That night, after Lee has fallen asleep, she peels open the envelope and counts the money there and thinks through the odds. She does a bit of math on the envelope flap. She thinks of Lee’s story, of Julius in overalls working off a debt, and then about his discharge. She worries she’s misunderstood them both. She thinks of Lee standing so long at the counter with his coffee cup, waiting for the woman to fill it. She studies the envelope and her arithmetic and she’s not sure what she might need the money for, only that she does, only that winning would prove something vital that she cannot otherwise prove, and that no one else can see.
* * *
—
THAT WEEKEND Lee borrows again the boss’s Lincoln and drives them through downtown and across the river to see the interstate. In another year it will be complete, running along the edge of Mission Valley; they can see its elevated form now, the men hanging overhead, the black dust from the columns. Lee stops the car along the curb and he and Muriel look up at the cranes and the skirts of rebar, the figures held by flat ropes. The general feeling of the time is that such a marvel is deserved, as marvels are deserved all over the West.
They drive on, past lemon and orange and avocado orchards, hidden inside the city as if cupped inside its palm. The orchards are surrounded on all sides by a network of cul-de-sacs and graveled lots and as they pass Muriel watches the rows of trees flare by the window, interrupted by patches of cleared land and glimpses of the river running low, gridded through with new roads not yet paved. She looks at Lee and in this light he has the chromed look of a photograph, peering ahead at the driveways and ghosted streets. They pass a cowfield, a roadside lean-to stacked with eggs, a sign offering jarred local olives, then again into the not-yet neighborhood.
Muriel knows where they are going and though she might have expected it still she feels deceived. In a half-mile the road turns back to gravel and curves south to the river. Lee stops the car and they get out to stand along the dirt margin. He turns to Muriel and smiles. He gestures across the lot in front of them, marked off by twine and stakes of wood, then marked off again by small flags stuck in the ground between the stakes. The back of the lot disappears in a tangle of blank ash and scrubby bushes, and below this hidden limit is a soft bluff that drops into the river, which they can hear from where they stand. Lee takes her hand in his.
“This tract is the best of them, two thousand for the land and the specs, then I bet we could build out for another six. Hardly anything, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering how fast all this land will go. What it will cost in another year.”
Lee’s voice lifts into insistence. He looks at her and she looks back. The fact of her mother’s house in Kansas rises up between them.
Lee says, “We could get at least six grand for that house, you’ve got to know that’s true. And we got a couple hundred bucks already.”
She holds his gaze until he looks away and across the lot to the river beyond.
Finally she says, “But you promised your brother you’d do this together.”
“And do you see my brother anywhere?”
His tone is wounded. He holds her hand just long enough to offer his forgiveness but not his surrender and then he lets go.
He says, “This place, California, it’s indifferent to the past. All the people and the cities and the ocean and all of it.” He waves an arm to indicate distance. “All the sailors coming back and the factories and the folks coming over the border. In another year there won’t be nothing to buy and then where will we be, we’ll have to go all the way backwards.”
Muriel does not respond. The sunlight is muted inside the trees and the wind shakes them. She can see dust brought loose and drifting above the crowns of the trees. Lee puts an arm around her and when she stiffens he squeezes her lightly and drops his arm. As if to remediate this failed gesture he gathers himself and says, “You know, that last time me and Julius saw each other, on Okinawa. We had two days of R and R and we met in a village where all the men went, from the stations. This was last year, May, it’s still so cold there in May we sat bundled head to toe even inside the bar, you could hear the wind outside. I thought he was being strange but I couldn’t figure why and then we met this other fella from his station and things got real strange then.”
Lee pauses and looks at her then looks away. Muriel has not heard this story before. He lowers his eyes against the vista and folds his hands across his beltline and toes the dirt and decides to say the next thing.
“Julius beat that fella pretty bad and we got eighty-sixed. Walked a mile in that cold afterward, just shaking and not talking. Then we sat in the train station and waited for morning, and it came out then that Julius was in trouble for something, he’d been caught in the barracks with some other man. I assumed smoking grass or gambling but then a few weeks later they put him on the Saratoga, even though he only had a few months left. In Long Beach they gave him a general discharge and half-pay and nothing for the leave he hadn’t taken. I heard this from that same friend’s cousin. Of course I don’t know what he did but sure thing it was worse than poker.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asks.
“You know what he said, when he finally called?” Lee says. “He said it was good I was marrying you. He said, that sad girl, she needs someone to tell her what to do.”
Muriel crosses her arms and will not look at Lee, whose gaze is imploring. He wants to be forgiven right away for saying this, he wants her to understand he is only the messenger. Yet she catches in his tone a savage relief. He could not abandon his custodial role but it might be taken from him. He might be glad to have his brother disappeared. She hadn’t known this before and it frightens her.
Muriel turns from him and walks to the road and waits. Lee walks down to the bluff and stands a moment looking out. He leans to touch the wooden stake and then the line of twine that runs out from it, his fingers light along the top like someone making a sense memory. He’d been a poor child and knew the value of things. For a moment she’s not angry, thinking about how poor he’d been.
