With a bowl and a carton of salt he retired to the bathroom. There he mixed a solution that he snuffed up his nostrils over the basin, a remedy Ruben Luna had recommended for toughening the interior of the nose. Sucked into his head, the warm salt water trickled down his throat. He choked, spat into the basin and, sneezing, sprayed his face in the mirror with blood-tinted drops. He snuffed in harsh handfuls, pinched his nostrils shut and dabbed the solution on his swollen brows, the make-up dissolving over his fingers like the pigment of his skin. He shook salt from the box and caked it on his eyelids and lips. When he released the brine from his outraged nose, cords of mucus dangled out after it. Sneezing and coughing, his eyes watering, he went on dabbing and snuffing.
Later he drove to the levee beside the river channel where freighters and tug-towed barges entered and left the port. Zipped up in his leather jacket, each fist squeezing a small rubber ball, he ran along the dirt road past burst mattresses, water heaters, fenders, sodden cartons, worn-out tires and rusty cans strewn down the steep bank. At the shore rocked bottles and driftwood, blackened tules, papers and occasionally a reeking, belly-up fish. Gulls turned in the gray sky and stood on piles across the channel. By the time Ernie was opposite the warehouses he was hot and sweaty. His breathing fixed to the plopping of his long black tennis shoes, he pounded past the port. As larks rose with flashes of yellow from the dead weeds and wild grass, sailed ahead, landed, sang their six tremulous notes, hushed and flew up once more, he came unflaggingly on, feeling he would never tire.
Where the channel forked off from the San Joaquin River the bank took a gradual turn. The oaks of Dad’s Point stood ahead in the distance, their trunks painted white. Mouth gaping, his damp hair in his eyes, his body like a fired-up furnace, Ernie held his stride opposite Rough and Ready Island, where rows of moth-balled warships, their gun mountings sealed in protective pods, were moored three abreast for the future. Gagging on a dry throat, he chose some object as his finish line and, plodding up to it on weighted legs, plodded right on past. His head back and his heaving chest shot with pains, he strained on to a farther landmark. He did not quit there either. He fought on with himself to the edge of the park and, stumbling over the lawn past picnic tables and barbecue pits, careened with flailing arms farther and farther under the trees, until at last he stood gasping on the muddy bank of the point with nowhere else to run.
5
The gym was open when Ruben Luna arrived with Ernie Munger, who went on to the locker room. Gil Solis and Babe Azzolino stood idly by the ring with their hands in their pockets, their faces expressive only of suspended emotion as they waited for their athletes.
“I just took the kid down and bought him his license,” Ruben said, joining them.
“That right?” Babe’s straining voice, impaired by Adam’s-apple punches, was little more than a hoarse, penetrating whisper. Short, trim, his snub face thrust forward now with a look of intense concentration, the remnants of his black, oiled hair combed back from the temples, he rocked on his toes, jingling change in his yellow-ochre slacks.
“What if he quits?” asked Gil. “You’re out your five bucks.”
“He won’t quit. You know what the doctor said about him?”
“Look what Castillo did to me.” Gil’s tense, lined face was bitter. “You know how much money I gave that guy? I bet I use to give him a dollar every day. Two dollars, three dollars. Nearly every damn day. And he run off on me. Every day it was movies. Movies. I was always digging in my pocket for that guy and he takes off back to Mexico. Know what he is now? Know what he is? Number ten.”
“You should of done something right at the time,” Babe gasped, his voice croaking, breaking.
“What could I do?”
“You should of gone right to a lawyer.”
“Yeah,” said Ruben. “I took the kid to the doctor and he thought the needle was dull. He wanted to get some blood, you know, but it don’t go in.”
Gil hoisted his pants. “I know one thing, I’m not loaning any more money. Needle was dull, huh?”
“No, no, it was a good needle. So you know what he says?”
“Well, he probably had a dull needle.”
“No, he tried two needles.”
“Who’s this?” whispered Babe. “The kid?”
“Yeah, I took him down and got him his license today, and the doctor could hardly get a needle in him.”
“What was the matter, dull needle?”
