Fat City

by Leonard Gardner

  Ruben was on the apron cutting Ernie’s shoelaces with surgical scissors when the count began. But the referee did not complete it. He signified the obvious with a wave of his arms and bent down to remove the mouthpiece. Ruben left the shoes, ducked into the ring, cut the laces of the gloves and jerked the gloves off. He was on his knees cutting away the handwraps when the ringside doctor came through the ropes. The doctor pulled up his trousers and squatted. With a long pale index finger he lifted one lid and then another from the brown motionless eyes that gazed sightlessly up at the circle of faces. Hands shaking, Ruben waved the ammonia vial under the dented nose. Babe, pressing a chunk of ice against the nape of Ernie’s neck, pulled his ears, and the referee stretched the gold waistband up from Ernie’s abdomen as it heaved in desperately rapid respiration.

  A minute must have gone by. The Negro, in his green robe now, came and stood with his seconds over the prostrate form, and still Ernie had not moved. His legs had quivered for an instant after he had fallen, and that had frightened Ruben as much as the rigidness that followed. He was clear of blame, but he was terrified. He felt the same vertigo he had felt several years before when Jaime Guzman collapsed in the gym. He had not been clear then, and he had suffered the remorse of one warned a hundred times yet who had persisted. Barely able to stand, he had told solemn doctors and indifferent hospital attendants about the protective headguard and the sixteen ounces of padding in each glove, of how Guzman had got up after the knockdown and even shadowboxed before going to the locker room. He repeated it all to Guzman’s crying wife in the waiting room, and after Guzman died in surgery he explained it to a reporter on the phone, naming the other man who had been in the ring, telling of the brief time Guzman had been in training, once more describing the knockdown and once more omitting the other that had come before it and omitting how he had chided him and made him go on despite the look he had seen briefly in his eyes, until he had gone down the second time and the look was clear to everybody in the gym. Ruben had felt he was finished then, but he had also speculated that Guzman might have been hurt in one of his bouts in the navy before he had come to him. In the gym after the funeral there was no mention of the other knockdown, and he devoted himself to the benefit fight that raised for the widow ten percent of a $1,600 gate. Gradually he overcame the memory of the face in the casket. With a toupee over the shaved skull, it had resembled no one he had ever known anyway. But now under the ring lights Ruben experienced the same dread, and as he massaged Ernie’s arms with unhurried hands, his face distressed but not frantic, he felt the hopeless folly that was his life.

  It lasted until Ernie’s lids at last began to flutter. As his eyes opened, blinked, squinted and closed again, Ruben struggled to contain his joy, afraid it too was error.

  “What’s your name?” asked the doctor in an imperious tenor, and Ruben passed the ammonia again under Ernie’s nose. This time there was a slight recoiling. “That’s enough of that,” said the doctor, but Ruben felt he was the superior in experience and moved the vial once more past the nostrils. Ernie grimaced. Twitching, blinking, he tried to raise his head.

  “What’s your name?”

  Ernie squinted up at the faces.

  “Where are you?”

  “Did I get knocked out?”

  “What’s your name? Tell me what your name is. Can you do that?”

  “Ernie Munger.”

  “What town are you in? Hum?”

  “Oakland. What round is it?”

  “It’s all over. How many fingers do you see? Can you see my hand?”

  When Ernie sat up, the Negro bent down to him for the belated gesture of sportsmanship, his face framed by a white towel. “Good fight. You all right now?”

  Ernie looked at him dully. Babe rose, patted the victor’s back and hoarsely whispered to his seconds: “Real good puncher.”

  Helped to his feet, Ernie stood with one shoulder hunched while Ruben and Babe tied the robe around him. His arms across their necks, his shoes gaping, he was conducted up the aisle and around a vendor shouting: “Cold beer!”

  In the dressing room, Ruben held ice at the back of Ernie’s neck, sending Buford Wills out for his fight accompanied only by Babe. “I’ll be right out,” he said.

