On Swift Horses
On Swift Horses
Shannon Pufahl
Set in 1950’s America at a time when people stopped looking west and started looking up: a breathtakingly beautiful debut novel of revolution, chance and the gambles we take with the human heart. Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack. When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband Lee. Instead it is Lee’s brother, Julius, a thief and Korean War veteran – and someone she has only met once – whom she longs to tell, and who has struck a spark of promise and possibility inside her quietly ordered life. Julius has found himself in Las Vegas, where his gift for gambling leads him to a job patrolling the boards above the casino tables, watching through the cigarette smoke for chancers and cheats. There he meets Henry, a blackjack artist and a man who shares Julius’s passions, and his secrets. As tourists gather on roof tops to watch atomic clouds bloom in the desert, Henry and Julius's love burns in the shadows – until one night Henry is forced to flee. Through the parks and plazas of Tijuana and the bars and beaches of San Diego, On Swift Horses mesmerisingly charts the journeys of Muriel and Julius on their separate quests for freedom, new horizons and love.
ON SWIFT HORSES
Shannon Pufahl
Copyright (#ulink_35bc5365-8844-54b9-9a27-7d679feb91cc)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Shannon Pufahl 2019
Cover image © Epics / Getty Images
Shannon Pufahl asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008293963
Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008293987
Version: 2019-09-26
Dedication (#uc453a29d-d82d-50af-81c2-c8414cb7d45c)
For Dorthy Figgs—
my grandmother and a first-rate card player
Epigraph (#uc453a29d-d82d-50af-81c2-c8414cb7d45c)
The declaration of love marks the transition from chance
to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened.
—ALAIN BADIOU, In Praise of Love
An honest game has always been a great rarity.
—HERBERT ASBURY,
Sucker’s Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America
Contents
Cover (#u9a944bb1-6f24-525f-a5aa-92d5aae4762a)
Title Page (#uef68deb0-a398-58f6-9841-023ac3ace76b)
Copyright (#u7b57e290-d05c-5775-9be4-1d572b2672ef)
Dedication
Epigraph
I.
1. THE SEA (#ua174e854-849f-590d-b4b0-580e98e8da3b)
2. THE GOLDEN NUGGET (#uacb50bdc-b35a-5b4c-bb70-8cb56dc7466c)
3. THE VALLEY (#uf7ea82d3-a084-59de-900f-48208f3d7ab8)
4. THE MEADOWS (#u83efd059-683a-52c2-bb0c-06d7046d3951)
II.
5. THE BLUFFS (#litres_trial_promo)
6. TIJUANA (#litres_trial_promo)
7. THE CLIFFS (#litres_trial_promo)
8. THE BORDER (#litres_trial_promo)
III.
9. SWALLOWS (#litres_trial_promo)
10. PARADISE (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I. (#uc453a29d-d82d-50af-81c2-c8414cb7d45c)
ONE (#ulink_722b6c71-d104-5dce-b238-f4ffc0011f56)
The sea (#ulink_722b6c71-d104-5dce-b238-f4ffc0011f56)
At the Heyday Lounge the horsemen think they are the only gamblers. They file in each morning, their shoes dusty and their pockets jangling with coins, like parishioners. They sit in a dark corner under a single blade fan, a plantation relic hauled from the lounge owner’s Southern home to this coastal city thirty miles from Mexico. Above them the fan has the look of salvage but it makes no sound, and though it keeps the flies from their faces and necks and midmorning cocktails they do not notice it.
Every weekday the men come. They speak openly because they believe the lounge owner to be simple—which is true—and Muriel, their waitress these long mornings, to be a woman and therefore incapable of both memory and complex reasoning. It does not help that she is young, that she looks like the empty plains she comes from, flat and open and sad. She and Lee, newly married, have been in San Diego only a few months and are learning slowly how to be modern, and though she has always worked it is fair that the horsemen take her for a housewife forced into labor by circumstance. They could not know from her wide shoulders and square waist and rural modesty that she had taken the bus from Kansas on her own, that she could play cards and drive a car, or that she’d left behind a house she owned outright, to come here.
So they wave their hands at her and call her sweetheart from across the room and order their drinks with pointed enunciation as if she were hard of hearing. Though she remembers not only their drinks but the clip of their mustaches, the red-rimmed dimness of their eyes, she writes the orders down on a notepad and hands the paper to the bartender. The horsemen are retired trainers from the furlongs at Del Mar or bookmakers for rich men in the coastal hills. A few are ex‑jockeys, burned out and overweight, unsure what else life might have to offer them. They talk as men do, confident and gently adversarial, about the coming race day, the horses off their feed, the jockeys with tapeworm, the cup and feel of the track. They set long odds and argue over them.
For a few months Muriel listens. She writes down their private speculations and begins to join their language to its objects. When her shift ends at two she walks toward the sea and takes a late lunch at a restaurant where she works a second job on the dinner shift. She sits in a booth in the corner and studies her notes and the previous day’s racing form. She might rise and walk then, along the rolling line of surf. She thinks of horses, and her mother, and the day she was married. As she walks she collects shells and beach glass and slips them in the pocket of her sweater. Before she returns to work she unfolds the pocket and dumps these same items back onto the beach, so all that’s left is a rim of sand in the pocket hem. At ten Lee walks to the restaurant from the factory a few blocks away and they go home together, arms linked like young lovers and not like married people, because they do not know each other very well.
THEN, IN EARLY DECEMBER, Muriel has a night off from the restaurant but tells Lee she’s working. In the drugstore across the street from the Heyday Lounge she buys a pair of sunglasses she considers ridiculous. They cover her eyebrows and half of her nose and make her look much older, like a woman in possession of a fortune or a married lover. She buys a sunhat and a thin scarf printed with flowers. She removes her sweater though her arms show and she worries they will burn in the low winter sun and make her sleep difficult. She takes a twenty-minute bus ride to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The bus winds around Jimmy Durante Boulevard and from the windows of the bus she can see the grand entrance to the track, the high hedges and the waving flags. A statue of Bing Crosby, the track’s founder and financier, gleams hard and gold in the afternoon light. In San Diego in those days it was said that Crosby used the track to impress Grace Kelly, who hated horses but loved men. Muriel lets the bus wind back around to Camino del Mar and gets out to have a coffee in a diner along the beach. She smokes and looks around as if she is waiting for someone. Her shoulders are warm and the bridge of her nose sweats under the sunglasses. The sea is soft and cold-looking. From the beach several others watch as a woman wades out to the breakers and stops. Muriel thinks of her mother, who had told her about the shore at Galveston, where she had been once with a man Muriel knew was not her father. Her mother said the sea was smooth as a lake and brown, and that someone told her it was filled with jellyfish. Muriel watches as the woman at sea turns and lifts a hand to her forehead and seems to regard the shore in contemplation of some final leaving. It is a curious thing, being married, how Muriel must think of this odd afternoon errand as something done for both of them, an adventure Lee will share in one way or another. She had thought it would be difficult to lie to him but she found it easier than their daily recitations of the truth. She had expected for herself the same power her mother found in men. But she often finds her husband’s gaze embarrassing.
Finally she stands and walks up the seaside street and back across Durante. She passes the high hedges and the tall gates and walks past the turf club and the runs. At the turnstile she crowds in with another woman and two men. The warden in the booth waves them through. She climbs the stairs behind the three others and lets them break off in the stands. From this height she looks around. She is surprised by how many people are at the track and how many of them are drunk. The sailors clump together and slap each other’s backs. Their heavy white pants hang to their heels and they laugh and push back their vigorous hair. There are men in ripped shoes and young boys in bow ties and there are many other women too, Muriel is glad to see. She sits under the second-floor balcony in the shade and covers her hair with the scarf.
From the stands the horses are not what she imagined. They are tall and obdurate and only lightly controlled. A dozen of them are paced out and lined behind the gates. The field is looped first in grass then dirt, a third smaller track built for harness racing and unused. Across the field the stables are lined in courtly rows, and from this height Muriel can see the sharp shadows thrown by the palms, over the hot-walkers and the low-roofed stalls. The smell of the dirt and the stables and the wheaty smell of the grass are familiar to her, though from the sea comes a punkish wind. She has a gimlet and studies the racing form, thinking of the words she’s heard the horsemen use, the names of trainers and jockeys. She watches the men file to the betting windows along the aisle. For a long time she watches without seeing any woman approach the glass and she begins to worry that perhaps she is not allowed to bet at all. The horses rear in their gates. Their bridles clang against the gates and sound like vespers. Then the gunshot and the race begins. The men in the stands yell instructions at the huge dark horses in a language of violence rolled in with endearment—summer up, take it, ride that, brake baby. The dust and the noise are thrilling, and Muriel stands without thinking and watches the horses turn the track, the pounding of their hooves at odds with their agile speed. When the race ends the men rise and punch the air, then tear their tickets in half and throw them to the ground.
After the race the crowd calms. Muriel moves to the windows and the cashier does not look up and when she speaks he is not surprised. She plays two dollars on the next race, on a horse named Pastoral, whom the men at the bar called canny and somber. The odds are six‑to‑one and when the horse crosses a length ahead she is up twelve dollars. She can hardly believe it. She takes her ticket back to the man behind the glass, who smiles this time and counts out the bills. She drinks another gimlet and no one notices. She lets the next race pass and then she rises and leaves through the tunnel. She takes the bus back downtown, her money folded away in her purse. Lee comes to collect her at ten and they walk home together. By then the drink has come out of her and she is tired, her dress dirty with sea air and car exhaust. The wind off the ocean blows down the alleyways and makes her shiver.
Lee says, “You should have worn a sweater.”
She leans into him and his solidity is a fact that seems weighed against possession. He puts an arm around her and she considers the scarf in her bag, which would warm her. Though he would make nothing of it, she does not want him to see it, it is too much a part of the day.
Across the street a barbershop is closed but still lighted, a man sweeping up, his silent figure inside the fluorescence like an image on a screen. By the door of the shop a boy of seven or eight is still out at this late hour, throwing rocks across the empty street in some game of his own devising. When he sees them he comes forward with his hand out. Lee looks at her and then at the boy and makes a gesture meant to indicate penury. The boy turns to Muriel and she sees the fox in him and he knows she sees it. He starts to sway back and forth and then to dance. His pockets are full of rocks and they make a sound like dice. Then the sweeping man disappears into a back room and the shop lights go out and they are suddenly alone with the boy. In the dark street he lifts his knees high and slaps his little palms against them, and though he does not sing he seems about to. He holds Muriel’s gaze and she laughs and pulls her purse up and brings out a quarter and hands it to him. Lee reaches out for her arm but does not stop her. The boy takes the coin and gives a look to Lee, who says to Muriel, “Oh for heaven’s sake,” in the embarrassed way his Lutheran mother might have said it, if he’d ever known her. The boy turns from them and dances back to his post at the curb; Muriel thinks she will remember him a long time, as the recipient of her good fortune.
In the hallway of their boardinghouse Lee stops to call his brother from the shared telephone. Most often Lee does not reach his brother but tonight he does. Muriel listens to his quiet voice on the phone, laughing and then pleading, the way he is even when Julius is merely mentioned now, an older sibling’s curse, to envy the freedom of the younger man and also believe he will suffer from it. It is the same voice he used in the street and he would use this voice on her again, if he knew. And if she took him to the track he would not understand, he would scowl at the dirty men and the fragrant, snorting horses.
THE MORNINGS in San Diego have a particular tang, the ocean air sweetened by the drift of tanker fumes. Muriel and Lee are among the many thousands arriving each month, husbands and wives but mostly just men, bright with Western promise and their own survival, back from the Pacific. In general a masculine city, Muriel thinks, sailors and black ships and swirls of oil in the ports. The coastal hills cut a jagged line at the horizon. The great fig tree in Balboa Park spreads its roots like an apron of snakes.
At night when it is dim and she is tired she often mistakes the waving surface of the bay for wheat, and this she prefers to the sea, the low intimation of the Plains glimpsed sidelong. Days when they are both off work they walk together through town and along the thoroughfares, collecting cans and bottles for the junkman. South of Balboa Park the interstate is being pulled through by cranes and paddle scrapers and a hundred men a day on the iron trusses. Often the two of them stand watching for long moments as Lee narrates the freeway’s path, through La Jolla and Oceanside and all the way to Oregon. A second highway crosses the first and runs east all the way to Ohio, passing through the open country they left behind. These routes will isolate the naval station and the ports, and the dark district by the railyard where the sailors take their leave, and the locals speak of this as a blessing, a cross over something vague and unseen that the future will not accommodate.
Inside this new grid the city widens up and out, over the coastal hills and north to the mesas, networks of tract housing all the way to Birdland. Lee wants a half-acre in Mission Valley, on the San Diego River, where they can build a three-bedroom and plant fruit trees. He has pinned the advertisement above the window in their kitchenette. When he and Muriel sit up late smoking and playing cards he tells her about the narrow valley, once settled by missionaries and then by nut and dairy farmers, now divided into lots graded flat and grassless. Sometimes he stands and goes to the little window and touches the pastel houses and the long furrows of cypress trees, and though he sighs dramatically and smiles Muriel knows he is not joking. She knows that he imagines her there in a real kitchen and a real bed. He believes the great future will meet them, in the new suburban landscape. They could prod that future along if they sold her mother’s house in Kansas, but Muriel will not yet consent to it. When Lee asks she says she isn’t ready, and if he worries why that might be he doesn’t say so. The truth is he doesn’t need her permission but he wants it.
It is 1956 and Muriel is twenty-one years old. Old to be starting a family, but she had waited almost a year to marry Lee and refused for a year before that. She had thought she could live as her mother had and then her mother died. Her mother had been the first woman in Marshall County to own a car, an eight-hundred-dollar Chevrolet she won in a department store raffle. She was Catholic but would not attend any Mass where the women weren’t allowed to wear pants, which left one church on the north side of Topeka. Every weekend they left Muriel’s stepfather in Marshall County and drove a hundred miles to hear the Mass in slacks. They stayed Saturday night in a motel by the highway and washed their faces and their scarves in the sink and rose early the next morning. After church they ate at a seafood restaurant across the street called Lucky’s. When rain filled the gutters they jumped from the street to the curb in their flat church shoes and stayed another night while the weather passed. Later, Muriel’s mother was the first woman in Marshall County to get a college degree and then a divorce. She died at thirty-six, a month before Muriel’s nineteenth birthday. When the paper reported her death they said that she was married and that she’d died at home, neither of which was true.
That Christmas Lee came home and brought his brother, whom she had never met. Both men owed another year to the navy and they’d agreed to pool their discharge pay and build a house in California when it was all over, but Lee took the leave when she asked. She hadn’t written him in months though she had received letters almost weekly. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. He and his brother hauled in to Long Beach and spent five days on a bus through the snowy mountains and arrived on the last Sunday in Advent. It had been just four months since her mother died.
The day the men arrived Muriel and Lee made love on top of the covers with the weather radio on. It was a balmy winter, rainy and with little snow, and even with the radiator off and fingers of steam reaching across the windows they sweated in their underwear. She asked him to wear a condom—a tube of lambskin she’d bought the week before, both weighty and soft, like an elbow glove—and he’d asked her again to marry him, this unsuperstitious Catholic girl living alone in her dead mother’s house.
While they lay together Julius returned from an errand in town and came into the yard and saw the pulled curtains and the fogged glass. He took off his heavy jacket and boots and his shirt and he lay down in the damp grass under their window. When Muriel opened it to smoke, as Lee wet his face and hair in the bathroom down the hall, she saw Julius lying there, bare-chested, staring at the window above. She startled, but being a woman generally unafraid of men, she cocked her head curiously at him. He raised one hand from the ground in a funny little wave.
“Toss one of those down to me,” he said.
Muriel hesitated but sensed in his receptive pose someone merely curious. The cigarette fell limply and landed on his shoulder. He reached across and took the cigarette without sitting up and placed it between his lips, then feigned checking his coat pockets by patting the sides of his bare chest.
“And now a match,” he said.
Muriel began to laugh, then covered her mouth so Lee would not hear. She dropped the matchbook out the window and Julius caught it and lit his cigarette and his smoke began to wind along the side of the house. He lay smoking and smiling and then with one prone hand he tried to toss the matches back up to her. Each time they fell back to the ground comically.
“I guess I’ll have to return these later,” he said.
They looked at each other a long moment and then Muriel became embarrassed and stubbed her cigarette out on the window sash and ducked back inside.
That night they stayed up with a bottle of rice liquor and Julius told jokes about Eisenhower and Protestants. Neither he nor Muriel mentioned his bare chest or the rain on his skin. He told them about Korea, about the landscape paintings he had seen burning there, stacked so that mountains burned through mountains, rivers melted onto ocean waves curling up like hair, and he said it must be like how the world began. When they were very drunk they went out and walked into the shaved wheatfield and lay under the winter sky. It was Christmas Eve. The men talked of their father and California and between them Muriel felt included in a deep understanding. Later, as Lee slept, she and Julius played cards and talked and though soon they were too drunk to make much sense she remembers the snap of the cards on the table and an alertness to her dead mother’s proximity. Julius told her about a man he knew years ago, before the navy and the war, who sold rabbits in town. The man bred them in a hutch lashed to the bed of his pickup, Julius said, each night stopping somewhere near a park or a wooded lot so as the rabbits slept they might hear the sounds of their brethren, of their own country. Curled in the cab of the truck the man slept under blankets made of rabbit fur. He was the rabbit man, Julius said, he wanted to be one of them. He had the thickest hair you ever saw, and a little nose like a rabbit, and big brown eyes.
The man drove all over town, to fairgrounds and schoolyards and to the flea market downtown, offering everywhere some different price for the rabbits, depending on how he felt about them. One day you’d see him, Julius said, and a three-pound rabbit he was snuggling in his arms would cost fifteen cents, then the next day it’d be up to fifty, because the thing had held his gaze for a full minute in a way he thought of as romantic, then that same unsold rabbit would do something terrible, like scratch his arm all up or fight with another rabbit, and the price would drop again to almost nothing. You see, it was his affection that drove that particular economy, and for that reason he made so little he had to sell his truck and all his rabbits, and I heard he wound up working in a gas station, like anybody else. But oh, he was still handsome as all get-out.
Julius leaned across the table in feigned amusement and showed his missing tooth when he smiled and Muriel smiled back at him. In the look held between them was some acknowledgment though Muriel did not know what the story meant. She had never heard a man talk this way about another man. She felt she was hearing a riddle.
“He didn’t live anywhere?” she asked.
“He lived in that truck.”
“So how did you know him then?”
Julius did not answer. Instead he reached out and held her hand for a moment and turned it over palm up then dropped it. She thought about his chest rising and falling and the rain on his skin and the way he’d looked up at her. Then he picked up the cards and shuffled them and dealt and did not say much after that.
