had a decent meal in a week.”
The captain nodded. “Go on in. I’ll send some steak your way.”
Sarat laughed. “Ain’t nothing like that flying steak you got here. You shoot them down yourself?”
“I’ll shoot you down, you keep running your mouth. Flying steak’s better than none.”
The captain pointed to the grand bullethead windows of the church’s street-side facade. The original windows had been smashed long ago in one of the riots following the massacre at Fort Jackson, the insides stripped and looted down to the pews and the floorboards.
“Your friend Bragg is in there, by the way,” he said.
“The old one or the young one?” asked Sarat.
“Ha! The old one can’t get up to take a piss nowadays. It’s the kid. Got his whole entourage with him too.”
“Christ,” said Sarat. “Well that’s no fun.”
The captain wiped the beaded sweat from his forehead and wiped his hand on the side of his jeans. “He gives you any trouble, you let me know. I’ll go in there and kick his ass—don’t care how united his daddy’s little rebels are.”
They thanked the old captain and went inside. Beyond the redbrick exterior, there was little left of the original church—only the words AND THEY WENT DOWN BOTH INTO THE WATER, painted in an arch along the wall, and below it a pale hollowness where once there hung a shining cross.
The captain was a collector of long-dead things, species that had once existed but could not adapt to the planet’s unbreaking fever. Taxidermied heads of caribou and muskoxen and sea lions and white-faced foxes stared down from the walls with marbles in their eyes.
The dinner hall was full. The air was heavy with the smell of fryer oil and sawdust on spilled beer. The tables were arranged haphazardly throughout what was once a grand nave. In the rear of the room a frenzied herd of line cooks moved in chaotic ritual around stoves and bubbling pots.
The twins searched the room for a place to sit. Instantly, Sarat saw the men turn to watch her sister. Dana shifted the room’s orbit, took charge of the air. The boys turned toward her like filings to a magnet’s pole. Sarat waited for one of them to do more than look; secretly she hoped for it.
They found a table in the back by the kitchen. But before they sat, one of Adam Bragg Jr.’s bodyguards came over and asked them to join his party.
“We’re good where we are,” said Sarat.
“We’ll be over in a minute,” said Dana. When the bodyguard was gone she turned to her sister. “Just a couple of minutes,” she said. “Just to make nice.”
“You know it won’t be a couple of minutes,” said Sarat. “Why we gotta go make nice? We don’t work for him, we haven’t pledged allegiance to no United Rebels or anybody else.”
“I don’t give a shit ’bout the United Rebels or anybody else. But people like him won’t suddenly stop being important because we ignore them. Better to have him on our side in case we need him or his daddy’s help one day.”
“Goddammit,” Sarat said, rising. “Can’t even eat proper around them. Let’s get it over with.”
They found the young man, who on this night was celebrating his twenty-first birthday, seated at a large circular table in a corner of the room. It was the only table in the place covered with cloth, and around it hovered a flock of bodyguards, rebel grunts, well-wishers, and hangers-on.
Seated at the table were a couple of faces Sarat recognized: a well-known smuggler named Henson; Augusta’s deputy mayor; the head of the reef pilots’ union; and three other men who, by the stiff pull of their ill-fitting suits, were probably government men from Atlanta. The fractured politics of the wartime South dictated that high-ranking members of the United Rebels and the Free Southern State should not be seen socializing, given the diverging tenors of each on the subject of peace. But in Augusta such rules were often temporarily set aside.
“ ’Evening, ladies,” said Bragg. “A true pleasure to see you. Sit, sit.”
The sisters sat near their host. He introduced them to the table, loud enough so that the orbiting entourage could also hear.
“These are Dana and Sarat Chestnut,” he said, “survivors of the Camp Patience massacre and proud patriots of the Southern nation. I’m honored to call them friends.”
“It’s great to see you two girls,” one of the suits from Atlanta said. Bragg introduced him as the director of the Free Southern State’s media operations for northern Georgia.
“Aren’t you two the sisters of that boy Simon, the Miracle Boy?”
