On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  “Something like that.”

  “Just like that.”

  “You all had a party,” she says.

  “My brother still has some vinegar in him.”

  “Well he must’ve got it from you.”

  She nudges him sweetly and he lets her but she feels his distance. She thinks of his face in the night and his small touch and these seem like gestures from a film in another room. She had drunk too much and imagined it, she feels sure now. Lee sits cross-legged in the yard and the horse stands some distance away, chewing the new grass.

  “You want double or nothing?” Lee calls to his brother.

  “You couldn’t get no bookie on earth to take that bet,” Julius says. He turns back to Muriel.

  “What was it you told me about them horses?” he asks.

  Muriel is surprised.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those fellas where you work. The racehorses.”

  “I didn’t think you remembered that,” she says.

  “I remember lots of things,” he says.

  “That was just a lark,” she says quickly.

  “The horses, or telling it to me?”

  “The horses. Both, I guess.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you mean what happened?” she asks.

  Julius doesn’t answer. He leans back and stabs one boot heel on the toe of the other, and in his length and his posture is someone naive and recently hurt. She remembers him sitting just this way in her mother’s yard, but he had been young and wild then. He had known far more about the world than she did. Now in his filthy jeans and his ripped shirt he is vulnerable, receptive, as if these traits have been drawn out from some isolation. This surprises her and she looks away from him. As she does the damp surface of the new grass catches her motion. The few clouds also catch there and the surface is like the lens of an eye. For a moment she watches the light sift and break up these images. She is not sure what to make of his questions, coming now so late in the story.

  “Must’ve been hard, letting go of your mother’s house,” he says.

  “It was.”

  He flicks the cigarette into the yard and it hisses out in the damp grass. She pokes hers out and wipes her fingers on her dress and leaves the butt ledged on the stoop. He watches her closely. She looks back. She feels wary of him now.

  “You remember that card game we played?” he says.

  “We played lots of card games,” she says, but she knows the one he means.

  “We played it the night the weather finally cooled. Maybe it was Christmas Eve,” he says.

  “It was.”

  “And Lee got railed and slept on the table, and you and me placed bets on what he was dreaming.”

  “He was dreaming about cleaning heads midship.”

  “Girl, he was dreaming about you.”

  Muriel shies. Julius’s teasing shove is an act of affection but he brings it too hard and knocks her sideways.

  “There was something you said then, about how your mother played cards. I was trying to remember it.”

  “On your honor?”

  “That’s it.”

  He lights another cigarette. His fingernails are clipped tight and clean as if he’s managed them carefully, though at the ridges they are dark as pitch.

  “That was her rule. If you’re playing for coins or matches or something and you run out, you get one more play,” he says.

  “Yeah, but she always said nobody ever won on their honor.”

  Julius lifts one finger in sudden understanding and his sleeve falls back and his gentle wrist is exposed. Through the trees the river drifts by and lends its sound to the fields beyond.

  “Your honor ain’t something you want in the pot,” he says.

  “That’s what she thought.”

  “Smart woman.”

  “She’d like you saying that.”

  Muriel remembers the way her mother played cards and misses her terribly. Though her mother never cheated she made everyone think she had and in this way charged the game with vengeance, and often those playing against her tried to call her out and lost by playing too meanly. It was a strange kind of bluff and Muriel wonders if Julius would have fallen for it. He holds the cigarette out to her and she takes it and drags and keeps it. This feels a little better, this camaraderie, the shared memory of their time together. Placing him and her mother together in her thoughts. She thinks of his kiss the day before and the smell of her palm and wonders if they might return to that moment and go on from there.

  “I told you, I remember lots of things,” he says.

  A lea of clouds passes over and catches the sun. The ground beneath them darkens. In this new light the yard seems burned at the edges as if the ground had sunk there hot and all at once and then filled through the night, not with dirt but with groundwater, seeped up from the earth the way gold was said to in the book of Daniel. The horse steps out of the trees and into the strange light. She walks with high-footed humor past the rim of the grass and Muriel thinks how horses love drama, even if they are old, even if they are overmatched.

  “Where have you been all this time?” Muriel asks.

  “I told you.”

  “Before that.”

  “You know I was in L.A. some, other places up there too.”

  “Why didn’t you ever come here?”

  “Did you really expect me to?”

  She hands the cigarette back. The horse stands bathing in the bright sun. She looks toward Muriel and Julius on the stoop and snorts. This look goes on for several beats and is touching in its seriousness and then the horse turns sharply away and begins to move along the tree line toward the river.

  “What’d you spend that sixty dollars on?” Muriel says finally.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “You bought a horse, is what you did.”

  “I bought that horse with someone else’s money,” he says and leans back again on the stoop.

  “And what did that someone give you the money for?”

  He laughs amiably but when he looks at her his face is tired.

  “Not for horses,” he says.

  “There’s my point.”

  “Here’s the thing about money, it don’t really belong to anyone.”

