On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

Lee doesn’t answer.

  “I think they figured they could just dock my pay and get some money out of it,” Julius says.

  “Out of what?”

  “I told you, just a card game. Bad luck I got caught is all.”

  “That ain’t what I’m saying and you know it.”

  Julius closes his eyes and lets the silence stretch out between them.

  Finally Lee says, “You’ve been three hours away all this time and couldn’t even jump a train.”

  “What would’ve been the point?”

  “I guess I’m saying you can’t be mad.”

  “I didn’t say I was mad.”

  Julius cradles the receiver and fishes for cigarettes and comes up with an empty pack.

  “I’m doing all right now, though,” he says.

  “But you ain’t in L.A.?”

  “Got too crowded there.”

  In his mind Julius sees the little house in the valley and the river running by. Muriel standing in the kitchen like a prairie vignette, shovel propped by the door and a bucket of wash water on the porch, though surely the view behind is treed and without clouds and crisscrossed by powerlines and the white contrails of military planes headed out to the coast. He sees himself there as a child but he can’t see himself any other way. His brother is there in his enlisteds, ironed flat as housesiding, and then their father on a Sunday playing checkers with the board they’d made from shingle. They had everything now.

  “I ain’t in any trouble. Got a real good job at the moment, good little thing going.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it but that don’t change what was supposed to happen. It don’t change that you didn’t call.”

  “I just wasn’t in no position to.”

  “There’s a damn phone every ten feet anymore.”

  “It was you all went on ahead.”

  “How long you think we’d wait, huh? Not like you had any discharge to contribute.”

  The operator comes on for another nickel and Julius presses the hard plastic of the receiver between his cheek and shoulder and wiggles his pocket and finds one more coin there.

  “Got just one more nickel, George Lee.”

  Julius drops the nickel, then neither speaks. The argument sputters out. He imagines Muriel’s house and her hissing radiators and how they’d all been together there.

  “She doing okay then? Muriel?”

  “Oh sure,” Lee says, and in the pause that follows Julius senses some discord. He thinks about her eager voice on the phone.

  “I can’t get her too excited about this new place, but she loves that little car,” Lee says. “And that’s fine, you know, women need things they can’t explain. The whole world is different to them.”

  “True enough,” Julius says. He makes another X in the glass. The floor of the booth is covered with black shoe scuffs and cigarette butts left by other lingerers. He thinks of that night he and Muriel talked so long. He’d been standing in a phone booth much like this one, on the corner of Fourth and Alameda, in the hour between when the produce train headed east and the railway post headed west, rattling past the flimsy apartment where he was staying. He recalls her voice as a gentle intervention in that window of silence, a silence that had come to unnerve him after so much regular noise. He’d never spent any time at all talking to women and it felt luxurious to him. He’d imagined her in pegged pants and a man’s shirt, the way women were sometimes in movies, just laid or about to be laid, at ease in a world that desired them. It is not just Lee’s voice he wants then, but the sound of both of them together.

  “Is that her calling you now?” he asks his brother, though on the other end is static.

  “I don’t hear nothing,” Lee says, and Julius can sense his confusion, his slight unwitting concern.

  “Should you holler back just in case?”

  And his brother agreeably does, and there distorted by the door and the hallway and the many miles is Muriel’s voice calling back to Lee, though Julius can’t make out what she’s said.

  “She says hello and it’s about damn time.”

  “Well, hello back then. Hello back.”

  The slots go off again and a man’s voice calls out and Julius wonders who he is and if he’s won or if he might be searching for someone. No voice calls back and the slot-bells jingle and the casino is quiet again. Julius says, “You know what, tell me where you’ll be. It’s time I sent a letter to you now.”

  A moment of silence on the line and then Lee says, “If that’s your price,” and gives Julius the new address.

  “I’m going to sit down this very afternoon and write you,” Julius says.

  Then the operator is on again and Julius leans against the wall of the booth until the call drops. For a moment he stands there listening to the hum of the open line.

