“But say it’s true, about Pan. Then you got to think, this time of year, that what we’re celebrating is the end of pleasure and history.”
Julius holds his breath a long moment and looks around and sees the proprietress far back behind the counter and the turntable louder than the rain and decides to risk the next question.
“Did you get caught ever, in the army?”
Jackie waits, looks over his shoulder to locate the woman himself.
“I did not, but I knew others who did.”
Neither man speaks. Julius leans against the chairback and then leans forward again.
“You did though,” Jackie says, and Julius nods.
“I had two months left. Can you believe that?” Julius says.
“What’d they do?”
“Let me off pretty easy, really. General discharge, no leave and half-pay.”
“That’s lucky.”
“I saw the man again though. The man I got caught with. That was the worst part, really.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was with my brother when I ran into him, a last R and R before they put me on the boat.”
“What’d you do?”
Julius looks away and doesn’t answer.
“I’m sure it’s all right,” Jackie says.
“Well I must not have killed him or I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Julius says then.
Jackie nods and both men look away from each other and stare out the window.
“I’ve only seen my brother once since then, though,” Julius says.
For a long time neither man speaks.
Finally Jackie says, “What about when you got back?”
“They had started raiding the hotels and such. Some Negroes were killed, some other men.”
“I was in San Francisco for a while and it was the same there,” Jackie says.
“They crippled people, or they sent them to jail. Lots of guys never turned up again, and some women, not many. Who knows what happens after that. Same as anything, probably. The bars and hotels will come back, or they won’t.”
“But you didn’t go to jail.”
“No I did not.”
Here Jackie turns away from the window and looks at Julius directly. Julius has never had a conversation this intimate with someone he’d not slept with, with whom he had not shared that mutual confession. Before Jackie can ask him anything, Julius says, “I did go once, to jail, but not for that.”
“Then what for?”
Julius shrugs.
“Just your basic theft,” he says. “My father was sick as hell, and we were just kids. He gave everything to the church and the house was falling in and it was winter.”
“How long were you in?”
“A few weeks. They let me run probation. When that was over, my brother got me and we joined up.”
“So what happened after that?”
“Same as you, I reckon.”
“No, with your father.”
“What he wanted, I think. He met the maker he so admired.”
Jackie leans back in his chair and looks up at the paintings and along the walls of the dining room and shakes his head. Then he laughs. “God. Are we all criminals, then?”
Julius mirrors this new mood and laughs in turn. “Not much we can do about it, you ask me,” he says.
“Well, there’s the truth.”
“I guess I tried once but it didn’t take.”
“No use in seeking praise from this fucking world.”
“You sure you ain’t no believer?”
“No use seeking it anywhere men have been, is what I mean.”
A long silence between them. The rain braids against the window and the song ends and the woman does not turn the record. Julius lowers his voice.
“So you don’t know those others, really.”
“The unfortunate blond?”
Julius thinks of Chrissie’s sullen face and laughs. “Or the others. By the boat. That tall fella who brought the wine.”
“Only by sight. They got philosophies, you know. Live down here across the border because the laws are better for them. If I were you I’d just steer clear.”
“What’s their game?”
The man eyes him a moment. “I got no part in it, so I’m not going to say.”
“You must not have played with them but once or twice before, or they’d have sniffed you out by now.”
“No, just been here a few days. Won’t probably last a few more,” Jackie says.
“You ever meet a fella named Henry? He’s Mexican but down here he may not look it.”
“I’ve met all sorts of people. I don’t remember any Henry.”
Julius waits.
“I’m sorry,” Jackie says, and shrugs.
“There’s a cantina up the road. I saw it lighted. You think there’s other men there?”
“Like I say, it ain’t my business.”
Jackie tents his fingers together over the deck of cards and it is clear to Julius he won’t say more. When Jackie lifts his hands again the deck has disappeared. Julius thinks of the other cots lined up in the room upstairs and whether they are bolted to the floor or if they could be pushed together. Though he does not want this man he knows that Jackie wants him, and the feeling of another person’s body long and warm against him is appealing. Perhaps he could ask about Henry again, after. But he doesn’t want to wait. He wants to find the tall man with the wine and the night is already drawing away. Jackie reaches for his back pocket and Julius waves him off and stands and pays the woman for the dinner and for another night in the room upstairs.
“Quién es?” Julius points to the record player.
“Ponce,” the woman says. “‘Estrellita.’” Then as if for the first time she smiles and the lines around her face are deep and charming and Julius nods and thanks her.
Back at the table the talk has drained out between them and soon Jackie stands.
“Hey then,” he says. “You got a room here I could show you how to cold-deck, long as you don’t try to use it on me.” He points toward the stairway. The wool coat is done to Jackie’s neck, but one pocket flaps open at the seam and Julius sees the man’s thumbnail against the drab olive of the wool where it pokes from the torn pocket.
