On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  “They say drinking alone is the first sign of trouble. Too bad us.”

  Julius glances at him sideways, as if reluctant to abandon his privacy, but then he says, as pitifully as can be believed, “Usual state, tonight or any other.”

  “You oughta go back home, then. We all ought to.”

  “Not sure I’d be entirely welcome.”

  “Oh surely now.”

  “I was a navy man, misfit me for any life in Kansas.”

  A touch of pride in this partial truth, as if, were he simply to tell it right, such a story might sum it up. He knows what will happen next and that the man will stack him two or three beers and that Julius will offer his company in recompense. In Los Angeles he drank this way whenever his pockets were light.

  “No fooling. Army here. Different war than yours, though, I’d venture,” the man says.

  “Korea. By way of Japan, like everybody.”

  “Oh, you’ll like this then,” the man says and turns on the stool to hem in toward Julius. Julius turns to meet him. Easy friendship of remote places, of early mornings.

  “Here’s a story: Two nights ago I was at the Desert Inn and in the clubroom they’ve cleared out all the tables but one and set up something with tiles, look like dominoes.”

  “Pai gow,” Julius says.

  “You got it, but don’t ruin the story.”

  Julius nods and sticks his nose in his glass theatrically. The man laughs.

  “That your last nickel?” he says, and nods toward the bar.

  “Just about.”

  The man signals the bartender who hauls another two beers and the man pays. When he’s downed half the pint and wiped his mouth he says, “So I’m at the bar waiting for a five-card call. I’m no real five player, but no one plays seven-card too well around here, perhaps you’ve noticed.”

  “Just this morning I sat through twenty grim hands down at Binion’s,” Julius says.

  “Sure, you can play at Binion’s if you’re touched. Anyhow, a bunch of Chinamen in suits file in and they sit for some time, playing that pai gow. I get called for a place at poker and play in and more or less forget about the whole thing. But then some hours later I’m leaving—” And here the man looks meaningfully at Julius and Julius sees the smallness in him, his grand scale of address, and what is surely coming next, a story about his bigness, veiled by detail. “Real flush, mind you, had some luck at that table, and who’s coming out but those Chinamen, and I can hear the game breaking up in the cardroom, the sound of all those tiles being swept off and the scrape of chair legs. Might’ve heard a gong too, swear it.”

  The man pauses, raises two fingers for another round. Julius knows already that this kind of man will thrive on a bit of enmity, lightly offered. He is tall and wiry and high-cheeked, good color up to his temples, old enough to be Julius’s father. Julius counts in his head how many beers the man might have in him and subtracts that number from the price of loneliness.

  “So I stop and watch them pass, and with them are three hardnosers, casino men you know, acting almost conciliatory, and so I’m thinking: What would a bunch of Chinamen be doing in one of our great cathedrals? You think there’s an opposite to communism, it’s gotta be the fucking clubroom at the Desert Inn.”

  “Sure enough,” Julius says.

  “But then I think, and to my amazement: This place we’ve got here, these casino runners, hell, they can just set a spread for Chinamen to play any foreign game. Who cares who’s watching, middle of the goddamn day? What a thing is progress.”

  The man leans back into the room and scrapes at his chin with the butt of his hand.

  “I’m not sure I catch your drift, friend,” Julius says.

  “Look. I won’t say it out loud, I don’t know a damn thing about you except your service in the Far East, which I believe by the shivering look of you. But you know who runs these casinos, without my saying it.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so. If you’re so green how’d you end up in this joint with the rest of us dumb fuckers?”

  “I ain’t so green.”

  “No shit. Look, all I mean is, you got your regular business types, your Henry Kaisers and your Sears and Roebuck. And then you got Moe Dalitz and Wilbur Clark, and who says that’s not business?”

  “It’s business, I can see that, I get some relief from that fact.”

  The man lowers his chin and looks at Julius. The door opens and throws a wedge of light into the room and across the man’s face. He nods.

  “That’s right. But what I’m saying is, we got business here without all that bullshit of right or wrong. You don’t have to believe in nothing to run a casino, not even democracy. It ain’t like war. You can let in whoever you want, throw out whoever you want. Ain’t no House Committee on fortune, poor or good.”

  “You’re getting me a little worried now, friend,” Julius says.

  The door closes and the room again grows dark. Julius straightens his shoulders and sits up and brings his jaw tensely forward. It might be the edge of this town and dark as night and every man in the joint drunk and soaking in his own misery but he doesn’t want the association. The cops who cleared the cardrooms and the men’s hotels in L.A. said they were all reds, working against decency. Julius thinks he’d be smart to change the subject.

  But then the man says, “Oh hell. I’m just like anybody. I pay my taxes—” And he gestures in a wide arc meant to take in the whole room. “It’s 1957. McCarthy’s dead. I thought we got to talk differently now.”

  He signals the bartender again and Julius thinks he ought to end this small con and pay his own way. He tosses a dime on the bartop and the man flicks it back to him.

  “God in heaven, Kansas,” he says and makes a pitiful face. “Your very last nickel huh.”