“Yeah,” said Sarat, “and whose sister is you?”
The man looked at his host, the smile fading from his lips.
“Enough small talk,” said Bragg. “Let’s eat.”
From the kitchen came a parade of bowls and silver trays: chicken liver; cracklings; rice smothered in redeye gravy; corn chips and Mississippi caviar; beef that was not really beef but pigeon, charred black on the outside and pink within. The table descended into a glutton’s silence, the only sound that of jaws and silverware. In the lull, Bragg leaned over to his guests.
“I heard you were out in Halfway,” he said. “That true?”
Sarat said nothing.
“Well, at least you made it out alive. Not many my father sends out there can say the same.”
When the guests were done, the plates were cleared and in their place came others: trays of sliced peaches and watermelons and cantaloupes; jugs of ice water and lemonade and artillery punch. Until finally those seated around the table could eat and drink no more.
Tipsy and slurring his words, one of the Atlanta men rose to make a toast. He started with something about the Southern spirit and the great and noble cause of freedom, but soon he talked himself into a pretzel, until finally Bragg interrupted him: “Let’s just say: To the South, victorious.”
“To the South, victorious!” echoed the man. The table raised their glasses.
The men from Atlanta soon left. A few of Bragg’s people took their place at the table. Among them were two of the Salt Lake Boys, Trough and Cornhill.
There had been six when the rebels first found them: orphans in the battle of Spanish Fork, where the Blues, Mexican troops, and even a few misguided Texas outcasts fought to a standstill near what became the very northwestern edge of the Mexican Protectorate.
They were rumored to be the brood of Mormons. In the aftermath of the battle, the rebels found them hiding in a piggery on the outskirts of town, and named them after the places they found them. Eventually they were taken back south and drafted into the Bragg family’s bustling orbit.
The staff cleaned the tables and then brought out cigars and brandy. The cigars were from the old Caribbean islands, expensive and among the last of their kind. The haze that filled the air was sweet and earthy.
“You know my father sends me out here because he doesn’t trust me,” said Bragg, leaning close to the twins, high on the easy camaraderie of the freshly drunk. “He says it’s to make sure the supplies get past the Blues out on the coast and into the right hands—to keep an eye on things. But I think he just wants me out of Atlanta as much as possible. Afraid I’ll kill him in his sleep, all that palace coup shit old men worry ’bout.”
Bragg laughed. He was looking at Dana but watching her sister. He carried an effortless charm wielded almost exclusively by those born into comfort or those who rose from nothing to achieve it. He smiled by default, teeth sheathed, eyes like pistol barrels, as though a camera lens stalked constantly on his periphery. He was gifted with a very rare and advantageous talent for seeming to speak intimately, every word a precious secret between old friends.
Others came to the table, but were turned away: rebels and would-be rebels and the kin of both, all in need of favors; dockhands and laid-off reef pilots looking for smuggling work; refugees wanting a room in the Atlanta slums, refugees wanting out.
And then there were those men aligned with the groups who’d refused to come under the United Rebels’ umbrella—they watched from tables at the other end of the room, observing the delicate fracture lines of the divided, wartime South.
To Sarat, it was all nonsense, the petty turf wars of insecure men. Rarely a day passed without news of some fresh dispute between the Free Southern State and the United Rebels and the myriad fringe fighters who controlled swaths of territory in the border battlegrounds—disputes over who should run the schools, collect the taxes; whose dead should place first on the murals. She had seen them do these things both publicly—in defiant, chest-thumping speeches—and privately, pragmatically, in the backrooms of Atlanta and Augusta. She saw them do these things and she was disgusted by it. They were to her nothing more than prideful, opportunistic captains, arguing over the boundaries of long-obsolete star maps as all the while the opposing armada’s cannonballs tore their hull to shreds.
For Sarat Chestnut, the calculus was simple: the enemy had violated her people, and for that she would violate the enemy. There could be no other way, she knew it. Blood can never be unspilled.
“Anyway, the old man will be glad to hear you made it out alive from Halfway…” said Bragg.