  “That sixty dollars sure enough belonged to me.”

  “Did it now.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “My philosophy . . .” he says. “And don’t make that face, I just got the one. What I think is, you can give somebody something, but once you give it that somebody gets to use it for whatever he wants.”

  “So what are we supposed to use a horse for?”

  “Anything you want.”

  She looks out across the yard and the river. Lee has reclined in his infant grass and spread his arms in a posture of beatification and is not listening to them.

  “Okay then,” Muriel says. “You remember so much. You remember that story you told me? About the man who sold rabbits?”

  “God yes, I forgot about him. What a—” Julius says, but does not finish his thought.

  “You said he was handsome,” Muriel says.

  Julius smokes hard and looks away from her. The darkness he brought with him darkens further in the cold morning and turns to fragility.

  “You said he seemed just like a rabbit,” Muriel says.

  Julius nods and smiles but then, as if arrested by another, more urgent thought, he turns to her and says, “I had a friend in Vegas. I’ve seen a lot of things, but he had something I ain’t ever seen before. Tiny little pistol on the end of a chain, supposed to connect to a pocket watch or key fob. I don’t think it works at all, but it looks a lit
tle menacing. He would say, Julius, what a thing seems like is all that matters.”

  The horse starts in to the yard toward Lee and Lee sits up. Julius sees the horse too and stands and scrapes the dirty seat of his jeans with both hands. He looks down at Muriel and says, as if to conclude his previous thought, “I remember I asked you if you’d ever been in love.”

  “You did ask me that,” she says.

  He stomps his boots rigid and hands down the cigarette. Muriel reaches up for it. They are commensally arranged then, Muriel can feel this in the angle between them, the long-legged man with his moody brow throwing a serrated shadow along the grass, below him her sleepy figure, her hair still stiff from the night before. She thinks of her afternoons at Del Mar, the hour she’d spent at the Radford Hotel. That brief interval in which she might have chosen anything, the seductive anonymity of the room. She had been so angry at Julius then, for disappearing, but she doesn’t want him to know that now. She wants him to see her as she had been, with money heaped across the bed and all her bets come winning, not as she is now, a woman on a stoop in the suburbs.

  “I remember what you said, too,” Julius says.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “But maybe you just had the jitters.”

  Muriel smokes the cigarette out and pinches the cherry and drops it and Julius kicks dirt over it with his dirty boot.

  “You never told me how you knew that man,” Muriel says.

  “What man.”

  “The rabbit man.”

  Julius smiles sadly.

  “I’ve been lots of places, like I said.”

  Julius looks at her and she looks back and for a long moment they hold this look between them and Muriel can see in his tired face some yearning or perhaps the opposite, perhaps a desire to be left alone. She wonders what he sees in her face. Then Lee says in a sweet and placating voice, “Okay then, girl,” and the moment is broken. Muriel and Julius turn away from each other and watch as the horse stops in the center of the yard twenty feet from Lee. Lee rises and puts his hand out for her to smell, as if she were a dog. He approaches slowly and she lets him. He strokes her mane and flank and asks the horse how she feels about him.

  Julius calls out to him, “She thinks you’re about as smart as a brick.” Then he says softly, almost to himself, “Man said mustang. That was the whole idea.”

  Lee presses a hand to the horse’s flank and walks forward. The horse follows. Julius lets out a low whistle. At the edge of the yard is an upturned bucket and when the horse is close beside it Lee stands on top and balances. The horse does not move away but looks at him and seems to nod. With both hands on the horse’s wither he swings one leg wide and jumps off the bucket with the other, and though the horse sidles he manages to land and lean over her neck. The noise of this maneuver is absorbed by the trees. He bends full on the length of her and Julius stands and stares. The horse walks to the scrub along the bluff and then turns back to the house. Lee whistles through his teeth and then lifts slowly from the mare’s back. He raises an arm and waves an imaginary hat. When the horse steps forward again he slides perilously then rights himself. Julius watches all this with mild annoyance.

  “Who you want to call wild now, huh?” Lee calls out.

  Julius turns away and spits. Muriel looks at him and sees his hunched shoulders and disappointed face. Why had he brought up the racetrack? What he might know seems suddenly menacing and dangerous, and though she cannot quite read him she knows he is afflicted by something. She might think money or revenge or her long-ago disclosure, but she had spent her childhood with a beautiful woman and so she recognizes what she sees in him as heartache. It amazes her to see it. She thinks of the rabbit man and the man with the tiny pistol and a thought begins to form and she can almost catch the tail of it. She senses inside his trouble the sharp contours of her own.

  The horse stops in the center of the yard and Lee slides from her. When she doesn’t move away he palms her long neck and leans his face to hers. Muriel watches this romance and next to her Julius takes his hands from his pockets and stretches his arms and shakes them loose.

  “Let’s see about this then,” he says, and moves toward his brother and the horse.

