Fat City

by Leonard Gardner

  “Who wants to make a store stop?” the driver asked on the road back to Stockton. So empty cans and bottles clanked along the floor when the bus arrived with its silent motionless passengers in the sunlit town.

  “You’ll never see me again,” declared Tully, and he swayed, leaning oddly backwards, up the street to his hotel, straw cowboy hat cocked forward, his fingers discovering new mounds of muscle in the small of his agonized back.

  But the pay was ninety cents an hour, and two days later he was again gripping a short-handled hoe.

  12

  I’m getting my share, Ernie Munger assured himself at the station on Center Street under floodlights besieged by moths. Still he felt an uneasiness, an indefinable lack. He would phone Faye, talking on sometimes after a car crossed the thin black hose between office and pumps, talking while it waited, and complaining at the departing ring that the customer had not given him a chance to get out there.

  “Are you very busy tonight?” Faye would ask, and he, thinking he heard an impinging, possessive, matrimonial tone, would feel a deadening resentment. Other times her voice was cheerfully independent and he felt he was in love.

  On his nights off, his arm around her in a movie, he waited impatiently for the evening’s consummation in the car. But at its approach she became somber, and afterwards was tense, petulant, glum.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked late one night on a levee amid sounds of crickets and frogs and the close rustle of leaves.

  “Nothing.”

  In the distance, dominating the lights of the town, the red neon crest of Stockton’s twelve-story skyscraper flashed, a line at a time.

  CALIFORNIA

  WESTERN

  STATES

  LIFE

  PROTECTION

  “Don’t you feel good?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “I said nothing.”

  “Well, what you getting mad about then?”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can’t I be quiet if I feel like it without everybody getting all worked up?”

  “You’re the only one getting worked up.”

  “Well, leave me alone then. I have a right to my moods.”

  “All right, I can take a hint. Don’t think I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m not stupid. I know what it is. Maybe you need somebody that’s got more to give you.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “You’re unfulfilled. I know, I’m sorry, I’m not blind.”

  “I’m fulfilled. I’m perfectly fulfilled. That’s not it at all.”

  “You didn’t get real fulfillment.”

  “I feel perfectly fine. I’m fulfilled. Now don’t worry about it. That’s not what’s bothering me at all. I just feel out of touch sometimes.”

  “You mean you’re mad.”

  “I’m not mad. I’m a little worried, that’s all.”

  Ernie felt a dismal apprehension. “What about?”

  “You know what.”

  “We’ve been pretty careful.”

  “You’ve been pretty careful. If I was careful I’d never come out here. You wouldn’t marry me now, I know you wouldn’t. Men just don’t after they’ve slept with somebody.”

  “They do too. They do it all the time. What are you talking about?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Caught between prudence and expediency, afraid of committing himself and afraid of losing his rights to her, he replied despondently: “I would too.”

  “When?”

  “Well, when it’s right for us both. We don’t want to rush into a mess when we’ve got each other anyway.”

  “Don’t you want to be with me every night?”

  “Sure I do. Maybe I could get a day job.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I guess I don’t feel ready yet. I feel I need a few more fights first,” he heard himself saying. “I just don’t feel I’m ready to get married.”

  “I wasn’t proposing to you. That’s a thing I certainly would never do. I wouldn’t want anybody who didn’t want me.”

  “I want you.”

  “That’s up to you. I wouldn’t force myself on anyone. If you don’t want to get married you don’t have to. I wasn’t asking anything about that. I just meant what if, you know, you got drafted or something—how do I know where I stand? Would you want me to wait?”

  “Well, sure,” said Ernie, thinking there was no harm in that and piqued by the thought of someone else having her.

  “I mean these are things I’m just asking for my own sake. I don’t want you to feel I’m obligating you.”

  “I don’t, I don’t,” he assured her.

  “Like what would you want if you had some more fights? What’s that got to do with it? Would that make a difference? What would you feel like doing after you had them?”

