On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  The track is crowded with the better class of gamblers, the fine-hatted women and men in linen suits, those for whom the horses carry history and status. These people will know the names of owners and foals and which stallions have come to stud. Among this crowd she will not be noticed because she is no one important. She wins the first two races and this does not surprise her, so before the third race she buys a drink and bets both the winner and the perfecta, which leaves more to chance but also more to gain. When these come through she feels the prickly blood in her ears and the drink falling quietly through her and she takes one ticket to the south windows and the second to the east so no single cashier will know how much she’s won. She keeps out half the bills and folds the others into a tight square and closes it in the brown paper. Then she buys another drink and bets less than planned on a win-place-show, but she wins this race, too. This last-minute change, determined by an unlikely win in the previous race, makes Muriel feel conspicuous. She considers sitting out the fifth race. The day is warm and the crowd raucous and changeable, the clear feeling of the day is hazardous. Beside her in the upper section a man and a woman who is too young to be his wife lean into the shade with their legs entwined. Below them a fist of sailors with their hair undone and falling into their eyes. All around the track are postures of similar intemperance. Yet she is calmed by a sense of isolation from any other world. There is only now the heat of the day and the smell of the horses and the lived fact of her presence here. Suddenly she can do anything she likes. She stands and bets a win and another exacta, then moves quickly to an empty seat along a row of couples. Among them she will be invisible, and any seat next to her will be presumed to belong to her husband, off at concessions or at the mutuel window.

  She wins that race and the race after. Now the square of bills is too large to be folded again, so she peels away a quarter of it and holds it without counting, because she can guess how much is there. The next race is the one she’s waited for. With this stack of money she rethinks her strategy. To bet the whole amount would produce too big a win, so she takes a third of it to the east windows, a third to the south, and the rest downstairs to the front, and in that way makes three separate bets, all according to the horsemen’s talk and her interpretation of it. All in all a two-thousand-dollar stake. She knows this caution is its own kind of risk, that anyone watching would find such behavior suspicious, or that another gambler with the same tactic could take notice of her. But she cannot bring herself to name the full number for a cashier. To tell a stranger such an amount seems to her less an act of hubris than an admission of startling freedom. That she could hand that kind of money to improbability.

  She waits another fifteen minutes for the post. The crowd bristles and the breeze has whipped in from the ocean and brings with it the intricate, living smell of the offing. Finally there’s Willie Declan on the big bay called California Star, coming to post in the sixth position with Sayonara looking grim in the third. She checks the odds one last time though she knows them. Around her the crowd has quieted and as the horses enter the stalls she has a strange feeling of doubling, the horses and their riders lined neatly behind the starting gate, the crowd lined in their rows to watch. A sensation like the tremor of a cask. The horses break in a wall and move toward the inside track and as the horsemen have predicted Declan finds the rail and squeezes Sayonara out and behind him. The field stretches wide, Declan keeping Sayonara at a length, then a half-length, then holding, and then a surge and Sayonara falling back again. The race continues without change or spectacle and when Declan takes the race by two lengths she doesn’t move. Sayonara is second, and the clip-legged roan is third, behind the other two by a distance. She’s won each bet she made.

  Across the finish line the horses cool at a trot, then the pit ponies are led out and the horses become mere animals again, snorting and tightly controlled and walking along the outside rails. She thinks suddenly and for no reason she can name of the chickens at the woman’s house in the valley and their coordinated movement, then of the moment she has imagined but not seen, of the woman leaned back, her braid brought in front of her shoulder to be trimmed. Something in this image makes her furious and light-headed. A quick calculation of the winnings alarms her and she looks around at the loosening crowd, some people leaping and some sitting resolute, a group of old men turned toward each other and away from the track, and waits for someone to notice her. As she waits she finds the inside seam of her purse with her fingernails and starts to work it, scraping at the thin lining until she breaks a hole. Without looking down she rips away at the seam until she’s made a pocket in the side of her purse. She places the fold of money in it and hides the bulge with the newspaper she’s brought and then the ball of her sweater pressed against it. Her face and arms are cold though she is sweating openly. None of the races has been remarkable. They will not enter legend or be spoken of in any way except personally, when years from now someone here remembers the afternoon at Del Mar in 1957, when he was on leave, or before there were children, or because it was his birthday.

  Finally, when the crowd’s energy has lessened and people have turned back toward the turf or their companions, she makes again her careful rounds to the separate banks of windows and puts half of the winnings in the hole in her purse and the other half down the front of her dress. Now the trouble is in getting home. Certainly she will not stay for the last races. Though she’s made no outward sign she knows that any woman leaving alone on a day like today is an easy mark, and anyone might have been watching her. She crowds in behind a married couple pressing through the turnstiles and follows them out to the parking lot, then at a distance through it. When they peel away to find their car she moves swiftly forward, where another group of people is halted at the crosswalk, which clears for them to cross the turf road and onto Via de la Valle.