“The kid’s like leather.”
“That’s odd, Ruben. That’s odd. Let me tell you that’s odd. I wouldn’t of thought that looking at him. Yeah, that’s odd. Manny Chavez had thick skin, you know, but he was tough, you guys know that, I mean they don’t come like him every day.”
“That’s not half of it. Hold on. He finally gets the needle in, see, and gets the blood and it’s almost black.”
“I had Chavez down in L.A. against Montoya—first round he gets butted over the eye and the blood starts running and I think well there goes the fight. But it’s not his blood, it’s Montoya’s. He’s got a cut on the top of his head must of took ten stitches. Chavez didn’t have a mark on him.”
“Remember that guy Estrada?” interrupted Gil. “I seen him open a Coke bottle with his teeth.”
“The hell you say. They break?”
“Listen, I didn’t tell you the half of it. The doctor gets the blood out, it’s black, and he’s just staring at it when I ask him to burn the veins out of the kid’s nose—stop those nosebleeds. So he puts the blood down a minute and gets his spark gun and when he gets done burning his nose out he picks up the tube again and turns it upside down to have another look and the blood in it don’t even run down. It just kind of stays up at the top of the tube. It’s turned to gelatin.”
Gil dug thoughtfully between his buttocks. Ruben sighed, made a few aimless sputters with his lips and began to hum. Babe cleared his mined throat. “Manny Chavez,” he whispered, “had the clearest piss of any man I ever seen. He’d take a specimen and the piss in that bottle would be just as clean and pure as fresh drinking water.”
6
On the day before Ernie’s first bout, he drove with Faye Murdock out of town and across the Calaveras River—brown and high from the rains—and turned down a lane that ran parallel to the levee. At a dirt turnoff used by lovers and fishermen, he drove up onto the levee and parked out of sight of housing tracts while dull-gray mud hens flapped away in the late afternoon, running over the water as they flew. Dark clouds extended to the horizon. Along the muddy banks of the river, red-wing blackbirds sang in the cattails. His arms around Faye, as before on so many other untraveled roads, Ernie whispered and blew in her small bitter ear.
Faye was a solemn dark-haired girl with large attractive teeth, fair skin, and a short fleshy body that seemed to Ernie impervious to stimulation. He had begun taking her out because for a time she had gone with Steve Bonomo, whose success with a previous girl Ernie had read about on the wall of a high school lavatory. His first time alone with Faye, Ernie had sensed a difference from the other crossed-legged girls he had dated. He felt in her lips and arms a lonely employment of him. Doggedly his campaign had gone on until he and Faye were among those who cruised under the lights of Main Street in predictable, faithful pairs, the dense one-way traffic proceeding slowly through yellow lights, blocking the street to cross traffic, the riders conversing from car to car while horns blared, the procession starting off again with squealing tires and rapping pipes only to brake, lurching, once again to a creeping mass. Yet, for all his fidelity, Ernie remained as frustrated as the young men who cruised alone or in groups as he had once cruised, looking for that mythical female pedestrian who would like to go for a ride.
The sky darkened, the liquid singing of the blackbirds diminished and ceased, mud hens swam back to shore, climbed up the banks and huddled in the willows. The lights of a farm came on in the brown distance where patches of tule fog lay on the barren muddy fields. A wind came with t
he darkness, rattling the license plate, and a low, honking flight of geese passed.
Later in the night it began to rain. To Ernie the first patters were like small sounds from Faye’s mouth. Her lips had been against his so long that his mind was drifting among images of reeds wavering with the delicate movements of her tongue. When the roof began drumming, they sat up. Rain was pouring over the windshield, battering the ground, hissing into the invisible river. Ernie opened the window and the cold rain blew against his face. From his hunger he realized that many hours had gone by. In the light of a match, Faye’s wan and tired face, the downward angle of the cigarette, her rumpled clothes, unpinned hair, and the slump of her neck renewed his hopes.
