Fat City

by Leonard Gardner

  9

  Hundreds of men were on the lamplit street, lined for blocks with labor buses, when Billy Tully arrived, still drunk. He had been up most of the night, as he had nearly every other night since the loss of his cook’s job; and he had been fired because of absences following nights out drinking. It had been agony getting up after three hours’ sleep. After the night clerk’s pounding, Tully had remained motionless, shaken, hearing the knocking at other doors, the same hoarse embittered summons down the hall. It had been so demoralizing that he had taken his bottle out with him under the morning stars. In the other pocket of his gray zipper jacket were two sandwiches in butcher paper. He had eaten no breakfast.

  The wine calmed his shivering as he passed the dilapidated buses, the hats and sombreros and caps of the men inside silhouetted in the windows. The drivers stood by the doors addressing the crowds.

  “Lettuce thinners! Two more men and we’re leaving.”

  “Onion toppers, over here, let’s go.”

  “Cherries! First picking.”

  “They ripe?”

  “Sure they’re ripe.”

  “How much you paying?”

  “A man can make fifteen, twenty dollars a day if he wants to work.”

  “Shit, who you kidding?”

  “Pea pickers!”

  The sky was still black. Only a few lights were on in the windows of the hotels, dim bulbs illuminating tattered shades and curtains, red fire-escape globes. Under the streetlights the figures in ragged overalls, army fatigues, khakis and suit coats all had a somber uniformity. They pushed to board certain buses that quickly filled and rolled away, grinding and backfiring, and in these crowds Billy Tully jostled and elbowed, asking where the buses were going and sometimes getting no answer. He crossed the street, which was crossed continuously by the men and the few women and by trotting preoccupied dogs, and stopped at a half-filled sky-blue bus with dented fenders and a fat young man in jeans at the door.

  “Onions. Ever topped before?”

  “Sure.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last year.”

  “Get on.”

  Tully climbed into the dark shell, his shoes contacting bottles and papers, and waited amid the slumped forms while the driver recruited outside. “If these onions were any good,” Tully said, “looks like he could get him a busload.”

  “They better than that damn short-handle hoe.”

  “Maybe I ought to go pick cherries.”

  “You make more topping onions, if we can get this man moving.”

  The stars paled, the sky turned a deep clear blue. Trucks and buses lurched away. The crowd outside thinned and separated into groups.

  “Let’s get going, fat boy,” Tully yelled.

  “Driver, come on. I got in this bus to top onions and I want to top onions. I’m an onion-topping fool.”

  The bus rattled past dark houses, gas stations, neonlit motels, and the high vague smokestack of the American Can Company, past the drive-in movie, its great screen white and iridescent in the approaching dawn, across an unseen creek beneath ponderous oaks, past the cars and trailers and pickup-truck caravans of the gypsy camp on its bank and out between the wide fields. Near a red-and-white-checkered Purina Chows billboard, it turned off the highway. Down a dirt road it bumped to a barn, and the crew had left the bus and taken bottomless buckets from a pickup truck when the grower appeared and told them they were in the wrong man’s onion field. The buckets clattered back into the truckbed, the crew returned to the bus, and the driver, one sideburn hacked unevenly and a bloodstained scrap of toilet paper pasted to his cheek, drove back to the highway swearing defensively while the crew cursed him among themselves. The sky bleached to an almost colorless lavender, except for an orange glow above the distant mountains. As the blazing curve of the sun appeared, lighting the faces of the men jolting in the bus—Negro paired with Negro, white with white, Mexican with Mexican and Filipino beside Filipino—Billy Tully took the last sweet swallow of Thunderbird, and his bottle in its slim bag rolled banging under the seats.

  They arrived at a field where the day’s harvesting had already begun, and embracing an armload of sacks, Tully ran with the others for the nearest rows, stumbling over the plowed ground, knocking his bucket with a knee in the bright onion-scented morning. At the row next to the one he claimed knelt a tall Negro, his face covered with thin scars, his knife flashing among the profusion of plowed-up onions. With fierce gasps, Tully removed his jacket and jerked a sack around his bottomless bucket. He squatted, picked up an onion, severed the top and tossed the onion as he was picking up another. When the bucket was full he lifted it, the onions rolling through into the sack, leaving the bucket once again empty.

