On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
come from Los Angeles and how the place had shifted beneath him like a coin and the man says that’s how things are now. Even in Iowa you’d be hard-pressed to get a job making anything but asphalt. They lie each to a bed and Julius asks across the distance whether the man is married and he says, “Sure.”
“How long you been married?”
“Not long.”
Julius holds the bottle over the gap between their beds and the man reaches out and takes the bottle and sits up a little and drains it. Then he hands the empty bottle back and turns on his side. He smiles but his smile is meant for someone other than Julius.
“My brother’s married newly too,” Julius says.
“That’s nice.”
“It is. Though it’s strange too.”
“I’m tired now, friend,” the man says.
“We don’t have to say nothing else.”
“If that’s all right.”
Soon Julius is aware of the man’s deep sleep and though the moment has passed he is not unhappy. Lee said that the best he ever slept was in Long Beach that last Christmas leave, when Muriel finally wrote and told him about her mother and asked him to come home. Lee and Julius had tendered in together on the Bryce Canyon and stayed at the Royal. They’d been at sea so long that even their boots were still serviceable, and though the war was over then and had been for some time, they both still owed a year to the navy. They sat in the hotel bar and Lee showed Julius the letter from Muriel and they talked about the plans they’d made together and Lee said it didn’t change anything. The next morning they found the first bus and rode east.
A year later Julius walked out onto the same dock at Long Beach but everything felt different. A woman in a Quaker dress handed him a copy of Isaiah bound in blue paper. He cashed his half-pay and took a bus downtown and sat at a lunch counter and read the booklet. He had forgotten Isaiah and how in the Bible all men were singular, good or bad, and he decided not to join his brother in San Diego. Probably he had decided this some time ago. He walked all night through the city thinking about dragons and springs and stands of rushes, and about his brother’s marriage, and he saw that the parks and the bars were filled with men. He felt absorbed into the great diffusion, as if he were dead. That afternoon he paid six bucks for a room with a window and slept all that day and into the next and that was the first time he slept the way he thought his brother had meant it.
AT DAWN JULIUS wakes to find the Iowan crying into the pillow, almost choking, his sobs forced out so hard his slight shoulders pull backward, bunched in the middle like a pleat. Julius rises and goes to his bed and places a hand on his back until the sobs fade, and as the harsh desert light comes through the motel window the man turns his face up to Julius and says, “I’m sorry. It’s just the drink.”
Julius says he’s all right. For a while longer the man lies on his back looking up while Julius sits on the edge of the bed. Neither speaks and outside they can hear the swampcooler dripping onto the pavement. The man takes Julius’s hand in his and waves it back and forth in a kind of comic handshake and then drops both their hands to the bedspread. Then he rises and enters the bathroom. Julius lies down where the man had been and falls back into hazy sleep. He wakes to find the man gone. Under a plastic motel cup is a hundred-dollar bill, a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, every towel in the bathroom wet and crumpled on the floor. It is a lot of money and Julius knows that he has been paid not for the room or the booze but for discretion. He says aloud to the room, “I wish you hadn’t of done that,” then folds the hundred into a tight square and puts it inside his boot. Should he see the man again he will return the bill, moist and reeking of his feet.
He steps out. The afternoon rinses the desert in brown light. He finds a cardroom dealing five-card, but the play is slow and stupid so he goes back to Binion’s and tries his hand at faro. For a solid hour he wins more than he loses and while he’s still in the black he cashes out and takes his winnings down the street to El Dorado. There he plays a game called high-low at a dollar a hand and cashes out well ahead. At the Lucky Strike the hotel’s full, same at the Apache, and Binion’s is ten bucks for a single, so Julius walks back through the fringe to the Squaw. The deskman takes him to the same room he’d had the night before. The sheets have not been changed, only tucked in at the corners, the bedspread tossed loosely over the pillows. He tries to sleep in one bed and then the other, and when he can’t he lifts one bedspread and shakes the ash from it and drops it on the floor. He lies on half and pulls the other half over himself. When he wakes up in the morning he has seventy-five dollars and a stack of uncashed chips and the Iowan’s bill. He showers and shaves and steps out into the bright day. He asks the deskman to switch him to a single room and pays for a week in advance.
FROM THE WINDOWS of their hotel rooms, visitors to booming Las Vegas may witness two competing wonders. On the desert floor Lake Mead accumulates, covering the brown valley. Two years of good snow in the mountains have swelled the banks, and in the afternoons tourists gather along the high ridge of Hoover Dam to watch the men sluice open the valves. Some say the walls of the dam are cemented with the bones of pack mules and men, probably rope too, Julius thinks, miles and miles of rope. And teeth. Empty carafes of coffee. Chewed and discarded fingernails.
But in the sky to the west of the dam is the real attraction. There mushroom clouds draw tourists in from less auspicious places, crowded cities in the east, farm towns north and west. On the rooftops men in tuxedos sip Atomic Cocktails with their sighing wives. They smoke smuggled cigars and ignore the news from Washington, the warnings of radioactive fallout, the strange, scraped feeling behind their eyes. These bombs, after all, are not meant to hurt them. Makeshift signs announce their names—Diablo, Hat Trick, Candy Boy—propped among the other dazzling junk of the city. On bomb days the pit bosses lure the gamblers outside, early morning before the desert sun appears and whites out the horizon where the bomb will lather, sometimes long into the day. On these mornings the casinos quiet, a spreading silence that echoes, inversely, the seismic gnash of the bomb outside.
In this setting Julius is not anyone in particular. He is not the tuxedoed men nor the lovers of those men and playing poker or twenty-one in the windowless rooms excites no one’s suspicion and in the morning the street is still alive. Unlike in Los Angeles or Ventura or Long Beach he is not guilty of anything. In other cities where he’s slept or turned cards or met men, he might have to slip out a side door or wait in an alley, but not here. To him, the neon and the money and the bombs are the marks of a city far ahead of the times. The tourists play poorly and Julius cleans them out and they shake his hand after and thank him and the cops sit with loosened ties at the same table. He sleeps during the day and eats when he wants to.
So he stays. Two weeks pass. He keeps his room at the Squaw a half-mile off Fremont Street. He plays faro until noon at a locals’ casino run by Mormons and stashes his winnings in a rolled sock in the ceiling panel of his room. The Mormons run a nice joint though they themselves are merely rumors. Julius has heard they live out past the city limits in a compound with eight-foot-high fencing and a swimming pool treated with saline, to simulate the great stinking lake gifted to them by God. He stops sometimes at the train station and fishes out a dime and thinks of his brother and Muriel but he does not call them, and soon so much time has passed he worries they will resent or even forget him, and he dreads this imagined moment, the silence after he says his brother’s name.
One morning he leaves the tables and steps into the dawn street and when he looks ahead to the horizon he sees a fist of fire reach up from the earth and soften into smoke. It is many miles away and the sound reaches him several moments later, a muted bang like a rock hurled against the side of a barn, and he thinks of how his brother, when they were children, would hook a thumb inside his cheek and pull it out to make a popping sound, to indicate that something had gone smoothly. Above him on the rooftops of the casinos a cheer goes up, peculiar, muffled, cautious even, and Julius looks above to see the tiny heads of men and women balanced against the easements, some even forcing their heads through the big looping letters of neon signs. The sky brightens suddenly then, as if the bomb has accelerated the dawn, and washes the buildings and the blinking signs in white