He walks out of the marina and scans the horizon, the tall buildings and the naval base and the steam-pipes to the north, the bridges rising just east of them, and follows these downtown. In a few hours he can catch the nine-thirty bus to Anaheim and hitch from there, to L.A. or even further north. He waits in a plaza where a half-dozen boys are throwing dice. For a while he sits at the edge of the game watching and enjoying the boys’ English. The rest of the plaza is empty; a seawind catches against a ball of overhead streetcar wires. Clouds coming in to cover the last of the warm and brilliant day. The dice players switch the game so two boys throw together into a circle drawn with the hot butt of a cigarette while a third calls out numbers. Julius asks what this game is called, and they tell him Man on the Moon. He can’t get the gist of it, though the other boys whoop and raise their fists, and soon his eye begins to wander. At the back end of the plaza he sees a single stand of feeble trees, paper sacks flacked against the trunks and gulls among the roots. Then he sees shallow figures and knows what the trees are for. He watches the figures move inside the stand. Their motions seem like pantomime or shadow play and some other man might misread them, but Julius does not. He watches until the two men come out of the trees, and when they’ve passed through the plaza he stands and follows them across the street. The men stop a moment in front of an old building. The windows are boarded and painted black and what must have been fine architrave has splintered through the century. A man in a low white hat nods to the two men and opens the door and the men disappear inside. Above the flat roof of the building Julius can see the sea pressed out to the horizon. He remembers something Henry told him long ago about San Diego. He rises and follows the two men and when the man in the hat looks him over Julius turns in a slow circle with his arms out and grins and the man waves him through without smiling.
It is only eight o’clock, but the hotel bar is full of sailors and gritters and fine boys with long necks. He’s never been in this place, but he’s been in others like it. He asks for a glass of whiskey and leaves a quarter on the bartop and turns to watch the dancing men. He can hear their shuffling footsteps as they dance and the noise of cars outside. He stretches his arms so the new flesh at his side pulls and hurts and he imagines it breaking open. He wonders if his body will ever feel good again. On the floor of the strange hotel, the men hold each other. None of them looks his way, though he can see in their faces the wonderful fear they feel. He thinks that this fear is the first part of desire. That terror, like longing, is a door one opens—whatever disaster or pleasure arrests one’s motion does nothing to dispel one’s cravings, which spring back unencumbered, like a hinge. Here is the allure of love and of chance, to give the lie to reformation.
He asks for another whiskey, and when it comes he stands and passes through the dancing men to the lobby desk. He leans over the desk and picks up the phone. He knows how close his brother is, but not what Lee must think has happened, in the time he’s been gone. That Julius has fallen in with thieves, maybe, or that he is dead, and perhaps Lee should think these things, perhaps they are true. Then he wonders if Muriel has been found out and what she might have said to Lee. He presses the tongue and stands another moment with the receiver in his hand. Then he sees behind the desk an aluminum hatch like a garage door. The bottom skirt is lifted a few inches and Julius hangs up the phone and comes around the desk and rolls it up. On a corkboard behind are notes and photos and business cards tacked to the board and a few bits of ribbon and matchbooks listing phone numbers or names. He’s not seen anything exactly like this but he knows what it is. In the service they’d had what were called dead-letter walls where they posted lost mail. Though they all wore canvas jackets with their names and ranks and every movement was rostered, still there were men who were lost at sea or whose bodies were never found. How often they had stood around on low days and read their love letters aloud and with great solemnity. He feels now as he felt then, that the declaration of love is a gift offered only to the missing. No wives or girlfriends he knew, nor mothers or fathers, would have said aloud the words they wrote to those sons. It surprised him how rarely they found a letter or photo from someone who should not have sent it, a mistress or another boy back home, that the men who died or disappeared were mostly forthright and ordinary. The things their people were desperate to say were the same things people everywhere wanted.
He looks another moment at the young faces, then tips up his glass. He wonders how long the dancing will last. Then his eye is drawn to a poker chip in the bottom corner and he leans close and recognizes the lettering on the printed felt, from the Aces High Casino in Boulder City, where once he and Henry ate steak and kissed above the great dam. He smiles but the light feeling of coincidence lasts only a moment, because below the chip he sees a slip of paper with his own name scrawled out. Above this a request for forgiveness. For a moment he looks in disbelief. Of course it wasn’t he who wrote this, so the apology must be for him or some other Julius. But then, in the corner of the paper, he sees a scratch of words in a different hand, as if they’d been added to the paper without unpinning it: Im sorry to. Please come back here and meet me. Below this the letter H drawn big and slanted and then an arrow pointing to the chip, which is worth five dollars.
Julius claps his hand on the desk. His empty glass rattles on the desktop. He steps out and back into the lobby and looks around. Still the music plays; no one is watching him. He moves back to the desk and looks again. He lights his last cigarette and tosses the empty pack and the matchbook on the desk as he stares at the paper. He feels a sudden urge to take these things and hide them. He unpins the paper and the chip, puts both in his pocket, and walks out the front door.
