On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  She walks back up to the plaza and finds the Ford. Inside she locks the doors and starts the engine but leaves the headlights off. Her hands are shaking and she might cry but she feels exhilarated and fully awake. The windows are fogged and she wipes this away and looks out at the plaza where men still gamble and the busted streetlights look like graying teeth in the night. Another police car passes but more slowly and pulls up to the curb across from the hotel. Again she thinks the word, lover. Suddenly the word itself seems built to admit meanings she could not have anticipated. Her mother must have known there were such places as this even if there were none in the small town where they lived. She had been to El Paso and Galveston and twice to Wichita. She had known men who sat all night in barrooms playing cinch and come-and-tell-em for more than what they earned. Among these men and others in the factories she must have heard of those who met quietly and very carefully in this way. And her mother might be proud of her for looking, for knowing this, or her mother might be ashamed, who could say now.

  It is past nine o’clock; Lee is still working. She drives toward the river through the poor neighborhoods and under the freeway site and down onto the county road. The neighbor’s kitchen is dark, the porchlight out. Muriel parks behind the cypress where the car can’t be seen from the road. The sky has darkened to a color like damp silk and though the report was for fair weather the rain has returned. As she walks to the door, the rain beads coldly on her neck and arms. She knocks on the door and the kitchen light comes on and Sandra opens the door. A concerned look.

  “Hi there,” she says.

  She broadens and lifts her arms against the doorway. The doorjambs are sweaty with the rain and Sandra’s palms against them make a wet brushing sound.

  “It’s raining,” Muriel says.

  Sandra’s shirt is worn pale at the elbows and along the collar, a peek of skin between her belt and the fabric of the shirt as her body stretches up and across the doorway.

  “It is,” Sandra says and drops her arms and steps forward.

  Muriel can smell the fecund wet of the mud and the fresh rain coming down over it and even the dry quiet of the kitchen beyond which smells of woodfire.

  “Are you all right?” Sandra says.

  “I thought I might buy some eggs.”

  Sandra’s look is worried. “Okay,” she says. Then, “You got seventy-five cents?” and steps back to let Muriel through the doorway.

  Inside the kitchen is cold and the fire in the parlor chinked to embers. A single cup on the table rimmed in old coffee and the kettle turned upside down in the sink. Clementine peels on the counter, a shock of feathers across the doorway. Muriel feels exposed and strange seeing these half-done tasks. The gray light through the curtain cuts the room and traces the table and the doorway, making their shapes visible but not their edges. She apologizes for the hour. Above the sink the window lets in the scant moonlight and the trees sway in the arbor beyond. She sits and stretches her legs beneath the table. She wishes she could heel off her shoes and she realizes how tired she is. She remembers she is bare-legged and she must smell like smoke and cologne. Sandra boils a kettle for coffee. On the counter a weather radio catalogues the price of hay and gasoline. When the price of chickens is called Sandra flicks the volume up and listens, then flicks the radio off.

  “Those eggs just went up three cents,” she says.

  “Surely I’m grandfathered in.”

  “We did make a deal at seventy-five. I suppose that has to stand.”

  The kettle swoons and Sandra fills two cups but does not sit. Muriel closes her eyes and sees the globe lights flickering and the man Peter’s sweet face. Then the men kissing, then the police car. Sandra stands with her back to the counter and she has the keen but apprehensive look of a pickpocket.

  “Tell me a story about this place,” Muriel says.

  The kitchen light casts down on Sandra’s black hair and her hair reflects it. Muriel traces the curve of her mouth and then down to her narrow shoulders and tries to imagine what might happen next.

  Sandra looks at her and says, “Okay then. You remember I told you before that those lots used to be olive grove, but I don’t think I told you the rest. Before that it was all Spanish mission. Before that it was Indian land and before that who knows.”

  Sandra lowers her chin and looks out as if from under some shade and she is so beautiful then. Muriel lights another cigarette and holds out a second one and Sandra takes it. Muriel pops the match and Sandra leans to her. She lets the match touch only a moment, then leans away.

  “Did you live here when there were olive groves?” Muriel asks.

  “Oh no, that was my father’s time.”

  Muriel lifts her cup and coffee spills down her wrist and she sets the cup down again and shakes her hand and licks the coffee away.

  “But he saw them, and his father before him would have known the Franciscans, the last of them anyway. What my father always said was that they had these big blouses like women or Arabs and they walked out to the river in the morning and fed the fish. That the fish could hear them coming and shaking the cans of feed and the fish would gob up to the surface. Hundreds of them, like trained dogs. The place where they gathered looked from above like boiling water. Of course he hadn’t seen that, but his own father told him.”

  For a long moment neither woman speaks. Muriel drinks the coffee in two swallows and thinks to ask for another cup, but instead she’s going to do the next thing. She can hear the next thing like a sound in the room.

