He peels off his torn shirt and puts on Ralph’s, which is nicer and cleaner and smells of the man’s aftershave. He leaves the truck and walks up the broad street back into the denser part of town. There, to pass the remaining daylight, he steps into a movie house showing a cabaretera. He pays a quarter for the movie and another for a lukewarm beer and sits in the darkened theater in the back. The few other men there sit far away from each other and slump down so that only their hands and noses are visible, their shiny foreheads. On the screen before him the ficheras flirt with the practiced ease of women who have never loved romance, who have always understood it as work, as a myth to make work tolerable. The machotes wear mustaches and wide-collared jackets, and when the ficheras uncross their ankles or sweep their long hair forward to cover their breasts the theater fills with sighs and then the furious sound of trumpets from the speakers hung low along the banisters.
Under the dim orange lights the men are all one color, a sameness that turns the theater into something nascent, like a perimeter of heaven, though some must be sunburned or pale as the plains or dark-eyed and brown-skinned. When Julius sees his hands around his glass or his faint reflection in the black wall he sees that he too is the same—the color of dusk across a mown lawn. Below him a boy sits alone, nine or ten years old, a souvenir Tom Mix hat covering half his face. From the side and above, Julius can see the boy’s slender frame, his chin and broad nose. On the screen the fichera is sitting in a crowded bar across from a fat man whose scrutiny is stupid and vulgar, and when he asks her to dance for him she pulls out her falsies and hands them over the table, then stands and slips off one strap of her bra. The frame cuts off her waist and her legs and her arms below the elbow, but the movement of her shoulders suggests she is reaching under her skirt to remove her panties. The camera holds her gaze as she does this. The boy raises his chin and presses the hat back with a finger and Julius sees the wide-eyed, nectarous youth in him. He feels his own gaze filtered through the eyes of the fichera, her excitement at the possibility of revelation, the mutiny in it, as she undresses for the man, for the boy in the cowboy hat, for Julius, for the theater. In the cinematic trick of perspective the fichera’s gaze falls on everyone equally, and Julius can almost feel the silky tug, the slippery freedom of undressing, as she is revealed. She is a saint preparing herself for some ceremony. In the darkness of the theater Julius’s mind is refracted as his sight is pulled first through the woman on the screen, then the boy below him who is not quite old enough to understand, then the other men scattered around the rows. He feels, all at once, what each of them might be feeling, watching the woman undress. He thinks of the man Ralph and his freckled shoulders. He looks down at his empty glass and shakes his head at this strangeness. Through the tinny speakers the sharp drums of the bolero plunk and circle. The fichera begins to dance, and the men in the theater groan back in their seats. The boy’s tall hat dips down until it covers his whole face; he is a peasant sleeping in huaraches and pantaloons, a stubborn parody of the border. He slouches into the seat until he disappears.
When the dance is over and the shot cuts away to a landscape of dirty mountains against an ocean flat as paper half the men in the theater rise to leave. Julius watches the end of the movie and the scattered feeling subsides. As the credits roll through a manic cumbia, he works his way down the aisle.
Outside the theater he follows the boy up the block toward the Zona Norte. Evening now, the infinite winter blue dropping between the buildings and across the hat brims of the tourists and the mariachis, emotional in its contrast to the darkened theater. Julius shakes out his arms and stretches his neck and keeps soft eyes on the periphery. The boy makes his way to the Plaza Veinte de Noviembre, where he joins a group of men selling cartonería dolls and wooden coins. Julius walks past them toward the center of the plaza. As he does the boy draws a finger pistol at the men and they fall back laughing, hands up. The oldest among them leans forward and flicks the brim of the hat so it sails off the boy’s head and drops to the ground.
Across from the merchants, a man in a guayabera unbuttoned to the navel weaves in and out of the flow of tourists. As Julius passes he sees what the man is selling: the sight of his own heart, knocking visibly against the skin of his bared left breast, rolling up and down in a knuckled ball. Julius stands and watches a moment without believing what he sees. Those around him do not respond to the sight, as though the man has been here for some time and is no longer a shock to anyone. His heart beats fussily, perfectly there and heart-shaped as if it might soon break the skin. Some tourists avert their eyes, a few toss pesos, and the man plays for them either way, showing his impossible heart and holding out his hand. Julius waits and watches for wires or seams in the man’s skin but he finds no deception, though a heart so close and defenseless is unimaginable. The man disappears back into the crowd like a rumor.
Julius returns to the lot and starts the truck. At the entryway he pays a different man the dime and sways out onto the broad avenida. He finds the park again by memory and leaves the truck along a side street where there are a few knitted chabolas set away in the trees. Then he walks to the back corner of the park, where he removes the shirt and twists it under the slow-running water of a fountain. When he shakes the shirt open he sees that the water has rusted the fabric where he and Ralph have sweated, along the collar and the armpits, and he scrubs these sections with the flat nail of his thumb. He wrings the shirt out again and puts it on damp, then combs water through his hair. The moon is out and a few pale flecks of starlight. In the grassy center a half-dozen shadows have begun to assemble. He lies down in the grass with the fob coiled in his fist and the damp back of the shirt letting through the cool softness of the ground.
