The place was silent, so much so that one could have heard the straw drop from the Warden’s teeth above if the man was such a fellow as to chew on a straw. The entire bloody mess had been aimed at this moment, when ‘Mister Texas’ the interloping CSA Colonial Marine—merely being held a day or two until the Military Police might be bothered with extraditing him back to the hell which bore him—might fight Gill Saint, President by-way-of-the-fist for the honor to preside over this miniature nation he would soon be forever separated from.

The bets were all in, and no new ones had been made. Whiff had the gift of sensing the truth like a cheap trollop in the night and he knew in his bones, that none of these men, damned as they were, wished well the demon that now danced among them, who had mocked their savage conventions such as they were, and who now stood to erase the very inept governing body that ruled their fool hearts. As crude as the rule of the Seven had been, it was what passed for civilization in these parts, and few men relish the sight of their society expiring before their eyes.

Silence reigned, above, below, and on the yard.

Gill Saint, hulking muscle bound ‘President of the White Side’, stepped forward, towering a head over ‘Mister Texas’ and being more than twice as wide. The man was formed as if by a child who had read too many comic books and wished a hero that could lift improbable weights—that child being ignorant of the cruel subtlety of Men. Gill was entirely bald from the ears up and had a coat of hair that would have sufficed a bear from the ears down.

The savage Forester looked at him cockeyed, quite a bloody torn up mess himself, but not seemingly winded or weary in the least. His mockery was gone and he addressed the President graciously, “Your pleasure Sir?”

Gill’s garbled diction was not up to much and Whiff admired him somewhat for forming a passable sentence in English that could have been understood beyond these walls. “I’ll remove my men before we fall to.”

The Forester gave a salute and turned his back, his trickster antics and gloating ways gone like a whisper in a storm.

Gill walked over to Cat Claw Able’s twisted body with the one-eyed head, stooped, picked his former henchmen up like a baby, and walked him off to the ring of men beneath the Warden, four of which took the ruined burden from his arms.

Gill then walked over calmly to where the nose of Rat Swallower Cobb oozed on the pavement, picked it up like some Yankee golfer retrieving his ball from the Ashland Greens, carried it over to the maimed corpse of his most storied man, rolled over the big body, put the nose roughly in its place, and picked up and cradled the huge fellow like a faint wife, carrying him over to the ring of spectators, six of whom relieved him of his burden.

Gill returned solemnly to the scratch mark at ring center, sparing a darting eye in Old Blue’s direction—an eye wet with a deeply welling tear. Old Blue gave him the ‘lay and pray nod’ which was the sign used by corner men to let their fighters know that they had but a chance in hell and to just try and hang in there on the ropes in hopes the referee or ringside doctor would come to the rescue—two personages that were notable for their absence in this crude parody of the sporting life.

Gill turned toward his antagonist, raised his hands mechanically, and waved the Forester on. The man was too wary by half to just wade in on any foe and began his sinuous cavorting dance, probing with hand, finger, fist and foot, measuring the hulking beefcake for a beating that Whiff could sense would not be for the faint of heart. When the smack, pop and thud of blows answered too slowly to be returned commenced, Whiff turned to Old Blue as the crowd began a low murmur.

“Who was Cobb to him?”

“His younger brother.”

“He’s built like Oh Henry himself, but can he fight?”

“Not a lick—Lord knows I tried. He barely fought his way to the top of that pack on character alone; just able to take more than could be given. Truth told half of those boys could have beat him, but knew he was the better man en let ‘im last. He has that calming quality they need—don’t count fo’ shit now—Good God!”

Old Blue, seemingly a kind of fatherly figure to Gill, winced and recoiled as the sickening thud of unanswered blows crescendoed with a cracking right cross that Gill clumsily stepped into that reformed his face into something temporarily alien and unrecognizable. When the face settled and twitched almost back into place Gill reached again for his skipping tormenter only to be kicked in the knee, which gave way with a sickening crack.

