On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  When the day opens the streets fill with navy men taking the sidewalks four across. When one group of sailors meets another they slow and walk deliberately and sometimes one group fans aside so the other men can pass and sometimes they hold the path. The panhandlers and hawkers watch this cautiously. The pigeons keep their margins and when the men have passed they peck back to the sidewalks and the hawkers resume their calling. Julius finds a few small bars packed with local men and drops nickels for weak beer and peanuts. He does not ask about Henry but instead waits, watching the doors and corners.

  At dusk he joins a card game in a hotel lounge and finds the men there playing Mexican Sweat for two-dollar antes, a version of poker in which all the cards are known and there are no raises or bluffing and the men wait for a trump to turn and decide their fates. He plays in for twenty minutes, but the absence of bluffing makes it difficult to suss anything out. He loses twenty dollars and no one speaks to him.

  “I sure wish I knew where a norteño might find a better time than this,” he says.

  None of the men look up from their cards. Another few minutes pass and Julius begins to feel the prickle of the men’s attention. When he rises to leave, one of the men half-stands and his hat falls from his knee and he gestures with one arm in a wide arc toward the door.

  “Basta,” he says, “adios.”

  All night he walks through Centro and Este and down into the Cacho by the old casino, where the gridded streets give out to curving lanes that cross each other at narrow unmarked intersections. In each of these places Julius peeks in windows and through tilting trees and waits on benches near where men have gathered. He sees the men leaned against the cinder-block walls and squatted on their heels. Some are men like the men he saw that morning and some are the sons of dust bowl migrants down from the denuded hills across the border. Loose-legged Okies with their fat combs and their hair ducked back and their big self-conscious laughter. By midnight the small open lots in among the shops and the bars are lighted with fires in painted drums and the shadows assemble around in postures of organized danger. The fires shoot fetters of sparks into the night.

  On Jalisco he passes a hotel built like a prison tower and he stops in the lobby for the toilet and a drink of brown water from the tap. He is hungrier than he can remember being. The walls and floors of the lobby are cold gray cement and the elevator door stands open but inside it is empty and dark. All the shabby chairs are unused except one by a narrow window, up high like a jail, where a woman sits alone. She is dark-haired and not young and does not appear to be waiting for anyone, though she presses one thumb under her chin and curls her first knuckle to the side of her mouth as if anticipating some insight. The window casts down a providential neon from the street outside and colors the woman’s face, streaks of green and red wheeling across her nose and chin like a pinion. For a long moment Julius stands watching her. He feels very tired and hungry and as the woman sits detained by the light he thinks that he’d like to be touched by her, perhaps held close. She does not look like Muriel but she has Muriel’s bearing, and he feels that if he called out to her she might turn to him with Muriel’s face. A strange, urgent thought, but another thing he cannot ask for.

  Then Julius thinks of the simple landscape of Henry’s body, his moments of concentration, and Henry and Muriel and this woman seem placed one over the other like slipped film. These are the mysterious things he knows about his lover, as much as he knows about this woman or his brother’s wife or anyone else. He might look in every bar or hotel lobby and find such traces in the presence of others, and even if he stands for weeks in this very spot he might not wait long enough for Henry to catch up with this thought of him. In twelve hours he’s spent two hundred dollars and he is nowhere. The gray walls of the lobby emit no sound and Julius hears his own breathing. In some park where he has been the hour before, Henry might be standing among the palms, never knowing that Julius has passed through. The woman reaches out for a glass on the chair arm and moves slightly forward, revealing her face through the light, and the spell is broken. Julius hears a clamor in the stairwell and walks back through the lobby doors, out into the everlasting city.

  The sun is at seven in a cloudless sky. He looks across a street bright with flags and finds that he’s walked all night in a circle. To the south the crumbling minarets of Agua Caliente, to the north the tourists’ Bel Airs, and beyond these things the fringes Julius has skirted, that he thinks he’s found the edges of. Then he thinks of the fob in his pocket and remembers Henry standing with an elbow propped on the dresser and knows suddenly what he will do.

  He finds the alley as easily as men find anything in cities where they are looking, past the streets downtown where the shopkeepers are sweeping and rolling out their carts, into an older part of the city. Across the street a bar emits the low sound of laughter and music. The men out front stand smoking and teasing one another. He will have to navigate their dawning sobriety and the clarity it brings, but he knows also that the men who are left here have not found what they wanted, or they would be somewhere else. That sadness, that unmet need, will be useful to him. As the men began to clump together at the sidewalk’s margin he knows there is only a slim chance that any of them has money left.

  Inside, the bar is full. The jukebox in the corner plays a country ballad; the men sway and clap each other at the chorus, which must remind them of something they are substituting this long night for. Julius elbows up and orders and pays with a new dollar. Then he stands at the end of the bar waiting. Behind the bar a cheap mirror kinked at the center and curled with smoke. The room gives off the odor of damp cotton. The back wall is covered in catalogue tear-outs of women in girdles and suspender belts, advertisements for toreos and weeklong fiestas at the coast, a map of the world as it was in 1840.

