On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

“I don’t think I knew anything about it.”

  “Cheers to that horse, then, after all.”

  Sandra takes her hand and leads her back to the house and from behind Muriel watches the way she walks, almost elliptically, her legs bare beneath the wrinkled hem of the shirt.

  * * *

  —

  EACH NIGHT, as she falls asleep next to Lee, the confidence of the day comes apart like paper. She listens to his breathing and the familiar quiet of their bedroom and thinks about what she’s promised and what she might do now. She thinks of that day in her mother’s house: Marry me, Lee says, and we’ll go to California. The word California like an incantation. She hears herself say yes, she hears downstairs the snap of cards as Julius sets solitaire at the kitchen table.

  * * *

  —

  THE END OF THAT WEEK, Muriel returns from the lounge to find Lee standing in Sandra’s driveway. She pulls to the ditch and waits behind the cypress. Her heart beats wildly and she covers her mouth and feels her face grow hot. She watches as Lee peers into the walnut orchard across the road and she worries he’ll turn toward her and she tries to think of what to say. Then Sandra steps out of the house in a duster and mud boots carrying a length of rope. Muriel feels her chest tighten at the sight of her. Sandra strides past Lee and Lee frowns but follows her and both cross the road and into the orchard. Muriel steps out but leaves the engine running and calls out and both Lee and Sandra turn to look at her.

  “She’s in the orchard again,” Lee says and points and Muriel follows his finger through the furrows and sees the horse, past the small alfalfa field planted to draw pests and water from the orchard above it. Both the field and the orchard are ankle-deep in rainwater along their eastern edges. The horse stands still and appears to be looking out at them.

  “Sandra here thought a rope might work,” Lee says.

  “She can’t walk through all that mud but she might try,” Sandra says.

  “So you say,” Lee says.

  He takes off across the road and Sandra shoulders the wet coiled rope and follows him. Muriel watches from the road. The sodden ground sucks at their feet and they lift their knees high to escape it and as they come closer the horse drops her snout and steps backward into the orchard row with her ears flattened. Then she turns and starts to hasten away, parallel to the field. Sandra signals to the west with her rope and Lee nods to her. Then she leaves the field along the edge of the arbor, closest to the river, where the water has collected knee-high. Lee moves into the orchard and Sandra drives the horse out toward a berm of dark clay that divides the orchard from the ash trees beyond, below this a falling grade that turns to water among the empty lots. Two had been sold in the last month and Lee pauses, unsure if he should trespass. If the horse slants left or quickens her pace she risks stepping hard into the standing water and the mud below it. Lee flanks north toward the river to cut off this possibility and around the lots and into a row of trees. The branches bower across and meet above the row and drip rainwater so the resting surface below gives the appearance of lace or shelling. From this distance Sandra is small and delicate, and Lee recedes like a boat going out, and seeing her lover and her husband joined in this task makes Muriel afraid but also strangely satisfied.

  Sandra has nearly reached the clay berm when the horse finds an overgrown tractor path that rises out of the rainwater. Lee changes tack and marches up parallel, hoping to cut the horse off at the end of the path, but the water slows him. The sun is lowering and the trees cast down reflections of their upper branches as though they’ve been duplicated in a mirror, both halved and multiplied. Because the horse has not yet been named, they can only call what names they can think of, hoping to coax her as they move very slowly through the trees.

  “De-li-lah,” Lee calls out.

  “Peaches,” calls Muriel, from her post by the road.

  Then Lee loses her. Muriel can no longer see the horse or Sandra; even their footfalls are lost in the wind. Lee turns back and comes wading toward Muriel, between the wefted irrigation ditches. He stands in the orchard row catching his breath. As Muriel looks out across the rows, the branches seem to fill with fast-moving shadows. Then she looks up and sees a dozen bodies moving and leaping across the bowers. A pause, then more dark shapes advancing. Muriel looks down at the water and sees them in reflection: the feet and eyes and tails of rats, their reflections much crisper than the rats themselves as they leap through the branches in the setting sun.

