Padgett Powell - Edisto

Well, I took one. Taurus looked in the sack when I did, as if to count the remainder, but he didn't say anything.

It was awful, but I used it to hurry up and get there with.

We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly and got some food. They had Hoppin’ John so I got some in a square carton with a nifty wire handle and intricate closing designs cut into the flaps like a goldfish carton at a fair.

We finally got there. It was in a gym, a big blood-colored thing probably built by the W.P.A., because it had those heavy, square, useless blocks of stone all over so you couldn’t tell if it was a museum or what. It was as big as an airplane hangar, with third-story windows they open with chains and pulleys from the floor, and fans in the windows the size of propellers.

Five thousand people were in there on bleachers and metal folding chairs around a boxing ring in which a Negro who looked like a moose was trying to box a pink-white dude with a snow-white flat-top haircut. I say white, but he had green-and-blue tattoos all over his body — a standing bruise. I never had seen any real boxing before and what got me was how nobody seemed to get hit and they spent a lot of time hugging each other until the referee would tell them none of that. The Negro was as big as James Earl Jones and as bald and looked scared, and the white man was bobbing all the time and sliding and grinning all the while like he knew a private secret.

"The black guy’s with the promoter’s stable," Taurus told me.

"Stable?" I said. "Like horses?"

"The other guy’s from prison."

"You mean like Sonny Liston? He learned to box there and got out—"

"No," he said. "He’s in there. He lives there.”

"How do you know?"

"I saw their bus."

"Wha’d it say?"

"C.C.I."

"Charleston Cornhole Idiots."

"Columbia Correctional Institution.”

Well, that made all the difference in the world. Now I saw the white guy’s secret. He was grinning because he was on the town, out of stir for the night, chained up and bused down and unchained for a night of freedom. And the Negro twice his size was scared because he was in the ring with a convict.

Behind the boxers loomed an almost drive-in-sized luminescent screen, white as the moon. The real fight would come on that. You could see a big cable running across the floor away from it that I guess the broadcast had to come through. The moose and the bruise performed their bobbing and hugging, their tiny terrors like mortal shadows against the very sky.

"What’s that fireman doing here?"

"He’s the fire marshal. I don’t know."

We watched the fire marshal talk to a dude with pointy shoes and skinny pants near the door. Then the dude sort of held his hands up in the air and pushed it several times like he was saying "All right" or "Calm down" to the fireman. Then the fireman left and they began closing the doors, but people pushed through. Then they locked them with chains I around the handles, the bar kind you press to open school doors. People hit the doors with chairs, which you could tell were chairs because their legs came popping through the glass, that thick, glue-colored glass in school doors with chicken wire set inside. It sounded like guns.

When the first flicker of light hit the screen, it threw up the boxers’ shadows bigger than Olympic giants and the whole crowd shut up. Like that. We must have looked like a photograph of a crowd, faces silent, still, looking through blue cigarette smoke.

One more tiny flicker and the hum-drum cranked up louder than ever and I didn’t hear any more chairs go off. It flickered a bunch and the fighters started sort of ducking from the light, crouching down and taking a peek at the screen so not to miss anything.

When it flickered off they were huddled in a little clench, taking a peek, and when it came on it cast their shadows up on the screen, and we laughed, because you’d see tiny mortals in a huddle and then they’d start lighting and it would come on and they’d be bigger than Godzilla for a couple of crazy, huge hooks; then sloppy amateurs again, then birUP: Killers on the Skyline, the biggest sluggers of all time.

The crowd started booing, so the promoter threw in the towel on his moose, who was glad, and they got out of the ring and everyone just watched the screen. A second or two of faraway light like heat lightning kept hitting it, notching up the noise with every moon — like vision; the audience a bunch of primitives getting giddy because they can’t figure out the television, don’t know whether to watch the fantastic little men in it or to watch it, weirded out by the promise of the spectacle but also by this queer satellite light or whatever pouring a faraway world into this hot, smoky gym.

A flash of something real: Ali! and cheers go up. Coppery and gliding, done up in white shoe tassels, eyes bright as a squirrel’s, dancing like skip-to-the-music. Those tassels whipping around, wrapping and unwrapping, cracking like whips, violent -looking things, snapping and fibrous and lashing his solid legs. You can’t hear yourself.

And Joe! Louder cheers. He chugs in wearing pedal pushers, big green paisley bloomers, already snot-daubing, a million hunkering little ducks and hooks in the perfect rhythm of the taut rope, buoy down and buoy up, and hinh and hinh , Joe’s got the sound going already.

You know what he is?" I say.

"Who?"

"He’s a renascent smart ass."

Taurus looked at me.

"But now Joe," I said. "There is business in Joe." I had him smiling.

A rumor comes by that Joe’s family is in the gym and people are looking for them, but fat chance of that because there’s every dude with a wallet between Denmark and Olar in the joint, pimps and kers and city muh-fuh gentlemen in colorful undershirts, and country cane pole ones ln flannel shirts, but Taurus is looking at one bunch up top I decide might as well be them. There are three or four heavyset kind-of-old ladies in Cossack hats like fur bowls on their heads — probably their Sunday rigs. And behind them stand some men a blt younger and thin-looking in cigar-brown suits with their white shirts very bright, and dark, skinny ties. Their faces are dark and narrow too. Overall they look a bit unsure about things, like it’s church.

That’s about how Joe looks, bouncing in his corner as if he’d like to kneel down in a pew. And Ali orbiting, advertising, selling, leering like he ought to have on an Elvis Presley costume instead of a terry robe, and Joe snot-daubing, and if they were his people in there, they drove up in probably one big Buick and planned to drive all the way back that night just to see their boy on a drive-in movie screen beamed in by a radio contraption in space a million miles away, and Joe is worried about them driving that far, as if he doesn’t have enough to worry about with, I have to admit, a majestic-looking machine of a man ass-holing all around the ring, and Ali, Mr. ex-Cassius Clay, is worried about a woman at ringside he’s going to leave his sweet wife for named Veronica Porshe. I read that later.

Well, there’s a bunch of circus barking, and ding and they’re off. Whatever it is that goes on, goes on punctuated by dings and the yelling becomes who won that i one don’t know i don’t know either who won that one and ding and yelling again. Five thousand fire-code violators yelling, elbowing, stomping, craning, holding their heads when they can’t stand it, lusting for their chosen hero on this living moonscape of escape when-

Silence.

Ali is going over, going over like, like a tree—

All noise.

We see only then, before he hits the deck, Joe’s extra-special message to Mr. Smart Ass, looping out of the dark like one of those mace balls, Ali’s eyes skittering toward it white like a horse’s. All the people are in the air.