Fat City

by Leonard Gardner

  Since the receipt of the ominous papers referring to him as the defendant, as if his marital shortcomings had been criminal, Tully’s only knowledge of his wife had come from her brother, Buck, whom he had met again one night on El Dorado Street between two shore patrolmen. A third-class petty officer, he appeared to have been strolling with the thirteen buttons of his fly open. Tully had hurried over and asked what had happened to Lynn. The patrolmen had ordered him to leave, an argument ensued, and Buck, between displays of defiance and submission, told him that Lynn was married to a Reno bartender. At the time the news had shaken Tully, yet he could not completely believe it. On these melancholy nights when he felt that only reconciliation could salvage his life, he believed she could not love anyone but him.

  Shoes squeaked by outside the door. Reviewing old uncertainties and mistakes, Tully gazed down at the magazines. Finally he reached for the Modern Screen and propped himself up with his head between the rods of the bed. On the magazine’s cover was an extravagantly smiling starlet in a bathing suit with a penciled dot over each breast and a scribbled cleft at the crotch. The coughing went on across the hall. It was time to change hotels.

  2

  The Lido Gym was in the basement of a three-story brick hotel with a façade of Moorish arches, columns, and brightly colored tile. Behind the hotel several cars, one tireless and up on blocks, rested among dry nettles and wild oats. In a long, narrow, open-end shed of weathered boards and corrugated steel, a group of elderly men were playing bocce ball with their hats on and arguing in Italian. A large paper bag in his hand, Ernie Munger went down the littered concrete stairs. In a ring under a ceiling of exposed joists, wiring, water and sewage pipes, a Negro was shadowboxing in the light of fluorescent tubes. Three men in street clothes, one bald, one with deeply furrowed cheeks, the third wearing a houndstooth-check hat with a narrow upturned brim, all turned their faces toward the door. The one with the deeply furrowed cheeks reached Ernie first.

  “Want a fight, kid?”

  “You Ruben Luna?”

  “Gil Solis. How much you weigh? You got a hell of a reach. You looking for a trainer?”

  They were joined by the man in the hat. A Mexican, as was Solis, he was perhaps forty, his face plump and relaxed, his skin smooth, his smile large, guileless and constant. “I’m Luna. You looking for me?”

  “Yeah, I just thought I’d work out. Like to see what you think. Billy Tully told me I ought to come by.”

  “You know Tully?”

  “I boxed with him the other day down at the Y.”

  “Is he getting in shape? How’d you do, all right? You must of done all right, huh?”

  Now the bald man came over, whispering hoarsely, and Luna guided Ernie away with a hand on his shoulder. “Got your stuff there? We’ll get you started.” They walked on their heels through the shower room, the floor wet from a clogged drain. In a narrow, brick-walled, windowless room smelling of bodies, gym clothes and mildew, several partially dressed Negroes and Mexicans glanced up and went on conversing.

  “Look around and find you an empty locker,” said Luna. “Better bring a padlock with you next time. Get one of those combination kind. They’re hard to pick. I’ll be out in the gym when you get your togs on.”

  A service-station attendant, Ernie removed his leather jacket, oil-spotted khaki pants and shirt. When he came out into the gym in tennis shoes and bathing trunks, Ruben Luna sent him into the ring. With other shadowboxers maneuvering around him in intent mutual avoidance, their punches accented by loud snuffling, Ernie self-consciously warmed up.

  “How’d you like to go a round or two?” Luna asked after he had called him out. “I’m not rushing you now. I’d just like to get a look at you.”

  “With who?”

  “Beginner like you. Just box him like you did Tully. Colored boy over there.”

  Before a full-length mirror a boy in a Hawaiian-print bathing suit and white leather boxing shoes, his reddish hair straightened, was throwing punches.

  Looking at those high white shoes, Ernie pushed his hands into heavy gloves held braced for him by the wrists. He stepped into a leather foulproof cup. A head-guard was jerked over his brows. Padded and trussed, his face smeared with Vaseline, a rubber mouthpiece between his teeth, he stood waiting while two squat men punched and grappled in the ring. Then he was following his opponent’s dark legs up the steps. For two rounds he punched, bounded and was hit in return, the headguard dropping over his eyes and the cup sagging between his legs. Afterward Ruben Luna leaned over the ropes, contending with Gil Solis for the head-guard’s buckle.

  Stripped of the gloves, Ernie stood on the gym floor, panting and nodding while Ruben, squared off with his belly forward and hat brim up, moved his small hands and feet in quick and graceful demonstrations. “You got a good left. Understand what I mean? Step in with that jab. Understand what I mean? Get your body behind it. Bing! Understand what I mean? You hit him with that jab his head’s going back, so you step in—understand what I mean?—hit him again, throw the right. Bing! Relax, keep moving, lay it in there, bing, bing, understand what I mean? Keep it out there working for you. Then feint the left, throw the right. Bing! Understand what I mean? Jab and feint, you keep him off balance. Feinting. You make your openings and step in. Bing, bing, whop! Understand what I mean?”