In the morning Lee banged coffee cups in the kitchen and mended things in the house that she did not know how to mend and she agreed to marry him after all. Because she was orphaned and alone, but also because of Julius, who had made her feel that the world was bigger than she had imagined and because Lee, in loving his brother, became both more interesting and more bracing. She knew her mother would not approve but her mother was not around to say so. She sold first the car and then the furniture. Her mother’s clothes she left boxed on the porch for the Lions Club. She bought the bus ticket and paid the tax board for the year and with what little was left she paid the Carter boy down the road to insulate the pipes and till up the lawn and cover it over with gravel to keep the grass from overgrowing. She sent the same boy home with her mother’s houseplants and hoped for the best. She told Lee they’d keep the house because that’s what her mother would have wanted and Lee did not argue with her. That she would get to California and find Julius gone was not something she considered.
THE FIRST TIME is a transgression. The second is a strategy. After work, Muriel takes a quick lunch down the street and emerges from the café transformed, her dress balled in her purse, wearing now a pair of loose slacks and one of Lee’s striped dress shirts, the low-brimmed hat over her hair and the big sunglasses. She gets off the bus a stop early and walks the last half-mile to Del Mar. She does this once a week, then twice. Depending on what she’s heard that morning she bets a quinella or a box or a place, at first on just one race and then on three or four. She does not always win. Sometimes she deliberately lays money on a horse the men have said is lame or sick in the head, or on a jockey they’d seen drinking rum with young women the night before. When she loses those races she feels a sense of power she never gets from winning, because losing proves the accuracy of her judgment. It has the benefit, too, of concealment. As long as she is not seen by the men at the lounge—who, she thinks, have never actually looked her in the face and would not recognize her even if she introduced herself—she feels she may engender any speculation she wishes except that she is cheating.
It comes to her naturally. From the horsemen she learns a vocabulary built from idiom and double entendre—silks and shadow rolls, tongue straps and hand rides—and the rest she learns by instinct. She learns what it means when the track is cuppy, when a horse is washy or ridden out. She becomes familiar with the anatomy of horses, croup and neck, muzzle, cannon, hock, loin, as if she had run her hands along each and felt what they were made of. She begins to think of the landscape differently, as if the horses themselves have given it names. The hills and the lowtide terraces are sorrel, dapple-gray. The round, unburdened trunks of palm are chestnut in the coastal light, light that’s blood bay or buckskin depending on the weather, cast high and cloudless over the roan sea.
She is stopped sometimes, at work or waking in the mornings, by a poignant feeling. The feeling is like happiness but it comes so slowly and is so austere she might easily mistake it for grief. She could not explain it but she knows this feeling has something to do with keeping a secret from Lee, which she had somehow always felt she was doing even before she had a secret to keep. It has something to do with wherever Julius is and what her mother would think of all this. If she were a different kind of person she might have wondered whether love was always this way, if it existed in the spaces between people, the parts they kept strange to each other. She tapes the money inside a white envelope, on the underside of the lazy Susan, a place her husband will never look and may not even know is there.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas they borrow a Lincoln from Lee’s boss to see the lights at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Neither has seen Christmas lights before. At the fairgrounds they go on for miles, roped lights in the shape of trees and hills of snow, illuminating the space around them and the horizon in each direction, like a city gone nuclear. The cars line up with their headlights off and wind through the new world. Those with radios tune to a station playing Christmas songs. Lee turns his broad face to her as they sit idling in the line of cars. His is a simple amazement, the way his eyes become bright and focused when something small and unmiraculous makes him happy. If she had not heard his stories of the war or the privation of his childhood she might think him a savant or an innocent, someone inured to pain or ignorant of it. He seems unchanged by the sea or the city. She knows that even strangers recognize this immutability in him, that they see it as heroic. For a moment she considers telling him about the horses, because she envies the smallness of his joy. She is able to imagine that he would not care how she came by the money, only that she had it.
“To think this time last year we were in Kansas,” Lee says.
The racetrack lights are off but she can see the dark palms rising above the stables, just ahead. Lee leans across the bench seat and over Muriel’s handbag to kiss her. She thinks how quickly it had all happened. On the radio the Jackie Gleason Orchestra plays “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” like a dirge. Car horns bleat behind them and Lee laughs and pulls away from her and drives on. The palms move in gray contour against the winter sky. Of course there is no snow but the lights throw shadows on the ground in metallic circles that trick the eye. She hadn’t known the trees would be so lovely in the dark or that the track would be so close.
“You know,” he says then, “it ain’t like we have to wait for him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“You’ve said that before.”
Lee shakes his head.
“It was your plan to come here. You two,” she says.
“But it’s just us now.”
“He’s just stretching his legs. It was a long time you were overseas.”
“It ain’t shore leave, now.”
“It’s only been a few months.”
Lee sighs. The music snaps out and is replaced by static, then another station breaks through. That station plays a bandstand number too loud and ends the conversation. Lee reaches over and cups her knee and drives on.
Back home they kiss for a long time until Lee leans back and looks at her softly and lets his hands rest on her arms. He waits a moment. This part of lovemaking Muriel finds stifling and inelegant, though she could not say exactly why. She does not know if he wants her consent or her desire but either way she wants to refuse him, simply because he asked. She looks away and knows he will read this as demure. He kisses her neck and brings his arms around her again. Her secret makes her more aware of his deference. She thinks of what it will feel like in another few minutes when he is inside her and how straightforward this feeling is. She’d like to skip ahead to that moment. Beyond his shoulder the perfect flat wall of the bedroom catches their shadows. The window is open and the noise of traffic and other lovers and construction and children and cooking is the noise of a city breaking into itself. A man calls out the name of their street and another that crosses it and a second voice calls back. Of course the men are not in the room or even near enough to see, but like the cars and the birds and the backhoes their voices become part of lovemaking, and it occurs to Muriel that she might like this noise and the cover it offers.
Later, they lie together a long time. The supper hour has come and gone and the city has quieted. The phone in the hall rings a long time before Lee finally rises to answer it. Muriel hears him wish his brother a happy Christmas and say that they should be together, that Julius should come soon. Muriel stands and goes to the window that looks down into the alley between their building and its twin. She can feel the cold outside the window against her bare skin. She lights a cigarette and lifts the window. The streetlight falls into the alley and over the dry bricks and a few birds fly soft and quick across the entrance and toss small hand-shaped shadows against the alley wall. She recalls a boyfriend her mother had, sometime in the forties, who sold lightbulbs door‑to‑door. To persuade housewives and old widows, he cast against their walls the silhouettes of butterflies and rabbits and men in tall hats. After dinner, in those few months her mother loved him, that man taught her to twist her fingers into cheerful creatures. He had been kind, slimly built. The bulbs he sold made bluish light and glowed through the flesh of his hands. For a moment she thinks that man must be sitting somewhere against the wall of this alley, making birds with his fingers. In the hallway she hears Lee ask his brother if he needs any money and then his long sigh.
THE NEW YEAR comes and the weather hardens. Muriel adds more and more of the winnings to her tips and blames the extra money on holiday cheer, on the business brought in by the last of the men back from Korea. Lee folds the bills into eighths and stores them like hock in a coffee can. On Sunday nights he counts them out. Then, as the fairground lights on the racetrack’s edge disappear, as spring comes, the horsemen begin to lose and Muriel does too. At the lounge the men sit grimly late into the day. They wonder if they’ve lost the touch. They worry they’ve misread all the signs. The feel of the track has left them, perhaps as punishment for their arrogance. They have no feel for jockeys and turf conditions, no joy for horses at all. They spit on the floor and smoke cigarettes until the fan above merely pushes the smoke back and forth, like a machine for making waves.
They have had all these conversations before but Muriel doesn’t know that. In this new reality she becomes reckless, betting conspicuous amounts on odds‑on favorites for little gain, just to remember the feeling of winning. She comforts herself by thinking she has solved the problem of her dishonesty. In the lazy Susan there is less than two hundred dollars; a few more weeks of padding her wages and it will be gone. She feels determined to lose the rest of it, as a kind of retribution or for the sake of some strange neatness. She thinks the word, neatness, as if she is tidying up the kitchen or ironing a dress.
Then the track is closed for two weeks. When it reopens, the turf is newly surfaced and smooth as hair. The horses have been traded out, some up from Santa Anita and others from the Canadian circuits, the jockeys rested and sweated out to make weight. On Fat Tuesday the races stretch through the afternoon and she drinks too much. She wins two races in a row and is flushed. Yet even with the drink she feels self-conscious and the crowd is tight around her. It is unusually warm and the track has been decorated with bunting and palm fronds tied into hearts and sprays like hands.
The last race is a special stakes and by evening the crowd has swelled. Women fan themselves with the palmhands and dab their temples with bits of ice. Muriel stands next to a woman from out of town, who tells her husband in an accented voice what to bet. Both Muriel and the woman have a decent bounty on a horse called Flood to win and they discuss his chances as the horses come to post. The horsemen have picked him, though they think he is too young and jumpy as a virgin. As the race begins, the foreign woman flicks Muriel’s arm with her fingers and winks.
“This is us,” she says, nodding to the track.
The horses burst free and the race comes together. Next to Muriel the woman bounces on tiptoe. When Flood wins by a length, the woman turns and puts a hand on Muriel’s shoulder and kisses her lightly on the mouth. The strangeness of this kiss makes Muriel laugh. Her mouth opens around the sound and her teeth scrape the woman’s big straight teeth—horse teeth, Muriel thinks, and laughs again. The woman laughs back at Muriel and Muriel can taste mint and whiskey on the woman’s lips. Had Muriel said it out loud, horse teeth? They both pull away. For a moment the woman’s eyes catch hers with a wince, then turn softer, turn down, and she raises her glass and jiggles the ice and mint and says, “Time to repent.” She licks her lips, then wipes them with her fingers. The horses settle with their pit ponies, the air heavy with the heat of their bodies, and the noise of the track returns. The woman’s husband fans his wife with his hat and asks if they have won. The woman does not answer him but looks again at Muriel and Muriel does not know how to look back at her. Then the woman turns to her husband and flashes her ticket and flicks Muriel’s arm again as she walks away. Muriel is careful not to watch the woman though she wants to see her full height, the shape of her legs.
She carries this desire to the bus stop and downtown, then through the streets with Lee, past the oblate sea and the colorful houses, stopping in a pub for a drink and another at home. They leave the radio on as they make love, Lee’s astonished face next to hers on the pillow, a soft fold in the dim light. Her tough man, undone. He says, Muriel, we should have a child. He whispers into her hair, Muriel, don’t ever leave me. She knows after these months together to expect this as she expects his deference, and so she lets him murmur, touches his temples and his thick eyebrows with her fingertips until he falls asleep. She is like a parent then, not resentful but protective. The bedside clock ticks on the nightstand and the sheets scallop at the edge of the mattress.
When he is fully asleep she takes the money from the inside of her shoe and puts it in the envelope in the lazy Susan. Suddenly it seems there is too much of it. She’d won not a third of her money back, but she has a feeling of great prosperity. She knows this feeling would please the men at the lounge. That they would say she’d cut her teeth. That in gambling there is a plateau, a period of time when progression ceases, when exhaustion sets in, and then the odds shift. You win and you are alive again. She could play another month or longer if chance runs her way.
LATER, THE PHONE RINGS and wakes her and when no one picks it up Muriel rises from the bed and steps quietly into the hall to answer it.
When Julius hears her voice he laughs so sharply she has to pull the receiver from her ear. She brings the phone back and says Julius’s name and finds she is grinning in the dark hallway. She asks him when he’ll join them and he says, “Oh soon now, not long.”
“You mean it?” she asks.
“You bet,” he says.
She asks him what it’s like in Santa Barbara or Ventura or wherever he is and he says, “Girl, you wouldn’t believe it,” and then he starts to sing a song about the badlands and how dark they are even in the morning. On his end of the line a siren spools out and when it stops she hears he’s still singing and she listens until he can’t remember the words and then she asks him if he’s been eating and how the weather is and anyplace they might send a letter. He asks if she’s been winning at cards and when she says she tried to teach Lee how to play hearts he says, “No trick-taking games, he’s not brutal enough for it. You better stick to war.”
Through the wall she can hear Lee snoring. In the kitchenette the radio plays the Grand Ole Opry. She slides down the wall smiling into her hand until she sits with her legs in front of her and her bare feet shooting into the hallway and disappearing into the dark. What a strange miracle to talk on the phone for no particular reason. They talk for ten minutes, then twenty, until Muriel begins to worry about the coins Julius is dropping for the line. She tells him he shouldn’t waste his money and he says it’s no waste at all but then he seems to remember his purpose and asks after his brother.
“He’s asleep and I’m out here in the hallway with my hand over the receiver.”
Silence on Julius’s line and then a clank of freight and men’s voices raised some distance away.
“We sure hoped you’d be here by now,” Muriel says.
“My brother hopes a lot of things.”
Muriel nods to the darkness.
“Don’t you think it’d be strange?” he says. “All of us together?”
“That’s what Lee wants though.”
“True enough,” Julius says, though she can tell he isn’t sure.
“I want,” she begins, but she worries she should not say the next thing. She is not sure what the next thing is. The dark hallway is silent and outside she can hear the traffic lights clicking. For a moment neither speaks.
Finally Julius says, “There’s sometimes lots of ways of getting to a place.”
She thinks of Christmas Eve and the story of the rabbits. His tone is the same, it seeks her approval for something. She wants again the feeling she’d had that night, of recognition. So she laughs. The line tosses back her laugh in delay and Julius says, “Well fine, what do you think then?”
“Oh now, Julius, it’s just the way you said it.”
“Maybe I will have to come there just to set you right.”
His tone is lighter but not quite kind and when she laughs again he says, “You think I wouldn’t.”
“You haven’t yet,” she says, and then he laughs too. Her face is hot and she wants a drink. She thinks that no matter what else is true about Julius he loves his brother, and because he loves his brother he is also obliged to her. She had come all the way out west knowing this. And if he knew about her or about their life without him he might come along finally too. So she tells him about the horsemen and the notes she’d taken and how she’d run their advice both ways to see if it worked. For a moment he doesn’t say anything. She worries the whole thing will lose its sweetness, in the open air between them. Then he laughs, asks her what her favorite kind of horse is, guesses geldings in a teasing voice. He means it cutely but she’s disappointed. She can tell he doesn’t believe her. Aloud it is hardly believable.
“No geldings there, Julius,” she says.
“That’s a nice racket for a gal, though,” he says.
“Oh, but it’s just a whim,” she says, to take the sting out of the moment.
“Careful now. Might be one of them things you can’t ever get enough of,” he says, but he’s still kidding her. The operator rings on and asks for another dime and Julius searches his pockets and comes up empty. The line goes dead and Muriel sits a long time with the receiver in her lap and the dial tone chiming. She hears Lee’s snoring and the pipes laboring in the wall and the radio in the kitchen plays “Walking the Floor over You” and then “Goodnight Irene.”
TWO (#ulink_6be89a67-1d53-5a37-b9a1-730c2b2b252d)
The Golden Nugget (#ulink_6be89a67-1d53-5a37-b9a1-730c2b2b252d)
A few days later Julius is in a back room in Torrance playing five-card. He draws so hot for so long that a crowd gathers, and in that crowd are men he knows and men he doesn’t. All are good drinkers and quick to blame others and thrilled at the warm spring day.
“Hallelujah anyway,” says one man, when Julius turns up a flush one card short of the royal.
He is playing two hardnosers and a novice and a young joe who bluffs too often. Along the walls the men are crowded together so close that ash from their upheld cigarettes drops onto their collars and into their shirt pockets. The smoke hangs above the crowd and drifts prettily. Outside the noise of jackhammers and asphalt trucks, and from the bar up front the low tones of the jukebox, so the back room sounds like a dentist’s office. Julius is in this part of the city by mistake, forced onto Del Amo Boulevard by a girder collapsed across 190th Street which he’d been walking toward the sea, thinking about his brother. He hasn’t found work in a week or more. But now he’s got two hundred dollars and the game’s big stack and there’s nowhere he has to be and no one looking for him. He hasn’t had this kind of luck since before the war or even earlier.
“You oughta take this game to the desert,” says a man close to Julius.
Someone else hollers, “Get a little coin in your pocket and then we’ll see what you’re really about.”
“I’ve been there and it ain’t much,” says another.
“Anything legit’s bound to scrape you up, Freddy.”
“Our Freddy here gets hives when even other people tell the truth.”
“Even if you lose, you can watch them bombs for free.”
“I just can’t believe it, all night and no cops and twenty-dollar buy-ins.”
“Sounds like Korea, the good parts anyway.”
A voice from the back asks what they mean about the bombs and several men begin to explain at once but all Julius hears is the name of the place and several of its cheaper hotels and aspersions cast at the weather. The crowd drinks and cheers him but he’s begun to sense the anxiety that accompanies good fortune. A few of the men know him to be a petty thief but never a card cheat, but most of them don’t know either of these things. Along the back wall are three men talking and watching him. Another man by the door learns his name and calls it out. Before things get dangerously better, he takes five dollars from the plywood where they’ve laid the game and buys a round for the crowd. He wins two hands, then bluffs another just to lose and folds the next.
It hurts him to cheat luck this way but there is always a longer game. He’s been in California just six months and already a man he knew was murdered outside a club in Rosewood. The police had raided two bars known for their friendliness to men and low lights. The raids changed the hustlers weekly, like the Sunday lettering on a church sign. He thinks about the nature of cheating and how it is tied to dignity, then pushes up his sleeves and buys another round and pockets for himself sixty dollars in ones and fives and lets the rest ride on a hopeless low straight that breaks the bank. He bows out and another man takes his place, but when he leaves the bar the three men by the wall follow him all the way to 203rd Street. It is just dusk and the city is sprayed in birdsong. To the west the blue ledge of twilight behind the buildings makes the city seem more important than it is. The men catch him in the alley and push him back and forth between them in a pinball fashion that means the thing they hate about him is also a thing they fear, and it is easy enough to hand over the cash and let that be the end of it and mercifully it is. Back in his little room he gets under the covers without undressing and he doesn’t sleep all night.
A few days later he gets a letter from his brother’s wife begging him south. Muriel has folded three crisp twenties in the envelope and signed off, It’s about time you got out of Los Angeles for a while. Julius takes this as an omen. He thinks about her that Christmas in Kansas, coming down the porch steps with her skirt hem balled in a fist against the wind and raised halfway up her thigh, and about his brother’s happiness. The story she’s told him of the horses, which he might be willing to believe, but it’s hard to imagine a woman alone in that way. He had promised to join them but that does not seem like what the letter and the money are telling him he ought to do. He waits a day and then he packs two rolled shirts and his knife in his good boots and carries each boot like a grocery sack under his arm and onto the train to Las Vegas.
