On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  At the Squaw he collects his old shirt and boots and the jacket and tie. He fishes a hand through the bureau drawer for underwear and socks. When his fingers catch Henry’s gun he pulls it out. He shoves the fob and the envelope in his pocket and rolls his shirt and razor in a motel towel and leaves the room key on the television set. He takes the rolled towel from his busted boots and slips it under his arm, then leans against the doorway to pull the boots on. Then, with the good jeans and the jacket tossed over his shoulder and the good boots in his hands he leaves the way he came, on the evening train headed north.

  In Pahrump he waits for the mail train to Indian Springs and pays a dollar for the open coach. When he arrives it is nearly noon. He takes a room on the second floor of a hotel downtown. Inside the room he locks the door and pulls the chain across and then sets the single chair against the knob. He turns on the television and dials through the midday news, which shows a mockup of the Russian satellite, and he moves past this channel to a black-and-white western. He rolls the volume knob all the way down. On the screen a pair of silent cowboys plan something across a barroom table. Behind them the walls of the barroom are gilt in punched tin; in black-and-white they look like snowfall.

  Julius goes to the window and fingers the curtain back and stands looking out at the little town. To the south the long pull of the desert and to the north a hem of mountains. Just across the street a sign that names the town. He remembers a long way back, to the man from Iowa. For a moment he sees himself at the bar with that man the day he arrived. He wonders how long the cat-faced men had known, and thinking back through the weeks of play with Henry makes him cringe with shame and longing. Worse, the men had made a fool of him. They had let him come down with his reconnaissance and his little half-story about the blond and the old man, and they let Henry play on until Julius left the peek and then they made Julius wait three days in suspense. They hadn’t dropped him from the roof or knifed him in an alley, but they had made their knowledge a kind of torture, and now even though he’s out of their proximity he is not beyond the reach of this knowledge, and this makes him more afraid than love does.

  He closes the curtain and turns back to the television. He slips off his boot and finds the Iowan’s bill there. The ink is gone from the edges and the folds worn to lace, but it is spendable. He needs to think and to sleep but he worries that sleep won’t come. In the room beneath him another television plays the same program but with the volume up high so he hears the music and the cowboys’ dialogue as if damped by water, while on his own screen the men in profile ride through a landscape like the one outside his window but a hundred years ago and brighter than any city.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT JULIUS dreams that he is inside Henry’s dream. That wherever Henry is sleeping, in a rooming house in San Diego or in the county jail, his dreams are of Kansas, of Muriel’s mother’s house. In the dream Henry walks through arched vistas of bluestem and foxtail barley, grass so tall and gently blown it is like a sea churning, waist deep, lighter than water. Julius doesn’t know if this is the past or the future. Henry enters the house and goes up the stairs to the room where Muriel used to sleep, and Julius sees himself inside this dream, lying in bed in the middle of the day. All the windows open and the breeze blowing through. Birds flying through quick as fingers snapping. They are both aware of the passing sky above them, a rain coming fast. Julius turns and the sheet falls back and he is naked. Henry moves toward the bed. The rain begins, first a few noticed drops and then a thousand more. As Henry knees up onto the bed he glances again out the window at the barley and the unkempt lawn, the silvery boundary between them, the graying sky behind them, the grass merely a stage to play out this moment. Say it’s billiards, Henry says, say it’s horses. He whispers this to Julius inside the dream, and to the sleeping Julius on the edge of the dream, while outside in the yard the rain fails on the upward-straining grass.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING Julius goes downtown and finds a pawnshop where he sells the good boots and jeans and the jacket and tie. He adds all this up and he needs three or four times that to get even a few days away from Vegas and the cat-faced men, and a hundred times more to find Henry, if what he knows about Tijuana and hustlers is true. He hates that this is true and that he knows it and he hates the only option he has. He asks around and the locals thumb him north and he hitches a ride to a ranch some miles away, sprawled out among the scrub and backed against a ledge of orange rock. It is a cheerless operation, a few lilting buildings with tin roofs peeling up in the heat, a split-rail fence weathered a dilute gray. A man with an eyepatch and shoulders as broad as a doorway—much broader than the man from Iowa, who, when he slept, curled his thin shoulders forward like someone anticipating a blow—waves to Julius from a sagging porch.