“I ain’t no card cheat,” Julius says, and wishes it were still true.
“Well I’ll play you euchre for quarters then,” the man says and smiles hopefully.
“Ain’t euchre for ladies and people with families?”
Jackie laughs and Julius turns his palms up and looks at them and drops them away. Jackie steps forward and reaches out with one finger and touches the stiff collar of Julius’s jacket and then traces down the hem of the lapel until he reaches Julius’s heart and then he taps once. Julius steps fractionally back and pulls the jacket closed and looks up to find the proprietress. She is staring down at her book. Jackie lifts his hands in a comic gesture of contrition, and all at once Julius dislikes him.
“Might have spent all the luck I’ve got tonight,” Julius says.
Jackie nods and wipes his hands on his coat front and turns and the men part under the veil of this invitation.
* * *
—
UPSTAIRS HE TAKES off his shirt and shakes it out and puts it back on. He washes his face and arms in the sink and stows away his razor and comb. Then he steps back out into the night. The streets both north and south of the rooming house are empty, and for a moment he stands inside the sound of the sea. The rain has let off and the town smells of offing and cooked meat and burned lavender. He walks several blocks north and sees then the lighted cantina and a crowd gathered outside. He can hear music, another flautist or the same one, and steel drums and a singer and a six-string guitar. As he approaches he sees Americans
smoking on the patio. The Americans have the look of itinerancy and among them are the first women Julius has seen in Rosarito besides the proprietress. They lack the bold insistence of the American women he met in Tijuana and bear instead some calm defiance, as if their presence is a misunderstanding they might soon correct.
He walks through the group of men and their women to order a beer at the bar and turns in a slow circle around the room. Then he orders another beer and carries both outside. The band has set up along the iron balustrade and Julius leans a few feet from the guitar player. He leans and drinks his beer and waits. The band strikes up an unfamiliar melody. At one table two women sit close and the men across deal cards in a diamond pattern, but Julius does not recognize the game and he can’t imagine betting with women. He sees no other card or dice games and he worries he’s in the wrong place. Across the street another crowd of locals is gathering outside the cantina’s light and he watches them awhile and decides he will wait until his beer is gone.
The band is playing “El Torero” and the flautist takes the high line and it gives the song a hollow lightness like inside of a shell, though below the melody the drums drag along the street, as if the two forces were competing for the souls of those gathered. In all directions the streets are empty and dark, though along the margins Julius can hear the shuffling of night animals and far away the ubiquitous barking of dogs. The band finishes the song and in the quiet interval Julius hears the Americans and the brittle laughter of the women. He wonders where Jackie has gone and if he will see him again.
A few of the women walk off toward the neighborhoods and he wants to call out to them so that they might stay and keep him company. For a moment he wishes harder for that than for Henry or the tall man, but then one of the women catches him looking and pulls her skirt above her knees as if she were walking across a ditch and spits a dark string of tobacco by her ankles and winks at him. In the pegbox shadow of her thigh he sees a penknife and a dark fuzz of hair. It occurs to him for the first time that there might be as many kinds of women as there are birds or men or wind. He imagines Muriel in the stands at the horse track alone and for a moment senses her freedom and her separateness but he can’t hold on to this sense. In his mind she turns again into his brother’s wife and the guilt he feels is a thin scratch across the dark night and the weeks that brought him here.
Soon the musicians shut away their instruments and wander off hauling these black cases toward the beach. He finishes the first beer and nests the second inside the empty glass. He moves out of the cantina’s light and across the street beside the group of men in heavy serapes bunched together along the curb and spilling out into the lane. The men turn to look at him, but none speaks, and Julius sees that they are playing some kind of card game run by a seated dealer. He moves inside the building’s darkness and watches as the musicians disappear toward the beach. The globe lights of the cantina flick off and for a moment the street is lighted only by the reflection of the moon on the wet streets and the sea beyond. A brawl of complaint from the patio and then the lights return and the crowd quiets but one woman still cries out and her single voice carries through the silence for a half-second until it turns to laughter.
The men at the curb are playing not pitch or poker but reading lotería cards. A young man in a blue guayabera lays out the cards in a cross, faceup. Across from him another man with a bandaged hand. The young man turns over a card, then speaks to the injured man across from him. The circled figures bow forward in a single motion, as if peering into a hole or grave. From where Julius stands, he can see the turned-up cards over the bowing heads of the men. Each card marked with a figure or object—la sirena, el camarón. A rooster, a boot, a soldier, a dandy, the moon.
Julius saw once, in Compton, a woman turn cards like these for money, to tell the fortunes of those gathered. The reading was not private but on a street corner, a crowd assembled to witness each other’s fates. Now the young man turns up a card red with a muscled heart, pierced by a fragile arrow. A sigh through the crowd, a ripple of movement, and the men sing out: No me extrañes corazón, que regreso en el camión.