He walks many blocks without awareness until he finds himself in a neighborhood of bright craftsmans and small lawns. Out front are men with hoses and women gathering children and the smell of dishwater. He looks down at his dirty clothes and nubby boots and knows he stinks of whiskey and the sea. He turns onto a cross street and walks further south until the houses give out to dirt lots and brick storefronts. He takes the note and the chip from his pocket and studies them. In his own hand these items have a sentience that excites him. The first apology he could dismiss as a mistake, a note for some other Julius and some other absolution, to which some other H responded or which Henry mistook. But the chip from the Aces is unmistakable. Then he turns the paper over and sees on the other side a racing form from June of 1957. He holds the paper out and looks at it from this distance and brings it back. In the upper corner the name Chester Hotel and a few men’s names and by the sea and he remembers this from Muriel’s envelope, folded among the other papers there. The whole story slips into place and he can’t believe it.
Night is coming blue and heavy now. He looks at the street signs and past these to roofs floating back into the cityscape and realizes that he has walked himself lost. He folds the note around the chip and puts the little packet in his boot. Across the street three men sit outside a barbershop with their knees spread far and several yards up the sidewalk a solitary dog stands watching them. Julius watches the dog and then the men. A half block from these men a child stands alone at the curb. He is blond as wheat and tough-looking and he sees Julius looking and doesn’t care. He leans back and throws a rock into the empty street, throws it side-arm as if the street is a lake and he is trying to skip the rock across. He is seven or eight, Julius guesses, that age when a personality emerges but no real sense of will. The boy finds a loose chunk of sidewalk with his toe and leans to pry it up. Julius crosses the street and the boy watches him. He stands with the ball of cement in his hand and Julius waves and begins to speak, though they are still ten yards apart.
“Hey now, can you tell me how to get to the train station?”
The boy nods and reaches out with the same hand that holds the cement and gestures southeast.
“Are we north of the marina or south?” Julius asks.
“North,
” the boy says. He drops the cement from shoulder height and it breaks into many smaller pieces and he gathers them and holds them appraisingly in his palm and picks one out. He bends his elbow and reaches back and skips the piece of cement across the street and Julius turns his head to watch. It drops in a sink of asphalt and goes no further. Then the boy takes another and skips it and this piece jumps three times across the whole width of the street and then a fourth time over the curb and bounces high near the barbershop.
“Fucking A,” the boy says.
“Fucking A,” Julius says.
The boy’s face flushes with pleasure but he does not let it last. He tosses another piece and it skips and dies away. Julius takes in his crop of blond hair and his dark eyes. The disorienting knowledge that the boy will grow into a man, a man someone might love and, in loving, would imagine as the child he is now, as lovers often do. The strange eroticism of the lover in a past without one’s presence, the lover before he is caught in another’s sight line. He remembers his sense of Henry, those long afternoons at the Squaw, as a child somewhere hot and dusty while Julius himself was a child far away, his wonder at how they were joined in time. As if the past were simply a story they told to establish suspense.
There is only the one explanation. And while it is improbable, it is only the improbable that gives the ordinary meaning.
“Be careful out there, kid,” Julius says to the boy.
The boy looks up but says nothing and Julius walks on and soon the street curves south. The sky has deepened a rich purple and the houselights are coming on; the streetlamps punch through the sea fog in small discs. He crosses a railyard and slips under a chain-link fence and comes up to the station from the back. He asks the stationmaster the fare to Boulder City and it is far more than he has. He asks the man if he can work for the rest and the man laughs and waves him away. Then he asks for fare partway and the man quotes him numbers from here to Barstow and here to Needles and a half-dozen other stops. Julius empties his pockets and sits on the ground below the ticket window and counts the money while the man leans on the counter and watches him through the iron grate. Finally he looks up and asks the fare to Los Angeles—at least he knows where the card games are there, or where he might hustle a five—but he doesn’t have enough for this either. He’s already missed the evening bus and there won’t be another until tomorrow afternoon. He wonders how long Henry will wait, how long he’s already waited. He thinks of the terrace overlooking the dam and the way they’d danced and the kiss they shared in the raw desert darkness. The stationmaster points and Julius turns and sees a family standing behind him with their suitcases lined up neatly by size and he stands and thanks the man and walks away.
He walks north along the sidewalk and holds out a thumb and for twenty minutes cars pass him without slowing. Then it occurs to him what he must do and he shakes his head against it. He does not want to see Muriel or his brother this way and he doesn’t want more of their money. Already he has taken from Lee his wife’s secrets and her love and he doesn’t want to take anything else. But she had been there and now she knew and the thought amazes him.
The dark is coming and he is nearly downtown again when finally a milk truck pulls to the curb. He looks in the window and the man driving is middle-aged and clean as linen and husbandly. He tells the man where he wants to go and the man says he’s in luck and Julius climbs over the wood-rail ribs of the truckbed and settles among the crates of bottles. They drive through the derelict neighborhoods, then past the great park where the trees drape heavy and pale, and then into the river valley.
