On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  In the kitchen Lee says, but softly now, inviting, “I wish that had mattered, little brother.”

  “I guess I thought I’d see old Dad again.”

  “It always seems like there’s more time but there’s only so much.”

  “You act like it don’t matter to you.”

  “Wasn’t nobody could save that man.”

  “We might’ve tried harder.”

  “I’m telling you, Julius.”

  “Well, I guess you had other things you wanted.”

  “So did you.”

  “Without him here you ain’t so beholden to me,” Julius says.

  Then their voices lower past her hearing and she drifts to the edge of sleep until they rise again.

  “A year and a half is too long,” Lee says.

  “Hell, you don’t want my company. Look at you two, married and settled and all that.”

  “I said I wanted it. How many times I have to say it?”

  “You just want to keep me in line.”

  Lee does not answer.

  “I’m right, huh,” Julius says then.

  “Well Muriel surely wanted you to come. You should have seen her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I honestly think she was counting on it.”

  For a long moment no one speaks.

  Then Julius says, “But you convinced her otherwise.”

  “Seems to me you did that yourself, by disappearing.”

  Silence, then Julius again, “As soon as you got that letter from her you’d had it with me. You saw your chance.”

  “Why’d I bring you along then, that Christmas?”

  “’Cause you thought you had to. ’Cause you worried what I’d do all alone.”

  Lee says something Muriel can’t hear and then Julius speaks too in agreeable tones and for a while it seems their argument has ended. Outside she can hear the river pulling gently. She recalls a night early on, when they’d driven out to the house to drop off the table and some clothes and dishes, and rather than drive back to town in the dark they’d slept in the empty house. Next to her husband on the living room floor with their coats covering their legs, she heard the river running as it is now, but through the walls and windows and the blank space of the yard it had sounded like a mere breeze. She had made a wish that night, that the river would rise and come into the house and take them. She missed her mother and her own house and the low plains from the bedroom window. She had missed the familiar smell of wheat. Before the day she won so much at the track, there had been only the secret and its own pleasure. It might have been horses or bridge or anything capricious, or anything merely new. But after she’d gone to the bank and posted the envelopes and lied to her husband the secret and its source were the same, they were commensurate. She’d liked having a secret, but she did not like lying. Lying had erased her from everything.

  Suddenly a chair scrapes back and Muriel hears it fall onto the kitchen floor. When Lee speaks his voice comes from a distant corner of the room, as if he’s moved very far from the table.

  “Well that’s just fine. I saw how well you got along in the service, on your own.”

  “That was nothing.”

  “I know that ain’t true. And that fella in Okinawa, in that village bar.”

  “I told you I didn’t know him.”

  “Then why did you fight him like that?”

  “He insulted us.”

  “Maybe so but it ain’t like you.”

  A glass planted on the table, the ashtray rattled. The radio still on but dampened to susurration so through the wall and down the hallway it sounds to Muriel like a secret.

  “You going to tell me the rest of it?” Lee asks finally.

  “There ain’t no way to say it, George Lee.”

  Their voices drop again and the night deepens and soon the valley grows quiet and slips into its full pastoral and Muriel lets sleep come.

  * * *

  —

  SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN she is awakened by noise from the road. She rises and walks through the empty house and stops in Julius’s room. He’s folded the blankets and stacked them in the corner. The rest of the room is empty. She goes to the kitchen. The radio is on and plays low. She looks out the back window and sees nothing. She tries the window over the sink. A line of dust hovers at the road. Then she tips the coffee can and sees that it’s empty. She walks back to the front room and opens the door and the truck is gone, though the trailer is knifed on the roadside and unhitched. Hoofprints deep onto the road and disappearing north and away. The sky has leavened a snowy yellow. She knows all at once what has happened and she is not surprised, though she wonders if she should be.

  She turns and passes back through the kitchen and the front room and down the hallway. In the bedroom Lee sleeps soundly. She moves to the front wall and again lifts the framed mirror and turns it. She peels the envelope from the backing. One envelope is gone and in the other Julius has left the deed to her mother’s house and the tax receipt and the letter from the Carters. She unfolds these items and reads them. Inside the folded receipt she finds another slip of newsprint and she unfolds this and sees the names of horses and jockeys and the odds laid out by post order, in the margin a few notes in her own hand. She folds the form into her pocket and puts back the rest, then peers out the window to the drive and the road beyond, cast up in thin dust where he’s driven the truck through and away. Again she sees the prints on the road and thinks of the places a horse might go and how far away those places are.

  In the bed Lee is solid and perfectly shaped. She recalls the snags of their argument and starts to piece it together and then another thought arrives: If Julius didn’t believe her that night on the phone, about the horses, he does now. He’d seen the deed and the letter and the tax receipt, perhaps the racing form, too, and surely he could find the story there. She thinks of his dark shape in their bedroom, two nights before. The conversation on the stoop and the heartache she’d seen in him. She is sure now that he’d come to steal from them but this is less important than the redemption she’s begun to feel, that has begun to sneak into the day. She thinks, I have been found out. And that fact brightens all the months before and renames them.

