On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
many blackjack cheats have you seen from that attic, just this month?” Julius says.
“Blackjack gives a man the edge, that’s true enough.”
Henry looks at him a long moment and Julius looks back and each is reminded of the other’s nakedness. Julius can feel this memory like a shape between them.
“You got people?” he asks.
“Oh, some,” Henry says.
Julius nods. Behind the bar the long mirror snags the orange discs of overhead light.
“I’m supposed to be in San Diego,” Julius says.
“How’s that?”
“With my brother. We planned on it, when we was overseas. I think mostly he wants to keep an eye on me. Nice weather though, and in San Diego you can build a house in the river valley for a song.”
“I know about California.”
“I guess you do.”
“How come you ain’t there then?”
“Too hard to tell.”
“But you could tell it to me.”
Henry smiles at him and Julius smiles back. He thinks of Muriel’s house in Kansas and his brother’s happiness. That Christmas Eve in the winter wheat talking about everything. The last time they were all together on earth.
“Too hard to tell,” Julius says again, and Henry laughs and shrugs and lets the mood change.
Soon they leave that bar for the Moulin Rouge. There Henry moves out onto the dance floor like he’s at a wedding, a wedding long put off and finally consummated under duress, legs moving in an ecstatic shuffle surely picked up in the grange halls of his youth, but even in his joy and his relief Julius knows he is withholding. At first he is alone, but when a slow song begins he finds a woman on the edge of the crowd. Julius drinks and watches. Henry’s cheek rubs against the forehead of the woman he holds, so close and so often that Julius can’t help but imagine the feel of it, the smell in Henry’s hair of tobacco, sweat, the raw wood of the attic catwalk. He knows what will happen next and he is not sure he wants it all again. He stands and steps outside. It is just past dawn, the heat already beginning to return. The streets are still crowded with men. The soggy bunch of the bill in his boot irritates him and to have something to do with his shaking hands he pulls the boot off to shift it. He worries that maybe all he’s ever really liked are the moments in which love was uncertain, when he could arrange himself in postures of ready seduction, in bed or half-dressed or letting a button linger under his hand, or, before any of these, leaning inside a doorway or stepping off the curb to cross a street where a man stands waiting, the look between them as he walks, the moments when he could still turn away, the private, erotic knowledge that one is the object of another man’s long gaze. He recalls other men from years or months before, men in the service or men who left the city in a rush or men who fell in love with women. He remembers the man from Iowa and his shaking back and the little snatches of song they sang. And his disgust is instructive, palliative. He does not have to worry over his own weakness then, when so many other weaknesses are apparent.
Finally Henry comes outside and looks up and down the street and sees him and waves. Julius pulls the boot back on, his sock bunched in the bottom and his jeans half-inside the shaft, and walks that way to his room at the Squaw, sending Henry through the parking lot ahead of him to wait in the alcove, then leaving the door unlocked while he takes off his shirt and jeans so Henry can scan the area before entering. But Henry does not wait, and before Julius can get his shirt undone Henry has banged through the unlocked door and turned Julius by the elbow and kissed him.
Muriel loves best those days when there are no races and the horsemen tell stories of fiasco and anomaly. At the lounge one afternoon she hears of a claiming race some years before, when a six-year-old broke a Del Mar track record and promptly dropped dead. Another, in which a redhaired boy from Montreal rode with his broken leg taped to the saddle girth. Or the story about the potbellied paint named Gingersnap who made such fast friends with an Angus bull that the two could not be separated and had to travel cheek by jowl in a special trailer widened for them.
Or, better: The horsemen in their leisure speak of things that cannot happen, that simply won’t. There will never be another Seabiscuit, not because he was built by God, as the papers said, as the trainers claimed, but because the universe allows only so much improbability. Nor another corker like the half-bred filly Quashed, who beat a Triple Crown winner by a short head over two and a half endless miles. Likewise the storied beasts of another era, National Velvet and Sergeant Reckless, warhorses on the eastern front, creatures from a dream an entire culture had once shared and woken from.
Through March of 1957 Muriel plays the late afternoon races ten dollars at a time. The winnings are limited by the stakes, which are mean and provincial, and though she knows now the names of stables and jockeys and colts gone early to stud still each new detail excites her. Each new detail is a familiar shape in a dark room. The high stakes are coming when the spring season opens, and most days the men drink more and longer and sit with their knees spread wide and out from the tables, taking account of the odds.
“Hoo now, in a couple weeks we’ll have some real money in play,” says the man with the mustache.
“Just think about that Lakes and Flowers race last spring at Hollywood Park,” says another.
“God that was gorgeous.”
“Like watching a sunset, but faster.”
“You got all the same riders as that race coming to Del Mar, and almost all the ponies, but no Misrule and no Porterhouse, so our field will be smooth as honey.”
“We’ll see where the odds end up. Eight races, I’ll be damned if one of them doesn’t come in double digits over the stilt.”
The old jockey called Rosie, given to water metaphors, says, “Tide’s coming in, bringing glad tidings.”
“Since when do tides bring that?” says the mustache.
“It’s called a pun, friend,” Rosie says darkly, but all the men laugh because the future is so bright.
AT HOME Muriel is distracted. One night she burns the meat and then the bread and when Lee touches her arm she cries out because she had forgotten him in her speculations. Lee tilts his head but says nothing and together they walk to the diner around the corner. Muriel feels a restful invisibility there, among the other patrons, who eat and talk and worry not at all about horses or progress or the passage of time. Lee orders pie and when the woman brings it he cuts the piece down the middle and slides the smaller half onto his saucer and pushes the rest across the table and Muriel makes a show of eating it and then a show of being full. When he’s finished his half and a third cup of coffee she pushes the plate back, barely touched. He winks at her and calls the waitress for the coffeepot and when she doesn’t acknowledge him he takes the cup and stands at the counter for a long time. The radio behind the counter plays heartache music. He holds his cup out like a pauper and finally the woman fills it. When he sits to eat he says, “Can’t have pie without coffee,” as if he were apologizing for this mere fact, for both the waitress and himself.
After dinner they walk back to their building and as they cross the common foyer they can hear the ringing phone. Lee wings the door open and takes the hallway in three long steps and Muriel listens for his reaction. He waits only a moment before