  “Then I guess I’d want somebody so it’d seem worth getting my ass kicked . . . so I could . . . I don’t know . . . have a home. But I want to get set up first,” he said, unconvinced, afraid of what he was saying.

  “I don’t want to hold you back. I want to be good for you.” She put her fingers on his cheek, her eyes only hollows in the dim starlight. “I want to cook for you.”

  It filled him with panic. To such devotion, such sacrifice, he felt rejection would be unbearable, that to quibble at all would be an unthinkable cruelty. Profoundly moved, he kissed the lax waiting mouth with exquisite unhappiness.

  Later, on her front porch, she looked so lovely to him, so graceful, her full lips in a smile so gentle, that he could not turn and go home. So many obstacles, so much uncertainty lay ahead in consequence of what he had been forced to say in the car, that this time of intimacy had a transitory sweetness. He would not marry her, and so she would not be his much longer. Eventually there would be conditions he could not agree to. He must cherish the present like a memory. This would be the time of Faye, this would soon be over. Her presence, her voice, the taste of her mouth would be replaced by another’s and lost forever. Or perhaps there would be no other after her and he would again be alone with his lust. He would not marry her, so felt a blissful freeing of his love, an elation that carried him after her through the doorway to a final kiss that became not the last but the first in a fevered goodbye with her skirt up and his little tin box out in the glove compartment of the car. Sitting on the carpeted stairs leading up to the room where he hoped her parents were asleep, he pulled her down onto his lap.

  Afterwards Ernie was pensive. Through days of peat-dust storms he waited uneasily. When a month was up he drove Faye to a doctor and sat in the car knowing already what the answer would be and feeling a singular peace. He would quit fighting. Certainly now he could no longer take the risks. There was no decision to make. He had no thoughts of escape from her and was strangely unperturbed. There seemed to him only one thing to do. They were married in the Little Chapel of the Wayfarer in Carmel, the bride wearing a white dress, the groom expressionless in sport coat and slacks. After a dinner of swordfish steak on the wharf in Monterey, they phoned the news to their parents and rented a motel room under cypress trees. Two nights later they were sleeping in Faye’s room.

  On Ernie’s second night back at work, his employer, Mario Florestano, was waiting for him in the doorway of the station, the largeness of his alerted face accentuated by frontal baldness, long ears, a slight neck and narrow shoulders.

  “You left the shitter open,” he said.

  Ernie, seeking an attitude, looked at him with puzzled eyes. “I did? I thought I locked it up.”

  “You certainly did not. Want me to tell you what I saw when I drove in this morning? A wino coming out putting toilet paper in his pocket.”

  “I’d swear I locked it.”

  “Listen, didn’t you hear me? I said I saw him coming out. Now what I want to know is how he got in.”

  “I can’t figure it.” Ernie gravely pul
led on the end of his nose. “I’d swear I remember checking the door before I left.”

  “You couldn’t of checked that door. That door was open. How else did he get in there and get that toilet paper? Did he have a passkey?”

  “I don’t know, he might of had one. I sure don’t remember leaving that door open.”

  “Forget it, forget I ever said anything about it. Don’t go on any more. It’s settled.” Florestano paced off under dangling fan belts, turned abruptly and came back. “If you don’t want to admit it, forget it. He got in there and he got the toilet paper and arguing won’t bring it back. Now I’m not trying to accuse you if you don’t want to admit it. I just want you to realize your mistake so it won’t happen again.”

  “I’d admit it if I thought I did it.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  “If you want to put the blame on me it’s up to you.”

  “No, no, it’s not a matter of blaming anyone. These things happen. It was just something I wanted to call your attention to. Nobody wants to sit on a toilet seat a wino’s been on. It’s like shaking your dick where a nigger shook his. You got to think of the public. It’s public relations. Personally I couldn’t care less. One man’s as good as another as long as they pay their way. Only there’s people around that don’t feel that way. So if an undesirable asks you for the key, the shitter’s out of order. It’s just a matter of consideration. If there’s no undesirable piss on the toilet seat you’ll get repeat customers. So that door stays locked.”

