On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  Up the beach to the north, three men come into view. In the dark they appear motionless, though they grow as they approach like shadows in the afternoon. A tall man is among them and it might be the same man, it might be Henry. Julius rises from his place under the lean-to and walks out where the moonlight peeks through the clouds. On the other side of Paseo Costero, a woman comes out onto her stoop; one of the men calls her over and the group huddles a moment. Then the woman crosses back and enters the house and closes the door firmly. Then the street is empty.

  The remaining figures separate and in the fringe of darkness left by the streetlights Julius can see who they are but not the state they’re in. He does not raise a hand or call out and his heart moves down inside him and he listens to the sound of their boots in the sand. He is sorry to have stood and revealed himself, but maybe some chance could be salvaged. He can feel by the pitch of the air that the wind is rising and the tide is coming in. When they are a few yards away the tall man turns to the others and says something Julius can’t hear and all three men stop. Dick and Chrissie light cigarettes and stare out into the dark street and then the tall man says to Julius, “Here you are then.”

  Julius does not answer. Close up the man is wiry and straight-shouldered, with legs like a dividing compass set at a nautical mile, and all at once Julius knows who he is.

  “You’re looking to shine us again,” Dick says, but not confidently.

  The tall man spits into the surf. One night in the Parque Santa Cecelia Julius had taken from this man a thousand pesos and a bar-cap and he had tossed the bar-cap over the wall of the slum. He remembers now the man’s childish demeanor and the magazine he was reading and his hands raised like binoculars against the setting sun. He had not pleaded or threatened as other men did but instead asked what kind of round the little gun accepted. And Julius had told him .22, though each knew that was impossible, and the moment between them was dangerous. That afternoon or perhaps the next day Julius gave the thousand-peso note to the heart man in the Plaza Veinte de Noviembre and felt absolved.

  “Your pal here got his boots back,” Julius says and his voice is fragile and too high. He nods at Chrissie’s feet. Chrissie points one foot out then the other. Dick leans against Chrissie in some approximation of affection. Drink and night have made them nervier and less ridiculous, though still they seem to Julius like two ends of a frayed rope. He wonders how he might escape this and how much time he has to do it.

  Chrissie says, “You all have a good supper?”

  The energy between the boys darkens. Julius tries to keep his body loose and inviting. He did not imagine being watched, though perhaps he should have.

  “Shrimps,” he says. “Must’ve come right out of the sea.”

  “That’s generally where they come from,” Dick says.

  The tall man has not spoken again. He thumbs his cigarette into the surf and it hisses then sinks.

  “You waiting for someone, or you want to play for studhorses this time or what,” Dick says. Chrissie stands with his eyes barely open and a dark chuckle shaking his shoulders. He seems too drunk to speak or walk; he keeps dropping his cigarette in the sand and picking it up again.

  “Just out walking,” Julius says. “Nice night for it, except for this rain.”

  Dick sighs as if charmed by this banality. Julius glances toward town and then behind him and the street is still empty and it’s a long run to the rooming house on dry sand and still the dark figure might return. He thinks of the man’s hands curled to his eyes and the way he’d kissed Julius so long even after he’d pulled the gun. As if the tall man can see Julius remember this, he cocks his head and looks Julius over. Then he laughs. “Hello again,” he says.

  Chrissie finds some string back to the world and straightens up and says, “Say what now?”

  The tall man does not explain but looks at Julius mildly. Not disbelief but the opposite, as if Julius has been expected for some time and his presence now is just some touching confirmation. The way Julius has imagined Henry looking when Julius finally found him in some card game or bar. The way he’d felt all that day and night.

  “Nice to see you again,” Julius says. Perhaps he can be saved by forthrightness the way he was saved before.

  “Is it now,” the man says.

  Julius thinks of the way this man handed over the money like someone making an offering. He’d asked about the little gun with such fond unsurprise.

  “You got out of Tijuana then,” the man says.

  “I didn’t find what I was looking for there.”

  “I don’t seem to recall what you was looking for,” the man says.