Two nights ago now, after he found the envelopes, he’d sat in the kitchen wondering what he should do. He thought about what Muriel told him on the phone, and the money she’d sent, and both things took on new and surprising meanings. The tax receipt and the deed and the letter from the neighbors were easy enough to parse, and the racing form gave them provenance. The words she’d written on the form were familiar to him somehow but he couldn’t say why. He sat in the kitchen a long time considering all this. His reflection looked back at him from the window like an image on a movie screen, as crisp as that and as distant. It was a kind of double exposure, he’d thought. He knew if he told his brother that Lee’s heart would be first broken, then adjudicated, then dialed back to its small expectation. The strangeness of the crime might be enough to salvage things. Yet it would be the lie and not the money that injured Lee: The lie would confirm something his brother could not admit or name.
Yet, more troubling was Julius’s sense that he too had betrayed his brother and that he’d wanted to. Whatever he had hoped for by coming to them and by bringing the horse dissolved inside this fact. He had learned Muriel’s secret because he had come to steal from them, but long before that she had tried to tell him about it. He’d stayed on the phone that night a long time because he’d wanted her love and her disclosure, he’d wanted something his brother did not have. He wanted to be known by her and he suspected she wanted to know him but he had no way to say what he meant. In the dark window of their kitchen he was no longer handsome or tempting. He leaned his head on his brother’s table, wanting to weep but unable, and felt his decision taking shape in the cold morning. He might have left the hundred dollars in the coffee can but he needed the cruelty of it, the retribution his brother’s hurt would bring to him. He could not tell his brother and he could not keep a secret with his brother’s wife and that left only thieving, only his own exile.
Often, as a child, he had imagined the crucifixion—not the abstractions of sin or death or eternal life but the actual bite of the nail. During a sermon in the small church where his father had tithed, Julius dragged there some morning in summer for something he’d done, the pastor told the congregation that the nails were driven not into Christ’s palms, as everyone
had believed, but into His wrists. Julius watched his father ring his hand around his own wrist as the pastor spoke, as if he had just been released from some rope or cuff, and Julius understood for the first time that his father had feelings.
In the trees above him a bird takes off in the direction of the city. In the winter trees the birds move in dark flutters like waving hands. He thinks of every dead thing as a bird in the air. He remembers something then, a little fold in time. He sees himself at eleven or twelve holding a hedgepost while Lee digs around it, bare branches like those above him now, cast against a cold sky. He remembers no more than this, just the feeling of that moment and the pastel white of the sky, the blank arms of cottonwood and oak stretching across the view.
Now, perhaps right now, Ralph is sitting at a bar playing pop-cap or freckles with some hard-up kid, and as the kid leans out of his practiced reserve and lets some intimacy open between them Ralph begins to speak. He tells the kid he was approached, just that morning, by a dark-haired man in a dirty shirt with a missing button, a man with broad, unlucky hands. He is careful here to keep his shoulders square and his voice low, not to affect any toughness but rather a posture of masculine delight, the body arranged to mask its desires, to create a friable distance between the story he is telling and the way he really feels about it. In his boastful voice he tells the kid about the tiny pistol, his lost money. The young puto, vocationally aware of the man’s tastes but inexperienced, pockets this story to use later, as a cautionary tale, or as foreplay. He tells it first to his lover in a noisy café, to avoid talk of where he’s been, and then to the other kids at the plaza where he works. The story will roll out into the street where men gather, down into the Zona Coahuila and back out to the place where Julius lies now, imagining it. By then the story will have changed but one salient detail will remain, and it is by this singular item that Henry will know, when the story reaches him in some motel or bodega or alley, and he’ll begin to trace it back. And it will not matter that Julius betrayed him, that the decent work of the casino has been lost to theft and wandering. When he hears the story of the pistol he will come to Julius and Julius will be forgiven for all he has done wrong.
* * *
—
IN THE DEEP WINTERS of their Kansas childhood Julius and his brother found work among the farm boys, kept busy through the fallow season clearing snow for county maintenance, salting sidewalks and thawing stock tanks. They were gathered in the dark at the corner of Ninth and Topeka Boulevard in a repurposed school bus shared by the maintenance and sheriff’s departments, fitted inside with bars like towel racks for attaching handcuffs. The bus was unheated and the boys smoked with the transom windows popped out, admitting a flange of road salt and snowy mush. The city in those days was a single laid-out line of brick warehouses narrowing to the southern horizon, with the residential districts scattered out like henpeck to the east and west, and on such dark mornings the boys could see the early stars reflected in the blank panes of windows.
Julius’s memory of the bare branches and the hedgepost is from one such winter, soon into the thaw, nearly spring. He and his brother had been hauled up Burnett’s Mound where an ice storm weeks before had downed trees and flopped the fence that marked off a dirt path from a copse of cow oak. The fence had a moral purpose—to keep teenagers and servicemen from parking there, those who might reveal to young women the city lights and the western sky and the thorny work of romance—and their task that day was to restore it. Julius was just twelve, his brother nearly fourteen, old enough to have forgotten almost everything about their mother, who had been dead ten years, though something in the regular morning tasks still brought her perceptibly near, her smell and shape and warmth, a loneliness that reached out for some meaningful form so that they might name it and in that way snatch loneliness back from the general world.
