by Jack Tunney
BROOKLYN BEATDOWN
ANOTHER TWO-FISTED FIGHT CARD NOVEL
JACK TUNNEY
FIGHT CARD
CREATED BY PAUL BISHOP AND MEL ODOM
OTHER TITLES IN THE FIGHT CARD SERIES
FIGHT CARD: FELONY FISTS
FIGHT CARD: THE CUTMAN
FIGHT CARD: SPLIT DECISION
FIGHT CARD: COUNTERPUNCH
FIGHT CARD: HARD ROAD
FIGHT CARD: KING OF THE OUTBACK
FIGHT CARD: A MOUTH FULL OF BLOOD
FIGHT CARD: TOMATO CAN COMEBACK
FIGHT CARD: BLUFF CITY BRAWLER
FIGHT CARD: GOLDEN GATE GLOVES
FIGHT CARD: IRISH DUKES
FIGHT CARD: THE KNOCKOUT
FIGHT CARD: RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE
FIGHT CARD: AGAINST THE ROPES
FIGHT CARD: THE LAST ROUND OF ARCHIE MANNIS
FIGHT CARD: SWAMP WALLOPER
FIGHT CARD: GET HIT, HIT BACK
FIGHT CARD: CAN’T MISS CONTENDER
FIGHT CARD: BROOKLYN BEATDOWN
MORE FIGHT CARD NOVELS
COMING SOON
FIGHT CARD: UNION OF THE SNAKES
AND DON’T FORGET
THE FIRST TWO EXCITING
FIGHT CARD MMA NOVELS
FIGHT CARD MMA: WELCOME TO THE OCTAGON
FIGHT CARD MMA: THE KALAMAZOO KID
AND COMING SOON
FIGHT CARD ROMANCE: LADIES NIGHT
FIGHT CARD: BROOKLYN BEATDOWN
e-Book Edition – First Published July 2013
Copyright © 2013 Derrick Ferguson
Cover by Keith Birdsong
This is a work of fiction. Characters, corporations, institutions and organizations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher.
ROUND ONE
Too Sweet’s Bar & Grill
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, N.Y.
1955
The profane screaming, cheering and general mayhem of the crowd had reached such a wall-vibrating level it could easily be heard from a block away, but Levi Kimbro had long learned how to tune it out. He cared about nothing but putting down the man in front of him. He cared about nothing but seeing this man lying unconscious at his feet on the blood-splattered concrete floor.
Cornbread Broughton approached him with the easy, deceptively unhurried style he had mastered. Cornbread came at you slow as a pastor’s sermon on Sunday morning. Then, when there were just a few feet separating you, he was suddenly inside your defenses, whaling away like a demented lumberjack going to work with an axe on a helpless tree. A testament to the success of this style of attack was the swelling around and above Levi’s left eye, where Cornbread had given him a couple of good bangs in the second round.
Levi threw out the blindingly fast jab he’d been working behind all night long. Trying to keep Cornbread at a distance. The jab had stung Cornbread enough times during the fight for him to developed a healthy respect for the damage it could inflict.
Levi’s feet kept moving, keeping him out of range of the sledgehammers Cornbread used for fists. The cat had the heaviest hands Levi had ever felt.
“That’s it, baby!” the shrill, drunken woman’s voice cut through the chaotic din. “You keep on dancin’. I sho’ love to watch you dance.”
A lot of people did. It was how Levi Kimbro had been nicknamed Dancer. Backrooms like this one were his dance hall, his place to dazzle, and it was time to remind Cornbread of that fact.
Levi threw hooking jabs at Cornbread’s head, knocking sweat and droplets of blood into the howling mob surrounding them. No ring here, just a ragged square marked out with duct tape, surrounded by men and women bawling for blood. Crumpled currency changed hands as men bet their week’s pay on the outcome of the fight. Bottles of liquor were passed around and greedily upturned. Hastily rolled joints were exchanged. No time for glasses or nice polite behavior. This was all about the blood.
