Fuller slipped his Stetson back on the back of his head and called out: “Would someone get me some cardboard to cover this fucking thing up?”
Many times Billy had seen Fuller at the Palace or the Strand or the Victory Drive-In, settled into his seat watching the cowboys on the big screen. He’d prop up his boots and munch on a sack of popcorn with that small, cruel mouth and peer at the screen with his beady brown eyes.
He looked straight at Billy, as if he’d been caught peeping into someone’s window. “Where’s your daddy at? Go on and pull at his pant leg about what you seen.”
Then Fuller’s gaze fell upon the girl with her pegged jeans and boy’s shirt and hair twisted into a ponytail and tied with a red bandanna. Fuller wet his lips and smiled, as if he was about to speak, his eyes wandering over her body and face as he stood there with all that activity around him, just breathing her in.
When Billy turned back, the girl – Lorelei – had disappeared.
2
BEFORE I MARRIED JOYCE and settled down in Phenix, I’d come to Columbus, Georgia, at the end of the Depression to make my way as a prizefighter. I was only a teenager, just old enough to leave the corn and cotton farm I’d grown up on outside Troy, Alabama, where I’d heard about Kid Weisz from boxing magazines. I knew he’d trained some of the top fellas like Corn Griffin, who was supposed to be heavyweight champ before getting upset by Jim Braddock in ’34. And I’d showed up at his sweaty hothouse brick gym with little more than a duffel bag, an old jump rope, and some dog-eared paperbacks with titles like Scientific Boxing by a Fistic Expert and The Sweet Science.
I was skinny and rangy, and my feet got tangled up about every time I sparred. But I lived in that gym every day and listened to old Weisz and his strange, loopy philosophies I still hear in my head about every morning in the shaving mirror: The world is largely made up of gropers, kid, little people who are always being pushed around by the natural bullies of society.