FREMONT STREET BLINKS with men, lights, billets of paper, dropped coins, raised voices, and that afternoon’s monsoon rain. Julius walks from the train station directly to Binion’s and puts his name in for the poker room. He waits a long time to be called and when he is, the only open seat is at a table filled with young men in jackets and ties. He trades one of Muriel’s twenties for a stack of chips and loses it in ten mercenary hands.
He walks back through the casino past the slot-lines and the craps tables and the crowds gathered for anyone hot. Outside on Fremont it could be ten o’clock or midnight or just before dawn. It is just like the men said: The sidewalks are full of Angelenos and old gangsters and showgirls in feathers from rump to neck. Julius walks awhile through this modern noise and the dry landscape, and no one wonders about him or even looks his way. Even carrying his boots and in his dusty jeans like a pauper against the lighted street he is just another fortune seeker in the West. He goes back to Binion’s and sits at the bar and posts his boots upright on an empty stool and orders a drink. Behind him the slot-wheels clunk and the coins fall into the metal sleds. The craps tables beyond are full of suits and other legitimate men and the bar is open all night and drinking he has the sense of a deep rightness.
When a man sits next to him, Julius strikes up a conversation. The man is from Iowa, a salesman in Vegas for a trade convention, slight around the waist with blunt fingernails and thin white wrists. Julius shakes his hair and stretches one leg across to the rung of the man’s barstool so their knees are touching and the man is hemmed in between the bar and Julius’s body. The man tells Julius a story about a ranch just north of town, in Indian Springs, where for fifty dollars a Mexican with one eye would take men like them to a wild mustang roundup. He asks if Julius might like to go with him and Julius knows what kind of conversation this is. He says he knows next to nothing about horses but he could learn, and when he angles in the man turns toward the bar and into the fence of Julius’s body.
When they are very drunk they stagger half a mile off Fremont to the neon fringe and pay cash for a two-bed room at the Squaw Motel. There they share another fifth of whiskey and talk a long time about the flat places they’re from and how red the West is and from memory they catch bits of song and sing them out. Julius tells the man he’s come from Los Angeles and how the place had shifted beneath him like a coin and the man says that’s how things are now. Even in Iowa you’d be hard-pressed to get a job making anything but asphalt. They lie each to a bed and Julius asks across the distance whether the man is married and he says, “Sure.”
“How long you been married?”
“Not long.”
Julius holds the bottle over the gap between their beds and the man reaches out and takes the bottle and sits up a little and drains it. Then he hands the empty bottle back and turns on his side. He smiles but his smile is meant for someone other than Julius.
“My brother’s married newly too,” Julius says.
“That’s nice.”
“It is. Though it’s strange too.”
“I’m tired now, friend,” the man says.
“We don’t have to say nothing else.”
“If that’s all right.”
Soon Julius is aware of the man’s deep sleep and though the moment has passed he is not unhappy. Lee said that the best he ever slept was in Long Beach that last Christmas leave, when Muriel finally wrote and told him about her mother and asked him to come home. Lee and Julius had tendered in together on the Bryce Canyon and stayed at the Royal. They’d been at sea so long that even their boots were still serviceable, and though the war was over then and had been for some time, they both still owed a year to the navy. They sat in the hotel bar and Lee showed Julius the letter from Muriel and they talked about the plans they’d made together and Lee said it didn’t change anything. The next morning they found the first bus and rode east.
A year later Julius walked out onto the same dock at Long Beach but everything felt different. A woman in a Quaker dress handed him a copy of Isaiah bound in blue paper. He cashed his half-pay and took a bus downtown and sat at a lunch counter and read the booklet. He had forgotten Isaiah and how in the Bible all men were singular, good or bad, and he decided not to join his brother in San Diego. Probably he had decided this some time ago. He walked all night through the city thinking about dragons and springs and stands of rushes, and about his brother’s marriage, and he saw that the parks and the bars were filled with men. He felt absorbed into the great diffusion, as if he were dead. That afternoon he paid six bucks for a room with a window and slept all that day and into the next and that was the first time he slept the way he thought his brother had meant it.
AT DAWN JULIUS wakes to find the Iowan crying into the pillow, almost choking, his sobs forced out so hard his slight shoulders pull backward, bunched in the middle like a pleat. Julius rises and goes to his bed and places a hand on his back until the sobs fade, and as the harsh desert light comes through the motel window the man turns his face up to Julius and says, “I’m sorry. It’s just the drink.”
Julius says he’s all right. For a while longer the man lies on his back looking up while Julius sits on the edge of the bed. Neither speaks and outside they can hear the swampcooler dripping onto the pavement. The man takes Julius’s hand in his and waves it back and forth in a kind of comic handshake and then drops both their hands to the bedspread. Then he rises and enters the bathroom. Julius lies down where the man had been and falls back into hazy sleep. He wakes to find the man gone. Under a plastic motel cup is a hundred-dollar bill, a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, every towel in the bathroom wet and crumpled on the floor. It is a lot of money and Julius knows that he has been paid not for the room or the booze but for discretion. He says aloud to the room, “I wish you hadn’t of done that,” then folds the hundred into a tight square and puts it inside his boot. Should he see the man again he will return the bill, moist and reeking of his feet.
He steps out. The afternoon rinses the desert in brown light. He finds a cardroom dealing five-card, but the play is slow and stupid so he goes back to Binion’s and tries his hand at faro. For a solid hour he wins more than he loses and while he’s still in the black he cashes out and takes his winnings down the street to El Dorado. There he plays a game called high-low at a dollar a hand and cashes out well ahead. At the Lucky Strike the hotel’s full, same at the Apache, and Binion’s is ten bucks for a single, so Julius walks back through the fringe to the Squaw. The deskman takes him to the same room he’d had the night before. The sheets have not been changed, only tucked in at the corners, the bedspread tossed loosely over the pillows. He tries to sleep in one bed and then the other, and when he can’t he lifts one bedspread and shakes the ash from it and drops it on the floor. He lies on half and pulls the other half over himself. When he wakes up in the morning he has seventy-five dollars and a stack of uncashed chips and the Iowan’s bill. He showers and shaves and steps out into the bright day. He asks the deskman to switch him to a single room and pays for a week in advance.
FROM THE WINDOWS of their hotel rooms, visitors to booming Las Vegas may witness two competing wonders. On the desert floor Lake Mead accumulates, covering the brown valley. Two years of good snow in the mountains have swelled the banks, and in the afternoons tourists gather along the high ridge of Hoover Dam to watch the men sluice open the valves. Some say the walls of the dam are cemented with the bones of pack mules and men, probably rope too, Julius thinks, miles and miles of rope. And teeth. Empty carafes of coffee. Chewed and discarded fingernails.
But in the sky to the west of the dam is the real attraction. There mushroom clouds draw tourists in from less auspicious places, crowded cities in the east, farm towns north and west. On the rooftops men in tuxedos sip Atomic Cocktails with their sighing wives. They smoke smuggled cigars and ignore the news from Washington, the warnings of radioactive fallout, the strange, scraped feeling behind their eyes. These bombs, after all, are not meant to hurt them. Makeshift signs announce their names—Diablo, Hat Trick, Candy Boy—propped among the other dazzling junk of the city. On bomb days the pit bosses lure the gamblers outside, early morning before the desert sun appears and whites out the horizon where the bomb will lather, sometimes long into the day. On these mornings the casinos quiet, a spreading silence that echoes, inversely, the seismic gnash of the bomb outside.
In this setting Julius is not anyone in particular. He is not the tuxedoed men nor the lovers of those men and playing poker or twenty-one in the windowless rooms excites no one’s suspicion and in the morning the street is still alive. Unlike in Los Angeles or Ventura or Long Beach he is not guilty of anything. In other cities where he’s slept or turned cards or met men, he might have to slip out a side door or wait in an alley, but not here. To him, the neon and the money and the bombs are the marks of a city far ahead of the times. The tourists play poorly and Julius cleans them out and they shake his hand after and thank him and the cops sit with loosened ties at the same table. He sleeps during the day and eats when he wants to.
So he stays. Two weeks pass. He keeps his room at the Squaw a half-mile off Fremont Street. He plays faro until noon at a locals’ casino run by Mormons and stashes his winnings in a rolled sock in the ceiling panel of his room. The Mormons run a nice joint though they themselves are merely rumors. Julius has heard they live out past the city limits in a compound with eight-foot-high fencing and a swimming pool treated with saline, to simulate the great stinking lake gifted to them by God. He stops sometimes at the train station and fishes out a dime and thinks of his brother and Muriel but he does not call them, and soon so much time has passed he worries they will resent or even forget him, and he dreads this imagined moment, the silence after he says his brother’s name.
One morning he leaves the tables and steps into the dawn street and when he looks ahead to the horizon he sees a fist of fire reach up from the earth and soften into smoke. It is many miles away and the sound reaches him several moments later, a muted bang like a rock hurled against the side of a barn, and he thinks of how his brother, when they were children, would hook a thumb inside his cheek and pull it out to make a popping sound, to indicate that something had gone smoothly. Above him on the rooftops of the casinos a cheer goes up, peculiar, muffled, cautious even, and Julius looks above to see the tiny heads of men and women balanced against the easements, some even forcing their heads through the big looping letters of neon signs. The sky brightens suddenly then, as if the bomb has accelerated the dawn, and washes the buildings and the blinking signs in white until they seem almost to have disappeared. It is as if everything has frozen, as if they have all been returned to the desert unfettered by worry or language, base elements, the faces dissolving in the bright light until they are featureless, each face turned toward the horizon in the same astonished, straining way. He feels suddenly part of something, among these people for the first time.
That night he climbs to the Binion’s roof and sits at the edge with his smoking hand out in the night. He’s never really been on his own before and here it is easy. In the long western evening the booming city makes its careful transition. First the night birds and then the cars quieting and then the brief wind before sunset and the streetlights clicking on, until in a few silent spaces Julius can hear the peculiar hum of the desert. The bombcloud is still visible as a gray paste across the surface of the low moon, flattened now and stretching a hundred miles. He reaches his arm out across the alley and trails his hand through the air. He’d grown up in a shakeshingle ranch and had gone from there to the navy, where he’d never spent a night above the ground. From this height the city seems to belong only to him. He remembers an afternoon in childhood when he and Lee discovered an uncapped silo filled by years of rainwater. They had climbed the ladder and looked down into the hole from the rim, a hundred feet above the ground. The reflection of their own heads in the water was framed by the circle of light coming in, the circle turned black on the surface of the water like a negative and burnished around the edges, as if they stood inside an eclipse. For a moment he wishes for his brother and the future they’d imagined together. He looks out at the desert landscape and thinks of that silo and the memory covers the sight of the moon and the dispersing bomb so they are layered like bits of film, the dark of that water and the light inside it lifted through the bare mountains, so looking out he has a sense of boundless time. He flicks his cigarette up and out so it arcs into the alley. When he looks again the vision has dissolved. His brother has never been here and is not coming to take him home and if he walks through Las Vegas at dawn there is no one who cares to know it, no one waiting in a Torrance alleyway to steal back what they’ve lost. A man like Julius at the tables with his money in plain view. Here there are rules, and they are known, and you can win fifty bucks on a low-card straight fair and square, no hustle, just luck. What comfort in playing against the house and not against men.
A FEW DAYS later Julius walks into the Golden Nugget and sits next to two men smoking spiced cigarettes at the polished bar. For a while they make small talk until Julius learns their occupation. For weeks now he has watched the pitmen and the bosses run the casino floors and the sporting desks, men with quick eyes, and though they watch him and count out his chips he has never spoken to them. He asks the smoking men how a man might find such work. In turn they ask him what skills he has to offer. He is amazed they want to know.
He says, “I know how people steal. And I also know why they do.”
The men look so much alike they could be twins. Each turns his head to the mirror behind the bar as if searching for some message in the glass and then turns back to him. They remind Julius of a pair of sister cats they’d had when he was a child, indistinguishably marked and moving as one body as only animals can, sitting under the oak tree by the bunkhouse snatching birds from the air. He recalls the long faces of those cats, their eyes bubbled and transparent from the side, as he looks at the two smoking men.
“But you yourself do not steal,” says the man closest to him.
He places his fingertips together and looks at Julius over his tented hands. Julius leans toward him on the stool so his arm lies flat against the bar. He’s had a few drinks and is flush with dollar chips.
“Partly I know how people steal because I have stolen, I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “But it seems to me that this ain’t the place to steal, and I’d like to be on the right side of that.”
The men consider this. They take in Julius’s slim frame, his worn-down boots mud-splattered, the length of his hair. Julius has a warm feeling of acceptance, a sense that the men see not a thief or a sailor but someone born to a better fate.
“We’ve seen you around,” one says.
“You play aboveboard, we like that,” says the other.
They offer him a job running pit surveillance and he takes it, shaking each man’s hand firmly but waiting until he is a few blocks off Fremont and nearly to the Squaw before he smiles.
He returns that night and climbs a set of narrow stairs to an attic above the floor of the Golden Nugget. The stairs lead out to catwalks along the walls and through the middle of the attic, touching just off-center above the casino pit below. The catwalks are scaffolded and set so close to the ceiling Julius feels his hair brush against it. Every ten feet a two-way mirror is set into the attic floor, so the man walking the catwalk can look through them and watch the players below. Large fans front and back send in a hot breeze. Julius walks to the center and looks down at a craps table. He sees only the players’ hands, some fat-fingered and hairy, nails untrimmed, others slender and graceful. A man at the edge of the table leans forward to take the pot and for a moment looks up and Julius nearly turns away. But the wide shadowy sheet of glass bows down and out, convex, so the man looking up sees not Julius’s silent gaze but his own face, arched and upside down, as if he is staring into the curved back of a spoon. Julius himself has seen these windows from below, and though he’d assumed he was being watched he had not really considered all this, that above him was a network of paths and railings, made for watching. The whole thing seems to him so ingenious he nearly laughs aloud.
For an hour he moves between the windows watching the action at craps and blackjack. He sees nothing unusual, though from above the character of each game is changed and made piecemeal, divided into possible cheats or cons, and these are different from the things a player would suss out, by virtue of being punishable. Watching the games this way impresses him. In Los Angeles a man like him would never be trusted with such a job.
When he moves toward the center of the scaffold he sees in the distance a dark figure. Julius stops and waits. The figure comes closer and in the light cast up through the windows Julius sees the man’s boots, then his nubby trousers.
“You’re new,” the man says as he approaches.
Julius nods. They stand facing each other over the lighted window. The man is tall and dark-haired, Julius’s age or a bit younger.
“Henry,” says the man.
Julius says his own name and puts out his hand. The man’s hand is rough but his handshake is light and quick. He holds his other arm against his waist and in the pale light Julius sees it is ripped in scars.
“First time?” the man asks.
“It is,” Julius says.
“What do you think so far?”
Henry does not seem cruel to Julius though his appearance would suggest it, so Julius says what he thinks.
“You play?” Julius asks.
“Sometimes,” says Henry.
“This sheds some light on that, huh.”
“It does,” Henry says. “Seeing it this way is like watching yourself make love.”
Julius laughs and nods, then he reaches up to cover his mouth against the sound and because his missing tooth makes him suddenly sheepish.
“Instructive,” he says, through his hand.
“But a little ruinous,” says Henry.
“That’s right,” says Julius.
He drops his hand and looks at the man a long moment. The look goes on until Henry laughs and Julius laughs with him but then the laughter turns and stops. In this silence Julius becomes again self-conscious and looks away at the floor and then at his own hand on the railing. Henry says, “Welp,” and goes on his way to the other side of the casino loft.
Every few hours Julius and Henry pass each other at the place where the scaffolds cross over the pit below. Henry raises a hand or makes a hasty salute. The breeze across the center cools and dies. Below the tables thin out. On the third pass Henry stops a moment and makes a joke about a woman at the corner craps table, and suggests Julius take a look down her dress, and Julius says he will.
At four A.M. Julius descends the stairway and punches a clock in a back room filled with bank bags and boxes of casino matches behind mesh cage. This room, too, is covered in two-way glass, and an iron door with a sliding bar lock leads to another room. As he marks his pay card, a man in a seersucker suit slips out and closes the door promptly and soundly. From inside the lock is turned again. The man in the suit catches Julius’s gaze and holds it for a long moment, until his eyes begin to seem distant and opaque to Julius, like the two-way glass, as if somewhere inside the man there is another man who looks out, watching him. This must be the pit boss, Julius thinks. The man walks away without speaking.
Outside a yellow paring of sunrise. Julius walks all the way to the end of Fremont where the train station is busy with people. Beyond the station the brown scrubby plain rises into a rim of mountains. Julius steps into a phone booth, fishes out a nickel, and dials his brother’s number. For a long time the phone rings and Julius listens to the jangling bell until the sound becomes the backdrop to a thought he’s having. He thinks of the bomb he saw, and his new job. He wants to tell his brother these things but he isn’t sure where to start. But the fact of his brother seems suddenly necessary, some confirmation that his voice is welcome and known. He recalls the last time he saw Lee, in Okinawa, and feels a hollow feeling of doubt, which passes, which turns to envy and then to fear. Julius hangs up before the call rings out again.
Back at the Squaw he lies awake a long time thinking of the games he’s seen and the men’s hands below him and their various shapes, the half-moons of nail beds catching the neon and the man Henry’s scarred arm, until the daylight breaks fully through the curtains.
CASINOS MAKE SOME GAMBLERS forget the complications that attend money. As he walks the scaffold Julius considers the dark enclosure of the casinos, the money traded for chips and markers, the absence of clocks in any pit or cardroom, nothing closing or changing, breakfast buffets in the middle of the night. All the strategies for disrupting time, for breaking the link between cause and effect. But now it is Julius’s job to resist these things. The peek gives him perspective. He paces the catwalk looking for drunks, card palmers and dice loaders, cheaters of all kinds. He spends the most time above the blackjack tables. Blackjack is the only casino game where the gambler can get an edge over the house and for this reason it attracts cheaters of all kinds. Card markers and sleeve-men, confederacies of slack players who fake dim-wittedness to pass good cards to their partners or bust out better players waiting for the drop. Of course they know he is watching. At the tables they listen for his boots above, trying to gauge the distance before palming an ace or passing a queen, and in this way he becomes a part of the games below and the methods of the cheating men.
Each night between eight and four Julius is their steward. He thinks of himself this way. His job is to watch the players and nothing more. He does not administer punishment, only speculation, only what he believes he sees. Mostly he watches the players’ hands. Those with square or short or clumsy hands may mark but they do not palm. They are not built for it. The slender-fingered men, short nails buffed pale, no rings, wide cuffs touching the clefts of their palms—if those men start to lose, Julius will stay at the well above them past the time he is supposed to move on. Losing, for the best of them, is its own kind of strategy. He reports each suspicion with diligence to the two cat-faced men and collects his check at the end of each week. With the money he makes he pays for his room and his cash-ins and eats steak for breakfast and March starts to fade away. He sleeps through the warming afternoons and wakes with a feeling of purpose.
