On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  “I don’t have any interest in you that way,” Julius says.

  “That may be, but what if you did?”

  “I’ve got enough of my own troubles now.”

  “I can see that clear enough.”

  Then she reaches out to trace the faint rose at his shoulder, sooty and stiff with rain. He reaches up and covers her hand with his own and they touch that way, both their hands at his shoulder. He feels her attention turned behind to the billiard table. He could take anything from her and it would not change her opinion one bit; she has already decided about him. To him that is a freedom that will not barter for virtue. It is the way he recognizes tenderness.

  So he says, “You remember how McCarthy used to talk, about fairies and reds.”

  “Sure,” says the second woman. She looks at his hand touching the brunette’s and frowns.

  “One has secrets and the other traffics in them, and there’s a bad combination,” says the brunette.

  “That was the idea. But McCarthy didn’t see the irony in it, did he,” Julius says.

  “And what’s that?” asks the brunette.

  “A whole great majority of Americans had never heard of fairies or reds until McCarthy and Cohn got them in the craw. And now everyone has to wonder if they’ve met one. So do you all.”

  “Well, hasn’t this turned bleak,” the second woman says, but he can tell what’s dawning on her.

  “Here’s the thing,” he says, and catches the eye of each woman in turn. “You don’t want people’s secrets, do you? When you’re someone with secrets that means you’re either very good or very bad, and neither one seems to me much to hope for.”

  “Things I learned in Tijuana,” the brunette says.

  Both women look away and through the tilted bottles to the street beyond. Outside the mariachis have lifted their instruments and stubbed out their cigarettes and stand tuning for evening. They are transformed by these acts. The rain falls inside the trumpet bells and the rims of their sombreros and along the neck of the vihuela. A strange confusion of causality, whether the mariachis have changed to or from something. The rain on the tin roof of the cantina sounds like teeth grinding.

  The brunette turns back to him and says, “You ought to be careful out there.”

  “You too,” Julius says.

  “Out there is where everything is though, isn’t it,” she says.

  She slides her hand from his and pats it gently and lifts it from his shoulder and places it neatly in his lap. The other woman has not looked back and now she stands and turns toward the billiard table and says, “Mary Ann,” and shoulders the brunette who stands too.

  Julius leaves them then and walks out into the rainy street. He walks through the plaza where the heart man works, but the heart man is not there. The vendors have returned and the rain comes lightly and Julius buys a glass of corn chicha and drinks it as he stands by a statue of Flores Magón, then buys another and downs it, and when the vendor shakes his hand to indicate a third glass Julius toasts the statue and pays the vendor another nickel and crosses the river toward Los Insurgentes with the sour cup. By now he is maudlin drunk and he knows it. He returns to the truck and pays the man the dime and rolls out onto the street, then turns again on Padre Kino and past the federal highway headed toward the border.

  Several blocks from the border park, Julius stops the truck along a covert of trees and waits for full darkness. He tries to recall the day, sorting its elements into a simple order. He thinks of the men he saw, then their wives or children or lovers or bosses, then the women at the bar and their husbands, and he tries to count who might have seen him or might be told about him. He imagines Henry circling the same bars and plazas looking for him, an hour or two behind, perhaps now buying a glass from the same man by the same statue. It had been so long now and he doesn’t want to walk again into the soaking park, but he worries that if he does not keep his routine he will become remote from the workings of history. That what is left after history is merely fate. He says very quietly, please, then he closes his eyes and says it again. He doesn’t have anyone in mind when he says it yet it does not feel unheard.