  Outside the lobby a half-dozen tournament men are breaking up, walking in different directions down Sixth, two of them slipping through the alley that lets out onto Las Vegas Boulevard. Julius tries to imagine Muriel’s face. He wonders what it would be like to walk through the streets of any town with a beautiful woman and be seen that way. What it must feel like to his brother, to be given that chance.

  Next to the phone booth is a cigarette machine. Julius steps out and nudges the machine but no loose packs fall through. He stands in the lobby looking out, then follows the tournament men down the alley and back toward the station. The evening train has arrived and the newcomers take the first steps of their pilgrimage. Signs going up on the corners for another detonation in a few days’ time, this one called Galileo, smaller signs claiming sightings of the Russian satellite, which no one has confirmed. Then Julius sees Henry at the curb in front of the Golden Nugget. He is leaned into another man who stands counting chips in open view. This other man hands half the stack to Henry, punches him lightly on the shoulder and walks away. Henry pushes back his hair and glances around. Julius waits for Henry to leave and then waits a few minutes longer before he turns away.

  Back at the Squaw the room is empty. Julius lies on his back looking up at the ceiling, thinking of his brother’s new house. His brother sleeping beside his wife while outside the cypress trees stand in their custodial lines. He tries to imagine Henry there. He recalls a moment at the beginning of their affair, Henry standing naked in the middle of the room, half-hard, the light from the bathroom covering his brown skin and recasting it bronze, the withered arm like a remnant not of the past but of a whole other existence, as if he had borrowed it from someone older and more knowing. Somehow his injury never made him seem hurt. It lent him instead an air of placatory misfortune, as if he had taken someone else’s trauma out of pity. Henry looked at Julius so intently that he thought he might die waiting for Henry to touch him. You go on home, Joey, and grow up to be strong and straight, he said. He held the good hand over his heart.

  And Julius said, Shane, come back. Henry lifted his hand and aimed his finger up at the ceiling like a movie outlaw bringing down a bank. Posed like that, a figure straight out of a western but the kind of western they never find to watch, one in which the lens follows not the sheriff or the boy but the dark bandit, across the mountain and back to the hideout, inside the curtained room where he undresses.

  * * *

  —

  SOME DAYS LATER Julius sleeps late and wakes with Henry beside him. He buys two cups of coffee in the lobby and he and Henry sit drinking them on the bed while the television plays a football game. The plaid bedspread pulled up and tucked into the space between the wall and the mattress, pulled slick as the back of a knee, ashes in the embroidery. Julius’s other shirt hung to dry in the shower, his jeans folded on the chair with the wallet still in the pocket. Henry in his white undershirt with his legs planked out and crossed at the ankles is a picture of honest manhood. The two men look at each other, amused by the light domesticity of the scene. />
  “Yes, ma’am,” Henry says.

  “Go, Rams,” Julius says.

  Outside Sunday morning quiet, the peculiar hour between the all-nighters and the all-dayers, when the sidewalks are empty on Fremont Street and the gritter boys come out for dropped change. In this quiet Julius can hear, from six blocks away, the alarm calls of slot machines and the barkers with their coupons for free pulls and buffets. For a while they sit without speaking while the television plays on low. They do not touch or sit close enough to touch, but in the conjugal spirit of the morning they begin to talk of the places they’re from. Henry tells him again of the parks and plazas of Tijuana, where he spent the years after the war.

  “I hate to say this to you now, given my feelings. But a man can earn a good living down there with all the sailors and the husbands from California, who can’t find love in the northern cities no more.”

  “Oh I’m sure of it, they’ve got all those cities copped up now, from San Fran to San Diego.”

  “I had a bit of time in San Diego too, but I’ll tell you there’s a city doesn’t want no greasers.”

  “You ain’t no greaser.”

  “You tell that to the cops.”

  “They run you out?”

  “Worse than that even. I had a decent job there but I messed it up.”

  “How so then?”

  “Like you want to know.”

  “I do.”

