Leonard Gardner - Fat City

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.

“You’ll work the tower again. Can your partner hustle?”

“This kid’s a great athlete.”

“We’ll send him with you then. Just watch out for your hands, kid.”

The two walked to the idling Caterpillar and Tully climbed up the rungs of the narrow tower hitched behind it — a fifteen-foot metal cylinder, like a drainage pipe mounted on wheels, into which, having reached the top, he lowered himself until his feet were on the platform, his waist level with the mouth of the tube. He pulled up the long pole that leaned against it, held it under one arm like a lance, and the tractor and the tower lurched into motion. Bracing himself with a hip as he rocked and swayed, brushed by leaves, he swung the pole in a sideways sweep. With the first assault, Ernie, under the tree clearing nuts from in front of the Caterpillar’s metal track, yelled out in protest, his voice barely audible in the roar of the engine. Tully’s second blow sent down another bombardment of green-hulled walnuts. While Ernie shouted up at him, he laughed and flailed again at the tree. Another shower of nuts fell. Ernie covered his head, stooped, rose, throwing, and a nut rang against the tower. The driver motioned him forward. Ernie, his mouth working angrily, ran on to his position in front of the tractor, and Tully, belaboring the branches, saw him gliding in a swift and furious crouch, his hands, deftly knocking aside nuts, darting at times within inches of the advancing track. The crouching figure, the tractor and the tower all turned about the tree as one unit and progressed to the next tree in line. The pole crashed into the branches, Ernie was pelted, and Billy Tully was euphoric. Up near the green treetops in the swaying tube with a view of crawling nut-sackers dispersed over the ground, he wielded his stick with great energy.

The tree-beating ended at noon, and Tully and Ernie joined the others crawling over the clods. Nuts banged into buckets, buckets were emptied into sacks. Covered with dirt, the two talked and scrabbled through the afternoon.

“I’m just a damn fool wasting my time out here,” said Tully. “But you get in a bind. I got my responsibilities too. Don’t think I don’t. I got a woman on my hands and that means getting up at four and breaking your back all day. But if I can start fighting again that’ll be the end of that.”

“Sure, you’ll be making some money anyway. You can sleep in the morning. Anything’s better than this.”

“It’s not just that. I’ll flat-ass leave her.”

He lifted a full sack and jogged with it to the truck. When his sore knees again dropped onto the dirt beside Ernie, he said: “All I need’s a fight and a woman. Then I’m set. I get the fight I’ll get the money. I get the money I’ll get the woman. There’s some women that love you for yourself, but that don’t last long. Ernie?”

“Yeah?”

“Take care of that wife of yours.”

“I’m trying.”

“I envy you. That’s the truth, even though you got to break your back. I was married. I didn’t know what a good one I had. Don’t let anybody knock marriage, kid. You don’t appreciate it till it’s gone.”

“It’s got its compensations.”

“That’s a fact. That’s absolutely right. It’s got its compensations. I’d say that’s exactly it. You can’t get around that. I had it good but I blew it.” Rising up on his knees, Tully took out his worn wallet.

“Good-looking,” said Ernie, studying the plastic-covered snapshots.

“Redhead.”

“She looks stacked.”

“She was stacked, all right, and I let something like that get away from me. I tell you, if I had some money I’d send her a plane ticket tomorrow. What I’d like to do is get a couple of fights and rent a nice house. You want to go to the gym sometime? Maybe we could work out again, see how I feel. I was in bad shape last time. I mean don’t think I like doing this. You should of seen the house we had. New car. Everything.”

And so Tully, relating the story of his marriage, crawled through the afternoon, separating nuts from clods until all nuts were the same hated one thrown forever into the bucket.

On the day Billy Tully and Ernie Munger came together through the door of the Lido Gym, a new period of energy began for Ruben Luna. He had been in a slump. Only Wes Haynes and Buford Wills were in training. With his wife and children Ruben felt such impatience that he rarely could look at them, his eyes shifting around them as though to lessen his weight of suffering. On Halloween he had been coerced into going trick-or-treating, his daughters, in masks and costumes, running on ahead to ring doorbells while he came along behind holding the hand of his sheet-draped son. From the shadows of the sidewalk he had watched their animation as they filled their paper sacks with candy, and he felt only the utter dullness of it all, the meaningless expenditure of himself that he was powerless to stop, begun imperceptibly long ago in the name of a love he could no longer feel. The more excited his children had become, the more constricted he felt, until it was as if his children and his wife, and the whole town with its porch lights on under a sky of drifting clouds, were conspiring against his life. To one neighbor, teasing with hands behind his back, Ruben bellowed from behind a shrub: “Are you going to give those kids that candy or aren’t you?” Soon he was not speaking at all. When his children ran across the street without looking, he said nothing.