  Julius approaches him. “I heard you had horses. Mustangs.”

  The man thinks this over. He looks at Julius and then scans the horizon, his hand shielding his one good eye, which is blue as a jay. Julius sees only four horses bent over a trough some distance away, and across the rock and scrub in all directions he sees nothing else.

  “Sure,” the man says. He stands and bangs his boots against the porch to get them fully on again. They walk toward the little group of horses standing in the scrub. There are two gray horses and a spotted one with a rump raised high and only a patch of tail. At the end of the trough is a ewe-necked mare, mane long and blonde as hell.

  “Which one you want?”

  “Those are mustangs?” Julius asks, thinking maybe the man hasn’t understood him. The man shifts between one short leg and another, so slow it seems impossible, as if the entire weight of his considerable breadth were moving from one place to a wholly other one. He blinks once, then again.

  “Yeah,” the man says.

  He can’t show up empty-handed and he can’t turn around. He likes the one with the blonde mane, haunches like tractor tires. She might be enough for his brother’s forgiveness, for what has already happened and for what comes next. He thinks about the house and his brother’s prosperity and he knows where his brother would keep a dollar.

  The man exhales mightily. “Oh, that one,” he says, and shakes his head a little, looking at the ground. “That one’s wild as lightning.”

  Julius looks again at the golden horse, who stands there eating.

  “All the better,” he says.

  The man shrugs, quotes him a price half what the man from Iowa told him, and Julius feels the whole thing is fated. He hands over the hundred-dollar bill and the man hands him back the remainder in dented fives. In town he buys a third-hand truck and a trailer for a song and drives the bouncing mess back to the ranch to collect the horse, who balks at the ramp but obliges after a switch from the man, who leaves the rest to Julius. In the cab Julius waves back his hair and flicks out the legs of his jeans. He thinks of the man from Iowa with his woman’s back, his little choking cries into the pillow, before this the lonely phone booth and Muriel’s story of the horses and the money in her letter. He’d spend a day in San Diego and eat a hot meal and see his brother and his brother’s wife. The decent and natural fact of their lives.

  He drives slowly back through town. He worries he won’t make it, that the horse will bust loose and run down the highway like the wild thing he wants her to be, that he will lose this moment and the mistakes that brought it to him. A few cars pass him and honk, but it is not so far and he is young. He thinks of Henry’s pink lips, then his shoulders, then his body. That the one-eyed Mexican was not Mexican at all, that the horses were fed by trough in the desert scrub, makes no difference to him. Between the pickup and the trailer and the golden, wet-eyed horse, he’d paid a hundred dollars for an enterprise worth less than half that, but it feels necessary to him. It feels necessary to start again in just this way.

  II.

  FIVE

  The bluffs<
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  The days shorten and in the evening the wind comes down the river and blows the leaves from the trees so they settle in heaps against the new house. Lines of smoke band across the northern sky and anyone outside or near an open window can smell the burn of the freeway site, inside it the brackish hint of the river. Lee and Muriel spend their days at work in town, then evenings in the new house. They bring the card table from the apartment and buy two folding chairs at thrift. In a coffee can they save their wages toward a real bed and a Naugahyde sofa and they still have a long way to go. In the backyard Lee sows grass seed, though the season is late and the men at the dry goods tell him it will drown in the rainy season, that winter crows will peck it until it’s gone.

