On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  * * *

  —

  WITH HIS ARM held fast against the towel he ducks down the alley to the next street over and sneaks along the storefronts, then through another alley to a residential pocket where the clouds cast long shadows over the squat yards. Inside these shadows children move in groups of six or seven, off into the narrow streets, several groups to the north and another to the south, until they have spread in a cross through the neighborhood. At each house they stand ranked on the cement steps, an appointed leader rapping at the door, until it is opened and a grim adult sends them away. This will go on until the dusk is final, until the children are admitted, as Mary and Joseph were, into the warmth and feast of the willing.

  At a distance Julius follows the children moving north, along a line of row houses strung eave to eave in green and gold flags. He keeps to the shadows and the overhanging palms, and once he’s past the houses he cuts back across and waits where the highway meets the ocean road. A few passenger cars roll by slowly with their windows up; these he ignores. He looks up and down the road and along the beach but sees no one. For a long time he waits for another car to pass and none does. He thinks of very little, though the memory of his father is present and the thought of Henry, and the two combine to make a lonely atmosphere. The rain pings in the cut at his forehead and he holds his sleeve against it. If he meets the boys or the tall man again the daylight might save him, but the daylight is going. He counts the miles to Tijuana. The walk would take the whole night or longer and already he is exhausted.

  He crosses the coast road then and passes through a stand of scrubby pine and down onto a pier. The sea comes in so thick and high it is like a forest. He steps out for the nearest boat and is hauled aboard by revelers, and with great effort he walks across the rocking bow. He steps over the waling to the next boat and then again to the one after that. The boat bounces as another man steps onto it and a cusp of gulls flush before him and settle again behind. He sits against a clocher of rope and reaches in his pocket and finds the playing card; he thinks of Jackie’s touch after dinner the night before, and realizes that he must have slipped it in Julius’s pocket. On the back, Jackie has written a verse from Isaiah: In the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.

  He looks out at the sea and the horizon rests like cut paper against the heavy sky. He remembers the day he was finally free and he stepped off the ship in Long Beach and took the woman’s booklet and sat and read it. In Isaiah the holy land is the place where heaven and earth touch. Perhaps that means that in every other place there is division, distance, an unnamed thing holding heaven from earth, like the line out at sea that can never be reached. Isaiah did not give this thing a name, but Julius suspects it is tenuous, less a separation than a pressure, like the fine agony of two bodies pressed together, like one man’s hand touching another. That the space between heaven and earth is the touch those two hands make.

  III.

  NINE

  Swallows

  Morning comes in cold and sunny and the world has not changed overnight. Muriel wakes and makes coffee. Lee showers and they sit together awhile listening to the weather, which promises to be fair past the Lagunas and all the way to Houston, and when the news comes on she flicks the radio off and steps outside and lights a cigarette. Along the tree line the alfalfa has punked, but there are cleared spaces that suggest the horse has come around. Where they’ve tugged the trailer the sun is dappled by the trees and beneath the awning the grass is dry and dark, like a hand swiped across a fogged window.

  They head into town and Muriel drops Lee at the factory and drives on past Island Avenue and over the tracks and onto a green spit built as surf break. It’s Saturday and the sailors are out in their white crackerjacks playing catch or lounging. She drives further and finds a clump of sea pine and parks beneath it. Behind her is a rough pier where there were once grand hotels and now squat housing for the naval base and carnival games and tented surf camps. The incoming tide is blue and wild, and out a hundred yards surfers hang in a line. Overhead waves rise from the surface like mountains. The surfers are crouched on their boards as if assembling something delicate and temporary while the waves hold one behind the other, piled miles back into the South Pacific.

  She thinks of the Heyday and the owner and the horsemen, and then she thinks of Lee—of him the day she arrived in San Diego with her one suitcase, and long before this of the day she first met him, outside a bar where her mother was drinking. She thinks of Gail’s kiss and her long shadow cast by the sunset. For a long time she watches the surfers, until her neck begins to ache.

  The sea reminds her, as it often does, of the fields of her childhood. For miles in every direction the prairie grew waist-high in bluestem and Indian grass, sometimes a great elm in the distance too wide to cast a shadow. In the spring the fields were burned north to west in a pattern set by the Forest Service, then in summer the grass returned new and green and then quickly stiffened and paled, until in winter it caught ice and waited heavy as a robe across the vista. In this way the seasons remade the grasslands in their own image. If anyone had told her that one day she would watch the ocean and see the weather and the seasons change it the way the fields were changed, she would not have believed them. She would not have believed any story about her life as it is.

