On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  “You’d see her out there any day of the week, in any weather. Of course no one asked but the overall sense was that she was plying her wares. You ever see a working girl on a bicycle? That’s the kind of town it is and I’ll tell you I’m glad to have seen it now. One afternoon the rain came sudden like it does and there she still was, riding up and down. Must’ve thought she had the market cornered, since all the other girls had gone inside to save their dresses and whatnot. And wouldn’t you know it, here comes some old blackjack stiff with a newspaper tented over his head with one hand and trying to wave her down with the other. And that’s when we all realized the drawback of such a method, of riding on a bike and not just hanging about, when even on an empty street in the rain a customer had to make such an obvious gesture to get her attention.”

  “Ain’t it legal there?” Lee asks.

  “Believe it or not it ain’t. Rest of the state it is. Vegas, they banned it.”

  “Well that’s ironic, huh,” Lee says, in an indulgent tone. Julius frowns. Muriel notices again the poor state of his clothes. In the bright overhead light of the kitchen the skin at his neck is rough and red, as if he had shaved in the dark. She remembers him as fresh and young, not this man before her now.

  Julius plays down two face cards and a nine of spades. But Muriel has two kings and a jack, and she slaps these down grinning on the table.

  “You didn’t pick up any of that on the draw. What were you waiting for?” Julius asks.

  “Your confidence,” she says.

  She cups the dimes they’re using for ante and pulls them in. In Julius’s tone, in the crass story, an unease that widens out over each of them and over the house. As if Julius’s presence distorts their respectability. Muriel senses this and it excites her, it draws away her feeling of apprehension, though the brothers play as if burdened by it, as if they might rather do something cruel or reckless.

  “Well, I’d tell you the end of that story but it hasn’t ended, I bet. Somewhere that girl is still riding that bicycle, and that’s the moral right there. Nothing was going to stop her.”

  “You’ll remember sometimes when the Sunday Dorcas ended and there on the street were them edified women of North Topeka, handing out leaflets,” Lee says.

  “Good lord, those women in their terrible black shoes! Only Lutherans would let women that frigid have meetings.”

  “That’s about the closest we ever got to the kind of thing you’re saying.”

  “Oh God, Lee, that might be the funniest thing you ever said,” Julius says, but he doesn’t laugh. He palms the deck and starts to shuffle in the elaborate way of movie cowboys, the bridge cracked upward and downward, the deck split with the heel of his thumb. Lee asks Muriel if the store just off the county road is open past seven and if they need milk for the morning, and she hums a moment before answering. Lee rises and takes the coffee can from the counter and fishes a finger through the bills inside. Julius glances up from the cards and looks at Muriel then at the coffee can. Here a small intrusion of the domestic life they had assembled without him, the familiar, logistical talk of married couples.

  From outside, a wet snort near the kitchen door. They all three start, then their laughter erases the retreating edge of Julius’s odd look.

  “I guess she came out, then,” Julius says.

  He stands and walks to the kitchen door and opens it onto the yard, bluish this hour past dusk, and pokes his head out. Lee rises too and when he’s halfway across the kitchen the horse passes by the open door and Julius jumps back. The horse turns her great head in and sniffs. Julius moves behind the table and Lee laughs, still moving forward, and reaches out one hand to the curious face. To everyone’s surprise the horse necks in under the lintel and pulls back her black lips. Her teeth are flat and even, the color of church piano keys. She steps slowly in until her withers and neck are even with the cabinets and Lee touches her huge jaw with the flat of his hand.

  “Well hello there,” he says.

  The horse lowers her head and accepts Lee’s touch and then she throws up her proud snout and Lee scolds her lightly. She snorts in happy consanguinity.

  Muriel stands. Julius holds still behind the table and as she moves close to the horse he says, “Careful, girl.”

  The horse leans further in and clops toward Muriel until the horse has all four feet on the linoleum. This close, she is chinked in vein and bone and smells of grass. In these last months Muriel hasn’t missed horses or the track but she misses horses now. Now that one is here. She reaches out and the horse bows and Muriel touches her in the bony cleft between her eyes and looking down the horse’s eyelashes are thick as terry. Muriel has never touched a horse before.

  From outside the planate slap of wood dropped from height, at the tract up the road. The horse jerks and neighs and Muriel moves her hand away and Lee steps back. Julius claps once and then again and the horse moves swiftly backward in the way of cultivated creatures, a perfect awareness of the space through which she’s passed, gait low and competent. Lee follows and says, “That’s all right, honey, that’s all right.” The horse leans away from Lee’s reaching hand and fully out into the yard. Julius skips over and closes the door and shuts her out. Lee says, “Hey now,” the way he might reprimand a child.

  “You don’t want no wild animal in your fancy kitchen, now do you?” Julius says.

  “That horse is just fine,” Lee says. “Though she could use a hosing off.”