Then, at the beginning of April, the heat comes and covers the city in a shimmer. The casino attic is so hot Julius can feel his heart straining against his ribs. Sweat drips from his nose and brow and from his fingertips as he paces the catwalk. After an hour he takes off his boots and socks and unbuttons his shirt and wets a hotel towel and wraps it around his neck. He sips from a flask of whiskey and smokes to distract himself.
Before he and Henry are due to switch sides Julius rewets the towel with a cup of water already tepid. He leaves his shirt open and tucks the tails into the back of his jeans and walks to the other side. Henry walks slowly toward him and waves dully and does not call out. He is shirtless, covered in sweat, sheets of it over his face and neck. Julius watches him come. There is no breeze and the bowed glass is waxed by the heat. Henry pauses at the crossing to brace himself against the scaffold for a moment. He reaches out, one hand on the railing and the other pressed suddenly into Julius’s bare chest, his palm squarely in the cleft of Julius’s rib cage. Then he looks at Julius. “Oh,” he says and sinks to his knees, his arms bent so his elbows press into Julius’s thighs and his thumbs hook the flat bones in Julius’s hips. Henry leans his head on Julius’s waist, his cheek turned to the copper snap of Julius’s jeans, and to keep him from falling Julius takes his shoulders and his fingers slide in the man’s sweat. Julius leans as far as he can backward, the scaffold against him. He starts to say, “Now come on.” Henry’s hands fall away and he twists sideways to retch over the scaffold railing and Julius does not wait or offer comfort but turns back. As he walks along the catwalk to the other side he can feel Henry’s palm still there in the center of his chest, like a footprint rising slowly from the stubble of a mown field.
When his shift ends he waits until he hears Henry’s boots on the stairwell and keeps waiting long minutes after the door has banged shut below. It is a quarter past four when he finally collects his boots. He thumps them on the heels to evict mice or spiders and finds the Iowan’s bill there. It’s damp and when he unfolds it, it smells of sweat and cigarettes. He folds it again and puts it back. Downstairs he clocks out but makes a note in the margin that the last fifteen minutes should go unpaid.
Outside a cooling rain has come and gone and the streets reflect the neon in shallow pools at their edges. Julius turns toward the Squaw and is ducking down a side street when Henry catches him.
“Surely you ain’t going home,” Henry says.
“You mean my room or where I’m from?”
Henry laughs. “Home for the day, bud.”
“Well, I was planning on it.”
“Too hot to be cooped up.”
“A lot cooler now.”
“I owe you a drink, for before.”
The man looks so earnest, so genuinely embarrassed by his own weakness in the heat, that Julius knows he cannot refuse without revealing something about himself. He remembers the shape of the man’s shoulders where he’d touched him, square and ordinary now beneath his shirt. Together they walk down the wet streets and find a tourist bar and order the only kind of beer they have. Julius keeps an eye out for the bosses or any other men who might know them, who might think them in collusion or worse. For a while they talk about the weather and that night’s gambling and the sad landscapes of their childhoods. Henry is from the Central Valley and spent many summers in the fields there.
“I settled for Henry because no one could say Javier,” he says.
When Julius asks why he’s come to Vegas and how long he’s worked the peek, Henry says, “I guess they figure I can’t be much of a cheat,” and raises the injured arm.
“No, I guess you ain’t no palmer,” Julius says.
“Ain’t much of anything.”
Henry smiles and Julius sees something else about him.
“But I bet you play all right.”
“If you mean playing the goat or maybe by ear, because that’s all I’ve ever done till now.”
“I sure wish there was more poker, and not just in them cardrooms,” Julius says.
“House ain’t got no motivation for it. You play it overseas?”
Julius nods.
“What’s your game here?” he asks.
“Twenty-one,” says Henry.
“That so.”
Henry lowers his eyes.
“I know what people think about blackjack players.”
“How many blackjack cheats have you seen from that attic, just this month?” Julius says.
“Blackjack gives a man the edge, that’s true enough.”
Henry looks at him a long moment and Julius looks back and each is reminded of the other’s nakedness. Julius can feel this memory like a shape between them.
“You got people?” he asks.
“Oh, some,” Henry says.
Julius nods. Behind the bar the long mirror snags the orange discs of overhead light.
“I’m supposed to be in San Diego,” Julius says.
“How’s that?”
“With my brother. We planned on it, when we was overseas. I think mostly he wants to keep an eye on me. Nice weather though, and in San Diego you can build a house in the river valley for a song.”
“I know about California.”
“I guess you do.”
“How come you ain’t there then?”
“Too hard to tell.”
“But you could tell it to me.”
Henry smiles at him and Julius smiles back. He thinks of Muriel’s house in Kansas and his brother’s happiness. That Christmas Eve in the winter wheat talking about everything. The last time they were all together on earth.
“Too hard to tell,” Julius says again, and Henry laughs and shrugs and lets the mood change.
Soon they leave that bar for the Moulin Rouge. There Henry moves out onto the dance floor like he’s at a wedding, a wedding long put off and finally consummated under duress, legs moving in an ecstatic shuffle surely picked up in the grange halls of his youth, but even in his joy and his relief Julius knows he is withholding. At first he is alone, but when a slow song begins he finds a woman on the edge of the crowd. Julius drinks and watches. Henry’s cheek rubs against the forehead of the woman he holds, so close and so often that Julius can’t help but imagine the feel of it, the smell in Henry’s hair of tobacco, sweat, the raw wood of the attic catwalk. He knows what will happen next and he is not sure he wants it all again. He stands and steps outside. It is just past dawn, the heat already beginning to return. The streets are still crowded with men. The soggy bunch of the bill in his boot irritates him and to have something to do with his shaking hands he pulls the boot off to shift it. He worries that maybe all he’s ever really liked are the moments in which love was uncertain, when he could arrange himself in postures of ready seduction, in bed or half-dressed or letting a button linger under his hand, or, before any of these, leaning inside a doorway or stepping off the curb to cross a street where a man stands waiting, the look between them as he walks, the moments when he could still turn away, the private, erotic knowledge that one is the object of another man’s long gaze. He recalls other men from years or months before, men in the service or men who left the city in a rush or men who fell in love with women. He remembers the man from Iowa and his shaking back and the little snatches of song they sang. And his disgust is instructive, palliative. He does not have to worry over his own weakness then, when so many other weaknesses are apparent.
Finally Henry comes outside and looks up and down the street and sees him and waves. Julius pulls the boot back on, his sock bunched in the bottom and his jeans half-inside the shaft, and walks that way to his room at the Squaw, sending Henry through the parking lot ahead of him to wait in the alcove, then leaving the door unlocked while he takes off his shirt and jeans so Henry can scan the area before entering. But Henry does not wait, and before Julius can get his shirt undone Henry has banged through the unlocked door and turned Julius by the elbow and kissed him.
THREE (#ulink_02ce4ea7-1c7f-5815-96cc-6fd999526d61)
The valley (#ulink_02ce4ea7-1c7f-5815-96cc-6fd999526d61)
Muriel loves best those days when there are no races and the horsemen tell stories of fiasco and anomaly. At the lounge one afternoon she hears of a claiming race some years before, when a six-year-old broke a Del Mar track record and promptly dropped dead. Another, in which a redhaired boy from Montreal rode with his broken leg taped to the saddle girth. Or the story about the potbellied paint named Gingersnap who made such fast friends with an Angus bull that the two could not be separated and had to travel cheek by jowl in a special trailer widened for them.
Or, better: The horsemen in their leisure speak of things that cannot happen, that simply won’t. There will never be another Seabiscuit, not because he was built by God, as the papers said, as the trainers claimed, but because the universe allows only so much improbability. Nor another corker like the half-bred filly Quashed, who beat a Triple Crown winner by a short head over two and a half endless miles. Likewise the storied beasts of another era, National Velvet and Sergeant Reckless, warhorses on the eastern front, creatures from a dream an entire culture had once shared and woken from.
Through March of 1957 Muriel plays the late afternoon races ten dollars at a time. The winnings are limited by the stakes, which are mean and provincial, and though she knows now the names of stables and jockeys and colts gone early to stud still each new detail excites her. Each new detail is a familiar shape in a dark room. The high stakes are coming when the spring season opens, and most days the men drink more and longer and sit with their knees spread wide and out from the tables, taking account of the odds.
“Hoo now, in a couple weeks we’ll have some real money in play,” says the man with the mustache.
“Just think about that Lakes and Flowers race last spring at Hollywood Park,” says another.
“God that was gorgeous.”
“Like watching a sunset, but faster.”
“You got all the same riders as that race coming to Del Mar, and almost all the ponies, but no Misrule and no Porterhouse, so our field will be smooth as honey.”
“We’ll see where the odds end up. Eight races, I’ll be damned if one of them doesn’t come in double digits over the stilt.”
The old jockey called Rosie, given to water metaphors, says, “Tide’s coming in, bringing glad tidings.”
“Since when do tides bring that?” says the mustache.
“It’s called a pun, friend,” Rosie says darkly, but all the men laugh because the future is so bright.
AT HOME Muriel is distracted. One night she burns the meat and then the bread and when Lee touches her arm she cries out because she had forgotten him in her speculations. Lee tilts his head but says nothing and together they walk to the diner around the corner. Muriel feels a restful invisibility there, among the other patrons, who eat and talk and worry not at all about horses or progress or the passage of time. Lee orders pie and when the woman brings it he cuts the piece down the middle and slides the smaller half onto his saucer and pushes the rest across the table and Muriel makes a show of eating it and then a show of being full. When he’s finished his half and a third cup of coffee she pushes the plate back, barely touched. He winks at her and calls the waitress for the coffeepot and when she doesn’t acknowledge him he takes the cup and stands at the counter for a long time. The radio behind the counter plays heartache music. He holds his cup out like a pauper and finally the woman fills it. When he sits to eat he says, “Can’t have pie without coffee,” as if he were apologizing for this mere fact, for both the waitress and himself.
After dinner they walk back to their building and as they cross the common foyer they can hear the ringing phone. Lee wings the door open and takes the hallway in three long steps and Muriel listens for his reaction. He waits only a moment before he hangs up and turns to her and threads his fingers behind his head. He says that some husky voice has offered him life everlasting.
“That’s what she said.” The hands behind his head like a man being marched somewhere terrible. “Over the telephone, no less.”
Inside the apartment the smell of burned bread is chalky and unpleasant. Muriel opens the window above the sink.
“How long’s it been?” she asks.
“A month now.”
“Has it ever been this long before?”
“Not that I recall.”
Through the open window come the sounds of the street below, cars idling at the curb and voices from the sidewalk and between these noises the high call of gulls making a last round before the full darkness. Lee cracks a beer and sits at the table and takes a drink.
“I guess he’s doing fine on his own, wherever he is. Los Angeles or wherever.”
He tips up the can and looks at her over the rim like a man making a point and when she doesn’t answer he rises. He stands with his back to the counter.
“I guess you don’t think so,” he says.
“I don’t know what I think,” she says.
And she doesn’t. She remembers Julius’s voice down the line and what she’d told him about the races. She feels foolish, knowing she was not believed. Julius had not called since then. Lee looks at her as if he hopes she might speak again and explain away his worry or his bitterness but she says nothing more. Instead she goes to him and takes the beer and drinks and hands it back. It pleases him when she does things like this, simple things that suggest their shared lot in life, an easy intimacy.
“I told you he was always disappearing, even before our old dad was gone,” he says. He hands the can back to her and she jigs it to judge its fill and drinks all but the last swallow.
“But it turned out all right before,” she says.
“But it always happened again.”
He crosses his arms and leans against the counter. Muriel cracks another beer and hands it to Lee and takes one for herself.
“We’ve been here nearly seven months,” Lee says. “I’m not sure what else I can do.”
He closes his eyes and opens them again. Muriel thinks of that Christmas Eve and the men’s plans. How Lee had told her, as they lay together in her mother’s room, that he would always take care of Julius. He’d said this the way any courting man might, as a stay against his own misfortune. She knows that Julius’s absence changes what he’s able to declare about himself.
“It isn’t your fault,” she says to him.
“You tell that to our old dad. Not that you could’ve even when he was alive.”
Muriel nods remotely. She puts her head on his shoulder and sighs pleasantly, though his smell and this contact are at odds with her thoughts.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I caught Julius on Kansas Avenue in a bar the Del Monte guys used for faro?” Lee says.
“I don’t think so.”
“Our father was not dead but nearabouts. I guess I was eighteen then because it wasn’t long after this that I signed us both up, though Julius was too young. I was out looking for him, down in the factory bars, and in the third or fourth one I tried there he was in a pair of overalls, cleaning the heads. You wouldn’t believe the filth of that place. And it turned out he was working off a debt and he didn’t want to tell me, because he’d stolen from that bar, right from the till, to play into their card game.”
In the hallway the phone rings again but Lee does not move toward it. Soon someone else answers, speaking in a scolding voice.
“I’m not sure I realized it then, but I did soon after—my brother knew things I didn’t, he had passions of his own,” he says. He makes a face. She thinks of the story Julius told of the rabbit man and how he’d held her look for so long across the table. She does not share Lee’s fraternal resentment but she does feel betrayed, and also that she has been the betrayer. She had told Julius her secret and sent him that money and after that he disappeared. She wonders if her confidence was a kind of permission, the way even bluffs could close the distance between people.
Lee finds a cigarette and lights it and blows the smoke hard toward the open window. He says, “You know, after I’d been let off here, in San Diego, I couldn’t find him for two weeks. He’d been back himself already a month. I was sure of his date because I had a friend in the same crew and he told me they’d come back. Two weeks.” Lee holds up two accusing fingers. “Then finally he got my number from somewhere and he called me. He’d spent all the money he had and he asked me to wire more to a motel in Palm Desert. This was before you got here, you was probably on that bus in Arizona or someplace.”
For a moment Muriel looks at him without speaking. He holds out the cigarette for her and she shakes her head and reaches for the pack and lights her own.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” she says.
“I didn’t see why it would matter to you.”
“I thought you all got back at the same time,” she says. She turns away and blows her smoke into the room.
“Well, we didn’t.”
She knows he wants to say more but she doesn’t want him to say it. She doesn’t want to know any more than she already does. She thinks of the time passing and Lee’s worry. She sees him need her more because of all this. She steps forward and kisses him and before he can speak again she presses him toward the bedroom and unbuttons his top button and asks for his haste and his force.
THE NEXT DAY, Muriel stands at the end of the bar with a newspaper crossword folded neatly, jotting notes in the margins. In a week the season will open, and the undercard and then the Monday stakes are thick with good horses and riders known for putting on a show. For now the track is fast and the weather fine and the men speculate openly. Rosie is thinking through the chances of a newcomer named Willie Declan, who by all accounts will mount the favorite.
“You know the line, water everywhere and nothing to drink. That’s how Declan is on that California Star,” Rosie says.
“Hardly matters in that field. In with all those real riders, he’ll be as lost as a girl,” another man says, and drains his glass.
W. D., Muriel writes, lost at sea. But the horsemen are not done with Willie Declan.
“He’s a cement brick,” the mustache says. “Sure you can fit him in your hand, but you can hardly lift him.” He gives the table a look.
“But the hunnerd-granner,” says Rosie, who always stands up for the jocks.
“In the hundred-grander he ran on Whittleman’s Bitty King, and that was a gift of a fine match. Bitty could’ve carried a Mark 7 and won on slop.”
“But you can’t say Declan isn’t ready for a big race like this.”
Rosie again, and at this a few of the men make kissing faces at him.
“Maybe not. But I can say that he’s been a little light after that flu he had, and with Roustabout kicking up the way he is these last weeks no one will beat him who won’t ride the rail for a halfie.”
“I’ll wait for positions. At six Declan could take two from the rail, especially if Sayonara gets anywhere under five, and Declan could squeeze in that way. That’s how I’d run it, I’d sail the inner harbor,” says Rosie, but his voice is lowering now. He is fifty years old and still fit but he carries some sorrow the other men find disquieting.
“I’m sure you would but that don’t mean you can,” the mustache says, and leans across the table and flicks Rosie on the chin.
The talk goes on this way. At this first stage the odds are fluctuating, and a late El Niño rain would bring a scratch or two, from the finer runners whose trainers won’t race them on mud. Anyone glancing at Muriel’s notes would see a set of names and numbers and track slang coded into her own shorthand: ’Nara if under five see W. D. Whittle on the wire if cuppy. Too Young 4–8.Roust at center post breaks ’Nara.
The week goes on. The odds begin to calcify, then a horse falls ill and a jockey gets bumped and another disappears for two days downtown. The men grumble and reset their charts. The hot clear weather brings a strange nothingness: no moths against the screens, no hum of insects, neap tides quiet all night. Instead there is a permeating blueness like the inside of an eye. The heat brings people out of the houses and shops and back rooms. Along the narrow streets of Muriel’s neighborhood, workmen cart flowers and crates and white heaps of ice. In the tiny front yards women dump wash water into short stemmy stands of geraniums. The children spill from stoops and curbs in overalls and short sleeves, the coastal sun catching them and turning them divine, in that instant freed by the sun from work and peril. Their mothers in dresses the color of unready peaches, sweating over the wash.
Downtown the dice players and cigarette men and men in tight pants, shirts unbuttoned to their navels. Walking from home to work is like passing between two worlds. Muriel finds herself one afternoon standing a long time in front of a shop window, thinking about the races. Behind her a newspaper vendor and two men in denim jackets are reflected in the window. The men are young and she can smell their cigarettes and their cologne. She looks up at the store window and draws herself away from their attention. She remembers her mother in the summer cooking chops and onions in her underwear while a man sat fully dressed at the table, watching her. The way this distinction between them, between nakedness and not, seemed to confirm something her mother believed about love: that vulnerability existed only in asymmetry, that two people could not be vulnerable together. Her mother believed if she gave men this small advantage she would not be harmed.
In the shop window a large television plays a game show. A man in a glass booth on a soundstage gazes outward in concentration while a clock ticks away in the corner. Muriel thinks of Julius and where he might be and why he hasn’t come. The show gives way to an ad for Convair, a woman standing with a suitcase in her hand watching an airplane take off. Though she can’t hear the TV Muriel realizes she is hearing an airplane and she looks up and sees a real airplane in the sky, reflected in the store window. She turns and tracks it as it flies over the city headed east. This confluence seems like luck or validation or something mystic. When she turns back to the television the plane is gone, but the other plane is still reflected in the window, as if it had flown off the screen and into the actual sky. She imagines the airplane flying past the rough buildings of this city, over the vendor and the smoking men and the mothers in their collared dresses. Out past the central mountains, then further east across the desert and into the scrub, rich and minty and full enough to hide a child, then over the irrigation circles and tired motels of her youth and down into the endless prairie and over her mother’s house. The plane disappears in this direction and the sound goes and then it is just the men and the contrail, reflected in the glass.