Levi slipped Cornbread’s straight right punch and gave him a right hook into his ribs, making Cornbread back up, wheezing and grunting with the effort of trying to get air back in his lungs. Levi brazenly dropped his hands, waggling his head back and forth, clowning for the crowd, and they rewarded him with whoops of delight.
Cornbread snarled and leapt forward, wrapping his arms around Levi’s arms and torso. He cleaned jerked Levi straight up, lifting him completely off the floor. They stood there like some bizarre statue., Cornbread snapping at Levi’s throat like a hungry dog.
“Let ‘im go! Knock it off!” The lead weighted end of a cosh came down on Cornbread’s left shoulder. “Let him go! I ain’t going to tell you agin’!” And Bendigo Cribb meant what he said.
For going on twenty years now, Cribb had been the referee for more backroom, bareknuckle, brawls than could be counted. He was respected for his fairness and for his handling of the crowds that turned out to watch the brawls.
He enforced his word with his cosh and, if that wasn’t enough, the gold-plated .45 automatic stuffed in his waistband. And if that still wasn’t enough, the half-dozen men he employed as security for these fights, along their weapons, were more than enough to finish any argument.
Cornbread let go of Levi, who got in a last jab as his feet hit the ground. The bell rang, signaling the end of the round.
“Corners!” Bendigo hollered. Levi moved to his safe zone, signified only by the sudden appearance of a three-legged stool. His corner man, Nappy Johnson, shoved the crowd back, yelling, “Give ’im room! Let the man breathe!”
Levi dropped onto the stool and let Nappy work on his swelling eye. “That is one tough boy, man,” he gasped.
“Here, drink some water and save your breath,” Nappy said. “I told you he had some heavy hands, but remember, he don’t watch his right side.” Nappy’s hands moved quickly and surely on his fighter’s face. “He didn’t expect you to last this long. He’s too used to lettin’ them heavy hands do all the work. You keep on banging away at his right side, an’ the second he lose his temper, you ring his bell but good. An’ I want to see more doublin’ up on them jabs, y’hear me? ”
Levi didn’t answer, just spit in the battered tin bucket Nappy seemed to have pulled out of thin air.
Bendigo signaled for one of his men to whack the bell and the two fighters came back out for the fourth round. Levi immediately went to work on Cornbread’s right side and saw red murder in the man’s eyes.
Levi ducked back from a whooshing overhand right and pounded Cornbread’s right side some more since he obligingly left it open. Cornbread’s entire right glowed as if he’d been beaten with a barber’s strop.
Cornbread came back with a dangerous short uppercut, scoring a glancing blow off the side of Levi’s head, knocking him back into the clamoring mob. Eager hands caught Levi, preventing him from falling. A woman’s slim arm darted out, delicate fingers stroking his brawny, dark mahogany-skinned shoulder.
The woman looked at the blood and sweat on her fingers, large dark brown eyes sparkling with intensity as she slowly rubbed her thumb on those fingers, one by one, feeling the heat rise in her.
The helping hands threw Levi back into the fight and he used the momentum to add to a straight right punch. Cornbread’s head snapped back so hard, somebody in the crowd yelled, “He done gon’ an’ broke that sucka’s neck!”
Not quite, but the blow plainly disoriented
Cornbread long enough for Levi to dive in, looking more like he was doing a samba than fighting, but the result was all that counted – a smashing hard right that snapped Cornbread’s head to the left. Levi gave him another right, another right, and one more just because.
Cornbread tripped over his own feet trying to recover and crashed to the concrete floor. He left a wide blood-streaked, sweaty, smear as he bounced over on his side, trying to get back up on his feet to continue the fight. His eyes rolled madly, trying to focus on something, anything.
Bendigo waved Levi back. He didn’t have to lift his cosh in warning. Levi was all right with him. They never got into any beef in or out of the ring. Levi backed off while Bendigo bent over Cornbread, who had gotten to his knees, struggling to get to his feet.
Cornbread’s corner man was at Bendigo’s side, insisting his man could continue the fight. Bendigo waited until Cornbread got to his feet by himself and nodded at him.