  One afternoon they are in the front yard breaking up dirt clods with a garden hoe and re-spreading the dirt level to the curtilage. Across the road another house is going up, the frame is straight as teeth against the vista. The adjacent lot is still unsold but the next two are graded and mapped out for foundations. At the edge of their own lot a line of trees has been left and marks the northern edge, behind the house the river runs low and soft. Against the setting sun Muriel slants her hand to her forehead and squints. From the direction of the city comes an old GMC pickup with a trailer, barreling through the dust it makes. The pickup slows to a crawl. She looks at her husband and he steps forward. The truck turns sharply into their drive and stops, the trailer jacked at a sharp angle, one set of tires still on the road, and from the cab Julius emerges without turning off the engine.

  “I’ll be damned,” Lee says.

  Julius walks toward him and shrugs his shoulders, as if he too disbelieves his presence there. They meet in the dusty yard and Lee takes his brother in a hard hug and thumps him on the back with the flat palm of his hand and says again, “I’ll be damned.”

  Muriel watches this without moving. She is wearing a pair of old canvas pants and a workshirt tied in a quick knot at the tails. She thinks she must seem like a country housewife inured to beauty. Over Lee’s shoulder she catches Julius’s gaze and returns it.

  “Look what you’ve done,” Julius says and waves to take in the house and the lot. “How about old Dad, huh? Wouldn’t he be choking on this. You got a whole acre here?”

  Close to him now Muriel can see the squareness of his chin and his wide ears, and though she would not have been able to remember them precisely they are as familiar to her as grass. A new feeling then, something like disappointment. She sets her face and her shoulders coldly against this feeling.

  “Not even a postcard, to say you’re coming?” Lee says.

  “You can count on me for surprise,” Julius says. His voice is cheery but it rings against his teeth and comes out pitched too high. Behind them the truck still idles, halfway on the road. Lee looks across the front yard at the truck and then up at his brother. Julius traces a light circle in the dirt with the toe of his boot, the sound of the engine ringing against the tree line. For a moment the silence between them is heavy enough to stand on.

  “I might pull all the way in, if you don’t mind me parking this heap in your fine yard,” Julius says.

  “Oh, sure thing,” Lee says. Then, “You bet.” He turns to Muriel with a look so open she sees the child in him. They watch Julius back the truck out of the drive a few feet to get the trailer straightened out. He pulls forward and the truck wheel digs into the descending bank of the drive and spins dirt out in a trough.

  “That’s a horse trailer,” Lee says to Muriel.

  She cannot reconcile the fact of Julius’s presence with her long anger that he had not arrived and never would. She hears the animal make a wet noise of complaint, the trailer creaking like a bad ladder. Julius backs up again to take the turn a little wider. Behind the truck and the jackknifed trailer the sun is setting over the bright city. Muriel pulls at her shirt, unties the knot and lets the tails drift. She reaches up to touch her hair. Finally Julius backs all the way out and gives up and parks the truck two wheels in the road ditch. He cuts the engine and steps out of the cab smiling.

  Lee calls to his brother, “You win a bet or lose one?”

  Julius comes to stand by them again. “Mustang. You wouldn’t believe the story.”

  Lee waits but his brother says nothing more. Muriel notices the dirty legs and seat of his cuffed pants, the boots worn so badly he appears to be pushing forward on the balls of his feet to keep from falling back on the ground-down heels. One sleeve of his shirt hangs in a bell, the seam flayed open.

  “Look at this,” he says again, as if he had arrived only to witness their prosperity. He raises his arm and makes again the broad gesture that takes in the trees and the river and the house still unpainted but set straight as a church, and in this second wave is a certain anxious filiality. He seems taller, much older than before, older even than Lee, who stands next to his brother like an antidote to something, all clean cheeks and hands.

  “I guess I had something a little more country in mind,” he says.

  “I can see that,” Lee says, and nods at the horse as if in apology.

  “Where in heaven did you get a mustang?” Muriel asks.