  “I keep it locked.”

  Mario Florestano gave him a long look. “So how’s married life treating you?”

  Left in charge, Ernie scattered sawdust on the floor of the lube room, pushed it around with a long-handled broom, scooped it up blackened, and dumped it in a drum of empty oil cans. He wiped off the grease rack, wiped and hung up the tools and ambled out to cars, thumbs hooked in his pants pockets. When the streetlights came on he went to the switchbox and the night air quivered in the tall white beams of the floodlights.

  13

  Along El Dorado and Center Streets between Mormon Slough and the deep-water channel hundreds of farm workers and unemployed loitered in the warm summer evenings. They talked, watched, drifted in and out of crowded bars and cardrooms, cafés, poolhalls, liquor stores and movies, their paths crossed by lines of urine from darkened doorways. Around the area cruised squad cars and patrol wagons with their pairs of peering faces. The fallen, the reeling and violent were conveyed away. Ambulances came driven by policemen. Fire trucks arrived and sodden, smoking mattresses were dragged out to the pavement. Evangelists came with small brass bands. Sometimes a corpse was taken down from a hotel. Occasionally in The Stockton Record there was an editorial deploring blight.

  On the morning the orange city maintenance trucks came to Washington Square, Billy Tully was sitting on the grass. The park was a block of lawn and shade trees within a periphery of tall date palms with high sparse fronds, faced on one side by the ornate eaves of Confucius Hall and on the opposite side by the slate steeple and red brick of Saint Mary’s Church.

  “Now what they going to do, mow the grass?” he said after the three vehicles had parked and the workmen were climbing down from the cabs.

  “Pick up trash, I guess,” said a tanned, wrinkled man sitting near him in the shade.

  Chains rattled, tailgates dropped, tools were dragged over truckbeds. The workmen entered the park with axes and chain saws.

  “Must be a diseased tree,” said Tully, and a man with a scab down the bridge of his nose announced: “Tree surgeons. Probably a diseased tree.”

  The last day haul had departed for the fields hours before. There were perhaps forty men reclining on the grass—gaunt night sleepers in coats, and farm workers in shirt sleeves, unhired at the morning shape-up. Two men and a woman in overalls rose from under the tree where the workmen stopped.

  “Tree surgeons,” shouted the man with the scab after the rope starter had been pulled on the first chain saw. Roaring and sputtering like an outboard motor, the saw dug into the tree. In a moment another saw was roaring on the other side of the park. Ropes were thrown up into the foliage, sawdust flew, the trees swayed, tilted over, cracking, and fell with a rush of green leaves and a crash of branches. Men were rising, shambling away, and one after another the trees they had rested under came crashing down. Billy Tully remained propped up on his elbows, his legs flat on the lawn, until the crew reached his tree. He got up with the others, everyone surly and argumentative, walking away while a workman called after them.

  “Hey, move your buddy.”

  An inert man remained behind unresponsive to prodding feet.

  “He’s no buddy of mine,” said Tully.

  “He won’t be anybody’s buddy if he don’t move.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “He’s breathing,” said the other workman.

  The man was lifted up at the knees and shoulders, head hanging sideways, mouth open, sockless ankles and thin white shins dangling. He was pulled in opposite directions, his legs were dropped, he was dragged on his rear as the man holding him at the armpits stumbled backward. Again he lay on his back. Exchanging accusations, the two workmen once again grasped the slack limbs and carried him out of the shade.

  Tully went back to the heat of his room. Barefoot and shirtless on the bed, he read a Male magazine and dozed to the sound of the saws a block away. They roared all day. By mid-afternoon, when returning laborers were arriving from the farms and Tully strolled back to the park, all the shade trees were down. Many of the trunks had been cut into sections and much of the foliage was gone. Across the park, as on the days that followed—when the trunks and limbs and stumps had all been cleared away and the patches of bare earth seeded—men lay lined in the elongated shadows of the palms and out in the glare of the sun.