  In the distance stood the driver, hands inside the mammoth waist of his jeans, yelling: “Trim those bottoms!”

  There was a continuous thumping in the buckets. The stooped forms inched in an uneven line, like a wave, across the field, their progress measured by the squat, upright sacks they left behind. In the air was a faint drone of tractors, hardly audible above the hum that had been in Tully’s ears since his first army bouts a decade past.

  He scrabbled on under the arc of the sun, cutting and tossing, onion tops flying, the knife fastened to his hand by draining blisters. Knees sore, he squatted, stood, crouched, sat, and knelt again and, belching a stinging taste of bile, dragged himself through the morning. By noon he had sweated himself sober. Covered with grime, he waddled into the bus with his sandwiches and an onion.

  “You got you a nice onion for lunch,” a Negro woman remarked through a mouthful of bread, and roused to competition, an old, grizzled, white man, with the red inner lining exposed on his sagging lower lids, brought from under his jacket on the seat his own large onion.

  “Ain’t that a beauty?” All the masticating faces were included in his stained and rotting smile. “Know what I’m going to do with it? I’m going to take that baby home and put it in vinegar.” He covered it again with his jacket.

  Out in the sun the scarred Negro at the row beside Tully’s worked on in a field now almost entirely deserted.

  Through the afternoon heat the toppers crawled on, the rows of filled sacks extending farther and farther behind. The old grizzled man, half lying near Tully, his face an incredible red, was still filling buckets though he appeared near death. But Tully was standing. Revived by his lunch and several cupfuls of warm water from the milk can, he was scooping up onions from the straddled row, wrenching off tops, ignoring the bottom fibrils where sometimes clods hung as big as the onions themselves, until a sack was full. Then he thoroughly trimmed several onions and placed them on top. Occasionally there was a gust of wind and he was engulfed by sudden rustlings and flickering shadows as a high spiral of onion skins fluttered about him like a swarm of butterflies. Skins left behind among the discarded tops swirled up with delicate clatters and the high, wheeling column moved away across the field, eventually slowing, widening, dissipating, the skins hovering weightlessly before settling back to the plowed earth. Overhead great flocks of rising and falling blackbirds streamed past in a melodious din.

  In the middle of the afternoon the checkers shouted that the day’s work was over.

  Back in the bus, glib and animated among the workers he had surpassed, the Negro who had topped next to Tully shouted: “It easy to get sixty sacks.”

  “So’s going to heaven.”

  “If they onions out there I get me my sixty sacks. I’m an onion-topping fool. Now I mean onions. I don’t mean none of them little pea-dingers. Driver, let’s go get paid. I don’t want to look at, hear about, or smell no more onions till tomorrow morning, and if I ain’t there then hold the bus because I’m a sixty-sack man and I just won’t quit.”

  “Wherever you go there’s always a nigger hollering his head off,” muttered the old man beside Tully.

  “Just give me a row of good-size onions and call me happy.”

  “You can have them,
” said Tully.

  “You want to know how to get you sixty sacks?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Don’t fool around.”

  “You telling me I wasn’t working as hard as any man in that field?”

  “I don’t know what you was doing out there, but them onions wasn’t putting up no fight against me. Driver, what you waiting on? I didn’t come out here to look at no scenery.”

  They were driven to a labor camp enclosed by a high Cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, and as the crew rose to join the pay line outside, the driver blocked the way. “Now I want each and every one of those onion knives. I want you to file out one by one and I want every one of those knives.”

  “You going look like a pincushion,” said the sixty-sack Negro.

  The crew handed over the short, wooden-handled knives, and the driver frowned under the exertions of authority. “One by one, one by one,” he repeated, though the aisle was too narrow for departing otherwise.

  Tully stepped down into the dust and felt the sun again on his burned neck. Standing in the pay line behind the old man, he looked down the rows of whitewashed barracks. A pair of stooped men in loose trousers, and shirts darkened down the backs with sweat, passed between buildings. In the brief swing of a screen door Tully saw rows of iron bunks. A Mexican with both eyes blackened crossed the yard carrying a towel. Tully moved ahead in the line. The paid were leaving the window of the shack and returning to the bus, some lining up again at a water faucet.