  “I told you just about.”

  The beer comes and the man lifts his glass and contemplates it, then sets the glass down and purls it in the ring of condensation. Perhaps the conversation won’t survive. The drinkers in the corner extend for a moment a raucous energy, which both men turn to acknowledge. A light scuffle, a few raised voices, then one man is lifted under the arms by two others and dragged to the door. Julius and the man look at each other and decide in that glance not to intervene. The shaft of daylight as the door is opened, men’s voices, then the darkness again as the door is shunted closed. The mood changes between them.

  The man says, “So here’s a story. I had an old uncle, right, who spent his good drinking years in Europe, with our fine army.” Again he waves across the grim room. “He told the usual stories about it, women and booze and English cigarettes tasted like mud. But in the years after—” Here the man takes a long drink of his beer and Julius keeps his eyes on him, though already he’s tired of this story, he’s tired of every army story. “In the years after, my old uncle got religion and wanted to make amends. There was another private in his unit, cave-chested and not a hair on anything, including his eyelashes, and the other men used to pummel him and play jokes on him, the way men do.”

  The door opens again and an elevator man walks through with his uniform jacket off and draped over one arm. Another crow of voices from the back corner, and as the man crosses the room the other men gesture and begin the story of what has just happened. Between the door and the lintel Julius sees the street outside growing dark.

  “So my uncle gets it in his head that he’ll find this guy and say he’s sorry and all that. Like maybe an apology would turn this guy’s life around. He remembers he’s from Omaha, which is about a half-day’s drive, and he figures there can’t be too many fully hairless men in Omaha, though with the way this country’s going who knows. Anyway, he drives down there, and finds a phone book and gets the guy’s address, but when he goes by the house the place is run-down and when he knocks on the door the woman who answers has never he
ard of the guy, so he goes to the VFW and asks around. And wouldn’t you know of course they’ve heard of him, and after a couple beers my uncle knows everything he needs to know.”

  The man raises his hand again and Julius makes a feint for his back pocket and the man brushes him off. Now he’s plowed, warm flush in his cheeks and crotch. He’s hanging on to this story by a thread but still he’s pleased to be drinking. The man’s earlier comments have faded but not disappeared.

  The custodian continues. “What my uncle learned was that there was not a thing to differentiate the other guy from anyone else. He was married and had a job and paid his bills and lived the way people do. He’d even moved to a better neighborhood and every week he came down to the VFW and told his little war story and listened to the others and when he left no one breathed a sigh of relief or was sad to see him go. Seems he’d gotten a wig or something because the others knew him by name but would not have guessed this hairless bit about him. My old uncle saw no sense in apologizing to a man that plays with house money. That kind of man is just fine.”

  The custodian lets out a long and resolute breath and though Julius understands the story as a weight cast against the man’s own lonely life he’s not sure he understands the rest of it. He wants to ask what the man means about house money but suddenly he feels terribly sad. He thinks of his father in the front yard waving to each person who passed, the factory women in their scarves and flat shoes, the men coming behind them always at a distance, as if shadowing them for some experiment. Those who waved back and called out his father’s name, those who laughed openly. The aluminum chair and the cigarette butts and the reticence of his father’s raised hand, raised not for attention but out of duty to the Lord, who demanded that he greet every soul who passed. Then he thinks of Henry and his philosophies, half-formed to suit his needs. Moe Dalitz and the cat-faced men and the other illegitimates who run this legitimate city. Julius wants all those men to mean something other than what they mean.

  So he says, “Couldn’t you say though that that’s the story? All those VFW soldiers thought he was no one but your uncle knew he wasn’t? Your uncle knew he was Private So-and-So of the U.S. Army who got the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of his pals and had no hair and came back and made a nice life for himself without telling anyone about all the rest. Isn’t that the interesting part, the part where he doesn’t tell anyone?”

  Julius lets the image of his father slide away. The drink in him hotly now. The custodian studies Julius as if he had just arrived. The door opens again and the two men return without the chastened third.

  “At any rate, here you are telling me his story,” Julius says.

  “I told you my uncle’s story.”

  “No, I don’t think you did. I think I know more about that man from Omaha than I do about your uncle or you or whatever creed you favor.”

  Now he’s far overplayed it, and the man says, “Look, friend, I told you. I served this country like anybody else.”

  The man turns the stool around so he sits facing the room and unsettles their little camaraderie. Julius knows better than to follow him into this detachment. Inside the dark bar it is impossible to tell the hour and the desert sunlight through the doorway is the same anytime from eight to eight. Next to Julius the custodian wears fatigue around his eyes but now something bitter too, nerve at being challenged too vigorously, the fretful pride common in men of his class and age.

  Julius remembers an early morning in San Dimas not long after his discharge, when he’d spent a sleepless night in a marmalade factory. He’d been chased there by two locals from the Community Squad, who caught him loitering in a park. The factory smelled of orange rind and burned sugar and something else like copper, and at dawn a janitor came and saw him and ran him out. That man had looked nothing like the custodian next to him now but he had the same moralizing tone, the same vocational aptitude. Custodians are like spies, Julius thinks, and wishes he’d thought it earlier. The man has leaned his back against the rim of the bar and sits looking out with his beer glass cupped in both hands. Julius thinks then that he’d like to hear his brother’s voice, though it’s been so long since he’s called.

