On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
lunch at a restaurant where she works a second job on the dinner shift. She sits in a booth in the corner and studies her notes and the previous day’s racing form. She might rise and walk then, along the rolling line of surf. She thinks of horses, and her mother, and the day she was married. As she walks she collects shells and beach glass and slips them in the pocket of her sweater. Before she returns to work she unfolds the pocket and dumps these same items back onto the beach, so all that’s left is a rim of sand in the pocket hem. At ten Lee walks to the restaurant from the factory a few blocks away and they go home together, arms linked like young lovers and not like married people, because they do not know each other very well.
THEN, IN EARLY DECEMBER, Muriel has a night off from the restaurant but tells Lee she’s working. In the drugstore across the street from the Heyday Lounge she buys a pair of sunglasses she considers ridiculous. They cover her eyebrows and half of her nose and make her look much older, like a woman in possession of a fortune or a married lover. She buys a sunhat and a thin scarf printed with flowers. She removes her sweater though her arms show and she worries they will burn in the low winter sun and make her sleep difficult. She takes a twenty-minute bus ride to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The bus winds around Jimmy Durante Boulevard and from the windows of the bus she can see the grand entrance to the track, the high hedges and the waving flags. A statue of Bing Crosby, the track’s founder and financier, gleams hard and gold in the afternoon light. In San Diego in those days it was said that Crosby used the track to impress Grace Kelly, who hated horses but loved men. Muriel lets the bus wind back around to Camino del Mar and gets out to have a coffee in a diner along the beach. She smokes and looks around as if she is waiting for someone. Her shoulders are warm and the bridge of her nose sweats under the sunglasses. The sea is soft and cold-looking. From the beach several others watch as a woman wades out to the breakers and stops. Muriel thinks of her mother, who had told her about the shore at Galveston, where she had been once with a man Muriel knew was not her father. Her mother said the sea was smooth as a lake and brown, and that someone told her it was filled with jellyfish. Muriel watches as the woman at sea turns and lifts a hand to her forehead and seems to regard the shore in contemplation of some final leaving. It is a curious thing, being married, how Muriel must think of this odd afternoon errand as something done for both of them, an adventure Lee will share in one way or another. She had thought it would be difficult to lie to him but she found it easier than their daily recitations of the truth. She had expected for herself the same power her mother found in men. But she often finds her husband’s gaze embarrassing.
Finally she stands and walks up the seaside street and back across Durante. She passes the high hedges and the tall gates and walks past the turf club and the runs. At the turnstile she crowds in with another woman and two men. The warden in the booth waves them through. She climbs the stairs behind the three others and lets them break off in the stands. From this height she looks around. She is surprised by how many people are at the track and how many of them are drunk. The sailors clump together and slap each other’s backs. Their heavy white pants hang to their heels and they laugh and push back their vigorous hair. There are men in ripped shoes and young boys in bow ties and there are many other women too, Muriel is glad to see. She sits under the second-floor balcony in the shade and covers her hair with the scarf.
From the stands the horses are not what she imagined. They are tall and obdurate and only lightly controlled. A dozen of them are paced out and lined behind the gates. The field is looped first in grass then dirt, a third smaller track built for harness racing and unused. Across the field the stables are lined in courtly rows, and from this height Muriel can see the sharp shadows thrown by the palms, over the hot-walkers and the low-roofed stalls. The smell of the dirt and the stables and the wheaty smell of the grass are familiar to her, though from the sea comes a punkish wind. She has a gimlet and studies the racing form, thinking of the words she’s heard the horsemen use, the names of trainers and jockeys. She watches the men file to the betting windows along the aisle. For a long time she watches without seeing any woman approach the glass and she begins to worry that perhaps she is not allowed to bet at all. The horses rear in their gates. Their bridles clang against the gates and sound like vespers. Then the gunshot and the race begins. The men in the stands yell instructions at the huge dark horses in a language of violence rolled in with endearment—summer up, take it, ride that, brake baby. The dust and the noise are thrilling, and Muriel stands without thinking and watches the horses turn the track, the pounding of their hooves at odds with their agile speed. When the race ends the men rise and punch the air, then tear their tickets in half and throw them to the ground.
After the race the crowd calms. Muriel moves to the windows and the cashier does not look up and when she speaks he is not surprised. She plays two dollars on the next race, on a horse named Pastoral, whom the men at the bar called canny and somber. The odds are six‑to‑one and when the horse crosses a length ahead she is up twelve dollars. She can hardly believe it. She takes her ticket back to the man behind the glass, who smiles this time and counts out the bills. She drinks another gimlet and no one notices. She lets the next race pass and then she rises and leaves through the tunnel. She takes the bus back downtown, her money folded away in her purse. Lee comes to collect her at ten and they walk home together. By then the drink has come out of her and she is tired, her dress dirty with sea air and car exhaust. The wind off the ocean blows down the alleyways and makes her shiver.
Lee says, “You should have worn a sweater.”
She leans into him and his solidity is a fact that seems weighed against possession. He puts an arm around her and she considers the scarf in her bag, which would warm her. Though he would make nothing of it, she does not want him to see it, it is too much a part of the day.
Across the street a barbershop is closed but still lighted, a man sweeping up, his silent figure inside the fluorescence like an image on a screen. By the door of the shop a boy of seven or eight is still out at this late hour, throwing rocks across the empty street in some game of his own devising. When he sees them he comes forward with his hand out. Lee looks at her and then at the boy and makes a gesture meant to indicate penury. The boy turns to Muriel and she sees the fox in him and he knows she sees it. He starts to sway back and forth and then to dance. His pockets are full of rocks and they make a sound like dice. Then the sweeping man disappears into a back room and the shop lights go out and they are suddenly alone with the boy. In the dark street he lifts his knees high and slaps his little palms against them, and though he does not sing he seems about to. He holds Muriel’s gaze and she laughs and pulls her purse up and brings out a quarter and hands it to him. Lee reaches out for her arm but does not stop her. The boy takes the coin and gives a look to Lee, who says to Muriel, “Oh for heaven’s sake,” in the embarrassed way his Lutheran mother might have said it, if he’d ever known her. The boy turns from them and dances back to his post at the curb; Muriel thinks she will remember him a long time, as the recipient of her good fortune.
In the hallway of their boardinghouse Lee stops to call his brother from the shared telephone. Most often Lee does not reach his brother but tonight he does. Muriel listens to his quiet voice on the phone, laughing and then pleading, the way he is even when Julius is merely mentioned now, an older sibling’s curse, to envy the freedom of the younger man and also believe he will suffer from it. It is the same voice he used in the street and he would use this voice on her again, if he knew. And if she took him to the track he would not understand, he would scowl at the dirty men and the fragrant, snorting horses.
THE MORNINGS in San Diego have a particular tang, the ocean air sweetened by the drift of tanker fumes. Muriel and Lee are among the many thousands arriving each month, husbands and wives but mostly just men, bright with Western promise and their own survival, back from the Pacific. In general a masculine city, Muriel thinks, sailors and black ships and swirls of oil in the ports. The coastal hills cut a jagged line at the horizon. The great fig tree in Balboa Park spreads its roots like an apron of snakes.
At night when it is dim and she is tired she often mistakes the waving surface of the bay for wheat, and this she prefers to the sea, the low intimation of the Plains glimpsed sidelong. Days when they are both off work they walk together through town and along the thoroughfares, collecting cans and bottles for the junkman. South of Balboa Park the interstate is being pulled through by cranes and paddle scrapers and a hundred men a day on the iron trusses. Often