On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
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 mother would not approve but her mother was not around to say so. She sold first the car and then the furniture. Her mother’s clothes she left boxed on the porch for the Lions Club. She bought the bus ticket and paid the tax board for the year and with what little was left she paid the Carter boy down the road to insulate the pipes and till up the lawn and cover it over with gravel to keep the grass from overgrowing. She sent the same boy home with her mother’s houseplants and hoped for the best. She told Lee they’d keep the house because that’s what her mother would have wanted and Lee did not argue with her. That she would get to California and find Julius gone was not something she considered.
THE FIRST TIME is a transgression. The second is a strategy. After work, Muriel takes a quick lunch down the street and emerges from the café transformed, her dress balled in her purse, wearing now a pair of loose slacks and one of Lee’s striped dress shirts, the low-brimmed hat over her hair and the big sunglasses. She gets off the bus a stop early and walks the last half-mile to Del Mar. She does this once a week, then twice. Depending on what she’s heard that morning she bets a quinella or a box or a place, at first on just one race and then on three or four. She does not always win. Sometimes she deliberately lays money on a horse the men have said is lame or sick in the head, or on a jockey they’d seen drinking rum with young women the night before. When she loses those races she feels a sense of power she never gets from winning, because losing proves the accuracy of her judgment. It has the benefit, too, of concealment. As long as she is not seen by the men at the lounge—who, she thinks, have never actually looked her in the face and would not recognize her even if she introduced herself—she feels she may engender any speculation she wishes except that she is cheating.
It comes to her naturally. From the horsemen she learns a vocabulary built from idiom and double entendre—silks and shadow rolls, tongue straps and hand rides—and the rest she learns by instinct. She learns what it means when the track is cuppy, when a horse is washy or ridden out. She becomes familiar with the anatomy of horses, croup and neck, muzzle, cannon, hock, loin, as if she had run her hands along each and felt what they were made of. She begins to think of the landscape differently, as if the horses themselves have given it names. The hills and the lowtide terraces are sorrel, dapple-gray. The round, unburdened trunks of palm are chestnut in the coastal light, light that’s blood bay or buckskin depending on the weather, cast high and cloudless over the roan sea.
She is stopped sometimes, at work or waking in the mornings, by a poignant feeling. The feeling is like happiness but it comes so slowly and is so austere she might easily mistake it for grief. She could not explain it but she knows this feeling has something to do with keeping a secret from Lee, which she had somehow always felt she was doing even before she had a secret to keep. It has something to do with wherever Julius is and what her mother would think of all this. If she were a different kind of person she might have wondered whether love was always this way, if it existed in the spaces between people, the parts they kept strange to each other. She tapes the money inside a white envelope, on the underside of the lazy Susan, a place her husband will never look and may not even know is there.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas they borrow a Lincoln from Lee’s boss to see the lights at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Neither has seen Christmas lights before. At the fairgrounds they go on for miles, roped lights in the shape of trees and hills of snow, illuminating the space around them and the horizon in each direction, like a city gone nuclear. The cars line up with their headlights off and wind through the new world. Those with radios tune to a station playing Christmas songs. Lee turns his broad face to her as they sit idling in the line of cars. His is a simple amazement, the way his eyes become bright and focused when something small and unmiraculous makes him happy. If she had not heard his stories of the war or the privation of his childhood she might think him a savant or an innocent, someone inured to pain or ignorant of it. He seems unchanged by the sea or the city. She knows that even strangers recognize this immutability in him, that they see it as heroic. For a moment she considers telling him about the horses, because she envies the smallness of his joy. She is able to imagine that he would not care how she came by the money, only that she had it.
“To think this time last year we were in Kansas,” Lee says.
The racetrack lights are off but she can see the dark palms rising above the stables, just ahead. Lee leans across the bench seat and over Muriel’s handbag to kiss her. She thinks how quickly it had all happened. On the radio the Jackie Gleason Orchestra plays “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” like a dirge. Car horns bleat behind them and Lee laughs and pulls away from her and drives on. The palms move in gray contour against the winter sky. Of course there is no snow but the lights throw shadows on the ground in metallic circles that trick the eye. She hadn’t known the trees would be so lovely in the dark or that the track would be so close.
“You know,” he says then, “it ain’t like we have to wait for him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“You’ve said that before.”
Lee shakes his head.
“It was your plan to come here. You two,” she says.
“But it’s just us now.”
“He’s just stretching his legs. It was a long time you were overseas.”
“It ain’t shore leave, now.”
“It’s only been a few months.”
Lee sighs. The music snaps out and is replaced by static, then another station breaks through. That station plays a bandstand number too loud and ends the conversation. Lee reaches over and cups her knee and drives on.
Back home they kiss for a long time until Lee leans back and looks at her softly and lets his hands rest on her arms. He waits a moment. This part of lovemaking Muriel finds stifling and inelegant, though she could not say exactly why. She does not know if he wants her consent or her desire but either way she wants to refuse him, simply because he asked. She looks away and knows he will read this as demure. He kisses her neck and brings his arms around her again. Her secret makes her more aware of his deference. She thinks of what it will feel like in another few minutes when he is inside her and how straightforward this feeling is. She’d like to skip ahead to that moment. Beyond his shoulder the perfect flat wall of the bedroom catches their shadows. The window is open and the noise of traffic and other lovers and construction and children and cooking is the noise of a city breaking into itself. A man calls out the name of their street and another that crosses it and a second voice calls back. Of course the men are not in the room or even near enough to see, but like the cars and the birds and the backhoes their voices become part of lovemaking, and it occurs to Muriel that she might like this noise and the cover it offers.
Later, they lie together a long time. The supper hour has come and gone and the city has quieted. The phone in the hall rings a long time before Lee finally rises to answer it. Muriel hears him wish his brother a happy Christmas and say that they should be together, that Julius should come soon. Muriel stands and goes to the window that looks down into the alley between their building and its twin. She can feel the cold outside the window against her bare skin. She lights a cigarette and lifts the window. The streetlight falls into the alley and over the dry bricks and a few birds fly soft and quick across the entrance and toss small hand-shaped shadows against the alley wall. She recalls a boyfriend her mother had, sometime in the forties, who sold lightbulbs door‑to‑door. To persuade housewives and old widows, he cast against their walls the silhouettes of butterflies and rabbits and men in tall hats. After dinner, in those few months her mother loved him, that man taught her to twist her fingers into cheerful creatures. He had been kind, slimly built. The bulbs he sold made bluish light and glowed through the flesh of his hands. For a moment she thinks that man must be sitting somewhere against the wall of this alley, making birds with his fingers. In the hallway she hears Lee ask his brother if he needs any money and then his long sigh.
THE NEW YEAR comes and the weather hardens. Muriel adds more and more of the winnings to her tips and blames the extra money on holiday cheer, on the business brought in by the last of the men back from Korea.