On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  Gail pumps the brake. The brake lights hit the cliffside behind them and cast back at them like fire.

  “But I’ll meet you tomorrow, in the place you mean,” Gail says and rights herself in the seat and pulls away from the curb before Muriel can get her knees unbent. Gail drives back up the isthmus and past the bar they’d left and down two more blocks by the sea. The sun has set and a fine purple rim of light floats along the horizon. Near darkness along the road. Past the plaza, Gail pulls neatly to the curb.

  “Meet me here,” she says, and points to an old building with boarded windows painted black, once grand and stout and now cupped a little at the eaves. Just beyond the building the sky falls heavy across the rising tide. A man stands at the doorway in a lowered hat, watching them. Muriel knows that she is looking at the Chester Hotel and her desire expands inside this fact and turns into something new and terrifying.

  “Okay,” Muriel says, and Gail turns and reaches across the seat and touches Muriel’s chin with her thumb and the gesture is both sweet and coolly final.

  Then she pulls away again and Muriel points out the turns without thinking until she’s directed Gail to the Heyday Lounge. Gail does not ask about the house on the bluffs and Muriel does not explain why they have not driven there. Muriel collects her purse and hat and opens the car door. Along the city street the blue winter night feels less dangerous than she’d like. She leans into Gail’s open window and thanks her again for the ride and though she means to say more she does not. The windows of the lounge make squares of light on the pavement, so distinct and inviting they seem to Muriel like openings to the world below.

  Gail backs all the way to the intersection, turns onto the cross street and disappears. Muriel walks past the Heyday and past the cafés and the little houses near the sea. At State Street she gets in the car and drives toward the river. Against the darkening sky the city has a reproachful look. She takes the long way home, through the park and under the freeway and through the orchards. She feels dizzy and wanted. The orchards flit by in the darkness and appear to move. In Kansas she had driven with her mother at twice this speed through farmland on Sunday afternoons, and the wheat in any season rolled in the same peculiar way, the endless rows seeming to undulate as she drove by. Though she understood this as an illusion, she had been captured by the trick of it, as if the car itself brought the fields to life. In the cradle of the headlights she catches a dim shape. She pounds the brakes and the golden horse crosses the road at a clip, through the orchard and past the irrigation ditch and up into the field beyond.

  In her own driveway she checks her face for flush and shoves the hat and scarf to the bottom of her purse. In the kitchen she finds Lee sitting with his eyes closed and his chin tipped back. Built like a catapult, Muriel thinks, but sweetness in his posture, too, the way men were so vulnerable in their sleep. He starts at the sound of her footsteps and rises from the chair, his hands fisted, and for a moment Muriel sees him as he perhaps most wants to be seen, as a man ready for anything. She tastes Gail’s kiss and their parting has another taste and for a moment she might tell Lee everything, just to take this readiness from him. But then he sees her and laughs and opens his hands and presses his hair back and the feeling shifts. She watches him the way men watched women when they cried or sang. As if her husband’s pleasure at her return were something that required assuaging, as if there were terror underneath it. She moves forward to greet him and he asks about the hour and she drops the keys on the counter and says she had a fine day.

  EIGHT

  The border

  One summer night, back when they were working the peek, Henry arrived with two plastic jugs of water frozen all the way through and a couple of frozen hotel towels around his neck, plastered down inside his shirt. This was late August and the heat had returned after two weeks of storms in the mountains that kept the meadows cool and the sun vitiated by long clouds passing over at great height. The storms came through town, heavy rain falling in broad daylight, and dissolved into sunshine over the valley. The weather made everyone downtown feel homesick or lonely or worse. Men were caught with their attention flagging or drawn toward the horizon, and many lost more than they could afford and had to scrape together change for the train. Julius spent much of that time at the Mormon joint or sleeping through the gray mornings at the Squaw. There had been two stabbings in the wasteland off Fremont and a stakeout at the Hotel Apache that sent a half-dozen card counterfeiters not to jail but to Mesquite, where they were shot on an airstrip by men no one would name. The city was not panicked but it was unsettled.