On Burnett’s Mound they watched the sunrise from the top of the hill. They lifted the fence six feet at a time and dug the posts into the holes, through the top layer of frost down to where the earth was moist and workable. While two or three boys held the fence upright, another came through with rich new dirt and tamped the posts back in. As they worked, the day lighted slowly around the distinctive lip of the earth.
As was often the case, inmates from the county jail worked alongside them, and no one in authority prevented their interaction, though the hired boys were told not to let prisoners bum cigarettes or anything else, on penalty of mutual prosecution. On this day the inmates worked down the hill some distance, clearing branches and tossing them into a burn pile. By ten they had peeled off their square coats and moved about in the canvas pajamas that marked them as prisoners, while the guards stood holding their rifles. The men cast gloomy looks up the hill at the boys, who did their best not to look back.
Julius and Lee had reached that age and time when one of two things happens to brothers. Their father had been dunked in the Kansas River wearing only his nightshirt and since then had adopted the habits of pious men, with all the zeal and shortcomings of the converted. Julius and Lee each learned to negotiate this change differently. On weekend days Lee hauled the wash water from the street-spigot and made the coffee and kept the fire going while Julius disappeared into the vacant lots and the maze of winter trees by the river. The extra work they took on Fridays was the only time they were together now, except at night when they slept in the parlor by the woodstove. When, in another six months, their father stopped working and the electricity ran out and then the firewood, Lee quit school and Julius soon after him and both took jobs on factory row and came to separate conclusions about things.
But on this day they were still brothers. As they worked the prisoners started to loosen, to enjoy the outside world, and though they did not speak to the boys an air of attention began to drift between them. As they worked one of the men began to sing a little gospel song, about the river running headlong to the sea, and as he sang he lost the tune and began to hum inchoately until the other men laughed at his forgetfulness. Up the hill the boys stopped a moment to listen. Then a second man began another bar of the hymn, getting the words right this time, and the other prisoners joined in, and for a few minutes the tune carried along. The sun was fully up by then and the little frost had melted and the wet ground sucked at the boys’ boots as they moved between the posts. When the men reached the final verse no one could recall the words and the song fell apart in the field.
But the prisoners had invited the boys and anyone else to be aware of them. The guards had relaxed their watch, chatting with one another as they looked down idly at the men. Julius, whose sweet voice hadn’t changed yet, nudged his brother and began to sing, still holding the hedge-rail and keeping his voice soft. “Shoo fly don’t bother me, ’cause I belong to somebody,” he sang, rising up a fragile octave to mark the change in mood. The men down the hill stopped their work and looked at each other and then up the hill at the boys. Julius caught the eye of one prisoner who nudged the man next to him and pointed up at the singer and Julius felt a pleasant surge of fear. The guards quieted their chatting then. Lee saw the man pointing at Julius and moved closer to his brother. Even then Julius knew how to stand in a way that pleased other men like him, one hand in the back pocket of his jeans and the collar of his jacket popped up, though his youth was a disguise he would wear a long time. Lee started to sing along as a kind of protection, and Julius clapped the heel of his hand against the hedgepost while the guards looked on, until a voice rose up from below, then a few other prisoners’ after. Because no one knew the verses they sang this first line a few times, until finally the song died away. They went back to work until one of the boys drew up another song from the radio, which everyone knew, and the prisoners and the boys together sang through the song once and then again, while the guards watched. The guards did not settle back to their ease but they did not stop the singing either.
When the light began to fail the boys were gathered and put b
ack on the bus. Through the windows they watched the men come forward one by one to have their hands cuffed in front of them. The man who had pointed at Julius stared through the dirty transom window, and as he was cuffed he winked at Julius, who winked back. His brother, already preoccupied by their return home and what they might encounter there, did not notice this. Julius stared a long time until a guard butted the man with the rifle and he turned and walked down the road toward the second bus. Julius could feel it, the freezing bite of those handcuffs, flung closed in a stirrup. The boys had been hauled there to do work for pay that grown men were punished by doing, and this seemed the progress of things, the vista a boy of that class in that time might glance warily toward.
The boys’ bus followed the prisoners’ bus down the hill and to the flat south end of town where the feed stores were shuttered and a few men stood outside in the cold, smoking and talking. When they were well away from the site the buses parted ways, one toward downtown and the other out to the county jail. Later the city scraped all of it off—the cow oak stand, the hedge fence, the side of the mound itself—to pull through the new turnpike from Oklahoma to Kansas City, past towns that came to mean something by proximity to it, so that a man might take his wife down to the Granada in Emporia on a Friday night just because he could. But by then Julius was long gone, and Lee too, though if they’d opened a map they could still have pointed out the place they’d worked and where their father’s little forsaken house had been, along with a dozen bars and shops along the turnpike route, the razed shingles and bricks sent on to county salvage to be made into asphalt.
On Swift Horses Page 17