  “Good God,” Lee says.

  They turn away from one another to look up and to the east, to find the back end of this dark wave. From somewhere across the field, Sandra calls out, “They won’t come down, we’ve just startled—” but the words are ripped away or uncompleted.

  Muriel cries out. Lee turns, alarmed by her voice.

  “Sandra,” she says, and when Sandra doesn’t answer she says her name again.

  “Just stay still, darling,” Sandra calls back.

  Lee hears the word and turns to Muriel, his look baffled and strange. He lifts both hands to his cheeks, as if he is remembering something he was not aware he knew. Above them the sound of the rats is feathery and fast as they move across. For five or ten seconds they pass, like pockets of dark water shot through the trees, until silence follows and the branches still. Muriel thinks that Sandra has said it on purpose and she is not sure if she is angry or relieved. Lee does not know what to think. He says Muriel’s name very quietly.

  “It’s okay now, Lee,” she says, and points up to the empty trees.

  He drops his hands and looks away. The boy he was years before is in his confused look. The trees are still and she can hear the river but nothing moves in the orchard. Then Sandra calls out again, not any word but a slow and bewildered exhalation. For a weary and confused moment Muriel thinks they are in league together, the horse and the rats, that the horse has conjured the rats by some arcane magic to effect her escape, to make Sandra call out. This confederacy seems as logical as anything, there in the altered world. But then she sees the shape of the horse coming through the trees, Sandra leading her by the rope.

  “I’ll be damned,” Muriel says.

  Sandra is panting and red-faced and for a moment Lee glances between them.

  “This ain’t no mustang,” she says. “But she ain’t no nag either.”

  “I never believed she was either thing,” Lee says. His tone is brutal.

  Sandra looks at Muriel apologetically and Muriel knows she is right. Lee takes the rope and walks the horse down the road and Sandra and Muriel are alone. Sandra palms over her knees and pants and her skin is flushed with exertion and the cold drizzle. Muriel watches Lee walk away toward the house. From behind, the horse seems soft as pudding. Muriel cups Sandra’s neck and feels the heat there. Sandra sighs and arches into Muriel’s hand. When she straightens up she is crying, but her jaw is set.

  “I will sell this house and everything in it and I will go with you wherever you want,” she says. Then she turns away and crosses the road.

  After a moment Muriel goes too. She feels not moved or worried but strangely defiant. The car is still running on the roadside. She stands beside it and watches as Sandra heels her muddy boots off on the porch step and walks into the house. In her head she hears Sandra say the word again. She likes the sound of it but she’s not sure if she likes what it means.

  Lee skips dinner and spends the night bedding down the horse and feeding her and rubbing her coat. Muriel falls asleep alone in their bedroom, and when she wakes Lee has made coffee and he brings her a cup. In his kindness and his silence is the heartbreak coming for them. He leans to kiss her and she lets him. He has forgotten or he is willing to forget or he did not really understand. Sandra is the contrail of light left on the back of the eye by the sun. Like so much of Muriel’s life she is invisible. Muriel thinks that there is some dignity in that, yet it leaves a
life so immaterial it may be erased in a blink.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, at the lounge, the horsemen are mad with anticipation. They’ve called in wagers on grass stakes somewhere in India, and one of the men has a transistor tuned to a station broadcasting the race, half in a language no one knows, half in British voices hollow and nasal and distant. They can’t sit still, and as the morning wears on they stand and pace and gripe at each other. They lean in to the radio as if it might whisper to them, just once, the secrets of the universe.

  “Can you believe this,” says the man with the mustache, and the others shush him.

  He lowers his voice. “India,” he says and turns his face up and smiles.

  Another man says, “How far away is that even?”

  “Eight thousand two hundred miles,” the mustache says.

  “It don’t even seem like mileage, it seems like time.”

  “It is,” the mustache says. “It’s nine at night there.”

  “They race late.”

  “They race all day.”