When he turns around he has summoned his dignity and he lifts one hand to wave it all away. They get in the car without speaking and Lee drives slowly along the road to keep the gravel from flying up and chipping the paint of his boss’s Lincoln. When they pass the sign for olives Muriel asks to stop. Lee turns into the dusty yard and parks but does not cut the engine.
Muriel steps out of the car and climbs the porch and knocks but hears no movement; after a moment she knocks again, but still no one comes. She leaves the porch and shrugs to Lee but she’s not yet ready to get back in the car, she wants first to succeed at something. She turns and walks around the house, toward a set of outbuildings and chicken coops in back. Behind an empty corral she spots a barn with an open door and a tidy interior, and as the light changes Muriel understands that someone is inside. She calls out.
In the doorway of the little barn appears a young woman in a man’s striped overalls, cuffs pinched inside her boots. She raises one hand in the air without waving it, moving out of the doorway in quick steps like a child, into the dusty yard.
“You lost?” she says.
The chickens come clucking toward the fence and gather in a line and stare out at Muriel. Their sudden synchronous movement is comic. The woman in the overalls smiles and turns to shush the chickens.
“They’re like watchdogs,” Muriel says.
The woman says, “Dogs aren’t so humorless.”
Muriel takes another step toward the birds and they move back a fraction and as if a centerline had been drawn between them they part and peel off into their grainy little courtyard. As they totter away, they turn their small heads back suspiciously.
“I see what you mean,” Muriel says. She thinks of the horses moving as a wall from the gate, then fraying off as the race finds its ch
aracter. Animals were strange in this way, their sameness, their single-mindedness. The woman asks what Muriel needs.
“Your sign,” Muriel says, and with her thumb points back toward the road.
The woman makes a noise of understanding. Muriel takes in her slight frame. She is dark-featured and short and surely native to this place, the kind of woman her mother might have known when she was cleaning offices downtown, with whom she might have had coffee or cold sandwiches.
“That’s for García’s, next house over.”
Muriel thinks to apologize but the woman turns in a long stride toward the house and waves with one arm. Muriel follows, and though she is confused there is some pleasure in this, the casual submission to a stranger’s command, after the conversation with Lee. On the back step the woman heels her boots off and holds the screen door for Muriel to enter. Inside the house Muriel sees no sign of another person. The walls are bare and the rooms divided by thin curtains like bedsheets and along the floor are books stacked at various heights. A lamp lights a corner where an armchair sits though the rest of the room is without furniture. She cannot see past the curtains to the rooms in the back, though she feels by some intuition that they are empty.
“Not much of a decorator,” the woman says, a wave of her arm taking in the bare room and the perimeter of the house and the dry mums along the porch. For a moment Muriel sees herself as she imagines this woman does, as Julius apparently does, as someone simple and apologetic and easily led. They walk into a bright kitchen that faces the road. Through the window Muriel can see Lee in the car, his eyes closed against the sun, and beyond him to the river and the fields and the marked-off lots below. The woman looks out the window, over her shoulder, and Muriel sees her see the idling car and the square shape of her husband.
“Looking at land,” the woman says. Her voice is deep and softly accented, Muriel notices now that they’re inside.
“We are,” Muriel says.
“Now’s the time, I hear.”
Muriel catches in the woman’s tone a light resentment and understands then that she has been read as something else, that the woman sees not a Midwesterner or a waitress but a different kind of foreigner, a nice dress and a wide car coming in from town. She feels a refusal, a sense of herself as changed by the woman’s presumption.
“My husband wishes it was,” she says.
The woman turns from the pantry to look at Muriel.
“He’s out there pouting now.”
The woman registers no shock. Instead she collects a jar and hands it to Muriel.
“Is it land he’s upset over or some other reason?” she asks. She puts both hands inside the bib of the overalls.
Muriel tries the lid and can’t budge it. “He’s got all sorts of problems,” she says, and holds the jar out.
The woman regards it. “You think you can solve them with olives?”
“I’ve never had an olive, so I don’t know, but I thought I’d give it a shot.”
The woman drops the bib and takes the jar from Muriel. “That’s big of you,” she says.
She works at the jar lid with some force. A stalling quiet then, as they stand in the bright kitchen. Muriel has never learned polite talk. Her mother knew that people walked into the conversations you left open for them, that a small silence could change the course of a life. Never ask a man about his day, she often said. And because she never did, men told her all manner of other things, their secrets, their terrible fears.
Next to the sink is a small pair of scissors. A single coffee cup on the pine table next to a hand mirror. The woman’s hair is in two braids and the ends are as straight and dark as the edge of a nailbrush. It is easy somehow to imagine her leaned against the counter, the bite of the scissors and the hairs falling along the lip of the sink. Muriel feels a shift in her perception, a sudden longing for woman’s solitary act. Though Lee has not opened his eyes, she moves to one side of the window where she can’t be seen.
