On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
She worries the whole thing will lose its sweetness, in the open air between them. Then he laughs, asks her what her favorite kind of horse is, guesses geldings in a teasing voice. He means it cutely but she’s disappointed. She can tell he doesn’t believe her. Aloud it is hardly believable.
“No geldings there, Julius,” she says.
“That’s a nice racket for a gal, though,” he says.
“Oh, but it’s just a whim,” she says, to take the sting out of the moment.
“Careful now. Might be one of them things you can’t ever get enough of,” he says, but he’s still kidding her. The operator rings on and asks for another dime and Julius searches his pockets and comes up empty. The line goes dead and Muriel sits a long time with the receiver in her lap and the dial tone chiming. She hears Lee’s snoring and the pipes laboring in the wall and the radio in the kitchen plays “Walking the Floor over You” and then “Goodnight Irene.”
A few days later Julius is in a back room in Torrance playing five-card. He draws so hot for so long that a crowd gathers, and in that crowd are men he knows and men he doesn’t. All are good drinkers and quick to blame others and thrilled at the warm spring day.
“Hallelujah anyway,” says one man, when Julius turns up a flush one card short of the royal.
He is playing two hardnosers and a novice and a young joe who bluffs too often. Along the walls the men are crowded together so close that ash from their upheld cigarettes drops onto their collars and into their shirt pockets. The smoke hangs above the crowd and drifts prettily. Outside the noise of jackhammers and asphalt trucks, and from the bar up front the low tones of the jukebox, so the back room sounds like a dentist’s office. Julius is in this part of the city by mistake, forced onto Del Amo Boulevard by a girder collapsed across 190th Street which he’d been walking toward the sea, thinking about his brother. He hasn’t found work in a week or more. But now he’s got two hundred dollars and the game’s big stack and there’s nowhere he has to be and no one looking for him. He hasn’t had this kind of luck since before the war or even earlier.
“You oughta take this game to the desert,” says a man close to Julius.
Someone else hollers, “Get a little coin in your pocket and then we’ll see what you’re really about.”
“I’ve been there and it ain’t much,” says another.
“Anything legit’s bound to scrape you up, Freddy.”
“Our Freddy here gets hives when even other people tell the truth.”
“Even if you lose, you can watch them bombs for free.”
“I just can’t believe it, all night and no cops and twenty-dollar buy-ins.”
“Sounds like Korea, the good parts anyway.”
A voice from the back asks what they mean about the bombs and several men begin to explain at once but all Julius hears is the name of the place and several of its cheaper hotels and aspersions cast at the weather. The crowd drinks and cheers him but he’s begun to sense the anxiety that accompanies good fortune. A few of the men know him to be a petty thief but never a card cheat, but most of them don’t know either of these things. Along the back wall are three men talking and watching him. Another man by the door learns his name and calls it out. Before things get dangerously better, he takes five dollars from the plywood where they’ve laid the game and buys a round for the crowd. He wins two hands, then bluffs another just to lose and folds the next.
It hurts him to cheat luck this way but there is always a longer game. He’s been in California just six months and already a man he knew was murdered outside a club in Rosewood. The police had raided two bars known for their friendliness to men and low lights. The raids changed the hustlers weekly, like the Sunday lettering on a church sign. He thinks about the nature of cheating and how it is tied to dignity, then pushes up his sleeves and buys another round and pockets for himself sixty dollars in ones and fives and lets the rest ride on a hopeless low straight that breaks the bank. He bows out and another man takes his place, but when he leaves the bar the three men by the wall follow him all the way to 203rd Street. It is just dusk and the city is sprayed in birdsong. To the west the blue ledge of twilight behind the buildings makes the city seem more important than it is. The men catch him in the alley and push him back and forth between them in a pinball fashion that means the thing they hate about him is also a thing they fear, and it is easy enough to hand over the cash and let that be the end of it and mercifully it is. Back in his little room he gets under the covers without undressing and he doesn’t sleep all night.
A few days later he gets a letter from his brother’s wife begging him south. Muriel has folded three crisp twenties in the envelope and signed off, It’s about time you got out of Los Angeles for a while. Julius takes this as an omen. He thinks about her that Christmas in Kansas, coming down the porch steps with her skirt hem balled in a fist against the wind and raised halfway up her thigh, and about his brother’s happiness. The story she’s told him of the horses, which he might be willing to believe, but it’s hard to imagine a woman alone in that way. He had promised to join them but that does not seem like what the letter and the money are telling him he ought to do. He waits a day and then he packs two rolled shirts and his knife in his good boots and carries each boot like a grocery sack under his arm and onto the train to Las Vegas.
FREMONT STREET BLINKS with men, lights, billets of paper, dropped coins, raised voices, and that afternoon’s monsoon rain. Julius walks from the train station directly to Binion’s and puts his name in for the poker room. He waits a long time to be called and when he is, the only open seat is at a table filled with young men in jackets and ties. He trades one of Muriel’s twenties for a stack of chips and loses it in ten mercenary hands.
He walks back through the casino past the slot-lines and the craps tables and the crowds gathered for anyone hot. Outside on Fremont it could be ten o’clock or midnight or just before dawn. It is just like the men said: The sidewalks are full of Angelenos and old gangsters and showgirls in feathers from rump to neck. Julius walks awhile through this modern noise and the dry landscape, and no one wonders about him or even looks his way. Even carrying his boots and in his dusty jeans like a pauper against the lighted street he is just another fortune seeker in the West. He goes back to Binion’s and sits at the bar and posts his boots upright on an empty stool and orders a drink. Behind him the slot-wheels clunk and the coins fall into the metal sleds. The craps tables beyond are full of suits and other legitimate men and the bar is open all night and drinking he has the sense of a deep rightness.
When a man sits next to him, Julius strikes up a conversation. The man is from Iowa, a salesman in Vegas for a trade convention, slight around the waist with blunt fingernails and thin white wrists. Julius shakes his hair and stretches one leg across to the rung of the man’s barstool so their knees are touching and the man is hemmed in between the bar and Julius’s body. The man tells Julius a story about a ranch just north of town, in Indian Springs, where for fifty dollars a Mexican with one eye would take men like them to a wild mustang roundup. He asks if Julius might like to go with him and Julius knows what kind of conversation this is. He says he knows next to nothing about horses but he could learn, and when he angles in the man turns toward the bar and into the fence of Julius’s body.
When they are very drunk they stagger half a mile off Fremont to the neon fringe and pay cash for a two-bed room at the Squaw Motel. There they share another fifth of whiskey and talk a long time about the flat places they’re from and