  Then she is alone. With the scarf she wipes her brow and neck and brings it to her eyes as if she might cry into it though she does not feel like crying. She is not the type to search the peculiar for signs or omens but she cannot help the feeling now that some veil between worlds has been very slightly lifted, that she stands exposed on the weedy street corner. Across La Valle she can see the crowds of people outside the bars, everywhere in the coastal wind are halves of tickets and racing forms. It is seven o’clock in the evening. She knows she should move toward the bus station before she misses the seven-fifteen through downtown and is stranded for an hour among the crowds.

  She turns toward the stop but walks slowly and only when she sees the bus does she move all the way under the metal shade. For twenty minutes she rides in a state of watchful anticipation. Through the windows the city goes by. Housing grids and cleared ground breaking open the late daylight. The heavy flicker of palm trees. She thinks back to the bus ride from Kansas, five days across the Plains and then the Rockies, down into the great valleys of the West, the young men on their way to the naval yards and on to Japan, retching out the slits of the bus windows, sick before they’d even seen the ocean. Then the day she was married, witnessed only by the court clerk, because Julius had not come. She should have known then—she might have changed her mind. The progress of things like a pitcher tipped downward to fill a glass. How quickly it had all happened.

  She gets off a few stops early and stands under an awning not knowing what to do. Though she is far from the track now, she still has the feeling that anyone can look at her and know exactly what’s happened. Across the street and down another block she sees the Radford Hotel, four stories high and unfancy, but decent, and in this decent neighborhood. She walks to the light and crosses at the crosswalk, then down the next block, keeping to the storefronts and in the shade thrown by the buildings. The sun is low now and falling away. At the desk she signs her maiden name in the log and is given a key for a room on the third floor. Once in the room she closes the door and turns over the dead bolt and the brass hook.

  She lifts the skirt of her dress a
nd pulls out the money there, then takes the rest from the lining of her purse and drops the pile on the bed. Nearly ten thousand dollars—she knows it to the cent. She lights a cigarette and looks from the bed to the window facing the street, then back along the wall, as if she is searching for some rent or weakness. She is surprised to see a telephone on the nightstand. She could call Lee and tell him she’s taken an extra shift and then she could sleep or stay well past dark, but he might want to come by for her. On the bed and away from her the money is frightening and actual. She should have stopped after the third or fourth race. She sits on the edge of the bed and finishes her cigarette, then lights another. She lifts the receiver and asks the front desk for a line out, and when the tone comes she dials the number in Los Angeles, where they’d last reached Julius. After a dozen rings a man answers.

  “Julius?” she says, though she knows already that it isn’t him.

  “Maybe so,” says the man in the menacing voice men use to charm women. “Depends what you’re after.”

  She thinks suddenly that what has spooked her is not good luck but the vivid fact of luck itself. Even with all her preparation and the long knowledge of the horsemen, her account of the weather and the odds, only preposterous chance could have led to this result. And if there was such good luck in the world, and if it could outpace her own agency and her own knowledge, then bad luck must be the same, and no luck, too. She has been seen and accommodated by luck, and she wants out of its sight line.

  “What gives, sweetheart, you need some kind of advice?” the stupid man on the phone says.

  She hangs up without speaking and lies on her side facing the curtained window. Her mother’s house and her mother’s grave are five days’ drive and if she called the Carter boy she is sure he’d open the windows and sweep out the eaves, though what she would do after that she can’t say. She could do anything she wanted now but she doesn’t know what that might be. She cannot describe her disappointment and can imagine no one to whom it would matter.

  She closes her eyes and lies still a long time. She thinks of her mother’s house that Christmas Eve. In her memory the night deepens over the wheatfield as she and Julius sit turning cards in the kitchen. They have drunk all the wine in the house and Julius is turning up cards and explaining them. He says he once knew a man who sang so beautifully that other men wept even many days afterward. He tells her about the rabbit man and another man he knew who memorized the scientific names of flowers and all of these men seem to her unlike any she has known before. Like him they are receptive and lovely and out of place, not her mother’s men or her mother’s romance but something altogether else.

  “Where do you find such people?” she asks.

  “Oh everywhere, everywhere,” he says, and raises his arms above his head and opens them out as if marshalling a symphony. She wants a better answer but she does not know what question will prompt it. In his conducting motion she sees the basic contours of another world.

  Julius shuffles the cards and lays them out. He says, “This is the bedpost queen,” and shows her the queen of spades with the jeweled scepter upraised and amative. He turns up the king of hearts and says, “And this is the suicide king,” and when he asks her what it feels like to be in love she says she wouldn’t know then realizes what she’s said. But he laughs simply, then he lets his face sallow and says very seriously, “If the next card I turn up is a diamond or a seven we’ll build the house on a hill so we can see the sea.” He reveals the eight of clubs and they both look at it on the table and then he flicks it with his fingernail so it sails off the edge and he turns the next card and the next until they have the jack of diamonds.