  “Is that all you picked?” the paymaster demanded of the old man. “What’s the matter with you, Pop? If you can’t do better than that tomorrow I’m going to climb all over you.”

  “Well, it takes a while to get the hang of it,” came the grieving reply.

  Two dimes were laid on the counter under the open window. “Here’s your money.”

  The old man waited. “Huh?”

  “That’s it.”

  The creased neck sagged further forward. Slowly the blackened fingers, the crustaceous nails, picked up the dimes. The slack body showed just the slightest inclination toward departing, though the split shoes, the sockless feet, did not move, and at that barely discernible impulse toward surrender, three one-dollar bills were dealt out. With a look of baffled resignation the man slouched away, giving place to Billy Tully, who stepped up to the grinning paymaster with his tally card.

  As the bus passed out through the gate, Tully saw, nailed on a whitewashed wall, a yellow poster.

  BOXING

  ESCOBAR

  VASQUEZ

  The posters were up along Center Street when the bus unloaded in Stockton. There was one in the window of La Milpa, where Tully laid his five-dollar bill on the bar and drank two beers, eyeing the corpulent waitress under the turning fans, before taking the long walk to the lavatory. He washed his face, blew his dirt-filled nose in a paper towel, and combed his wet hair.

  On El Dorado Street the posters were in windows of bars and barber shops and lobbies full of open-mouth dozers. Tully went to his room in the Roosevelt Hotel. Tired and stiff but clean after a bath in a tub of cool gray water, he returned to the street dressed in a red sport shirt and vivid blue slacks the color of burning gas. Against the shaded wall of Square Deal Liquors, he joined a rank of leaners drinking from cans and pint bottles discreetly covered by paper bags. Across the street in Washington Square rested scores of men, prone, supine, sitting, some wearing coats in the June heat, their wasted bodies motionless on the grass. The sun slanted lower and lower through the trees, illuminating a pair of inert legs, a scabbed face, an out-flung arm, while the shade of evening moved behind it, reclaiming the bodies until the farthest side of the park had fallen into shadow. Billy Tully crossed the sidewalk to the wire trash bin full of empty containers and dropped in his bottle. Over the town a dark haze of peat dust was blowing from the delta fields.

  He ate fried hot dogs with rice in the Golden Gate Café, his shoes buried in discarded paper napkins, each stool down the long counter occupied, dishes clattering, waitresses shouting, the cadaverous Chinese cook, in hanging shirt and spotted khaki pants piled over unlaced tennis shoes, slicing pork knuckles, fat pork roast and tongue, making change with a greasy hand to the slap slap of the other cook’s flyswatter.

  Belching under the streetlights in the cooling air, Tully lingered with the crowds leaning against cars and parking meters before he went on to the Harbor Inn. Behind the bar, propped among the mirrored faces in that endless twilight was another poster. If Escobar can still do it so can I, Tully thought, but he felt he could not even get to the gym without his wife. He felt the same yearning resentment as in his last months with her, the same mystified conviction of neglect.

  At midnight he negotiated the stairs to his room, its walls covered with floral paper faded to the hues of old wedding bouquets. Undressing under the dim bulb, he stared at the four complimentary publications on the dresser: An Hour With Your Bible. El Centenela y Heraldo de la Salud. Signs of the Times—The World’s Prophetic Monthly. Smoke Signals—A Renowned Anthropologist Marshals the Facts on What Smoking Does to Life Before Birth. He wondered if anyone ever read them. Maybe old men did, and wetbacks staying in off the streets at night. And was this where he was going to grow old? Would it all end in a room like this? He sat down on the bed and before him on the wall was the picture of the wolf standing with vaporized breath on a snow-covered hill above a lighted farm. Then the abeyant melancholy of the evening came over him. He sat with his shoulders slumped under the oppression of the room, under the impasse that was himself, the utter, hopeless thwarting that was his blood and bones and flesh. Afraid of a crisis beyond his capacity, he held himself in, his body absolutely still in the passing and fading whine and rumble of a truck. The blue and gold frame, the long cord hanging from the molding, the discolored gold tassel at its apex, all added to the feeling that he had seen the picture in some room in childhood. Though it filled him with despondency he did not think of taking it down, or of throwing out the magazines and pamphlets and removing from the door the sign

  IF YOU SMOKE IN BED

  PLEASE LET US KNOW

  WHERE TO SEND YOUR ASHES.