  He opens the door again and the horse is still there but a few cool steps back, one eye casting back the twin image of the house, the other of Lee’s head and shoulders. Seeing her round eyes there in the doorway, Muriel remembers suddenly one of her mother’s men, who lived next door to their apartment and across a vacant lot. He’d made a lovers’ telephone from tin cans and a curl of boater’s string and he drew one end across the lot for her mother and kept one for himself. The day they moved out of that apartment Muriel saw him standing in the lot forlorn with the telephone in his hands. When he saw Muriel watching him he pressed the cans to his eyes so he looked like a minnow and grinned at her. She never saw him again after that, though he had been so sweet and childish, he’d had the nosy fortitude the horse had now, interrupting their card game.

  For a moment Lee stays in the doorway, between the kitchen and the horse, until Julius moves behind him and bangs under the sink for a coffee can. Lee turns toward his brother. They smile at each other in some mutual remembrance and Lee shuts the door and goes to his brother and takes the empty can and holds it out and his brother dumps the ashtray in. Julius dusts his palms against his jeans and lips a new cigarette and pats his pockets until Lee scuffles a drawer for another book of matches. As they perform these small tasks the energy in the room shifts back to them, they are brothers again. They had been vigorous children, Muriel knows, the way boys without mothers, with unsuitable fathers, were given to mischief and high emotion. She can see, in their dance around the kitchen, how they must have held themselves apart from the world. For a moment it is as strange to be with these men as it would be to wake among starlings.

  They play a round of spit and drink the last of the wine, and then Lee stands, peers out through the window and spots the horse by the tree line where Julius has dumped the apples. He pulls a coin from his pocket and looks at his brother shrewdly.

  “Tails,” Julius says.

  “Predictable,” says Lee, and with his thumb flips the coin high in the air. When it lands on the floor the men lean over. Julius claps his brother on the back.

  “We’ll go up together. You can give me a ride in that fine car,” he says.

  Lee stands and takes a few coins from the coffee can.

  “You know what I wish?” he says, leaned against the counter looking at his brother, the drink running ruddy up his neck. “I wish I could’ve been a kid for all this. Those builders took just eight weeks. You remember how
long we spent trying to fix old Dad’s place. I’d come out here after work and I’d look at the house all clean and new, just wood and angles, and think, now here’s a place that makes sense to a kid.”

  “We ain’t kids no more,” Julius says.

  “I’m trying to explain it to you.”

  Lee looks at Muriel as if she might help him. She knows that during the building he’d come out after work and climbed to the raised wall of the bedroom and looked out over the valley, because he’d told her so. She might say this to Julius now and allow him to see his brother this way. Most evenings Lee sat with the plans at the card table in their apartment kitchen, narrating them to Muriel, working his dreamy way through the rooms, names etched in their boxes like countries: CLOSET, BATHROOM, DEN.

  “I wanted you to be here then,” Lee says. “To see that it was possible, even for poor nobodies like us.”

  “I’m here now.”

  “Sure you are. Sure you are.”

  For a moment Lee stands with his hands folded below his beltline.

  He says, “We waited a long time for you,” then he turns in the doorway and steps into the hallway beyond. The sound of the bathroom door pulled shut. Julius looks around the room and up across the ceiling and out the front window. Silence in the kitchen, the slow wind through the trees.

  “Nobody’s fault is it,” Julius says, and drops his feet from the table and lets the front legs of the stool knock solidly to the ground. Inside this sudden intimacy Muriel doesn’t want reproach, but she can think of no other way to speak to him. She cannot say, You left me alone. Nor, You can see we got along just fine without you.

  He presses his toes against her shoe in a sweet goading nudge. She looks at his shirt with the ripped sleeve, down to the gritty nubs of his discarded boots, tipped now on the kitchen floor so the soles point up at her. She waits to see if he will say anything about their long phone call or the track or the time he has spent away from them and when he doesn’t, when he simply holds her gaze, she says, “Doesn’t look like you cashed out much ahead.”

  He laughs amiably and she laughs with him. He reaches out and takes her elbow, then skates his hand down her arm, turns up her palm, and kisses it. She thinks of what he might smell there, dirt and soap and sweat, ordinary things, and somehow this is more exciting than the fact of his touch, imagining what his touch will tell him about her. He holds her hand there a beat too long until the kiss turns parodic or even forbidden, and she laughs to keep the moment easy and pulls her hand away and waves it against his charm. Though he wears still the anguish he’s brought along, he’s smiling at her. Where his sleeve is ripped his elbow shows and she reaches out and pinches it and he yelps away and she lets this be the character of the moment.

  * * *

  —

  LATER, THE MEN HAVE BECOME DRUNK and drape across the table in their postures of male affection, playing a card game unknown to her and salvaged from childhood, a game whose rules seem to change with each hand in the way of children’s games. They’ve danced to all the songs on the radio and now the station has lapsed into static but Julius keeps swaying and Lee reaches out every few minutes and takes his brother by the shoulder and pulls him near. Conversations she can’t follow. The ashtray overflowing and juice glasses rimmed in dark wine and fingerprints. Outside, a scrubbing noise in the trees not far from the house, the shape of the horse visible for brief moments where the trees break open.

