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.