  But before Julius can answer or say Henry’s name the man places both hands in the center of his own chest and says, “Like I say, even with a twenty-two you’d have to shoot someone right between the eyes, and that weren’t no twenty-two.”

  Instantly Julius knows that he has lost his chance for anything other than what happens next. The coin has fallen the wrong way. The fear of this moment is mixed with the anticipation of it, so much so that it feels almost wanted. The man moves forward with his hands still folded tenderly; Chrissie is barely present, but Dick picks up the whiff of danger. He takes Chrissie’s arm and they too move forward so that Julius is hemmed. Julius looks up and down the empty beach. He can no longer hear music or men’s voices in the streets beyond. He could run or protest or put up his fists, but none of those things feels like what he’s meant to do.

  The man reaches out for Julius and takes both his hands in his own and for a moment they stand like betrothed reciting their vows.

  “It’s all right,” Julius says.

  “Oh, not a thing’s all right,” the man says and drops Julius’s hands. His look is terribly sad. For a moment he pauses with his palm against his cheek, as if deciding something final, and then he leaps at Julius and both men fall to the ground. Chrissie jumps wholly into consciousness and squats by Julius’s shoulder and helps the tall man haul him up. Then all three men come at him and begin to back him down the beach and toward the lean-to.

  Julius calls out first Chrissie’s name, then Dick’s, but neither man stops and the fact that he knows their names will not make them stop. They’ve been waiting all night and maybe all their small lives for this violence. So Julius says his own name and then Henry’s and he tries to tell the man that he’s sorry and he reaches in his pocket for his money. Then the man hauls back and strikes him with a closed fist. When he falls, the man kicks him once swiftly in the face. Julius crosses his arms over his head and shouts for the man to stop, he tries to say again that he’s sorry, but the man knows everything he wants to know and Julius’s mouth has filled with blood and is pressed against the sand. He stands again with his fists up but the boys merely laugh and flank him and soon he is on the ground again and curled protectively, no longer trying to rise. The pain comes and astounds him. And yet he feels the lightest sweetest feeling, that he is in fact recognized and known. In his way the man has carried the story of Julius and Henry, even if he does not know it. Should Julius die in this dark town, from this beating, there is the smallest chance that Henry will know not only that Julius is sorry but that he is loved, and this is the end he’s been waiting for.

  Julius tries to say, “I can tell you the whole story. I can tell you what it’s about.”

  The tall man does not answer. He kicks Julius once in the ribs and again in the face. For a moment Julius feels his consciousness falter and there is Henry again and this time Julius does not shake him away. Henry behind the man watching, a shadow in Julius’s eye, like the aphotic rim of the ocean beyond which there is only impalpable life, which Julius saw on Henry’s face that night at the Golden Nugget and other nights before that when he was distant or unkind. Vaguely he feels hands inside his shirt and his jeans pockets and someone pulling at his boots. In Henry’s imagined presence a terror Julius kn
ows is not imagined, and inside that terror is a state of perfect understanding. Julius sees the sand and the moonlight and hears the surf lapping, beyond the breakers the soft suck of the trough against the ocean floor, beyond even this the fizz of moonlight on the resting surface.

  Then a car turns onto Paseo Costero without its lights on. The man sees it and waits for a moment, and when the car slows and flashes the high beams he kicks Julius once more in the face, then runs across the street. The two boys run in the other direction, down the beach. The man leaps into a yard lush with winter citrus, and as he disappears behind the house a dozen lemons brush off the branches and fall into the shining grass. The driver does not see Julius crumpled on the beach or does not care to get involved and drives by him. Julius blacks out with his boots halfway off and his heels stuck in the bootshafts like slipped plaster and the rain falling into his upturned ear.

