Leonard Gardner: Fat City

“You should of done something right at the time,” Babe gasped, his voice croaking, breaking.

“What could I do?”

“You should of gone right to a lawyer.”

“Yeah,” said Ruben. “I took the kid to the doctor and he thought the needle was dull. He wanted to get some blood, you know, but it don’t go in.”

Gil hoisted his pants. “I know one thing, I’m not loaning any more money. Needle was dull, huh?”

“No, no, it was a good needle. So you know what he says?”

“Well, he probably had a dull needle.”

“No, he tried two needles.”

“Who’s this?” whispered Babe. “The kid?”

“Yeah, I took him down and got him his license today, and the doctor could hardly get a needle in him.”

“What was the matter, dull needle?”

“The kid’s like leather.”

“That’s odd, Ruben. That’s odd. Let me tell you that’s odd. I wouldn’t of thought that looking at him. Yeah, that’s odd. Manny Chavez had thick skin, you know, but he was tough, you guys know that, I mean they don’t come like him every day.”

“That’s not half of it. Hold on. He finally gets the needle in, see, and gets the blood and it’s almost black.”

“I had Chavez down in L.A. against Montoya — first round he gets butted over the eye and the blood starts running and I think well there goes the fight. But it’s not his blood, it’s Montoya’s. He’s got a cut on the top of his head must of took ten stitches. Chavez didn’t have a mark on him.”

“Remember that guy Estrada?” interrupted Gil. “I seen him open a Coke bottle with his teeth.”

“The hell you say. They break?”

“Listen, I didn’t tell you the half of it. The doctor gets the blood out, it’s black, and he’s just staring at it when I ask him to burn the veins out of the kid’s nose — stop those nosebleeds. So he puts the blood down a minute and gets his spark gun and when he gets done burning his nose out he picks up the tube again and turns it upside down to have another look and the blood in it don’t even run down. It just kind of stays up at the top of the tube. It’s turned to gelatin.”

Gil dug thoughtfully between his buttocks. Ruben sighed, made a few aimless sputters with his lips and began to hum. Babe cleared his mined throat. “Manny Chavez,” he whispered, “had the clearest piss of any man I ever seen. He’d take a specimen and the piss in that bottle would be just as clean and pure as fresh drinking water.”

On the day before Ernie’s first bout, he drove with Faye Murdock out of town and across the Calaveras River — brown and high from the rains — and turned down a lane that ran parallel to the levee. At a dirt turnoff used by lovers and fishermen, he drove up onto the levee and parked out of sight of housing tracts while dull-gray mud hens flapped away in the late afternoon, running over the water as they flew. Dark clouds extended to the horizon. Along the muddy banks of the river, red-wing blackbirds sang in the cattails. His arms around Faye, as before on so many other untraveled roads, Ernie whispered and blew in her small bitter ear.

Faye was a solemn dark-haired girl with large attractive teeth, fair skin, and a short fleshy body that seemed to Ernie impervious to stimulation. He had begun taking her out because for a time she had gone with Steve Bonomo, whose success with a previous girl Ernie had read about on the wall of a high school lavatory. His first time alone with Faye, Ernie had sensed a difference from the other crossed-legged girls he had dated. He felt in her lips and arms a lonely employment of him. Doggedly his campaign had gone on until he and Faye were among those who cruised under the lights of Main Street in predictable, faithful pairs, the dense one-way traffic proceeding slowly through yellow lights, blocking the street to cross traffic, the riders conversing from car to car while horns blared, the procession starting off again with squealing tires and rapping pipes only to brake, lurching, once again to a creeping mass. Yet, for all his fidelity, Ernie remained as frustrated as the young men who cruised alone or in groups as he had once cruised, looking for that mythical female pedestrian who would like to go for a ride.

The sky darkened, the liquid singing of the blackbirds diminished and ceased, mud hens swam back to shore, climbed up the banks and huddled in the willows. The lights of a farm came on in the brown distance where patches of tule fog lay on the barren muddy fields. A wind came with the darkness, rattling the license plate, and a low, honking flight of geese passed.

Later in the night it began to rain. To Ernie the first patters were like small sounds from Faye’s mouth. Her lips had been against his so long that his mind was drifting among images of reeds wavering with the delicate movements of her tongue. When the roof began drumming, they sat up. Rain was pouring over the windshield, battering the ground, hissing into the invisible river. Ernie opened the window and the cold rain blew against his face. From his hunger he realized that many hours had gone by. In the light of a match, Faye’s wan and tired face, the downward angle of the cigarette, her rumpled clothes, unpinned hair, and the slump of her neck renewed his hopes.

Within closed steamy windows an embrace went on like the same endless moment, broken only by an occasional digestive murmur and Faye’s lighting of cigarettes. Finally, in his weariness, Ernie began to accept that once again he had been baffled. There was no consolation from having tried everything he could think of. To appear in a ring tomorrow without ever having won this other battle seemed presumptuous and dangerous. He alone in the Lido Gym carried a burden of silence and deceptive innuendo, and he wondered if this could mean the difference between victory and defeat. He was persevering with his repertory of foreplay, which nothing else ever followed, when Faye’s fingers came to rest on his thigh, over the small tin box in his pocket.

“Aspirin?”

Alarmed, he gave no answer, and uncertain what he should do, he allowed her hand into the pocket. She withdrew the box and he heard it click open in the darkness. As the silence continued he sagged against the door. The box snapped shut and was replaced.

“Were you planning it all this time?”

“No.”

“You always carry them?”

“It was just in case something came up.”

“You mean if you couldn’t use them on me you’d use them on whoever would let you?”

“I wouldn’t want anybody but you.”

“What made you think I’d do it?”

“I was just hoping.”

“Is that all you think I am?”

“What do you mean? We haven’t even done it.”

“You want to, though. Is that all you think about?”

“I don’t think about that at all.”

“You just said that’s what you were hoping.”

He thought a moment. “I just want what we’d both enjoy.”

“Oh, sure.”

For a while neither spoke, and Ernie wondered if he had talked his way clear.

“Do you really care for me?” she asked at last.

There was a silence so heady that he began to tremble. “I guess I’m in love,” he answered, and slumped lower in fear of what he had said. Had he committed himself for nothing, or had he only said the one thing he should have said all along? The rain beat on the roof. They were sitting apart; he did not know now if she would even let him touch her, but unable to think of anything else, afraid the opportune moment might be passing, he reached out to her and she moved into his arms. It was as if the air had been knocked out of him. She clung to him and he contorted, suffocating, kicking the door as he tried to maneuver, knowing beyond all doubt that the inevitable moment had at last arrived. He pulled at her clothing, pushed her down on the seat. He sprawled, he thrust a foot through the spokes of the steering wheel. There was a smack of flesh. As Ernie’s eyes pinched shut he felt the pulse of ecstatic oblivion and the horn began to honk.