“Keep your voice down,” said Sarat. “You want everyone in the place to know?”
“Don’t worry so much,” replied Bragg. “You’re still new, still a ghost. Only people in this room who understand what you’ve been up to are at this table. And believe me, they’ll have their tongues cut out before they say a word of it to someone who’s not supposed to hear.”
He turned to the two Salt Lake Boys sitting at his side. “Ain’t that right?”
The boys said nothing. They sat as though encased in wax, no smile or frown on their lips. The elder of the two wore his hair parted down the middle—a child’s haircut that made him look younger than his sibling, who had his hair buzzed close to the scalp.
“You know their two older brothers are already dead?” said Bragg, speaking as though the boys were not at the table. “One got taken during a FOB raid near Fayetteville—Lord knows what hellhole the Blues are keeping him in now, if they haven’t already killed him. The other strapped on a farmer’s suit and sneaked himself past the wire. Made it all the way up to Kentucky then got himself shot dead outside a checkpoint before he could even get the damn thing to blow.
“My old man signed off on both too. Neither kid had so much as fired a pistol in his whole life, but he okayed it anyway.”
Bragg turned to Sarat. “But with you, he wouldn’t hear it. Couldn’t imagine a girl out there fighting. If it wasn’t for Gaines’s pull with him, no way he would have changed his mind. Anyway, he’ll want to see you, so you can plead your case to him. Maybe he’ll give you a second chance.”
“I don’t plead with no one,” said Sarat. “Your old man is nothing to me. He ain’t my boss, ain’t my father. I don’t need his permission. You got something you need to say to him, go on and say it yourself.”
“I’d rather just wait for him to die, if I’m being honest,” said Bragg. He waited on the sisters for a reaction and got none. “You know he was fifty-six when he had me? Fifty-six! There’s a goddamn half-century between us—how am I supposed to bridge that? He’s caught up in the old way of doing things, still thinks he’s in the desert, still fighting that old, faraway war. All that tradition he’s saddled with, it’s too late to shake it off. Better just to wait him out and hope they haven’t raised the Blue banner over Atlanta before he finally has the decency to die.”
The conversation was interrupted by a chorus of hooting and applause on the other side of the room. A piece of gossip moved around the dining hall, and all those who heard it responded with happy cursing and calls for another round.
“What are they so pleased about?” Bragg asked one of his bodyguards. The guard inquired with a waitress and returned to whisper something to his boss. The shine came off Bragg’s smile. He turned to Sarat.
“Was it you who did it?” he asked.
For the first time that evening, Sarat afforded herself a smile.
“Jesus Christ,” said Bragg, and then he finally did lower his voice. “You poker-faced bitch. You’ve gone and changed the whole damn war.”
Sarat winked.
Bragg turned to his bodyguard. “Free up another couple of seats at the Citadel,” he said. “We got some real celebrating to do.”
A LONG LINE FORMED outside the doors of the Citadel. It was mostly young men, waiting on the fight. A roving squad of doormen monitored the crowd; whenever anyone got too loud, or an altercation broke out, the bouncers quickly removed all parties involved.
A couple of street vendors traversed the lineup. One sold Dixie cups of Joyful, brewed in the row houses down the street. Another hawked peanuts and roasted corn.
The young men waited for the doors to open, and when they finally did, they shoved at one another on the way upstairs to the nosebleeds.
The Yuffsy was fought at midnight on the turn of every month. There were other, smaller fights that took place at the Citadel at other times, but only on this night did all twelve contenders gather for the big-money bout. Some fans came from as far as Mississippi to see it, the great Southern spectacle of battering men.
The Citadel used to be the grand rotunda of an old museum. It was a fine and high-roofed lobby. Inside the ring, the floor was padded but the padding was thin, and a man thrown onto it with sufficient force could feel resonating in his bones the marble tiles below.