  Now summer had come back violently and the peek was a hundred degrees or more. Julius walked the eastern section with his boots off and his jeans rolled past his calves. Below him the floor of the Golden Nugget was half-empty. The heat was keeping the Angelenos away and many others in their rooms, and those downtown that night played with cautious intensity, as if recent events had frayed not their nerves but their ability to imagine themselves removed from ordinary life. When Henry arrived he walked through his own section of the peek to find Julius on the other side and draped two cold towels over his neck and shoulders. Julius asked where in hell he’d found a freezer and Henry smiled and did not answer. He walked away and Julius felt the cooling weight of the towels and sighed and Henry turned halfway around and blew a kiss over his shoulder. Julius did not like romance on the job but he let this display charm him, because the night would be long. He turned up his sleeves and adjusted the towels and watched the men at craps below, who seemed to play as if the whole game had been revealed to them, as if they understood the way the rolling dice obeyed the universe, and this was not a comfort. There was no cheat in them, and Julius grew bored and sleepy and thought of other things.

  The hour stretched late and below a piano man played songs they knew from the war, “I’ll Get By” and “Don’t Fence Me In,” songs Julius heard in the factory bars of his youth. In the hot stillness of the peek he could catch almost every word, and on the other side he could hear Henry pacing. Then, in a break between songs, Henry started to sing “Wishing Will Make It So,” the way Ray Eberle sang it, with his keening tenor, pitched too high. When the men at craps below raised a noise, Henry’s voice was vanished. A moment later the piano man started up again and Julius heard it was the same song, and when the man started singing about the parted curtain of night, a sweet quiet passed along the scaffold and Henry laughed. For a moment Henry’s laughter caught along the edges of the peek and hung there, and then both men started walking toward the center, and when each came into view of the other they stood a moment still smiling. Then, because this odd prescience made them both feel exposed, they did not come closer but simply waved, as if between them were an invisible barrier that crossing would make permanent. Julius thought of the night they first touched, when the heat was even greater and Henry shirtless and young. While the piano man played they mouthed the words to each other. When the song ended, they both heeled around and returned to their posts.

  Later, after work and an hour of blackjack, Henry came home to the Squaw smelling of well whiskey and sweat. In the small room he took Julius in a vaudeville waltz across the tamped carpet and sang to him, Wishes are the dreams we dream when we’re awake. By then the morning had broken and both men needed sleep, but the heat was coming back and with it a sense that something was fleeing, having just been named.

  * * *

  —

  IN ROSARITO BEACH Julius wakes from a dream about that night, in a rented room on the sea road he’d paid two and a half dollars for. He’d not slept so well in a month or more. He rises and pulls the blanket across a twinned cot like the ones they had in the service and leaves a nickel for the wash. Next to him another three cots are laid out with blankets, unmussed. He washes his face and neck in the bathroom down the hall and remembers why he’s come, and the words of the man in the cellar, who sent him here, who told him it was time to move on.r />
  Downstairs the proprietress stands dishing cold paella into Mason jars. He nods to her and leaves the key and does not say he’ll be back and she does not ask. Along the walls of her small dining room are paintings he hadn’t noticed the night before in the rainy dark, when he’d arrived in search of Henry. In each of these paintings the same motif, a solitary boat out past choppy surf, floating at the horizon line. They are not accomplished paintings but they have, in their faulty perspective, a compelling narrative. Julius nods again to the proprietress and gestures to the empty tables in the dining room and asks if she serves dinner or supper and she holds up the paella spoon and points out to the sea and says, “Camarónes. Después de las tres.” Julius nods and pats his pockets and finds there everything he owns and steps out into the gray afternoon.