That night, after Lee has fallen asleep, she peels open the envelope and counts the money there and thinks through the odds. She does a bit of math on the envelope flap. She thinks of Lee’s story, of Julius in overalls working off a debt, and then about his discharge. She worries she’s misunderstood them both. She thinks of Lee standing so long at the counter with his coffee cup, waiting for the woman to fill it. She studies the envelope and her arithmetic and she’s not sure what she might need the money for, only that she does, only that winning would prove something vital that she cannot otherwise prove, and that no one else can see.
THAT WEEKEND Lee borrows again the boss’s Lincoln and drives them through downtown and across the river to see the interstate. In another year it will be complete, running along the edge of Mission Valley; they can see its elevated form now, the men hanging overhead, the black dust from the columns. Lee stops the car along the curb and he and Muriel look up at the cranes and the skirts of rebar, the figures held by flat ropes. The general feeling of the time is that such a marvel is deserved, as marvels are deserved all over the West.
They drive on, past lemon and orange and avocado orchards, hidden inside the city as if cupped inside its palm. The orchards are surrounded on all sides by a network of cul‑de‑sacs and graveled lots and as they pass Muriel watches the rows of trees flare by the window, interrupted by patches of cleared land and glimpses of the river running low, gridded through with new roads not yet paved. She looks at Lee and in this light he has the chromed look of a photograph, peering ahead at the driveways and ghosted streets. They pass a cowfield, a roadside lean‑to stacked with eggs, a sign offering jarred local olives, then again into the not-yet neighborhood.
Muriel knows where they are going and though she might have expected it still she feels deceived. In a half-mile the road turns back to gravel and curves south to the river. Lee stops the car and they get out to stand along the dirt margin. He turns to Muriel and smiles. He gestures across the lot in front of them, marked off by twine and stakes of wood, then marked off again by small flags stuck in the ground between the stakes. The back of the lot disappears in a tangle of blank ash and scrubby bushes, and below this hidden limit is a soft bluff that drops into the river, which they can hear from where they stand. Lee takes her hand in his.
“This tract is the best of them, two thousand for the land and the specs, then I bet we could build out for another six. Hardly anything, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering how fast all this land will go. What it will cost in another year.”
Lee’s voice lifts into insistence. He looks at her and she looks back. The fact of her mother’s house in Kansas rises up between them.
Lee says, “We could get at least six grand for that house, you’ve got to know that’s true. And we got a couple hundred bucks already.”
She holds his gaze until he looks away and across the lot to the river beyond.
Finally she says, “But you promised your brother you’d do this together.”
“And do you see my brother anywhere?”
His tone is wounded. He holds her hand just long enough to offer his forgiveness but not his surrender and then he lets go.
He says, “This place, California, it’s indifferent to the past. All the people and the cities and the ocean and all of it.” He waves an arm to indicate distance. “All the sailors coming back and the factories and the folks coming over the border. In another year there won’t be nothing to buy and then where will we be, we’ll have to go all the way backwards.”
Muriel does not respond. The sunlight is muted inside the trees and the wind shakes them. She can see dust brought loose and drifting above the crowns of the trees. Lee puts an arm around her and when she stiffens he squeezes her lightly and drops his arm. As if to remediate this failed gesture he gathers himself and says, “You know, that last time me and Julius saw each other, on Okinawa. We had two days of R and R and we met in a village where all the men went, from the stations. This was last year, May, it’s still so cold there in May we sat bundled head to toe even inside the bar, you could hear the wind outside. I thought he was being strange but I couldn’t figure why and then we met this other fella from his station and things got real strange then.”
Lee pauses and looks at her then looks away. Muriel has not heard this story before. He lowers his eyes against the vista and folds his hands across his beltline and toes the dirt and decides to say the next thing.
“Julius beat that fella pretty bad and we got eighty-sixed. Walked a mile in that cold afterward, just shaking and not talking. Then we sat in the train station and waited for morning, and it came out then that Julius was in trouble for something, he’d been caught in the barracks with some other man. I assumed smoking grass or gambling but then a few weeks later they put him on the Saratoga, even though he only had a few months left. In Long Beach they gave him a general discharge and half-pay and nothing for the leave he hadn’t taken. I heard this from that same friend’s cousin. Of course I don’t know what he did but sure thing it was worse than poker.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asks.
“You know what he said, when he finally called?” Lee says. “He said it was good I was marrying you. He said, that sad girl, she needs someone to tell her what to do.”
Muriel crosses her arms and will not look at Lee, whose gaze is imploring. He wants to be forgiven right away for saying this, he wants her to understand he is only the messenger. Yet she catches in his tone a savage relief. He could not abandon his custodial role but it might be taken from him. He might be glad to have his brother disappeared. She hadn’t known this before and it frightens her.
Muriel turns from him and walks to the road and waits. Lee walks down to the bluff and stands a moment looking out. He leans to touch the wooden stake and then the line of twine that runs out from it, his fingers light along the top like someone making a sense memory. He’d been a poor child and knew the value of things. For a moment she’s not angry, thinking about how poor he’d been.
When he turns around he has summoned his dignity and he lifts one hand to wave it all away. They get in the car without speaking and Lee drives slowly along the road to keep the gravel from flying up and chipping the paint of his boss’s Lincoln. When they pass the sign for olives Muriel asks to stop. Lee turns into the dusty yard and parks but does not cut the engine.
Muriel steps out of the car and climbs the porch and knocks but hears no movement; after a moment she knocks again, but still no one comes. She leaves the porch and shrugs to Lee but she’s not yet ready to get back in the car, she wants first to succeed at something. She turns and walks around the house, toward a set of outbuildings and chicken coops in back. Behind an empty corral she spots a barn with an open door and a tidy interior, and as the light changes Muriel understands that someone is inside. She calls out.
In the doorway of the little barn appears a young woman in a man’s striped overalls, cuffs pinched inside her boots. She raises one hand in the air without waving it, moving out of the doorway in quick steps like a child, into the dusty yard.
“You lost?” she says.
The chickens come clucking toward the fence and gather in a line and stare out at Muriel. Their sudden synchronous movement is comic. The woman in the overalls smiles and turns to shush the chickens.
“They’re like watchdogs,” Muriel says.
The woman says, “Dogs aren’t so humorless.”
Muriel takes another step toward the birds and they move back a fraction and as if a centerline had been drawn between them they part and peel off into their grainy little courtyard. As they totter away, they turn their small heads back suspiciously.
“I see what you mean,” Muriel says. She thinks of the horses moving as a wall from the gate, then fraying off as the race finds its character. Animals were strange in this way, their sameness, their single-mindedness. The woman asks what Muriel needs.
“Your sign,” Muriel says, and with her thumb points back toward the road.
The woman makes a noise of understanding. Muriel takes in her slight frame. She is dark-featured and short and surely native to this place, the kind of woman her mother might have known when she was cleaning offices downtown, with whom she might have had coffee or cold sandwiches.
“That’s for García’s, next house over.”
Muriel thinks to apologize but the woman turns in a long stride toward the house and waves with one arm. Muriel follows, and though she is confused there is some pleasure in this, the casual submission to a stranger’s command, after the conversation with Lee. On the back step the woman heels her boots off and holds the screen door for Muriel to enter. Inside the house Muriel sees no sign of another person. The walls are bare and the rooms divided by thin curtains like bedsheets and along the floor are books stacked at various heights. A lamp lights a corner where an armchair sits though the rest of the room is without furniture. She cannot see past the curtains to the rooms in the back, though she feels by some intuition that they are empty.
“Not much of a decorator,” the woman says, a wave of her arm taking in the bare room and the perimeter of the house and the dry mums along the porch. For a moment Muriel sees herself as she imagines this woman does, as Julius apparently does, as someone simple and apologetic and easily led. They walk into a bright kitchen that faces the road. Through the window Muriel can see Lee in the car, his eyes closed against the sun, and beyond him to the river and the fields and the marked-off lots below. The woman looks out the window, over her shoulder, and Muriel sees her see the idling car and the square shape of her husband.
“Looking at land,” the woman says. Her voice is deep and softly accented, Muriel notices now that they’re inside.
“We are,” Muriel says.
“Now’s the time, I hear.”
Muriel catches in the woman’s tone a light resentment and understands then that she has been read as something else, that the woman sees not a Midwesterner or a waitress but a different kind of foreigner, a nice dress and a wide car coming in from town. She feels a refusal, a sense of herself as changed by the woman’s presumption.
“My husband wishes it was,” she says.
The woman turns from the pantry to look at Muriel.
“He’s out there pouting now.”
The woman registers no shock. Instead she collects a jar and hands it to Muriel.
“Is it land he’s upset over or some other reason?” she asks. She puts both hands inside the bib of the overalls.
Muriel tries the lid and can’t budge it. “He’s got all sorts of problems,” she says, and holds the jar out.
The woman regards it. “You think you can solve them with olives?”
“I’ve never had an olive, so I don’t know, but I thought I’d give it a shot.”
The woman drops the bib and takes the jar from Muriel. “That’s big of you,” she says.
She works at the jar lid with some force. A stalling quiet then, as they stand in the bright kitchen. Muriel has never learned polite talk. Her mother knew that people walked into the conversations you left open for them, that a small silence could change the course of a life. Never ask a man about his day, she often said. And because she never did, men told her all manner of other things, their secrets, their terrible fears.
Next to the sink is a small pair of scissors. A single coffee cup on the pine table next to a hand mirror. The woman’s hair is in two braids and the ends are as straight and dark as the edge of a nailbrush. It is easy somehow to imagine her leaned against the counter, the bite of the scissors and the hairs falling along the lip of the sink. Muriel feels a shift in her perception, a sudden longing for woman’s solitary act. Though Lee has not opened his eyes, she moves to one side of the window where she can’t be seen.
“There’s a story about this valley,” the woman says finally. She waits for Muriel’s interested look and Muriel gives it. “I’m sure you saw the fruit orchards. Was oranges and lemons and walnuts, get shipped out to Ohio and whatnot. But those are going too, for the tracts, but that’s neither here nor there. Because what I mean to say is that not that long ago you’d have seen olive trees too. And olive trees have thin leaves like fingers, bright green on one side and pale on the bottom, seeming too small for how the trunks grow, which is twisted and thick, so an olive tree is like two things put together. I say this because if you haven’t had an olive probably you’ve never seen an olive tree either, or you didn’t know you had.”
The woman pauses. Muriel remembers with pleasure the effusive, sudden talk of country people, after so long in the city. She nods to keep the woman going.
“So. Used to be this valley was full of them,” the woman says. “They say when the Spanish came they looked down into the valley from the Lagunas and saw the leaves blowing and they thought the ground was changing color. And though they knew olives, it still took them a while to come down here, the sight was so strange.”
She removes the lid and fishes one finger along the inside of the jar and flicks an olive into her palm. “If only they’d stayed up there looking down, but then I wouldn’t be here I guess,” she says. She holds the olive out to Muriel. Muriel takes it and puts it in her mouth. The taste is salty and the texture is fleshy, disorienting, but under the saltiness something plummy, rich as jam.
“There’s a pit,” the woman says.
Muriel finds it and spits it into her palm.
“What do I do with it?”
“I usually toss mine in the yard.”
“But then it might grow a tree.”
The woman laughs as if Muriel has finally surprised her. “But that’s not the end of the world,” she says.
Lee’s voice on the porch, then, and the women turn from each other. The woman hands the jar of olives to Muriel without replacing the lid, then hands the lid to her. She opens the door and moves out onto the porch in her bare feet and Muriel follows. Lee moves back to stand on the steps.
“We could also use some eggs, if you’re going to shop,” he says to Muriel.
“I’ve got those. Laid this morning and warm yet,” the woman answers. She leans her shoulder neatly against the porch rail. Muriel hides the jar behind her back. In her closed hand the olive pit feels like a pressed thumb. Lee nods and the woman moves past him into the sunny yard. She takes a container of eggs from the small hut by the fence and walks back toward them.
“What do we owe you, then?” Lee asks.
“Oh. I can’t sell the olives to you, surely. It wasn’t really me you wanted,” she says.
She stands now below them in the yard and raises her hand to her forehead against the sun.
“Then we’ll have to overpay you for the eggs,” Muriel says.
Lee takes the eggs and heads back to the car, and once he’s past the woman she looks at Muriel and makes a condoling face. Muriel dips into the jar and takes another olive and eats it. She spits the pit over the porch rail. The woman says, very quietly, “You’ve got it now.”
Muriel lids the jar and hands the woman a dollar, then ducks into the idling car. The woman watches them back out of the drive and turn away.
BY THE TIME they’ve returned the car and walked back to the apartment the sun has lowered in the sky, throwing the buildings and the power lines into ashy shadow. Muriel makes a quick dinner and hard-boils half the eggs. Once they’ve finished eating and put out the next day’s work clothes the mood has softened between them, and Lee turns on the radio and pours them each a glass of beer. They play three hands of gin and Muriel lets Lee win them all.
Later, as she lies sleepless, Muriel thinks of the woman and her tidy house. She thinks of the trees, grown so tall by the river. She remembers the story Julius told that Christmas, of the burned paintings in Korea, and then she thinks of her mother’s funeral. Her mother had been buried without service in the Protestant cemetery a mile from their house. There was no bidding prayer and no eulogy, just the two pallbearers and a few of her mother’s friends. It was almost September but the long heat of that summer carried through the season without ease. Nothing would settle. No rain, and the dust gathered in the air and hung there. The machines in the fields nearby turned up contrails of dust that lingered in lines a half-mile long. The heat collected in the bright spaces between the trees and birds and squirrels dodged through them as if through barn-fire. While the casket was lowered Muriel looked out at the blazing landscape. Through the hanging dust the sun was setting, and the red light cast up and caught in the dust and waved like flame, and that was the end of things.
Next to her now Lee sleeps soundly and she can feel his heat in the room. She remembers Julius’s serious look as he told them about those paintings, his fingers tented together. What’s the harm in landscapes? he said. That’s what I can’t get over. Then his wide grin. When he finally calls, she thinks, I will ask him to tell that story again.
A FEW DAYS later Muriel leaves the Heyday in a loose dress, a sweater over her shoulders and her hair pushed back by sunglasses. She takes the bus as far as Twelfth Street and walks the rest of the way, nearly all her money folded in a piece of brown paper and pressed inside the elastic waistband of her dress. She imagines the odds will change one more time but not by much. Judging from the clear weather and the positions and the horsemen’s last details she has a good number for the bay in the seventh race, and several others in the earlier stakes races. A chancy amount to win in the first five, plus a little luck on a series of boxes in the later runs would end the day well ahead, if the odds hold and the win pool clocks out where the horsemen predict. She has calculated each possible win to pay out below the tax limit. What she might do with the winnings she hasn’t considered. The money has been abstracted into something else, something terrifically unlike her. Carrying it inside her dress she feels the way she imagines a saint might feel, with a secret that is also a piety, a kind of goodness that holds its own in the world. She could lose every race this season and still have enough to start over.
The track is crowded with the better class of gamblers, the fine-hatted women and men in linen suits, those for whom the horses carry history and status. These people will know the names of owners and foals and which stallions have come to stud. Among this crowd she will not be noticed because she is no one important. She wins the first two races and this does not surprise her, so before the third race she buys a drink and bets both the winner and the perfecta, which leaves more to chance but also more to gain. When these come through she feels the prickly blood in her ears and the drink falling quietly through her and she takes one ticket to the south windows and the second to the east so no single cashier will know how much she’s won. She keeps out half the bills and folds the others into a tight square and closes it in the brown paper. Then she buys another drink and bets less than planned on a win-place-show, but she wins this race, too. This last-minute change, determined by an unlikely win in the previous race, makes Muriel feel conspicuous. She considers sitting out the fifth race. The day is warm and the crowd raucous and changeable, the clear feeling of the day is hazardous. Beside her in the upper section a man and a woman who is too young to be his wife lean into the shade with their legs entwined. Below them a fist of sailors with their hair undone and falling into their eyes. All around the track are postures of similar intemperance. Yet she is calmed by a sense of isolation from any other world. There is only now the heat of the day and the smell of the horses and the lived fact of her presence here. Suddenly she can do anything she likes. She stands and bets a win and another exacta, then moves quickly to an empty seat along a row of couples. Among them she will be invisible, and any seat next to her will be presumed to belong to her husband, off at concessions or at the mutuel window.
She wins that race and the race after. Now the square of bills is too large to be folded again, so she peels away a quarter of it and holds it without counting, because she can guess how much is there. The next race is the one she’s waited for. With this stack of money she rethinks her strategy. To bet the whole amount would produce too big a win, so she takes a third of it to the east windows, a third to the south, and the rest downstairs to the front, and in that way makes three separate bets, all according to the horsemen’s talk and her interpretation of it. All in all a two-thousand-dollar stake. She knows this caution is its own kind of risk, that anyone watching would find such behavior suspicious, or that another gambler with the same tactic could take notice of her. But she cannot bring herself to name the full number for a cashier. To tell a stranger such an amount seems to her less an act of hubris than an admission of startling freedom. That she could hand that kind of money to improbability.
She waits another fifteen minutes for the post. The crowd bristles and the breeze has whipped in from the ocean and brings with it the intricate, living smell of the offing. Finally there’s Willie Declan on the big bay called California Star, coming to post in the sixth position with Sayonara looking grim in the third. She checks the odds one last time though she knows them. Around her the crowd has quieted and as the horses enter the stalls she has a strange feeling of doubling, the horses and their riders lined neatly behind the starting gate, the crowd lined in their rows to watch. A sensation like the tremor of a cask. The horses break in a wall and move toward the inside track and as the horsemen have predicted Declan finds the rail and squeezes Sayonara out and behind him. The field stretches wide, Declan keeping Sayonara at a length, then a half-length, then holding, and then a surge and Sayonara falling back again. The race continues without change or spectacle and when Declan takes the race by two lengths she doesn’t move. Sayonara is second, and the clip-legged roan is third, behind the other two by a distance. She’s won each bet she made.
Across the finish line the horses cool at a trot, then the pit ponies are led out and the horses become mere animals again, snorting and tightly controlled and walking along the outside rails. She thinks suddenly and for no reason she can name of the chickens at the woman’s house in the valley and their coordinated movement, then of the moment she has imagined but not seen, of the woman leaned back, her braid brought in front of her shoulder to be trimmed. Something in this image makes her furious and light-headed. A quick calculation of the winnings alarms her and she looks around at the loosening crowd, some people leaping and some sitting resolute, a group of old men turned toward each other and away from the track, and waits for someone to notice her. As she waits she finds the inside seam of her purse with her fingernails and starts to work it, scraping at the thin lining until she breaks a hole. Without looking down she rips away at the seam until she’s made a pocket in the side of her purse. She places the fold of money in it and hides the bulge with the newspaper she’s brought and then the ball of her sweater pressed against it. Her face and arms are cold though she is sweating openly. None of the races has been remarkable. They will not enter legend or be spoken of in any way except personally, when years from now someone here remembers the afternoon at Del Mar in 1957, when he was on leave, or before there were children, or because it was his birthday.
