Fat City Read online

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I got locked out of my room.”

  “Why haven’t you been down here?”

  “I would have been. I’m ready to start training but I don’t have my stuff. I don’t have the money to get my bags out of hock. What can I do?”

  Ruben gave him a dollar and told him to wait, and after Tully had eaten hamburgers and drunk a milk shake standing in the gym, and after he had showered and waited until the last boxer had gone back to the locker room, Ruben drove him to the Owl Hotel and redeemed his bags.

  “I’ll be at the gym training tomorrow,” Tully promised out on the sidewalk, and Ruben gave him fifteen dollars.

  Tully went to bed early that night, full of chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes, and hearing the sounds of the street, he drifted in the darkness with his loss.

  23

  The rains ceased; new green leaves covered the elms and sycamores lining residential streets. When a haze of peat dust again hung over the town, Luis Ortega told Ruben that he had talked with Tully. Ruben had not seen Tully since he had given him those fifteen dollars, an error he still regretted. Tully had said he was working as a cook, Ortega reported, but his face was dirty and there was a straw hat on the bar. He had talked about getting into shape.

  As summer approached, hundreds of men were again on El Dorado Street, leaning against storefronts, cars and parking meters; and Ruben, passing from his house to the port and from the port to the gym, looked among them for Billy Tully. He did not expect to see him. When Tully wanted to fight again, Ruben believed he would come back to the gym. Until he did, he could only wait. But he did not hope. He had given up on him once already and been disappointed by too many others. As if in rebellion against his influence, they had succumbed to whatever in them was weakest, and often it was nothing he could even define. They lost when they should have won and they drifted away. Over the years he would see one around town. A few he read about in the newspaper—some fighting in other towns for other managers, one killed on a motorcycle, one murdered in New Orleans. They were all so vulnerable, their duration so desperately brief, that all he could do was go on from one to another in quest of that youth who had all that the others lacked. There was always someone who wanted to fight. He had Ernie Munger, Buford Wills and Wes Haynes; Luis Ortega was back in training, and so Ruben went on.

  Ortega had once been a middleweight. With his shoulders hunched around his ears, his chin on his chest, he had stalked, flatfooted and perpetual, through round after round of punishment and won a string of main events by knockouts. Between bouts he had gone to fat. Unequal finally to the added effort and deprivations of conditioning, he had retired. When he returned to the gym, encouraged—Ruben knew—by Tully’s victory over Lucero, Ortega was fifty pounds overweight.

  Ortega’s face was bloated. His sharp-bridged nose curved sideways, his arched brows were split, and he kept an impeccable mustache. On the backs of his plump hands were old homemade tattoos, faded pachuco crosses. His belly and buttocks wrapped in sheets of plastic under a bleach-spotted sweat suit, a pair of tight trunks over the pants and a terry-cloth bathrobe over everything, his great chin jiggling, he produced an abundance of grunts and sweat, but it was clear to Ruben that Ortega would never be a middleweight again. At last he matched him with a young heavyweight in Salt Lake City, securing a preliminary bout for Ernie Munger, who was back in the gym after an absence of several months. Five days before the fight, Ortega, weakened by steam baths, came down with flu. Ruben phoned for a postponement, but Ortega was replaced by a substitute. Now there were no longer travel expenses for three; there was only bus fare for Ernie.

  “I’ll have to send you up alone,” Ruben said. “You can take your guy easy. You’ll have a nice trip, knock him out and come back with a few bucks for the wife and kid.”

  “Go by myself?” asked Ernie.

  “It’s the expenses. How can I go? There’s no expenses for me any more. You want a fight, don’t you?”

  “I want a fight.”

  “I mean between you and me I begin to wonder about some of these guys. Who can you count on any more? If it wasn’t for you kids I guess I’d just quit.”

  24

  Ernie arrived in Salt Lake City on the morning of the fight and strolled yawning in the shade and sunlight along broad, tree-lined streets where water flowed in the gutters. He stared up at the granite spires of the Mormon Temple and ate ham and eggs while reading the sports page. So the fans would know he was white, Ruben had listed him as Irish Ernie Munger, over Ernie’s protest that there was no Irish in his family.

  Listless after a vibrating night of open-mouth sleeping on the Greyhound, Ernie bought a magazine and took a room in a lobbyless hotel, where he rested most of the day. His was the opening preliminary, and he believed afterwards that if he had not felt so torpid and had warmed up thoroughly he would not have been knocked down by the first punch of the fight. It caught him cold—a right to the jaw thrown by an opponent with a ruddy rural face and a body as rangy as his own. Ernie dropped to his hands and knees, sprang up before a count and was slugging back without fully realizing what had happened when the referee intervened to wipe the resin dust from his gloves. Then, stunned by blows as powerful as the first, his knees sagging but resisting, he was not even aware of being hit, only of impact already past and survived; and he knew he would not go down again, that the straining face he was smashing could not summon the power to overcome him. Punching with deadly excitement, he sensed he was going to win, saw it in the other’s altered stance and in his eyes, and he rushed forward, belaboring the suddenly blood-smeared face until his opponent lay out of his reach.

