On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  At the lounge the men suffer and despair at the weather. Dusk comes early and with sudden force. One night Muriel is woken from a dream of Artie Cleaves, whom she has never seen. In the dream he is small as a child, wearing pink silks, and he is kneeling over the fallen horse while the cups and ticket stubs drop from the upper boxes. Against the fine buckskin hide, the jockey’s silks appear translucent. Inside the dream Muriel sits in the grandstand, and as she watches, the buck begins to rise. Artie Cleaves stays kneeling on the track until the horse is all-fours again. Then he lies down in its place, between the horse’s legs. The horse passes lightly alongside the jockey’s small body and keeps going, stepping in high action down the fairway. The ambulance comes and the doors open and out comes the woman in the sable coat, from the bar. She looks into the stands and catches Muriel’s eye and grins.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY Muriel calls in sick and drives the car as far as State Street and parks under a streetlight. Again the day is gloomy and the sea seems stirred by some offense. Muriel goes into the bar and sees Rosie talking to the same woman. The woman’s back is to the room, but the coat and her dark hair are unmistakable, and as Muriel enters she lowers her chin among the rough shoulders of the other patrons and sits a few feet from the edge, where the bar curves back toward the wall.

  She orders a drink and covers one side of her face with her resting palm. For a long time Rosie and the woman talk of the track. They are beyond the edge of the kinked mirror and Muriel cannot see them. In the other noise of the bar she hears only pieces of their conversation but she won’t risk moving closer. She is not sure what she means to do next. She thinks of that first day at Del Mar when she’d taken the bus all the way around and sat for an hour at a diner. She had known nothing then. At the races that day she watched the sailors in their heavy slacks and the piqued horses as if she were new to every worldly sight. Rosie and his friend are engaged in the same kind of speculation: the health of jocks and their weights, the horses rumored to be up at claimers. But the horsemen’s grim prediction is replaced by Rosie’s untempered joy, the woman’s clear low voice.

  Rosie says, “And maybe that’s no winning choice but you can’t help but see the future in it.”

  “I suppose I could help it, but I don’t want to,” the woman says.

  At the front now are men in cuffed pants and misshapen hats, young and able, playing some game with the carnival horses. One man presses the horses forward with the billiard bridge while his companions uncover dominoes and call out the numbers. There seems to be some wager on this contest: When a number is called, a horse moves forward, and one man celebrates while the others scowl and pull pennies from their pockets and toss them onto the table.

  More talk covered over by the noise of the room, the woman’s voice lowering and then her laughter rising, until Muriel hears the tones of departure. She feels Rosie move behind her and when he’s passed she turns to watch him. She thinks suddenly that she could make him see her, that she could call his name and when he turned toward her voice she could smile and stand, and ask him where she might find the Chester Hotel or if she is already there. And when he balked or tried to turn away she could ask him about the time in Tijuana when half the pit ponies got rainscald from being boarded uncovered in the monsoon season. Or the time when his mother called to tell him she’d taken up with a no-name trainer from Snake River and did he want to come ride in the Indian relays for a bit of cash. Rosie would look, and look again, and see finally his brown-haired waitress with the Midwestern build, and he would know how long and how carefully she’d been listening.

  But when she turns back to find her purse and her cigarettes, the woman has again taken the seat next to her. She orders a drink in the same low voice, then turns to Muriel.

  “You’re back then,” she says.

  Muriel watches Rosie duck out the door. The woman’s perfume is dusky and masculine. Next to her, Muriel thinks, she must look as friendless as an apostle.

  “Now you must be a gambler,” the woman says.

  “Still no.”

  “Your husband then? Absent again.”

  The woman tosses her coat on the bar and shakes out her bangles and sighs. The wide lapels of her blouse come together low, suggesting some regal affect, though Muriel can see the open back and the tender skin under her arm. Muriel would never wear such a thing, though her mother had worn peasant blouses in bright patterns that fell off her shoulders in summer.

  “Maybe you don’t gamble but surely you read the news,” she says.

  “I suppose.”

  “That poor Russian dog died.”

  “They knew that would happen, didn’t they?”

  “What gets me, first creature to go into orbit and it’s a terrier.”

  The woman’s face is exasperated and seeking, the way men’s faces sometimes were at the Heyday, when they were feeling righteous.

  “Better a dog than a—” Muriel begins, but the woman interrupts her.

  “Russian?”

  The woman snorts.

  “I just imagine that dog,” she says. “I don’t know if you know dogs but I’ve known a lot of them. And I can see that dog clear as day, giving exactly no goddamns about space. You can count on dogs for that. They are not ambitious.”

  This time when the barkeep comes Muriel accepts the woman’s nod, and when he returns with two cool glasses she tips hers up.

  “Hey, Tony,” the woman says to the bartender. “What are we calling this place nowadays?”

  The bartender tilts his head. The woman grins at Muriel.

  “‘Tony’s,’ same as always,” the bartender says.