Within closed steamy windows an embrace went on like the same endless moment, broken only by an occasional digestive murmur and Faye’s lighting of cigarettes. Finally, in his weariness, Ernie began to accept that once again he had been baffled. There was no consolation from having tried everything he could think of. To appear in a ring tomorrow without ever having won this other battle seemed presumptuous and dangerous. He alone in the Lido Gym carried a burden of silence and deceptive innuendo, and he wondered if this could mean the difference between victory and defeat. He was persevering with his repertory of foreplay, which nothing else ever followed, when Faye’s fingers came to rest on his thigh, over the small tin box in his pocket.
“Aspirin?”
Alarmed, he gave no answer, and uncertain what he should do, he allowed her hand into the pocket. She withdrew the box and he heard it click open in the darkness. As the silence continued he sagged against the door. The box snapped shut and was replaced.
“Were you planning it all this time?”
“No.”
“You always carry them?”
“It was just in case something came up.”
“You mean if you couldn’t use them on me you’d use them on whoever would let you?”
“I wouldn’t want anybody but you.”
“What made you think I’d do it?”
“I was just hoping.”
“Is that all you think I am?”
“What do you mean? We haven’t even done it.”
“You want to, though. Is that all you think about?”
“I don’t think about that at all.”
“You just said that’s what you were hoping.”
He thought a moment. “I just want what we’d both enjoy.”
“Oh, sure.”
For a while neither spoke, and Ernie wondered if he had talked his way clear.
“Do you really care for me?” she asked at last.
There was a silence so heady that he began to tremble. “I guess I’m in love,” he answered, and slumped lower in fear of what he had said. Had he committed himself for nothing, or had he only said the one thing he should have said all along? The rain beat on the roof. They were sitting apart; he did not know now if she would even let him touch her, but unable to think of anything else, afraid the opportune moment might be passing, he reached out to her and she moved into his arms. It was as if the air had been knocked out of him. She clung to him and he contorted, suffocating, kicking the door as he tried to maneuver, knowing beyond all doubt that the inevitable moment had at last arrived. He pulled at her clothing, pushed her down on the seat. He sprawled, he thrust a foot through the spokes of the steering wheel. There was a smack of flesh. As Ernie’s eyes pinched shut he felt the pulse of ecstatic oblivion and the horn began to honk.
In a moment all was still. Collapsed, conscious again of the rain on the roof, he realized he had experienced the ultimate in pleasure.
“Was it good?” he asked.
“It was nice,” whispered Faye.
Ernie was gratified, hearing that. Still he was uncertain. He wondered if everything had gone as it should. Was that all there was to it? Perhaps it had been celebrated out of proportion because there was nothing else to live for. He lay with his face in a split in the seat, his nose squashed against the stuffing.
“It must be getting late.”
“Yeah.”
“Are we all right here?”
“We better go,” he murmured into the seat.
“Do you think we should?”
He abruptly sat up. “We better get out of here.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have stayed so long.”
The engine rumbled, the lights shone out into the rain, the wipers swept and clacked across the windshield. After a few yards the car stopped, wheels spinning in the mud. Ernie shifted from low to reverse, trying to rock free, but the tires dug in and settled firmly.
“What’ll we do? I should have gone home,” said Faye.
Glad to get away from her, he stepped out into the rain. Leaving her at the wheel, he grasped the rear bumper, his back to the car, his shoes gripped by mud. Shouting directions, he heaved forward. The car thrust backward. He leaped away, screaming above the whining wheels. She shifted and the engine died.
“I can’t do it,” she said and he was afraid she was going to cry. Face streaming, he got back in to start the engine. “I wish we hadn’t come,” she said. “I wish I’d stayed home.”