  It did not occur to him that he could, because he did not even feel he lived here.

  In the dark he arranged himself with tactical facility in the lumpy terrain of the mattress. When the pounding came again on the door, he lunged up in the blackness crying: “Help!”

  Out in the hall the hoarse voice warned: “Four o’clock.”

  10

  Confidence, Ruben Luna believed, was the indispensable ingredient of success, and he had it in abundance—as much faith in his destiny as in the athletes he trained. In his own years of battling he had had doubts which at times became periods of terror. With a broken jaw wired into silence, he had sucked liquid meals through a tube, wondering if he were even sane. After a severe body beating and a bloody urination in the dressing room, he had wondered if the big fights and large sums he had thought would be coming but never came could be worth what he had already endured. But now Ruben’s will was like a pure and unwavering light that burned even in his sleep. It was more a fatalistic optimism than determination, and though he was not immune to anxiety over his boxers, he felt he was immune to despair. Limited no longer by his own capacities, he had an odds advantage that he had never had as a competitor. He knew he could last. But his fighters were less dependable. Some trained one day and laid off two, fought once and quit, lost their timing, came back, struggled into condition, gasped and missed and were beaten, or won several bouts and got married, or moved, or were drafted, joined the navy or went to jail, were bleeders, suffered headaches, saw double or broke their hands. There had been so many who found they were not fighters at all, and there were others who without explanation had simply ceased to appear at the gym and were never seen or heard about again by Ruben, though once in a while a forgotten face returned briefly in a dream and he went on addressing instructions to it as
though the intervening years had never been.

  With a passive habitual smile, Ruben worked to suffuse them all with his own assurance. At times it was impossible for him to control the praise and predictions that issued from him like thanks, and he was aware of exaggerating; yet he felt a boxer needed someone who believed in him, and if it were true that confidence could win fights, then he could not be sure his overestimates were really that at all.

  Guiding Ernie Munger down a long aisle in the Oakland Auditorium, Ruben felt a prescience of victory. Ernie had won his last three fights—by decisions in Watsonville and Santa Cruz, by knockout in Modesto, where his opponent had been overcome as much by his own exertions as by Ernie’s blows. Now under this great ceiling, in the midst of this large crowd at an annual event sponsored by the Oakland Police Department, Ruben no longer was fretting. He thought only of his posture, of maintaining his position beside Ernie, of the steps he was mounting to the ring, of the ropes he was then spreading, sitting on the middle strand as he raised the rope above for Ernie and Babe to duck under. As he bustled, administered and directed, he was functioning at his best and he felt again the soaring, yet controlled, excited wholeness, periodically his, that he thought of as his true self. Smiling, he dabbed at Ernie’s brows and stroked a Vaseline stripe down his broad dented nose, regretting its disfigurement though believing that it was just as well for Ernie to start his career with the nose he was sure to have ended with anyway. At least he would not be preoccupied with protecting it.

  At the bell, Ruben was standing behind Ernie just outside the ropes, facing a short Negro with bulging arms and a Mohawk haircut. Then, sitting on the ring steps beside Babe, their heads on the level of Ernie’s dancing feet, Ernie’s new gold-trimmed white robe still over his arm, Ruben experienced the first waning of confidence. He saw in the Negro’s opening blow a power that was undeniable, that was extraordinary. It was a wide hook slung to the stomach under Ernie’s jab; and as instantaneous strategic adjustments were occurring in Ruben’s mind, Ernie was struck under the heart with a right of resounding force. Ruben then felt a foreboding. Though Ernie maneuvered with a degree of skill, there was an aspect of futility in it all. When he reached out with both gloves to block a left, Ruben’s hand went into his sweater pocket for the ammonia vial and a right swing landed with an awesome slam on the lean point of Ernie’s chin. He went down sideways along the ropes, toppling stiffly in the roar, and hit the canvas on his back, his head striking the floor, followed by his feet. His eyes stared momentarily, then closed as his body went rigid.