  “There you go,” the woman says, and drains her glass. Then she looks at Muriel again and Muriel tries to smile but she’s disappointed, though if this little bar had been the place she sought that would have saddened her, too. She tries to imagine the form of the question, if there’s some way she can ask about the hotel without telling the woman anything about herself. There must be an art to searching, but she does not know what it is, only that it is not as simple as listening. Now the question seems naive, and too small to hold its own implications.

  “You know they ran a book on it?” the woman asks.

  “On what?”

  “The dog.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “What would happen to it.”

  “What were the odds?”

  “Twenty to one the dog would make it into orbit, hundred to one he’d come back down.”

  “What about dying?”

  “Nobody wanted to pay out that bet.”

  The woman raises her eyebrows and Muriel laughs the scrupulous laugh the woman clearly wants, that aligns Muriel with her. The woman smiles again and winks.

  “It used to be enough to lay odds on the one outcome, win or lose, but now you can speculate about how long it will take for the mail to come, or whether John Foster Dulles prefers oranges to apples,” she says. “You could get half the population to bet on a race between raindrops.”

  “Why do you suppose that is?” Muriel asks, and she really wants to know.

  The woman takes a thoughtful drag and drains her glass.

  “Oh, who knows. Suddenly you care about something you’d never thought of before and never would care about, just because there’s odds on it.”

  The bartender plunks two more drinks in front of them and gestures to the corner, where a man in a clean white jacket sits drinking alone. The woman pushes both cocktails onto the bar mat and shakes her head and the bartender leaves the glasses there, but turns to the jacketed man and shrugs. Then the woman looks back at Muriel.

  “Though I’d be more inclined to say it’s because it heightens the suspense.”

  Muriel pats her purse and reaches for her cigarettes, and before she can find her lighter
the woman has clicked hers open and reached out. Muriel dips to light the cigarette.

  “It bothers you that it’s a terrier in particular?” she asks.

  “Terriers are hole diggers and rat killers. Terrestrial. You want to send a dog into space, send something that howls at the moon.”

  The woman turns her head slightly and looks over her own shoulder, as if in Muriel’s sight line were the rebuttal to this sad assertion. Then she turns back and laughs and waves her hand and returns to herself. Muriel likes the slight tilt of her head, the bright consideration in her face. Suddenly Muriel does not want to lower herself to ask what she’s come to know. She wants instead to simply sit here, with this woman in this place. She beckons the young bartender over. “Don’t let any man buy us anything,” she says. “If anyone asks, explain that our husbands are coming any minute. Say they’re merchant marines, or ex-cons. Elaborate at will.” She slips the corner of a five-dollar bill under the bar mat. She had seen her mother do this once, when Muriel was young and they were waiting at a restaurant bar for a man Muriel no longer remembers. She suspects that the bill means less here than it did in Holton, Kansas, but she likes the gesture of it, the way it confers to the woman her full attention, as it had once conferred her mother’s.

  The woman turns toward Muriel and closes the distance between them. She shakes the ice in her glass, then reaches in and plucks one piece out. For a moment she holds the ice in her fingers until it wets her palm and then she pops it in her mouth.

  “How long until he shows?” the woman asks. For a moment the ice stalls her voice, then she cracks the ice and swallows.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Marriage is a lottery, isn’t it? Maybe not for men, though more than it used to be,” she says.

  The need to stop talking this way floats between them. Muriel lifts her glass and lets the ice click against her teeth.

  “Gail,” the woman says.

  “Muriel.”

  They talk a little longer about the dog and the satellite but the mood has shifted between them. They remark on the weather and Muriel tells her about the house they’ve built on the river bluff. Soon their glasses are empty. Gail does not mention the man Muriel is supposed to be waiting for and Muriel doesn’t either. When Gail insists on driving her home Muriel does not protest, though she’ll have to double back to retrieve the Ford. Gail collects her coat and the five-dollar bill and leaves a ten in its place. The five she hands to Muriel, who folds it back into her purse.

  Gail drives an old Packard the color of slate and inside it is creamy with warmth though the day has chilled. For a moment they sit in silence as the engine wakes and idles high, then Gail pulls out onto the coastal street and drives north with the windshield wipers fanning.

  “What did we do before cars?” she asks, and she means everyone but also specifically them.

  The woman drives her back the long way, through neighborhoods opening out in narrow vistas along the shore. In the barrio Gail turns a horseshoe across the centerline to head back south and asks if Muriel minds a scenic route. Across the vista the sun lowers captiously and Muriel nods and Gail smiles and cuts across the midway and onto Catalina Boulevard and up the cliff and there pulls neatly to the side of the road. There are no streetlights and the sea is visible as a white fringe that stretches into gray at the horizon, the sunset pouring down over it, a little too fine for the mood between them.

  “Look at that,” Gail says. She turns in the driver’s seat so her back presses against the door and she can stretch her legs out from beneath the steering wheel. She does this so quickly the move feels self-protective. Behind her head the dramatic reflection of the sunset, the feeling between them of standoff or threat, which Muriel dispels by looking out toward the ocean. To a woman from the plains, the sea from these cliffs is too much. The heart leaps out for it, a reluctant pragmatism draws the heart back.

  Gail says—with the candor that seems her trademark now, cultivated like a trademark—“Funny. I never meet anyone.”

