On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl
unfettered by worry or language, base elements, the faces dissolving in the bright light until they are featureless, each face turned toward the horizon in the same astonished, straining way. He feels suddenly part of something, among these people for the first time.
That night he climbs to the Binion’s roof and sits at the edge with his smoking hand out in the night. He’s never really been on his own before and here it is easy. In the long western evening the booming city makes its careful transition. First the night birds and then the cars quieting and then the brief wind before sunset and the streetlights clicking on, until in a few silent spaces Julius can hear the peculiar hum of the desert. The bombcloud is still visible as a gray paste across the surface of the low moon, flattened now and stretching a hundred miles. He reaches his arm out across the alley and trails his hand through the air. He’d grown up in a shakeshingle ranch and had gone from there to the navy, where he’d never spent a night above the ground. From this height the city seems to belong only to him. He remembers an afternoon in childhood when he and Lee discovered an uncapped silo filled by years of rainwater. They had climbed the ladder and looked down into the hole from the rim, a hundred feet above the ground. The reflection of their own heads in the water was framed by the circle of light coming in, the circle turned black on the surface of the water like a negative and burnished around the edges, as if they stood inside an eclipse. For a moment he wishes for his brother and the future they’d imagined together. He looks out at the desert landscape and thinks of that silo and the memory covers the sight of the moon and the dispersing bomb so they are layered like bits of film, the dark of that water and the light inside it lifted through the bare mountains, so looking out he has a sense of boundless time. He flicks his cigarette up and out so it arcs into the alley. When he looks again the vision has dissolved. His brother has never been here and is not coming to take him home and if he walks through Las Vegas at dawn there is no one who cares to know it, no one waiting in a Torrance alleyway to steal back what they’ve lost. A man like Julius at the tables with his money in plain view. Here there are rules, and they are known, and you can win fifty bucks on a low-card straight fair and square, no hustle, just luck. What comfort in playing against the house and not against men.
A FEW DAYS later Julius walks into the Golden Nugget and sits next to two men smoking spiced cigarettes at the polished bar. For a while they make small talk until Julius learns their occupation. For weeks now he has watched the pitmen and the bosses run the casino floors and the sporting desks, men with quick eyes, and though they watch him and count out his chips he has never spoken to them. He asks the smoking men how a man might find such work. In turn they ask him what skills he has to offer. He is amazed they want to know.
He says, “I know how people steal. And I also know why they do.”
The men look so much alike they could be twins. Each turns his head to the mirror behind the bar as if searching for some message in the glass and then turns back to him. They remind Julius of a pair of sister cats they’d had when he was a child, indistinguishably marked and moving as one body as only animals can, sitting under the oak tree by the bunkhouse snatching birds from the air. He recalls the long faces of those cats, their eyes bubbled and transparent from the side, as he looks at the two smoking men.
“But you yourself do not steal,” says the man closest to him.
He places his fingertips together and looks at Julius over his tented hands. Julius leans toward him on the stool so his arm lies flat against the bar. He’s had a few drinks and is flush with dollar chips.
“Partly I know how people steal because I have stolen, I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “But it seems to me that this ain’t the place to steal, and I’d like to be on the right side of that.”
The men consider this. They take in Julius’s slim frame, his worn-down boots mud-splattered, the length of his hair. Julius has a warm feeling of acceptance, a sense that the men see not a thief or a sailor but someone born to a better fate.
“We’ve seen you around,” one says.
“You play aboveboard, we like that,” says the other.
They offer him a job running pit surveillance and he takes it, shaking each man’s hand firmly but waiting until he is a few blocks off Fremont and nearly to the Squaw before he smiles.
He returns that night and climbs a set of narrow stairs to an attic above the floor of the Golden Nugget. The stairs lead out to catwalks along the walls and through the middle of the attic, touching just off-center above the casino pit below. The catwalks are scaffolded and set so close to the ceiling Julius feels his hair brush against it. Every ten feet a two-way mirror is set into the attic floor, so the man walking the catwalk can look through them and watch the players below. Large fans front and back send in a hot breeze. Julius walks to the center and looks down at a craps table. He sees only the players’ hands, some fat-fingered and hairy, nails untrimmed, others slender and graceful. A man at the edge of the table leans forward to take the pot and for a moment looks up and Julius nearly turns away. But the wide shadowy sheet of glass bows down and out, convex, so the man looking up sees not Julius’s silent gaze but his own face, arched and upside down, as if he is staring into the curved back of a spoon. Julius himself has seen these windows from below, and though he’d assumed he was being watched he had not really considered all this, that above him was a network of paths and railings, made for watching. The whole thing seems to him so ingenious he nearly laughs aloud.
For an hour he moves between the windows watching the action at craps and blackjack. He sees nothing unusual, though from above the character of each game is changed and made piecemeal, divided into possible cheats or cons, and these are different from the things a player would suss out, by virtue of being punishable. Watching the games this way impresses him. In Los Angeles a man like him would never be trusted with such a job.
When he moves toward the center of the scaffold he sees in the distance a dark figure. Julius stops and waits. The figure comes closer and in the light cast up through the windows Julius sees the man’s boots, then his nubby trousers.
“You’re new,” the man says as he approaches.
Julius nods. They stand facing each other over the lighted window. The man is tall and dark-haired, Julius’s age or a bit younger.
“Henry,” says the man.
Julius says his own name and puts out his hand. The man’s hand is rough but his handshake is light and quick. He holds his other arm against his waist and in the pale light Julius sees it is ripped in scars.
“First time?” the man asks.
“It is,” Julius says.
“What do you think so far?”
Henry does not seem cruel to Julius though his appearance would suggest it, so Julius says what he thinks.
“You play?” Julius asks.
“Sometimes,” says Henry.
“This sheds some light on that, huh.”
“It does,” Henry says. “Seeing it this way is like watching yourself make love.”
Julius laughs and nods, then he reaches up to cover his mouth against the sound and because his missing tooth makes him suddenly sheepish.
“Instructive,” he says, through his hand.
“But a little ruinous,” says Henry.
“That’s right,” says Julius.
He drops his hand and looks at the man a long moment. The look goes on until Henry laughs and Julius laughs with him but then the laughter turns and stops. In this silence Julius becomes again self-conscious and looks away at the floor and then at his own hand on the railing. Henry says, “Welp,” and goes on his way to the other side of the casino loft.
Every few hours Julius and Henry pass each other at the place where the scaffolds cross over the pit below. Henry raises a hand or makes a hasty salute. The breeze across the center cools and dies. Below the tables thin out. On the third pass Henry stops a