Ernie returned to the rear bumper. While the tires sprayed mud, he grunted and pushed and yelled at her not to spin the wheels. Finally, feet sucking and splashing, he walked off in search of boards, crashing angrily through the bushes down the steep slope of the levee. He was close to the water now but could not see it. In front of him was a black expanse with a sound like escaping steam. As he felt around on the bank he heard Faye calling from the car and he bellowed back, disgusted that she thought he would run off in the rain and leave her. Whipped by twigs, he was pulling himself along the bank from willow to willow when a whirring of wings rushed up before him. Recoiling, he slipped, throwing out his hands, striking the ground on his side, and instantly he was in the icy shock of the river, up to his waist, disbelieving, tearing away chunks of bank in terror. Blindly he clambered out and stood quaking on the slick bank, his teeth chattering, water pouring from his pants and his shoes full. Clutching twigs, his mind assailed by that black immersion, by what had happened in the car, he felt that everything had passed out of his control. He had to get home, had to get warm and dry and rested for his fight, but he was out here, wet in the bushes, stuck miles from town with a girl he might now never be able to get rid of. Through the hissing rain his horn sounded. Ernie moved ahead along the bank, weighed down by his pants.
He returned to the car dragging a waterlogged board.
“Ernie? Is that you?”
“Who else? What’s all the noise about?”
“I was afraid you got lost.”
Cursing, he jammed the board under the rear tire. He pushed, the wheels spun, the board cracked, the car surged ahead and mired down, Ernie collapsing in the glow of the taillights. Wallowing on his knees, he dug at the mud, jammed the cracked board back under the tire, and heaved against the car while Faye raced the engine. When they at last reached firm ground near the point where the levee road turned down again to the paved lane, the car lurched and careened ahead. Ernie ran after it down the turnoff.
“Will you call me tomorrow?” Faye asked on the way back to town.
“What for?”
“Because I want to talk to you.”
Feeling the obligations already beginning, he agreed.
Her street was submerged from curb to curb, the water roaring under the car as they approached her house. Her porch light was the only one on in the block.
7
A carload of boxers departed in the rain. They rode past the county hospital, past leafless vineyards, orchards and walnut groves, barns, chicken pens and puddle-covered fields. On the back seat, slumped between Wes Haynes and Buford Wills—both wearing small black hats with upturned brims—sat Ernie Munger. Ruben Luna was driving. Beside him Babe Azzolino rode with Bobby Burgos, a Filipino bantamweight, who was his only fighter of the night. While the two managers talked on and on, Ern
ie nodded, dozed and jerked awake.
“We got the winners,” said Ruben. “What do you think?”
“I’d say we got the winners.”
“We got four sure winners. You know what I’d like to do some day? I’d like to take these guys to England. They appreciate class over there. When I turn these boys pro I’d really like to make that trip.”
In Salinas they had a dinner of chili burgers. “This guy can’t fight,” said Ruben, sitting across from Ernie in the booth. “You’ll knock him out. How you feel? Hardly wait to get in there?”
“I’ll give it all I got,” said Ernie.
“You may have to go the four rounds, so don’t punch yourself out. Don’t lose your head.”
“I won’t. I’ll pace myself.”
“It goes fast, though, so don’t hang back.”
“I won’t hang back. I’ll give it everything I got.”
“Yeah, but you want to pace yourself. Buford, your guy’s been around so you don’t want to let him get a good shot at you. But he’s a boozer, you know how these soldiers are. He won’t go the limit.”
Fog was blowing above the roofs and trees when they reached Monterey. Del Monte Gardens was near the edge of town. Ruben Luna, leaning slightly backward, coat and sweater unbuttoned, shirt open at the throat, hat back and arms swinging, led the way in. Several boxers were already in the dressing room, resting on tables, undressing, moving nervously around amid a murmur of voices and tense clearing of noses. Lightheaded from hours on the road, Ernie listlessly took off his clothes. In new boxing shoes, leather cup and a pair of purple-trimmed gold trunks with a monogrammed A, he shifted about while Ruben wrapped his hands, moving with him, winding the gauze and muttering to him to keep still. With narrow strips of adhesive, the bandages were taped down and anchored between each finger. The gloves Ruben pulled first onto his own hands, pounding and kneading the padding away from the knuckles before he removed them and, braced, held them for Ernie to work on. They were smaller than those Ernie had trained with, and he shuffled in his light shoes, swinging his arms while Ruben pursued him, smearing Vaseline around his eyes and down the bridge of his nose. Ruben then crossed the room to Wes Haynes, who was sitting in T-shirt and jockstrap on the edge of a table, his red straightened hair in a high mound.
Fat City Page 3
