Fat City

by Leonard Gardner

  “Now you won’t even let me have my dinner. You won’t even let me eat.”

  Surrendering, he slumped back into his chair. With tears running down her cheeks, Oma filled her mouth with peas. Tully’s appetite was lost under a wave of hostile despair. She’s out of her mind, he thought. Feeling suddenly gorged, he forced himself to go on eating, for the nourishment. “So?” he murmured.

  “Huh?”

  “Well? Do you like it?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t ask something and then not even say what you mean.”

  “Supper.”

  “All right, why couldn’t you say it? It’s fine.”

  “I thought maybe you’d know what I meant, seeing as how you’re not having any trouble eating it.”

  “You don’t want me to eat it?”

  “Of course I want you to. I just meant now you’re eating.”

  “I’m eating. Sure, I’m eating.”

  “So what was the big fuss about?”

  Her fork slammed down on the table. “Will you stop needling me? The big fuss is that nobody could eat with you sitting across the table.”

  “You never had it so good. There isn’t another guy in town would make you your supper so you could get something in your gut besides that goddamn juice.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m serious. Will you show me the common decency of a serious answer?”

  “Common decency. You wouldn’t know any if you saw it.”

  “Will you give me a straight answer or won’t you?”

  “Will you stop doing this to me?”

  “Doing what? What the hell are you yelling about? All I asked for was a simple answer.”

  “You rotten-ass bastard! You’re determined not to let me eat this food.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. I give up,” said Tully, pushing back his chair and rising. “All I been trying to do is get you to eat. If you don’t want my company just say so and I’ll get out of your way.” He went to the closet, and as he was taking down his jacket his eyes were drawn again to the dustless square on the floor.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Think I’ll take a walk around the block so you can eat in peace, since that’s what you want.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “You’re going out for a drink and leaving me here.”

  “I’m fighting in a week. You think I’d go out drinking?”

  “You won’t take me out but you sneak off the first chance you get.”

  “That’s right, everything I do is wrong. Not a goddamn thing suits you, does it?”

  “Billy, wait for me. Let me get ready. Just let me comb my hair. Are my shoes over there?”

  He went out the door. Her cries pursuing him, he trotted lightly down the stairs. Outside, alone at last, striding rapidly along the wet pavement, Tully experienced a moment of communion with his wife. It was so strong he was sure that wherever she was she must be thinking of him just at that moment. It seemed impossible she would not still be single. Unable to visualize her, he could not imagine her life as anything but emptiness.

  In an uptown bar where Oma was not likely to look for him, he felt her presence still depleting him. Now he thought he should have waited for her. Though he did not want her around, he felt guilty for not taking her with him, and he hated her for this inevitable confusion. He seemed unable to do what he wanted. What he did was either what she wanted or else was spoiled for him because it went against her wishes. Tormented, he longed to be rid of her. If Earl wants her he can have her, he thought resentfully. Only why would he? She was white; maybe that was enough. For the first time Tully realized he could leave with a clear conscience. There was someone to take his place. And knowing he had been avoiding that realization, he felt a palpitant anxiety.

  Why he phoned Ruben Luna again he was not entirely certain. What he did convey was that he was drunk, because his manager came and got him. “She’s destroying me,” Tully said in the car. “You’re right about this. I know it.”

  While Ruben’s wife, short and plump, in flowered robe and fur slippers, her long black hair in a single braid, stood in the hall doorway, Ruben made him a bed on the pink sofa.

  20

  The northbound Greyhound droned into Stockton’s fume-filled terminal, and among the passengers who filed stiffly out was a short Mexican wearing a camel’s-hair overcoat and pointed, high-heeled, yellow gaiter shoes. Arcadio Lucero, with a throbbing head and churning bowels after a long ride from Calexico, pushed open the door to the depot lobby and climbed the steps to the men’s room, where, in a dim stall, he stared without comprehension at an inscription scratched across the metal dispenser of toilet seat covers. Mexican dinner jackets.