  * * *

  —

  DAWN WAKES HIM but he lies a long time without moving, finding the parts of his body one by one until he is sure he is alive. The tide is hauling out and his clothes are wet and stiff with salt. When he opens his eyes he is staring into the wide face of a cat, ragged with rain. The cat opens its mouth in a cavernous yawn, then snaps it closed with a clicking noise that lights the beach. Julius presses up into a sitting position on the wet sand; the cat moves away at this motion and mews, then circles back, and when Julius reaches out he makes the mewing noise the cat has made and finds his tongue is gummy with blood. The cat seems to smile and curls underneath his reaching hand. He sees the false fronts of the shops gleaming along the shoreline and he remembers the bills slatted in his boots. He reaches up and the blood is sticky. He feels a throbbing behind his eye and inside his nose and rain falling coldly in his wounds. He stands with some difficulty and thumps into his bootheels and cups his hurting ribs. As he stumbles up the beach, the cat follows blithely behind.

  * * *

  —

  ALL THAT MORNING and through the day, Julius sleeps at the rooming house. He does not dream but he rises to the surface of sleep and what he sees is like dreaming, the curtain pulled closed and shadows across it lengthening and fusing out. He does not see Henry again and he fears seeing him. He fears that there are only so many dreams he might be granted now.

  When he finally wakes it is late afternoon, the final Sunday of Advent, and in the dusty sheets he’s left a sunburst of blood. On the next cot, someone has placed two towels and a cup of milk and a hunk of dark bread. He stands and goes to the small window and slips the curtain back. The light that enters is bright and wintry, but by the thinness of it he can tell the rain is coming again and twilight not far off. The blood has caked his hair and one side of his face. The smell is familiar, old blood and dirt, wartime, Kansas summer.

  He runs a shallow bath and wipes an arm of steam from the mirror to shave. The cut on his head is long but not deep. His nose has been broken and under his eyes and along his cheeks the bruise is noxious and dark. When he turns the razor along his jaw, the blade pulls away black freckles of blood. Along the rim of the sink a line of ants ambles toward the scrap of soap; Julius lays the razor in their path and for a few minutes watches them traverse it, their tiny bodies doubled by the steel flank, their confusion at its warmth. He leaves the razor there and dresses in his old shirt and throws Ralph’s filthy white one in the wastebasket. He pulls on his dirty jeans and pads back to the room in his bare feet, feeling better, hungry. He turns a chair to the window and sits and drinks the milk and eats the bread. The streets and the shops along the coast are decorated in bunting and thin garlands of gold.

  Out in the shallow bay a dozen boats are crowded together in a flotilla, connected by lanterns hung from the stemposts. Their decks are packed with men and children and women in bustled dresses white as noon in the lantern light and against the calm sea. The passengers watch as above them fireworks burst into streamers and drops of light. On one of the boats a band plays holy music. Julius watches as a man walks onto the deck of a boat from the southern dock, stepping quickly and lightly from boat to boat, moving among the gathered people as a woman might move through a bar toward the exit, until the bow of the farthest boat rocks under his arrival. The man disappears among the others and the fireworks drip like elm leaves across the sky.

  As children Julius and his brother had gone with their father to the reservation north of town to buy fireworks, each year on the Fourth of July. Among the rows of folding tables their father paced up and down, his fingers laced behind his back, studying each box. So little of any luxury had been theirs that they could not help a feeling of attachment to every possible choice, and as their father passed each box of fireworks they leaned on their toes and hoped but knew better than to ask questions. Always their father would choose the cheapest box, as if his long wandering through the aisles had been a penance.

  Once back home they waited out the long summer evening for the right degree of darkness. Julius remembers this part as a feeling and not as an event. Trying to remember the particular color of the evening, the time the sun disappeared or the positions of their bodies next to each other as they waited, was like trying to separate water from water. What he recalls is his father’s nearness, how painful it was to wait with someone else for something that always happened. The sun setting. The night coming. When the darkness did come they set the small firework on the slab of concrete by the bootscraper and lit it. The small explosion and the reference of the light and the smoke trailing thin across the dusk. Red and blue balls rising fifteen feet then falling apart. Every box of fire a surprise.

