Leonard Gardner - Fat City

He knocked out the national featherweight champion, and after one celebrated year was knocked out himself. He went on traveling, defeating hometown favorites all across Mexico, but the important fights he began to lose. Lucero now was wearing down. He had fought nearly two hundred times. What would become of him after he could not go on he had no idea, so did not think about it. All that was before him was tomorrow’s fight, and a week after another in Los Angeles, if he got by this one. A knockout loss would bring a thirty-day suspension.

Out on the street, Lucero found a drugstore with a Mexican clerk. While there he dialed the number given him in Mexico City by his manager, and to the voice that answered said: “Bueno? Gil Solis? Estoy aquí—Arcadio Lucero. Tengo un cuarto en el Hotel Lincoln.” With a tinfoil packet of large flat tablets, Lucero went up the street to El Tecolote. In the window was his picture on a poster. He bent over in the dim light and looked at Billy Tully — who was, he saw, not so young either — and at himself. He had gained ten pounds since the photo was taken. Even so, as he entered, it was evident that the bartender recognized him.

“Coca-Cola,” he said, mounting the stool. His last night in this city he had spent here drinking. The bar had been full until closing time, the jukebox blaring and strangers embracing him. He remembered being driven in a car crowded with men and women, and remembered firing his pistol out the window into the air.

Lucero put a tablet in his mouth, took a swallow from the bottle and belched through the devious chambers of his nose. He settled into a kind of contentment. The bartender was moving down the bar. From the corner of his eye Lucero saw the faces of his countrymen turning to look at him, and he felt at home, as at home as he ever felt anywhere.

After a steak dinner with Ruben and a stroll along El Dorado Street, Billy Tully went back to the Oxford Hotel, where he had been sleeping, sober and alone, for the past week. But in bed early after a day of leisure, he began thinking about Oma and about the fight. Though he had not seen Oma since the night he had left her, he could not grasp a sense of his freedom. He felt that in being here he was doing something wrong, that he was causing her suffering and tomorrow night would pay for it. Scheming his defense, he visualized himself punching and dodging until he became alarmed about insomnia. He turned and sprawled but could not sleep. At what occurred to him as the first light of dawn, he leaped out of bed with a moan of utter defeat and walked into a wall. Peering at his alarm clock, then out the door at the clock over the lighted stairway, Tully comprehended that he had been in bed only an hour. He got back under the covers and perused the Mexican fight results in Ring magazine. While finding no mention of Arcadio Lucero, he noted with dismay the number of knockouts suffered in Mexico in a month’s time. There had been such a quantity the correspondent had amused himself with an array of synonyms: dumped, demolished, iced, polished off, put to sleep, embalmed, disposed of. And these unknown defeated Mexicans so depressed Tully that he knew, with terrible lucidity, that the sport was for madmen. He turned out the light and dreamed he could not sleep.

Ruben drove him the next night to the Civic Memorial Auditorium, an adobe-colored edifice with fluted columns and statues of openmouthed bears guarding its walkway. Across the lighted façade, below an inscription that began Tomorrow and Forever and terminated down at the other end of the building with Defense of Liberty , fluttered a blue and white banner: Boxing Tonight . A line of early arrivals extended out onto the concrete walk from the general-admission window. In the lobby, filled already with Mexicans and smoke and the shouts of program vendors, a group of local boxers awaited free admission. Past ushers wearing Veterans of Foreign Wars caps, Ruben escorted them to ringside. He went on with Tully to the dressing room, where Ernie Munger, reclining on a table in black shirt and slacks, his raised neck no longer lean but bulging with muscle, greeted them with an absolutely expressionless face.

Ernie fought in the opening bout, watched by Tully from a back seat on the aisle. In the gym Ernie had at times beaten him to the punch and now what he saw was just another preliminary fighter. Ernie’s victory, after four rounds, did not ease Tully’s mood. He returned to the dressing room and was forcing up nervous belches when Ernie, lips bloody and nose swollen, came in with Ruben and Babe.

“He walked all over that dude,” said Ruben, his eyes searching Tully’s with concern. “You should be getting ready. How you feel? You feel all right?”

“Fine.”

“Dinner set all right?”

Tully could not answer. Openmouthed, he waited.

“Billy?”

There was a small airy sigh.

“Eat something?” Babe whispered.

“Oh, my God, you didn’t drink no beer just now, did you?”

A rich rumble rose at last.

“You sick?”

“No.”

“He had a good steak dinner. I took him to a good place, but then you can get a bad meal anywhere. You didn’t drink no beer out there, did you?”

“Hell no.”

“All right, don’t get mad. You’re down to a fine edge. That’s good. Just keep it that way. You’re going to take him.”

Tully removed his slacks and the new blue shirt and V-neck sweater, socks and underwear Ruben had bought him so he would not have to go back to Oma’s room for his clothes. With sweat trickling down his biceps, he pulled on his supporter, pale-blue trunks and shining purple robe. He sat remote and irritable while Ruben, with quick expert turns and folds, wound the cotton gauze into firm bandages from his wrists to his knuckles. The bandages taped, and tested with blows against Ruben’s palms, Tully took out his bridgework — his two upper front teeth — and began bobbing and shuffling around the room, shooting out his fists and blowing through his nose.

When Tully came down the aisle, between turning faces, Arcadio Lucero was already in the ring in crimson-trimmed black satin, his Indian profile impassive. Over the back of his robe in winking sequins of vaporous green, blue, red and gold, was an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Backed by Gil Solis and Luis Ortega, his seconds for the evening, he waited with an economy of movement, arms at his sides, head lazily rocking. Tully, following Ruben up the steps and ducking through the parted ropes with a jaunty swiftness he had practiced years ago as an amateur, felt only impatience. It was an old charged feeling of having gone at last beyond any deferment. Standing in the ring with a towel over his head, he wanted to fight and be through with it.

The announcement of Lucero’s name drew a partisan response from the half-filled gallery.

The robe was tugged off over Tully’s gloves, the mouthpiece was fitted around his teeth, and he was alone in the corner, his arms still tan from the fields, his torso pale, a tattooed swallow in flight over each breast.

“Keep away from him,” was the last thing he heard before the bell. But Lucero did not come after him. The Mexican waited at the ropes. Tully’s first lead drew no response. Wary, he stepped out of range, bounced on his toes, shuffled in, again pushed out his left, and Lucero, taking it on his high-arched nose, swayed back into the ropes. He leaned there, unflinching as Tully feinted, and in a single reflex Tully smashed his jab, cross and hook against that scarred and patient face. Then he was struck by a blow he had not even seen. Grasping for Lucero’s arms, he was pounded over the heart. He retreated, bounced, breathed deeply, and as he stepped back in, Lucero catapulted off the ropes toward him, and Tully was stunned. At the end of the round he returned to two grave faces.