At the turnoff Julius taps the roof and hauls out of the truck and waves a thanks to the driver, who heads off in the other direction. He walks a long mile down the road and his chest hurts. At his brother’s house there is a truck in the drive but not the Ford and this surprises him. It is well past ten o’clock now. He pauses at the start of the driveway and looks around the yard. He does not see the horse or the trailer he’d hauled her in. The grass has sprouted where the lumber once was, and the house looks finished and new. The driveway has been overlaid in white cement. The porch sills are planted in meager begonias. The front window is uncurtained and he can see through to the room beyond. There a man and a woman he does not know sit on a yellow divan watching television. Julius can hear the program and the sounds of children and soon two towheaded boys come roaring through the room and the man hollers after them. The woman turns to speak to the man and it is clear they disagree about something they know is intractable. The man touches the woman’s cheek in reconciliation and she skirts away. Then she yawns and the man watches her yawn and his face darkens. He reaches out and places his hand over her open mouth and clearly he means this comically, but the woman sees the menace in it. They shift away from each other then. For a long time Julius watches them watch the program. The children do not run through again and soon the couple rises and the man turns off the television and they move into the hallway and do not return.
Now it is very late. Julius wraps his arms around himself and walks back up the road. Above him the citylight is delicately held at the horizon. Up the road is another house and he steps onto the porch and knocks. He imagines his knock sounding through the house, and when no one comes to the door and no lights come on he walks around the house and finds a side window and sees through it a pair of mudboots and a box of nails but otherwise nothing at all. He walks to the back and tries the door there and finds it locked but a hard shoulder pops it open.
The house is hot and has not been aired in some time and smells of dust. He peeks around the corner and the parlor is empty so he goes in and reaches up for the light switch and flips it and the light comes on and he squints and turns it off again. Along the walls are moving boxes stacked two and three high. He peels one flap back and finds practical cotton pants in light colors all folded crisply and unfrivolous underthings and white T-shirts. In another are books in Spanish and a family Bible in the name Gutiérrez. He walks through to the kitchen and opens each cabinet door and feels along their sides and under the shelves and then beneath their overhanging width. He finds a few coins and chucks them up. On the counter a pile of chicken feathers gathered in a spindle. He checks the pantry and pockets a tin of crackers and opens an olive jar and eats three at once, then puts the jar back. When he finds nothing else he moves quietly back through the parlor and into the bedroom. Here it is warmer and still furnished, though the bed is unsheeted and the mattress tipped to the wall. He opens the bedside drawers and finds rubber bands and a Reader’s Digest and a photo of a girl in jodhpurs in a landscape much drier and more ancient than this one. He drops to his knees and flags his hand beneath the dresser, where he finds a single quarter and a matchbook. He palms these and puts them in his pocket.
Then he steps into the bathroom and lifts the seat and unzips. He wonders where his brother has gone and how he will find him. Whether Henry is still waiting or if he’s moved on, and how soon Julius might get there. What he will do once he does. When he’s finished, he opens the mirrored cabinet and finds a jar of petroleum jelly and a tube of ChapStick and a small pink bottle of perfume labeled in another language. In his palm the bottle has a receptive look, like a muscle. A woman’s small vanity. He feels a tenderness for its owner. He lifts one of the plastic shelves and there taped to the bottom is an envelope addressed to Sandra Gutiérrez from a woman in Coeur d’Alene. Inside the envelope is a twenty-dollar bill and a single pressed flower long ago faded brown and no letter. He smiles at this luck and takes the bill and tapes the envelope back. He walks through the house and out into the yard and turns around to press the door flush.
The night is cool but not cold and he follows the valley road where it runs along the river. To the southwest, a narrow cut of light marks the city. He has twenty-five dollars now and some change. The hour has grown very late, but if he catches the morning train to Barstow he can improvise before another night comes. As he w
alks more slowly he sees new driveways graveled into the lots west of his brother’s house. He walks between these drives and a house frame catches the moonlight and he recognizes the shape. It is a few weeks from windows and doors and wall plaster, and when it is done it will look just the same as the one his brother built up the road, where the young family lives now.
Then, at the edge of the yard where the dirt is cleared and flattened, Julius sees first the trailer and then an awning strung from it. He shakes his head. Between the trailer and the trees is his golden mustang. The trailer door is propped open and the floor inside is laid with dry hay. Around this makeshift shelter is a split-rail fence made from hedgewood of varying widths and splintered. He looks up at the house frame again and understands.
He walks across the yard and into the frame of the new house. He looks up through the crossing wood. He grabs an unfixed post and shakes it and dust falls and covers him. The house is lovely and well-made. He climbs a corner post and up into the rafters and sits looking out across the river. From this height he can see the other lots and the farmland to the north. Miles away, an aerosol of cloud stretches through the gray irradiate night. He thinks of his brother sitting just here and seeing the same things.
On Swift Horses Page 31