  Henry snorts. He uncrosses his legs and recrosses them and smooths the thighs of his jeans.

  “They only let greasers do two things and that’s row crops or horses.”

  “So it was cotton then.”

  “What makes you think I don’t know horses?”

  Julius laughs.

  “Well, a third thing, if you count billiards,” Henry says then.

  “I never saw you hit a pocket.”

  “Then you know it ain’t billiards.”

  Julius hips over and reaches for his jeans on the chair and takes a fold of bills from the back pocket and peels off a dollar and snaps it.

  “I’ll take you a quarter a game over at the Silver Palace.”

  “You got it, bud.”

  Julius drops the dollar on the bed and leans back, but the joke doesn’t last.

  “There was just the one place in San Diego, when I was there,” Henry says. “The Chester Hotel. You never went south that far, huh? Just as well. Fine old building though, right by the ocean, and back then you could find just about anybody there.”

  Henry lights a cigarette and pauses a moment before he says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if that place is burned to the ground by now, though. They raided it practically once a month. It’s an easier time in Mexico. In Mexico even I look pure American. Brings a premium with the husbands.”

  Henry glances up at Julius to see how he reacts to this. The room seems to hold his revelation like a draft. On the black-and-white television comes an advertisement for color televisions. The woman selling them wears a dress shaped like a conch, lipped at the top around her shoulders and darker than the background. She gestures toward the tower of new televisions like a witch.

  Finally Henry says, “This is better than any damn hotel or husbands, I’ll say that. Having a real job and being here with you.”

  “You ought to consider playing cards somewhere else, you want to keep that job,” Julius says, though he’s thinking something else.

  “I hear you every time you say that.”

  “There’s that tournament at El Cortez.”

  “Hoo, now there’s an easy time,” Henry says. “You want your dollar, go there. It’s all tourists who saw blackjack in a movie.”

  “So why you need a left-hand man then?”

  “Who says I got a left-hand man?”

  Julius doesn’t answer. He thinks of the rent boys he’d known in L.A. Their sharp division between sex and love, which they seemed always willing to revise for the least tenderness, and their clear satisfaction in the disappointment that followed, as if it proved all over again the line they’d drawn between body and soul. How they’d looked when the cops gathered them or they took some other beating, not sad but exalted. Not for the first time he imagines Henry among them, though now there is this other thing, which he had not been sure of before.

  “All I mean is, you got me. You don’t need to play partners with no one.”

  “I got you in this room but nowhere else,” says Henry. He pushes back his fine hair and wets his lips and waits. Then he says, “I was at the Boulder Club the other night and they got a new dealer, sits facing the door. When he thumbs up that hole card you could see it from a hundred feet away.”

  “That ain’t something you should know.”

  “But I do know it.”

  “You oughta be playing chuck-a-luck with the wives, you want an easy hand.”

  “Well okay, I’d do that if you came along, friend.”

  “You’d be just as likely to get me to church.”

  “Well then I’ll try that, too.”

  Julius nods gently. Henry rises and checks the pocket of his trousers and then the bureau drawer and then Julius’s jacket draped over the chair. His own jacket hangs from the bathroom knob and he searches those pockets and finds a cigarette package and a matchbook and a handful of other things. He lights a cigarette and speaks through the exhale.

  “If I ever went back to San Diego I think I’d last about a day. I couldn’t stand to look at another damn palm tree, and in them flops you have to sleep ass to elbow. Ain’t even no good cardrooms. No, I’d go back to Mexico. I can tell by your look you’ve never been there and never thought of going. But I’ll tell you, you meet all sorts.”

  “Got all sorts here.”

  Henry sifts through the items in his hand and dumps the matchbook and some coins on the dresser. He squints against the lipped cigarette and turns to Julius. Then he uncoils a short block chain and regards it.

  “I might pawn it, what do you think? Hardly good for anything.”

  “You do what you want, though it does lend you a bit of seriousness, which you need.”

  “I bet you never thought a person could win such a thing in a trick-taking game.”