Finally, when the crowd’s energy has lessened and people have turned back toward the turf or their companions, she makes again her careful rounds to the separate banks of windows and puts half of the winnings in the hole in her purse and the other half down the front of her dress. Now the trouble is in getting home. Certainly she will not stay for the last races. Though she’s made no outward sign she knows that any woman leaving alone on a day like today is an easy mark, and anyone might have been watching her. She crowds in behind a married couple pressing through the turnstiles and follows them out to the parking lot, then at a distance through it. When they peel away to find their car she moves swiftly forward, where another group of people is halted at the crosswalk, which clears for them to cross the turf road and onto Via de la Valle.
Then she is alone. With the scarf she wipes her brow and neck and brings it to her eyes as if she might cry into it though she does not feel like crying. She is not the type to search the peculiar for signs or omens but she cannot help the feeling now that some veil between worlds has been very slightly lifted, that she stands exposed on the weedy street corner. Across La Valle she can see the crowds of people outside the bars, everywhere in the coastal wind are halves of tickets and racing forms. It is seven o’clock in the evening. She knows she should move toward the bus station before she misses the seven-fifteen through downtown and is stranded for an hour among the crowds.
She turns toward the stop but walks slowly and only when she sees the bus does she move all the way under the metal shade. For twenty minutes she rides in a state of watchful anticipation. Through the windows the city goes by. Housing grids and cleared ground breaking open the late daylight. The heavy flicker of palm trees. She thinks back to the bus ride from Kansas, five days across the Plains and then the Rockies, down into the great valleys of the West, the young men on their way to the naval yards and on to Japan, retching out the slits of the bus windows, sick before they’d even seen the ocean. Then the day she was married, witnessed only by the court clerk, because Julius had not come. She should have known then—she might have changed her mind. The progress of things like a pitcher tipped downward to fill a glass. How quickly it had all happened.
She gets off a few stops early and stands under an awning not knowing what to do. Though she is far from the track now, she still has the feeling that anyone can look at her and know exactly what’s happened. Across the street and down another block she sees the Radford Hotel, four stories high and unfancy, but decent, and in this decent neighborhood. She walks to the light and crosses at the crosswalk, then down the next block, keeping to the storefronts and in the shade thrown by the buildings. The sun is low now and falling away. At the desk she signs her maiden name in the log and is given a key for a room on the third floor. Once in the room she closes the door and turns over the dead bolt and the brass hook.
She lifts the skirt of her dress and pulls out the money there, then takes the rest from the lining of her purse and drops the pile on the bed. Nearly ten thousand dollars—she knows it to the cent. She lights a cigarette and looks from the bed to the window facing the street, then back along the wall, as if she is searching for some rent or weakness. She is surprised to see a telephone on the nightstand. She could call Lee and tell him she’s taken an extra shift and then she could sleep or stay well past dark, but he might want to come by for her. On the bed and away from her the money is frightening and actual. She should have stopped after the third or fourth race. She sits on the edge of the bed and finishes her cigarette, then lights another. She lifts the receiver and asks the front desk for a line out, and when the tone comes she dials the number in Los Angeles, where they’d last reached Julius. After a dozen rings a man answers.
“Julius?” she says, though she knows already that it isn’t him.
“Maybe so,” says the man in the menacing voice men use to charm women. “Depends what you’re after.”
She thinks suddenly that what has spooked her is not good luck but the vivid fact of luck itself. Even with all her preparation and the long knowledge of the horsemen, her account of the weather and the odds, only preposterous chance could have led to this result. And if there was such good luck in the world, and if it could outpace her own agency and her own knowledge, then bad luck must be the same, and no luck, too. She has been seen and accommodated by luck, and she wants out of its sight line.
“What gives, sweetheart, you need some kind of advice?” the stupid man on the phone says.
She hangs up without speaking and lies on her side facing the curtained window. Her mother’s house and her mother’s grave are five days’ drive and if she called the Carter boy she is sure he’d open the windows and sweep out the eaves, though what she would do after that she can’t say. She could do anything she wanted now but she doesn’t know what that might be. She cannot describe her disappointment and can imagine no one to whom it would matter.
She closes her eyes and lies still a long time. She thinks of her mother’s house that Christmas Eve. In her memory the night deepens over the wheatfield as she and Julius sit turning cards in the kitchen. They have drunk all the wine in the house and Julius is turning up cards and explaining them. He says he once knew a man who sang so beautifully that other men wept even many days afterward. He tells her about the rabbit man and another man he knew who memorized the scientific names of flowers and all of these men seem to her unlike any she has known before. Like him they are receptive and lovely and out of place, not her mother’s men or her mother’s romance but something altogether else.
“Where do you find such people?” she asks.
“Oh everywhere, everywhere,” he says, and raises his arms above his head and opens them out as if marshalling a symphony. She wants a better answer but she does not know what question will prompt it. In his conducting motion she sees the basic contours of another world.
Julius shuffles the cards and lays them out. He says, “This is the bedpost queen,” and shows her the queen of spades with the jeweled scepter upraised and amative. He turns up the king of hearts and says, “And this is the suicide king,” and when he asks her what it feels like to be in love she says she wouldn’t know then realizes what she’s said. But he laughs simply, then he lets his face sallow and says very seriously, “If the next card I turn up is a diamond or a seven we’ll build the house on a hill so we can see the sea.” He reveals the eight of clubs and they both look at it on the table and then he flicks it with his fingernail so it sails off the edge and he turns the next card and the next until they have the jack of diamonds.
When she woke the next morning he was still at the kitchen table playing solitaire with the radio on low and she stood a long time in the next room listening to him sing along. For months she had risen from her mother’s bed and bathed and made coffee and gone to work and waited on the mail. She woke often from dreams about birds. And still she was no closer to understanding what she might do next. When finally she entered the kitchen Julius smiled and wished her a Merry Christmas but there was no indication on his face of what they’d shared. She’d thought then that he was trying on propriety, that the drink had turned and muted the feeling between them, and that was all. But now she knows he thought her sad and aimless, and too innocent for what he’d told her. The next evening the men left and sailed back to Japan and since then she had talked to Julius only once and he had never answered her letter. When she’d told him about the horses, he hadn’t even believed her.
Now, beyond the wall of the hotel, the sounds of the city are muffled and blank and what life exists there is expressed only as a tapping, a constant interval of noise, undifferentiated. She presses up on her elbows. Then she turns to sit cross-legged and takes up the pile of money and begins to arrange the bills by denomination. As she does she rotates each and stacks it so it matches the corners of the bill below. Then she counts it out, first the big bills then the small. She finds a sheaf of hotel paper and rips off three sheets and divides the bills into two big stacks and a smaller third and folds them inside, creasing the edges of each sheet to make an envelope. She slips these into the pocket she’s made in her purse and presses the edge of the ripped lining up and under the seam. Then she leaves the room and takes a narrow stairway back down and out a side door that leads to an alley. She walks the eight blocks home, catching with soft eyes the shapes of men and shopkeepers in her periphery, feeling the weight of the money the way one feels the imminent coming of rain.
At home she meets Lee’s fretting look at the door and tells him a story about a missed bus, about having to walk several blocks from the restaurant to take another line, one that wound through the Stingaree at summer dusk and from whose windows she could see the men playing dice against the brick fronts. She knows he’d worry about her in that neighborhood, but now that she’s home safe they can laugh about it, and she wants this laughter, this after-danger easing, to calm her. It does not occur to her that she wants to hurt Julius but his absence has turned into a justification, and she wants this day and what she will do next to stay the way a secret should, unavowed, and belonging only to her.
THE NEXT DAY the horsemen gather at the lounge later than usual, in black suits too big or small, depending on each man’s age and density. Someone they know has died—Gerald, they say, though Muriel does not recognize the name—and rather than the previous day’s big races they speak of the man’s funeral, where they have just been. Three nights ago a vice raid over by the railyard cleared the streets and sent men to jail or worse. The man they’re mourning was involved in some way, though no one says how. She sees that the jockey Rosie is missing.
“That’s what men like that can expect,” someone says.
Above them the plantation fan presses the air through the unseasonably warm day.
“Some asshole will always say Well now at least he didn’t suffer. And I’d say, then you didn’t know Gerald, because if there was ever a sufferer it was him—and it’s not like I’m speaking ill of the dead when we all talked this way about him when he was alive.”
The men speak quietly, as if this loss is a secret unlike the other secrets they tell.
“I hate to imagine Rosie’s sorrow, though he brought it on himself. So did Gerald. And whosoever is deceived thereby, is not wise,” says the man with the mustache.
“What will happen to the Chester Hotel, you think?” says someone else.
“Same as any of those degenerate places. It’ll come back or it won’t.”
“You suppose all them boys ran into the sea, to get away?”
“Is the Chester down by the sea?” one of the younger men asks.
Dark and cautious laughter, and then the man with the mustache says, “You’re saying you’d like to know, huh?”
The young man lifts his chin and narrows his eyes and says nothing more. Another man says, “It’ll come back. That building’s a hundred years old and I bet them type of boys have been there just as long or longer.”
The tables at the front of the lounge are empty; three men at the bar each sit one stool apart from the next, like strangers in a movie theater. One reads the paper and the two others talk about politics with their stools turned in toward the empty seat between them. Muriel’s purse is tucked under the bar and hidden. She wishes the horsemen would speak of the races and say if they’d won as she had, but she is also relieved when they don’t. She tears out the racing form and writes down the man’s name and the name of the hotel, and then Rosie’s name and then one hundred and by the sea, as if she were taking notes for the next day’s post. The morning has drawn slowly and the men show no signs of leaving and Muriel waits. She feels like waiting might be the only thing left for her to do.
She considers the man’s funeral and wonders if there had been horses there pulling the funeral cart, the coastal cypress decked in lace bunting, to make death seem like what it is, a return to the past, and in her mind the coffin holds the stranger Gerald as he might have been in his youth, lean and quick and ready. She folds the racing form into fourths and slips it into the pocket of her purse, with the money, as if for posterity.
When her lunch break comes she takes the bus ten blocks north and gets off near a service station perched just back from the street. Inside she buys a candy bar and then walks around the back of the station to a dim restroom and steps softly in. She dons again the slacks and striped shirt and broad-brimmed hat, careful not to touch the walls or the grimy sink of the restroom. There is some thrill in this that is almost erotic, parts of her body bared a bit at a time yet held away from the parameters of the room, as if she is undressing for someone she hopes will look but whom she won’t allow to.
At the bank she waits in line with the other men and women missing lunch for their small errands. When it’s her turn she slides two of the folded sheets of hotel paper through the window and asks for a cashier’s check for seven thousand dollars, made out to George Lee Sims and Muriel Sims, and says she’d like the check postdated, ten days from now. When the teller complies Muriel lets her hands drop from the strap of her purse and relaxes. She sees the check is as she’d hoped, printed in the corner only with the bank’s name and the address of its headquarters. Then she asks for another, made out to the property tax board of Kansas, and fans a dozen twenties on the counter, thinking that this young teller cannot know what she wants or why she is here or that her mother died in the undignified middle of the day.
She puts the two checks in her purse along with the receipts and turns to leave the bank. She waits until she is outside and several feet past the bank windows to walk more swiftly, down two more blocks to a post office, thinking that she was right about cash, that there are no real questions to ask about it, since it might come from anywhere but only ever means what it means. Inside the post office she buys three security envelopes and a plate of stamps. She writes a quick note to the tax board explaining that the check is prepayment for this year and next. Then another note to the Carters, asking them to tape the windows and drip the taps, along with four twenties folded tight, to cover another year of maintenance. She addresses the envelopes and stamps them. Then she places the seven-thousand-dollar check inside the torn lining of her purse, careful not to fold or crease it. She fills the last envelope with the rest of the cash and the racing form and the receipt from the post office and conceals this, too. Later she will sew the seam closed again and when all is settled she will find a hiding place.
Outside she removes her sweater and sits at a bus stop. From her purse she takes the last hard-boiled egg and rolls it gently against the bench to crack the shell and then peels it. In a few weeks the receipt from the tax board will arrive, and she’ll use this envelope for the big check, to make it all seem authentic. She imagines the moment she hands the check to Lee, and the relief he will feel. Now there would be a fine lawn and Sunday dinner and gracious talk about the meal and she and her husband would have the quiet life they had never been afforded when they were younger and unmarried, still living with their parents in those forgotten towns. Maybe they came out west only to claim a past denied to them, and not, after all, a future free from such notions.
She tries to imagine what her mother might think of this deception and she can’t. She’ll still have the house and her own money but she is giving up something more crucial and her mother would have seen that. Muriel has been so lucky and now she is beholden to luck and that leaves her utterly alone. If she gets away with this she will never go to Del Mar again. She promises this to herself. And if finally Julius does call, she would say nothing of paintings or horses or even say his name.
FOUR (#ulink_7c09d48d-0f4b-5d4d-81f2-351f31ad106b)
The meadows (#ulink_7c09d48d-0f4b-5d4d-81f2-351f31ad106b)
Henry in the hem of neon between the alley and the street. At night in the dim light of the peek, hair and eyes so dark they disappear, so that Julius sees only the bright buttons of Henry’s shirt and a flash of fingernail as he approaches the place where the catwalks cross. Henry in the morning at the Squaw Motel, curled inside the weather of some dream, Julius awake and watching him, knowing he must leave soon before daylight finds them together. Some nights a tenderness so great there is no way to touch Henry softly enough, other nights coarse and silent and sleepless.
Each morning Julius leaves the room with a telling joy he must tamp before the day begins. Once outside the room and through the lines of parked cars he turns onto Second Street and walks along the treeless grid of empty lots, taking the long way downtown. He feels wonderfully alone. That is what love feels like to him. As if finally he’s touching the very outside of himself, pressed against the limits of his body, singular, replete. The early dawn milled down to the low horizon is a blasted white; years from now, whenever he thinks of that view or sees it again, he will be rushed back to this moment in his life, and forever it will feel like love to him, that kind of bright sky.
Their affair stretches through the end of the spring and then the monsoon season. At night, the peek cools so fast that the chill sometimes catches them in shirtsleeves, skin pricked against it. Then the bitter summer comes, and they walk between the glass windows barefoot, their hair drenched with sweat. One night, early in July, Julius stands at the window watching a man below win every other hand of blackjack, sometimes losing two in a row but rarely. He watches the man a long time. As he watches, he tries to find the one piece that gives the pattern away. There is always one thing that people fail to conceal. He’s seen a man rise from the table after a profitable night only to see him again an hour later splitting chips with the dealer. He’s seen men lean back in their chairs and reveal aces tucked into their belts. Once, two cowboys—so fresh from the train they sat at twenty-one with their duffels under their feet—played for an hour before Julius saw the thing he needed: not the pattern of their cheat but the interruption in it, one cowboy marking wrong and busting his friend, who snaked his eyes so briefly at the first man that Julius knew exactly the game they were running.
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Shannon Pufahl
Set in 1950’s America at a time when people stopped looking west and started looking up: a breathtakingly beautiful debut novel of revolution, chance and the gambles we take with the human heart. Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack. When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband Lee. Instead it is Lee’s brother, Julius, a thief and Korean War veteran – and someone she has only met once – whom she longs to tell, and who has struck a spark of promise and possibility inside her quietly ordered life. Julius has found himself in Las Vegas, where his gift for gambling leads him to a job patrolling the boards above the casino tables, watching through the cigarette smoke for chancers and cheats. There he meets Henry, a blackjack artist and a man who shares Julius’s passions, and his secrets. As tourists gather on roof tops to watch atomic clouds bloom in the desert, Henry and Julius's love burns in the shadows – until one night Henry is forced to flee. Through the parks and plazas of Tijuana and the bars and beaches of San Diego, On Swift Horses mesmerisingly charts the journeys of Muriel and Julius on their separate quests for freedom, new horizons and love.
ON SWIFT HORSES
Shannon Pufahl
Copyright (#ulink_35bc5365-8844-54b9-9a27-7d679feb91cc)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Shannon Pufahl 2019
Cover image © Epics / Getty Images
Shannon Pufahl asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008293963
Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008293987
Version: 2019-09-26
Dedication (#uc453a29d-d82d-50af-81c2-c8414cb7d45c)
For Dorthy Figgs—
my grandmother and a first-rate card player
Epigraph (#uc453a29d-d82d-50af-81c2-c8414cb7d45c)
The declaration of love marks the transition from chance
to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened.
—ALAIN BADIOU, In Praise of Love
An honest game has always been a great rarity.
—HERBERT ASBURY,
Sucker’s Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America
Contents
Cover (#u9a944bb1-6f24-525f-a5aa-92d5aae4762a)
Title Page (#uef68deb0-a398-58f6-9841-023ac3ace76b)
Copyright (#u7b57e290-d05c-5775-9be4-1d572b2672ef)
Dedication
Epigraph
I.
1. THE SEA (#ua174e854-849f-590d-b4b0-580e98e8da3b)
2. THE GOLDEN NUGGET (#uacb50bdc-b35a-5b4c-bb70-8cb56dc7466c)
3. THE VALLEY (#uf7ea82d3-a084-59de-900f-48208f3d7ab8)
4. THE MEADOWS (#u83efd059-683a-52c2-bb0c-06d7046d3951)
II.
5. THE BLUFFS (#litres_trial_promo)
6. TIJUANA (#litres_trial_promo)
7. THE CLIFFS (#litres_trial_promo)
8. THE BORDER (#litres_trial_promo)
III.
9. SWALLOWS (#litres_trial_promo)
10. PARADISE (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I. (#uc453a29d-d82d-50af-81c2-c8414cb7d45c)
ONE (#ulink_722b6c71-d104-5dce-b238-f4ffc0011f56)
The sea (#ulink_722b6c71-d104-5dce-b238-f4ffc0011f56)
At the Heyday Lounge the horsemen think they are the only gamblers. They file in each morning, their shoes dusty and their pockets jangling with coins, like parishioners. They sit in a dark corner under a single blade fan, a plantation relic hauled from the lounge owner’s Southern home to this coastal city thirty miles from Mexico. Above them the fan has the look of salvage but it makes no sound, and though it keeps the flies from their faces and necks and midmorning cocktails they do not notice it.
Every weekday the men come. They speak openly because they believe the lounge owner to be simple—which is true—and Muriel, their waitress these long mornings, to be a woman and therefore incapable of both memory and complex reasoning. It does not help that she is young, that she looks like the empty plains she comes from, flat and open and sad. She and Lee, newly married, have been in San Diego only a few months and are learning slowly how to be modern, and though she has always worked it is fair that the horsemen take her for a housewife forced into labor by circumstance. They could not know from her wide shoulders and square waist and rural modesty that she had taken the bus from Kansas on her own, that she could play cards and drive a car, or that she’d left behind a house she owned outright, to come here.