  He allows a thought of Muriel to gather at the back of his mind. He’d not slept that first night and before dawn he pulled his boots on and drank a silty cup of yesterday’s coffee, then stepped out into the blue chill of the grassless yard. He walked down to the river bluff and stood watching the brown water while he pissed into the scrub. From the bluff the new house was white and clean and quiet. He thought of the envelopes and what he’d found there and he could not make sense of it. Why she would still have the deed and the tax receipt to a house she didn’t own. Perhaps they were only souvenirs, he thought. But when he zipped and turned back he saw her through the kitchen window, standing at the stove. The propane burner fluttered a weak blue and caught under the base of the kettle. Her hair was strangely plaited and combed back like a man’s. As she stood there waiting for the kettle she placed both palms at the counter’s edge and pushed back so her arms straightened and her back arched. She looked then like paintings of trees he had seen in Japan, the ken painters had in that part of the world for bowed or windblown shapes, the way the trees or waves or cliffs or fields exposed the constant motion of the earth. A moment later Lee entered, and she stood upright and lengthened her neck and dropped her hands from the counter and turned toward her husband. Julius saw the gravity of her mood dispelled by the simple adjustment of her body, and he knew then something true about her and about his brother’s marriage, though it was another day before he really understood it. He wished then that he could go back to their earlier conversations and listen again but harder this time. He had thought that his brother had it all, and realizing it wasn’t true shook something free in him.

  Finally then he sees the man he needs, at the rear of the bar. From the slant of the man’s round chin toward the room Julius can see the weakness in him, the want in his arm thrown loosely across the back of the chair. Julius waits for the man to feel his attention, and when he does Julius looks back at him. This look hangs between them long enough to answer its own question. When Julius finishes his beer he orders two more and carries them to the man’s table and raises one glass. The men at the jukebox have awakened from their thin daydreams and play now
the rancheras they know from movie westerns and draw pantomimed pistols on each other. One man narrows his eyes down the sight of his finger and out the front door.

  The man says his name is Ralph, though Julius suspects it is not. He gives his own name honestly and the man smiles. Up close Julius sees that he is older, light hair cut just a day or two before. On the back of his chair is an Eisenhower jacket coated in dust, one corner of the collar unraveling, belonging first to an uncle or brother. The kind of jacket a man past a certain age would wear to honor another, better war. When the man offers the empty chair, Julius sits with his elbows looped around the back and his hips curled under his waist, knowing he seems younger and less shrewd this way. They speak then of ordinary things, the price of a Corona and its general flavor, the dark women on the Avenida Ensenada, and at each turn in the conversation Julius asks a question meant to seem artless and naive. As they talk, Julius studies the man’s hands to see what risks he might be willing to take, the same way he’d watched gamblers from the peek above. His own hands he drapes lightly at the ends of his arms. The music of accordions and vihuelas like a bed being bounced.

  Finally Julius says, “Night’s full over and it’s too late now for anything good to happen.”

  “Not so, friend,” Ralph says. “Days don’t work the same here.”

  “You ever feel like that, though? Like there’s just this narrow window of time when what you want might come to you? I feel like that all over right now.”

  And at this signal Ralph does what Julius needs him to do. He leans forward and lowers his voice. Between them the smudged glasses like a story about what happens next.

  “Listen, I know a place we could have some fun, before the day is through,” he says.

  A few simple looks and first Julius rises and then Ralph after him. Out front the man flags down a cab and they are driven through the gilt winter dust. When they are dropped at the gates of a park Ralph pays the driver and steps stiffly out and strokes the dust from his sleeves and snaps out his collar. They are somewhere at the northern edge of the city, near the border. Bright blue cinder-block walls etched with the park’s name and its founding—Santa Cecilia, 1898. Across the street a puzzle of chabolas made from particleboard and broken brick and glass bottles, each shoveled into the next, the roofs thatched in tree limbs and plastic sheeting and bolts of cloth, all of it held up with ropes attached to iron crosses and bits of fence. From the mass comes a cacophony of human sound, laughter, pots banging, the cries of young children, somewhere near the street a slide harmonica. Above all this a pall of woodsmoke, waiting crows along the eaves.

  “The mother of invention,” Ralph says.

  For a few minutes they walk toward the center of the park as if they had not yet agreed on anything. Inside the blue wall the sounds of the slum dissipate. The trees open into a small meadow planted in struggling crabgrass. In this country light Julius sees that Ralph was once handsome, that in many places he still is. Through the branches above, the late morning sun falls into soft shadows that texture the grass.

  Julius sees no other people, though along the edges of the meadow are a few solitary shapes, a hint of habitation. Ralph leads him through the open space and behind a stand of ash, near a low stone wall.

  “You’re here from the station,” Julius says.

  “You’ve done some service, too, I see. You’re of that age.”

  “Sure enough, so we’re even on that score.”

  Ralph unbuttons the dusty jacket and puts his hands on his hips and lets the jacket open over a white silk shirt embroidered at the shoulder in faint roses. The buttons are pearlescent and feminine and strain against the man’s broad chest.

  “I don’t need to know any more about you as long as you don’t ask me.”