  In the bedroom she takes off her clothes. She leaves the lamp off and stands in front of the mirror. Through the thin curtains, the moonlight and the citylight cast into the room like faraway lights underwater. With her fingers she waves back her hair and parts it long from one side and tucks it behind her ear so she looks like Dietrich when she tips her hat in Morocco. But she is not so beautiful and she knows it and on her the wide part looks matronly but not dignified. She fusses her hair back out so it falls around her face and in the strange light she looks almost blonde, as she was born. She recalls with remorse the story her mother told of their last winter in town, when Muriel’s hair had darkened and she’d grown four inches. That spring they moved to Marshall County and her mother was married and Muriel spent the summer not among the rural children but in her room looking out across the fields, so her hair did not lighten in the sun and she was never blonde again. Her mother told this story the way any mother might, to acquaintances and shopkeepers, as a lament for her own youth. That Muriel had been grateful for her new plainness was something she knew would hurt her mother.

  From the kitchen she hears the music of the radio and the men’s laughter. She pulls her hair straight back, pricks her hairline with her finger, and makes a long center part. She tows each half behind her ears and ducktails the back together, which gives her the appearance of an evangelical or a hayseed, so she fingers it back over but keeps it balled at her neck, and here is something closer to what she wants. With her palm she lifts the front so it arches softly up and away from her forehead. She looks bold and almost masculine, but something in her posture or her eyes gives her away as herself. She steps back from the mirror and looks at full length. Her own body is a thrill then, her breasts and hips below the tomboy hair, and she slides her hands flat along her sides and down her thighs and feels the warmth of her skin in the dark room.

  She gets into bed without dressing and sleeps easily and dreams of horses across the fields of her childhood, though in life she never saw horses there. Much later she is awakened by a sound in the room. Lee’s body next to her is heavy and hot. She turns toward the door and as she nears sleep a shadow passes by the doorway. She drifts off and when she wakes again Julius is in their room, by the window looking out, and she thinks first of her nakedness and then of the hour. She thinks she must be dreaming, though his smell is in the room. The figure rises and comes toward the bed and it is indeed Julius, his face calm and pale. He leans over and kisses her forehead and she stirs and lifts her chin toward him. She says his name. He holds a finger to his lips and turns and leaves the room.

  For a long time she waits without sleeping. Then something occurs to her. She rises and steps to the mirror. She lifts it from the nail and turns it, and there is the envelope with the deed to her mother’s house and the receipt from the tax board and a letter back from the Carters, saying all is well. Inside this envelope is another, smaller one, folded tight with the rest of the money, two thousand dollars give or take. She sifts through these things as if in confirmation of the facts. Everything is there. She takes this as it is and soon she sleeps and when she wakes she thinks she must have dreamed it. That the wine and the horse and her own long waiting had entered the night and made the shape of him.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING comes in warm and bright. Muriel rises and finds the men already dressed. The kitchen is disordered and on the back stoop the radio plays country-western from twenty years ago. The brothers stand at the back of the yard looking up at the house. The horse has slipped away, off among the trees to the east, and Muriel watches as the men split off north and south to bring her back. The mood between them is tense, this she can tell from their heavy strides and the bolt of impatience she feels from Lee, who disappears inside the morning shadows. The horse hears them coming through the trees and steps tall into the yard away from them and the look on her long face is weary, as if this game is one she’s played before and she knows the odds. Across the river the pinpricked valley, a few houselights on in the early morning. The moon is still up and looks cold but bright as brass.

  Lee steps out of the trees and whistles and lets his hair fall across his eyes, like a weekender freed from work in town. They’ve draped a blanket over the horse, but when they come close she moves deftly away and the blanket falls onto the ground. Lee sidles up and touches her flank and the horse tilts from him but does not run and he steps carefully forward and his brother sneaks up to steady her from the other side but s
he sees him long before he is parallel. She stands thoughtfully between them. Neither man will step in front of her and she seems to sense this small respect, this memory of her power. She moves straight forward and her march draws dust which rises motely around her and again she slips off into the trees, toward the vacant lot to the north.

  Lee turns to Julius and says something Muriel can’t hear. The men confer lightly, then Lee sits in the center of the yard and laughs. In his defeat he becomes a man she hasn’t seen in some time: a little Midwestern boy laughing at his own failure like only failure suits him.

  Julius stands a moment looking at his brother, then comes to Muriel on the stoop.

  “We’ve got a little wager going here,” he tells her. “Who can mount her and stay.”

  He sits beside her and lights two cigarettes and hands one over.

  “Looks like you’re just trying to catch her, let alone ride her,” Muriel says.

  Julius smiles and hollers to Lee in the yard: “Even your wife says that mare’s got too much blood.”

  Lee looks up into the coming daylight and does not answer.

  “You all aren’t going to get very far with this,” Muriel says to Julius.

  “It’s good you’re on my side,” Julius says.

  “It isn’t just the horse that’s holding you back.”

  She takes a long drag and smiles but Julius is working through some feeling. For a moment they smoke in silence. The mist snakes from the river below and crawls into the tree line where the horse stands, then burns off to nothing at the road. The horse is reddish in this light but her mane is nearly silver, split across her wide brow in leaves so her eyes below are numinously dark.

  “So this is paradise, huh,” Julius says.

  His voice is rough and strange and he radiates frustration.