  The tide is coming in high and flat. Though it is past lunchtime he sees no one along the road or on the beach except a fisherman in hip waders far out on a sandbar. Somehow his troubles feel light and amendable. Past the rooming house and a laundry and the small hotels, the town gives way to landscape. In the low hills to the east are two-room houses and restaurants and a few awnings stretching across the roadway. Beyond these the shell of a plant or factory half-finished against the green mountains to the east. The rest of the afternoon he walks the edges of the town and in a cross through the center. The town is so small he does this half a dozen times without seeing anyone except shopkeepers and children hauling refuse to the street. One park he passes holds so many gulls it seems to be another sea, pushed inland. The rain does not abate but falls slowly, as if through the pocked lid of a jar. He feels Henry’s nearness, formless and light. The great pleasure of having seen him, even for the briefest moment, in his dream. He thinks that perhaps the man in the cellar sent him out to the coast just to sleep one good night in a bed, to open up the space for the dream to enter. Otherwise the coastal town seems empty and useless and Julius knows he will have to wait for night, when the gamblers might come out and the other wayward men.

  In a shop at the eastern edge of town he buys a hot champurrado made with Nestlé syrup and sits drinking it by the fogged window. The sun is setting. Outside a pack of lank dogs in reservation colors, red and brown, with mismatched eyes and of various sizes, trot past shops and hover in doorways, greeted by the shopkeepers like visiting relatives and sometimes tossed scraps of fish. Julius worries about how much money he has left. He remembers that most of the money is Muriel’s, and where it came from, and the charitable feeling of the day wavers. He watches the dogs bend in their distinctive way over some carcass while the bunting overhead sends trails of water to the curb.

  As he sits in the shop, he remembers something else about that night in the peek: that during the strange stormy weather, after the break-up at the Apache, the cat-faced men had moved in a table for a new game called canasta, which was like rummy but played against the house. The game was too complicated to be popular and because each hand took a full ten or fifteen minutes to play the stakes were steep, and for several weeks it sat empty in the middle of the pit like a weird invention. But the night Henry sang the song, two men sat playing for several hours. Because the play at craps was honest and perfunctory, Julius stood for a long time at the window above the canasta table, watching the men suss out the game and each other. They were good-looking men, near in age, and though they did not seem to know each other they played with a polite deference to one another’s skills. But at some point in that long hot night a deal had gone around that made the men angry first with each other and then with the dealer. As the men stood facing one another across the felted table, the dealer did as he was trained, folding one hand over the other on the bumper and waiting for the pit boss. When the boss came, the card players followed him quietly and Julius walked down the catwalk to the adjacent window to watch. The two men and the boss stood making hot gestures until something shifted, and all of the men began laughing and then clapped shoulders and went on their way. The next day Julius found the dealer and asked what the problem had been. The dealer smiled and said it was the damnedest thing: Both men had been dealt exactly the same hand. When Julius scoffed at this, the dealer explained that canasta was played with a double deck, and that while such an occurrence was unlikely it was not, strictly speaking, impossible. The men had suspected some foul play on the part of the dealer or the Nugget itself, but then it had dawned on them what magic they had seen. Because Julius had witnessed so many men raised from the tables and taken away, he knew how powerfully this affected their allegiance, and that while they might never see each other again those two men would think of each other forever, whenever they felt alone.

  Now the darkness is falling quickly. Julius counts through the weeks. It must be mid-December or later and the longest night of the year is coming. When he looks out the window at the coast road, he sees men’s shapes on the beach and under the awnings. In the other direction a cantina is lighted and beginning to fill. He leaves the shop and walks down the road toward the water. He sees a lean-to made from a wrecked pier and a sheath of aluminum siding, a few men assembled there. He’d hoped for such a game and this is a good place to start. If he plays in a while he can drop a few canny questions and find the places in this town where men gather. When he finds that place he might run a hustle or show the little gun like he did in Tijuana or he might just wait for what the night has to offer. The dream and his memory of the canasta players and the words of the man in the cellar have left him with a deductive certainty. As if all those things are arrows that point in the same direction.