  She doesn’t have to go back to the hotel or see Gail again. She might turn around and drive home and sleep in her own bed, and when Lee hitched out after work she might stand in the kitchen to greet him. Julius might return or not, and either way they would keep each other’s secrets and go on. That was how people lived. She locks the car doors and drapes her coat over herself frontwise. Outside the street is quiet as the waves come in. She closes her eyes and sleeps for an hour, then wakes again and looks out at the sea. The surfers have moved on, though the waves are still coming. She thinks of the moment Lee pulls away during their lovemaking and the way that pause is like a murmur in a heartbeat, a brief interruption in a pattern that might otherwise go on forever. She closes her eyes and sleeps again.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE AFTERNOON she wakes and drives to a gas station, where she buys a candy bar and washes her face in the bathroom and fixes her hair. She strips off her stockings and shoves them in her purse. She’s brought her best skirt and she pulls this on over her bare legs, tucks in her blouse and dabs a bit of perfume behind her ears. Then she drives to the hotel with the covered windows and waits. The same man in his lowered hat stands in the doorway and Muriel watches him and the entrance a long time, while behind the sun lowers over the calming sea. By six o’clock Gail has not appeared. Muriel should be frightened but she feels better than she has all day. She hears the train passing at a distance across the seawall and the sound is a comfort, proof of ordinary life.

  She wonders how long she should wait. Along a back channel of shrubs she sees a man emerge as if from a doorway, arms at his sides as he looks around. From the south end a second man in a light suit keeps along an untrimmed line of poplars. Behind the branches the horizon seems to sink, the spongy orange light of this city buoyed above the tree line so the men appear as shadow play against the gray wall of trees. For a moment both men wait at this distance. Then they wave to each other and walk toward the hotel and the man in the hat nods them inside.

  Muriel steps out of the car and smooths her skirt and retucks her shirt and walks down the street with her arms crossed tightly over her purse. She pauses outside the heavy door of the hotel and the man in the hat looks her over and laughs. Over the boarded inset window is pasted a notice of police raid, but with the edges scraped away and the word Police crossed out and Air written above it. At the bottom corner, in another hand, the word Shelter.

  “If you say so, honey,” the man says and opens the door.

  Inside the hotel is shabby but done up in elegant colors, gold and red damask wallpaper and walnut panelin
g. The lobby is shallow but wide as a ballroom. Below her a plank floor trod in sand and ash. Past an empty desk a set of armchairs with a table between them, beyond these a string of lights along a banister leading upward.

  Already the bar is full of sailors and other young men in cuffed jeans and striped derby jackets. The windows are painted black on the inside, too, and the air is coastal and sticky and gray with smoke. The bar itself is cherry and lacquered and set very low. Muriel sees no other women. She sits at the bar with her back to the door, and when the bartender comes he asks if she knows where she is.

  “I’m meeting someone,” she says.

  “Are you now,” he says.

  “I am.”

  “Here I thought every night was the same,” the man says.

  He coughs and dabs his mouth with two fingertips as if re-creating some tenderness and then he shakes his head. He is tall and handsome and dressed like a porter. She asks for a Stinger and when he brings it she thanks him and he curtsies and smooths his hair back. She sits a long time with her knees pressed against the underside of the bar. Several times the door opens, and in the cut of light is another man and not Gail. The bar and the lobby fill slowly with men dressed in dark clothes. One man approaches her and asks if she is lost but he stands at some distance as if she might be a kind of decoy. She asks him if he knows a man called Julius or another called Rosie, and when he shakes his head she makes a pinching motion and says, “What about a little gun,” and the man laughs and says, “Plenty of those here.”

  Not long after this the lights are lowered and the men begin to come together. Someone scratches on a record. There are no clocks and no windows, so she can’t tell what time it is, but she’s had three drinks and it must be nearing eight. Perhaps Gail waited outside or perhaps she is still waiting but probably she never showed. Muriel feels hot though her legs are bare, and her neck catches the draft and she wishes for someone’s hand at her waist. Soon the men begin to dance and whisper and hold each other in the powerful darkness. A man in a pinstriped suit stands watch at the door; another stands behind the old lobby desk with his hand on a telephone. The man next to her is turned away, telling a story about his father. It is so dark that Muriel can’t tell if the man is talking to himself or someone else, and as she listens to the story it could be Lee’s or anyone’s. Perhaps that’s what the darkness has done, turned every story here into every other.

  The turntable plays “What a Fool I Was.” The men on the dance floor are paired off and holding each other. She might have expected this and she is not surprised but the feeling she has is like surprise. Surprise at the simple candor of it, the fact that her company has not prevented it. A little scuffle travels through the room and then the room is suddenly bright. Globe lights strung along the ceiling drip down and catch the men in their tender poses; then the lights go off again, then on, then off. Muriel looks around and sees the man behind the desk flipping the switch with one hand and with the other holding the phone to his ear. For a moment no one moves. One man in a workman’s shirt and heavy boots draws his chin back and yelps recklessly; his partner reaches out to shush him and the first man slaps his hand away. The turntable plays the last wobbly bars of Eddy Arnold. Muriel thinks to stand, but the lights have not come back on and upstairs she hears the pad of footsteps but no doors opening. The next song begins and it’s “How High the Moon” and the electric serration of the guitar clunks the room back open but no one dances yet; the song hangs there until someone laughs and then someone else. What had seemed at first like panic then settles into formality and the men start to move again.

