American War(73)

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.