* * *
—
THAT NIGHT AFTER DINNER Lee rises from their silent table and opens the kitchen door. Muriel watches him as he goes outside and makes a round along the tree line and through it to the bluff and halfway up the road. When he comes back his cheeks and hands are red with cold. He shakes the empty coffee can, fishes a hand through it, plunks it down again. He picks up a hammer and a box of nails, sets them down, then takes up a measuring tape and scouts the walls and cabinets, making small marks and scratching them out, until finally he sits again at the table.
The radio lists farm prices and then the weather, its ecumenical tone a structuring music. Muriel does not try to comfort him.
“You know what,” he says. “We was in the service when our father died and it was me that got the notice in the mail along with his wedding ring. Julius didn’t like it was me that got the post, but of course it would have been because I’m older. They had to tear down the old house, it’d gotten so bad. The county sold what was left and sent a check for seventeen dollars to the station in Japan and I signed that over to Julius and he lost it at cards the same night.”
He picks at the frayed ends of his fingernails. Muriel thinks of the argument in the kitchen two nights before. Lee does not act like someone overheard or like a man betrayed. But his hurt is fresh and implacable.
He says, “It ain’t like this never happened before. And he feels bad about leaving here like that, and about taking the money from the can, I guarantee you, though feeling bad won’t do no good to anyone. That night in Okinawa, on R and R, he jumped this other fella, out of nowhere. That fella said we were too poor for the navy and should’ve been grunts at Camp Casey, hauling out the army’s trash, but men say things like that and worse when they’re drunk and they’re in some fucking war that’s never-ending. But I think Julius believed him. I think he might’ve agreed. He couldn’t ever see how much luck he had, in getting to live like he does.”
“Like how,” Muriel asks.
“Like there ain’t no future.”
Lee stands then and walks through the front door. Muriel follows him and stands in the doorway and watches as he hauls a bag of grain from the trunk of the car and shoulders it and carries it to the tree line. He opens the bag and edges its contents from one end of the lot to the other. She presses out of the doorway and goes to him.
“I’m just bribing the old girl now,” he says.
His voice is not bitter or angry but oddly buoyant. She wonders if he’s always been this way and she hadn’t noticed until now. As if, without Julius’s trouble, without his own gentling proximity to it, he is no one. She thinks of those first months they were together in San Diego and how walking home after dark Lee had linked his arm with hers; the feeling was not romantic but protective, as if he were leading her in blindness. She had liked this feeling more than any other in their marriage and she realizes she has not thought of him this way in a long time. Perhaps Julius had been right, and she had needed someone to tell her what to do. Hiding her mother’s house and giving Lee her winnings had changed what she expected of him, and though she’d wanted him to have those things she isn’t sure she wants to share them. Sharing is a debt she had not anticipated.
Lee looks up then and squints into the sky and points.
“Hey, there it is,” he says to her, and suddenly there is joy in his voice. “Not clear as day, but you can tell. It looks just like a beach ball to me.”
Lee nudges her and she searches for the satellite in the sky and finds it, just closer than the stars and slightly larger. She knows from photos on the news that the slick hull is pierced by antennae whipped back from the body, but she can’t see them. She can see only the bead of it, like a copper tack, doubled in her vision so that she almost feels she can track the satellite’s motion as it circles above them.
“I just can’t imagine it,” she says.
“It’s right there.”
Lee points again.
“No, I can see it,” she says. “But I can’t imagine it.”
A noise in the tree line like a man walking on stones. Lee turns toward the sound and looks and waits, and when nothing emerges he turns back to Muriel.
“We ought to name her,” Lee says. “Maybe she’d come back if she had a name.”
“I was thinking Peaches,” Muriel says.
“What about Delilah?”
“God no.”
“Or maybe Patsy.”
“George Lee, those are husky broad names and you know it. You want a horse for a girlfriend, you might have got a younger one.”