So they wave their hands at her and call her sweetheart from across the room and order their drinks with pointed enunciation as if she were hard of hearing. Though she remembers not only their drinks but the clip of their mustaches, the red-rimmed dimness of their eyes, she writes the orders down on a notepad and hands the paper to the bartender. The horsemen are retired trainers from the furlongs at Del Mar or bookmakers for rich men in the coastal hills. A few are ex‑jockeys, burned out and overweight, unsure what else life might have to offer them. They talk as men do, confident and gently adversarial, about the coming race day, the horses off their feed, the jockeys with tapeworm, the cup and feel of the track. They set long odds and argue over them.
For a few months Muriel listens. She writes down their private speculations and begins to join their language to its objects. When her shift ends at two she walks toward the sea and takes a late lunch at a restaurant where she works a second job on the dinner shift. She sits in a booth in the corner and studies her notes and the previous day’s racing form. She might rise and walk then, along the rolling line of surf. She thinks of horses, and her mother, and the day she was married. As she walks she collects shells and beach glass and slips them in the pocket of her sweater. Before she returns to work she unfolds the pocket and dumps these same items back onto the beach, so all that’s left is a rim of sand in the pocket hem. At ten Lee walks to the restaurant from the factory a few blocks away and they go home together, arms linked like young lovers and not like married people, because they do not know each other very well.
THEN, IN EARLY DECEMBER, Muriel has a night off from the restaurant but tells Lee she’s working. In the drugstore across the street from the Heyday Lounge she buys a pair of sunglasses she considers ridiculous. They cover her eyebrows and half of her nose and make her look much older, like a woman in possession of a fortune or a married lover. She buys a sunhat and a thin scarf printed with flowers. She removes her sweater though her arms show and she worries they will burn in the low winter sun and make her sleep difficult. She takes a twenty-minute bus ride to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The bus winds around Jimmy Durante Boulevard and from the windows of the bus she can see the grand entrance to the track, the high hedges and the waving flags. A statue of Bing Crosby, the track’s founder and financier, gleams hard and gold in the afternoon light. In San Diego in those days it was said that Crosby used the track to impress Grace Kelly, who hated horses but loved men. Muriel lets the bus wind back around to Camino del Mar and gets out to have a coffee in a diner along the beach. She smokes and looks around as if she is waiting for someone. Her shoulders are warm and the bridge of her nose sweats under the sunglasses. The sea is soft and cold-looking. From the beach several others watch as a woman wades out to the breakers and stops. Muriel thinks of her mother, who had told her about the shore at Galveston, where she had been once with a man Muriel knew was not her father. Her mother said the sea was smooth as a lake and brown, and that someone told her it was filled with jellyfish. Muriel watches as the woman at sea turns and lifts a hand to her forehead and seems to regard the shore in contemplation of some final leaving. It is a curious thing, being married, how Muriel must think of this odd afternoon errand as something done for both of them, an adventure Lee will share in one way or another. She had thought it would be difficult to lie to him but she found it easier than their daily recitations of the truth. She had expected for herself the same power her mother found in men. But she often finds her husband’s gaze embarrassing.
Finally she stands and walks up the seaside street and back across Durante. She passes the high hedges and the tall gates and walks past the turf club and the runs. At the turnstile she crowds in with another woman and two men. The warden in the booth waves them through. She climbs the stairs behind the three others and lets them break off in the stands. From this height she looks around. She is surprised by how many people are at the track and how many of them are drunk. The sailors clump together and slap each other’s backs. Their heavy white pants hang to their heels and they laugh and push back their vigorous hair. There are men in ripped shoes and young boys in bow ties and there are many other women too, Muriel is glad to see. She sits under the second-floor balcony in the shade and covers her hair with the scarf.
From the stands the horses are not what she imagined. They are tall and obdurate and only lightly controlled. A dozen of them are paced out and lined behind the gates. The field is looped first in grass then dirt, a third smaller track built for harness racing and unused. Across the field the stables are lined in courtly rows, and from this height Muriel can see the sharp shadows thrown by the palms, over the hot-walkers and the low-roofed stalls. The smell of the dirt and the stables and the wheaty smell of the grass are familiar to her, though from the sea comes a punkish wind. She has a gimlet and studies the racing form, thinking of the words she’s heard the horsemen use, the names of trainers and jockeys. She watches the men file to the betting windows along the aisle. For a long time she watches without seeing any woman approach the glass and she begins to worry that perhaps she is not allowed to bet at all. The horses rear in their gates. Their bridles clang against the gates and sound like vespers. Then the gunshot and the race begins. The men in the stands yell instructions at the huge dark horses in a language of violence rolled in with endearment—summer up, take it, ride that, brake baby. The dust and the noise are thrilling, and Muriel stands without thinking and watches the horses turn the track, the pounding of their hooves at odds with their agile speed. When the race ends the men rise and punch the air, then tear their tickets in half and throw them to the ground.
After the race the crowd calms. Muriel moves to the windows and the cashier does not look up and when she speaks he is not surprised. She plays two dollars on the next race, on a horse named Pastoral, whom the men at the bar called canny and somber. The odds are six‑to‑one and when the horse crosses a length ahead she is up twelve dollars. She can hardly believe it. She takes her ticket back to the man behind the glass, who smiles this time and counts out the bills. She drinks another gimlet and no one notices. She lets the next race pass and then she rises and leaves through the tunnel. She takes the bus back downtown, her money folded away in her purse. Lee comes to collect her at ten and they walk home together. By then the drink has come out of her and she is tired, her dress dirty with sea air and car exhaust. The wind off the ocean blows down the alleyways and makes her shiver.
Lee says, “You should have worn a sweater.”
She leans into him and his solidity is a fact that seems weighed against possession. He puts an arm around her and she considers the scarf in her bag, which would warm her. Though he would make nothing of it, she does not want him to see it, it is too much a part of the day.
Across the street a barbershop is closed but still lighted, a man sweeping up, his silent figure inside the fluorescence like an image on a screen. By the door of the shop a boy of seven or eight is still out at this late hour, throwing rocks across the empty street in some game of his own devising. When he sees them he comes forward with his hand out. Lee looks at her and then at the boy and makes a gesture meant to indicate penury. The boy turns to Muriel and she sees the fox in him and he knows she sees it. He starts to sway back and forth and then to dance. His pockets are full of rocks and they make a sound like dice. Then the sweeping man disappears into a back room and the shop lights go out and they are suddenly alone with the boy. In the dark street he lifts his knees high and slaps his little palms against them, and though he does not sing he seems about to. He holds Muriel’s gaze and she laughs and pulls her purse up and brings out a quarter and hands it to him. Lee reaches out for her arm but does not stop her. The boy takes the coin and gives a look to Lee, who says to Muriel, “Oh for heaven’s sake,” in the embarrassed way his Lutheran mother might have said it, if he’d ever known her. The boy turns from them and dances back to his post at the curb; Muriel thinks she will remember him a long time, as the recipient of her good fortune.
In the hallway of their boardinghouse Lee stops to call his brother from the shared telephone. Most often Lee does not reach his brother but tonight he does. Muriel listens to his quiet voice on the phone, laughing and then pleading, the way he is even when Julius is merely mentioned now, an older sibling’s curse, to envy the freedom of the younger man and also believe he will suffer from it. It is the same voice he used in the street and he would use this voice on her again, if he knew. And if she took him to the track he would not understand, he would scowl at the dirty men and the fragrant, snorting horses.
THE MORNINGS in San Diego have a particular tang, the ocean air sweetened by the drift of tanker fumes. Muriel and Lee are among the many thousands arriving each month, husbands and wives but mostly just men, bright with Western promise and their own survival, back from the Pacific. In general a masculine city, Muriel thinks, sailors and black ships and swirls of oil in the ports. The coastal hills cut a jagged line at the horizon. The great fig tree in Balboa Park spreads its roots like an apron of snakes.
At night when it is dim and she is tired she often mistakes the waving surface of the bay for wheat, and this she prefers to the sea, the low intimation of the Plains glimpsed sidelong. Days when they are both off work they walk together through town and along the thoroughfares, collecting cans and bottles for the junkman. South of Balboa Park the interstate is being pulled through by cranes and paddle scrapers and a hundred men a day on the iron trusses. Often the two of them stand watching for long moments as Lee narrates the freeway’s path, through La Jolla and Oceanside and all the way to Oregon. A second highway crosses the first and runs east all the way to Ohio, passing through the open country they left behind. These routes will isolate the naval station and the ports, and the dark district by the railyard where the sailors take their leave, and the locals speak of this as a blessing, a cross over something vague and unseen that the future will not accommodate.
Inside this new grid the city widens up and out, over the coastal hills and north to the mesas, networks of tract housing all the way to Birdland. Lee wants a half-acre in Mission Valley, on the San Diego River, where they can build a three-bedroom and plant fruit trees. He has pinned the advertisement above the window in their kitchenette. When he and Muriel sit up late smoking and playing cards he tells her about the narrow valley, once settled by missionaries and then by nut and dairy farmers, now divided into lots graded flat and grassless. Sometimes he stands and goes to the little window and touches the pastel houses and the long furrows of cypress trees, and though he sighs dramatically and smiles Muriel knows he is not joking. She knows that he imagines her there in a real kitchen and a real bed. He believes the great future will meet them, in the new suburban landscape. They could prod that future along if they sold her mother’s house in Kansas, but Muriel will not yet consent to it. When Lee asks she says she isn’t ready, and if he worries why that might be he doesn’t say so. The truth is he doesn’t need her permission but he wants it.
It is 1956 and Muriel is twenty-one years old. Old to be starting a family, but she had waited almost a year to marry Lee and refused for a year before that. She had thought she could live as her mother had and then her mother died. Her mother had been the first woman in Marshall County to own a car, an eight-hundred-dollar Chevrolet she won in a department store raffle. She was Catholic but would not attend any Mass where the women weren’t allowed to wear pants, which left one church on the north side of Topeka. Every weekend they left Muriel’s stepfather in Marshall County and drove a hundred miles to hear the Mass in slacks. They stayed Saturday night in a motel by the highway and washed their faces and their scarves in the sink and rose early the next morning. After church they ate at a seafood restaurant across the street called Lucky’s. When rain filled the gutters they jumped from the street to the curb in their flat church shoes and stayed another night while the weather passed. Later, Muriel’s mother was the first woman in Marshall County to get a college degree and then a divorce. She died at thirty-six, a month before Muriel’s nineteenth birthday. When the paper reported her death they said that she was married and that she’d died at home, neither of which was true.
That Christmas Lee came home and brought his brother, whom she had never met. Both men owed another year to the navy and they’d agreed to pool their discharge pay and build a house in California when it was all over, but Lee took the leave when she asked. She hadn’t written him in months though she had received letters almost weekly. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. He and his brother hauled in to Long Beach and spent five days on a bus through the snowy mountains and arrived on the last Sunday in Advent. It had been just four months since her mother died.
The day the men arrived Muriel and Lee made love on top of the covers with the weather radio on. It was a balmy winter, rainy and with little snow, and even with the radiator off and fingers of steam reaching across the windows they sweated in their underwear. She asked him to wear a condom—a tube of lambskin she’d bought the week before, both weighty and soft, like an elbow glove—and he’d asked her again to marry him, this unsuperstitious Catholic girl living alone in her dead mother’s house.
While they lay together Julius returned from an errand in town and came into the yard and saw the pulled curtains and the fogged glass. He took off his heavy jacket and boots and his shirt and he lay down in the damp grass under their window. When Muriel opened it to smoke, as Lee wet his face and hair in the bathroom down the hall, she saw Julius lying there, bare-chested, staring at the window above. She startled, but being a woman generally unafraid of men, she cocked her head curiously at him. He raised one hand from the ground in a funny little wave.
“Toss one of those down to me,” he said.
Muriel hesitated but sensed in his receptive pose someone merely curious. The cigarette fell limply and landed on his shoulder. He reached across and took the cigarette without sitting up and placed it between his lips, then feigned checking his coat pockets by patting the sides of his bare chest.
“And now a match,” he said.
Muriel began to laugh, then covered her mouth so Lee would not hear. She dropped the matchbook out the window and Julius caught it and lit his cigarette and his smoke began to wind along the side of the house. He lay smoking and smiling and then with one prone hand he tried to toss the matches back up to her. Each time they fell back to the ground comically.
“I guess I’ll have to return these later,” he said.
They looked at each other a long moment and then Muriel became embarrassed and stubbed her cigarette out on the window sash and ducked back inside.
That night they stayed up with a bottle of rice liquor and Julius told jokes about Eisenhower and Protestants. Neither he nor Muriel mentioned his bare chest or the rain on his skin. He told them about Korea, about the landscape paintings he had seen burning there, stacked so that mountains burned through mountains, rivers melted onto ocean waves curling up like hair, and he said it must be like how the world began. When they were very drunk they went out and walked into the shaved wheatfield and lay under the winter sky. It was Christmas Eve. The men talked of their father and California and between them Muriel felt included in a deep understanding. Later, as Lee slept, she and Julius played cards and talked and though soon they were too drunk to make much sense she remembers the snap of the cards on the table and an alertness to her dead mother’s proximity. Julius told her about a man he knew years ago, before the navy and the war, who sold rabbits in town. The man bred them in a hutch lashed to the bed of his pickup, Julius said, each night stopping somewhere near a park or a wooded lot so as the rabbits slept they might hear the sounds of their brethren, of their own country. Curled in the cab of the truck the man slept under blankets made of rabbit fur. He was the rabbit man, Julius said, he wanted to be one of them. He had the thickest hair you ever saw, and a little nose like a rabbit, and big brown eyes.
The man drove all over town, to fairgrounds and schoolyards and to the flea market downtown, offering everywhere some different price for the rabbits, depending on how he felt about them. One day you’d see him, Julius said, and a three-pound rabbit he was snuggling in his arms would cost fifteen cents, then the next day it’d be up to fifty, because the thing had held his gaze for a full minute in a way he thought of as romantic, then that same unsold rabbit would do something terrible, like scratch his arm all up or fight with another rabbit, and the price would drop again to almost nothing. You see, it was his affection that drove that particular economy, and for that reason he made so little he had to sell his truck and all his rabbits, and I heard he wound up working in a gas station, like anybody else. But oh, he was still handsome as all get-out.
Julius leaned across the table in feigned amusement and showed his missing tooth when he smiled and Muriel smiled back at him. In the look held between them was some acknowledgment though Muriel did not know what the story meant. She had never heard a man talk this way about another man. She felt she was hearing a riddle.
“He didn’t live anywhere?” she asked.
“He lived in that truck.”
“So how did you know him then?”
Julius did not answer. Instead he reached out and held her hand for a moment and turned it over palm up then dropped it. She thought about his chest rising and falling and the rain on his skin and the way he’d looked up at her. Then he picked up the cards and shuffled them and dealt and did not say much after that.
In the morning Lee banged coffee cups in the kitchen and mended things in the house that she did not know how to mend and she agreed to marry him after all. Because she was orphaned and alone, but also because of Julius, who had made her feel that the world was bigger than she had imagined and because Lee, in loving his brother, became both more interesting and more bracing. She knew her mother would not approve but her mother was not around to say so. She sold first the car and then the furniture. Her mother’s clothes she left boxed on the porch for the Lions Club. She bought the bus ticket and paid the tax board for the year and with what little was left she paid the Carter boy down the road to insulate the pipes and till up the lawn and cover it over with gravel to keep the grass from overgrowing. She sent the same boy home with her mother’s houseplants and hoped for the best. She told Lee they’d keep the house because that’s what her mother would have wanted and Lee did not argue with her. That she would get to California and find Julius gone was not something she considered.
THE FIRST TIME is a transgression. The second is a strategy. After work, Muriel takes a quick lunch down the street and emerges from the café transformed, her dress balled in her purse, wearing now a pair of loose slacks and one of Lee’s striped dress shirts, the low-brimmed hat over her hair and the big sunglasses. She gets off the bus a stop early and walks the last half-mile to Del Mar. She does this once a week, then twice. Depending on what she’s heard that morning she bets a quinella or a box or a place, at first on just one race and then on three or four. She does not always win. Sometimes she deliberately lays money on a horse the men have said is lame or sick in the head, or on a jockey they’d seen drinking rum with young women the night before. When she loses those races she feels a sense of power she never gets from winning, because losing proves the accuracy of her judgment. It has the benefit, too, of concealment. As long as she is not seen by the men at the lounge—who, she thinks, have never actually looked her in the face and would not recognize her even if she introduced herself—she feels she may engender any speculation she wishes except that she is cheating.
It comes to her naturally. From the horsemen she learns a vocabulary built from idiom and double entendre—silks and shadow rolls, tongue straps and hand rides—and the rest she learns by instinct. She learns what it means when the track is cuppy, when a horse is washy or ridden out. She becomes familiar with the anatomy of horses, croup and neck, muzzle, cannon, hock, loin, as if she had run her hands along each and felt what they were made of. She begins to think of the landscape differently, as if the horses themselves have given it names. The hills and the lowtide terraces are sorrel, dapple-gray. The round, unburdened trunks of palm are chestnut in the coastal light, light that’s blood bay or buckskin depending on the weather, cast high and cloudless over the roan sea.
She is stopped sometimes, at work or waking in the mornings, by a poignant feeling. The feeling is like happiness but it comes so slowly and is so austere she might easily mistake it for grief. She could not explain it but she knows this feeling has something to do with keeping a secret from Lee, which she had somehow always felt she was doing even before she had a secret to keep. It has something to do with wherever Julius is and what her mother would think of all this. If she were a different kind of person she might have wondered whether love was always this way, if it existed in the spaces between people, the parts they kept strange to each other. She tapes the money inside a white envelope, on the underside of the lazy Susan, a place her husband will never look and may not even know is there.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas they borrow a Lincoln from Lee’s boss to see the lights at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Neither has seen Christmas lights before. At the fairgrounds they go on for miles, roped lights in the shape of trees and hills of snow, illuminating the space around them and the horizon in each direction, like a city gone nuclear. The cars line up with their headlights off and wind through the new world. Those with radios tune to a station playing Christmas songs. Lee turns his broad face to her as they sit idling in the line of cars. His is a simple amazement, the way his eyes become bright and focused when something small and unmiraculous makes him happy. If she had not heard his stories of the war or the privation of his childhood she might think him a savant or an innocent, someone inured to pain or ignorant of it. He seems unchanged by the sea or the city. She knows that even strangers recognize this immutability in him, that they see it as heroic. For a moment she considers telling him about the horses, because she envies the smallness of his joy. She is able to imagine that he would not care how she came by the money, only that she had it.
“To think this time last year we were in Kansas,” Lee says.