  “I’ll catch up with you.” He was conscious of the minutes going by as he roughly toweled Ernie’s body, as he helped him on with his clothes, gave him a drink of brandy from the medical kit, studied his eyes and draped the robe over his shoulders as he sat shivering on the rubbing table. He heard the bell as he was taking his pulse. “How you feel now?”

  “Head hurts. Can I have some water?”

  Ruben heard the shouts of the crowd and felt the pull of the fight like a physical compulsion. He ran for another manager’s water bottle, covered with grimy adhesive tape, and as he was returning with it, the door hurled open and Babe was in the room again, shouting inaudibly. “He’s cut!” Ruben saw the lips say before the croaking sounds registered, and he ran to the medical kit. With the water bottle still in his other hand, he ran past Babe out into the cavernous auditorium, soaring with that grave yet turbulent completeness down the aisle toward the square of glaring light where Buford Wills, small and frail and black, with a trickle of blood down his face, was battling a tattooed Mexican.

  11

  Wearing a new straw hat, Billy Tully crawled for seven days in the onion fields, then he was back on the dark morning street among crowds of men left behind by the buses, acridly awake with nothing to do at the impossible hour of 5 a.m. The men grumbled about workers from Mexico, talked of the canneries hiring, passed bottles, knelt in doorways for furtive games of crap, and in the blue light of dawn dwindled away, up Main and Market, along Center and El Dorado, back to the hotels, the lawn and shade of Washington Square, to Chinese and Mexican cafés and to the bars whose doors again were opening.

  After reading the paper over coffee and eggs, Tully went back to his room, slept awhile on top of the covers, then took a bus across town. In a crowd of several hundred he stood in the sweet-sour stench of stewing peaches outside a cannery. Trucks passed laden with peach lugs and can-filled cartons. On a vast paved area behind a Cyclone fence, yellow forklifts were stacking lugs into piles the size of barns. Amid the hum of machinery, gleaming empty cans clattered constantly down a conveyor from a boxcar where a man was unstacking and feeding them to the belt with a wooden pitchfork. Blocking the steps to the office, an aged watchman armed with a billy club and a large revolver, his pants hiked above his belly and dewlaps quivering over his buttoned and tieless collar, warned the crowd to keep back from the building.

  “Are you hiring or not?” Tully demanded, sweating and irritable now that the sun had cleared the roof.

  “You’ll just have to wait and hear from them inside.”

  “It don’t do them no good us standing here. Why can’t they come out and say if they don’t want us?”

  “I wouldn’t know nothing about that.”

  “Then let me go in and ask somebody.”

  “Keep back. No one’s going in that office.”

  “Why not? Who the hell you think you’re talking to?”

  “I’m just doing what they told me. They told me don’t let nobody in the office and nobody’s going through that door as long as I’m here. It’s none of my doing.”

  “They’re hiring all right,” said a man at Tully’s side. “I was out here yesterday and they said come back today.”

  Tully pushed to the front of the crowd and stood with his hands on his hips to prevent anyone from pushing around him. One of the big corrugated steel doors was open; visible in the gloom of the cannery were lines of aproned women. Inside the doorway a forklift had set down a pallet stacked with full lugs, and now a man left the crowd, stepped into the doorway and came back with two peaches. Several men and women followed, returning with handfuls of fruit before the watchman arrived and took the peaches from one final, grinning, capitulating pilferer. At that moment two Negro women
sat down on the office steps. The guard ran belligerently back, neck and pelvis forward, squared chin bony from the downward abandonment by its flesh. Arguing, the women rose, and his head turned from them to the open door, from which one more man slipped back to the crowd with a handful of peaches.

  “Well, you old fart, are they hiring or not?” shouted Tully.

  “Not your kind. You can go home right now.”

  A whistle blew, the cans stopped rolling from the boxcar, the women inside the building left the line, and the office door was opened by a youthful, sober-faced man in a white short-sleeve shirt with a striped tie.