They both laugh and for a moment it seems like everything might work out fine. The wind sends down a shiver of rain. Across the empty lot next door comes a dark gull gliding and they both watch it until it’s gone.
That night she lies awake a long time. The moonlight cuts across their bedroom and over Lee’s masculine resting form and she thinks again of Rosie and the other horsemen teasing him. She remembers Julius standing in the bedroom and how she’d said his name. He had not taken anything from her then. The next day he’d asked about her mother and the game they played on Christmas Eve and he’d told her about his friend. Then he’d quarreled with his brother about their father and the service, and sometime that night he did take the money, which surely he’d come for. In her husband’s ignorance and in Julius’s theft she should find her own widening guilt, wider than the house and the money and further back, all the way back perhaps to the night she stayed up turning cards at her mother’s table. She might also feel relief or gratitude. But she does not feel these things. She rises and slides her hand behind the dresser and pulls away the newsprint taped there. She unfolds it and reads the name of the place and where to find it. In the moonlight Lee’s shoulders quiver and the room is heavy with his breath. For a long time she watches him sleep and she feels the wild feeling of someone pardoned, the way women in movies felt about the men they left behind. She remembers mornings during her childhood when she woke too early and could hear down the hall the sound of her mother also waking, a man shifting in the bed then standing, the noise of a belt being lifted from the floor and threaded through. It was always the first thing she knew, the distinctive chiming sound of the belt buckle, a sound all men seemed to make. And though the sound itself was particular it never differentiated one man from another, so she would have to wait and see who he was when the coffee perked.
Those mornings, her eyes closed in her own room on the second floor of her mother’s house, she experienced an anticipation much like the one she feels now. She would hear the buckle, then the slow rough sound of bedding being drawn away, the unoiled headboard and the floorboards. She might have been anyone in that constellation of forms. Of course she was herself, down the hall and thus outside the ritual intimacy of waking, dressing lovers, but through force of allegiance she was also her mother, one arm below her head and the other draped over the edge of the bed in a suggestion of escape. But then she saw her mother from this angle, as if from across the bed and above, the way the man must see her, his belt looped through and not yet clasped, the ends hanging outward and down, both menacing and vulnerable in his half-dressed, standing silhouette. Later, her mother might touch that man as he sat drinking coffee, she might lean to kiss him on the head, and Muriel would feel herself transposed again, the smell of cigarettes in the man’s hair, her mother’s lips against her own child’s brow, quick, domestic, like a key in the door.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY, the horsemen come early and stay late. In the corner the owner has pressed two tables together and covered them with a drop cloth. Ten days to Christmas and all the other tables are empty except those by the front windows, where a half-dozen men have spread themselves along the benches as if waiting to meet people other than themselves. With a taping knife the owner strips the fan of residue left by months of smoke. The smo
ke makes a film in the bevels and seeing the owner peel this away is like watching the restoration of a lung.
After lunch Rosie rises from the table and walks out the door trailing cigarette smoke. For a moment Muriel watches the owner at work on the fan and when he doesn’t glance up or even sigh Muriel follows Rosie out to the street, where the light rain has drawn up the smell of engine oil. For a moment she stands in the glowering afternoon. She watches a group of men walking along the street on the other side. To her left two women laughing, a single man following behind. Rosie crosses the street against the light, his hands in his pockets as he picks up speed and brushes past the group of men and on ahead. If he turns uptown she’ll duck back inside. If he crosses Eighth toward the sea she’ll follow him, because that way is where she wants to go. He turns left and Muriel waits. He disappears past the corner.
When the light turns, Muriel rushes across and trails Rosie at a distance. When he crosses again onto the small street that runs a block from the ocean, she does the same. He turns to walk south along the line of cafés and small bars hemmed in by cottages and beach houses and the ferry landing to the north. Then past the Hall of Justice and a square block of project housing and a city park paved over with bitumen. Muriel has no watch, but the courthouse clock says four-fifteen. They cross Island Avenue and then J Street and Rosie dips down an alley and out onto K Street where the sea rises out of the cement at the vanishing point between the buildings. He turns left and Muriel waits a moment then follows down the alley and when she turns onto K he is a block ahead. The rain has nearly gone and the clouds above cast shadows along the sidewalks.
