Fat City

by Leonard Gardner

  “Well, so what? So you’re sorry.”

  Baffled, Tully was in a turmoil. There was nothing he could do. Caught where he had been so many times before, he felt he would slam his hateful head on the bar if she did not forgive him. “I feel I could just break my head,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t stop you.”

  “I feel like beating my head on the bar,” he warned.

  “Go ahead.”

  With a loud knock his forehead struck the varnished wood. Her hands were on him then; she held him by the shoulder and under the chin and there was strength in her arms. Taking up his glass he toasted the staring faces. He was feeling good again; he had regained his authority.

  “What did you want to do that for?”

  “You can count on me right down the line,” he said.

  “You want to knock your brains out?”

  “You can count on me. Don’t you believe me?”

  “I get along all right.”

  “Listen, let me tell you something. You can count on me right down the line.”

  “I thought you wanted to hit me.”

  “Forget that, will you? I never hit a woman in my life. I’m not that kind of lousy bastard. Ask anybody. I won’t let a friend down. Let me buy you a drink. Don’t you think you can count on me?”

  “Just don’t bump your head any more.”

  “Will you forget that? I asked you a question. Do you think I’d let you down?”

  “I don’t know, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t. After all, I mean, how would I know?”

  “You can count . . . on . . . me,” he declared to emphatic slaps on the bar. “I’m the reliable type. You think I’m kidding, don’t you? You can count me among your friends. Don’t you believe me? Any time you need anything, come see me. You’re all right. I mean that.”

  “Well, I like that about you. You know who your friends are.”

  “That’s right.”

  “These others I wouldn’t ask for the time of day.”

  “They wouldn’t give it to you.”

  “You’re the only son-of-a-bitch that’s worth a shit in this place.”

  “I appreciate that. I mean because there’s something I like about you.” Tully sat with his arm around her neck. The crisis was past, the confusing emotions gone so quickly it was as if that brief desperate turbulence had no significance. He felt loose and supple. His scalp was tingling from a sensation of astonishing intimacy.

  When they went out together he was fondling her curly head. And he was in control now, talking rapidly to allow no interruption, trying to circumvent all possible subjects for contention in order to remain in favor. At the door, during a crescendo of trumpets and guitars, he glanced back over his shoulder in leering triumph, but no one was looking at him. A cooling breeze had risen. The sky was clear; the Big Dipper tilted over Center Street. Tully realized how drunk he was when he stopped on the sidewalk for a kiss and, eyes closed, pleased at finding he was the taller, lost his balance. Oma had surged against him, and as they walked on, his arm across her back, hers at his waist, she continued to lean against him, forcing him toward walls and store windows.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you make it?”

  “I guess I’m drunk.”

  “I’ll get you home. Don’t worry about anything. You can count on me. We going the right way?”

  When she began to cry, he was moved by a sudden conjugal sympathy. “I love you so much,” she said, and it was such an unexpected confession that he felt he had never been so happy. Pulling her up the dark stairway to her room, he felt that from now on everything would be different.

  16

  Billy Tully’s suitcase stood empty in the closet; his coats, slacks and shirts hung from wire hangers, and beside the suitcase and his canvas athletic bag was a carton filled with Earl’s clothes that Oma had taken down from hangers and removed from the dresser drawer where Tully’s gray underwear now was neatly stacked. The underwear he had ceased wearing, the T-shirts because of the heat, the tattered jockey shorts ostensibly for the same reason, but also abandoned for the sake of virility. He had found that hanging free facilitated desire. He was trying to be compatible. Though able enough, he felt he was a lover more from duty than from inclination. With his wife he had not had to try. From her he had met with reprimands for inopportune fondling, for lingering about, trying to embrace her over the sink or on her way between stove and refrigerator, for entering the bathroom to ask if he could join her in the tub. At times his wife had been coyly elusive, insinuating rewards for deferment, at times cross, shouting that he interfered with her housework and allowed her no peace. Then he had been hurt and sulked on the sofa, silently cursing her and grinding his teeth. Eventually he had gone to her with apologies and contrite embraces that again brought on a burgeoning of desire. That desire, that yearning for her, had been the foundation of his marriage, and after she was gone it had not left him. He yearned for her even while holding Oma Lee Greer in his arms.

