On Swift Horses

by Shannon Pufahl

  Muriel cuts the engine but does not step out of the car. The sea breeze has blown the clouds in and over the narrow streets and into the mountains so the waning daylight comes through, though from the west another dark thrum, coming in. She steps out of the car and walks up the sidewalk and into the hotel. The bar is empty, the stools upturned, all the lights on. Behind the clerk’s desk, a deco lamp with a broad glass shade and a corkboard covered in notes and photos. She approaches the desk and waits, and when no one appears she slips behind it.

  The board reaches from the crown molding down past her hips. Some of the photos show men in their dress uniforms or school outfits, but most are notes listing names and phone numbers and dates. J.R.B. call home; Willie we moved to Chico 8/57, you can find us there off the main road; Still have your Spot Kenneth, he is eating fine. The photos seem posted for the entirely missing. In one, a boy not sixteen years old smiles openly; on the white border below his face someone has written Wm. Boyd, last at station November of ’57. On a few photos women’s names in childish letters marked with hearts or stars.

  Below all this, at knee level, hangs a General Crane and Hoist calendar from 1956, still open to December. A brass call bell sits on the desk, its clapper knob missing. Muriel turns around and looks out at the empty lobby, walls lined with framed photographs of the neighborhood as it had been many years before, before the war or even the war before that, silhouettes of men in narrow-brimmed hats, bent forward as if pressing against an unseen force. Below these photographs is the brass-railed bar; a gold spittoon by the door holds a single umbrella, turned point-down and dry. Only now does she notice that the boards bolted across the window casings are pocked with holes looking out to the streets beyond. The last daylight comes through them in long tight runnels, like water from a hose.

  She turns again and tries to make sense of the collection. On one hand it is simply a set of messages intended for those without telephones or permanent addresses, who might be known only marginally or who might pass through on their way somewhere else. But the photos record some larger loss, not of any single person but of time. The young men’s faces are cleanly shaven and confident. In each of these faces the suggestion of some remarkable change, from the pictured boy to the man sought by those who love or owe him. Lost boys who will see themselves on the wall and come home or not. She does not see Julius or any mention of a man like him, though she stands for a long time looking.

  Outside, the rain rattles like nails dropped in a can; she hears a car go past, footsteps overhead, the brief sense of habitation made by these noises a confirmation of the lobby’s emptiness. In another time, Julius’s disappearance and his theft might have been understood as necessary. Not long ago, men were taken away by war, by quests of one kind or another. That it is 1957 is a trick of history. That men now are meant to stay and be loved. That women are meant to stay and love them. Should he come through this place she wants him to know that she understands.

  Footsteps across the plank floor and Muriel turns and sees a man in a too-small suit gilded at the collar and the seams. The suit itself is a color difficult to name though if pressed she might have said coral.

  “Sad, ain’t it,” he says. He keeps to the other side of the desk but reaches out to move the bell sideways and with his palm wipes away some grime. In the lamplight he is older but still handsome, though his hairline has pulled back and revealed a tender birthmark the color of wine.

  “You someone’s wife?”

  Muriel shakes her head.

  “Just his girl, then?”

  “Sister-in-law,” she says, though this feels imprecise.

  “Well, put up your name anyway.”

  The man moves to the side of the desk but doesn’t come around it. Muriel glances behind and sees the desk affixed to the wall on the other side. There is no paper, nothing to write with, but the man catches her looking and opens a drawer in the desk. He finds a nubbed pencil and hands it to her.

  “You know,” he says, pressing the thin stubble of his hairline with the butt of his thumb. “This place was built a century ago. You have to be amazed at the number of men and other people who must have come through, though of course there’s no way to know. That’s the thing hey, no matter what they do to us there’s always more.”

  Muriel moves fractionally back and reaches out for the wall behind her. She does not want to leave any proof she’s been here but she knows what she wants to say. She searches her purse and finds the racing form, where long ago she’d written the name of the hotel. She thinks about what happens next and Lee’s sorrow and what it might mean to Julius.