  “Well, good to know they’re racing somewhere,” the mustache says.

  “Now you want to see the world.”

  “Not all of it, just the racetracks.”

  The signal lapses. Rosie stands on a bar chair holding an antenna the size of a hubcap. Muriel watches this without caution. He pays no attention to her though she loves him a little now, after seeing him in the bar with Gail. Rosie catches the signal and holds a moment and the men cheer, but then the plantation fan passes back and shoves the antenna sideways. Rosie wobbles on the chair but he does not fall. He calls out to the owner, who is sitting in the corner listening. The owner rises and turns off the fan, then lingers at the men’s periphery, as if he is one of them. Muriel is amused by the whole scene, by the horsemen’s sudden interest in the world to come, now that they can lay money on it. Rosie finds the signal again and the British voice comes roaring back in.

  “What did he say?” one man asks.

  “The Queen of England is there,” says another.

  “I wouldn’t think she’d be welcome.”

  “She can still love horses, even if she ain’t got an empire.”

  “And the empire can still love her.”

  “Only empire now is ours.”

  They’ve laid a pool on a late race, through a bookie no one names. Two races pass and the broadcaster calls them in a voice made for some other event, perhaps a sermon or a fund-raiser. Though they’ve set no money on them, the men listen to these races carefully. The race slang sits awkwardly on the British announcer’s tongue.

  “I never did think about a hand ride that way,” Rosie says, from his height.

  “Only when this fella says it like it’s some kind of flower.”

  “Oh sure, Rosie. You know shit about hand rides.”

  When their race begins the men shush everyone, the other men at the bar and the cooks in the back. For a moment the lounge is quiet as winter.

  “Here we go,” the mustache whispers.

  The race goes off like any other. The horses leave the gate high and close in and the announcer calls this calmly. The men have money on an Arabian called Father of All. He pulls ahead early and the announcer describes his gait as like a bowstring and says he runs as if he feels himself chased by something always just behind. The men shake their heads at this poetry but Rosie nods as if this confirms his reconnaissance.

  He says, “Wish I could see it.”

  The horse picks up a bit of distance from the pack. The jockey turns the horse the way a child would turn a bicycle, by leaning gleefully into the speed. The announcer describes this in hushed tones. The horsemen stand and raise their arms but do not call out. Muriel can see in their bright faces the race they are imagining. That in their minds the horses are like the horses in their dreams, as if the fact of horses at all is a dream. They have been taken back to the very beginning. Rosie holds the antenna very still and the men hold themselves very still and the horse necks on beautifully and the whole lounge is involved in this drama, halfway around the world.

  The mustache says, “We’re going to do it.” And the whole lounge believes they will. The sound of the horses running and the announcer’s voice roll on against the noise of the traffic outside. The announcer pauses—the end is coming. Then, in the last moments, the jockey leans into Father’s neck and drops his hands and relaxes his seat so the horse feels his weight and slows. For half a furlong they ride this way, pressed together and losing ground, and another horse comes up along the outside and passes them.

  The men cry out.

  “What is he doing?”

  “Why would you ease there?”

  “Goddamn these Indians, don’t they know how to ride?”

  “Does he just want to keep riding forever?”

  Their questions can’t be answered. Over the thousands of miles the same noise as any track, people cheering and glasses ringing and the slowing clop of hooves. The horsemen sit dejected. One of the men reaches out and yanks the dial. The radio catches static, then raving jazz, until finally it gives out all the way to silence. Rosie leans recklessly to the side and another man rises and offers ballast and then a third man says, “Just leave the fucking thing, Rosie.”

  Rosie creaks the antenna one little bit at a time with his eyes closed as if he is searching for something palpable in the dark. Muriel thinks of him making love to a man and how that man would be so much taller and how Rosie might want that, that feeling of subjection. She wonders if Gerald was old or young and how much Rosie had loved him. Then the radio fuzzes back to life. Frank Sinatra’s voice enters the room and all at once the tune is obvious.

