On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  When the boys were let off, the foreman waited at the door to hand them each two dollars in coins. Julius and his brother did not stop for day-end popcorn at the hardware store or bread for Sunday as they might have on another evening. When they turned the corner where the neighborhood gave way to factory bars and the chain-link fence collapsed under thistle they saw that their father was not in the yard. Since it was Friday he might be at church reciting Vespers and in fact he was, and though neither boy said anything the relief was palpable between them. Inside Julius found the Hills Bros. can and shook it and when he heard the sound it made he tipped the can over into his brother’s cupped palms and fished out the cigarette butts their father kept there, along with a few coins. Then Lee wiped the coins one by one on his jeans and put them in his pocket with their wages and Julius tossed the butts in the woodstove.

  They found a Mason jar in the cupboard, dabbed it out with a rag, and set it on the stove to warm. Lee took a pint of milk from the larder and poured this into the warming jar. For a few minutes the boys sat by the fire with their boots off and talked about what they might do next. The larder was empty but for the milk and the wood was low. If they didn’t hide or spend the coins their father would give the money to the church, as he had many other necessary things. The window frames gaped and the roof was caving. When the milk had warmed Lee took a long drink, then handed the jar to Julius.

  “Ain’t nothing going to fix all this,” Lee said, and his brother nodded.

  “But you have to do something, don’t you.”

  “I guess.”

  Lee covered the jar with the rag and set it back on the stove, then held his hand near the flue collar, which leaked heat.

  “I’ll get another five this week if I work two shifts on Wednesday,” Julius said.

  “Just don’t spend it where you ought not,” Lee said. Then he stood up, turned the aluminum chair over, and kicked through the base with his foot. The seat was covered in a peeling vinyl and Julius asked if it ought to be burned.

  “Who cares,” Lee said and cracked the cheap base over his knee and when it didn’t break he used the little woodaxe by the stove and split it. He fed the pieces to the fire, which burned the vinyl in a puff of green and then settled. The brothers looked at the second chair, which they thought they remembered their mother using in the evenings, though probably they had only imagined this.

  “Not that one, not yet,” Julius said and Lee agreed, though it would have burned the whole night.

  “We’ll wait for when we really need it,” Lee said. They took the chair to the small mudroom off the kitchen and covered it with a blanket and shoved it in a corner. Then Lee took the woodaxe and carried it through the backyard and past the factory fencing to where the river trickled levelly and from the fallen branches there he gathered what he could carry.

  The next morning they turned back their blankets and rose and before they fed the fire they checked in on their father, who was still sleeping, and then in the mudroom for the covered chair. When their father woke he waited several long minutes at the table and when Lee brought him hot coffee he said nothing. But when he had finished his coffee and set the cup down on the table he made with his hands the shape of a chair, though not to Lee or to anyone else. Then he went outside and sat directly on the cold ground and waited.

  All that day their father sat in the yard, though it was nearly freezing and the wind funneled down the street between the tall buildings and past their house. Only a few people passed in the weather and their father waved to each of them and wished them God’s blessings. At midday Lee coaxed him inside with cold ham sliced the night before and muddy coffee warmed on the stove, and as he stood at the kitchen counter to eat their father thanked them for observing the Sabbath. For an hour he slept in the parlor with his arms crossed, and when he woke and went back outside Lee took out a horsehair blanket and a hot-water bottle and said this was all they could do. Soon after, Julius left for downtown, where he could make a few coins shoveling sidewalks and then take those coins to the bar where they let him play monte, and he does not remember a time after that when he spoke to his father about anything of note.

  * * *

  —

  IN TIJUANA, anyone who sees Julius in the days that follow might think he is a man on a call from the Lord. If the stars fell on him he would have acted surprised but not been. Along the Avenida Ensenada a litany of sights: Girls from San Diego in dresses above their knees kicking their heels straight out to the music of the vihuela. Sailors easy in their peacetime rest. He sees more men like the men he’d met the first day, in ironed jeans thick as canvas and cuffed above the ankle, and their female counterparts in the backstreets, high-rouged. Along the avenues shell-gamers with folding tables and three-card monte played with an eared deck and boys in graceful poses and other boys kicking rocks through the alleys and girls on the fire escapes watching these boys for no reason they can name except that they are discouraged from looking elsewhere. The man in the Plaza Veinte de Noviembre with the peculiar condition that makes his heart roll outside his ribs—ribs that must, Julius begins to realize, be missing—works each day as the twilight falls. In the absence of anyone dear, each stranger is a vessel for his anticipation.