  Lee steps away and Julius takes the bucket and upends it. He finds a position near the horse’s belly and presses as Lee did and throws his leg over. The horse whinnies sideways but does not bolt. Julius nickers at the horse and she moves forward. Her hide trembles and she snorts and Muriel thinks of horses she’s seen and bet on and how from far away they seemed smooth as plaster.

  Lee comes to stand by Muriel and takes her hand and says, “Sorry about this.”

  She shakes her head.

  “My brother never let nothing go,” he says.

  “You’re the one who said he’d never come.”

  “I never have predicted him, in the end.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I don’t see you complaining.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  Lee brings her closer. He softens his tone.

  “What’s going on with your hair then?”

  “I just slept on it wet is all.”

  He nods remotely.

  “Except I’m not at all sure what to do with him now,” he says.

  “Did he say how long he’d stay?”

  Lee laughs. “Well, he can’t leave that heaping truck on the road all winter,” he says.

  A silence between them. The horse stands stock-still in the center of the yard while Julius digs his heels to nudge her forward.

  “Can you believe this horse,” Muriel says.

  “I can’t.”

  “What a thing to do.”

  “I just don’t see the reason in it.”

  “You never wanted a horse?”

  “Well, sure, what kid doesn’t? But we ain’t kids.”

  “He’s saying he’s sorry to you,” Muriel says.

  “Oh. I guess.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “I think he could say it another way.”

  Lee frowns as he watches his brother.

  “You seem to be having an okay time,” he says to her.

  “So do you.”

  “Oh, we’re all having fun sure enough.”

  Suddenly then a flat noise and a cry and there is Julius planked on the ground, both arms out and his legs spread. The horse has run him into the low-hanging branch of a tree. He reaches up to touch his forehead. The horse clips off toward the road. Muriel covers her mouth and Lee laughs openly and from his supine post Julius says, “I guess no one has any worry I’m dead then.”

  “Got over that worry the last time,” Lee says.

  The horse looks back when she is some distance across the yard and stares a funny moment. She snorts hugely. At this Julius throws up his hands in frustration but does not rise and Lee laughs with his palms on his knees and his black crown of hair shaking. Julius laughs too but not happily. He lies still looking up at the sky. Lee stands over his brother and sends down a hand but Julius waves him away.

  “Would you say I won or Lee did?” Julius asks Muriel.

  “Oh, who cares about that,” Lee says.

  “You cared before.”

  “That was before I won.”

  Both men laugh then. The horse is moving across the yard and as they watch she crosses the road into the walnut orchard beyond. Neither man moves to chase her.

  “I told you she’s wild,” Julius says.

  “And I told you we ain’t got no fence.”

  Julius nods, winces. “You’d not think it,” he says to distract Lee, “but you can actually see some stars.” He points up at the sky and calls his brother to lie down next to him but Lee is still looking after the horse and does not move. Under his boots the ground sinks wetly.

  “We go
t real troubles, catching that horse now,” Lee says.

  “Your wife’ll look at stars with me,” Julius says to him as if he had not spoken. Then to Muriel, “You look then.”

  Muriel cants toward him but does not lie down.

  “You hear they’re making a Sputnik cocktail?” he says.

  “Who’s they?” Muriel says.

  “Two parts vodka, one part sour grapes.”

  Julius crosses his arms over his chest like a dead man. Lee scowls over him.

  “It’s just a bluff, all the thing does is circle. Them Russians are just trying to scare us,” Lee says.

  “A bluff still has some truth in it,” Julius says.

  Lee stands with the river black behind him and his face caught in the sunlight.

  “You said you saw them bombs,” he says. “Now that ain’t no bluff.”

  Julius sits up and finds a clump of folded winter grass and pulls it. It comes away in his fingers and he lets the blades drift. Then he sweeps one arm out the same way he did when he arrived but this time the gesture seems to dismiss his own appreciation and the very fact of the place.

  “Can’t have everything, hey. Not people like us,” he says, and the simplicity of this seems to comfort him.

  * * *

  —

  LATER THEY SET UP thirty-one and the brothers tell jokes and sing along with the radio. The strain between them has lessened. When the hour grows small Muriel showers and steps into the bedroom which is cold and smells of wood dust. She lies a long time without sleeping. In the kitchen she listens to them laugh and joke until something shifts between them. A chair scuffs back and something knocks against the table and she hears Lee tell Julius that he is free to go, then Julius’s voice thick with drink and the late hour saying Lee has misunderstood. She worries about what will happen next. She listens as she had once listened for the moment the record scratched off in the living room and her mother stopped laughing and the house grew very quiet. Just the sound of wind or night birds and her mother would climb the stairs with a man often still wearing his boots. Muriel could see the morning star through the window facing east and on those nights she curled toward it, away from her door and the hallway, when her mother passed. She would remember what they’d been told one Sunday, that it was the devil who rose first, because he had been God’s most beautiful creation and then he had fallen, so as the earth turned past the night it was the devil first up from the ground. Good morning, devil, she thought as she looked at that star.