On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  For two weeks Julius and Henry spook the blackjack tables at the Boulder Club an hour at a time. Julius sits at the sloppy dealer’s table and Henry sits at the table behind the dealer’s back. Henry watches as the dealer corners up the hole card and then he judges the other cards on the table and the money in play. He drinks and laughs and sends Julius signals and Julius plays accordingly. Sometimes there is little to win and sometimes the tables are too crowded and in any case they do not stay together long. As they learn the cheat’s intricacies they run things quietly, cashing out no more than thirty dollars a night. Of course Henry could make more with another, more daring man, but this is the delicate agreement they’ve made.

  Each night Julius worries that above the tables a man in a catwalk watches them sit across from each other, that he studies them for palms and marking, for playing two sides against the men to their left, who will draw after them. But Henry’s little gestures, the small differences in his laughter—these are things only Julius knows. After a week they have two hundred dollars between them and they each buy a coat and tie and Julius has his boots shined. Henry hails a cab on Fremont Street and hands the driver a twenty to take them all the way to the Aces High Casino in Boulder City, where they eat steak on an open terrace overlooking the dam. A piano man plays loose ragtime and all around them are couples and businessmen and old women in lace gloves drinking champagne and they are among these people as birds are among trees.

  After dinner they walk across the dam on Route 93. The lighted roof of the Aces High rises behind the wall of stone. The sky is so dark it plunges into the massive lake and all the way to the bottom like a cataract. Julius imagines that the stars sit among the bones of men there, on the lake bed. He and Henry stand a long time looking from east to west across the canyon where the concrete is pressed by the rock into the curved shape of the dam. It seems to be held there by pressure and nothing else.

  Henry says, “It almost looks like it’s been here forever.”

  “And will be forevermore,” Julius says.

  They look at each other and like lovers everywhere take such claims about the world to be their own fortune. Henry glances around and moves back into the shadow of a penstock where the darkness is complete and Julius moves into the dark with him and kisses him. And though both men pull away then and leave the shadow one at a time, there is still some victory in it. Back at the Aces they dance and drink until the dawn starts to leaven the vast desert.

  Once home at the Squaw they bounce the bed so hard the manager comes around the corner and knocks at the door and Henry calls out in a convincing falsetto that he ought to go to the pictures or get himself a Gulch lady if he’s so hard up for love. “At least my loneliness don’t make no noise, girl,” the man hollers through the door and Julius and Henry laugh behind their hands until he leaves.

  In the new quiet demanded of them they touch slow and easy, but inside Julius is wholly gone. If he could turn his love into a noise it would be the noise of a bomb in the far desert, one that reaches the city in delay. The dawn sight of the cloud drawing up is the spectacle and the miracle but still at its distance could be a mere trick of the eye. Sometimes whole minutes later comes the convulsive thud, as if the sound was the sound of time passing and could not be rushed, and only then is the bomb real. No man could make that sound and no man could stop it. It is the sound of time itself coming forward and catching them where they stand.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE END of the third week Henry says they ought to run the outside table at the Nugget, where they’ve added two tables tight together with new dealers and high limits. The house stands at seventeen and the splits are twice as good as the Boulder Club and they could make a grand in ten quick deals. Julius refuses and makes a point about working there and in that way being known and Henry says they can keep playing for nothing if that’s all Julius wants. He lets his eyelids sink beautifully and Julius knows that thirty dollars a day was never going to last. He tries to kiss this knowledge away and when that doesn’t seem enough he lets Henry stack him at the Boulder Club for an extra hundred and when the chips are cashed he turns his money over and he feels weak and lonesome but he’s bought them time.

  Another night they work the peek together and when they switch sides Henry grabs Julius by the collar and kisses his neck and Julius pulls away and scolds him but then lets Henry kneel and take him in his mouth and when a noise in the stairwell sends them away from each other the feeling is of great and reckless dread. Back in the room they argue and Julius throws a glancing punch that leaves a mark and then he has something to apologize for. He does and they make up and the next morning play slow stud at Binion’s and don’t cheat at all, but that evening another argument sends them sprawling. Henry takes the night on the town. When he returns at dawn he is drunk and contrite and for a long time they sit side by side on the bed not knowing what to say until finally they have dry and disconsolate sex that makes them both come at once.

  When the sun rises they give in to sleep. Julius dreams of nothing and when he wakes the room is hot and he gets up and opens the bathroom window and stands a long time in the small breeze it offers. He thinks of the ride from Tokyo to Inchon and the men leaned against the bulkheads naming off the things they loved and would like to have again: peanut butter, sex, American beer. They prayed for these things and not for their own lives. Julius had thought not of objects or pleasures but of his father. He’d wondered abstractly if the love of God and fathers was so lasting because it could be neither denied nor consummated. It was always on its way, the way Inchon was, and heaven, the way money and chance outpaced you and did not end. He could keep refusing or he could give in but neither would protect him.