  “Certainly not in a game meant for women,” Julius says.

  Henry lets the chain fall straight from his open fingers. At the end of it is a tiny pistol. Henry told Julius he’d won it in a game of pitch on the way to Sioux Falls. The chain is dainty, rubbed smooth; the pistol no larger than a thumb and dry as paloverde.

  Henry points the gun at Julius and says, “Pow.”

  Julius clasps his hand against his heart and bolts backward.

  “You’re a fine shot,” he says.

  Henry puts the gun on the bureau, stubs out the cigarette, and comes back to bed.

  “The thing with money is, it don’t last if you spend it. Always got to have more.”

  “Now there’s the truth.”

  “A man will do more for money than he will for love.”

  Henry rolls to him and Julius waits a long moment before rolling too. The erotic taste of the other man’s breath released into the space between them. For ten minutes, longer, they lie this way, their knees threaded together, chests touching, kissing then stopping to look then kissing again, neither man willing to move the game forward. Julius feels not sexual jealousy but something more complicated. He imagines Henry as a younger man, a jockey’s groom at some two-bit place or a picker in a hot field, boot hitched up against a fence or a truck, then further back, a child playing stickball on a dirt road. Henry in his small existence with no awareness of Julius, Julius somewhere with no knowledge of him, two hands chasing each other on a watch face. Julius taking a shower or having a drink or shoveling snow while two thousand miles away Henry’s body was engaged in some other act, unrelated but simultane
ous. In this magical overlap a sense of Henry’s childhood as part of his own, a sense of owning too that boy in the golden city with his ready mouth. The man who tricked with men for money once a child always fated for that.

  Finally Henry pulls away and bends around to glance at his watch.

  “Now what do you say, huh,” he says. “That Boulder Club table clears out this time of day.”

  “Honey,” Julius says and the word pleases them both.

  “Honey what.”

  Henry kisses Julius again and Julius thinks of his father and the times he’d gone with him to church, near the end of the man’s life. Before his reformation he had been the kind of man everyone wanted to please. And by simple paternal alchemy Julius had been left with that reservoir of energy, that desire to be visible to the single person whose pleasure mattered. He knew his brother was this way too. They were in the service when their father died and there was no funeral and no mourners, just a notice in the post. Their little house was razed and they never went back. He thinks of his brother’s new house, the fine turn his life has taken.

  “You know what, I’ll play just to shut you up,” Julius says finally.

  “There’s my boy.”

  “I’m telling you, though, keep it simple. I ain’t no cheat at heart.”

  “You won’t even have to do nothing but win.”

  Henry kisses him again. Julius smells the hot smell of him and then both men leave the bed. Together they dress and tuck in their shirts and pull on their boots and step out into the still-warm day, the sun beginning its drift down into the valley. They walk without speaking past the rooming houses and municipal buildings and the little half-stocked bodegas, the stuff of real life not meant for tourists, toward the lights of downtown.

  * * *

  —

  IN LAS VEGAS it is not possible for any man to forget where he is. Often Julius has considered this. Perhaps on some mornings in winter, or late summer as it is now, when the light comes in low but just as instantly, a man might wake on the tenth floor of some hotel and in the still-dark room confuse for a moment the walls or the slant of light for the white plains of his youth. But such confusion could happen anywhere away from home. As soon as his head returned to him he would see the lighted figures against the hotel drapes, the names of casinos and the price of a buffet dinner. And if he stands to part the drapes he will see the far mountains shadowed into landscape, the clouds cast down onto them, then the once green expanse of the ancient meadow that gives the city its name, then the strips of buildings and their peculiar grace. He might eat, he might work, he might find a store and buy a pack of cigarettes, but he has no need of other things: booze will be offered to him, and sex, and he won’t need a toothbrush or bar of soap. In other famous cities of the West, with their own famous geography, their memorable architecture, a man might go about an ordinary day and never think about where he is, because he is too busy trying to get what this other city gives up willingly.