The Forester bounced away as Gill limped doggedly after him, dragging his now useless right leg like a dead weight. What came now was not punches, not eye ripping finger strikes, or bone breaking kicks, but slaps, slaps that resounded to the rooftop and surely echoed out into the yard, shaking the mold of muscle that was Gill Saint like Little Jew Johnny shaking his dangling kosher dogs in their casing behind Whiff’s profitably famous Jew Boy Johnny’s hot dog stand. Never mind that Johnny was a catholic Brazilian, he shook those bogus kosher dogs to beat the band for the Yankee tourists just as the layers of muscle on Gill Saint’s broad back shook and settled in their own pale casing.

He nudged Old Blue elbow to arm, the old code that he wanted a scouting report on the ringer that had showed up to thrash his Candy Cane Carnival boxing champion. In point of fact, the best ringer ever to show his face on Whiff Gleason’s stage had been Jordy, and without Old Blue there to call him for what he was, Whiff had been too late stopping the bout and poor Mighty Mo had went down into a milkshake and applesauce retirement, never to chew right again. He had missed Old Blue Hauler on that dread day. But the lord works in mysterious ways as they say and Jordy became his best and most trusted friend—until this terrible morning…

Old Blue intoned in his ragged croak, “My time up North taught me somethin’ of that karate—which is Jap boxing—that come over from Hawaii by way of California. But this is not karate and that vicious bitch wrestling was not Judo—which is Jap wrestlin’. This stuff here comes from south of the Rio Grande. Them boys that done fought in Brazil way back in the Pre-Atomic War, and in Panama against the Japs in the Yellow War, they adopted that shit—the shin kicking and such from the Filipino squirts that served as Japanese scouts. Some of dem deserted en come over. That’s what we got here Whiff, what the Marines have done to adopt the ways of them enemies. They don’t teach this shit at the Citadel, at VMI, and damned sure not at the Arlington War College.

More sickening slaps, then meaty thuds, followed by vicious kicks continued to shake the form of gill Saint as he continued his hopeless one legged attempt to close with the dancing.

“Don’t boy, don’t—jus’ fall!” Blue yelled hoarsely so as it sounded like the whisper of the dead from below, barely audible to Whiff above the morbid murmur of the gathered inmates and down-peering guards.

Gill took a mighty slow swing with a meat hook punch, which his opponent ducked only to rise with a cartwheel kick that spun the great roundly muscled head around on its thick neck.

“Oh no,” groaned Old Blue as the murmur lowered and faded away to an attentive silence, the entirety of the gathered mass of men seemingly hypnotized by the patter, slap and thud of the blows that rained down on their former champion, now reduced to a limping, bleeding, blushing punching bag.

Gill managed a pawing jab, only to have the marine grab the wrist below the big malleted hand and then thrust a sideways kick over the arm of the taller hulk into his mouth, sending big Sweet Tart sized teeth scattering like bloody piano keys across the concrete. The marine let go the hand and slammed the shin of his other leg into the bridge of Gill’s nose, sending gouts of blood spraying left and right.

Still Gill kept his feet, blindly reaching for the man who slid along on his calloused feet like the Devil’s own puppet. He slammed first one shin to the kidney as he stepped around, then the other to the liver, then the other again to the short ribs. Still Gill stood and reached out for his tormentor.

With one wooden drag step Gill lurched toward ‘Mister Texas’ only to eat a thunderous right cross that cracked the jaw as loudly as any maul had ever driven a spike.

Still Gill—eyes now a watery mess of blood, tears and sweat—groped for the marine, who calculated the next step of the lumbering giant so as to slam a shin into Gill’s knee and send him to both knees in a helpless state.

Old Blue was looking away, facing the yard and looking at the catwalk above with arms crossed. The guards were staring in open mouthed fascination. The inmates all seemed to be dismayed at the lack of passion and excess of lethal intent.