The rotunda’s central circle was bound into an octagon by fencing that ran all the way up to the second-story balcony. Most of the spectators sat in the balcony. But on the first floor, ringside, there were two dozen seats reserved for Augusta’s gilded class: Southern government leaders; celebrities from Atlanta; foreign captains in town for the weekend; and whoever else wielded sufficient cash or clout.
Bragg and the Chestnuts sat in those chairs; dead center and near the wide double-doors from behind which the fighters would soon emerge. Popcorn and wild invective rained down from the balcony seats.
The lights dimmed. A strafe of thundering rock descended from the speakers overhead.
The doors swung open to savage applause. The fighters walked barefoot, dressed only in shorts. Some wore bands around their heads and compression sleeves on their arms or legs. The sleeves were decorated in bright colors: reds and yellows and greens; adorned with lightning bolts and tigers’ fangs and the stars of the Southern flag. The men bore tattoos of crosses and Bible verses and razor wire and the names of kin. They walked into the cage eyes dead ahead, as though no crowd existed. Soon the lights rose and the music died and the cage door was closed. The twelve men stood, sizing each other up, planning paths of attack.
Conventional wisdom said there was no way to win a Yuffsy in the opening minute, but plenty of ways to lose. Many fighters, when the bell rang, opted not to pounce on the weakest-looking of the bunch but the slowest—someone with whom they could safely spar without appearing cowardly, as the other men thinned their own ranks. But rarely did such tactics work as intended, and often two men who targeted the same sluggish Goliath would find themselves instead compelled to fight each other. The chaotic nature of the sport ensured that a dollar bet on any fighter was a dollar bet almost at random, and any man who managed to win even three or four fights before retiring was considered to have had a stellar career.
The ringside announcer read the fighters’ names. A couple were new to the circuit, and had likely been included by the fightmaster simply because they looked big and granite-jawed enough to stay on their feet for at least a few minutes before going down.
The defending champion was a nineteen-year-old from Hattiesburg named Joshua who fought under the moniker Wraith. There was a rumor he had once spent time with the Sovereigns, fighting in East Texas when he was only thirteen. It was a lie invented by his manager, in part to blunt another rumor—started by a rival’s camp—that the fighter was in fact the son of Northerners, and had signed a deal with a promoter in Pittsburgh in anticipation of war’s end.
A victory on this night would mark three consecutive Yuffsys for Wraith, an unprecedented run in a contest where the previous winner always walked into his next cage match centered in eleven men’s cross-hairs.
Only one contender interested Sarat: a veteran named Taylor. She’d heard of him a long time ago, in Camp Patience. He had lived there once, before the massacre. She knew little about him or his people—whether they had left with him and, if not, whether any of them had survived. She only knew that he’d lived once in the South Carolina slice and that now, almost a decade of fighting under his belt in a competition where the average fighter’s career lasted four months, his body was irreversibly broken. Sarat ignored the other fighters and watched only him.
The bell rang. A cheer rose from the balcony. The men stalked one another and soon were sparring. In a Yuffsy a man left the ring only one of three ways: by tapping out, sustaining an injury brutal enough to warrant a retreat to the cage’s only door, or by being knocked unconscious—in which latter case a couple of Octagon clowns were dispatched to drag the fighter out of the ring.
In order to maintain the Yuffsy’s appeal as the South’s true outlaw sport, the organizers were loath to put any rules on the books and, strictly speaking, the twelve men who entered the cage every month were bound by no written code.
But in reality, an elaborate system of unsaid conventions regulated the melee: an honor code concerning sucker punches and the length of time a man may avoid his opponents. A fighter clearly headed for the exit should be left alone, for example. But there was no actual punishment for violating these rules.
The night’s bout raged on but no man fell. At the twelve-minute mark, all twelve fighters were still standing. The crowd applauded the dozen-dozen, a rarity. But by fifteen minutes, half the fighters had left the cage: four on their own power, bloodied and limping; two dragged out by the clowns, unconscious. The exits came as they always did, in a cascade. As soon as the shame of being the first fighter down was gone, the men’s threshold for pain suddenly plummeted, and those who knew they had little chance of winning were almost happy to find themselves in a headlock or an arm-bar from which they could tap out.