  Julius pulls a wounded face and she realizes she had not yet spoken. He does not answer her. She feels suddenly a powerful resentment, a frustrated resentment like children feel when their lies are disbelieved. It has been nearly two years.

  “How far you haul it from?” Lee asks.

  “Little town in Nevada. North of Las Vegas, which is where I’ve been.”

  Julius fingers his hair back then shoves his hands in his pockets and takes them out again. He takes the sides of the flayed sleeve and twists them together so the fabric sits in a ball behind his elbow.

  “Can’t keep it in there all night, surely,” Lee says.

  “Her,” Julius says. “She’s a mare.”

  The three of them move out onto the road and stand behind the trailer. Muriel can smell the horse and it is a smell she knows. Julius frowns, then moves toward the trailer and pulls the bolt closure back. Then he flings the doors open. The horse snorts, her rear to them, dusty and round as an apple, but otherwise does not move.

  “Call her a wedding gift. Or . . .” Julius says, rubbing his palm along his forehead. “. . . housewarming,” he says finally, as if he had invented the word. And then he does invent one: “Horsewarming,” he says, and at his own joke he smiles.

  “Now, it’s a fine idea, Julius, but you said yourself—”

  “Since when are you the kind of people who couldn’t make use of a horse?”

  Julius looks at each of them in quick turn, in case they might have become those people in the time he’s been away. Muriel thinks again about their long phone call, and the secret she’d told him about the races and wonders if he believed her after all. A moment’s excitement at this prospect, and then a sharp worry.

  “But we’ve got no fencing, Julius,” Lee says finally. “Seems like something necessary, don’t it?” He looks at Muriel sternly. She moves closer to the trailer. She can smell the stress of the horse and the dirt on her coat and in her poor hooves. She looks back at Lee with all the puzzlement she can muster.

  “Only necessity is salvation, anyhow,” Julius says brightly.

  Lee’s stern look turns parochial. “I never did get why Dad said that,” he says.

  “I think he thought only the needy get saved, not that getting saved is all you need.”

  “Well, that sure would be like him.”

  Together they watch the horse ignore them. In front of them the light spreads in gauzy colors against the low-lying clouds. Muriel wants to reach out and touch the horse but she worries she’ll startle it. An insular threat beats between the men as they talk this way.

  “Our old dad would be the type to muddle up the whole issue of salvation though, in the end,” Julius says.

  The horse is a foot s
horter than a racehorse, the color of dry sand, ewe-necked and too long in the hip. Muriel watches its dark eye turn back and glance behind and for a moment catch Muriel in its vision. Muriel can feel herself caught and considered there. The horse snorts. Then it looks away and is still and silent inside the dented trailer. Muriel can see now that it’s no mustang or thoroughbred but a simple palomino nag, the kind of fat girl used in the pit for cooling runners. Probably once called Holly or Peaches. She might wait in that trailer until she dies.

  “Well okay, I guess we’re real Westerners now,” Lee says then, and at this he takes his brother in a tight sidearm.

  Julius ducks his head as if Lee had gently cuffed him and clears his throat and spits onto the dirt. The horse moves her ears to locate the sound.

  “Let her be a while and she’ll come out. We didn’t come from too far but it took some time on these roads,” he says. “I bought some apples on the way, so I’ll put those around and she’ll be sure to come for them. If you’ve got a jug or barrel, we can water her a little. Until then I’m wasted for a drink. Afraid you’ll have to invite me in.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY GATHER AROUND the card table in the kitchen with a bottle of port wine. Muriel takes one chair and Lee the other and the men bring in a wooden stool from the yard where Julius sits and heels off his boots. She looks around the house. An empty house, a house without a dining table or wallpaper, feels haunted by the future imagined for it, which has not been this future, all three of them together. The kitchen seems to wait, to hover between being lived in and not. Julius sits on the stool with his knees spread wide and his missing canine tooth like a little hole in the story he is telling, about a woman who rode up and down Fremont Street on a bicycle.