  A young man turns to Muriel and holds out a hand and says, “When in Rome.”

  “If this were Rome, I’d be someone else,” she says, and knows the drinks have landed.

  “That isn’t how it works,” the man says, and leads her to the floor.

  “Maybe if I were someone else this would be Rome.”

  The man’s smile is pitying but gentle, patient.

  “All I mean is, shouldn’t I be a man,” she says.

  “You’re fine, darling.”

  They dance to that song and the next and Muriel wonders where Gail might be and with whom and if she’ll ever see her again. The man has dark eyes and freckles nearly black against the night, and his cheeks are still full and tender. She leans close and places her forehead on his shoulder. He dances with her the way she’d seen men dance at weddings with their younger cousins, yet when she looks at his tilted cheek and his neck she thinks that from a distance they must look like lovers. She thinks the word, lover. She thinks of Julius beneath her window that Christmas in Kansas and she lets this thought widen out until the loneliness she feels seems to involve even the music, whose tones began to lower and slow until every song is an elegy, and the night itself, which now is growing long.

  The man angles his face away from her and says, “How’d you get in here then?”

  In the dark with this stranger, with these men and their strangeness, so fragile in the dark, it seems possible to say things exactly as they are.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she says.

  “Aren’t we all.”

  “Someone specific.”

  “Not your husband, I hope.”

  “No, not him.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Julius.”

  “No, honey, your name.”

  She cocks her head at him.

  “What’s yours?”

  “Peter.”

  He might be no more than eighteen. He loosens his arms and she unspools from him and then he spools her back. The next song is quick and jangly and the crowd doesn’t like it. Someone scratches the record off and a long moment passes in silence. Peter leans out of their embrace and lights a cigarette and offers it to her and she waves it away.

  “Muriel,” she says.

  “What do you think is going to happen next, Muriel?”

  He smokes with his head tilted back to keep the smoke away from her. It could be a polite gesture, yet the way he does it makes it seem avoidant, as if he wants no part of himself to be touched.

  “I was supposed to meet someone, but she didn’t show.”

  “Your first time getting stood up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Big part of this game.”

  “Is it?”

  “Lots of times this place doesn’t even exist,” Peter says. He points to the concierge desk across the ballroom and says, “They have a board, if you’re really looking.”

  The music starts again. Two men dancing close lean into each other, then one turns to face the other. One man says, “Not much time now,” and the other leans to kiss him. Muriel thinks to close her eyes or look away but she doesn’t. The first man’s mouth searches out the mouth of the other and the second man gives up his mouth but keeps his eyes open and sees Muriel watching and his eyes go brass and lively. The first man pulls away and catches the second man open-eyed and smiles very softly at him. Muriel feels the kiss transposed over her and pressing her down. She has never seen two men touch each other this way. Something about its nearness, its very newness, hurts her, is outside the world. She thinks of kissing Gail in the ocean sunset and then of Julius on the horse and the long afternoons at Del Mar and the turned-up smell of the turf.

  “Lucky them,” Peter says.

  He pulls Muriel suddenly close and dips her. He bends his knee and her back rests on it and then he lifts her gently up. Another man says Peter’s name and comes close and touches his shoulder and Muriel aches for him, for both of them.

  “I’m off now, honey,” Peter says and kisses her on the forehead.

  Then she is standing alone on the dance floor. Around her the beautiful men are dancing. In every man there is a trace of Julius. She wonders what this feels like to them. To be among each other, but hidden from everyone else. She
had heard people speak of love as if it was either a salve or a curse. Her mother said that love was worth doing over and over. But what her mother must have felt, she’d seen reflected in every little corner of the world: men touching women in bars, couples dancing, a film in which a man stands yelling in the rain or on a train platform. What to call this place and these men, herself among them? When she’d seen Julius lying beneath her window Muriel hadn’t known who or how he loved, or if she loved him, only that his attention fell on her in a way that suggested love could be instant and precise, without desire or consummation but just as ardent as those things. She did not know if her mother had ever felt this or if she’d wanted to, and if not this then what.

  Then the record scratches off and the lights come on again and stay on and the men on the floor break apart. No hesitation now. She sees Peter move away from his man and both hurry toward the street. A few take off for the back and Muriel follows them through a side door. Outside, the evening is new and cold. When she looks up the alley she sees the back end of a Continental, but no one around. She turns into the alley and walks toward the street and she is a block past Market before the squad car is visible. It passes the hotel without stopping and the sirens are off and the windows down and the cop has one smoking hand out the window and the other cocked over the wheel.