  Rosie calls out, “Hey then, this is better,” and abandons whatever else he had been searching for.

  The mood shifts. Muriel remembers the song from years before and it spools out into the lounge. The past comes back to the men and Muriel senses they won’t try this again, this trick with the radio and the foreign bookie. Rosie sings along. The mustache reaches out to raise the volume. Then all the men sing, You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams. The men’s voices turn it into an anthem and the great affliction they’d felt seems to change into a sweeter thing, permission for their failure to be admitted without acrimony.

  Muriel remembers something then. A Kansas morning, Muriel at the kitchen table and her mother leaned against the counter, while they waited for the percolator. A man upstairs still in bed, someone her mother had met at a wedding the day before. Muriel can’t remember his name, it might have been Jim, something brisk and ordinary. The radio playing softly the same song the men are singing now, refracted in her memory by the distance from that moment and her mother’s presence in it.

  “Been too long since I met someone,” her mother had said.

  She was confident, dressed in a nightshirt and nothing else. Her hair piled unambitiously. She was not always this way. Sometimes she wept. Thinking of this now Muriel realizes how young her mother still was, not yet forty, still years from it. Outside the summer morning lived with hot breeze and june bugs scratching at the screens. Her mother’s shoulders had burned the day before; in the kitchen light they looked delicate and warm and Muriel wanted to press her cheek to them, to feel the heat there.

  “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, though. You know how these things go,” her mother said. She balanced one hip against the counter and rested one arm on the other, holding a burning cigarette upright. A posture as familiar to Muriel as any touch would be.

  “Here’s a lesson for you, and maybe it seems like an obvious one,” her mother said. “People in love want a mirror held up to them, and someone has to be the mirror. It’s too easy to let love narrow down to just two people staring across at each other and trying to see themselves. So you have to figure out the difference, whi
ch one is really you and which isn’t, which one is just you reflected in someone else. Then you’ll know if it’s love or not.”

  Muriel recalls this morning all at once. The men sing, And love is either in your heart or on its way. The lounge owner has joined in and Rosie’s balance is faltering.

  Later that same day, as Jim and her mother slept, Lee arrived stinking of diesel and the farmhand’s truck he’d driven out in. At the door he knocked politely, though Muriel had already risen at the dead sound of his boots on the porch. He apologized for the silage smell and she let him peck her cheek like a cousin. At the table they drank coffee and talked of the future. Lee would be shipping off the next day or the day after, and he’d come to say goodbye. He brought flowers and a store-bought cake and they ate it with the coffee. Then, over the sound of the radio, came the sound of her mother upstairs moaning, then the low growl of Jim’s pleasure, then laughter, the bouncing of the bed. Lee was shocked to stillness. His face turned red and he looked around the room for escape and then up with closed eyes at the ceiling. Another girl might have risen in shame. Someone else still might have relieved the poor son of a zealot by laughing. She knew he had been to Leavenworth then on to Asia and was going back again and had seen many parts of the world, but he was so young and had never had a mother. She sat and held Lee’s eye and the commotion rose to its inevitable pitch, and when Lee’s discomfort became unbearable Muriel put her elbows on the table and nested her chin in her palms and waited.

  What had she wanted, then? Some revenge for her mother’s freedom. For her mother’s ease and recklessness and how much power Muriel took from those things but also how much loneliness. Revenge for the contentment Lee offered and the world of men she had lived in forever and would always live in. She wanted love, but not the way her mother had it. She wanted something she’d never heard of before.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HER SHIFT ENDS, Muriel gets in the car and drives downtown and parks near the Chester Hotel, next to the old streetcar tracks. She thinks of the young man Peter and what he told her. Below the messy curtain of wires stretch the old tracks, which carried first freight then laborers then men in starched uniforms to the bases just north. The iron rails, now sunk into the asphalt, catch in their grooves flattened weeds and rainy smears of oil. A group of sailors in their dark enlisteds smoke under a theater marquee and the door to the hotel is unmanned.