  In the flooded shower room, Ernie was addressed by a small Mexican standing motionless under the other nozzle: “How’s the ass up here?”

  “Not good. Where you from?”

  “L.A.”

  “How’s the ass down there?”

  “Good.”

  Soapless, the two hunched under the hissing spray.

  “Are the guys tough in this town?”

  “Not so tough. How about down there?”

  “Tough.”

  “Just get here?”

  “Yeah, I was in a bar yesterday, this guy’s calling everybody a son-of-a-bitch. So I go out and wait for him. He come out and I ask did that include me. Says yeah. So I got him. I mean I just come to town. Some welcome. I don’t know, trouble just seems to come looking for me.”

  Then the man began to sing, repeating a single phrase, his voice rising from bass moans and bellows to falsetto wails. Earth Angel, Earth Angel, will you be mine? The song went on in the locker room, the singer, as he put on his clothes, shifting to an interlude of improvisation: Baby, baaaby, baaaaby, uh baby, uuh, oh yeauh, BAAAAAAABY, I WANT you, while naked figures walked to and from the showers and steam drifted through the doorway. Drawing on his pants, Ernie, bruised, fatigued and elated, felt he had joined the company of men.

  3

  The bruises around Ernie’s eyes faded from purple to greenish yellow and were superimposed by others. His lashes were rooted in blood-filled ridges, red welts marked the outer corners of each narrowed eye, there was a fatness to his nose. Yet Ruben Luna, observing from the ropes, knew this helmeted and heavy-gloved sparring in the gym was hardly fighting at all.

  “Hit him. Don’t apologize,” he shouted, and Ernie nodded, once turning his head to listen and taking a punch. Assuming a classic pose, he circled and feinted, springing away from threatening gestures, then with no discernible reason, as if he had been waiting not for an opening but for inspiration, he charged, punching wildly. Every day, by another amateur or by the two professionals near his weight, one lighter, one heavier, both phlegmatic, his nose was bloodied.

  Ruben watched patiently, believing in the eventual perfection of every promising move. He attended with towel and water bottle. Holding the heavy bag bucking against his chest, he coached with his cheek against the leather only a few inches from Ernie’s smacking fists. Concluding every workout he folded the towel into a pad, placed it on the floor, and while Ernie balanced on his head, bending his long neck from side to side, Ruben stood holding his ankles, gazing between the V of his legs off across the gym with the rapt eyes of a man whose reason for attention was ending for the day.

  He went home to h
is family. Amid the arguing and nonsensical monologues of his children and the scolding of his wife, he ate his supper. He went to bed early and got up early, drove to the union hall, was dispatched with the gangs in the cold early light, and passed the day driving a forklift in the port. At noon he bought coffee and cupcakes from a girl in gabardine slacks who arrived every day in a snack truck. After work he drove across town to the gym, and in a coffee shop he was served pie by a tall blond waitress before crossing the street to his boxers.

  “My white kid might shape up into something,” he told his wife.

  “That’s good.” Her hips wide in a sheer, peach-colored nightgown, her legs heavy and short, she was bending over, folding back the white satin bedspread. With a weary moan she crawled onto the bed and settled herself under the covers. Leaning against the upholstered headboard, she began creaming her face. There was a fullness to her brown throat, a softness under her chin. Her thick, wide, fierce lips that had once excited him sank at the corners into plump cheeks creased where there had once been dimples.

  “He’s got a great reach and a good pair of legs. And he’s white, you know? He’s a real clean good-looking kid. He could draw crowds some day if he could just fight. And maybe he can if he’d just listen. If I could put all I know in him he could make it. But I didn’t learn it overnight either.”

  When his wife put away her jar and turned onto her side, pulling the covers up, Ruben began to undress. The room was lit by a bedside lamp, its shade enclosed in cellophane wrapping. On the dresser were a number of photos of his family, in frames and cardboard studio easels, among small boxes, ceramic figurines, and several bronze saddle horses of varying sizes standing on doilies. From one wall the serene face of Christ stared obliquely toward the back yard from a brass grillwork frame with a tiny burnt-out night light at the top.

  In a pair of yellow pajamas, ripped under the arms and tight between the legs, Ruben got into bed. “I got nothing against coloreds,” he said in the darkness. “Buford Wills is a good little colored boy, but there’s too many in the game. Anglos don’t want to pay to see two colored guys fight. They want a white guy. Like Tully. He was a pretty good draw. If he’d had a better punch he could of gone to the top. If he could of just hit harder and taken it a little better. He had everything else, but he let that bad streak discourage him. I guess he’s getting in shape down there at the Y, though, or he wouldn’t found this kid. He’s got some miles left in him. This kid must of done good, too, and he could develop. He’s tall for a welter. You ought to see the reach on him. If he put some weight on he could grow into a good-looking white heavyweight. Huh?” Ruben paused. “Victoria?” Unanswered, he felt his mood declining. What he had been saying now seemed foolish. In the isolation of his will, goaded by his back and shoulders, he felt the old urge to punch. Trying to sleep, he thought: I can’t, I can’t sleep. And he lunged over on his side, the feel of his wife’s body, as it curved against his, as familiar as his own. “Sweetheart?” He patted her. “You awake?”