The neighborhood changes quickly then. Rosie passes a Chinese restaurant three stories tall and wrapped in cracking neon; across the street is a bar with no sign, boarded in blackened plywood. A block away is a plaza marked by tilting palms that Muriel can see in pieces down the alleyways, and two other buildings boarded up. The concrete margins are lined with struggling trees set in cages and the discards of pleasure: playbills and keno tickets in the gutters, glass bottles broken and filled with rain. Cars rattle by on the wet streets; along the streets men walk alone or in pairs. There are no women. Four or five young men, filthy with dust, ride by on the bumper of a dump truck. At the bus stop, two old men watch this display. The truck blocks her line of sight, and when it passes, Rosie has disappeared. In the place where he was standing a narrow door stands open to the weather. Her eye follows a fire escape to the second story, where a figure leans through an open window and drops a peach pit into the street. Across the street three boys lean over a window-well with their asses in the air. She does not know if this is the place or not, it looks like a half-dozen others. Music leaves the doorway in pips and bass notes and she can hear men’s voices and the clink of glassware. It does not seem like a hotel but maybe the Chester is not a hotel at all. She loses her nerve. She turns away and takes the same route back to the lounge, where the owner is still scraping at the fan and the rest of the horsemen have gone.
* * *
—
SHE LETS A DAY PASS, then another, and on the third day she tells the owner she’s taken ill. She strips off her apron and dabs her forehead with it, then presses it with both palms to her abdomen to suggest female trouble. The owner reaches out and looks away as he pats her shoulder. Outside she ducks into an alley, pulls the hat and the scarf from her purse, and dresses there, resting the purse on the toes of her shoes. She takes the same route and when she crosses Broadway she lights a cigarette. She finds again the darkened doorway and the fire escape above. For a moment she waits. If she is the only woman, her hat and scarf will not disguise her. She pulls the hat brim lower and she is afraid. Then she thinks of the first time she went to Del Mar and the money she won and the way she felt afterward.
Inside, the bar is dimly lighted and crowded with bodies. She recognizes turfmen and a few radiant youth who must be sailors and the tense jaws of workingmen and a few suits in the back. In the corner are two men talking close. A waitress and another woman by the open door and a third woman in a fine coat at the edge of the bar. The woman in the coat is talking to two men and when one turns toward the door Muriel sees that he is Rosie, cheek unshaven and red with drink.
She takes a seat at the bar so that Rosie is behind her, and when the bartender comes he looks her over and stands without speaking. She orders a Stinger and tosses a quarter in the ashtray. He doesn’t reach out for it.
“It’s all right,” Muriel says.
“Is it?” the bartender says but he takes her quarter.
The mirror behind the bar is kinked in peeling lines and cracked across the top. She hears Rosie behind her and then the second man. The woman in the sable coat has a light accent and a voice rough from smoking. Her reflection in the mirror is watery and sedate. The bartender returns and slides the glass to Muriel and watches her take a drink.
“Okay then,” he says, and turns away.
Behind her the second man has gone. Someone puts a dime in the jukebox and plays a song she’s never heard and the two men in the corner cheer and sing along.
“Sounds like bad luck,” Muriel hears the woman say.
“Sounds like no luck,” says Rosie.
“You can’t get much from a color breed, is what I’ve always said.”
They are talking about the buckskin and Artie Cleaves. Rosie’s voice is brighter and louder, and the woman’s laugh suggests she relies on him for such forceful opinion. In the mirror beyond, Muriel sees Rosie shake his head. The woman turns away from him and looks cautiously around.
“You think he’ll show?” she asks, without looking back at him.
“I think it was a one-night thing.”
“You’re not over Gerald.”