  “Got work in a few,” he says, and the custodian nods without looking at him but pleasantly, as if avoiding any real feeling, good or bad, about his departure.

  “I liked talking to you, sure enough, and I thank you for the beers.”

  Again the man nods. He turns his face away and his reedy skin catches the light and in the hard-set line of his jaw is some dignity.

  * * *

  —

  OUTSIDE THE SUN has set and the neon drops bold light in the ditches. A sense of chronology returns. On the last block before Fremont Julius passes a bar with a front drawn up like a garage door, and inside he sees the man who was dragged out of the Cave, sitting at a table near the front. His forehead is gashed and blood has collected at his shirt collar, but he sits drinking whiskey and smiling. At the train station he finds a pay phone, but it’s occupied by a weeping man in a quilted jacket, so he heels around to walk another five blocks to El Cortez. He passes a few weary men smoking outside the open doors and walks into the lobby, then slides into a phone booth and rattles in a nickel. The call rings out for a long time, the conciliatory trill like a rope tossed out in the dark, and for a strange moment he wonders if he’s dialed the hairless man in Omaha. But then the line opens and there is Lee.

  “George Lee,” he says, and he hears in his own eager voice the old men who knew their father, who pumped their arms in greeting and said their names over and over as if their names were made of sounds they’d never heard before.

  “Well goddammit, Julius,” Lee says through high laughter.

  “Goddamn nothing. I can’t believe you’re still at home. You get fired or something?”

  “It’s past ten in the damn evening, been dark a whole hour.”

  Julius laughs then too. He wishes he could always be a source of joy. His brother covers the mouthpiece and calls out and Julius hears a woman’s voice.

  “Is that Muriel then?” he asks.

  “I thought she’d like to know you ain’t dead.”

  “I ain’t dead.”

  “Well hallelujah for that, you son of a bitch.”

  “Tell me all the news then,” Julius says.

  “Most of the news is that you ain’t dead.”

  “You go first, it’s my nickel and I get to say.”

  “How am I even supposed to start? Good lord, it’s been months and I’ll tell you I did think the worst.”

  “Start with the weather then.”

  Lee laughs and tells Julius that he hadn’t predicted the heat and Julius wouldn’t believe the wind and when he says nothing more Julius asks him about work and Lee says it’s been all right. The silence goes on a long time then. Finally Lee says, “Now, Julius, you should know something,” and then he tells his brother that they’ve finally sold the house in Kansas and bought that land in the valley. He lists these things in this order as if resistant to their hierarchy.

  “Well, shit, there’s the news,” Julius says.

  Lee clears his throat but doesn’t speak. The phone booth glass is yellow with tobacco smoke and along the sides are round clearings in the crud where other men have leaned. Julius runs a fingerline through the yellow film then turns this line into an X. Finally Lee says, “Pretty soon there won’t be nothing to buy.”

  “I can’t believe she let her mother’s house go.”

  “Yeah, she did,” Lee says, in his voice a small relief, that Julius has moved the conversation sideways. “I didn’t even know about it. She got it all done on her own, as a surprise to me.”

  “She didn’t need your signature or nothing?”

  “I guess not.”

  “What’s the point of being married then?”

  “All sorts of points
. You should find out yourself.”

  “You know me.”

  “I do. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Boy, we loved her mother’s place, remember?” Julius says. “Remember them doorknobs? All that brass, so smooth in your hand.”

  “Seemed fancy to us, but it was just a regular house,” Lee says.

  “Don’t pretend that’s how you felt about it.”

  A long pause on the line that absorbs the tension between them.

  “Well, I hope you got a fair price,” Julius says.

  “Just at seven thousand.”

  “That ought to do it then, guess you lucked out for sure.”

  “It ain’t luck.”

  “No?”

  Lee lets this comment settle. On his end of the line a rush of traffic. Then he says, “Them big-city contractors move fast. Put in the floors last week. Not a dime left for furniture, but we did get a little car. The place is still a ways out from town. Town’s coming though.”

  “Sounds prosperous, overall.”

  “Won’t have this number anymore, so you’ll have to tell me where to reach you. I’ve tried a hundred times that other number.”

  Behind Julius a bell goes off in the track of slot machines. He waits through this noise and then the silence after.

  “Brother, I haven’t seen you in more than a year,” Lee says. “Last time was in Okinawa, and after that—”

  Lee doesn’t finish this sentence but Julius knows what he’s thinking of. He remembers the last time they met, in that sailors’ bar. Lee had been so stout then, and so happy, though the night had gone terribly in the end.

  “It all turned out just fine,” Julius says.

  “It don’t necessarily seem that way to me.”

  “It wasn’t nothing, really, I told you that.”

  “Why’d they send you home then?”

  “Why are you asking me now?”