  In the man’s clean and hopeful look is something Julius doesn’t like. He thinks of the men and their wives below him in the peek. The ease of their beauty. He thinks of his own brother and his ignorance. He lets Ralph come forward and he slides one leg between Ralph’s legs and pulls him by the belt so their noses come hard together. Julius kisses the bottom of his laughing mouth and almost forgets himself.

  “Been too long then,” Ralph says.

  He takes the loose fly of Julius’s jeans in his fist to bring him closer. In the heat of this moment their cheeks press together and the dim light of the tree cover dapples them sentimentally. Julius drops one hand to dig in his back pocket. Over the man’s shoulder the regular daylight falls bright and unbroken inside the low wall of stones.

  “This can be very easy,” Julius says, the little blackened nub of the gun in the loose flesh under the man’s jaw.

  Ralph cuts his eyes and sees the gun and laughs. Julius presses the muzzle hard. Then Ralph frowns, reaches with one hand into his pocket, the other hand raised in mock surrender, and Julius laughs too, because of course the whole thing is ridiculous. The tiny gun a kind of joke about violence, like a stick of dynamite in a cartoon. Julius pulls the gun away and steps back.

  “You know I’ve been hustled in a dozen cities,” Ralph says, handing over the bills he’s pulled from his pocket. “Cost of doing business.” He makes a smacking sound with his lips, rubs the butt of his thumb across them.

  “Good to be realistic,” Julius says.

  The man leans against the low wall of stones and softens his look.

  “Is that it then?” he asks. “Awful lot of trouble for a few dollars I’d planned to give you anyway.”

  “I’m afraid that’s it.”

  Ralph rubs one palm down the hard front of his pants and the gesture is not lewd but somehow tender, as if he were smoothing a lover’s hair. He stands and steps forward and Julius holds the pistol straight out.

  “I ain’t no hustler. That ain’t why we’re here.”

  “Fine, if you say so. If that makes you feel better.”

  Julius dislikes the man’s tone but he’s never robbed anyone so openly and he does not know how to leave this interaction.

  “There can be more. Take off your jacket and shirt.”

  Ralph smiles and the tip of his tongue presses through his square teeth. He unbuttons the top button of his shirt and then stops. His face loses its flirtation and he glances off as if considering all this for the first time.

  “I’m going to let you keep that stupid jacket, but I want the shirt.”

  Ralph shrugs out of the jacket then unbuttons the shirt and takes it off one arm at a time while he switches the jacket between hands. He tosses the shirt and Julius catches it and flips it over one shoulder and levels the gun on him again.

  “How big are those boots?”

  “Listen, baby, you’re getting away with plenty here.”

  “What size?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Keep ’em.”

  Julius runs out of the forest shadow and into the coastal autumn light. He crosses the green expanse where a few old men have arrived with dominoes, then back into another grove of ash. He watches as Ralph emerges from the trees in the jacket buttoned tight to the throat. Ralph sees the old men and nods lightly and stands a moment in the clearing looking around. The men look at him and Ralph looks back and when one of the men begins to stand Ralph turns and walks out the way they came. Julius waits for ten minutes, then twenty, until he is certain Ralph will have found another cab and is back on his way downtown. Then he rolls the silk shirt into his pocket and leaves the cover of the trees and walks through the meadow and back out to the street.

  Once, he had stolen a woman’s pantyhose when he could find no money in her bag, and he kept the hose for some weeks though he had no use for them. He never told anyone that he had taken them, not the rent boys he knew or the card players whose talk was droll and vicious, any of whom would have laughed and liked Julius more for this pointless act, as if it proved his authenticity as a thief. To tell them the story wou
ld be to enlarge it, to unlive it. To share a moment of such intimacy would make those hearing the story more important than he wanted them to be.

  But now he needs the story shared. He thinks that if Ralph tells the right person about his foolish mugging, about the young man with the souvenir pistol, that word could travel pretty fast. The best stories and the harshest cautions took only days to circle in Los Angeles, through the streets and the poor neighborhoods. Such efficiency made it both dangerous and easy to live there. No privacy, but no surprises either. Julius feels sure that Ralph is the right type but one never knows; a man can become any type at any time. He walks around the perimeter of the park as the day begins to warm, and as he does he makes a mental map of the places he’ll return to once the sun has set.

  * * *

  —

  THROUGH THE REST of that morning Julius sleeps in the cab of the truck, curled, bootheels caught on the edge of the seat and his toes hanging. He wakes shivering in the cooling afternoon. He opens the door and steps out and shakes the stiffness from his arms and legs. The sun is lowering in a long cut of light and he follows it to the edge of the lot and stands looking out at the skyline of the city. He thinks of the work ahead of him. He pulls the envelope from his pocket and thumbs through the money there. In his head he adds this money to the cost of the old Ford, then to the price of the lot and the plans and the lumber and the labor. He had never won that much at anything, never known anyone who had. It was the kind of luck that made tyrants of men and yet she had given it away. She might have kept the money for herself along with the house in Kansas but she had bought the house for Lee and let him have his dream and his fantasy and hidden the rest. He tries to imagine any reason for such a decision and he thinks again of the night in Torrance and the way he’d lost on purpose to protect himself from harm and he sees the edge of her choice but not the thing entire.