  Elated in the dressing room, he wanted to return to Faye, and to his infant son, for whom, until this moment, he had not yet been able to feel any love. Now he believed it was for them that he had come all this way and fought. On the ride up he had decided he would hitchhike home and save half his expense money, and now he wanted to set off. He was elated by the shower over his body, by the feel of the towel, by simply being himself here pulling on his clothes, hearing the muffled shouts of the crowd.

  Conscious of recognizing glances, he came back into the arena. The main event ended with Luis Ortega’s substitute, an overweight Negro, sitting on the canvas. The spectators filed up the aisles, Ernie, full of hot dogs, was paid his fifty dollars, and ten of it he gave to the two nervous men who had seconded him. A half hour later he was on the highway at the city’s edge, standing near a closed service station, his thumb directed west.

  A silent man took him to the airport turnoff. There, with his canvas bag at his feet, the lights of the airport in the distance behind him, Ernie waited on the gravel shoulder, blinded by the swift approach of headlights and left behind with fluttering pants cuffs. From one car something came flying in a chorus of derisive howling, striking the ground near his feet. In the lights of the following car he saw a paper milkshake cup rolling along the shoulder, and spots on the legs of his pants. A plane roared out over the desert, lights winking green and red in the black sky.

  In time a car swerved off onto the shoulder beyond him, dust streaming up over the glowing taillights. Ernie ran toward it, and ran on and on, the car braking, then coasting, as if the driver had changed his mind and was starting off again. But the brake lights once more glowed bright and the car came to a stop. When Ernie jogged up beside it the door swung open and he saw two young women peering out at him.

  “Hi. Sit up here,” said the one by the open door. “The back’s full of junk.”

  Flustered, he ducked in, dropped his bag in back and slammed the door. The light went out, the car lurched ahead, the tires roared on the gravel, and Ernie, who before his marriage had spent so many futile nights looking for pickups, sat in wonderment at women like these.

  “Where you going?” asked the one beside him.

  “California.”

  “Yeah? So are we,” she said, and he was thinking of mo
tel accommodations when the driver asked: “What town?”

  “Stockton.”

  “What would anybody want to go to Stockton for?”

  “That’s where I live.”

  “I guess it takes all kinds to make a world,” said the driver.

  “Where you going?”

  “Where we’re going is a matter of conjecture, but we’ll get you down the road a way.” The driver was tall and, Ernie could see in the approaching lights, powerfully constructed. Her dark hair, combed back at the sides, was cut like a man’s. Her chin was heavy; she wore glasses, jeans, and filled a plaid shirt with a large bosom. Her companion was smaller, with blond hair cut in the same style, her face plump and slightly haggard, her hips, in jeans, wide on the seat.

  The car hummed on and now the road ran along the edge of Great Salt Lake, the water vast, motionless and black, with a stripe of lambent moonlight extending toward the car. Bathhouses, piers, a dark pavilion loomed on its shore, passed and fell behind. Along the sides of the road the sand glowed white in the beams of the headlights. On the left a range of mountains stood darkly against the sky.

  “How long were you out there?” the woman beside him asked after a prolonged silence.

  “Quite a while.”

  “Nobody’ll give you a ride up here. They’re all Mormons. I saw you were just a boy so we stopped. We’ve seen other guys along the road, but we didn’t pick any up.”

  “Hard cases,” the driver interjected.

  “They’re probably all still standing back there. I don’t know what finally happens to them.”

  “Somebody picks them up and gets rolled,” said the driver. “Tough guys. You can have them.”

  “Not me.”

  “You can have them, baby.”

  “I don’t want them.”

  “You want to help out, they’re all yours.”

  Ernie listened to this exchange with misgivings and decided he would not mention his bout. When asked what he was doing in Utah he answered: “Business venture.”

  “Business?” said the woman whose thigh rocked at times against his. “At your age?”

  “I’m not so young. I got a wife and a baby.”

  “You don’t either.”

  “I do too.”

  “Do you really? You look so young.”

  “You don’t have to be old to have babies,” said the driver.

  “Well, it’s good to have babies,” contested the other. “What’s wrong with having babies?”

  “I didn’t say anything was wrong with it.”

  “You implied it.”

  “I did not. If he wants to have kids that’s fine with me. Why should I care?”

  “Well, it didn’t sound like that when you said it.”

  “I can’t help the way I sound.”

  “Never mind.”

  They passed through a settlement and Ernie studied the profiled face beside him, believing that preferences had been established, though what was expected of him now he was not sure. Surrounded again by desert, they raced on. Far ahead points of light appeared and drew closer, shifted down to the road or remained in high cones, glaring in the eyes of the three squinting out the windshield, the dimmer clicking on the floor, the woman behind the wheel saying: “Son-of-a-bitch.” After a considerable time of alternated silence and pointless talk, Ernie let his leg fall lax against the plumper leg beside it. The woman did not move. The two thighs jiggled together through miles of humming darkness.

  “You going to be able to drive, Noreen?”

  “I can drive.”

  “Because when I give out I’m going to give out all at once.”

  “Want me to drive now?”

  “I’m holding up. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Any time you want me to drive just say so,” Noreen murmured, her eyes closed.

