On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  “You mean it?” she asks.

  “You bet,” he says.

  She asks him what it’s like in Santa Barbara or Ventura or wherever he is and he says, “Girl, you wouldn’t believe it,” and then he starts to sing a song about the badlands and how dark they are even in the morning. On his end of the line a siren spools out and when it stops she hears he’s still singing and she listens until he can’t remember the words and then she asks him if he’s been eating and how the weather is and anyplace they might send a letter. He asks if she’s been winning at cards and when she says she tried to teach Lee how to play hearts he says, “No trick-taking games, he’s not brutal enough for it. You better stick to war.”

  Through the wall she can hear Lee snoring. In the kitchenette the radio plays the Grand Ole Opry. She slides down the wall smiling into her hand until she sits with her legs in front of her and her bare feet shooting into the hallway and disappearing into the dark. What a strange miracle to talk on the phone for no particular reason. They talk for ten minutes, then twenty, until Muriel begins to worry about the coins Julius is dropping for the line. She tells him he shouldn’t waste his money and he says it’s no waste at all but then he seems to remember his purpose and asks after his brother.

  “He’s asleep and I’m out here in the hallway with my hand over the receiver.”

  Silence on Julius’s line and then a clank of freight and men’s voices raised some distance away.

  “We sure hoped you’d be here by now,” Muriel says.

  “My brother hopes a lot of things.”

  Muriel nods to the darkness.

  “Don’t you think it’d be strange?” he says. “All of us together?”

  “That’s what Lee wants though.”

  “True enough,” Julius says, though she can tell he isn’t sure.

  “I want,” she begins, but she worries she should not say the next thing. She is not sure what the next thing is. The dark hallway is silent and outside she can hear the traffic lights clicking. For a moment neither speaks.

  Finally Julius says, “There’s sometimes lots of ways of getting to a place.”

  She thinks of Christmas Eve and the story of the rabbits. His tone is the same, it seeks her approval for something. She wants again the feeling she’d had that night, of recognition. So she laughs. The line tosses back her laugh in delay and Julius says, “Well fine, what do you think then?”

  “Oh now, Julius, it’s just the way you said it.”

  “Maybe I will have to come there just to set you right.”

  His tone is lighter but not quite kind and when she laughs again he says, “You think I wouldn’t.”

  “You haven’t yet,” she says, and then he laughs too. Her face is hot and she wants a drink. She thinks that no matter what else is true about Julius he loves his brother, and because he loves his brother he is also obliged to her. She had come all the way out west knowing this. And if he knew about her or about their life without him he might come along finally too. So she tells him about the horsemen and the notes she’d taken and how she’d run their advice both ways to see if it worked. For a moment he doesn’t say anything. She worries the whole thing will lose its sweetness, in the open air between them. Then he laughs, asks her what her favorite kind of horse is, guesses geldings in a teasing voice. He means it cutely but she’s disappointed. She can tell he doesn’t believe her. Aloud it is hardly believable.

  “No geldings there, Julius,” she says.

  “That’s a nice racket for a gal, though,” he says.

  “Oh, but it’s just a whim,” she says, to take the sting out of the moment.

  “Careful now. Might be one of them things you can’t ever get enough of,” he says, but he’s still kidding her. The operator rings on and asks for another dime and Julius searches his pockets and comes up empty. The line goes dead and Muriel sits a long time with the receiver in her lap and the dial tone chiming. She hears Lee’s snoring and the pipes laboring in the wall and the radio in the kitchen plays “Walking the Floor over You” and then “Goodnight Irene.”

  TWO

  The Golden Nugget

  A few days later Julius is in a back room in Torrance playing five-card. He draws so hot for so long that a crowd gathers, and in that crowd are men he knows and men he doesn’t. All are good drinkers and quick to blame others and thrilled at the warm spring day.

  “Hallelujah anyway,” says one man, when Julius turns up a flush one card short of the royal.