  “It’s funny,” Sandra says, “but I think sometimes that I remember that, too. But it could have been something my grandfather dreamed and no one at all actually remembers it.” She looks at Muriel levelly and the look goes on a long time. Then Muriel rises and goes to her. She reaches out and touches Sandra’s waist and when Sandra does not shrug off this touch Muriel comes closer. Sandra lets her weight come away from the counter and into Muriel’s arms. She fingers the hem of Muriel’s blouse. Muriel touches the dent of Sandra’s lower lip with the flat bed of her thumb, then kisses her. They kiss until Sandra pulls away and looks at Muriel with delight and Muriel shrugs, as if anything she’d done could not be helped.

  “I wasn’t sure about you,” Sandra says.

  “Are you sure about me now?”

  “I’m not.”

  “What else do you need to know?”

  “First off, if Idaho isn’t the Plains, then what the hell are the Plains.”

  “I’ll show you on a map.”

  “Not now, though.”

  “No, not now.”

  Muriel kisses her again and the kiss goes on until Sandra turns and looks out the uncurtained window and moves to the side and pulls Muriel with her. At first a series of touches awkward in their plying. Muriel’s mouth at Sandra’s neck, Sandra’s hand on Muriel’s breast—questions about consent and possibility, answered by other touches. Muriel wonders vaguely about kitchens and the quiet way they take people’s secrets but leave them no place to lie down, which is what she wants most to do. As if in cognate feeling Sandra kneels and looks up at Muriel and lifts the hem of Muriel’s skirt and twists it to one side and holds the fabric against Muriel’s thigh. She kisses Muriel’s knees and shins and then the insides of her thighs and Muriel bends one leg onto the chair rung so her body opens. Sandra eases away Muriel’s panties and finds her with her tongue and lips, and Muriel presses her hands to the counter edge for balance. From above the sweet part of Sandra’s hair and the little moonlight dabbed onto it like paint. Outside the noise of the river and the wind in the trees and the rain falling. Muriel imagines her shadow through the kitchen window and her head leaned back and in that simple motion is the fact of her pleasure, though Sandra would not be seen as its source. It is too much, feeling this and also imagining it.

  “I can’t stand,” Muriel says.

  “You can�
��t stand it?”

  “No.”

  But Sandra doesn’t stop. Muriel’s legs shudder but she holds herself up and when finally she comes she bites through the soft flesh of her lip and the blood in her mouth is a tonic. Sandra rises back to her and kisses her. She tastes the wound and pulls away and thumbs Muriel’s lip back gently, and here their lovemaking ends with the bloody echo of its beginning. Sandra goes to the bathroom and returns with a fold of gauze. Muriel sets this inside her lip like snuff.

  “You are practical, aren’t you,” Muriel says. The gauze lisps her voice.

  “You aren’t?”

  Of course she is. But she feels she has just invented something. That she has told a secret that is also an invention. She has bet on horses and been where men dance together and now this. She looks at the peels on the counter and the empty kettle and the wash water left to chill and the coffee cup. A scene like a frontier tableau, the cheerful rind of the clementine, chicken feathers along the baseboards where they’ve drifted, no light but the dim rainy sky and the lowered fire casting on the walls and ceiling, the reticence inside a house in the late evening. While outside it is 1957. Over her head the unseen contrail of an airplane, the arc drawn by the metal satellite, asphalt and engine oil, rubber, nuclear fission. How delicate she feels. How out of time.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE ALL THIS, when Muriel was a child. She and her mother were still Catholic then. In the parlance of the day they were called snappers, distrusted perhaps less for their beliefs than for their weekly abstinence from meat. Because her mother was contrarian and aloof Muriel felt she was required to relish such slurs, as if they proved some fixed nobility. The church her stepfather belonged to was Free Methodist, and on Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings the men and women of that small congregation gathered in a Masons hall on folding chairs. Though their aims were virtuous they sang without much feeling, and after attending once Muriel’s mother refused to go again. If she wanted an upright piano and grape juice and paper fans, she said, she’d go to a barn dance in Bird City.

  The church they attended instead was large and beautiful and at the edge of the old part of the city. In a region so Lutheran and sane the church was an excess more unsettling than disliked, as if its beauty were a mandate on God’s own aesthetic. The pews were cherry, stained almost black, and the altar gilded and set high above; the candles left circles in the eye. Above the altar was a window of stained glass, round and red and divided into eighths by iron bars. During the sermon and the liturgy Muriel sat and counted the segments of the window clockwise and then back, a ritual to pass the time. The church was built with the apse at the south and the red window caught the light through the sun’s declination, as ancient temples were said to do. To Muriel the window had the presence of an eye, perhaps God’s, perhaps the architect’s, perhaps neither of these. Often she noted the changing colors of the glass as the service went on. The transepts and the nave were lined with stained glass panels more complex and beautiful, depicting Christ’s death and resurrection, one in which He lay with animals of all kinds and another in which John the Baptist held out an imploring hand. These stories she knew. But the red window told another story. In its simplicity it captured best the seasons. In autumn the low light made it burgundy and the high white light of summer revealed the thinness of the glass and in winter there was often no sunlight at all and the window was nearly purple in the candlelight. Yet it was always just there, segmented and still. The light through it varied but the window itself did not. Muriel in her youth could think of no better metaphor for God, though she would not have been able to explain this and could not have shared it with her mother, whose own beliefs were frangible and strange and not easily resolved by the figurative.