The yelling of the mob amazingly seemed to increase in volume as Bendigo waved for the fighters to resume. Cornbread tried to switch up his style and popped a series of jabs at Levi, looking to keep him back, give his head more time to clear and his legs to get a little steadier.
Levi was having none of it. He was ready for a hot meal, an even hotter bath, and a cool bed. He threw left, right combinations at Cornbread, who was simply too slow to counter or block. Cornbread’s lower lip split and blood spurted over his chin.
Levi risked turning his head away from Cornbread, looking at Bendigo. His eyes and face plainly asking the ref to call the fight over. Bendigo’s answering look was just as plain, yuh know the rules, son … put your man down.
Levi delivered a final uppercut to end Cornbread Broughton’s misery. The big fighter thumped when he went down. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind the fight was now over.
Levi winced from the many backslaps he received as the mob surged forward to congratulate him. Several men picked up the unconscious Cornbread. They would take him to the storage room where only his corner man would console him when he regained consciousness. There was nothing for the loser of a backroom brawl. Nothing at all. Not even a, “good fight, son.”
Nappy threw a towel around Levi’s neck. He reached down to Levi’s taped hands. The tape had been white as typing paper when Nappy had put it on earlier in the evening. Now, it was dark with blood and sweat. “Lemme cut this offa you.”
“Go get my money, Nappy,” Levi said, taking his hands back to accept a fifth of Jonnie Walker Red from a grateful fan.
Nappy sighed, but he turned away and disappeared into the crowd, which had only diminished a little even though the fight was over. Those who remained were the winners who had bet on Levi and were now high on their fat pockets. The losers were on their way home, coming up with elaborate excuses for their wives as to why the electric bill would have to wait to be paid, or why meat wouldn’t be on the shopping list this week.
Women pressed themselves against Levis still sweat-dripping body –
women plainly turned on by the brutality they just witnessed. Levi took a healthy swig from the bottle, enjoying the burn from the liquor as it went down.
It wasn’t anything like the burn he felt when he was fighting. It was nowhere even close, but it helped him come down from the adrenaline rush. He could have taken any of these women home and he had on many nights past. But he didn’t want a woman tonight. He just wanted his money and his bed.
Nappy returned bearing a gift. In one hand he held a sizeable chunk of green, held together with a thick rubber band. “It’s all there.”
“You take your cut?”
“You know better.” In all the time they’d been working together, Nappy had never taken his cut until Levi gave it to him.
“C’mon over here, I wanna talk to you.” Nappy took Levi by the elbow, pushing out of the circle of well-wishers until they found a relatively quiet corner of the back room. Big Maybelle’s Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On started playing as the bar’s owner, Too Sweet, plugged the jukebox back in as the crowd moved toward the bar.
Nappy unfolded his pocket knife and started carefully cutting the tape off Levi’s hands. “What’s goin’ on with you, man?” Nappy asked suddenly. “You ain’t been the same last coupla days. Can’t be money troubles ‘cause I know you don’t spend none on anythin’ you don’t need. You won’t even buy a car.”
“What do I need a car for, Nappy? I like walkin’. It gets me where I want to go.” Levi jerked his chin in the direction of a few women still hanging around, obviously hoping to catch his eye. “You buy a car then you got all these flash women hanging offa you, wanting to get in your pockets. I don’t have time for that nonsense.”
Nappy threw the bloody tapes on the floor. Too Sweet’s nephew, Deaf Jimmy, would clean up after everybody was gone. “When was the last time you had a woman, man? And don’t forget who you talking to. I done seen you take more than your share back up to your room. A woman is prob’ly what you need. After a fight you all keyed up, still got juice in your system you got to get rid of. You know what I mean.” Nappy winked.
Levi went over to where his neatly folded clothing rested on a stack of Rheingold beer cases. Dressing rooms were an often missing luxury in this sport. “It ain’t that, man. It’s just I … I don’t know. I’m just getting used to this life. Settling in, know what I mean? I ain’t hungry no more for what I got planned. It’s not that I’m getting to like this. But it’s becoming okay for me. Am I making sense?”