  14

  Ernie and Faye Munger moved into three rooms on the ground floor of an old, three-story, white shingle apartment house. The kitchen faced onto garbage cans and lawn chairs in a back yard enclosed by a hedge, and dishes occasionally vibrated in the cabinet from a motor idling in a garage beyond the wall. Faye’s mother, perpetually smiling and exclaiming, her green eyes wide open and fearful, came and hung curtains. She treated Ernie with an awkward deference, her disappointment evident in sidelong looks, and he spoke to her in a polite son-in-law cant intended to convince her of his exceptional qualities.

  In the curtained shadows he slept late, waking to find Faye, often nauseous, already up and dressed, his mornings not the times of sensual indolence he had imagined. At night he phoned the apartment from the station, and if Faye did not answer he called her parents’ house, where he invariably reached her, the ensuing conversations interrupted by customers, the receiver left on the desk while he slopped a wet rag over windshields, decided if a deficiency of oil was worth mentioning, peered into radiators but left the filling of them for another time and place. By the time he had locked up and driven home, Faye was usually asleep. They made love in the heat of the day.

  Often they were visited by Faye’s friend, Norma Panelli, who discussed with Faye in the kitchen the fortunes of various couples, the girls’ voices at times sinking to whispers. To Norma Ernie spoke little, in order to discourage too soon a return.

  With Faye crushed against him, he drove between the flat hot fields to Lodi or Tracy or Modesto, where they turned around to come back. He threw her into Oak Park Pool, swam to her underwater with lascivious fingers, stood on his hands with only his long white feet above the surface, ran off the high board and belly-flopped from the low, and with eyes stinging from chlorine, lay down panting beside her on the hot wet cement. When she walked between the pool and the dressing room his was not the only head that turned to watch. Coming home from these swims he was often ill-tempered and taciturn. One afternoon a car cut in front of them, the driver looking back as Ernie, brandishing a middle finger, filled the intersection with curses.

 
; “You better be careful,” Faye warned.

  “Careful of him? He’s just a sack of shit!”

  “Stop doing that! He’s liable to see you.”

  “I want him to see it! He’s the one better be careful.”

  In the apartment, Ernie continued to brood over the incident, wondering: who does she think she married? And it seemed that she neither knew nor respected him, that she denied the very basis of his personality.

  By the next day the occurrence had lost its significance. She was a girl, after all, and could have no sure sense of who he was. He forgave her, for that incomprehension itself attested to the uncommonness of his kind. It was enough that she love the part of him she knew; the other needed nothing from anybody. I don’t give a rat’s ass, was his motto. It was not comprehension he wanted, only her awareness that he was not like anyone she had known before. But it was as if what distinguished him was what she did not perceive. At times as he lay in bed listening to her breathing, a fear came over him that after marriage death was the next major event.

  Sometimes he was euphoric; he rewarded her with bouts of ardor, gaining energy as hers was depleted. At meals he jiggled his legs. In the midst of a conversation he might suddenly drop to the floor and begin doing pushups.

  “You’re the most nervous guy,” Faye said as Ernie was absorbed in rolling his neck while thoroughly masticating a raw carrot. “When you relax you really relax, but when you’re just sitting around you’re always moving.”

  “I’m exercising,” he stated through the uproar in his jaws. “Most people neglect their necks.”

  “I don’t mean just that. Look how you’re chewing.”

  “That’s how to get the most out of a carrot.”

  He was stimulated, he was pleased, yet at times he gazed at her for long moments, as if to gain by concentration some final elusive dominion. He would reach out and fondle her, amazed still at the breadth of his license. He buried his face in her, explored, examined, turned her about. I’ve liberated her, he told himself, yet was sometimes assailed by a strange sickening excitement and wondered if it were he who deserved the credit.