Battle said. “Oh, I wrestled some at Mumford, that’s where I picked up the moves. Coach told me I’d’ve been All-State if they let me on the mat with white kids. I trained to box. Joe Louis, he my main man. Then I got squashed flat by some kid from Chicago in my first round at Golden Gloves.” The apartment was on Crystal Street, a neighborhood I hadn’t visited in twenty-five years. I had followed the wrestler’s 1950 Chevy there from the Olympia in the Skyliner. The scabbed-over building he lived in might have been the same one I’d entered the last time. The railroad flat whose kitchen we were sitting in, with all the rooms opening off one another in a straight line like a cattle chute, might have been the same apartment; I’d only been there once, and that time I was carrying fifty thousand dollars in a beat-up suitcase to ransom a gangster, so I hadn’t paid close attention to details. The kitchen was comfortably shabby, with chickens on the yellow wallpaper turning brown as it neared the old pump-up gas stove and bare floorboards showing through holes the size of my head in the stained linoleum, and womb-warm in the spring cold.