“There’s a story about this valley,” the woman says finally. She waits for Muriel’s interested look and Muriel gives it. “I’m sure you saw the fruit orchards. Was oranges and lemons and walnuts, get shipped out to Ohio and whatnot. But those are going too, for the tracts, but that’s neither here nor there. Because what I mean to say is that not that long ago you’d have seen olive trees too. And olive trees have thin leaves like fingers, bright green on one side and pale on the bottom, seeming too small for how the trunks grow, which is twisted and thick, so an olive tree is like two things put together. I say this because if you haven’t had an olive probably you’ve never seen an olive tree either, or you didn’t know you had.”
The woman pauses. Muriel remembers with pleasure the effusive, sudden talk of country people, after so long in the city. She nods to keep the woman going.
“So. Used to be this valley was full of them,” the woman says. “They say when the Spanish came they looked down into the valley from the Lagunas and saw the leaves blowing and they thought the ground was changing color. And though they knew olives, it still took them a while to come down here, the sight was so strange.”
She removes the lid and fishes one finger along the inside of the jar and flicks an olive into her palm. “If only they’d stayed up there looking down, but then I wouldn’t be here I guess,” she says. She holds the olive out to Muriel. Muriel takes it and puts it in her mouth. The taste is salty and the texture is fleshy, disorienting, but under the saltiness something plummy, rich as jam.
“There’s a pit,” the woman says.
Muriel finds it and spits it into her palm.
“What do I do with it?”
“I usually toss mine in the yard.”
“But then it might grow a tree.”
The woman laughs as if Muriel has finally surprised her. “But that’s not the end of the world,” she says.
Lee’s voice on the porch, then, and the women turn from each other. The woman hands the jar of olives to Muriel without replacing the lid, then hands the lid to her. She opens the door and moves out onto the porch in her bare feet and Muriel follows. Lee moves back to stand on the steps.
“We could also use some eggs, if you’re going to shop,” he says to Muriel.
“I’ve got those. Laid this morning and warm yet,” the woman answers. She leans her shoulder neatly against the porch rail. Muriel hides the jar behind her back. In her closed hand the olive pit feels like a pressed thumb. Lee nods and the woman moves past him into the sunny yard. She takes a container of eggs from the small hut by the fence and walks back toward them.
“What do we owe you, then?” Lee asks.
“Oh. I can’t sell the olives to you, surely. It wasn’t really me you wanted,” she says.
She stands now below them in the yard and raises her hand to her forehead against the sun.
“Then we’ll have to overpay you for the eggs,” Muriel says.
Lee takes the eggs and heads back to the car, and once he’s past the woman she looks at Muriel and makes a condoling face. Muriel dips into the jar and takes another olive and eats it. She spits the pit over the porch rail. The woman says, very quietly, “You’ve got it now.”
Muriel lids the jar and hands the woman a dollar, then ducks into the idling car. The woman watches them back out of the drive and turn away.
* * *
—
BY THE TIME they’ve returned the car and walked back to the apartment the sun has lowered in the sky, throwing the buildings and the power lines into ashy shadow. Muriel makes a quick dinner and hard-boils half the eggs. Once they’ve finished eating and put out the next day’s work clothes the mood has softened between them, and Lee turns on the radio and pours them each a glass of beer. They play three hands of gin and Muriel lets Lee win them all.
Later, as she lies sleepless, Muriel thinks of the woman and her tidy house. She thinks of t
he trees, grown so tall by the river. She remembers the story Julius told that Christmas, of the burned paintings in Korea, and then she thinks of her mother’s funeral. Her mother had been buried without service in the Protestant cemetery a mile from their house. There was no bidding prayer and no eulogy, just the two pallbearers and a few of her mother’s friends. It was almost September but the long heat of that summer carried through the season without ease. Nothing would settle. No rain, and the dust gathered in the air and hung there. The machines in the fields nearby turned up contrails of dust that lingered in lines a half-mile long. The heat collected in the bright spaces between the trees and birds and squirrels dodged through them as if through barn-fire. While the casket was lowered Muriel looked out at the blazing landscape. Through the hanging dust the sun was setting, and the red light cast up and caught in the dust and waved like flame, and that was the end of things.
Next to her now Lee sleeps soundly and she can feel his heat in the room. She remembers Julius’s serious look as he told them about those paintings, his fingers tented together. What’s the harm in landscapes? he said. That’s what I can’t get over. Then his wide grin. When he finally calls, she thinks, I will ask him to tell that story again.
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS later Muriel leaves the Heyday in a loose dress, a sweater over her shoulders and her hair pushed back by sunglasses. She takes the bus as far as Twelfth Street and walks the rest of the way, nearly all her money folded in a piece of brown paper and pressed inside the elastic waistband of her dress. She imagines the odds will change one more time but not by much. Judging from the clear weather and the positions and the horsemen’s last details she has a good number for the bay in the seventh race, and several others in the earlier stakes races. A chancy amount to win in the first five, plus a little luck on a series of boxes in the later runs would end the day well ahead, if the odds hold and the win pool clocks out where the horsemen predict. She has calculated each possible win to pay out below the tax limit. What she might do with the winnings she hasn’t considered. The money has been abstracted into something else, something terrifically unlike her. Carrying it inside her dress she feels the way she imagines a saint might feel, with a secret that is also a piety, a kind of goodness that holds its own in the world. She could lose every race this season and still have enough to start over.
On Swift Horses Page 6