  On nights when Tully could not bear to hold Oma at all, after hours of bickering had made her so repulsive to him that he shrank from touching her, his desire for his wife was acute. Writhing in the darkness, he pined finally for any woman, other than the one beside him. On other, easier, nights, he enjoyed her with indifferent flamboyant vigor. But afterwards he experienced none of the affectionate gratitude he had felt for Lynn. He lay quietly, oppressed by a sense of dwindling life, of his youth dwindling away as he rested beside a woman he should never have known, here so far off the course he knew should have been his that he wondered with panic if it had been lost forever. He could feel no love, and the anguish of a life without it was greater now than when he had lived alone. Then at least there had been the anticipation; now, though there were comforts, there was no hope except in eventual escape, and of that he did not feel capable. When he imagined escape it was always to his wife that he fled, yet when an argument offered the break with Oma he had wished for, he knew, in the soberness of fear, that his wife was gone from him forever, that the course of his life could be no other than what it was, that without Oma he would be alone, that he was lucky to have her and would have to soothe her, agree with her and try in the future not to vex her. He rendered to her the same apologies and declarations he had rendered to his wife, and afterwards he felt a sad sense of sacrilege. Sometimes after Oma had gone to bed he stayed up with the light out and continued drinking by the open window, through which the warm September air, faint music, voices, the sound of shattering glass, the hum of cars and rumble of trucks entered with flashes of light that played over the sleeping form under the sheet, and he felt the guilt of inaction, of simply waiting while his life went to waste. No one was worth the gift of his life, no one could possibly be worth that. It belonged to him alone, and he did not deserve it either, because he was letting it waste. It was getting away from him and he made no effort to stop it. He did not know how. He fought urges to hurl his tumbler out the window. The chair he sat on smashed in his mind against the wall. Yearning for struggle and release, he felt he had to fight, as he had felt years before when he had come home from the army to begin his life and confronted the fact that there was nothing he wanted to do. But then he had had youth, and several service championships. His mother had died when he was a senior in high school, but his father and a brother and sister had still been in town. Now they were all gone, his father remarried and living in Phoenix, the brother in the Marine Corps, the sister living with her husband at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The last he had seen of any of them was over two years ago when he and Lynn had gone to visit his father prior to kidney surgery. But his father had passed the stones in the hospital and, relieved of the doleful prospect of an operation, had soon begun attacking his summoned offspring with the sarcasm of earlier years. A small red-faced, alcoholic cement finisher with brown teeth and an Oklahoma accent, th
e old man had got up from the hospital bed, gone home and got drunk. On the back porch, after a shouted quarrel with his father, Tully and his brother and his father’s wife had almost fought over the question of how much indulgence a son owed. Since then Tully had written a few postcards, but had seen none of his family. He thought of them with neither fondness nor dislike nor curiosity. He had left them behind, he told himself, the only one still here in the city where they had last lived together.

  Tully continued to get up before dawn. Though Oma received monthly compensation for the death of her first husband, he dressed in the dark with the bitterness of one supporting a parasite. While Oma went on sleeping, he ate bread with coffee; if he had time he fried eggs and packed a lunch. Quietly he closed the door and went down the stairs and, as he hurried along lighted streets to the long lines of trucks and buses, a sense of relief at being alone came over him. He rode, sleeping, to peach orchards, where he spent the sweltering days on ladders among leaves filmed with insecticide, a kidney-shaped bucket hanging over his belly from a shoulder harness and thumping his thighs as he ran with it loaded to the train of trailers pulled through the shadows under the trees. By mid-afternoon he was back in the room. In his purple satin robe with BILLY TULLY across the back in white letters, he clopped in unlaced sockless shoes down the hall to the tub.

  “You’re so handsome,” Oma said once as he stood in the robe after his bath, combing his hair in front of the mirror.