  “The cannery won’t be hiring any more personnel at the present time,” he announced from the porch. “We’ve got our full crews for peaches. Come back when the tomatoes are ripe.”

  A peach banged against the corrugated metal wall several yards to his side—a loud juiceless thump.

  “Who did that?” shouted the watchman. He was answered with snickers. The man on the porch stated that throwing peaches would not get anybody a job, and he went back into the office. The crowd fragmented, people walking off down the sides of the street, some running to parked cars, some remaining in the yard as if not believing the announcement. Tully went over to the open cannery door.

  “Not hiring!” yelled the watchman.

  Nearby in the immense dim room, a girl in jeans and workshirt was seated on a pallet eating a sandwich, her neck round and sloping, with short black curls at the nape.

  The watchman arrived wheezing. “Not hiring. Come back when the tomatoes are ripe. Don’t take any of that fruit.”

  Tully took a peach and walked past him into the sunlight. The small chunk he managed to bite away he spit out. When he threw the peach against the front door of a house, it struck with the hardness of stone. Along the sides of the street green peaches lay in the weeds.

  The next morning he went out with a busload of tomato thinners. It was a day haul he had many times been warned against, but it paid ninety cents an hour. There was no talk on the ride out of town. The men slept; those with seats to themselves lay down on them. By sunrise they were in the delta.

  Preceded by another, the bus jolted down a dirt road to a field bordered by irrigation ditches. With a few groans but mostly in silence, the men climbed out into the sparkling air and selected short-handled hoes from the bed of a pickup truck. Then they jumped a ditch, a foreman already yelling on the other side, and they ranged over the field to continue the previous day’s weeding. Bent double, chopping with hoes half a yard long, crossing and uncrossing their legs, they stepped sideways along the rows.

  Tully glanced around, saw what was being done, and began chopping, trying to leave an isolated tomato plant every width of a hoe blade. Engulfed by new weeds, grass and dandelion, they were seedlings growing in a double line down each row.

  “What the hell kind of weeding you call that?”

  Tully turned to a pair of legs in clean khaki. Straightening, he confronted a black mustache on a face he assumed, from its displeasure, was a foreman’s. Then he turned to the ground he had cleared: long, leafless gaps, interrupted by infrequent plants, several of which appeared now not to be tomatoes.

  “Shape up and get your ass in gear or you can spend the day in the bus.”

  “Tough shit. A lot I care. Big deal,” Tully whispered at the departing back, wanting to hurl his hoe at it. He stooped lower, gripped the handle closer to the blade and hacked on. Instead of spaced plants, for a yard of mounting anxiety he left nothing at all. Sliding his hand all the way down to the blade, he meticulously scraped around the next plant, cutting down grass and weeds in a closer and closer square, plucking with his free hand until the tomato with its two jagged leaves and an adjacent red-rooted weed stood alone; and then in one final minuscule nick both were down. Guiltily, he peered around before propping the tomato plant upright between two clods. Already his back was hurting. The pain began at his waist, spread down the backs of his thighs to the tendons behind the knee joints and up the spine to the shoulders and the back of the neck. A tractor came up his row pulling a disk harrow, and when Tully straightened and moved aside for it to roar past, plowing under the chopped weeds, tiny transparent specks quivered before his eyes. He was falling behind. Soon he was the last stooped man moving across the field, and the foreman, stepping in long strides over the rows, again came threatening dismissal. Tully chopped on with desperate imprecision, dismayed by the lowness of the sun, which seemed to hang stationary. He doubted his back could last, and it was not the loss of the money, a day-long wait or the hitchhiking back he feared. It was the disgrace, for all around him were oaths, moans, bellowed complaints, the brief tableaux of upright wincing men, hoes dangling, their hands on the small of their backs, who were going on under the same torment—some of them winos, donut and coffee men, chain smokers, white-bread eaters, maybe none ever athletes yet all moving steadily on while he fell farther and farther behind, hacking in panic over the desertion of his will. He could not resign himself to the inexorable day; he would have to quit, and the others, he felt, were fools in their enduring. Including himself, only three men out of two busloads were white.