  Now, he has nowhere else to go. There was Kansas and Los Angeles and the long gray slice of Asia and in all those places he’d been a petty thief and a faggot and alone. Outside his window is the noise of the city moving toward darkness and Julius leaves the bathroom and wakes Henry with his mouth and the night goes by sweet and quiet, and after work they sleep and wake together in the desert morning to birdsong thin as reed outside the covered windows of the Squaw.

  * * *

  —

  SOME NIGHTS LATER Julius works the peek alone. The catwalk has lost the dusty heat of summer and he watches through the windows with his jacket buttoned all the way up against the chill. Below him nothing much. All rules and pure luck on the floor, as if the games of craps and faro were simple acts of trade. Cigar smoke blown politely up and away from the wives. But when he checks the northern glass he sees below the shape of Henry’s ears and shoulders. From above the top of his head is dark and strangely unfamiliar, like the picture Julius had seen of the earth from space, that fragile and that abandoned. The table is half-full and Henry has a nice stack. It is two A.M. or nearly. At the far end, an old-timer in a corduroy jacket plays by the book; at the table behind are two men, one dark-eyed and brunet, the other with honeyed hair slicked back. Both with their hats on their knees, playing loose and mean. Julius stands watching and for a few unremarkable hands sees nothing unusual. He thinks Henry must be waiting out the lonely night for Julius’s shift to end. A warm and anticipatory feeling, then another thought comes through and darkens it. As Julius watches, Henry fails to hit a low draw and leaves the dealer with a ten that busts him out. At the other table the blond takes a five and clears the pot and winks at no one. Julius watches more closely. Another few hands like this, Henry standing low and busting first the old-timer and then the dealer. Behind, the blond smiling and clowning, touching his ear and then his nose. From above Julius thinks with clear and sudden terror how easy such a game is to spot, when it’s your own game.

  Henry’s dealer cracks the deck again. Julius wonders if the blond is older or younger than Henry and where he might be from. Of course Henry knows that Julius is above tonight, he has come to be found out. It’s a bluff, or something like it. Juli
us thinks of the few things he knows about his lover, the little biography. The larger things that lovers know, which have to do with essence or hurt. He thinks of what he’ll say later, if he says anything at all. On the next deal Henry hits a seventeen and steals an eight that would have made the old-timer’s hand, busting them both. Henry flutters his chips in a short stack. Behind, the blond hits a nineteen with a deuce and hollers out his pleasure and Henry regards the blond so levelly that Julius sees everything he fears.

  Suddenly a man in a black suit appears. He stands by the sports book a few feet away, watching Henry’s table. He lights a cigarette and waits. Julius knows who this man is. Not his name or his specific story but his role here. Behind him the sports book is empty except for a single man on a telephone leaned halfway across the bar. The sign above the bar reads, in ironic script, We are as close to you as your telephone. The man in the black suit taps his ash onto the floor.

  Julius leaves the window and descends the stairs and in the back room finds the cat-faced men sitting across from each other, one man’s feet on the other man’s chair rung, one passing another a copy of Life magazine. They don’t look up at him and when he tells them a blond is spooking at the new high-limit table they merely nod. One slaps the magazine closed and says, “Who’s his man then?” and Julius blinks but does not answer. He sees the way it all might go and it hurts him to see it, to think about doing it. To consider what it might solve for him.

  The man looks over the magazine at Julius’s hesitant form and finally Julius says, “Seems like the geezer, in the corduroy coat.”

  Both men stand and Julius climbs the stairs again. Back at the glass he watches. He’d like to make a noise or hold his lighter to the window to make Henry look up and see him, but he knows Henry will know what he’s done. The cat-faced men emerge into the pit. Above them the round globes slick their hair in white light. The sports book is empty now and the man in the black suit has drifted past its edge. The cat-faced men smile slow and wide and for a moment Julius almost loves them, as he has loved other men who carried some part of his fate. The way he loved sergeants and preachers. Henry sees them coming and looks up and though the glass above is black and indifferent Julius tosses down a little wave. Henry jerks his pretty chin and closes his eyes but the men do not raise him. Instead one man takes the old-timer by the elbow and the other leans to whisper something and the man stands obligingly and is walked away. Across, the blond stands and takes his stack and is met at the edge of the pit by another suited man. Henry stares ahead and plays another round and then another and finally he stands and moves out of Julius’s view and Julius does not see him again.

