Leonard Gardner - Fat City

“What’s my cut come to?”

“Well, I gave you all those advances. I got to collect on some of that, but I don’t want you fighting for nothing, either. We got you on your feet now. Three, four weeks you’ll be ready to go again. I’ll tell you, why don’t I just keep paying your room and board?”

“I’m not drinking any more.”

“I know, I know.”

“I’m not going to blow any of it. That divorce is what messed me up. Now I’m fighting again I want to get back with my wife and I got to have money. Just take your cut and I’ll pay my own bills.”

Double-parked at the side of the Oxford Hotel, Ruben counted out a hundred dollars. “It’s not worth the goddamn trouble,” said Tully, and opening the door, looked back at the traffic coming up the one-way street.

“I gave you those advances with the agreement they’d come out of your purse. I got four kids. But once we get another match made I’ll stake you. Don’t get out on that side, you’ll get run over. Shut the door. Get out over on this side.” At the same time that Tully stepped out on the traffic side, Ruben left by his own door to make room for him. They confronted each other across the hood. “What did you want to get out on that side for? Why didn’t you slide over?”

“What do you care?”

“You can get run into that way.”

Tully went around to the sidewalk. “You’re just looking out for me every minute, aren’t you? Except when it comes time to pay off.”

“I never made a dime off you in two years and you been hitting me for plenty. I’m giving you this hundred because you put on a hard fight and you earned it. But that don’t mean we’re square.”

“You think I’m going to catch punches for a hundred bucks?”

“I’ll talk to Mackin. Maybe he’ll put you on again in two weeks.”

“With this cut?”

“It’ll heal by then.”

“Know why I got this? This is the same place they cut me with that razor blade because you were too tight to go down there to Panama and work my corner.”

“That’s not old scar tissue. That’s a new cut.”

“That’s what you’d say, all right. Who the hell cares? All I want is the money for my sweat and blood.”

“How about a bite to eat? I’ll buy you a sandwich. You shouldn’t be out in this wind.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Come to the gym in a day or two, huh?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you.”

Tully went in the hotel and up the stairs, but did not enter his room. He only threw in his bag and relocked the door. Back downstairs in the entrance, he put his head outside to make sure Ruben had driven away before he stepped back onto the sidewalk.

In the Old Peerless Inn Tully had three whiskies with beer chasers, the second pair because the adhesive strips over his cut interested the bartender, who then recognized his face as that on the poster behind the bar. The third he bought to reciprocate and he bought drinks for the man on each side of him. By then the pleasure of celebrity began to diminish and he felt he had become too popular. After several prolonged handclasps, he left.

Out in the fog, weary, yet buoyant from the drinks, his mind dulled along with his aches and his energy returning, Tully was free of the sense of impending ordeal that had been with him for weeks. He felt whole, self-sufficient, felt his life had at last opened up and that now nothing stood between him and the future’s infinite possibilities. Already he was moving into that unknown and it was good, because it was his own life, untrammeled by any other. Excited by a sense of new beginning, he walked past dark bars, their doors closed against the cold. Few figures were on the sidewalks. Under the low-hanging lights in the poker clubs, vacant chairs separated players around the green-topped tables. Outside the Liberty Theater he stopped to look at the photos of several strippers framed behind glass in silver cardboard stars flecked with dusty glitter, and in a small pad of fat on a slender, pouting girl named Estelle was an exact replica of his wife’s horizontal navel. He studied it for some time before going to the box office.

A movie was groaning and flickering as he entered, its narrator proclaiming the virtues of nudism in a grandiloquent baritone charged with reverence for nature. Tully went down the dark aisle to a row near the stage. Slumped on his spine with his head resting on the back of the seat, he looked up at the workings of a great blurred rump. It was an old film, marred by dark shadows and dancing specks of light, and was spoiled for Tully by implacably positioned tropical foliage. Soon his eyes were closing in the drone of that voice.

“… and Rama vowed never to return to the world of dresses and tight shoes and all the restraints her upbringing had heaped upon her head. This was her domain, to live in as woman was intended to live, on a diet of sunshine and fresh air, caressed by the cool stream where — what was this? — there were fish for the angler who was quick enough to catch one with her bare hands!”

Tully sat up, squinting. Slouched about the small theater were other isolated men, squinting, yawning, some asleep under the sudden glare of the houselights. Tully waited in line at the lavatory, and when he came back to his seat the theater darkened and the maroon curtain jerkily parted. To the amplified music of a phonograph, the women came out one by one in velour and satin and sequined net, in floor-length gowns with grimy hems and long black gloves split at the seams. Middle-aged, they two-stepped across the stage, pulling off the gloves, pausing at the proscenium to expose a mottled thigh and shake a finger at the audience for peeking. The gloves were tossed to the wings, the gowns dispatched, fringes rose and fell, waved and jiggled. Unclasped brassières were held in place while orange and platinum heads shook in coy demurring. Released, breasts descended, blue-white, bulbous, low, capped with sequined discs. Fringed girdles off, haunches flexed and sagged, satin triangles drove and recoiled. Calves sinewy, thighs dimpled, scars tucked in the fat of bellies, the women rocked and heaved, beckoned with tongues, crouched and rose with the edge of the curtain between their legs. Mouths open, they trotted out on the runway in high heels, squatted, shook, lay on the floor, lifted legs, caressed themselves, rose and ran off with little coy steps, wriggling dusty buttocks. Estelle appeared last, revealing meager breasts, sharp hipbones, and a belly that had lost its plumpness since the pictures outside were taken. There was nothing about it to remind Tully of his wife. Where there had once been such a voluptuous declivity there was now only an unexceptional navel. He left with the same dissatisfaction he had felt every other time he had been here since the days before his marriage when he had attended with Ortega and Chavez. Only then they had driven out of town afterwards, in his Buick or Chavez’s Cadillac, and gone to a whorehouse at some small valley or mountain town or at a junction on the road to Yosemite. Once they had driven as far as Nevada. Now Chavez was in prison and Ortega had gone home to his family after sticking his head in the dressing room to congratulate Tully on his victory.

He felt remote, distracted, felt that after having beaten Lucero he deserved a woman. A weary, intangible confusion hovered in his mind, a sensation of forgetfulness though there was nothing to remember. He was walking not in the direction of his hotel but toward Oma’s, feeling capable of knocking on her door, of saying he had come only for his clothes, of putting them in his suitcase and then methodically stripping her, taking her without the slightest intrusion on his isolate self, then picking up his suitcase and leaving forever.

Her light was on, showing under the door. He knocked, and even when Earl opened the door, Tully’s equilibrium was not disturbed. The dark eyes, the whites a smoky gray flecked with brown, looked down into his with suspicious recognition.