  She presses the paper flat and turns it over. Forgive me, she writes. Then, below this, Julius. She pins the paper in a free spot near the bottom of the board and faces the man conclusively.

  “There’s a sentiment,” he says. Again he presses at his hairline and sighs. She looks up and sees the hem of some kind of screen or curtain over the board, as if to cover it like a storefront after closing.

  “What people mostly want, I think, is to know that there are others, that there are still people who haven’t forgotten you, even if that’s not a story anyone tells,” he says.

  He moves away from the desk and as he does she sees the pull where the suitcoat is buttoned, which makes little pleats around his waist.

  “Now, I don’t presume you need anything else, not a room or a drink, but if you wanted those things we do have half of them,” he says.

  “You’re right, I don’t need those things.”

  The man dips one leg behind the other in a kind of lateral curtsy and brushes his sleeve across the desk again and then with his other hand wipes away the dust he’s collected. Muriel thinks he might thank her now, but for what she couldn’t say. Instead he walks back into the lobby, where he sits down in one of the armchairs, slides a pack of cigarettes out of his suit pocket, and plucks one out and lights it. Then he leans down and picks up a magazine and crosses one leg over the other. His face disappears behind the magazine and his smoke comes winding up and disperses in the dark room.

  * * *

  —

  SHE WALKS OUT of the lobby and into the street. On the sidewalk she lights her own cigarette and walks past the boarded windows of the hotel back toward the car. The sea helming has begun to disappear in the clouds. She gets back in the car and locks the doors. She sits in the car a long time without turning the key. Over the street the swallows are swooping in dozens, dropping in curves like the weld on a barrel down to the pavement and back up to the tips of the trees. When the swallows dip and nearly touch the ground then camber up the feeling is of tremendous motion, as if the world has become unfixed.

  She remembers something else then, about the wedding where her mother met that man. Jim. The bride was someone’s young daughter in a homemade dress. Muriel was eighteen then, almost nineteen. She stood on the back edge of the reception and watched the dancing. The workingmen loosed from their labor, their women absent for a moment from the rough lives of children, who were allowed to run through a field of late summer corn. Once or twice a man hefted reluctantly to retrieve a crying child whose own menace had gotten the better of him. Most of the wives, hardly ever together in one place, sat in their churchy dresses with their ankles crossed and their knees together. In her short muslin dress and white hose, Muriel felt like a visitor to a future in which she was not accommodated. Jim stood among the men in a white plantation suit, the sleeves of the jacket pushed up his forearms and one tail of his shirt untucked. Muriel knew what would happen next and she felt not jealous or displeased but something else, something furious and lonely, there among the wedding party.

  The evening darkened over the party and the country house and the cornfield beyond. A flock of swallows dove over the field as the hot air slackened, and Muriel wondered what she might like to do next, now that her life had started. She was grown up and had a job and might
have done anything she liked. She sensed that whatever it was she had not yet encountered any sign of it. In the dark the chairs were brought in close and someone scratched the dial through country ballads and Sunday services to find a Kansas City station playing Patti Page and Johnnie Ray, and the dancing took on a new urgency. The following month these same women would arrive at her mother’s house with goulash and bottled milk and their scrubbed-up sons and cousins. The same men would stand too long on the porch and inch toward the door. As if Muriel had been widowed and not orphaned.

  The young groom danced close with his bride while the party watched.

  “Still free,” her mother said. “Just a bit longer.”