  At night he walks the parks and plazas and exchanges glances with other men while the night knits thickly, then in the strange hours between midnight and six he drives back to Santa Cecilia park, where he has discovered obscured thickets and cinder-block toilets and lean-tos of corrugated tin tilted back into the shrub. Here he finds willing men but not Henry, though he gets as close as he can to the leaning figures to peer at or proposition them, waiting for them to speak or reach out. Sometimes he takes money and sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes he takes a jacket or a watch and these he leaves at the edges of the slum, where he imagines they will be pawned or put to some ingenious use. In each case he flashes the little gun at the man he is robbing and says his own name clearly. If he is tired, or if the man he’s chosen seems dodgy, he might move away and into the open. If he finds a man particularly young he might walk up to him with a hand held out gently and offer some advice about the night, a word of warning about a thief known to work this northern section with a pistol the size of a woman’s thumb. Those boys might laugh at him but he knows they are listening. When the light begins to lengthen and the park fills with early risers from the adjacent neighborhoods, he stops to make casual conversation about the weather or the coming holiday, and if the tone is right he might ask if anyone has heard of the man with the pistol, or of another Americano much like himself, the way one might ask a stranger about the outcome of a race.

  In the daylight hours he drinks or plays cards in the many bodegas and navy bars, or he sleeps in the cab of the truck with his shirt rolled into one side window and his pants rolled into the other to block the light. He is not recognized and only twice does he see a trick again, from a distance, and then he ducks away. From the squat shops and piled garbage it is clear to Julius that this city, once bright with joy and life between the wars—when there was no booze or gambling to the north—is now decaying. It seems to Julius that Tijuana is the future that awaits all their steady surplus, that American luck will run out eventually and when it does all the cities will look like this. He thinks about telling his brother this and how Lee would sigh at him. There is some comfort in knowing he would not be believed.

  One night in the park he finds a man sitting in a lean-to with his legs crossed like a schoolboy. In his lap an open magazine and though there is no light he bows his head as if reading.

  “You got X-ray vision or something?” Julius asks.

  The man does not start but looks up slowly and it’s clear he’d seen Julius some time ago. He circles his fingers and holds a hand to each eye like binoculars.

  “You been waiting for me?” Julius asks.

  “Searching for someone,” the man says theatrically and
scans the clearing from left to right then settles on Julius again and adjusts the pantomimed lenses. “May as well be you.”

  The man smiles and lowers his hands and sets the magazine aside and rises. At his full height he is much taller than Julius and in another circumstance Julius might back away into the open field. But the man’s boyish gesture suggests not danger but something wilder and sweeter and Julius lets him come close.

  “I just hauled in this evening, from the coast,” the man says.

  “What were you doing out there?” Julius asks.

  “Lordy, you ought to go. That’s where the real fun is.”

  “What kind of fun?”

  “A fella’s kind, good American kind.”

  “Then why ain’t you there instead of here?”

  “Gotta come to town sometimes, to cash your checks.”

  The man smiles and pats his back pocket.

  “Ain’t I in luck then,” Julius says.

  Even at this distance it is too dark to see much about the man’s face. The man lights a cigarette and waves the smoke from his eyes though the stillness of the night settles it again just above his shoulder. The trees are motionless around them and the smoke hovers as if held by some force and both these things add to the odd feeling of detention.

  “My name’s Julius.”

  “I don’t need to know that,” the man says, not unkindly.

  Julius says, “What’s your pleasure then?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “I asked first.”

  And like other men in the preceding weeks this man reaches for Julius and cups his neck and kisses him. Julius digs in his pocket for the gun and brings it out and touches it to the man’s cheek. But the man does not pull away. Julius stops kissing him and pokes the gun into his ear and this catches the man’s attention finally and he leans out of the kiss. This close Julius sees that he is gray at the temples and blue-eyed.

  “Oh well,” the man says.

  Julius backs up and opens a few feet of space between them and points the gun and the man sighs. He looks at Julius as he finds his money and makes a curious face and something changes then but it takes Julius a moment to register it.

  “What kind of round does that thing take?” the man asks.

  “Twenty-two,” Julius says, and the man laughs. He hands Julius a thousand-peso note and a bar-cap and unholsters an imagined pistol and points a finger at Julius. Julius says, “Pow,” and the man turns his head as if a bullet has whizzed by him. Julius bangs the little pistol-butt with his palm as if it had misfired and regards it and then he laughs too.

  “You’d have to shoot me right between the eyes to kill me with a twenty-two,” the man says, and Julius registers the change for what it is. He stops laughing. He sees what’s underneath the man’s boyishness and it is not sweet or wild.

  “If you say so,” Julius says. He glances around for openings in the trees. His best route is behind him. But then the man turns his back and leans beneath the tin awning and retrieves his magazine. Julius moves a few feet away but when the man turns back he has no violence in him and he walks out toward the park. Julius breathes deeply and shakes his hands to get some feeling back in them.

  “Nothing ever goes the way you think it will,” the man says as he passes.

  “You can count on that,” Julius says, and watches as the man leaves the trees and disappears.

  That night Julius sees a rumbera in a movie theater on Revolución, where the beer is fifteen cents a pint. He chastises himself for his poor judgment, for failing to intuit the blue-eyed man’s true character. He worries he is not himself. The rumbera is less risqué than the cabaretera he saw some weeks before, more inventive, the women do not undress or feign undressing. Instead there is dancing, buoyant music, melodrama, and Julius finds it cheers him with its gritty confidence. The story itself is familiar: A young campirana, gifted with beauty and cara, lights out for the city. There she finds betrayal, fame, danger, modernity. She finds a man, then loses him. On the other side of this adventure she is gorgeous and shrewd, she is beyond help, she lives dancing on the edge of ruin.

