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, a
nd 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.
THE LIGHTS ROSE, the crowd dispersed. Usually the young men who came to watch the fight left afterward with adrenaline coursing through their veins, and were apt at the slightest provocation to start brawling with one another in the back alleys south of the boardwalk. But on this night the crowd was muted, and diffused quietly to the Imperial and the other Reynolds Street bars.
Adam Bragg Jr., fully drunk now, invited the sisters back to the Woodrow, where he and his entourage had booked every room for the weekend. But it was clear his interest lay in only one of the twins, and both declined.
Sarat and Dana stood awhile on the boardwalk, watching the docks. In the wake of the big winter storms, the wash often broke over the seawall. Tonight the water moved like black molasses. Even the massive freight ships, the first of which should have started to arrive at port by now, were nowhere to be seen.
“A guy at the fight said one of the gift ships ran aground all the way out at the Mouth,” said Dana.
“They’re here every month,” Sarat replied. “How do they still manage to screw it up?”
“The land shifts under the water. Places that were deep one season turn shallow the next, and unless you’re out there every day you can’t know it.”
Sarat watched the men down in the reef pilots’ house. The lights were on. They were drinking and playing cards and passing time, hoping for the call to head out to the Mouth, the gaping waterway where the ocean met the river near the drowned remains of old Savannah. Others had already joined the tugboats dispatched to rescue the freighter, because it was a day’s work and, even though the reef pilots earned a better living than almost any legal job in Augusta offered, they could still use the money.
“You going to meet that pretty boy of yours tonight?” asked Sarat.
“You know I am,” said Dana. “Don’t go making it a big deal when it ain’t. We’re just seeing each other is all. It’s just fun. I’ll be there when you get up in the morning.”
“He’s not even a real pilot.”
“He’s in training. Everybody’s gotta learn to do a thing before they do it. Gotta get taught.”
“He’s not good enough for you.”
Dana laughed. “You tell me one man you think is.” She took her sister’s hand and kissed it. “I’ll see you soon, beautiful girl.”
Sarat knew where her sister would be spending the night: the Fargo shipping building on 7th Street. It was a block-wide, bureaucratic-looking thing, and amassed within it were the reef pilot trainee dorms, the shipping authority and customs offices, the foreign crews’ hostel, and the north Georgia branch of the Free Southern State.
Sarat despised the place. It spoke to her of all the unnecessary adornments with which her country’s institutions justified their own existence. In truth, the customs officers were crooked, the hostel a thinly disguised brothel, and the temporary storage units in the basement used almost exclusively by smugglers.
It was, all of it, a lie—and the worst kind of lie: a charade of normality at a time of war. The thought of her sister inside that building—lying on one of those soiled bunks with one of those vacant, libidinous boys—made her sick.
Alone, she went to the Belle Rebelle to drink and then to sleep. It was a small bar, built inside one of the old row houses between 10th and 11th Streets. Upstairs, the owner, Layla Denomme, kept three rooms. Some nights she rented them out, but most of the time she let old friends and regulars stay there for free.
Layla’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Layla Jr., had been pouring drinks there for the last two years, standing atop a Yuxi crate to see over the bar top. She knew the regulars by name and Sarat by more.
Of the Belle Rebelle’s die-hard regulars, there were predominantly two groups—the first were stump-limbed war pensioners. They sat at the back tables, growing rust and getting eyes-shut drunk on Atlanta’s dime. The others were river rats: reef pilots, tugboat and towboat captains, and the men who ran skiffs laden with contraband in the dead of night. These patrons sat at a corner of the bar, congregated near a large screen mounted on the back wall.
The screen showed the position and status of the freighters as they approached and navigated the river. Whenever one of the charity ships needed a reef pilot or a batch of dockhands to help with unloading, a notice popped up on the screen.
The simple screen was, for the bar owner, a coup—the result of a years-long relationship with the proprietor of one of the very few working commercial satellites that still covered this slice of the world.
On this night the screen showed that the freighters, which should by now have been working their way upriver to Augusta, were instead log-jammed behind the ship that h
ad run aground. The workers nursed watered-down Joyful and cursed their lousy luck.
“If he’s got any sense, he’ll stay on that goddamned boat and hope they take his ass all the way back to China,” said one of the reef pilots. “He comes back here, they’ll string him up on the boardwalk.”
Sarat sat at the other end of the bar, where Layla the elder leaned on the bar top, eating frickles.
“Baby girl!” she said, hugging Sarat. “Gaines said you’d be coming around soon. It’s so good to see you.”
“How you been, Mama Layla?” said Sarat.
The bar owner shrugged. “The same. Bad night tonight. There’s talk it might be another couple days before they get that ship moving. People are starting to worry about credit, about paying last month’s bills.”
“Is there a storm out there or something?”
“Nah. They had one called Walter, was a Cat Six coming in off the Gulf four days ago, but died real quick over the Florida Sea. Just some rain and wind now, gave the gift ship captains a little trouble out past the borderline, but nothing too bad.”
“Then what’s keeping them?” asked Sarat. “It can’t just be that one stuck ship. Are the Blues tightening up inspections again?”
Layla shook her head. “Just the one stuck ship, can you believe it? They sent this new pilot out, kid named Brunswick—hasn’t been certified no more than a week, and they send him out to guide the first gift ship in. Well don’t you know, he’s running off last season’s map, and he guides them too far south. First damn ship of the month, and he runs them aground into Hutchinson Reef.”
“So they’re just sitting there?”
“Been there since dusk. FSS shipping authority folks being real hardasses about letting other ones go round it. I think they finally saw a chance to flex their muscles. So now everybody’s just waiting on them to pull her out and tow her in.”
“Christ,” said Sarat. “Can’t run a ship up a river. How we supposed to win a war?”
American War Page 23