A chill plaid down Whiff’s spine as he saw the colorless steel eyes of the man who he once thought nothing but a hobo as he walked by Whiff’s very lynching, until the Devil tossed him like a die at the feet of the World. The man seemed to be stepping away from the barely conscious kneeling form of Gill Saint. But he began to coil and turn, his eyes momentarily fixing Whiff with that look beyond hate that had frozen his soul this very morning as he plunged Diddle’s knife into the top of Boomer’s head and again when he slugged poor Tommy to his death on the hitch of that Union Motors pickup that had been Whiff’s lynch stand all the long night.

“No!”

Whiff might be near on fifty, and may have had the worst batting average in all the Negro League for the three years he was short stop for the Bay Fins. But he’d been quick since the first time Big Daddy Gleason caught him spying on his fornication magazines, and fat as he was, he was still faster of foot than the normal man.

“Negro on the slab!” called a shrill voice that was soaked up by the voiceless silence of the gathered hundreds.

His flank fat giggled like gelatin on the Fourth of July as he charged by the skipping form of the marine and dove on Gill Saint, a heel as hard as a brick digging into his upper back and bruising the shoulder blade through the thick padded armor acquired from 20 years of diligent training at the soft pretzel and beer stand.

Calling on decades of refereeing experience Whiff cradled the big head of Gill Saint under his arm and shoulder and extended his right hand back in the command to halt as he sprawled to cover as much of the fallen man’s body as possible.

There was stark silence.

He looked up into the cold steely eyes of the man who had at once saved and cursed him before the sun shone on this very day. These eyes seemed to be calculating something, and somehow Whiff got the idea that he was the biggest bead on this man’s internal abacus.

The strong voice of a man who had barked over the jolly-making of a hundred sailors at the door to Miss Maypole’s Revue on one sunny Virginia Beach Friday rang like a call to sensibility through the stunned precinct of the poor condemned whites who slaved away for the CSA Motor Vehicle Administration beneath the concrete floor on which he sprawled with the mangled giant, “If he dies, the Presidency is vacant—and you get no food.”

He could hear the Warden’s swivel chair creak above.

The eyes of the feral soldier that had been vomited up from some Mexican hell in the form of a homicidal hobo considered him harshly, then vacantly, then with a glassy eye and a softening of the face—suddenly reignited with the verve that had fueled his antagonistic introduction mere minutes—yet three-lifetimes—ago. The Forester then turned and looked upward, saluting the Warden and guards, and then turned and waved to the negroes on the yard.

A group of white inmates were busy arranging a sitting area made of three cots while others gathered jugs of water, loaves of bread, and tins of mackerel, hominy and beans.

The eyes of the man, considerably softer now, fell back to Whiff, and as he tried to think of the proper thing to say, was beaten to it by the hoarse croak of Old Blue Hauler, “Welcome home son.”

That seemed to melt the man into a childlike mold. His deep cavernous voice—oddly so for such a wiry man—then softened as well as he addressed himself to Whiff. “Do you tell the tales: Brer Rabbit en Run Son Run?”

Blue was tending to Gill now, easing his head over and speaking to him. So Whiff felt at liberty to rise and speak. “I recite the totality of Uncle Remus, and the Holler Tales as well.”

The man now looked around somewhat furtively, as if nervously regarding his new precinct for the first time. He then nodded his head ‘yes’ as he absently eyed the various guards and inmates going about their day as if nothing had transpired to turn this terrible little flat earth upside down. Their eyes both fixed on the now empty Warden’s swivel chair.

The deep hollow tone of the voice then returned, “I’d like me some negra tales while I await the MPs. Daddy was a Cherokee. Brer Rabbit was his favorite. Myself, I likes Run Son Run!”

Whiff nodded respectfully. The Forester’s composed detachment seemed to return as he sauntered over to the new throne that had been made ready for their President from the remnants of various cots and sundries. He took his seat, blood still running down the outside of his cheek from the furrowed brow above and motioned to the cot to his right, as if he were some primal potentate offering an embassy to visiting dignitary.

“Well, do tell boy.”