On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  When her lunch break comes she takes the bus ten blocks north and gets off near a service station perched just back from the street. Inside she buys a candy bar and then walks around the back of the station to a dim restroom and steps softly in. She dons again the slacks and striped shirt and broad-brimmed hat, careful not to touch the walls or the grimy sink of the restroom. There is some thrill in this that is almost erotic, parts of her body bared a bit at a time yet held away from the parameters of the room, as if she is undressing for someone she hopes will look but whom she won’t allow to.

  At the bank she waits in line with the other men and women missing lunch for their small errands. When it’s her turn she slides two of the folded sheets of hotel paper through the window and asks for a cashier’s check for seven thousand dollars, made out to George Lee Sims and Muriel Sims, and says she’d like the check postdated, ten days from now. When the teller complies Muriel lets her hands drop from the strap of her purse and relaxes. She sees the check is as she’d hoped, printed in the corner only with the bank’s name and the address of its headquarters. Then she asks for another, made out to the property tax board of Kansas, and fans a dozen twenties on the counter, thinking that this young teller cannot know what she wants or why she is here or that her mother died in the undignified middle of the day.

  She puts the two checks in her purse along with the receipts and turns to leave the bank. She waits until she is outside and several feet past the bank windows to walk more swiftly, down two more blocks to a post office, thinking that she was right about cash, that there are no real questions to ask about it, since it might come from anywhere but only ever means what it means. Inside the post office she buys three security envelopes and a plate of stamps. She writes a quick note to the tax board explaining that the check is prepayment for this year and next. Then another note to the Carters, asking them to tape the windows and drip the taps, along with four twenties folded tight, to cover another year of maintenance. She addresses the envelopes and stamps them. Then she places the seven-thousand-dollar check inside the torn lining of her purse, careful not to fold or crease it. She fills the last envelope with the rest of the cash and the racing form and the receipt from the post office and conceals this, too. Later she will sew the seam closed again and when all is settled she will find a hiding place.

  Outside she removes her sweater and sits at a bus stop. From her purse she takes the last hard-boiled egg and rolls it gently against the bench to crack the shell and then peels it. In a few weeks the receipt from the tax board will arrive, and she’ll use this envelope for the big check, to make it all seem authentic. She imagines the moment she hands the check to Lee, and the relief he will feel. Now there would be a fine lawn and Sunday dinner and gracious talk about the meal and she and her husband would have the quiet life they had never been afforded when they were younger and unmarried, still living with their parents in those forgotten towns. Maybe they came out west only to claim a past denied to them, and not, after all, a future free from such notions.

  She tries to imagine what her mother might think of this deception and she can’t. She’ll still have the house and her own money but she is giving up something more crucial and her mother would have seen that. Muriel has been so lucky and now she is beholden to luck and that leaves her utterly alone. If she gets away with this she will never go to Del Mar again. She promises this to herself. And if finally Julius does call, she would say nothing of paintings or horses or even say his name.

  FOUR

  The meadows

  Henry in the hem of neon between the alley and the street. At night in the dim light of the peek, hair and eyes so dark they disappear, so that Julius sees only the bright buttons of Henry’s shirt and a flash of fingernail as he approaches the place where the catwalks cross. Henry in the morning at the Squaw Motel, curled inside the weather of some dream, Julius awake and watching him, knowing he must leave soon before daylight finds them together. Some nights a tenderness so great there is no way to touch Henry softly enough, other nights coarse and silent and sleepless.

  Each morning Julius leaves the room with a telling joy he must tamp before the day begins. Once outside the room and through the lines of parked cars he turns onto Second Street and walks along the treeless grid of empty lots, taking the long way downtown. He feels wonderfully alone. That is what love feels like to him. As if finally he’s touching the very outside of himself, pressed against the limits of his body, singular, replete. The early dawn milled down to the low horizon is a blasted white; years from now, whenever he thinks of that view or sees it again, he will be rushed back to this moment in his life, and forever it will feel like love to him, that kind of bright sky.

  Their affair stretches through the end of the spring and then the monsoon season. At night, the peek cools so fast that the chill sometimes catches them in shirtsleeves, skin pricked against it. Then the bitter summer comes, and they walk between the glass windows barefoot, their hair drenched with sweat. One night, early in July, Julius stands at the window watching a man below win every other hand of blackjack, sometimes losing two in a row but rarely. He watches the man a long time. As he watches, he tries to find the one piece that gives the pattern away. There is always one thing that people fail to conceal. He’s seen a man rise from the table after a profitable night only to see him again an hour later splitting chips with the dealer. He’s seen men lean back in their chairs and reveal aces tucked into their belts. Once, two cowboys—so fresh from the train they sat at twenty-one with their duffels under their feet—played for an hour before Julius saw the thing he needed: not the pattern of their cheat but the interruption in it, one cowboy marking wrong and busting his friend, who snaked his eyes so briefly at the first man that Julius knew exactly the game they were running.