  “I am?” Pleased, smiling, he turned, stretched luxuriously, moved to where she sat, and stood over her in coersive silence, a hand at the back of her head urging her to further homage.

  In slacks and a short-sleeve shirt, the top buttons open, the sleeves folded up above his biceps, he took her out to eat. On the days when she was not in the room, he found her in the Harbor Inn, and after an early supper in a café crowded with farm workers, they spent the evening drinking.

  One night in the sour twilight of Paris de Noche they met Esteban Escobar with a large young woman. Her hair was platinum blond, the pits in her face obscured by a coating of pink make-up, and in her presence Tully felt restricted by Oma; now that he had her he was no longer free to pick up a woman. The four of them drank together, Esteban at times placing an audible kiss on the girl’s fat white neck. He wore a well-pressed, tan summer suit, a yellow silk shirt open at the collar and immaculate brown and white wingtip shoes. His flat brown face was immobile, his irises as black as his oiled hair and as inexpressive as a bird’s. Tully felt an old ease around him. While never close friends, they had both been at their peaks together, and Esteban had lasted. A Filipino asparagus cutter, he could still draw his countrymen to the arena. He, and the girl beside him, renewed in Tully the belief that his own retirement might only be a protracted layoff between bouts. He asked who was at the gym, talked of past fights, progressed to the subject of mismanagement and eventually to his bout in Panama with Fermin Soto, which he viewed now, for the sake of convenience, as the pivotal event of a long-suspect relationship with Ruben Luna.

  “To save a couple hundred bucks he sent me down there alone and blew my chance,” he said, and turned to Oma. “You know who Soto was then?”

  “Soto. He’s the one you fought, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “He was good, huh?”

  “Good? I had that bum hanging on. I was all over him like a swarm of flies. I was on that night. I was on. You never seen so many sick faces. My own seconds looked sick, those bums. They all figured me for nothing and for six rounds I’m knocking him silly. I had that guy by the ass and there wasn’t anybody in that arena didn’t know it. So I’m back in the corner, I know I got him, I’m not even paying attention to what they’re doing. I don’t feel a thing. I just know he’s going out of there next round. So I go out and he pops me a couple times and here’s the referee stopping it and blood pouring all over me. How do you like that? Both eyes cut. Nobody says a thing. They’re all happy. Audience screaming their heads off. Seconds patch me up and put me on the plane, all smiles. Adios. So the first thing I get back to Stockton I go see Ruben and he takes off the butterflies and looks at the cuts and says there were done with a razor.” Tully paused.

  “Were they?” asked Oma.

  “Were they? Sure they were.”

  “How could he tell?”

  “He could tell by looking at them. What do you think? So we went up to Sacramento to the commissioner and filed a complaint.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” He paused again. The others waited.

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  They were all silent.

  “That was a dirty trick,” offered the girl with Esteban.

  “That’s about it, all right,” Tully said, and attempted to generate something more. “I don’t know, maybe I should of gone into something else, like insurance. You fight your heart out and what does it ever get you?”

  “That was tough luck,” said Esteban in a clipped monotone. “Soto’s a good man.”

  “Good? I had that guy beat.”

  Esteban was leaning again toward his companion. “How about another drink? Tomorrow I take you downtown, get you something nice. You like perfume? I don’t care how much it cost, it don’t make no difference to me.”

  “Okay, okay, don’t hang on me.”

  “You like that, baby. Don’t tell me you don’t like that. I hang on you if I want to hang.”

  “Aren’t you sweet.”

  “I’m sweet if other people sweet to me.”

  “I been thinking about giving it one last try,” Tully said. “I just let myself go all to pot. I’m going to start doing some running. If I can get in shape I know I can still fight.”

  “Well, fight then,” said Oma.

  “I’m going to.”

  “Sure you are. I’ve heard that one before.”

  “I am.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “I mean it, goddamn it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh, screw you.”

  “Blow it out your ass, cowboy.”

