On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
path, through La Jolla and Oceanside and all the way to Oregon. A second highway crosses the first and runs east all the way to Ohio, passing through the open country they left behind. These routes will isolate the naval station and the ports, and the dark district by the railyard where the sailors take their leave, and the locals speak of this as a blessing, a cross over something vague and unseen that the future will not accommodate.
Inside this new grid the city widens up and out, over the coastal hills and north to the mesas, networks of tract housing all the way to Birdland. Lee wants a half-acre in Mission Valley, on the San Diego River, where they can build a three-bedroom and plant fruit trees. He has pinned the advertisement above the window in their kitchenette. When he and Muriel sit up late smoking and playing cards he tells her about the narrow valley, once settled by missionaries and then by nut and dairy farmers, now divided into lots graded flat and grassless. Sometimes he stands and goes to the little window and touches the pastel houses and the long furrows of cypress trees, and though he sighs dramatically and smiles Muriel knows he is not joking. She knows that he imagines her there in a real kitchen and a real bed. He believes the great future will meet them, in the new suburban landscape. They could prod that future along if they sold her mother’s house in Kansas, but Muriel will not yet consent to it. When Lee asks she says she isn’t ready, and if he worries why that might be he doesn’t say so. The truth is he doesn’t need her permission but he wants it.
It is 1956 and Muriel is twenty-one years old. Old to be starting a family, but she had waited almost a year to marry Lee and refused for a year before that. She had thought she could live as her mother had and then her mother died. Her mother had been the first woman in Marshall County to own a car, an eight-hundred-dollar Chevrolet she won in a department store raffle. She was Catholic but would not attend any Mass where the women weren’t allowed to wear pants, which left one church on the north side of Topeka. Every weekend they left Muriel’s stepfather in Marshall County and drove a hundred miles to hear the Mass in slacks. They stayed Saturday night in a motel by the highway and washed their faces and their scarves in the sink and rose early the next morning. After church they ate at a seafood restaurant across the street called Lucky’s. When rain filled the gutters they jumped from the street to the curb in their flat church shoes and stayed another night while the weather passed. Later, Muriel’s mother was the first woman in Marshall County to get a college degree and then a divorce. She died at thirty-six, a month before Muriel’s nineteenth birthday. When the paper reported her death they said that she was married and that she’d died at home, neither of which was true.
That Christmas Lee came home and brought his brother, whom she had never met. Both men owed another year to the navy and they’d agreed to pool their discharge pay and build a house in California when it was all over, but Lee took the leave when she asked. She hadn’t written him in months though she had received letters almost weekly. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. He and his brother hauled in to Long Beach and spent five days on a bus through the snowy mountains and arrived on the last Sunday in Advent. It had been just four months since her mother died.
The day the men arrived Muriel and Lee made love on top of the covers with the weather radio on. It was a balmy winter, rainy and with little snow, and even with the radiator off and fingers of steam reaching across the windows they sweated in their underwear. She asked him to wear a condom—a tube of lambskin she’d bought the week before, both weighty and soft, like an elbow glove—and he’d asked her again to marry him, this unsuperstitious Catholic girl living alone in her dead mother’s house.
While they lay together Julius returned from an errand in town and came into the yard and saw the pulled curtains and the fogged glass. He took off his heavy jacket and boots and his shirt and he lay down in the damp grass under their window. When Muriel opened it to smoke, as Lee wet his face and hair in the bathroom down the hall, she saw Julius lying there, bare-chested, staring at the window above. She startled, but being a woman generally unafraid of men, she cocked her head curiously at him. He raised one hand from the ground in a funny little wave.
“Toss one of those down to me,” he said.
Muriel hesitated but sensed in his receptive pose someone merely curious. The cigarette fell limply and landed on his shoulder. He reached across and took the cigarette without sitting up and placed it between his lips, then feigned checking his coat pockets by patting the sides of his bare chest.
“And now a match,” he said.
Muriel began to laugh, then covered her mouth so Lee would not hear. She dropped the matchbook out the window and Julius caught it and lit his cigarette and his smoke began to wind along the side of the house. He lay smoking and smiling and then with one prone hand he tried to toss the matches back up to her. Each time they fell back to the ground comically.
“I guess I’ll have to return these later,” he said.
They looked at each other a long moment and then Muriel became embarrassed and stubbed her cigarette out on the window sash and ducked back inside.
That night they stayed up with a bottle of rice liquor and Julius told jokes about Eisenhower and Protestants. Neither he nor Muriel mentioned his bare chest or the rain on his skin. He told them about Korea, about the landscape paintings he had seen burning there, stacked so that mountains burned through mountains, rivers melted onto ocean waves curling up like hair, and he said it must be like how the world began. When they were very drunk they went out and walked into the shaved wheatfield and lay under the winter sky. It was Christmas Eve. The men talked of their father and California and between them Muriel felt included in a deep understanding. Later, as Lee slept, she and Julius played cards and talked and though soon they were too drunk to make much sense she remembers the snap of the cards on the table and an alertness to her dead mother’s proximity. Julius told her about a man he knew years ago, before the navy and the war, who sold rabbits in town. The man bred them in a hutch lashed to the bed of his pickup, Julius said, each night stopping somewhere near a park or a wooded lot so as the rabbits slept they might hear the sounds of their brethren, of their own country. Curled in the cab of the truck the man slept under blankets made of rabbit fur. He was the rabbit man, Julius said, he wanted to be one of them. He had the thickest hair you ever saw, and a little nose like a rabbit, and big brown eyes.
The man drove all over town, to fairgrounds and schoolyards and to the flea market downtown, offering everywhere some different price for the rabbits, depending on how he felt about them. One day you’d see him, Julius said, and a three-pound rabbit he was snuggling in his arms would cost fifteen cents, then the next day it’d be up to fifty, because the thing had held his gaze for a full minute in a way he thought of as romantic, then that same unsold rabbit would do something terrible, like scratch his arm all up or fight with another rabbit, and the price would drop again to almost nothing. You see, it was his affection that drove that particular economy, and for that reason he made so little he had to sell his truck and all his rabbits, and I heard he wound up working in a gas station, like anybody else. But oh, he was still handsome as all get-out.
Julius leaned across the table in feigned amusement and showed his missing tooth when he smiled and Muriel smiled back at him. In the look held between them was some acknowledgment though Muriel did not know what the story meant. She had never heard a man talk this way about another man. She felt she was hearing a riddle.
“He didn’t live anywhere?” she asked.
“He lived in that truck.”
“So how did you know him then?”
Julius did not answer. Instead he reached out and held her hand for a moment and turned it over palm up then dropped it. She thought about his chest rising and falling and the rain on his skin and the way he’d looked up at her. Then he picked up the cards and shuffled them and dealt and did not say much after that.
In the morning Lee banged coffee cups in the kitchen and mended things in the house that she did not know how to mend and she agreed to marry him after all. Because she was orphaned and alone, but also because of Julius, who had made her feel that the world was bigger than she had imagined and because Lee, in loving his brother, became both more interesting and more bracing. She knew her