  “Just stay awake, that’s all.”

  “If we get sleepy we can pull over for a while,” said Noreen.

  Ernie moved his head closer to hers. A few vagrant hairs tickling his face, he asked, almost whispering: “Do you camp out by the road?”

  “We’ve been camping two weeks in Yellowstone.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of bears?”

  “Bears you don’t have to worry about.”

  Wondering if everything had somehow been already decided, Ernie turned his face toward her and waited. She gave him no sign. Finally his eyes closed, and he felt the plastic ribbing of the seat cover sliding slowly under his cheek until his nose came into contact with a soft neck smelling faintly of unwashed skin—like clean, scorched laundry—and of tobacco. He nuzzled it automatically and there was no response, not the slightest movement or tension. She appeared to be asleep, but then she was speaking beside his ear.

  “Gail?”

  “Huh?”

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t fall asleep at the wheel.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Do you feel like you might? Do you want me to talk to you to keep you awake? I don’t want you to get in a wreck. That’s all we need. So what are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So let’s talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “You don’t want to run us into a tree, do you?”

  “There aren’t any trees.”

  “Aren’t there? That’s right. When are there going to be some?”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “Are we still out here?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know? I can’t open my eyes.” She spoke toward the ceiling, Ernie’s lips still against her neck.

  “We really run into some lulus, don’t we?” the driver said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Just talking to keep awake. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “What were you getting at, though?”

  “I’m not getting at anything. I just meant there’s really some dillies around if you know where to look. I mean where do they get this stuff? My kid brother delivers laundry. You think he’s proud of that? But he puts in an honest day’s work and doesn’t ask for any favors. Nobody gives him any handouts. And you can be damn sure I never got any either.”

  “Me neither,” murmured Noreen.

  “Oh, come off it. You’ve had your little fanny pampered since the day you were born.”

  “When was I ever pampered?”

  “Don’t make me sick. This wasn’t my idea. You’re the one wanted to pick him up. It’s just that kind of attitude I don’t like. I mean my brother works for a laundry, that’s all I mean.”

  Ernie sensed that things were taking a wrong turn.

  “Well, don’t be mad at me,” said Noreen.

  “Oh, no, of course not.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “That’s just what I mean. It’s just that manipulative attitude.”

  “What attitude?”

  “You’re a couple of real winners. I mean we don’t hoard what we have. Room in the car—fine. But then to sit right back and give us this crap while my brother has to deliver laundry, well, it just makes you wonder. When people want to get somewhere they take the bus. They don’t ask somebody for a handout.”

  “I didn’t ask you to stop,” Ernie said, moving his head away from Noreen’s. “You could of gone on by easy enough.”

  “No, I don’t like it. My brother drives a laundry truck, but he pays his way.”

  “So?”

  “So? So you think that’s much of a job? Think he likes that? You think that’s the kind of work he wants?” She was leaning forward, shouting now, and Noreen, her eyes still closed, screamed upward: “Stop it!”

  “That’s it. That does it,” said the driver, applying the brakes, the car wobbling, veering, then bumping over the shoulder. “Now you’ve upset her. This is where we part company, buster. You’re going to have to get along
by yourself from here on. This just isn’t going to work.”

  Ernie did not speak for a moment of bewildered humiliation, feeling as if he had done something terribly wrong, then as if he were being persecuted without reason, then wondering if perhaps the driver were joking. “Are you kidding me? You’re crazy if you think I’m getting out here in the middle of the goddamn desert. Nobody’d every pick me up out here.”

  “You’ll make out. I don’t have any worries about you.”

  “What’s the matter, aren’t I your type or something?”

  “Oh, boy, that’s a good one. That’s really smart. You’re just no end of laughs. So what are you waiting for?”

  “I’m not getting out of this car.” He looked to Noreen, but her eyes were closed and her face indicated nothing.

  “Come on, don’t get funny,” said the driver.

  “I’m not moving.”

  “I said I want you out of here.”

  “I don’t care what you want. I’d be out here all night. What’d you pick me up for? Just to throw me out?”

  “Get out!” screamed Noreen, her eyes still closed.

  In the shock of betrayal, Ernie threw open the door. Outside in the cool air he wrenched open the back door and took his canvas bag from among the packs and sleeping bags.

  “No hard feelings,” said the driver, her face sallow in the dim overhead light. “We’re glad to help a guy out, but this was just getting too crowded.”

  Noreen had not moved. Ernie cursed and slammed the door, returning the women to darkness. The rear wheels spun on the gravel, he kicked the fender, ran and kicked it again, and was left behind. The taillights diminished until finally there was not a light anywhere in sight, except the stars, and they were numberless and incredibly remote. An uneasy realization of his solitude came over Ernie. There was not a sound anywhere; several times he looked behind him to dispel a sense of abysmal blackness at his back. At last a pair of headlights appeared. As they drew closer, the sense of isolation decreased and he imagined himself riding on again. Moving farther onto the highway, he put out his arm. The car came up in a blaze of light, swerved out and sped on. Ernie wandered short distances and stood with his weight on one leg and then the other. At intervals a car raced by.