  “Huh?”

  “I was talking to you. Did you fall asleep?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” He stroked her hip in atonement for waking her. “I just can’t sleep.”

  “I don’t think we should,” she murmured.

  Silent, he stilled his hand.

  “Do you want to?” she whispered. “I think it’s taking a chance.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “We could if you wanted to. I don’t care.”

  “No, no, no. I don’t care. I understand. That’s not it. I’m just jumpy.”

  They lay quietly. Ruben’s thoughts, diverted now, shifted to the snack-wagon driver. She was divorced, she had told him, and a mother of two children—a pleasant young woman whose friendliness he enjoyed as much as his glances at her snug gabardine slacks. But her children seemed a barrier and he began to think of the tall waitress across the street from the gym. She was reserved and had a look of sullenness. To her Ruben had spoken no more than his orders. He had looked at her behind the counter, leaning forward to see a little more, and that was all. But now she came to him with a forceful presence. He moved his hand over his wife, and the actual mass and possibility of her was strange and startling. Free of the mutual solicitude that kept him comfortable and subdued, he was aroused. His forehead wrinkling in concentration, he tried to keep the pale turgid nipples in his mind distinct from these flaccid bumps his children had suckled and that he, in the throes of excitement, had suckled too—a mimicry that had gone unmentioned, yet that even now, several years later, he felt had been wrong, a theft from his own babies and an abasement of a decent wife he did not deserve. Distracted, Ruben moved his hand down her belly, trying to realize that she was here offering herself up to him.

  “You think it’s all right?” she whispered, and the sense of peril unnerved and excited him. “You want to real bad?”

  He no longer knew, wanting only quiet so the mass of her could regain that vivid reality. Silently addressing her with a name not her own, he persevered to a realm beyond all personality.

  4

  Days were like long twilights in the house under the black walnut trees; through untrimmed shrubs screening the windows the sun scarcely shone. It was a low, white frame house with a sagging porch roof supported by two chains that through years of stress had cracked the overhang of the main roof where they were attached, pulling it downward at so noticeable an angle that everything—overhang, chains, porch roof—appeared checked from collapsing by nothing more than the tar paper over the cracked boards. Inside, from other chains, hung light fixtures that never totally dispelled the murkiness of the rooms. At the back of the house, Ernie Munger slept late, stirring only briefly to the chatter of water pipes, subsiding back to sleep and waking at the banging of a frying pan, eating breakfast in his dreams before waking up at noon. Sluggish, he lay on his belly thinking of young divorcees and of a girl in a house in Isleton, a farm labor town he had visited one night with Gene Simms and a carload of acquaintances, its short main street in the shadow of the levee of the Sacramento River. It had been at the height of the harvest season; footsteps and fragments of Spanish passed constantly along the hall outside the room where he and his party waited with several stoical Filipinos smoking gnarled toscano cigars. They waited two hours before giving up. But before that ride home at a hundred and ten miles an hour between delta fields, the door to the room had opened once and Ernie had seen a girl of surprising loveliness. He had thought of her, a blonde in a pink formal, for several weeks before he returned one night alone. In another crowded room he waited for her, thinking he was at last going to know what it was, until the anticipation began to exhaust him. When he finally climbed with her to the top of the stairs, he confronted a woman at a table with a pan. The girl went on ahead while this matron in nurse’s white made it clear what was expected of him. He balked, and at her first assisting touch his breath was stopped by the erratic pounding of his heart. Bathed by her antiseptic hands, he tried to resist the welling urgency, wanting to rush with his passion to the room where the girl was waiting, but he remained where he was, hopeless, the dismayed hygienist then calling down the hall: We had a little accident. He had not gone back again. Now he had developed a loyalty to Faye Murdock, a girl whose uncooperativeness excluded her from these morning reveries.

  He ate breakfast alone—soft-boiled eggs, whole-wheat toast, oranges and milk. By then his father, a tire recapper, would have finished half a day’s work and his lunch. At the hour his father came home, Ernie was at the gym. From there he went to the service station and worked until two in the morning. He saw his father seldom, and though his mother was home all day, Ernie’s association with her had long been only perfunctory. Short, impeded by her flesh, spreading and sagging from fifty years of gravity, hotcakes and pies, she showed on her face an almost constant expectation of mistake and mishap. Earlier in his life he had countered her worried curiosity with shouts of defiance.
Now he eluded it with shifting eyes, shrugs and a completely unanimated face. After his first day at the Lido Gym he had taken a bottle of liquid makeup from the accumulation on her dressing table, and with it he hid his bruises from her as he and his sister, who had recently married with no advance warning, had long ago learned to conceal their private lives. As he grew older he had begun to feel that it was no longer his father but he whom she held responsible for a life that seemed to him perfectly natural for a mother. “Why don’t you leave if you don’t like it,” he said to her one day in answer to a complaint encompassing the house, his father, his sister, himself, the entire town; and then her stricken face had filled him with anguish not only for what he had said but for the inconsiderate act of existing.