The flautist has lingered among the men. He peps a little song from the flute and the high vivid sound seems to travel up the wall behind them and hang there. Most of the men know the song and they sing out a fine melody but in hushed voices, as if hiding from the night. The rain is falling again but very lightly now and the cool air has changed its character as the pressure drops.
When the second man has learned his fate, Julius calls out. “What about me then? Me toca a mi.”
The gathered men scoff and shake their heads, but the young man waves him down. Julius finishes the second beer and ledges the empty glasses against the wall, then sits in the center of the men. The man in the blue shirt offers his flat palm and Julius thinks to touch it in greeting but then he understands. He rises and takes the envelope from his back pocket and sits again.
“Cuánto?”
The man holds up four fingers and Julius peels off the bills. The other men horseshoe behind, watching. The man in the blue shirt draws first the open hand, then the tall black boot, then the heart pierced by arrows. Up close he is younger than Julius by ten years or more, almost a child, and his smooth skin against the dark legs of the crowded men has the look of dusk among trees. The boy says, “This is already happen.”
Julius nods. Then the boy holds out his hand again and Julius tilts onto his hip and this time offers ten American dollars and says, “That ought to get us at least to the present, hey.” The men in the crowd laugh and shove each other. In the moonlight their eyes shine back with something like divine anticipation, the way believers in the Bible were said to apprehend the miracles.
The boy reveals a man holding the world on his back, then the uneasy woman in her hat and jacket, then the unmanned umbrella floating inside a horizontal rain.
“Viene la lluvia,” the boy says.
The men laugh. Julius knows the word for rain but not the grammar of the sentence so he says, “American dollars ought to equal English, then,” and the boy smiles and Julius senses his power is not deception but the mockery of deceivers, and this is far better than prophecy, because he can never be wrong. On the edge of the group the flautist has stopped playing and Julius can hear the waves and the wooden signs of the storefronts creaking in the wind.
“El gallo,” he says, “rooster.” He turns over three cards in quick succession and each is marked with the image of a bird. A flamingo on one kneed leg and a parrot on a stand and a songbird stretching toward heaven. The crowd is quiet.
“Esto es todos. Entonces. Everyone is here.”
Julius looks at the birds in their line, like some genealogy of flight. He reaches out to touch the parrot with his finger and the boy waves off his reaching hand.
“You wait, please,” the boy says.
When he looks down again the boy has turned up a bucket. He studies the line of cards a moment and turns up a final card, marked with a tin star. He rubs his hands together, then opens them palm up, and Julius knows the fortune is completed.
“So it’s a bucket,” he says.
“No, el cazo. Como—” With his hand cupped the boy makes a scooping motion and brings his hand to his mouth.
“Like a dipper? Like a water dipper?”
“Sí, exactamente. Con la estrella.” The boy places the star over the pot and with one finger presses both cards toward Julius. “Norte. North-uh.”
The crowd laughs and someone says Americano and someone else says adios but the boy waves silence at them and looks at Julius gravely.
“Están todos en el norte.”
“Everything is what now?”
“Every person. In the north.”
The boy is severe and radiating certainty but Julius feels this statement is like the rain, obvious and without utility. The cards are wetted with raindrops that lighten
the colors but the boy leaves them on the ground as if in punctuation.
Through the legs of the standing men, Julius sees a slim figure walking toward the beach. The man is very tall and dark and has a familiar bearing. Julius stands and holds his hand against the light. The men in the circle look where he is looking and turn back shaking their heads at his impropriety. Julius thanks the boy and the gathered men sing out, “El caso que te hago es poco,” and when Julius does not acknowledge this they sing it again, and then a single man calls out without singsong, “La guía de los marineros.”
“You should not stay here,” the boy says. “You should go there.” He points with two fingers pistoled toward the northern border.
Julius nods and walks across the street and toward the sea. He could easily run and catch the man, but he doesn’t want to frighten the figure away. The man glances over his shoulder but does not seem to see Julius and then he turns north. From the side Julius can see the man’s brow and his arm held against his body and Julius’s breath quickens. He waits and watches as the figure crosses laterally to the beach, then passes under the old pier and disappears.
Then Julius too crosses Paseo Costero. There is nothing much to the north; the man will have to come back this way, and when he does Julius will approach him. He has waited so long and the waiting feels now like an oblation. The tide is coming in and he sits against the same soffit and pulls his knees to his chest. In the dark sand are prints like comets where the men roughhoused earlier, now eroded and flattened by the spreading waves. When he closes his eyes he sees the four birds laid out on the street and in his mind those birds are the same as the footprints. When he opens his eyes he expects to see the prints lifted and on the wing. He thinks of Henry’s story about the little gun and the game of pitch on the train to Sioux Falls. How he’d not believed it because he did not believe any real gamblers would call pitch by that name if they’d play it at all. But Henry had come from somewhere, the gun had come from somewhere, everything had.
On Swift Horses Page 25