  When she woke the next morning he was still at the kitchen table playing solitaire with the radio on low and she stood a long time in the next room listening to him sing along. For months she had risen from her mother’s bed and bathed and made coffee and gone to work and waited on the mail. She woke often from dreams about birds. And still she was no closer to understanding what she might do next. When finally she entered the kitchen Julius smiled and wished her a Merry Christmas but there was no indication on his face of what they’d shared. She’d thought then that he was trying on propriety, that the drink had turned and muted the feeling between them, and that was all. But now she knows he thought her sad and aimless, and too innocent for what he’d told her. The next evening the men left and sailed back to Japan and since then she had talked to Julius only once and he had never answered her letter. When she’d told him about the horses, he hadn’t even believed her.

  Now, beyond the wall of the hotel, the sounds of the city are muffled and blank and what life exists there is expressed only as a tapping, a constant interval of noise, undifferentiated. She presses up on her elbows. Then she turns to sit cross-legged and takes up the pile of money and begins to arrange the bills by denomination. As she does she rotates each and stacks it so it matches the corners of the bill below. Then she counts it out, first the big bills then the small. She finds a sheaf of hotel paper and rips off three sheets and divides the bills into two big stacks and a smaller third and folds them inside, creasing the edges of each sheet to make an envelope. She slips these into the pocket she’s made in her purse and presses the edge of the ripped lining up and under the seam. Then she leaves the room and takes a narrow stairway back down and out a side door that leads to an alley. She walks the eight blocks home, catching with soft eyes the shapes of men and shopkeepers in her periphery, feeling the weight of the money the way one feels the imminent coming of rain.

  At home she meets Lee’s fretting look at the door and tells him a story about a missed bus, about having to walk several blocks from the restaurant to take another line, one that wound through the Stingaree at summer dusk and from whose windows she could see the men playing dice against the brick fronts. She knows he’d worry about her in that neighborhood, but now that she’s home safe they can laugh about it, and she wants this laughter, this after-danger easing, to calm her. It does not occur to her that she wants to hurt Julius but his absence has turned into a justification, and she wants this day and what she will do next to stay the way a secret should, unavowed, and belonging only to her.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY the horsemen gather at the lounge later than usual, in black suits too big or small, depending on each man’s age and density. Someone they know has died—Gerald, they say, though Muriel does not recognize the name—and rather than the previous day’s big races they speak of the man’s funeral, where they have just been. Three nights ago a vice raid over by the railyard cleared the streets and sent men to jail or worse. The man they’re mourning was involved in some way, though no one says how. She sees that the jockey Rosie is missing.

  “That’s what men like that can expect,” someone says.

  Above them the plantation fan presses the air through the unseasonably warm day.

  “Some asshole will always say Well now at least he didn’t suffer. And I’d say, then you didn’t know Gerald, because if there was ever a sufferer it was him—and it’s not like I’m speaking ill of the dead when we all talked this way about him when he was alive.”

  The men speak quietly, as if this loss is a secret unlike the other secrets they tell.

  “I hate to imagine Rosie’s sorrow, though he brought it on himself. So did Gerald. And whosoever is deceived thereby, is not wise,” says the man with the mustache.

  “What will happen to the Chester Hotel, you think?” says someone else.

  “Same as any of those degenerate places. It’ll come back or it won’t.”

  “You suppose all them boys ran into the sea, to get away?”

  “Is the Chester down by the sea?” one of the younger men asks.

  Dark and cautious laughter, and then the man with the mustache says, “You’re saying you’d like to know, huh?”

  The young man lifts his chin
and narrows his eyes and says nothing more. Another man says, “It’ll come back. That building’s a hundred years old and I bet them type of boys have been there just as long or longer.”

  The tables at the front of the lounge are empty; three men at the bar each sit one stool apart from the next, like strangers in a movie theater. One reads the paper and the two others talk about politics with their stools turned in toward the empty seat between them. Muriel’s purse is tucked under the bar and hidden. She wishes the horsemen would speak of the races and say if they’d won as she had, but she is also relieved when they don’t. She tears out the racing form and writes down the man’s name and the name of the hotel, and then Rosie’s name and then one hundred and by the sea, as if she were taking notes for the next day’s post. The morning has drawn slowly and the men show no signs of leaving and Muriel waits. She feels like waiting might be the only thing left for her to do.

  She considers the man’s funeral and wonders if there had been horses there pulling the funeral cart, the coastal cypress decked in lace bunting, to make death seem like what it is, a return to the past, and in her mind the coffin holds the stranger Gerald as he might have been in his youth, lean and quick and ready. She folds the racing form into fourths and slips it into the pocket of her purse, with the money, as if for posterity.