  He is playing two hardnosers and a novice and a young joe who bluffs too often. Along the walls the men are crowded together so close that ash from their upheld cigarettes drops onto their collars and into their shirt pockets. The smoke hangs above the crowd and drifts prettily. Outside the noise of jackhammers and asphalt trucks, and from the bar up front the low tones of the jukebox, so the back room sounds like a dentist’s office. Julius is in this part of the city by mistake, forced onto Del Amo Boulevard by a girder collapsed across 190th Street which he’d been walking toward the sea, thinking about his brother. He hasn’t found work in a week or more. But now he’s got two hundred dollars and the game’s big stack and there’s nowhere he has to be and no one looking for him. He hasn’t had this kind of luck since before the war or even earlier.

  “You oughta take this game to the desert,” says a man close to Julius.

  Someone else hollers, “Get a little coin in your pocket and then we’ll see what you’re really about.”

  “I’ve been there and it ain’t much,” says another.

  “Anything legit’s bound to scrape you up, Freddy.”

  “Our Freddy here gets hives when even other people tell the truth.”

  “Even if you lose, you can watch them bombs for free.”

  “I just can’t believe it, all night and no cops and twenty-dollar buy-ins.”

  “Sounds like Korea, the good parts anyway.”

  A voice from the back asks what they mean about the bombs and several men begin to explain at once but all Julius hears is the name of the place and several of its cheaper hotels and aspersions cast at the weather. The crowd drinks and cheers him but he’s begun to sense the anxiety that accompanies good fortune. A few of the men know him to be a petty thief but never a card cheat, but most of them don’t know either of these things. Along the back wall are three men talking and watching him. Another man by the door learns his name and calls it out. Before things get dangerously better, he takes five dollars from the plywood where they’ve laid the game and buys a round for the crowd. He wins two hands, then bluffs another just to lose and folds the next.

  It hurts him to cheat luck this way but there is always a longer game. He’s been in California just six months and already a man he knew was murdered outside a club in Rosewood. The police had raided two bars known for their friendliness to men and low lights. The raids changed the hustlers weekly, like the Sunday lettering on a church sign. He thinks about the nature of cheating and how it is tied to dignity, then pushes up his sleeves and buys another round and pockets for himself sixty dollars in ones and fives and lets the rest ride on a hopeless low straight that breaks the bank. He bows out and another man takes his place, but when he leaves the bar the three men by the wall follow him all the way to 203rd Street. It is just dusk and the city is sprayed in birdsong. To the west the blue ledge of twilight behind the buildings makes the city seem more important than it is. The men catch him in the alley and push him back and forth between them in a pinball fashion that means the thing they hate about him is also a thing they fear, and it is easy enough to hand over the cash and let that be the end of it and mercifully it is. Back in his little room he gets under the covers without undressing and he doesn’t sleep all night.

  A few days later he gets a letter from his brother’s wife begging him south. Muriel has folded three crisp twenties in the envelope and signed off, It�
�s about time you got out of Los Angeles for a while. Julius takes this as an omen. He thinks about her that Christmas in Kansas, coming down the porch steps with her skirt hem balled in a fist against the wind and raised halfway up her thigh, and about his brother’s happiness. The story she’s told him of the horses, which he might be willing to believe, but it’s hard to imagine a woman alone in that way. He had promised to join them but that does not seem like what the letter and the money are telling him he ought to do. He waits a day and then he packs two rolled shirts and his knife in his good boots and carries each boot like a grocery sack under his arm and onto the train to Las Vegas.

  * * *

  —

  FREMONT STREET BLINKS with men, lights, billets of paper, dropped coins, raised voices, and that afternoon’s monsoon rain. Julius walks from the train station directly to Binion’s and puts his name in for the poker room. He waits a long time to be called and when he is, the only open seat is at a table filled with young men in jackets and ties. He trades one of Muriel’s twenties for a stack of chips and loses it in ten mercenary hands.