“Yeah, yeah, you are.” Nappy picked up Levi’s folded shirt, opened it with an expert snap. “If you had told me forty years ago I’d be runnin’ a fourth-rate boxing gym on Fulton Street and being the corner man for backroom bareknuckle fighters, I’d have laughed myself into a hernia. Yet here I be.” Nappy gestured at himself, at the smoky room, at the outside world. “And you know what? I come to terms with it a long time ago. Nah, it ain’t the life I wanted. But I own my place free and clear, my car’s paid off, I done outlived three wives, I come and go as I please, and men tip their hats to me and call me Mr. Johnson when they meet me in the street.”
“Your point?”
Nappy shrugged. “Sometimes there ain’t no point. You get up in the morning, go about your business and hope others do the same. You don’t like where this is goin’, do something about it. I been telling you for the longest you’re just wasting your time in these brawls. You got what it takes to go pro. You got speed, you got stamina, you got heart, and most of all, you got the brains. You know how to think in a fight.”
Levi tucked his shirt in his pants, zipped up and belted. “Right, and give over most of my winnings to some manager who ain’t no better than a mobster? Sign some contract that keeps me on some white man’s leash like a dog? Be told when to dive and when I can win? Nothing going on that noise, man. I know how the fight game goes. Leastways here I get to keep what I earned with my own sweat and blood and not watch it go into another man’s pocket.”
Nappy sighed. “It ain’t all bad, man. I know the right people. I’m not gonna stand here and tell you we can stay clean. But we can go places.”
“I don’t want to be a boxer, Nappy. Not that kind anyway.”
“You ain’t got long to be this kind, either.” Nappy nodded at the dried blood on the concrete floor. “You been lucky this past year, Levi. Cats get crippled in these kinds of fights they stay in too long. Or worse.”
Levi shrugged into his hooded black pea coat and slapped his well-worn flat cap on his head. “You want your cut now?”
Nappy shook his head. “You give it to me t’morrow. Give it to me now and I’ll be spending it on one’a them flash women you was just talking about!”
Nappy Johnson’s roaring laughing followed Levi as he made his way to the delivery entrance and then out into the street.
ROUND TWO
March in Brooklyn meant a lot of things, but most important to those who walked everywhere was if The Hawk was talking. That’s
all folks wanted to know if they were fixing to go out for the evening.
“The Hawk out there tonight?”
“What that ol’ Hawk doin’ tonight?”
“Man, The Hawk is out there waitin’ for me.”
The Hawk – the brutally cold wind that blew to the sound of a bird of prey’s hunting call. It flew up and down the canyons of Brooklyn with icy talons digging deep to stay in the bones.
However, it was a cold Levi Kimbro embraced. He never was one to complain during the winter months. It was supposed to be cold. It’s why they called it winter.
Levi still had the fifth of Black in the inside pocket of his pea coat to warm him up a bit if necessary. Not that he planned on going anywhere but home. He walked west on Fulton Street, passing by bars open on both sides of the street.
The other shops and businesses were dark, locked up for the night, had been for hours. But the places where the party people hung out stayed open late and long.
Six blocks further east was Nappy Johnson’s Gym where Levi worked. But Levi’s studio apartment lay to the west, on the corner of Tompkins and Decatur, no more than a brisk fifteen minute walk.
As he walked, Levi’s thoughts replayed the conversation he had just had with Napoleon Johnson, and he regretted not being more honest with him. Certainly, the man had treated him like family ever since Levi came to Brooklyn after his honorable discharge from the Army.
Just after leaving the Army, Levi had written Father Tim to tell him he was going to New York, try to make a life there. Father Tim wrote back, telling Levi any time he wanted to come back to Chicago and St. Vincent’s he was more than welcome.
Cholly Dougan, the janitor/maintenance man at St. Vincent’s for forty-two years had gone home to be with The Lord, praise Jesus, and he had taught Levi everything he knew about boilers, carpentry, masonry, electrical and plumbing work. Father Tim would be delighted to have Levi come and take Cholly’s job.