  Later, back at the Squaw, Julius undresses in the dark. Shadows on the inside of the drapes. He waits for the knock and when it doesn’t come he climbs under the covers. The sun is rising. He thinks of other men he’s busted and the confederacies he’s sniffed out and he knows where the blond is headed now. He feels a vindication that sickens him. He waits a long time. Sleep hovers close and he thinks of Henry tipped far back, spine concave, over the edge of the table or bed, nipples like dimes, until his shoulders disappear and his face disappears and his body is a boy’s body, sweet belly soft and unmuscled, brown nipples flat against his chest. It feels like another childhood, this moment Henry’s face disappears into their lovemaking, the inverse exposure of it, a chance for Julius to see him as he might have been before he was marked off as anyone, before he even had a name. In his waiting and his valor Julius tries to imagine a grateful scene. He tries to imagine the door opening and his lover entering, but he falls asleep and wakes alone.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY he looks for Henry in the rooming house behind the Moulin Rouge and at the clubs on the edge of Glitter Gulch, and when he doesn’t find him there he goes back to the Squaw and waits. The day drags on strangely and he begins to worry. After work he drinks at the bar until noon and stumbles drunk through the white streets and sleeps with the door open. He is woken by shouts from the vacant lot and he rises and stands in the doorway in his underwear and watches as the streetlight clicks through the colors. He bathes and pulls on the same clothes and goes to work again and comes home after and watches Gunsmoke and does not sleep. When again it is afternoon and Henry has not appeared, Julius leaves a note and rises and walks toward Fremont. At the Mormon joint he goes on a tear so profitable it is a form of violence, and with pockets bulging and fists clenched he is asked politely by the pit boss to find another place to play until his luck passes. Instead he stands and walks to the roulette table, lays everything on red and loses. He stares at the boss squarely and returns to the faro table. He smokes so many cigarettes his eyes twitch. He sits so long and so alertly that he believes he can tell which type of liquor is being poured at the bar behind him by the smell and the sound of the liquid in the glass, by the clink the bottle makes as it is removed from the shelf.

  The next morning after work he returns to the Squaw and bolts the door and pulls the chain across. The week’s sheets are gray with dust and skin and hair oil but he will not strip them to place outside for the maid. In the dirty curl of bedclothes is evidence that Henry has slept and woken there. He flings off the bedspread and shakes it and then he pulls out all the drawers and dumps them and there are Henry’s shirts and socks and a bale of bills totaling sixty dollars and his lover’s best jeans and the watch fob. He kicks apart the shirts, then gathers them and throws them in the corner. Then he lifts the fob and holds it in the lamplight. The gun is slightly larger than his thumb and rounded at the handle like an umbrella, the trigger a loose button on the side. He slides into the grip and thumbs back the hammer and presses the trigger with the tip of his middle finger. He holds it to his temple. Henry would not leave it, no matter how angry he is. He might leave his socks and his jeans but not the money and not this. Julius sees again the men coming toward the table and the blond being lifted. He sees Henry stand, but after this he cannot find him in his memory; he disappears past the edge of the glass. Julius presses the button and the hammer clicks softly and he feels the firing pin coil out and tremble the metal against his skin.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT IN the back room the two cat-faced men are waiting for him.

  “Here’s our good man,” one says, and together they face him gravely. Both men reach toward Julius and place a hand on each hard shoulder, one man’s left and the other man’s right pressing him together, so that facing them Julius has the impression of being embraced, of being included in a circle of understanding. He decides to risk the question.

  “I guess you ran them out of town, huh.”

  “Who’s that then?” asks the man on his right.

  “Them blackjack skippers,” Julius says.

  “There’s a fine car on the dawn train for spooks,” says the man on his left.

  “The old-timer gave us trouble,” says the other.

  “Can’t take them to the back eighty these days,” the first man says sadly.

  The men are still hemming him but seem to have forgotten his presence. Julius cannot risk another question and the men’s hands are heavy. He sniffs and they look down at him and both smile the way men smile at other people’s dogs. They drop their hands.

  “Good thing for your steady will,” says the first man, taking a roll of bills from his breast pocket.

  “What about those others at the new tables, the greaser and the brunet?” asks the other.

  “What about them?” Julius asks.

  “You knew the greaser, before,” says the other.

  “Not well. We work together, here,” Julius says.

  “He played here often. But not with you.”

  “No, I ain’t never played here.”

  The man regards him but does not answer. He clicks three bills from the stack and puts them in his coat pocket, as if he is compensating himself for the cho
re before him now. Then he nods to the other man who holds out an envelope. Julius takes it and lifts the flap and sees a stack of chips from the Boulder Club, where he’d played with Henry just three nights before.

  “You hadn’t played together here,” the first man says.

  Julius catches his emphasis. He shakes his head and lets the envelope flap closed.

  “I ain’t never taken nothing from here,” Julius says, but the men do not acknowledge him.

  “I don’t expect you’d like to see your friend again, considering.”

  Julius shakes his head again but slowly this time.

  “I bet nobody on the dawn train wanted to see him either, or in the place he got off.”

  The man snaps his fingers strangely then reaches up to straighten his tie. For a long moment Julius stands without understanding. Then the first man steps forward and holds open the office door, and when Julius walks through it both men follow him across the casino floor and through the front doors to the sidewalk, where they wait until he reaches the corner. Julius turns back once and sees them there, watching him. As he walks the full meaning comes to him and at Carson Avenue he breaks into a run.