  He tucks the shirt in tightly and brushes the roses with his fingers. He stamps down on the bills in his boots to make them flat again. Then he leaves the truck. The slum is quiet in this twilight hour and the gate to the park stands open. Inside the meadow is silky with rain. He watches the wind animate the grass and the small pools of rainwater, and as he watches a shadow emerges through the trees by the stone wall where he’d been weeks before, with Ralph. The shadow edges and takes shape against the branches and in the fading light between them, a figure like a man behind a lectern or altar. The shadow does not move closer but stands there with the square of darkness in front, then the figure raises his arms, hands open like someone asking not to be shot or blamed. Julius moves across the meadow and the figure moves toward him. The man stops and Julius keeps coming and in the slant of light he sees the man in more detail. He is tall and lanky and short-haired. Julius thinks of Henry’s grim laugh and his courtesy. He narrows his eyes and smiles and thinks the same thought many men have had looking at the dimming sky—that the dark universe is lighted by human will.

  But before he can cross the wall the man vanishes. Julius steps over the wall and into the shelter of trees. Inside the half-tumbled stones he sees what he’d missed before, with Ralph and on the nights after when he’d stuck to the tree line, an opening in the ground that hints at some depth beyond. It seems impossible that he has not noticed this but when he bends down and looks he sees the earth cleared and a set of wooden doors swung open. He is looking at a root cellar.

  He steps through the squat doorway and the darkness is purple and gray, influenced by the pocks and open spaces above them where the rock has fallen in or a tree root grown through. Fifteen feet down, the hardpan gives way to black, fragrant dirt, and it seems there should be tombs but instead there are stone arches held together with mud and moss, the bottoms crumbling and shifted. He smells a wheaty cologne and then he sees the man’s shape. He calls out.

  “Henry?”

  The man does not answer. Instead he pushes into Julius and kisses him and Julius knows at once that he is not Henry. In the dark of the tunnels Julius can see only the gray outline of the man’s shoulders and chest. Their belt buckles clank together. He is not Henry but he is someone and Julius’s desire and his desperation allow some confluence. He runs his hands through the man’s lacquered hair, the feeling between his fingers like tar-slicked weeds on the side of the road where he once worked off a probation. He had been so young then, caught stealing cartons of engine oil from the back of a gas station. Hot summer on the plains, drinking beer afterward with the other men, fingernails black with tar. One man lighting the tar on his hands with the end of his cigarette. Why should he remember this now?

  The man untucks his shirt then reaches for Julius’s and Julius helps him lift it. Still he cannot see the man’s face, though the smell of his cologne is deep and grassy and he thinks that he will remember it forever. He unbuttons from the bottom so his shirt tents open and the man can touch his bare skin. How quickly and how fine.

  “You know me,” Julius says.

  “I don’t know you, darling, but I could.”

  The man’s voice is sudden. It is casual and even and it could be Henry’s voice.

  “You do—you know me.”

  The man’s body is so yielding and expressive and he touches Julius like it might be the only thing left in the world that he can manage. He kisses Julius’s neck and collarbone. Julius thinks that he has disappeared from himself and not been replaced by anything. He has been lifted out of time and the body left here now in its blank pleasure is like the light delay of stars.

  “You’ve been out to the coast then,” the man says.

  “What coast now.”

  �
�That’s where I come from. That’s how you might know me.”

  The man pulls him forward again so they crush together chest to knees. Julius stumbles and the man catches him and he remembers that he is drunk. He reaches down where the man is hard and lovely and the man touches him in return. The man makes a noise of languorous assent and kisses Julius again. Then the man kneels and takes Julius in his mouth and he gives head like a saint and very quickly Julius comes. The man stays on his knees and finishes himself and calls out in Spanish in a high fragile voice that Julius likes the sound of. He pants a minute and Julius lowers too so their knees are touching and he puts his arms around the man. The man does not pull away but lets his shoulders sink into this embrace. They hold together against the cold wall until Julius lifts his face away and makes a space between them.

  “What coast,” he says again.

  “You’re looking for a certain man, you go there,” the man says in his new faint voice.

  “What makes you think I’m looking for someone.”

  “I’ve seen you here. If I’ve seen you here others have too. You mustn’t linger.”

  “When did you see me?”