  And Muriel sees clearly the opening this stranger has made. She is not certain what it means, but she knows it is there, that if she is going to ask she must ask now.

  “I heard you talking.”

  “Oh?” Gail’s lips turn the sound into an embrace.

  “I’m looking for a place,” Muriel says.

  “Aren’t we all.” Gail leans forward.

  “A specific place,” Muriel says.

  “Not Tony’s?”

  Muriel shakes her head and Gail laughs. For a long moment neither speaks.

  “It’s a hotel. I don’t know if it still exists or not,” Muriel says finally.

  Something odd and refusing enters Gail’s face.

  “And how did you hear about it?”

  Muriel doesn’t answer.

  “Why do you think I would know?” Gail says.

  “You just seem like you would.”

  A beat of silence as Gail considers this.

  “What brought you to Tony’s then? If you’re not a gambler?”

  “Only the rain.”

  Muriel considers the foolish hat and her damp hair. She is not sure if she feels exposed by Gail’s scrutiny or embarrassed by her own plainness, but either way she is out of her depth. This matters much less to her than what might happen next.

  Gail leans toward Muriel conspiratorially and her face changes again.

  “Do you really know what you’re asking?”

  “I think so.”

  “How’d you find that bar back there, really?”

  “I asked around.”

  “You did not.”

  Muriel wants to lie but she feels sure that Gail will call her out.

  “Okay,” she says. “I know someone.”

  “Who do you know?”

  “You’ve probably met him. Gambling type. Carries a little pistol on the end of a chain.”

  Muriel pantomimes smallness between finger and thumb.

  “I’ve met no such man, and I know all the gamblers.”

  “Well,” Muriel says.

  “Such a thing seems hardly useful.” Gail’s voice is flirty and low. The sound of the engine is a humming breath in the quiet of the roadside. Gail rests her chin in her hand and looks past Muriel to the sky beyond. Muriel can smell her hair which is dark and loose and the pitched sweetness of her perfume, which has caught the smell of the rain and changed slightly, into something softer. They hold the moment between them like a shell.

  “Well, maybe you can introduce me then,” Gail says.

  Muriel can’t believe what is happening. In her beige sweater and practical dress she feels for a moment like a churchgoer, left with mild rapture in the pews. She leans forward. A look of disbelief on Gail’s face, which turns to clear amazement. Muriel tries to imagine closing the distance and leaning into Gail’s fine mouth. In her life Muriel has kissed only her husband, though she has witnessed hundreds, perhaps more—kisses her mother delivered or accepted, moments at the lounge in which a couple parted or reunited or met that very night. Young women and their cowboys in the movies. Somehow she can see all of these moments at once. From this catalogue Muriel draws up one she remembers well: Ingrid Bergman’s index finger hooking Cary Grant’s ear in a film about murder, the sea below and behind them, draining away along the smooth endless curve of the shore, the city also arched in tall buildings and hotels, much like the scene below Muriel now, in the quiet western sunset of Point Loma. But in the absence of love and of any man the movie kiss takes on the atmosphere of comedy. Ingrid Bergman laughs the delighted, vulnerable, slightly cruel laugh she is clearly suppressing for Cary Grant, the laugh that is ready for his sudden distance. In Muriel’s mind Ingrid Bergman laughs into the anticipating circle of Gail’s pert mouth.

  “Maybe,” she says, to both Gail and herself.

 
Gail leans forward and their noses are nearly touching. The question of the hotel has not been answered but another has been asked. Muriel rises on her palm until her chin is against Gail’s lips and her mouth at the tender skin at Gail’s temple. Gail’s coat falls away from her upraised shoulder. It is only a touch and can be taken back and Gail’s fingers behind Muriel’s ear might be easy enough to forget, too. They both know this and that the boundary is receding. That to touch any further than this would mark out a confession. Muriel lifts her chin and brings her mouth to Gail’s mouth. She hopes Gail will resist. Her resistance would give Muriel power, would make Muriel feel certain, in control of this. But instead Gail lowers that slow inch and presses her mouth to Muriel’s and the kiss is tender and long. Outside there is no sound and no cars passing. The bench seat of the Packard sets them at an odd angle and presses their faces together but keeps the rest of their bodies apart and because she wants something else now, she wants the woman closer, Muriel hauls onto her knees in the seat and wraps an arm around Gail’s shoulders and draws her in. Gail leans her head back and laughs. Then she comes forward and kisses Muriel again and her palm finds Muriel’s breast and brushes Muriel’s nipple which hardens and sends down a line of heat and both women make low noises of surprise, but then the sound of an engine knocks against the cliff behind them and a set of headlights condenses on the road. Muriel’s desire slows all of this, and when Gail pulls abruptly away she doesn’t understand at first. She has forgotten her search and the time and the time of year. She feels suddenly very much like a woman.

  The car passes and the moment has changed. Gail retreats and pulls her coat closed and seems frightened. Muriel would not have thought she could be frightened.

  “I can’t stay out any later tonight,” Gail says.

  “Me either,” Muriel says, though she wants to and she could.