  At the young bride’s throat, in the hollow prized by men, a gold cross, Protestant, unspecial. The cross sat perfectly still in that hollow while she danced. As Muriel watched she thought of the night to come, the girl laid across a wide bed by her young husband, clumsy farmhand new to all forms of human touch, familiar with trees and the hot undersides of cattle but not with women, expecting perhaps his mother’s dense, unforgiving smell, not at all prepared for the softness of the girl, her ready legs, around him in an instant. The girl, too, with no other point of reference, her groom’s new bare chest above her own, the only bare chest she’d seen in her dark and pious childhood the flayed nakedness of Christ. Muriel could see with shocking clarity the husband’s lips taking up the little cross, pulling it away with his teeth. The wet circle left by his mouth. The sacrilege he would feel at that, the girl moved near climax by it, the single act of transgression left to them in their marriage bed. What a thing to picture. Did Muriel think of this that afternoon with her mother beside her, watching the girl dance? Or is she only thinking of it now, in the cold car, now that she knows the names of so many things?

  A month after that wedding, her mother was dead. Muriel thinks of the house now and knows it might be ravaged by vandals, curtains ripped down, windows broken, the neighbor boy pulling out wire for scrap. She thinks of the towns between here and there, of the yellow desert and the mountains and the long flat pull of the highway. She counts the hours it will take and how many nights she might sleep along the way. She wonders if the cake plate in the closet is filmed in dust, if the winter there is bitter or mild. She thinks of what she might ask Sandra to leave behind and what she will say to Lee.

  The rain is coming harder now and the clouds seem to involve her in their intentions, strung wild to the east. In the rearview mirror she sees a figure in jeans and boots; she turns, expecting Julius, but it is only a stranger waiting at the curb. A new thought has begun and she can almost reach the bow of it. The soft pastoral of that wedding and her mother’s pleasure that night and the next day. The privacy conferred by marriage, the selves remade and distilled by it, the way it was like a cloak thrown over the broadest parts of a life, hiding everything but the fact of it. The way her mother mistrusted this, as if love were a force outside of people’s will and thus could be neither consummated nor claimed. As if love were a third party gathered to witness otherwise private devotions: The young bride and her anticipation. Men and boys on the edge of her waiting joy. Sandra’s flushed throat and dark braids and all the men who were lost or searched for at the Chester Hotel. Muriel herself there looking. Love was always somewhere outside oneself, it was always improbable. It could happen to anyone and it could happen a thousand times or only once or never. You had to search for it and you had to allow it. To allow it was to be seen by that perceiving force, and it is this thought, finally, that makes Muriel turn the key and drive into the hard-coming rain, where Sandra will be waiting, where everything will be known.

  TEN

  Paradise

  All that winter, Julius works among pescadores trawling for skipjack and yellowtail in the Sea of Cortez. He coils rope and guts and listens to the men talk of the women they’ve left or might meet. They do not care about his busted face or his sadness because they’ve had enough of both.

  In a wooden doghouse boat they tool from Guaymas to Colima on nights so dark the darkness seems animate, like Japanese monochromes of cloud. In the evenings below deck the pescadores wonder what world they might encounter when the season ends. Some are young, but not all, and the older men remember when the seas were higher and the cities fewer. They have come from the droughted inlands and the hot forests for jobs paving highways and laying cement, but they miss Coahuila and Durango. In Durango there were windstorms and little pacas you could tame and every village had an edge you could ride past and be in the desert alone, and there’s nothing like that in the cities. The world is smaller now but the needs of it larger and the hope that any ordinary man might thrive in it decreases as the distance does. They send a word or two his way in English when he doesn’t understand but mostly he understands. He tells them often about Kansas and the heavy fields and the emptiness there and this affinity keeps him in their good graces. For these reasons and the dry fine weather, Julius lasts six months with them.

  He doesn’t know what he wants or what he intends to do next and he knows he’ll have to go, but for now the sea is enough; he feels hidden by the water and sky. The wound on his forehead begins to scar and lends him an air of vulnerability. His ribs heal poorly, and when he laughs or coughs the pressure in his chest feels loose and liquid and passable. Where he sewed the wound, the scar is like basting and still itches. He keeps the little pistol down in his bootheel or below his bunk or stows it in the slip, but he finds he can’t stand to look at it.