  SIX

  Tijuana

  When Julius crosses the border it is just past dawn. He passes through San Ysidro without trouble while men in guayaberas and felt hats cross the elliptical archway above carrying sacks of fruit and grain, some with shoes tied together at the laces and slung over their shoulders, others with cardboard suitcases mended with tape. Once through the border the signs switch to Spanish but the landscape is still dusty and gently rolling and dotted in creosote the color of mint. For a while he drives along the main thoroughfare with the river running between the lanes bright and flat as a mirror.

  He thinks not of Henry exactly but of the white heat of the Squaw in the afternoons. Next to him on the bench seat is the little pistol and eighteen hundred dollars from the envelopes Muriel stashed behind the mirror and a hundred more from the coffee can. The money will last a long time if he is careful, though how long it will take he can’t say. A mile into the city he turns off the broad avenida and drops into the tourist section where the buildings are low and plain, but each has a lighted sign erected in a wing high up and out over the street. Above him the tangle of letters and scaffold seems to arc across and meet in the median like a bower. Along the curbs are cars parked nose to fender for many blocks ahead, though it is still only seven in the morning. On the sidewalks are fruit merchants and mariachis in sombreros and charro suits so dark and studded with gold they catch the morning sun and appear to wave, and wandering through these figures are tourists and sailors and women in broad-brimmed hats like movie stars.

  He takes Agua Caliente east and away from the thicker traffic. He pulls into a parking lot attended by a
man in a green jumpsuit too tight in the shoulders and crotch.

  “Five cents to park, ten cents to leave,” the man tells him through the rolled-down window of the truck.

  “That’s the very definition of getting you coming and going.”

  “How it is,” the man says.

  Julius pays him the nickel and parks the truck in the corner of the lot in the big shade of a tipuana. The sun has risen without his notice. He steps out and looks across the city, which is bigger than he thought and cleaner. On the street are flower sellers propping up their stalls and canopies, ringing them with dried asters and ristras coated in polish as if preparing for some sacrifice. In their aprons and sniptoe boots he sees them as stage dressers against the ragged prospects of this city, and the moment feels unreal to him. A sorrow he remembers from years before, looking at the first green coast of Asia, when he learned how small his childhood had been. He had not known he was clumsy and vulgar and unimportant until he’d seen new places like this, and men with other languages, and cities with their toothy skylines. Just across the border another world.

  He walks out to the street and finds a hotel and pays for a private room. He’s already lost a week and thinks he should look for Henry right away but the room is so quiet and clean and he is afraid. He washes his face and neck and arms in the bathroom down the hall, and when this doesn’t seem enough he runs a few inches of hot water in the tub and drapes his clothes on the toilet and sits with the water just over his hips. He hears footsteps on the landing and someone passes the door but does not open it and then another door opens and slams shut. He leans back in the water and closes his eyes but his clothes smell rank and the tap drips and he can hear the pipes laboring in the wall. He empties the pockets of his jeans and the breast pockets of his shirt and dunks the clothes in the water and scrubs them together. When he lifts the jeans the water is grainy with dirt and he twists them and hangs them back over the tank, then drains the water and scoops the silt toward the drain and runs another inch. He sits again in the hot water and wrings the socks a second time. He recalls a night at the Squaw when the heat was broken by clouds from beyond the dam and he sat in the tiny hotel bathtub with his shoulders out of the water and his knees pulled up to his chest. Then Henry woke up in the other room and came in and sunk down in the tub across from him, and for a few minutes they sat in smiling silence with their soft cocks blurred and floating, half-hidden by their updrawn knees, as Henry scooped the cooling water and tossed it over his face and head.

  Julius thinks through the little part of the city he’s seen and wonders where the cardrooms are and the hustlers and where he might begin. The sliver of soap is as blue and useless as skim milk and breaks in his hands, so he washes his armpits and crotch with one sock then hangs them both over the spout. He sits in the water until his shoulders prickle. Outside the sound of rain starting and stopping, the faint draft of the sea. He dries with a washcloth thin and pilled as carpet, then sleeps through the day and all night, and only when he wakes does he think of his brother and Muriel and what he knows about her now.

  * * *

  —

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING he walks out into the crowd of flower sellers and ambulantes again preparing for the day. In the parks and plazas he looks for young men alone in the shadows or spread out deliberately among the pines, but he does so with a tourist’s soft eyes. All along the fringes and among the ravaged trees are Indian women in serapes and young boys selling gum and loose cigarettes. The only men he’s likely to find in the morning light are pickpockets and bail bondsmen in their wide-bottomed slacks, but he considers Henry’s early rising. When he enters a park somewhere in the Marrón he sits a moment on a cement bench and rests on the heels of his boots. There in the corner, under a canvas tarp sagging between a tree and a scarred statue of a bull, are three men standing cocked, dark jeans pegged at their ankles and their bootshafts uncovered. One wears a slouch hat in a dun color like hay. Behind them and across a narrow street is a bodega painted silver, with a corrugated awning bent back at the edges and showing rust. He feels their gaze drift toward him. He looks past them to the shining silver front of the bodega, which reflects back the men’s shapes in a wave, their jeans blurred gray and their dark hair. When he feels their attention turned somewhere else he slides his gaze across them long enough to see that none is Henry.

