Leonard Gardner - Fat City

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.

Ruben was on the apron cutting Ernie’s shoelaces with surgical scissors when the count began. But the referee did not complete it. He signified the obvious with a wave of his arms and bent down to remove the mouthpiece. Ruben left the shoes, ducked into the ring, cut the laces of the gloves and jerked the gloves off. He was on his knees cutting away the handwraps when the ringside doctor came through the ropes. The doctor pulled up his trousers and squatted. With a long pale index finger he lifted one lid and then another from the brown motionless eyes that gazed sightlessly up at the circle of faces. Hands shaking, Ruben waved the ammonia vial under the dented nose. Babe, pressing a chunk of ice against the nape of Ernie’s neck, pulled his ears, and the referee stretched the gold waistband up from Ernie’s abdomen as it heaved in desperately rapid respiration.

A minute must have gone by. The Negro, in his green robe now, came and stood with his seconds over the prostrate form, and still Ernie had not moved. His legs had quivered for an instant after he had fallen, and that had frightened Ruben as much as the rigidness that followed. He was clear of blame, but he was terrified. He felt the same vertigo he had felt several years before when Jaime Guzman collapsed in the gym. He had not been clear then, and he had suffered the remorse of one warned a hundred times yet who had persisted. Barely able to stand, he had told solemn doctors and indifferent hospital attendants about the protective headguard and the sixteen ounces of padding in each glove, of how Guzman had got up after the knockdown and even shadowboxed before going to the locker room. He repeated it all to Guzman’s crying wife in the waiting room, and after Guzman died in surgery he explained it to a reporter on the phone, naming the other man who had been in the ring, telling of the brief time Guzman had been in training, once more describing the knockdown and once more omitting the other that had come before it and omitting how he had chided him and made him go on despite the look he had seen briefly in his eyes, until he had gone down the second time and the look was clear to everybody in the gym. Ruben had felt he was finished then, but he had also speculated that Guzman might have been hurt in one of his bouts in the navy before he had come to him. In the gym after the funeral there was no mention of the other knockdown, and he devoted himself to the benefit fight that raised for the widow ten percent of a $1,600 gate. Gradually he overcame the memory of the face in the casket. With a toupee over the shaved skull, it had resembled no one he had ever known anyway. But now under the ring lights Ruben experienced the same dread, and as he massaged Ernie’s arms with unhurried hands, his face distressed but not frantic, he felt the hopeless folly that was his life.

It lasted until Ernie’s lids at last began to flutter. As his eyes opened, blinked, squinted and closed again, Ruben struggled to contain his joy, afraid it too was error.

“What’s your name?” asked the doctor in an imperious tenor, and Ruben passed the ammonia again under Ernie’s nose. This time there was a slight recoiling. “That’s enough of that,” said the doctor, but Ruben felt he was the superior in experience and moved the vial once more past the nostrils. Ernie grimaced. Twitching, blinking, he tried to raise his head.

“What’s your name?”

Ernie squinted up at the faces.

“Where are you?”

“Did I get knocked out?”

“What’s your name? Tell me what your name is. Can you do that?”

“Ernie Munger.”

“What town are you in? Hum?”

“Oakland. What round is it?”

“It’s all over. How many fingers do you see? Can you see my hand?”

When Ernie sat up, the Negro bent down to him for the belated gesture of sportsmanship, his face framed by a white towel. “Good fight. You all right now?”

Ernie looked at him dully. Babe rose, patted the victor’s back and hoarsely whispered to his seconds: “Real good puncher.”

Helped to his feet, Ernie stood with one shoulder hunched while Ruben and Babe tied the robe around him. His arms across their necks, his shoes gaping, he was conducted up the aisle and around a vendor shouting: “Cold beer!”

In the dressing room, Ruben held ice at the back of Ernie’s neck, sending Buford Wills out for his fight accompanied only by Babe. “I’ll be right out,” he said.

“I’ll catch up with you.” He was conscious of the minutes going by as he roughly toweled Ernie’s body, as he helped him on with his clothes, gave him a drink of brandy from the medical kit, studied his eyes and draped the robe over his shoulders as he sat shivering on the rubbing table. He heard the bell as he was taking his pulse. “How you feel now?”

“Head hurts. Can I have some water?”

Ruben heard the shouts of the crowd and felt the pull of the fight like a physical compulsion. He ran for another manager’s water bottle, covered with grimy adhesive tape, and as he was returning with it, the door hurled open and Babe was in the room again, shouting inaudibly. “He’s cut!” Ruben saw the lips say before the croaking sounds registered, and he ran to the medical kit. With the water bottle still in his other hand, he ran past Babe out into the cavernous auditorium, soaring with that grave yet turbulent completeness down the aisle toward the square of glaring light where Buford Wills, small and frail and black, with a trickle of blood down his face, was battling a tattooed Mexican.