  In the waiting room Lucero bought a pack of gum and a newspaper. Chewing vigorously, he carried his bulging, expansible, strap-cinched leather suitcase several blocks to the Lincoln Hotel. In the closet of a room overlooking the lights and traffic of El Dorado Street, he hung the overcoat on a wire hanger. He was dressed in a wrinkled turquoise suit and a white knit shirt. The coat was long, with two low-set buttons. Under it crossed the straps of suspenders and a shoulder holster. With a hand over the long fly of his trousers, his coat open, he lay on the bed listening to the sounds in the street and in his own abdomen.

  From Mexico City to the border at Mexicali, Arcadio Lucero had read comic books and slept in a Pullman berth through glaring sun and starlit darkness, past pale barren ground, adobe villages, towns and cities, mountains, desert, then silos and cultivated fields. He had drunk soda pop from tepid bottles carried in buckets through the train, and eaten mostly what was brought aboard or held up to the windows by the crowds of shouting peddlers in a long succession of stops. Barefoot girls and women had come down the aisle with pans of goat meat, great baskets of chicharrones, hot tortillas wrapped in cloths. Boys, men, old toothless women had run along beside the car when the train was again in motion, calling, offering bananas, guavas, mangoes, paper cones of flavored ice, Jello shimmering on the palm of a hand, lifting something up to him and fumbling his money, running faster to give him his change, or slower, grinning, shrugging, as the train pulled away. Somewhere he had bought half a roasted cow’s head and eaten it held by the horn with newspaper on his lap. What had caused the diarrhea he did not know. But he had fought with it before, and soon he would go to a drugstore.

  Over the voluminous legs of his trousers he opened the newspaper. On a page with a photograph of basketball players, he stared at the columns of print until his name separated itself from inscrutable words. He drew from his pocket a small bone-handled knife, folded the paper along the edges of the article, slit each fold, threw all the remaining paper on the floor, and squinted at the excised article, his lips moving silently at each appearance of his name.

  Of Billy Tully he knew nothing and he cared to know nothing. He went where there was work, and who his opponents were no longer made any difference. He worried only about himself, his health, his conditioning, and his hands. Because he had broken his left on the top of a head, he had not fought in four months, and though he had carried the hand several weeks in a cast, it had pained him when he again had tried to hit with it in the gym. So he had rested it, and one day from a peddler outside a church he bought for two pesos a silver milagrito in the shape of a tiny hand. In the church he kissed the painted feet of the Virgin and the hem of her robe, laden with hundreds of silver hearts, legs, arms, horses, cows, pigs, and on a small exposed patch of the purple velvet had pinned his hand. The pain was gone the next time he went to the Baños Jordan and threw his fist against a heavy bag.

  He had resumed training and, in debt to his manager, had been quickly matched. On the train he had shadowboxed in the men’s room, and at stops along the way had got off and run up and down beside the standing cars. Often in the past he had fought with less training
; he had fought without training at all, keeping in shape by fighting sometimes once and twice a week. Since his first bouts as a fourteen-year-old flyweight, he had many times gone into the ring after nights of bedless sleep, with half-healed cuts, broken nose, sore throat, fever, venereal infections, and had learned to have faith in his body. A few times he had been knocked down and had stayed down—not from fear but from the certainty of a severe beating—and that had seemed right too, because his body was his livelihood. Early he had learned how to last, and he had lasted now fifteen years.

  Arcadio Lucero had begun with desperate fury and a relentless style evolved in disputes with other shoe-shine boys in the zocalo of Oaxaca where, after the death of his mother, he had slept on the benches under the trees. In winter, wrapped in a serape and wearing a knit cap, he had coughed and shivered with other boys and men through nights of semi-sleep, and though he missed his mother he did not miss an earlier comfort. Before her death he had slept huddled with his brother and sister on the sidewalk while she dozed and tended a charcoal brazier with one or two ears of corn keeping warm at the edge of the grate for any late passer-by. A Zapotec Indian, she had squatted through the days at the same spot, selling the corn she seasoned with slices of lime dipped in salt and powdered chili, while he and his brother loitered outside cafés and cantinas and in the dirt streets of the market, driving away dogs, begging, standing watch at parked cars, wagons, loaded mules and burros. Hard blackened ears of corn had been his breakfast until that cold morning when he awoke to a dead fire and saw his mother lying on her side, openmouthed. His sister, the youngest, had died earlier. His brother left town with a farmer, and Arcadio went to the park with a can of wax.