  The man does not answer. The cold of the tunnel is suddenly boundless, and in the silence Julius can hear the tapping rain above. He feels the man’s heat and cannot imagine kissing him again, though between them still the sweet camaraderie that came from their kissing. The man touches his cheek and Julius squints but sees only that the man is clean-shaven, his eyes are brown or dark green. He turns his face into the man’s touch so his chin and ear are cupped and then he turns again to press his lips to the man’s palm.

  “You need more than this place, to find someone, is what I’m saying to you,” the man says.

  Then he rises into his kneel and kisses the top of Julius’s head and then he stands. He clamps the waist of his pants together and turns and ascends the stairs without saying anything more. Julius watches him until he disappears.

  Then he too stands and buttons his shirt and jeans. He feels the unevenness in his boots and stomps them tighter. He thinks of what he’s heard about the coastal towns. Then he flicks open his lighter and lifts it. He moves to the back of the room where the mud walls have been tamped smooth in some bygone procedure. In the earth are scratched figures of men swimming or running, animals with human heads, trees scored in the soft grain as if made from a single line, the trunks lifting up into branches. Along with these images are swirls of graffiti, men’s names and Spanish slang he doesn’t know. He walks with the lighter held a few inches away from the wall and swung top to bottom. Hispanophone names and hands outlined in mud. A dozen hearts drawn in their crude dimensions, two curved lines reaching up and apart then meeting at the bottom. Because he has spent each night in this park he has the unsettled feeling that this place has sprung suddenly from some distant imagining, that it was not open to him until now. The way that insights and charms were withheld from men who were not ready to receive them, though those men wailed in their rooms. On the ground the indentation of the man’s knees and the white trail of his cum, other knees and other cum like maps to the need that had led them here. Only longing itself would bring back the thing their touching has stood in for, it could not be named by the ordinary world. And though Julius has never seen ancient art carved in stone or drawn on brittle paper, he does not need history or paintings to know that yearning takes these bright forms. Here were the archetypes of human dream, and they marked the very end, the great finale, of love. Every man who ever lived had been here. It would take less than an hour to reach the coast and in the rainy dark he might be seen as these marks are, only by other seekers, and with this shape and these new eyes he would find the man he loves.

  SEVEN

  The cliffs

  The day after Julius’s departure Muriel stands behind the bar smoking and waiting for the evening. The afternoon is gray, remorseless, a cold and hesitant rain falling straight down between the buildings and onto the parked cars. The lounge owner has pulled the plantation fan from its mounting and angled it in the corner on a drop cloth. Above the horsemen the ceiling is a lighter color in a broad shape that matches the fan’s arc. Without it, the horsemen’s cigarette smoke and her own and the smoke of the other customers draws in a flat cloud from one corner of the lounge to the other. The low winter light and the gathered smoke lend everything a pallor that suits her mood. In the corner the fan has the forlorn look of scrap.

  The horsemen complain of the smoke and the stale air, and when someone points out the resting fan the men look around and above as if hurt by some repudiation. Someone says, “Was that always there?” and another man replies, “Who notices the ceiling?” In its absence the fan is finally needed and here is an irony that pleases everyone. The lounge owner sends the men a round for their trouble.

  The day before, a horse had gone down at Del Mar. The man with the mustache recounts the story as if the other men had not been there to see it.

  “It was that huge buckskin and Artie Cleaves was bailed up on it and just after he got free the buck went down at the turn and when the stretcher came there was Artie by the tunnel crying like a girl. Like a girl.”

  The other men nod sincerely and do not let on that they know the story. Of course Muriel has not been to Del Mar since that day, months ago now, when she was so touched by luck. But hearing the man tell the story she feels a proximity to it, as if she’d watched it in a movie. The man describes the buckskin dropping into a kneel and then down, the jockey Cleaves pressing both hands flat on the horse’s head and leaping over and off, the sound of all this like a car stopping hot on gravel. Such things happened but she’d never seen it.