  He walks back through the casino past the slot-lines and the craps tables and the crowds gathered for anyone hot. Outside on Fremont it could be ten o’clock or midnight or just before dawn. It is just like the men said: The sidewalks are full of Angelenos and old gangsters and showgirls in feathers from rump to neck. Julius walks awhile through this modern noise and the dry landscape, and no one wonders about him or even looks his way. Even carrying his boots and in his dusty jeans like a pauper against the lighted street he is just another fortune seeker in the West. He goes back to Binion’s and sits at the bar and posts his boots upright on an empty stool and orders a drink. Behind him the slot-wheels clunk and the coins fall into the metal sleds. The craps tables beyond are full of suits and other legitimate men and the bar is open all night and drinking he has the sense of a deep rightness.

  When a man sits next to him, Julius strikes up a conversation. The man is from Iowa, a salesman in Vegas for a trade convention, slight around the waist with blunt fingernails and thin white wrists. Julius shakes his hair and stretches one leg across to the rung of the man’s barstool so their knees are touching and the man is hemmed in between the bar and Julius’s body. The man tells Julius a story about a ranch just north of town, in Indian Springs, where for fifty dollars a Mexican with one eye would take men like them to a wild mustang roundup. He asks if Julius might like to go with him and Julius knows what kind of conversation this is. He says he knows next to nothing about horses but he could learn, and when he angles in the man turns toward the bar and into the fence of Julius’s body.

  When they are very drunk they stagger half a mile off Fremont to the neon fringe and pay cash for a two-bed room at the Squaw Motel. There they share another fifth of whiskey and talk a long time about the flat places they’re from and how red the West is and from memory they catch bits of song and sing them out. Julius tells the man he’s come from Los Angeles and how the place had shifted beneath him like a coin and the man says that’s how things are now. Even in Iowa you’d be hard-pressed to get a job making anything but asphalt. They lie each to a bed and Julius asks across the distance whether the man is married and he says, “Sure.”

  “How long you been married?”

  “Not long.”

  Julius holds the bottle over the gap between their beds and the man reaches out and takes the bottle and sits up a little and drains it. Then he hands the empty bottle back and turns on his side. He smiles but his smile is meant for someone other than Julius.

  “My brother’s married newly too,” Julius says.

  “That’s nice.”

  “It is. Though it’s strange too.”

  “I’m tired now, friend,” the man says.

  “We don’t have to say nothing else.”

  “If that’s all right.”

  Soon Julius is aware of the man’s deep sleep and though the moment has passed he is not unhappy. Lee said that the best he ever slept was in Long Beach that last Christmas leave, when Muriel finally wrote and told him about her mother and asked him to come home. Lee and Julius had tendered in together on the Bryce Canyon and stayed at the Royal. They’d been at sea so long that even their boots were still serviceable, and though the war was over then and had been for some time, they both still owed a year to the navy. They sat in the hotel bar and Lee showed Julius the letter from Muriel and they talked about the plans they’d made together and Lee said it didn’t change anything. The next morning they found the first bus and rode east.

  A year later Julius walked out onto the same dock at Long Beach but everything felt different. A woman in a Quaker dress handed him a copy of Isaiah bound in blue paper. He cashed his half-pay and took a bus downtown and sat at a lunch counter and read the booklet. He had forgotten Isaiah and how in the Bible all men were singular, good or bad, and he decided not to join his brother in San Diego. Probably he had decided this some time ago. He walked all night through the city thinking about dragons and springs and stands of rushes, and about his brother’s marriage, and he saw that the parks and the bars were filled with men. He felt absorbed into the great diffusion, as if he were dead. That afternoon he paid six bucks for a room with a window and slept all that day and into the next and that was the first time he slept the way he thought his brother had meant it.

  * * *

  —

  AT DAWN JULIUS wakes to find the Iowan crying into the pillow, almost choking, his sobs forced out so hard his slight shoulders pull backward, bunched in the middle like a pleat. Julius rises and goes to his bed and places a hand on his back until the sobs fade, and as the harsh desert light comes through the motel window the man turns his face up to Julius and says, “I’m sorry. It’s just the drink.”

