Leonard Gardner: Fat City

Ernie was picked up at sunrise by a soldier in civilian clothes with sport shirts of all colors hanging from a metal rod across the entire width of the back seat, who owned two cars, had made love to innumerable women, drove at high speeds and talked with few pauses across Nevada and all the way to Sacramento. There the two parted. Ernie went the last forty-five miles by Greyhound, riding through the night coolness of low delta fields, past dark vineyards, orchards and walnut groves, isolated lights of farm houses, irrigation ditches full of moonlit water, then on the outskirts a gigantic technicolor face speaking silently on the screen of a drive-in movie. Dazed with fatigue yet alert in the eagerness of coming home, he rode into the city. The bus passed block after block of dark and dimly-lit houses. It stopped; the door opened and shut, then the bus bumped over railroad tracks and entered the downtown business district, the stores dark, box offices closed at the theaters, the marquee lights off, cars cruising down Main Street, and the empty sidewalks brightly lit. Ernie rose, and when the bus roared into the depot he was standing at the head of the aisle. He came lightly down the metal steps into balmy air and diesel fumes, and feeling in himself the potent allegiance of fate, he pushed open the door to the lobby, where unkempt sleepers slumped upright on the benches.