“Gerald was a bastard,” Rosie says, and the woman laughs. Rosie laughs too, but his face in the mirror is grim.
They talk for a while longer about the accident, then about the Sunday races. Muriel finishes one cigarette and lights another. She reaches up to loosen the hat then thinks better of it. She is not sure what to do next. A phone rings at the end of the bar and a man picks it up and doesn’t speak but after a moment he presses the receiver to his shoulder and calls out to the room, “Irish Chimes, Mistress, Loose Talk, nine-two,” and Muriel understands that there is gambling here and worries she’s made a mistake or reached a dead end. Cheers go up in a few corners. Rosie’s voice is drowned in the cheering. In the quiet after, Muriel hears the woman say, “Too bad for the stable. They paid some money for that buckskin.” To hear a woman speak this way about the horses she’s come to know is like hearing a woman broadcast the news.
“I did think he’d show, to tell the truth,” Rosie says.
“I know that,” the woman says.
“This world’s too small.”
“Tell that to Fred and Ethel,” the woman says, and gestures to the two men in the corner.
Rosie laughs.
“You hit that one on the nose,” he says.
A rough jostling behind and Muriel brings her purse around to her lap and links one arm through the strap. If this is just a gambling den and nothing more she should stand and leave and hail a cab. She feels stupid and alone and not at all sure what she thought she was doing. When she looks up again she sees no one in the mirror beyond, just the vague shapes of men and her own blurred reflection. For several minutes she hears neither Rosie nor the woman, and when she risks a glance at the room she does not see anyone she knows. She finishes her drink. When she feels a presence at her side, she turns away to hide her face, and in her periphery is a woman in a dark coat that carries with it a punky smell of hay. When she speaks, Muriel knows it is the same woman.
“You’re waiting for someone.”
While Muriel thinks how to answer, the woman speaks again.
“I don’t mind that. They turn up, I’ll skedaddle.”
The
woman slips onto the seat next to Muriel and shrugs the coat off and over the backrest. Her hair is dark and fragrant and loose around her face. She wears silver earrings in the shape of coins. She dips in her handbag and pulls out a cigarette case and tips it toward Muriel, who shakes her head.
“So, who is it then? The person you’re waiting for?” the woman asks.
“Just my husband.”
Tension at being spoken to this way, this odd and instant familiarity. She wonders if Rosie has seen her and sent this woman as his emissary. In the mirror Muriel sees the woman’s pile of hair and the little shining dots of the earrings but no other features. The woman’s face in the mirror is blurred and pale as sand.
“Personally, I’ve stopped waiting for mine.”
The woman wants this to be a leveling fact. But her tone is quarrelsome, defeated, and before Muriel can say anything else the woman has looped one arm around the back of the stool and leaned against it, her face tilted at a childish angle.
“Do you play the ponies?” she asks.
Muriel thinks immediately that she ought to lie. “Not me.”
The woman lifts her glass and regards Muriel over the cold lip of it but does not drink. Her close smell makes Muriel light-headed. She leans into the bar for support. She feels suddenly very frightened. The wind off the sea presses the rain flat against the dark front window so the outside light is serous against the glass.
“What’s this place called?” Muriel asks, and sees the woman watching her cautiously. Before she can answer, a noise from behind makes both women turn. There in the corner the two men stand facing each other. One man has a beer bottle held out and downfisted, like an awl; his rival stands dumbly with his hands upraised. What prompted this is unknown, and the other patrons are not sure if they’d like to see blood or be heroes. For a moment no one tries to intervene. Then a third man comes in from the back and stands between the fighting men and some conversation ensues. The man raising his hands is very young and wearing a new shirt buttoned to the neck and wrists, as if after all this he intends to go and find an office job. Muriel watches with disquiet. The man with the bottle seems not angry but despairing and finally he is coaxed to sit. The younger man leaves through the front and trails with him a sorrowful draft.
On Swift Horses Page 20