  Julius says he’s all right. For a while longer the man lies on his back looking up while Julius sits on the edge of the bed. Neither speaks and outside they can hear the swampcooler dripping onto the pavement. The man takes Julius’s hand in his and waves it back and forth in a kind of comic handshake and then drops both their hands to the bedspread. Then he rises and enters the bathroom. Julius lies down where the man had been and falls back into hazy sleep. He wakes to find the man gone. Under a plastic motel cup is a hundred-dollar bill, a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, every towel in the bathroom wet and crumpled on the floor. It is a lot of money and Julius knows that he has been paid not for the room or the booze but for discretion. He says aloud to the room, “I wish you hadn’t of done that,” then folds the hundred into a tight square and puts it inside his boot. Should he see the man again he will return the bill, moist and reeking of his feet.

  He steps out. The afternoon rinses the desert in brown light. He finds a cardroom dealing five-card, but the play is slow and stupid so he goes back to Binion’s and tries his hand at faro. For a solid hour he wins more than he loses and while he’s still in the black he cashes out and takes his winnings down the street to El Dorado. There he plays a game called high-low at a dollar a hand and cashes out well ahead. At the Lucky Strike the hotel’s full, same at the Apache, and Binion’s is ten bucks for a single, so Julius walks back through the fringe to the Squaw. The deskman takes him to the same room he’d had the night before. The sheets have not been changed, only tucked in at the corners, the bedspread tossed loosely over the pillows. He tries to sleep in one bed and then the other, and when he can’t he lifts one bedspread and shakes the ash from it and drops it on the floor. He lies on half and pulls the other half over himself. When he wakes up in the morning he has seventy-five dollars and a stack of uncashed chips and the Iowan’s bill. He showers and shaves and steps out into the bright day. He asks the deskman to switch him to a single room and pays for a week in advance.

  * * *

  —

  FROM THE WINDOWS of their hotel rooms, visitors to booming Las Vegas may witness two competing wonders. On the desert flo
or Lake Mead accumulates, covering the brown valley. Two years of good snow in the mountains have swelled the banks, and in the afternoons tourists gather along the high ridge of Hoover Dam to watch the men sluice open the valves. Some say the walls of the dam are cemented with the bones of pack mules and men, probably rope too, Julius thinks, miles and miles of rope. And teeth. Empty carafes of coffee. Chewed and discarded fingernails.

  But in the sky to the west of the dam is the real attraction. There mushroom clouds draw tourists in from less auspicious places, crowded cities in the east, farm towns north and west. On the rooftops men in tuxedos sip Atomic Cocktails with their sighing wives. They smoke smuggled cigars and ignore the news from Washington, the warnings of radioactive fallout, the strange, scraped feeling behind their eyes. These bombs, after all, are not meant to hurt them. Makeshift signs announce their names—Diablo, Hat Trick, Candy Boy—propped among the other dazzling junk of the city. On bomb days the pit bosses lure the gamblers outside, early morning before the desert sun appears and whites out the horizon where the bomb will lather, sometimes long into the day. On these mornings the casinos quiet, a spreading silence that echoes, inversely, the seismic gnash of the bomb outside.

  In this setting Julius is not anyone in particular. He is not the tuxedoed men nor the lovers of those men and playing poker or twenty-one in the windowless rooms excites no one’s suspicion and in the morning the street is still alive. Unlike in Los Angeles or Ventura or Long Beach he is not guilty of anything. In other cities where he’s slept or turned cards or met men, he might have to slip out a side door or wait in an alley, but not here. To him, the neon and the money and the bombs are the marks of a city far ahead of the times. The tourists play poorly and Julius cleans them out and they shake his hand after and thank him and the cops sit with loosened ties at the same table. He sleeps during the day and eats when he wants to.