Leonard Gardner: Fat City

In the flooded shower room, Ernie was addressed by a small Mexican standing motionless under the other nozzle: “How’s the ass up here?”

“Not good. Where you from?”

“L.A.”

“How’s the ass down there?”

“Good.”

Soapless, the two hunched under the hissing spray.

“Are the guys tough in this town?”

“Not so tough. How about down there?”

“Tough.”

“Just get here?”

“Yeah, I was in a bar yesterday, this guy’s calling everybody a son-of-a-bitch. So I go out and wait for him. He come out and I ask did that include me. Says yeah. So I got him. I mean I just come to town. Some welcome. I don’t know, trouble just seems to come looking for me.”

Then the man began to sing, repeating a single phrase, his voice rising from bass moans and bellows to falsetto wails. Earth Angel, Earth Angel, will you be mine? The song went on in the locker room, the singer, as he put on his clothes, shifting to an interlude of improvisation: Baby, baaaby, baaaaby, uh baby, uuh, oh yeauh, BAAAAAAABY, I WANT you , while naked figures walked to and from the showers and steam drifted through the doorway. Drawing on his pants, Ernie, bruised, fatigued and elated, felt he had joined the company of men.

The bruises around Ernie’s eyes faded from purple to greenish yellow and were superimposed by others. His lashes were rooted in blood-filled ridges, red welts marked the outer corners of each narrowed eye, there was a fatness to his nose. Yet Ruben Luna, observing from the ropes, knew this helmeted and heavy-gloved sparring in the gym was hardly fighting at all.

“Hit him. Don’t apologize,” he shouted, and Ernie nodded, once turning his head to listen and taking a punch. Assuming a classic pose, he circled and feinted, springing away from threatening gestures, then with no discernible reason, as if he had been waiting not for an opening but for inspiration, he charged, punching wildly. Every day, by another amateur or by the two professionals near his weight, one lighter, one heavier, both phlegmatic, his nose was bloodied.

Ruben watched patiently, believing in the eventual perfection of every promising move. He attended with towel and water bottle. Holding the heavy bag bucking against his chest, he coached with his cheek against the leather only a few inches from Ernie’s smacking fists. Concluding every workout he folded the towel into a pad, placed it on the floor, and while Ernie balanced on his head, bending his long neck from side to side, Ruben stood holding his ankles, gazing between the V of his legs off across the gym with the rapt eyes of a man whose reason for attention was ending for the day.

He went home to his family. Amid the arguing and nonsensical monologues of his children and the scolding of his wife, he ate his supper. He went to bed early and got up early, drove to the union hall, was dispatched with the gangs in the cold early light, and passed the day driving a forklift in the port. At noon he bought coffee and cupcakes from a girl in gabardine slacks who arrived every day in a snack truck. After work he drove across town to the gym, and in a coffee shop he was served pie by a tall blond waitress before crossing the street to his boxers.

“My white kid might shape up into something,” he told his wife.

“That’s good.” Her hips wide in a sheer, peach-colored nightgown, her legs heavy and short, she was bending over, folding back the white satin bedspread. With a weary moan she crawled onto the bed and settled herself under the covers. Leaning against the upholstered headboard, she began creaming her face. There was a fullness to her brown throat, a softness under her chin. Her thick, wide, fierce lips that had once excited him sank at the corners into plump cheeks creased where there had once been dimples.

“He’s got a great reach and a good pair of legs. And he’s white, you know? He’s a real clean good-looking kid. He could draw crowds some day if he could just fight. And maybe he can if he’d just listen. If I could put all I know in him he could make it. But I didn’t learn it overnight either.”

When his wife put away her jar and turned onto her side, pulling the covers up, Ruben began to undress. The room was lit by a bedside lamp, its shade enclosed in cellophane wrapping. On the dresser were a number of photos of his family, in frames and cardboard studio easels, among small boxes, ceramic figurines, and several bronze saddle horses of varying sizes standing on doilies. From one wall the serene face of Christ stared obliquely toward the back yard from a brass grillwork frame with a tiny burnt-out night light at the top.

In a pair of yellow pajamas, ripped under the arms and tight between the legs, Ruben got into bed. “I got nothing against coloreds,” he said in the darkness. “Buford Wills is a good little colored boy, but there’s too many in the game. Anglos don’t want to pay to see two colored guys fight. They want a white guy. Like Tully. He was a pretty good draw. If he’d had a better punch he could of gone to the top. If he could of just hit harder and taken it a little better. He had everything else, but he let that bad streak discourage him. I guess he’s getting in shape down there at the Y, though, or he wouldn’t found this kid. He’s got some miles left in him. This kid must of done good, too, and he could develop. He’s tall for a welter. You ought to see the reach on him. If he put some weight on he could grow into a good-looking white heavyweight. Huh?” Ruben paused. “Victoria?” Unanswered, he felt his mood declining. What he had been saying now seemed foolish. In the isolation of his will, goaded by his back and shoulders, he felt the old urge to punch. Trying to sleep, he thought: I can’t, I can’t sleep. And he lunged over on his side, the feel of his wife’s body, as it curved against his, as familiar as his own. “Sweetheart?” He patted her. “You awake?”

“Huh?”

“I was talking to you. Did you fall asleep?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He stroked her hip in atonement for waking her. “I just can’t sleep.”

“I don’t think we should,” she murmured.

Silent, he stilled his hand.

“Do you want to?” she whispered. “I think it’s taking a chance.”

“I know, I know.”

“We could if you wanted to. I don’t care.”

“No, no, no. I don’t care. I understand. That’s not it. I’m just jumpy.”

They lay quietly. Ruben’s thoughts, diverted now, shifted to the snack-wagon driver. She was divorced, she had told him, and a mother of two children — a pleasant young woman whose friendliness he enjoyed as much as his glances at her snug gabardine slacks. But her children seemed a barrier and he began to think of the tall waitress across the street from the gym. She was reserved and had a look of sullenness. To her Ruben had spoken no more than his orders. He had looked at her behind the counter, leaning forward to see a little more, and that was all. But now she came to him with a forceful presence. He moved his hand over his wife, and the actual mass and possibility of her was strange and startling. Free of the mutual solicitude that kept him comfortable and subdued, he was aroused. His forehead wrinkling in concentration, he tried to keep the pale turgid nipples in his mind distinct from these flaccid bumps his children had suckled and that he, in the throes of excitement, had suckled too — a mimicry that had gone unmentioned, yet that even now, several years later, he felt had been wrong, a theft from his own babies and an abasement of a decent wife he did not deserve. Distracted, Ruben moved his hand down her belly, trying to realize that she was here offering herself up to him.