  They sat in silence, all facing ahead while an over-head fan with oarlike blades revolved slowly through the heat. Angry, Tully frowned awhile into the mirror so that nobody would think he was stupid enough to be happy with Oma. Soon Esteban’s woman began to sigh with obvious impatience and so they all went down the street. Tully pressed against her as they entered a packed bar where a baldheaded man with side-burns and a blond woman with a worn, pretty face were picking electric guitars and singing.

  Why don’t you love me like you used to do?

  Why do you treat me like a worn-out shoe?

  My hair is still curly and my eyes are still blue,

  Why don’t you love me like you used to do?

  That night in the room, Tully experienced a desperation he was afraid he could not contain. He felt as if his mind might shatter under the stress of Oma’s presence. He could not bring himself to speak, and when she spoke he could not listen. At the sound of her voice he felt he had to get away. Yet because he could not love her, she seemed more defenseless, and he more bound. As assuagement for the loss of his liberty, he longed for a closer attachment. In bed beside her he lay motionless, repelled by the thought of contacting her with even a toe. But her hand sought him. Though he did not yield, it moved with proprietary assurance, until he turned, his foot tangling in the sheet and pulling it from their bodies as he thrust his leg between hers with the savagery of one administering punishment. His exertions made no discernible impression. Afterwards as Oma slept, he was so excruciatingly aware of his structure, of each troubled limb, each restless joint, that he longed to thrash about in search of some position of ease. But he moved slowly, carefully, in order not to disturb her. As he inched up an arm, straightened a leg, his muscles seemed to pulse on their bones in an agony of confinement. He was balked. His life seemed near its end. In four days he would
be thirty.

  17

  In the midst of a phantasmagoria of worn-out, mangled faces, scarred cheeks and necks, twisted, pocked, crushed and bloated noses, missing teeth, brown snags, empty gums, stubble beards, pitcher lips, flop ears, sores, scabs, dribbled tobacco juice, stooped shoulders, split brows, weary, desperate, stupefied eyes under the lights of Center Street, Tully saw a familiar young man with a broken nose. His first impulse was to move away through the crowd to avoid being seen, but they had both come here for the same reason. He approached him, calling, and even the name came to him. “Hey, Ernie.” The other looked around blankly. “How’s it going? You making the day hauls now?”

  Ernie stood with his hands in his pockets. “Shit, man, wife’s pregnant, I get up in the middle of the night two times now and come down to pick up a few extra bucks and run into a mob like this.”

  “Go out on nuts.”

  “I won’t be going out on anything with all these guys wanting to get on. You doing this shit?”

  “I go out now and then. I don’t pick, though,” Tully lied. “I can get on as a checker whenever I want to work. I’ll get you on walnuts. How’s it going? Been doing some fighting?”

  “I fought awhile.”

  They went down the block to a red bus with a wired-down hood. Framed in the windows were slumped men.

  “You go out yesterday?” asked the driver, who was leaning against the fender.

  “I was the tree-beater.”

  Looking at Tully’s face for the first time, the driver sucked mucus down from his nose and spat. “Get on.”

  “I brought you a sacker.”

  “I’ll wait and see if yesterday’s crew shows up first.”

  “You’re making a mistake if you pass this guy up. I’ll give you my personal voucher, this kid is a nut-sacking fiend.”

  Looking away, the driver gestured impatiently. “Get on then, both of you.”

  In the rear of the bus, amid a smell of urine, Tully felt only a moment of importance at getting Ernie a day’s work, then his influence began to seem more a matter of shame than pride. Afraid he might appear to be nothing but a farm worker, he began to talk about getting back into shape, finding encouragement in the fact that Ernie, after that disappointing day in the YMCA, had actually become a boxer. Talking while men snored around them, they bounced north past lighted dairies and through powerful odors of manure. The bus stopped on a dirt road among the dark shapes of trees in the gray light of approaching dawn. A tractor was running nearby. Under the trees lay blue-white mist. A truck had preceded them into the grove, and as the men swarmed to it for their sacks and buckets, Tully was called aside by the bus driver, who was standing with the ranch foreman.