On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
names and numbers and track slang coded into her own shorthand: ’Nara if under five see W. D. Whittle on the wire if cuppy. Too Young 4–8. Roust at center post breaks ’Nara.
The week goes on. The odds begin to calcify, then a horse falls ill and a jockey gets bumped and another disappears for two days downtown. The men grumble and reset their charts. The hot clear weather brings a strange nothingness: no moths against the screens, no hum of insects, neap tides quiet all night. Instead there is a permeating blueness like the inside of an eye. The heat brings people out of the houses and shops and back rooms. Along the narrow streets of Muriel’s neighborhood, workmen cart flowers and crates and white heaps of ice. In the tiny front yards women dump wash water into short stemmy stands of geraniums. The children spill from stoops and curbs in overalls and short sleeves, the coastal sun catching them and turning them divine, in that instant freed by the sun from work and peril. Their mothers in dresses the color of unready peaches, sweating over the wash.
Downtown the dice players and cigarette men and men in tight pants, shirts unbuttoned to their navels. Walking from home to work is like passing between two worlds. Muriel finds herself one afternoon standing a long time in front of a shop window, thinking about the races. Behind her a newspaper vendor and two men in denim jackets are reflected in the window. The men are young and she can smell their cigarettes and their cologne. She looks up at the store window and draws herself away from their attention. She remembers her mother in the summer cooking chops and onions in her underwear while a man sat fully dressed at the table, watching her. The way this distinction between them, between nakedness and not, seemed to confirm something her mother believed about love: that vulnerability existed only in asymmetry, that two people could not be vulnerable together. Her mother believed if she gave men this small advantage she would not be harmed.
In the shop window a large television plays a game show. A man in a glass booth on a soundstage gazes outward in concentration while a clock ticks away in the corner. Muriel thinks of Julius and where he might be and why he hasn’t come. The show gives way to an ad for Convair, a woman standing with a suitcase in her hand watching an airplane take off. Though she can’t hear the TV Muriel realizes she is hearing an airplane and she looks up and sees a real airplane in the sky, reflected in the store window. She turns and tracks it as it flies over the city headed east. This confluence seems like luck or validation or something mystic. When she turns back to the television the plane is gone, but the other plane is still reflected in the window, as if it had flown off the screen and into the actual sky. She imagines the airplane flying past the rough buildings of this city, over the vendor and the smoking men and the mothers in their collared dresses. Out past the central mountains, then further east across the desert and into the scrub, rich and minty and full enough to hide a child, then over the irrigation circles and tired motels of her youth and down into the endless prairie and over her mother’s house. The plane disappears in this direction and the sound goes and then it is just the men and the contrail, reflected in the glass.
That night, after Lee has fallen asleep, she peels open the envelope and counts the money there and thinks through the odds. She does a bit of math on the envelope flap. She thinks of Lee’s story, of Julius in overalls working off a debt, and then about his discharge. She worries she’s misunderstood them both. She thinks of Lee standing so long at the counter with his coffee cup, waiting for the woman to fill it. She studies the envelope and her arithmetic and she’s not sure what she might need the money for, only that she does, only that winning would prove something vital that she cannot otherwise prove, and that no one else can see.
THAT WEEKEND Lee borrows again the boss’s Lincoln and drives them through downtown and across the river to see the interstate. In another year it will be complete, running along the edge of Mission Valley; they can see its elevated form now, the men hanging overhead, the black dust from the columns. Lee stops the car along the curb and he and Muriel look up at the cranes and the skirts of rebar, the figures held by flat ropes. The general feeling of the time is that such a marvel is deserved, as marvels are deserved all over the West.
They drive on, past lemon and orange and avocado orchards, hidden inside the city as if cupped inside its palm. The orchards are surrounded on all sides by a network of cul‑de‑sacs and graveled lots and as they pass Muriel watches the rows of trees flare by the window, interrupted by patches of cleared land and glimpses of the river running low, gridded through with new roads not yet paved. She looks at Lee and in this light he has the chromed look of a photograph, peering ahead at the driveways and ghosted streets. They pass a cowfield, a roadside lean‑to stacked with eggs, a sign offering jarred local olives, then again into the not-yet neighborhood.
Muriel knows where they are going and though she might have expected it still she feels deceived. In a half-mile the road turns back to gravel and curves south to the river. Lee stops the car and they get out to stand along the dirt margin. He turns to Muriel and smiles. He gestures across the lot in front of them, marked off by twine and stakes of wood, then marked off again by small flags stuck in the ground between the stakes. The back of the lot disappears in a tangle of blank ash and scrubby bushes, and below this hidden limit is a soft bluff that drops into the river, which they can hear from where they stand. Lee takes her hand in his.
“This tract is the best of them, two thousand for the land and the specs, then I bet we could build out for another six. Hardly anything, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering how fast all this land will go. What it will cost in another year.”
Lee’s voice lifts into insistence. He looks at her and she looks back. The fact of her mother’s house in Kansas rises up between them.
Lee says, “We could get at least six grand for that house, you’ve got to know that’s true. And we got a couple hundred bucks already.”
She holds his gaze until he looks away and across the lot to the river beyond.
Finally she says, “But you promised your brother you’d do this together.”
“And do you see my brother anywhere?”
His tone is wounded. He holds her hand just long enough to offer his forgiveness but not his surrender and then he lets go.
He says, “This place, California, it’s indifferent to the past. All the people and the cities and the ocean and all of it.” He waves an arm to indicate distance. “All the sailors coming back and the factories and the folks coming over the border. In another year there won’t be nothing to buy and then where will we be, we’ll have to go all the way backwards.”
Muriel does not respond. The sunlight is muted inside the trees and the wind shakes them. She can see dust brought loose and drifting above the crowns of the trees. Lee puts an arm around her and when she stiffens he squeezes her lightly and drops his arm. As if to remediate this failed gesture he gathers himself and says, “You know, that last time me and Julius saw each other, on Okinawa. We had two days of R and R and we met in a village where all the men went, from the stations. This was last year, May, it’s still so cold there in May we sat bundled head to toe even inside the bar, you could hear the wind outside. I thought he was being strange but I couldn’t figure why and then we met this other fella from his station and things got real strange then.”
Lee pauses and looks at her then looks away. Muriel has not heard this story before. He lowers his eyes against the vista and folds his hands across his beltline and toes the dirt and decides to say the next thing.
“Julius beat that fella pretty bad and we got eighty-sixed. Walked a mile in that cold afterward, just shaking and not talking. Then we sat in the train station and waited for morning, and it came out then that Julius was in trouble for something, he’d been caught in the barracks with some other man. I assumed smoking grass or gambling but then a few weeks later they put him on the Saratoga, even though he only had a few months left. In Long Beach they gave him a general discharge and half-pay and nothing for the leave he hadn’t taken. I heard this from that same friend’s cousin. Of course I don’t know what he did but sure thing it was worse than poker.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”