Bragg leaned over to Sarat. “Your old neighbor has a busted foot,” he said.
Taylor from Patience shifted hard onto his right leg, his left foot swollen and purple at the ankle. Only he, the champion Wraith, and one of the last-minute entrants, a behemoth named Grayson, remained.
As it did toward the end of every Yuffsy, the cage, whose padding was now streaked with drying blood, looked too large for its occupants. Instinctively, the men stepped back from each other and took a moment to catch their breath. A large gash had opened over Grayson’s right eye; he wiped the blood with the compression sleeve on his arm. Soon the crowd grew tired of inaction, and began heckling the men, demanding action.
It was Taylor who moved first, limping toward Grayson. But before he got to him, Grayson raised his hand in surrender and made for the door. A chorus of boos erupted from the balcony, the crowd enraged that a man they believed still capable of fighting had chosen not to. They tossed peanuts and popcorn at the fighter as he left, calling him a coward and an embarrassment to the cage. Grayson made no response. Quickly he was shepherded beyond the great double-doors to the fighters’ quarters, a repurposed exhibition room in the bowels of the old museum that once housed the bones of dinosaurs.
Two men remained, and although one of them had gone into the ring the favorite, the other now commanded the audience’s affection. A few cheered because they knew the hopeless challenger came from the site of the famous Blue massacre, others because they knew he had failed to win a Yuffsy in twenty-three tries, a record. But most cheered because of an innate desire to back the underdog. That he stood no chance against his youth-armored opponent only endeared him further to the roaring crowd. Instinctively, they expected of him the same chivalrous defiance they believed they themselves, placed in the same position, would show.
The champ approached. He was wiry, his veins embossed in skin. The challenger struggled to hide his impairment. But it was more than the useless left ankle—which forced him now to skip and skitter where he stood—that hobbled him. It was an exhaustion in the very being of him, the weight of all his previous fights compounded.
The champ saw his advantage and played it. A swift kick to the swollen ankle brought the challenger down. Quickly, the champ jumped onto him and with a barrage of three quick punches, broke the challenger’s nose along the bridge, where it had been broken many times before.
In such instances, when a Yuffsy was down to just two men, one of whom was obviously on the verge of defeat, a broken nose was the customary way to end the fight with mutual dignity. All the challenger had to do was tap out or lie still on the ground; the crowd would not begrudge him for doing either. The champion, kneeling atop the challenger, paused and waited.
But the challenger refused. Instead, the bloodied, broken fighter swung a fist upward at his opponent. So surprised was the champ by this that he failed to block it, and the punch landed square on his jaw, although it had so little weight behind it that it did no damage. The champ responded with another barrage; the challenger’s head knocked side to side as though readying to come loose from his spine.
Once again the champ waited, and once again the challenger refused to submit. He swung from where he lay, this time unable to close his fist, such that he succeeded only in slapping the champ on the shoulder.
The crowd, now uncertain, grew quiet, nervous with the thought that the champ would inevitably lose patience.
But instead, the champ stood up. He left the challenger where he lay, a crimson halo on the padding near his head. He walked to the edge of the cage, near where the trainers were seated. He raised his hands in exasperation.
“What are you waiting for?” said the champ’s trainer.
“I gave him a chance to go out easy,” the fighter replied. “What do you want me to do, kill him?”
“If he don’t want to get killed, he’ll tap out,” the trainer said. “Do your goddamn job.”
As they spoke, the challenger stumbled onto his one working foot. He limped toward the edge of the cage and threw himself against the body of the champ. There was nothing left of him now but weight, and with it he knocked his opponent back against the side of the cage and onto the ground.
The champ screamed in pain as he fell. An unsmoothed protrusion in the mesh of the cage had cut a deep gash all the way along the length of his chest. Blood poured from the wound and spilled out the boundaries of the ring.
In a moment, the champ was standing again. Enraged, he knelt over his motionless opponent and beat him until the trainers and the crowd and all who watched knew he was dead.