  He walks toward the playing men and pats the envelope and the gun in his jacket pocket. Toward the surf line a fire reaches up to meet the coming night, the shapes of the men cast into shadow against the ombré blue of the horizon. They are playing a form of stud poker Julius knows from the Mormon joint, sometimes called Telesina or Shifting Sands, here called Stud Loco. The community cards are faceup and weighted with thimbles on a cardboard fruit box. Around the box the men kneel or sit against piles of sand palmed into chocks. Just beyond them and toward the surf a second group of men sit on an overturned boat half-buried in the sand.

  Julius stands by the playing men and when he’s noticed he gestures respectfully and one man nods and then another. Julius sits with his back against a fallen soffit, the sand cold but dry beneath him. The gathered men vary widely in age, some are Americans and some aren’t, but each of them watches Julius as he sits. Two young men, one blond and one freckled as July, have the penumbral look of card cheats; Julius sees in them something familiar, though he cannot place them anywhere specific. Two others are older locals in bright wool jackets with wide tooled leather buttons. The last man has a severity about him that Julius suspects comes from the service, that and his wool coat and his double-buckle cuffs, worn open and folded over so the brass rings in the wind.

  The blond is dealing. He says they’re playing lowball in honor of the Christmas holiday, and when Julius raises an eyebrow the blond explains that Jesus was a communist, that getting the most of anything should not be the goal of any God-fearer, American or otherwise, that’s what the old cat Himself had said.

  “The meek shall inherit the earth,” the blond says, and in turn his freckled friend raises his glass. “The meek,” they both say, and their drunkenness is callow and convenient.

  Julius says he’ll watch a hand to learn the scoring. The game is played like five-card stud poker, with three cards laid out faceup for everyone to use, and two cards dealt to each man. At each round the betting is called or increased, until the last card is revealed. The man with the army boots, the wool coat buttoned to his throat, claims victory with a low straight finished on the final card.

  “Playing straights and flushes then,” Julius says and nods to be dealt in.

  He plays for a while with the men, winning a little but mostly watching. The two boys sit shoulder to shoulder and are clearly playing in cahoots, and because non
e of the other players try to stop them, Julius assumes they are terrible at it and soon this is confirmed. As they play Julius learns their names are Dick and Chrissie. The man in the wool coat wins nearly every other pot and Julius suspects he is marking or dealing from the bottom. If he can catch him at this he might gather some advantage though what he might use it for is still unclear to him. The other players do not seem disreputable and soon the two older men wander away. In another circumstance Julius would rise and thank the men and be on his way. Cheats and drunkards could not be played against grandly. But something in the boys’ faces, the quiet intensity of the man in the wool coat, holds him there. The night settles while past the fire and the surf line the darkness competes with the remnant light on the water. Julius accepts a cup of wine, which tastes of milkweed and the sea, under that a rage of alcohol, and he turns the cup into the sand to keep it upright. Such a game is exactly the type Henry might find.

  The man in the wool coat antes and then Dick and Chrissie ante in turn. Julius pops a dollar in the pot. He’s got most of a high straight. Dick and Chrissie confer like women playing Kemps and the man in the wool coat shrugs openly. Then he raises a dollar and Chrissie calls his dollar and raises another dollar and Julius folds. The man side-eyes Julius’s cards and calls Chrissie’s dollar and deals the final card. As he does Julius watches not the top card but the man’s thumbs, which he might use to press the bottom card forward for the deal or to slide the card back into his palm. Instead he does something Julius hasn’t seen, sliding a card from the center of the deck by pressing in a long thumbnail. He deals this to Chrissie and then a card from the top to Dick. He does this so easily that Julius thinks it might be a joke. Then the man deals himself from the top and lifts the corner. Chrissie turns up his last card and says, “I’ll be motherfucked,” and counts out sixteen damp pesos and tosses them in the pot. The wool coat calls him and turns up a straight flush. Chrissie turns up a useless two-pair and the wool coat pulls in the pot.