  Below him now he studies the man’s gestures for any of the cheats he knows to expect, palms and sleeves and marks, but also for surprises. Cheats are always evolving. At one hand the dealer turns up a nine and the man stands; at another the dealer shows queen and the man hits recklessly and wins. Then, as the dealer shuffles, the man leans back and Julius sees it, the flick of his eyes to another man at the table directly behind the dealer. That man wears a turquoise ring turned sideways so the stone leans off his pinkie and onto the felt. When the next hand goes around, Julius watches the dealer and sees him lift the corner of his hole card and flash the man with the ring. The dealer is new and Julius knows this is sloppiness and not a larger con. New dealers often needed practice at checking hole cards. Another deal goes around and the first man waits. When the dealer lifts his card the second man sees it and turns his ring halfway around and the first man doubles down and hits a hardy seven. He wins that round. On the next the man with the ring makes no move and the first man stands and loses. Partners, Julius thinks. A novel but volatile trick. For another few hands Julius studies the confederacy to confirm his thinking. A nod from the second man and the first man splits, then at the next deal the ring is turned again, and the first man hits a sixteen with the four of clubs and takes the pot.

  It occurs to Julius, as it often does, that he could find the ringed man later, slide in next to him and whisper his role here. That in a dawn alley the man could slip him a bill for his silence and he’d have another enterprise, one in which his risk and investment are returned twice. But he isn’t after risk now. Or rather, he is only in the business of spotting it. So he leaves the dark glass, descends the stairs to the room of bank bags and cages, and knocks on the thick door. When the door opens Julius stands several feet back from the door and quickly describes the confederacy to one of the cat-faced men inside, then returns to the casino attic. Such a con is hard to prove and the men are allowed to keep playing, but a few hours later, when his shift ends, the pit boss in the seersucker suit meets him at the door and presses two ten-dollar bills into his palm and thanks him for his diligence.

  That night Julius tells Henry of the ruse he saw on the
casino floor and the bills the pit boss gave him. They are twisted together in the sheet like a bouquet, the late hour lighting the room grayly from behind the drawn curtains.

  “You think of tipping them off, though, those blackjack players?” Henry says.

  He reaches from inside the sheet toward the nightstand where a cigarette sits smoldering. He brings it to his lips in the quaint way Julius loves, as if he is touching a soft place where he’d been kissed or struck.

  “I might’ve,” Julius says.

  He reaches out two fingers to have the cigarette passed.

  “I always do. Think of it, I mean. Have you ever done it?”

  “Naw, naw,” Julius says. “Too much to worry over.”

  “It’d be easy enough.”

  “Don’t shit where you eat, is what I think,” Julius says.

  He had never been a philosophical thief. That is, he did not have a philosophy, nor did he believe in some set of rules that made the thieving legitimate, that elevated it above mere commerce. Opportunities presented themselves inside some other enterprise and the trick was to recognize them. Once in L.A. he had lifted a man’s wallet and still spent the whole night drinking with him, and when the bar bill came and the man went to show his generosity, Julius searched under tables and stools with him and shrugged grinningly. If he was suspected, by that point he was also well-liked. But he doesn’t want that sort of thing now. He wants this honest work and the nights playing cards with his honest pay in lighted rooms no cop has swept out.

  “You think—” Henry begins. He unwraps the sheet and stands naked by the bed. The pause in his talk a little seduction. Julius turns so that his face is half-buried in the pile of sheets and Henry grins, then turns so his high ass is bared. Two strides across the room and Henry finishes the sentence.

  “—that a man is only one person ever, no matter where he is or who he’s with?”

  “We got a name for that. It’s called talking out both sides of your mouth.”

  Julius sits up and watches Henry as he walks over to the bureau and turns to face him again. Julius feels a swell of boyish dislike for Henry’s bright face, that cruel feeling after sex. Henry has not asked directly because to ask directly would be an admission. But Julius knows what he wants. From the bureau Henry takes a crumpled Strikes package and finds the last cigarette there.

  “What I’m asking is, say you did tip those players off. But it was your job to see them in the first place. We’re up there every night, looking down at men doing exactly what we do when we’re not up there.”

  “I don’t cheat and I ain’t going to make a habit of cheating, so whatever you’re seeing ain’t me.”

  “Now I’m not saying cheating, I’m not talking about that. Think of it more agreeably than that.”

  “If you mean there ain’t no difference between cheating and not I’d say you’re crazy.”

  “What I’m trying to say if you’d listen is that this place, where you can take another man’s money off him like that and get rich doing it and also catch cheats and watch a bomb go off all in the same day, is exactly the kind of place where the line gets blurred.”

  “Between right and wrong?”

  “Sure. Or between real and not. Or legit or not.”

  “I still say it matters.”

  Henry smokes thoughtfully.

  “I ain’t seen that particular cheat before, but I have heard about it. You know what they call it?” he says.

  Julius shakes his head.

  “‘Spooking.’ Ain’t that applicable.”