  Those first frantic bouts in Oaxaca and Tuxtla Gutiérrez he had fought with grim zeal. Training sometimes in a dirt-floored gym, fighting under rain-drummed roofs with water dripping into the ring, he had moved northward, arriving at sixteen at the border at Juárez, where he stayed long enough to father a child. When he got to Mexico City he was grown, a seasoned and calculating puncher with the scars of a veteran on his broad Indian face. He weighed 126 pounds.

  Fighting in the capital, he could afford a suit and new pointed shoes with elevated heels. His thick hair he wore long, combed back over the tops of his ears. Set in one pierced earlobe was a tiny gold medallion. Soon his face was in the tabloids. Then the fans who crowded the floor of the gym closed about him. Young men lined the ropes when he sparred, pressed around him at the speed bag, a boy standing above him on the quaking platform as a steadying ballast against the force of his blows.

  The Coliseo was designed like a small bull ring, circular, its tiers of balconies screened off with chicken wire to protect the boxers, referee and ringsiders from thrown bottles and weapons that might have escaped the searching hands of policemen who patted down from armpits to ankles each entering spectator. Often through the chicken wire and up from ringside at the end of his fights, a shower of coins sailed into the ring. Leaving the arena past the lame and blind still moaning and chanting outside the doors, Lucero was followed by a group of admirers. Sometimes as many as twenty, they accompanied him up the unlit street, ingratiating, shouting, waiting with him at each corner for the last of the group to catch up—a smiling young cripple who dragged himself along the pavement on a piece of rubber tire. And there in the dark among glowing fragrant cigarettes, watching the laborious approach of that low twisted figure with helplessly tossing legs, he felt moments of limitless destiny.

  He knocked out the national featherweight champion, and after one celebrated year was knocked out himself. He went on traveling, defeating hometown favorites all across Mexico, but the important fights he began to lose. Lucero now was wearing down. He had fought nearly two hundred times. What would become of him after he could not go on he had no idea, so did not think about it. All that was before him was tomorrow’s fight, and a week after another in Los Angeles, if he got by this one. A knockout loss would bring a thirty-day suspension.

  Out on the street, Lucero found a drugstore with a Mexican clerk. While there he dialed the number given him in Mexico City by his manager, and to the voice that answered said: “Bueno? Gil Solis? Estoy aquí—Arcadio Lucero. Tengo un cuarto en el Hotel Lincoln.” With a tinfoil packet of large flat tablets, Lucero went up the street to El Tecolote. In the window was his picture on a poster. He bent over in the dim light and looked at Billy Tully—who was, he saw, not so young either—and at himself. He had gained ten pounds since the photo was taken. Even so, as he entered, it was evident that the bartender recognized him.

  “Coca-Cola,” he said, mounting the stool. His last night in this city he had spent here drinking. The bar had been full until closing time, the jukebox blaring and strangers embracing him. He remembered being driven in a car crowded with men and women, and remembered firing his pistol out the window into the air.

  Lucero put a tablet in his mouth, took a swallow from the bottle and belched through the devious chambers of his nose. He settled into a kind of contentment. The bartender was moving down the bar. From the corner of his eye Lucero saw the faces of his countrymen turning to look at him, and he felt at home, as at home as he ever felt anywhere.