  All that week Muriel leaves work early and parks behind the line of cypress. Across the ceiling of Sandra’s bedroom the light comes in the afternoon, reminding her of those brief years when her mother was married and they drove into town for Mass. One afternoon Muriel turns to Sandra and tells her this, about the window and her mother.

  Sandra says, “You were a deep kid.”

  “I wasn’t, though. I was just very often alone.”

  “But I’m more interested in your mother.”

  Muriel laughs.

  “What happened to her?” Sandra asks.

  “Heart attack.”

  “She must’ve been young.”

  “She was.”

  “You were young. You still are.”

  Muriel nods.

  “Did you get to see her?”

  “Only after. She was in another town, with a man.”

  “You miss her.”

  “That’s how it is, isn’t it.”

  They make love in the full daylight, the only light available to them. They are caught fondly by the sunlight, lengthened and blocked by tree limbs and the dresser and the curtains and the objects on the dresser, which cast long shadows against the wall and bend at the ceiling. Muriel is casual with Sandra’s body and with her own. When Sandra comes she is aporetic and rescued and she does not close her eyes. Muriel loves the way this sounds and feels and she works toward it slowly and with perfect attention. After, Sandra runs her fingers through her long hair, untangling the day’s braids, then braiding them back more tightly. She does this once, then again unbraids them, unhappy with their symmetry. As she shakes loose her dark hair Muriel smells the well water, the simple soap she uses, the smell of her skin and its many accumulations. Chicken feed and dust and rain and sweat.

  * * *

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON SANDRA SAYS, “It shouldn’t be this easy.”

  “It isn’t all that easy,” Muriel says.

  Sandra rises and pads to the kitchen without covering herself and comes back with a glass of water and the ashtray.

  “Lee will be all right. He’s got that look about him,” she says.

  “He isn’t your husband.”

  Sandra sets the ashtray on the bedside table and drains the glass and caves over Muriel, her lips cold against Muriel’s neck.

  “What about the rest?” Sandra asks and Muriel doesn’t answer her. They touch and bring sex close again. Muriel turns them both so that Sandra is beneath her and this makes Sandra laugh and rise receptively.

  “I got this place. It’s paid for,” she says then. She kisses Muriel’s eyebrows and the corners of her mouth and lifts her hips against Muriel’s hips.

  “We may have to leave this house, sometime,” Muriel says.

  Sandra dips into Muriel’s neck and Muriel slides her hand between Sandra’s legs and inside her.

  “So we won’t talk about it then,” Sandra says heavily.

  “Not right now,” Muriel says and brings Sandra’s mouth to hers.

  * * *

  —

  ANOTHER AFTERNOON Sandra says, “I saw you.”

  “When.”

  “Before.”

  Sandra twists to the side and Muriel watches her skin catch the light, her quiet spine and the soft dark cleft of her ass. She turns back and sits up against the pillows and lights a cigarette.

  “I knew you were there before I chased the horse down. I saw the lumber come. Then once the two of you in the yard. I saw your car go by a hundred times.”

  “How can you see anything from here?”

  Sandra angles the cigarette in the ashtray; she pulls on a shirt and tosses another to Muriel. Together they walk outside and stand in the shadow of the barn, where the yard meets a hill going up into a defunct dairy farm, sold the month before at auction. From here Muriel can see the housing tract and the freeway to the north, and to the east the brown radius of their yard. From this vantage their house seems like a model of a house.

  “Did you just stand here then, looking?” Muriel asks.

  “Girl, I have work to do. It was ju
st chance I saw you.”

  “You ever see the horse from here?”

  “That horse is long gone.”

  “How could she just run off like that?”

  “Horses don’t honor your hopes for them.”

  Evening is coming and the air is cool. Muriel leans against the barn and Sandra presses to her.

  “What if you had gone to García’s that day?” Sandra says and kisses her, out there in the open. Muriel turns her head. She thinks of the races and remembers the uncanny feeling she’d had, of intervention.

  “It happened to me like that once before,” Sandra says.

  “Me too.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Muriel knows she should tell Sandra about Julius. But that would mean telling her about her mother’s house and the horsemen and Del Mar. And to tell her those things would be like making a promise.

  “It wasn’t like this,” Muriel says.

  “What was it like?”

  The shadows of the cypress are nothing more than gray plashes on the ground. The sun is setting fast now and soon Muriel will have to go.

  “It was like I saw something no one ever told me was there,” she says. She kisses the tip of Sandra’s nose, to erase the romance of it.

  “Why didn’t you come up before?” Sandra asks.

  “Why didn’t you come down?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want me to.”