  He could resolve no more than to clear the next six inches before throwing down his hoe. He straightened up with difficulty and stared hazily at the blue sky that was scrawled with the familiar floating patterns etched for so long now on his eyes. He breathed deeply, stretched, bent back over the row, crouched, knelt, crawled, scrambled up, and all the while the ache in his back continued. He lasted until noon, until the unbelievable half hour of relief. Ten minutes of it he spent waiting in line at a pickup truck to buy bean and potato filled tortillas and a Pepsi-Cola.

  “Jesus Christ, you don’t care where you eat, do you?” asked one of the two white men passing him where he lay under a pepper tree among a humming profusion of green-glinting flies whose source of delight, he noticed now, lay directly beside him. He had thought the odor was coming from his lunch. With a twinge of embarrassment he rose and entered a bus—sweltering and full of Negroes—and sat next to a man reeking of Sloan’s liniment.

  Tully was falling asleep while he finished eating, but already the men were hobbling out of the bus and taking up their hoes. Following, he found himself off with the Negroes at one end of the field. Bloated, aching, he again bent over a row. Shuffling sideways, his legs crossing and uncrossing, the short hoe rising and falling, he labored on in the despondency of one condemned, the instrument of his torture held in his own hand. Of all the hated work he had ever done, this was a torment beyond any, almost beyond belief, and so it began to seem this was his future, that this was Work, which he had always tried to evade and would never escape now that his wife was gone and his career was over. And it was as if it were just, as if he deserved no better for the mess he had made of his life. Yet he also felt he could not go on even another hour. He felt his existence had come to a final halt, with no way open to him anywhere. Hand on his back, straightening, he gazed with bleary eyes at all the stooped men inching down the rows, and he felt being white no longer made any difference. His life was being swept in among those countless lives lost hour by captive hour scratching at the miserable earth.

  “You call this a living?”

  “Uh hum,” responded the man he had lunched beside, who, though young, appeared to have lost all his teeth and whose scent of liniment was periodically wafted to Tully’s nose.

  “How long’s it take to get use to this shit, anyway?” Tully asked, and was nettled by gleeful forlorn laughter from the chopping and shuffling men.

  “What a man want, what a man need, is a woman with a good job.”

  “I had that,” Tully said. “But she left.”

  Again there was that irritating laughter. Tully hoed on in silence, listening to a bantering discussion of divorce, which everyone around him seemed to have undergone.

  The wind came up; some of the men across the field masked themselves with bandannas, like bandi
ts, and those who had come with goggles around the crowns of their straw hats drew them over their eyes. The peat dust blew in trails across the field and the blue of the sky was obscured by a gray haze through which the sun shone dully like the lid of a can. Tully forced himself on and the others drew steadily away. Dizzy, the tendons at the back of his knee joints swollen and stiff, he stood upright, watching the foreman. He stumbled across the clods to the water can on the back of a jeep that moved slowly up the rows and idled among the men, and he drank a long time from the sticky tin cup. Rebuked for lingering, he limped back cursing. Even his eyes ached in the downward strain of stooping. He trailed farther and farther behind, the Negroes’ voices growing faint, blown by the wind.

  The sun sloped down the sky, the bent men moved on across the black earth. Tully was hardly thinking now, his mind fixed on pain and chopping and a vision of quitting time. Seeing a man go to the edge of the field, he rose and went to the foreman, who was suspicious but gave his permission. In the tall grass beside an irrigation ditch, Tully squatted a peaceful moment.

  When a white sedan arrived, raising a long trail of dust, Tully was lying in the dirt, propped on one arm, doggedly chopping. He did not understand that its appearance signified the end of the day until some of the crew began leaping over the rows and incredibly racing to the car, where a man now stood at the fender with a small green strongbox.