  21

  After a steak dinner with Ruben and a stroll along El Dorado Street, Billy Tully went back to the Oxford Hotel, where he had been sleeping, sober and alone, for the past week. But in bed early after a day of leisure, he began thinking about Oma and about the fight. Though he had not seen Oma since the night he had left her, he could not grasp a sense of his freedom. He felt that in being here he was doing something wrong, that he was causing her suffering and tomorrow night would pay for it. Scheming his defense, he visualized himself punching and dodging until he became alarmed about insomnia. He turned and sprawled but could not sleep. At what occurred to him as the first light of dawn, he leaped out of bed with a moan of utter defeat and walked into a wall. Peering at his alarm clock, then out the door at the clock over the lighted stairway, Tully comprehended that he had been in bed only an hour. He got back under the covers and perused the Mexican fight results in Ring magazine. While finding no mention of Arcadio Lucero, he noted with dismay the number of knockouts suffered in Mexico in a month’s time. There had been such a quantity the correspondent had amused himself with an array of synonyms: dumped, demolished, iced, polished off, put to sleep, embalmed, disposed of. And these unknown defeated Mexicans so depressed Tully that he knew, with terrible lucidity, that the sport was for madmen. He turned out the light and dreamed he could not sleep.

  Ruben drove him the next night to the Civic Memorial Auditorium, an adobe-colored edifice with fluted columns and statues of openmouthed bears guarding its walkway. Across the lighted façade, below an inscription that began Tomorrow and Forever and terminated down at the other end of the building with Defense of Liberty, fluttered a blue and white banner: Boxing Tonight. A line of early arrivals extended out onto the concrete walk from the general-admission window. In the lobby, filled already with Mexicans and smoke and the shouts of program vendors, a group of local boxers awaited free admission. Past ushers wearing Veterans of Foreign Wars caps, Ruben escorted them to ringside. He went on with Tully to the dressing room, where Ernie Munger, reclining on a table in black shirt and slacks, his raised neck no longer lean but bulging with muscle, greeted them with an absolutely expressionless face.

  Ernie fought in the opening bout, watched by Tully from a back seat on the aisle. In the gym Ernie had at times beaten him to the punch and now what he saw was just another preliminary fighter. Ernie’s victory, after four rounds, did not ease Tully’s mood. He returned to the dressing room and was forcing up nervous belches when Ernie, lips bloody and nose swollen, came in with Ruben and Babe.

  “He walked all over that dude,” said Ruben, his eyes searching Tully’s with concern. “You should be getting ready. How you feel? You feel all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Dinner set all right?”

  Tu
lly could not answer. Openmouthed, he waited.

  “Billy?”

  There was a small airy sigh.

  “Eat something?” Babe whispered.

  “Oh, my God, you didn’t drink no beer just now, did you?”

  A rich rumble rose at last.

  “You sick?”

  “No.”

  “He had a good steak dinner. I took him to a good place, but then you can get a bad meal anywhere. You didn’t drink no beer out there, did you?”

  “Hell no.”

  “All right, don’t get mad. You’re down to a fine edge. That’s good. Just keep it that way. You’re going to take him.”

  Tully removed his slacks and the new blue shirt and V-neck sweater, socks and underwear Ruben had bought him so he would not have to go back to Oma’s room for his clothes. With sweat trickling down his biceps, he pulled on his supporter, pale-blue trunks and shining purple robe. He sat remote and irritable while Ruben, with quick expert turns and folds, wound the cotton gauze into firm bandages from his wrists to his knuckles. The bandages taped, and tested with blows against Ruben’s palms, Tully took out his bridgework—his two upper front teeth—and began bobbing and shuffling around the room, shooting out his fists and blowing through his nose.

  When Tully came down the aisle, between turning faces, Arcadio Lucero was already in the ring in crimson-trimmed black satin, his Indian profile impassive. Over the back of his robe in winking sequins of vaporous green, blue, red and gold, was an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Backed by Gil Solis and Luis Ortega, his seconds for the evening, he waited with an economy of movement, arms at his sides, head lazily rocking. Tully, following Ruben up the steps and ducking through the parted ropes with a jaunty swiftness he had practiced years ago as an amateur, felt only impatience. It was an old charged feeling of having gone at last beyond any deferment. Standing in the ring with a towel over his head, he wanted to fight and be through with it.