  The mustache says that anyway Artie Cleaves always rode like someone trying to win back his heart and when he pushed the buck along the rail everyone there could guess what was coming. The race continued and the downed horse did not panic and this at least was a blessing. The ambulance bounced out and after the horse was carried off the men in the boxes stood and threw balled cups and tickets at Artie Cleaves. As the mustache tells this part of the story the other men at the table break into triumphant laughter, as if their lives were charmed by this accident or by the retribution from the boxes. Muriel sees on their faces the unmistakable relief of the exonerated. She had seen them this way before, once, when the man Gerald died.

  The mustache continues: “Because anyway the whole time Artie’d been riding that buck like a man in the process of escape. Pressed back into the cantle like that. And when he wept and those raffs threw their beer down on him! Well, I can’t condone that but I can’t blame them either. That’s how it is in winter. Not one of them real turfmen. Dumb cousins not even wearing hats or wristwatches, and they get the horses and the riders they deserve.”

  The others nod and this concludes the story. The mustache leans back in his chair and for a while sits silently while the others lodge their smaller complaints: meager train schedules, falling ticket sales, the general providence of men like them, set out here at the ends of the earth to tend some rich man’s field. Someone brings up Las Vegas and one of the men says, “Damn university now, out there.”

  “What subjects they teach, you figure?” someone else says. “Wire fraud? How to get elected to Congress?”

  “We get that Kennedy kid on the Rackets Committee he’ll shut down the interstates,” says another.

  “Only after they finish the interstates, that’s the law now. They pull the 15 down to Tijuana, we’ll be watching cars zoom south out of here and then zoom back with absolutely fuck-all.”

  “If you can even get out. There’ll be houses from here to San Ysidro, now they’ve annexed it.”

  “Better learn how to say coat-tugger in Spanish.”

  “Even downtown, huh. They’ll clear out the junkies and the queers until the whole thing looks like the Garden of Eden.”

  Silence then, as if someone had
let slip a dark secret. Muriel looks up from her tasks and sees the men leaning forward and lifting their glasses and drinking guiltily. Then someone says, “Ain’t that true, Rosie.”

  Rosie crosses his arms then uncrosses them. He doesn’t answer.

  “Hey, I’m on your side,” the mustache says. “They don’t just raid down there for fun, you ask me. They’re going to run out them hustlers and put up apartment buildings.”

  The other men turn toward him. Muriel remembers the day that man Gerald was buried. It was Rosie who knew him, she’d written this down, along with the name of a place by the sea where men gathered. This was just after she’d won so much but before everything that happened next, and now the money was gone and Julius, too. She thinks of Julius on the steps and the heartache she’d seen in him, the story of the man with the watch fob. The kind of place he might go next.

  “That’s the sad fact of things,” Rosie says. “Nothing to do with morality.”

  “You don’t think it has some moral implication though, additionally?” the mustache asks.

  “Oh sure, like you’re planning for the coming of our Lord.”

  The men laugh. Another man, a bookmaker younger than the others and always in better clothes, says, “Listen, gentlemen, here’s what I’ll tell you,” and then he leans into the table, where his voice dissolves. As he talks the others nod for a moment and then move marginally back, eyes cast elsewhere, as if the man’s ideas were scandalous. They glance at Rosie like boys hearing sacrilege and Rosie rises and drinks the bottom out of his beer and sets down the glass. He turns his head and spits on the floor and then he leaves the lounge. The others watch him go.

  “There’s a solution if I ever saw one,” one of the men says.

  “What a goddamn disappointment progress turns out to be,” says another, and the men bloom out laughing, slaps against their wide thighs.

  Muriel thinks she knows what all this means but she is not certain. Wherever he is, Julius might once or twice come through a place like that. She feels somehow that she needs confirmation. That she needs to see the place they’d named, the same way she’d needed to see the horses.