  Sometimes he wakes having dreamed of Korea and blue mountains as simple as line drawings in the distance. In those dreams he is not a sailor or even a man but a mere presence in the landscape, like a tree or a roof or a breeze, and below him the green country goes by, men and women on their way to work, children at play in the fields, birds and dogs and other animals asleep in shade or keeping to themselves. There is no conflict, and though he is there he is not important, he changes nothing in the scene below him. These dreams are so calm and beautiful that he wakes from them reluctantly to the noise of the pescadores and their endless work. He does not know what the dream is about but whenever he has it he wakes feeling reconciled to something. As if by disappearing, by watching without interfering, he has been forgiven. When he rises and goes on deck he forgets this dream among the men and the sun and the lack of shadow.

  * * *

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON LATE in June they pass out of the gulf and into the Marietas, where there are sea dahlias among the rocks. They anchor under a rock arch at midday and out at sea a thunderhead rises fifty thousand feet above the horizon. The weather report is read and heeded. The island is small and uninhabited and beyond it are three other islands even more forbidding. Julius suspects they are not meant to stay but to carry on another fifty miles to the mainland. But the report is for storms to the south and west, and the men haul in the nets and ride the shore.

  Shoveled into the rocky spit of the bay is an abandoned naval base. They anchor below its crumbling façade and Julius swims in the clear water while the men tow out blankets and carry them by dinghy and cast them along the sand. They are alone, and when the sun begins to set and the water turns inky and there are no other boats and no coast guard the men make a supper of boiled eggs and watercress. They eat while the lights of Puerto Vallarta clutter the distant shore. High up the spit, the abandoned base has the observant but dogged look of someone waiting for a cab. When the darkness comes and the tide rises, the seawater covers the concrete stilts and reaches the wooden walkway, glimmering at the windowsills. By then Julius and the other men are drunk on wine and strewn along the spit in happy clusters.

  They spend that inlet night among petrels. Virgo tilts east to west, nearly gone, and the storm passes many miles away. The men make a fire and sing songs in their language. Julius wanders off to a beach upwind and makes himself a bed there. He thinks of the man in Tijuana with the rolling heart and wonders if he�
�s ever seen water this color or felt left alone by the world. He lies on his belly, but when his hurt ribs seem to clunk forward he shifts his weight onto his elbows and lifts and feels the heaviness in his chest subside. He coughs and turns his head and spits into the sand. He thinks it might be time to move on.

  Above him the sliver of moon is hidden by clouds and seems blinked out. No wind, no breakers. He rises and strips and walks into the sea. The water is warm and feels thick as milk as he slides into it. He lets the water ballast him and floats with his arms out and his palms resting until the receding tide carries him too far. Then he rights himself and looks down. Just below the surface are thousands of small glowing creatures, crustaceous and ancient. When he trails his hand through the water and lifts it, his fingers are pecked in green light like fireflies. He shakes his hand and the lights fall away and back into the water. He thinks that he should wake the other men but probably they’ve seen this before or wouldn’t care to. He might be the only romantic among them and that is fine. He lets himself sink so the water covers his chin. The clouds pass over and the moonlight cuts through the water and the creatures cling a moment to his skin, then float away.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY THE SUN IS BRIGHT, and when the week’s catch is held they skip back to Colima and unload. The men cup his arms and shoulders and wish him well and Julius takes his pay in pesos and tuna steak and walks into town. He hitches far north to Hermosillo, eighty miles inland. There he gets a haircut and a shave and stays a night in a Chinese hotel; in the morning he hauls back out to the coast in a livestock truck carrying guinea fowl. From there he takes a boat to San Felipe and another truck to Ensenada. In Ensenada he finds a fishing charter headed north across the maritime and he hands over most of his remaining money in exchange for passage. The charter docks in San Diego late the next afternoon, in the middle of July, almost eight months since he left his brother’s house and crossed the border. He changes his pesos at the currency window and pays a dollar for the showers at the marina, then dresses and rolls his money in one boot and the pistol in the other. How he likes these moments, when he holds everything he owns.