  Julius nods but doesn’t smile, which is what Henry wants him to do. He thinks of men in fashionable ties pinned neatly to their white shirts, other men in three-inch boots made of dyed snakehide. The great variety of men he’s known or watched. All of them with something meant to identify their place in the world. A thin-brimmed hat tipped back, a rolled cuff. Always some talk, these days, about who or what they should be, and in this talk was frank ambition. A sense that there was nothing more important, or more interesting, than themselves. Julius knows about the nights Henry spends at twenty-one with other men and the money he makes at those tables. He’s known it from the beginning. Henry moves toward the bed in a sexy walk meant to shake Julius from his coolness, then sits on the edge.

  “You have people, though,” Henry says, as if this is part of the same thought.

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “You do though, huh?”

  “Just my brother and his wife.”

  “That’s enough. And they love you probably, they wonder where you are.”

  “I don’t see your point, friend.”

  “I’m saying they know you.”

  “They don’t know anything.”

  “They know more about you than anyone knows about me. I’ve been dead a hundred years, you ask my father or the fine citizens of Maricopa.”

  Julius makes a face.

  “Well hell,” he says. “Ain’t that too bad for you.”

  “It is. It is too bad for me,” Henry says.

  “Look, bud, you’re getting me mixed around. Whole point you ask me is, we get to be legit here. Play cards all night if we want to, and keep the game statutory to boot. What’s my brother’s wife or your self-esteem got to do with that?”

  Henry laughs at him. He reaches out and takes a hank of Julius’s hair and pulls him forward and kisses him.

  “What I’m trying to say is, there are nights sometimes when I look down through that glass at the game below and I half-expect to see myself,” Henry says.

  Then he moves in next to Julius and pulls the sheet so it catches under him and Julius rolls to one side to let it loosen and Henry slips under the freed corner so they’re arranged again as they were.

  “How would that be, to see yourself in the world?” Henry says into Julius’s prickly unshaved neck.

  “Could be a kindness. Could be disappointing.”

  “Maybe you did the right thing with those cheats, but maybe it don’t matter. Maybe trying to be good or right is just a chore they set up to keep us distracted from the real point.”

  Julius wants to move the conversation into another register. He reaches into the bedside drawer and pulls out the Bible and opens to a random page. Henry leans away from him so the sheet tightens between them and without looking at the page Julius quotes a verse from memory.

  “Those who guard their ways preserve their lives. See now, Henry, the Lord says we ought to go one way and not another.”

  “I’m not sure you should treat the good book that way. You’re asking for bad luck.”

  “Seems to me good luck and bad luck start somewhere far beyond Gideons.”

  “How is it a believer like you stays put every Sunday morning?”

  “I’ll tell you what, you ought to spread it around. Play something else besides twenty-one or the bosses will think you have a specialty.”

  “I do have a specialty.”

  At this Henry smiles and Julius pulls the sheet and with it Henry’s wiry ruined body and the two men make the kind of love that follows an unfinished dispute of some importance.

  Afterward, as Henry sleeps, Julius rises and showers, then returns the Bible to the drawer and steps out into the dark parking lot to smoke. He’d like to take his boots and his hundred-dollar bill and his bonus and walk down to the train station and wait for the dawn train out. But to leave Henry would mean leaving his real job and his house pay, and the feeling of repletion he had. Across the lot he watches the streetlight click through the colors and the bright line of the horizon that even on the darkest nights is visible as a blue vein against the mountains and the glow of the city. He walks through the lot without turning around and spends the early hours playing slow stud with some tourists. He doesn’t sleep, and when the light comes and he knows Henry must
have woken alone he gets up from the table and tips the dealer. In the bathroom of the Frontier he washes his face in the sink, then he eats a bit of breakfast and goes to Binion’s Horseshoe where they’ve set up a table for Kansas City lowball, and in this way he has the feeling of leaving, without the act.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING after work he plays the seven-card table at the Mormon joint and loses his bonus in four quick hands. He tries again at Binion’s and wins awhile but then he tries too hard. It’s late afternoon when his money’s gone so he wanders through the downtown bars but sees no men or women alone or amenable. He sits for ten minutes at the Lucky Strike but no one turns to him, and when the barman starts his long walk over Julius stands and steps out into the day doubly brightened, the neon spill of the lights over Fremont and the sun low and stern. He walks several blocks from downtown, where the dealers and the pitmen and the waiters gather in the low-end bars. The string of short buildings has a regimental air, like a barracks, and Julius dislikes the sight of it. But he wants some company that has no taint to it, he wants, for a few hours, to be no one’s lover.

  At an old tavern called the Cave, where the servicemen drink, Julius turns off the narrow street and sends a glassy flare of sunlight into the room when he opens the door. At the bar, a half-dozen men who don’t really know him but recognize him by sight; along the dim walls many others. Julius slides in next to a man drinking alone, older, dressed in the uniform of a custodian, his collar still buttoned all the way up. Julius does not look at him but orders a beer and when the bartender brings it he tosses a nickel on the bar; the custodian turns toward the motion and the sound, then looks away again. As Julius sits, he lets his attention drift until the man says what Julius needs him to say.