  Along the edge of the park early pigeons catch sunlight in their wings, tossed up occasionally by passing handcarts covered with fraying tarp, pushed by men in heeled shoes. A man and a woman walking slowly without speaking. Between Julius and the three men runs a cement path embedded with green stones and oblong pieces of glass, as if to evoke a river draining slowly out to sea. Julius looks up again and sees one of the men coming toward him. The man sits next to him on the bench. He wears furiously clean boots, each stamped on the toe with the image of an eagle.

  “Five or eight dólares, depend your interest,” the man says.

  He rolls his eyes up so far his chin follows and the effect is of violent dislike, of Julius or this work or the day itself. The clean bronze of his neck is like a lathe. Julius finds a ten and whisks it in his fingers. The man smiles. He inclines his head toward the alley and Julius know this is where he will be taken, should he name some pleasure. He smiles back at the man to buy himself time. The two men underneath the tarp share a glance. One holds out two fingers. The other scrapes a cigarette from his pack and the first man lips it and leans forward for a light. The rest of the park is empty except for the pigeons and from a distance Julius hears the bounce of an old truck and a sound like chickens squabbling. Next to him the man in the eagle boots is waiting.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Julius says finally.

  “Bien. We have lots,” the man says.

  He nods to his compañeros and they drop their cigarettes and move out of the shade slowly. One slackens his gait into a showy twirl and smiles.

  “Someone specific,” Julius says. “Específico.”

  The man frowns.

  “Como todos. That is my fate,” the man says and though this is a question and not a statement Julius laughs carelessly at the way it sounds. The man holds up a hand. The two compañeros stop in frozen motion, each with one foot hitched back off the ground midstep and their arms bent in a running posture. Then they smile stupidly and let their bodies loosen.

  The man says, “Maricón, no worry.” This is a term Julius knows. The man says it like a statement of fact, not a threat, but it still makes Julius bristle. If he can’t find the words he will be asking for sex and this is the transaction he most wants to avoid. If he wanted trinkets or cigarettes he could get those now, but not this new thing he’s after, this particular other person. He can smell the man’s shower, hard soap, tooth powder. He imagines a room sparsely furnished but clean as sunlight. A fire escape, flowerpot for butt-ends along the rail, the man with his smoking hand out the window. Julius is sure of these things, or their equivalent. But he does not know how to say what he needs to say to find that part of the man. He cannot simply ask about Henry as if he were a brother or cousin, nor can he lie and say that Henry is either of those things. Differentiating brotherly from romantic love is an industry in such places. He might ask for a young Mexicano with a wounded arm but beside him the man radiates impatience.

  “No hay problema, lo siento,” Julius says, and when he says nothing more the man stands and moves in front of him and looks down. Julius looks back at him and then around the empty plaza. The two hombres are standing at an occupational distance and speaking closely to each other but Julius can feel their attention. He thinks of the men who robbed him in Torrance and the other men he’d seen lined up against hotels and along the alleyways. The power men lost in such transactions and the dignity he’d lost, the two cat-faced men, their hands on each shoulder holding him. He thinks again of Muriel and it occurs to him suddenly that she must have won hugely to pull off what she
did. She had gone secretly to that track and placed her eavesdropped bets until she had enough for her own private life. What a trick she had pulled then. What fantastic improbability.

  The man in the boots whispers, “Como todos. Está bien,” and Julius knows he should go now, that he will not get what he needs this way.

  “Lo siento,” he says again.

  He leaves the bill on the bench so he won’t be followed and rises and says, “Muchas gracias,” and slips between the man and the bench. He takes a long route through the plaza and back around to the main street where the shopkeepers have started rolling out their awnings. At the corner now is a wooden oxcart hitched to a donkey painted in broad stripes like a convict, the man beside it small as a child and wearing a burlap maize sack cut out below the armpits. In the cart are hothouse roses the color of the sky above. As Julius walks away he looks behind to catch the man following, but no one seems to move at all in the lengthening daylight. Glancing sidelong at the faces in the trees and doorways he sees no one he has ever seen before.

  * * *

  —

  THE REST OF that day and through the night he walks. He will not risk the street peddlers or the hustlers, though this leaves only children and women and tourists and the slow drawn policeman on the take. Along the thoroughfares he stops in parks and cantinas, hotel bars decorated to look like the parts of Mexico the tourists will not see, jungle motifs and hacienda blues, papier-mâché masks hung from the vigas and ristras on the lintels, and in these places he parses out the money for information only middling and wryly offered. The tourists know nothing of anyone or anything and the cantina owners smile like Eddie Cantor and roll their eyes. Walking alone he is marked repeatedly by Indian boys dressed like rustlers who offer to take his photograph among the drooping palms. If Henry had taken the train or hitchhiked from Barstow he would have arrived four or five days ago, at most. Of course it’s possible that he has not come at all.