  Outside the music rises in pitch and a cheer goes up. Julius realizes he has been thinking of his father without remembering that he is dead. The old shirt he’s wearing is wet at the tail, and when he lifts it up he sees that he is bleeding. He stands with some difficulty and crosses again to the cot, then lifts the towel and holds it to the gash in his side. He touches his head and he is not bleeding there and his teeth feel sanded but fine. When he takes the towel away he sees that the wound is deep and the flesh aches where it pulls apart. Across his rib cage is a dark bruise in the shape of a clothesiron. He sits again by the window, leans over painfully, and picks up his boots by the shafts. He turns them over and peels the bills out along with the little gun. He remembers how, when the firework was lighted, his father jogged backward and away from the fuse and positioned Julius so he could see the lights but held him so he would not move too close. He recalls his father’s hands on his shoulders with all the devotion the man could offer. In the sky beyond, the small bombs were made meaningful only by the darkness they’d anticipated, temporary and without impact, only beautiful, only theirs.

  When he tries to locate Lee in this memory he cannot, though his brother must have been there, on the stoop or near the garage, watching. He knows he was loved more than Lee, in the way that troubled children are worried over and adored. He understands this suddenly. There is terrible joy in this, and a familiar shame, as if being loved is a gift that confers not safety but reparation. His brother must have known this even then, even in childhood, and carried it with him, and no wonder he wanted to marry and build a life without that burden. Lee might have blamed their father’s death or the night in Okinawa when Julius fought the man who’d been his lover or the discharge that followed. But now Julius wonders if it was really this inequity, the way love came to Julius and not to Lee, the way Julius spoiled it, though Lee held so easily the other good things of the world.

  Julius pleats half the bills around the pistol and puts this damp sachet in his bootheel. The other bills he folds into his pocket and then he presses back into his boots and stands slowly. He sees with the clarity of the failed how ridiculous a thing he thought he was doing. To attempt to be found, or to find someone else, this way. He has almost no money left; the tall man from the park and the two boys have taken it, along with the truck keys. But he thinks of the way the man folded his h
ands over his heart and how he’d used those same hands to hurt Julius and feels only that something necessary has been amended.

  Downstairs the lamps are lighted. The tables are empty and the chairs turned up and resting on their seats. A record is playing and he approaches the desk with the towel pressed to his forehead and corners it up demonstrably.

  “Lo siento,” he says.

  With his broken nose and bruised face he must look like someone back from the dead, but the woman does not regard him with fear or suspicion. She reaches out and taps her ash into a bowl. She has the beautiful dark eyes of this country and a long braid like a single unbroken tress. From the turntable comes a funereal song Julius does not recognize. He pats the front of his shirt and pantomimes an elliptical thread from the buttonhole; when the woman does not respond he pinches two fingers together, drawing them away from his pursed lips, then makes a circle with the finger and thumb of his other hand and guides the imaginary thread through it.

  “Button,” he says, and points again to his shirt.

  “Ah,” she says, holding up a finger. She slips behind the curtain and returns with a plastic basket. Raking through bobbins and pins and wax thimbles, she finds an off-white thread and a brown button and hands these to Julius. He holds the placket out and plies the needle through and around a few times, and though the button hangs loosely it holds the shirt closed. He bites through the remaining thread. Through this procedure the woman watches with amusement and though she could surely do better she does not reach out to help.

  Then he lifts his shirt and points to the wound there. She frowns at him. He holds out two fingers. She gives him the cigarette and he takes a long drag, then presses the cherry to the needle and rolls it around. He threads the needle again, and with the cigarette hanging limply from his mouth he stabs through the torn lips of his flesh and brings them together. The maneuver makes him cry out and hunch, and the woman comes around the counter and holds the shirt for him so he can use his other hand to pinch the wound closed. He threads through in tight circles. The awful feeling is familiar; he remembers the man in Okinawa and the blue forever of his eyes. When the wound is stitched, the woman leans down and bites the thread for him and ties it off. Julius looks down on the fine part of her hair and the light thrown against it and his pain is significant. He thinks of the milk and the bread and with one hovered finger he traces the woman’s part without touching her while she looks down tying the thread. Then she stands with the bobbin and he hands the needle back and she crosses again behind the counter. He folds the towel against the wound and presses it there, and with his other hand he reaches into his back pocket and takes out a few of Muriel’s bills. Among them is a playing card and he picks this out and pushes the bills across the table. When she pushes them back he says, “No, ma’am,” and walks out into the rainy street.