  The movie is a double feature. The rumbera is followed by an American western dubbed in Spanish. Julius stays through the western, which is funnier in Spanish but less romantic. The two films are not so different in kind, and together they make bearable the long interval of evening. Together they make their own story: The mujeres led to perdition in the bright city, the men hauling out for the bloody plains, as if the girls in their volantes had driven them there. A little parable, Julius thinks. A little truth about the world, played out in the murky theater.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE BEGINNING of the third week he steps out of a spitting rain and into a mercado at the northern end of Revolución. It is just dawn. Two days of drizzle and one of ominous wind have dropped great brown palm fronds and left the plazas empty and the streets skidded in mud. Julius drifts through bodies packed and steaming in the warm rain. Three nights in a row he has seen no one at the border in Santa Cecelia except the domino players at dawn, dressed in long dusters the color of barley. His back and legs hurt from squatting all night in the trees and his clothes smell of rain.

  He returns to the truck parked along the Avenida de los Insurgentes in one of the pay-twice lots. Inside the truck is cold and damp so he starts the engine and lets it idle and runs the heater. He peels off his damp shirt and jeans and hangs them over the dash for the heater to dry, then takes the little gun from the back pocket and a wad of wet bills and lays these on the seat. Under the seat he fumbles for the envelope. He straightens the wet bills and puts them together with the others, then counts out the amount. He has stolen less than he’s spent and too much time has passed.

  The heat unfogs the windows and outside it is still raining but lightly now, and to the south he can see a break in the clouds. While he waits for his clothes to dry he buffs the pistol with the tail of Ralph’s shirt until it is buttery and even. Then he floats through a light sleep, sitting upright in the cab, until the heat grows stifling even in his underwear. He wakes sweating from a dream about Henry and his brother and knows he won’t sleep again for a long time. He takes a handful of dollar bills and a twenty and the buffed gun and he slats the dollar bills along the bottoms of his busted boots to keep the rain out. Then he kills the truck engine and steps out into the late afternoon drizzle.

  In a cantina down Revolución he sees two women sitting alone at the bar. He ponies up next to them, and when a few minutes have passed he lets some attention open between them. The women order another round of drinks and raise their glasses in a toast to each other and then to the stranger to their right. Julius raises his glass back to them and swivels on his stool and the women introduce themselves. They are housewives on holiday, here with their husbands, who are shooting pool in the back.

  “This weather,” the first woman says. She is brunette and wears a pale lipstick the color of champagne. She looks so much like Muriel from the side that when Julius catches her at this angle he draws in his breath.

  “We’d be missing this rain in Bakersfield,” the second woman says.

  “That’s the only thing we’d be missing,” says the brunette.

  “Not over, they say. Even worse on the other side of Friday.”

  Beyond them, bottles on crude wooden shelves serve as a barricade between the bar and the street. Through the bottles Julius can see the low wet curb where mariachis sit smoking in a rare moment of silence and leisure. He watches the men, outlined all at once in unfaded life, sitting and joking on the curb, as if in their rest they are suddenly visible. The women talk of the hawkers and the little boys with their Chiclet gum and the donkeys painted like zebras and the ficheras that play the bars up and down the Zona Norte.

  “Now there’s something,” the brunette says. “The men buy caps from
the bartender and the caps pay for dances, but then they buy the woman a drink, too, which you never see them drinking.”

  “Everything here is for sale,” Julius says.

  “And what are you selling, mister?” the second woman says and raises three fingers for another round.

  “You ever hear of a Sputnik cocktail?” he says and when the women laugh he tells them the punch line.

  “At the very least it can’t see us here. No one will bother to look at a place like this,” the second woman says.

  “It can’t see you,” Julius says, and as he does the brunette also speaks.

  “It isn’t looking at Bakersfield either, I’d say.”

  “It ain’t looking at nothing,” Julius says.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I know about looking is all.”

  Straight-on the woman’s face is nothing like Muriel’s but she does have Muriel’s aloofness. He wonders if that’s the right word. If it might be instead a kind of patience. It would have taken extraordinary patience to do what she’d done. It would take patience to live with the result. He thinks again of her stretching posture through the kitchen window and her slicked-back hair. Christmas Eve so long before when he’d asked her if she’d ever been in love. He recalls very little about that night but he recalls her answer.

  When he is loosely drunk he reaches past the brunette to clasp the hand of the other and asks plainly, touching the second woman but eyeing the brunette, “Would you ever marry a man you didn’t love?” and both women laugh.

  The second one says, “Oh ho! You think those are the stakes, love and romance?”

  The brunette says, “I’m not trying to marry you, if that’s what you’re after.”

  Then both of them smile knowingly at each other and then turn smiling to him.

  “You know what, pal?” the brunette says. “Maybe you get to go around here without anyone watching, but we could never do that. We’d been sitting here less than five minutes before you showed up.”