The racetrack lights are off but she can see the dark palms rising above the stables, just ahead. Lee leans across the bench seat and over Muriel’s handbag to kiss her. She thinks how quickly it had all happened. On the radio the Jackie Gleason Orchestra plays “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” like a dirge. Car horns bleat behind them and Lee laughs and pulls away from her and drives on. The palms move in gray contour against the winter sky. Of course there is no snow but the lights throw shadows on the ground in metallic circles that trick the eye. She hadn’t known the trees would be so lovely in the dark or that the track would be so close.
“You know,” he says then, “it ain’t like we have to wait for him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“You’ve said that before.”
Lee shakes his head.
“It was your plan to come here. You two,” she says.
“But it’s just us now.”
“He’s just stretching his legs. It was a long time you were overseas.”
“It ain’t shore leave, now.”
“It’s only been a few months.”
Lee sighs. The music snaps out and is replaced by static, then another station breaks through. That station plays a bandstand number too loud and ends the conversation. Lee reaches over and cups her knee and drives on.
Back home they kiss for a long time until Lee leans back and looks at her softly and lets his hands rest on her arms. He waits a moment. This part of lovemaking Muriel finds stifling and inelegant, though she could not say exactly why. She does not know if he wants her consent or her desire but either way she wants to refuse him, simply because he asked. She looks away and knows he will read this as demure. He kisses her neck and brings his arms around her again. Her secret makes her more aware of his deference. She thinks of what it will feel like in another few minutes when he is inside her and how straightforward this feeling is. She’d like to skip ahead to that moment. Beyond his shoulder the perfect flat wall of the bedroom catches their shadows. The window is open and the noise of traffic and other lovers and construction and children and cooking is the noise of a city breaking into itself. A man calls out the name of their street and another that crosses it and a second voice calls back. Of course the men are not in the room or even near enough to see, but like the cars and the birds and the backhoes their voices become part of lovemaking, and it occurs to Muriel that she might like this noise and the cover it offers.
Later, they lie together a long time. The supper hour has come and gone and the city has quieted. The phone in the hall rings a long time before Lee finally rises to answer it. Muriel hears him wish his brother a happy Christmas and say that they should be together, that Julius should come soon. Muriel stands and goes to the window that looks down into the alley between their building and its twin. She can feel the cold outside the window against her bare skin. She lights a cigarette and lifts the window. The streetlight falls into the alley and over the dry bricks and a few birds fly soft and quick across the entrance and toss small hand-shaped shadows against the alley wall. She recalls a boyfriend her mother had, sometime in the forties, who sold lightbulbs door‑to‑door. To persuade housewives and old widows, he cast against their walls the silhouettes of butterflies and rabbits and men in tall hats. After dinner, in those few months her mother loved him, that man taught her to twist her fingers into cheerful creatures. He had been kind, slimly built. The bulbs he sold made bluish light and glowed through the flesh of his hands. For a moment she thinks that man must be sitting somewhere against the wall of this alley, making birds with his fingers. In the hallway she hears Lee ask his brother if he needs any money and then his long sigh.
THE NEW YEAR comes and the weather hardens. Muriel adds more and more of the winnings to her tips and blames the extra money on holiday cheer, on the business brought in by the last of the men back from Korea. Lee folds the bills into eighths and stores them like hock in a coffee can. On Sunday nights he counts them out. Then, as the fairground lights on the racetrack’s edge disappear, as spring comes, the horsemen begin to lose and Muriel does too. At the lounge the men sit grimly late into the day. They wonder if they’ve lost the touch. They worry they’ve misread all the signs. The feel of the track has left them, perhaps as punishment for their arrogance. They have no feel for jockeys and turf conditions, no joy for horses at all. They spit on the floor and smoke cigarettes until the fan above merely pushes the smoke back and forth, like a machine for making waves.
They have had all these conversations before but Muriel doesn’t know that. In this new reality she becomes reckless, betting conspicuous amounts on odds‑on favorites for little gain, just to remember the feeling of winning. She comforts herself by thinking she has solved the problem of her dishonesty. In the lazy Susan there is less than two hundred dollars; a few more weeks of padding her wages and it will be gone. She feels determined to lose the rest of it, as a kind of retribution or for the sake of some strange neatness. She thinks the word, neatness, as if she is tidying up the kitchen or ironing a dress.
Then the track is closed for two weeks. When it reopens, the turf is newly surfaced and smooth as hair. The horses have been traded out, some up from Santa Anita and others from the Canadian circuits, the jockeys rested and sweated out to make weight. On Fat Tuesday the races stretch through the afternoon and she drinks too much. She wins two races in a row and is flushed. Yet even with the drink she feels self-conscious and the crowd is tight around her. It is unusually warm and the track has been decorated with bunting and palm fronds tied into hearts and sprays like hands.
The last race is a special stakes and by evening the crowd has swelled. Women fan themselves with the palmhands and dab their temples with bits of ice. Muriel stands next to a woman from out of town, who tells her husband in an accented voice what to bet. Both Muriel and the woman have a decent bounty on a horse called Flood to win and they discuss his chances as the horses come to post. The horsemen have picked him, though they think he is too young and jumpy as a virgin. As the race begins, the foreign woman flicks Muriel’s arm with her fingers and winks.
“This is us,” she says, nodding to the track.
The horses burst free and the race comes together. Next to Muriel the woman bounces on tiptoe. When Flood wins by a length, the woman turns and puts a hand on Muriel’s shoulder and kisses her lightly on the mouth. The strangeness of this kiss makes Muriel laugh. Her mouth opens around the sound and her teeth scrape the woman’s big straight teeth—horse teeth, Muriel thinks, and laughs again. The woman laughs back at Muriel and Muriel can taste mint and whiskey on the woman’s lips. Had Muriel said it out loud, horse teeth? They both pull away. For a moment the woman’s eyes catch hers with a wince, then turn softer, turn down, and she raises her glass and jiggles the ice and mint and says, “Time to repent.” She licks her lips, then wipes them with her fingers. The horses settle with their pit ponies, the air heavy with the heat of their bodies, and the noise of the track returns. The woman’s husband fans his wife with his hat and asks if they have won. The woman does not answer him but looks again at Muriel and Muriel does not know how to look back at her. Then the woman turns to her husband and flashes her ticket and flicks Muriel’s arm again as she walks away. Muriel is careful not to watch the woman though she wants to see her full height, the shape of her legs.
She carries this desire to the bus stop and downtown, then through the streets with Lee, past the oblate sea and the colorful houses, stopping in a pub for a drink and another at home. They leave the radio on as they make love, Lee’s astonished face next to hers on the pillow, a soft fold in the dim light. Her tough man, undone. He says, Muriel, we should have a child. He whispers into her hair, Muriel, don’t ever leave me. She knows after these months together to expect this as she expects his deference, and so she lets him murmur, touches his temples and his thick eyebrows with her fingertips until he falls asleep. She is like a parent then, not resentful but protective. The bedside clock ticks on the nightstand and the sheets scallop at the edge of the mattress.
When he is fully asleep she takes the money from the inside of her shoe and puts it in the envelope in the lazy Susan. Suddenly it seems there is too much of it. She’d won not a third of her money back, but she has a feeling of great prosperity. She knows this feeling would please the men at the lounge. That they would say she’d cut her teeth. That in gambling there is a plateau, a period of time when progression ceases, when exhaustion sets in, and then the odds shift. You win and you are alive again. She could play another month or longer if chance runs her way.
LATER, THE PHONE RINGS and wakes her and when no one picks it up Muriel rises from the bed and steps quietly into the hall to answer it.
When Julius hears her voice he laughs so sharply she has to pull the receiver from her ear. She brings the phone back and says Julius’s name and finds she is grinning in the dark hallway. She asks him when he’ll join them and he says, “Oh soon now, not long.”
“You mean it?” she asks.
“You bet,” he says.
She asks him what it’s like in Santa Barbara or Ventura or wherever he is and he says, “Girl, you wouldn’t believe it,” and then he starts to sing a song about the badlands and how dark they are even in the morning. On his end of the line a siren spools out and when it stops she hears he’s still singing and she listens until he can’t remember the words and then she asks him if he’s been eating and how the weather is and anyplace they might send a letter. He asks if she’s been winning at cards and when she says she tried to teach Lee how to play hearts he says, “No trick-taking games, he’s not brutal enough for it. You better stick to war.”
Through the wall she can hear Lee snoring. In the kitchenette the radio plays the Grand Ole Opry. She slides down the wall smiling into her hand until she sits with her legs in front of her and her bare feet shooting into the hallway and disappearing into the dark. What a strange miracle to talk on the phone for no particular reason. They talk for ten minutes, then twenty, until Muriel begins to worry about the coins Julius is dropping for the line. She tells him he shouldn’t waste his money and he says it’s no waste at all but then he seems to remember his purpose and asks after his brother.
“He’s asleep and I’m out here in the hallway with my hand over the receiver.”
Silence on Julius’s line and then a clank of freight and men’s voices raised some distance away.
“We sure hoped you’d be here by now,” Muriel says.
“My brother hopes a lot of things.”
Muriel nods to the darkness.
“Don’t you think it’d be strange?” he says. “All of us together?”
“That’s what Lee wants though.”
“True enough,” Julius says, though she can tell he isn’t sure.
“I want,” she begins, but she worries she should not say the next thing. She is not sure what the next thing is. The dark hallway is silent and outside she can hear the traffic lights clicking. For a moment neither speaks.
Finally Julius says, “There’s sometimes lots of ways of getting to a place.”
She thinks of Christmas Eve and the story of the rabbits. His tone is the same, it seeks her approval for something. She wants again the feeling she’d had that night, of recognition. So she laughs. The line tosses back her laugh in delay and Julius says, “Well fine, what do you think then?”
“Oh now, Julius, it’s just the way you said it.”
“Maybe I will have to come there just to set you right.”
His tone is lighter but not quite kind and when she laughs again he says, “You think I wouldn’t.”
“You haven’t yet,” she says, and then he laughs too. Her face is hot and she wants a drink. She thinks that no matter what else is true about Julius he loves his brother, and because he loves his brother he is also obliged to her. She had come all the way out west knowing this. And if he knew about her or about their life without him he might come along finally too. So she tells him about the horsemen and the notes she’d taken and how she’d run their advice both ways to see if it worked. For a moment he doesn’t say anything. She worries the whole thing will lose its sweetness, in the open air between them. Then he laughs, asks her what her favorite kind of horse is, guesses geldings in a teasing voice. He means it cutely but she’s disappointed. She can tell he doesn’t believe her. Aloud it is hardly believable.
“No geldings there, Julius,” she says.
“That’s a nice racket for a gal, though,” he says.
“Oh, but it’s just a whim,” she says, to take the sting out of the moment.
“Careful now. Might be one of them things you can’t ever get enough of,” he says, but he’s still kidding her. The operator rings on and asks for another dime and Julius searches his pockets and comes up empty. The line goes dead and Muriel sits a long time with the receiver in her lap and the dial tone chiming. She hears Lee’s snoring and the pipes laboring in the wall and the radio in the kitchen plays “Walking the Floor over You” and then “Goodnight Irene.”
TWO (#ulink_6be89a67-1d53-5a37-b9a1-730c2b2b252d)
The Golden Nugget (#ulink_6be89a67-1d53-5a37-b9a1-730c2b2b252d)
A few days later Julius is in a back room in Torrance playing five-card. He draws so hot for so long that a crowd gathers, and in that crowd are men he knows and men he doesn’t. All are good drinkers and quick to blame others and thrilled at the warm spring day.
“Hallelujah anyway,” says one man, when Julius turns up a flush one card short of the royal.
He is playing two hardnosers and a novice and a young joe who bluffs too often. Along the walls the men are crowded together so close that ash from their upheld cigarettes drops onto their collars and into their shirt pockets. The smoke hangs above the crowd and drifts prettily. Outside the noise of jackhammers and asphalt trucks, and from the bar up front the low tones of the jukebox, so the back room sounds like a dentist’s office. Julius is in this part of the city by mistake, forced onto Del Amo Boulevard by a girder collapsed across 190th Street which he’d been walking toward the sea, thinking about his brother. He hasn’t found work in a week or more. But now he’s got two hundred dollars and the game’s big stack and there’s nowhere he has to be and no one looking for him. He hasn’t had this kind of luck since before the war or even earlier.
“You oughta take this game to the desert,” says a man close to Julius.
Someone else hollers, “Get a little coin in your pocket and then we’ll see what you’re really about.”
“I’ve been there and it ain’t much,” says another.
“Anything legit’s bound to scrape you up, Freddy.”
“Our Freddy here gets hives when even other people tell the truth.”
“Even if you lose, you can watch them bombs for free.”
“I just can’t believe it, all night and no cops and twenty-dollar buy-ins.”
“Sounds like Korea, the good parts anyway.”
A voice from the back asks what they mean about the bombs and several men begin to explain at once but all Julius hears is the name of the place and several of its cheaper hotels and aspersions cast at the weather. The crowd drinks and cheers him but he’s begun to sense the anxiety that accompanies good fortune. A few of the men know him to be a petty thief but never a card cheat, but most of them don’t know either of these things. Along the back wall are three men talking and watching him. Another man by the door learns his name and calls it out. Before things get dangerously better, he takes five dollars from the plywood where they’ve laid the game and buys a round for the crowd. He wins two hands, then bluffs another just to lose and folds the next.
It hurts him to cheat luck this way but there is always a longer game. He’s been in California just six months and already a man he knew was murdered outside a club in Rosewood. The police had raided two bars known for their friendliness to men and low lights. The raids changed the hustlers weekly, like the Sunday lettering on a church sign. He thinks about the nature of cheating and how it is tied to dignity, then pushes up his sleeves and buys another round and pockets for himself sixty dollars in ones and fives and lets the rest ride on a hopeless low straight that breaks the bank. He bows out and another man takes his place, but when he leaves the bar the three men by the wall follow him all the way to 203rd Street. It is just dusk and the city is sprayed in birdsong. To the west the blue ledge of twilight behind the buildings makes the city seem more important than it is. The men catch him in the alley and push him back and forth between them in a pinball fashion that means the thing they hate about him is also a thing they fear, and it is easy enough to hand over the cash and let that be the end of it and mercifully it is. Back in his little room he gets under the covers without undressing and he doesn’t sleep all night.
A few days later he gets a letter from his brother’s wife begging him south. Muriel has folded three crisp twenties in the envelope and signed off, It’s about time you got out of Los Angeles for a while. Julius takes this as an omen. He thinks about her that Christmas in Kansas, coming down the porch steps with her skirt hem balled in a fist against the wind and raised halfway up her thigh, and about his brother’s happiness. The story she’s told him of the horses, which he might be willing to believe, but it’s hard to imagine a woman alone in that way. He had promised to join them but that does not seem like what the letter and the money are telling him he ought to do. He waits a day and then he packs two rolled shirts and his knife in his good boots and carries each boot like a grocery sack under his arm and onto the train to Las Vegas.
FREMONT STREET BLINKS with men, lights, billets of paper, dropped coins, raised voices, and that afternoon’s monsoon rain. Julius walks from the train station directly to Binion’s and puts his name in for the poker room. He waits a long time to be called and when he is, the only open seat is at a table filled with young men in jackets and ties. He trades one of Muriel’s twenties for a stack of chips and loses it in ten mercenary hands.
He walks back through the casino past the slot-lines and the craps tables and the crowds gathered for anyone hot. Outside on Fremont it could be ten o’clock or midnight or just before dawn. It is just like the men said: The sidewalks are full of Angelenos and old gangsters and showgirls in feathers from rump to neck. Julius walks awhile through this modern noise and the dry landscape, and no one wonders about him or even looks his way. Even carrying his boots and in his dusty jeans like a pauper against the lighted street he is just another fortune seeker in the West. He goes back to Binion’s and sits at the bar and posts his boots upright on an empty stool and orders a drink. Behind him the slot-wheels clunk and the coins fall into the metal sleds. The craps tables beyond are full of suits and other legitimate men and the bar is open all night and drinking he has the sense of a deep rightness.
When a man sits next to him, Julius strikes up a conversation. The man is from Iowa, a salesman in Vegas for a trade convention, slight around the waist with blunt fingernails and thin white wrists. Julius shakes his hair and stretches one leg across to the rung of the man’s barstool so their knees are touching and the man is hemmed in between the bar and Julius’s body. The man tells Julius a story about a ranch just north of town, in Indian Springs, where for fifty dollars a Mexican with one eye would take men like them to a wild mustang roundup. He asks if Julius might like to go with him and Julius knows what kind of conversation this is. He says he knows next to nothing about horses but he could learn, and when he angles in the man turns toward the bar and into the fence of Julius’s body.
When they are very drunk they stagger half a mile off Fremont to the neon fringe and pay cash for a two-bed room at the Squaw Motel. There they share another fifth of whiskey and talk a long time about the flat places they’re from and how red the West is and from memory they catch bits of song and sing them out. Julius tells the man he’s come from Los Angeles and how the place had shifted beneath him like a coin and the man says that’s how things are now. Even in Iowa you’d be hard-pressed to get a job making anything but asphalt. They lie each to a bed and Julius asks across the distance whether the man is married and he says, “Sure.”
“How long you been married?”
“Not long.”
Julius holds the bottle over the gap between their beds and the man reaches out and takes the bottle and sits up a little and drains it. Then he hands the empty bottle back and turns on his side. He smiles but his smile is meant for someone other than Julius.
“My brother’s married newly too,” Julius says.
“That’s nice.”
“It is. Though it’s strange too.”
“I’m tired now, friend,” the man says.
“We don’t have to say nothing else.”
“If that’s all right.”
Soon Julius is aware of the man’s deep sleep and though the moment has passed he is not unhappy. Lee said that the best he ever slept was in Long Beach that last Christmas leave, when Muriel finally wrote and told him about her mother and asked him to come home. Lee and Julius had tendered in together on the Bryce Canyon and stayed at the Royal. They’d been at sea so long that even their boots were still serviceable, and though the war was over then and had been for some time, they both still owed a year to the navy. They sat in the hotel bar and Lee showed Julius the letter from Muriel and they talked about the plans they’d made together and Lee said it didn’t change anything. The next morning they found the first bus and rode east.
A year later Julius walked out onto the same dock at Long Beach but everything felt different. A woman in a Quaker dress handed him a copy of Isaiah bound in blue paper. He cashed his half-pay and took a bus downtown and sat at a lunch counter and read the booklet. He had forgotten Isaiah and how in the Bible all men were singular, good or bad, and he decided not to join his brother in San Diego. Probably he had decided this some time ago. He walked all night through the city thinking about dragons and springs and stands of rushes, and about his brother’s marriage, and he saw that the parks and the bars were filled with men. He felt absorbed into the great diffusion, as if he were dead. That afternoon he paid six bucks for a room with a window and slept all that day and into the next and that was the first time he slept the way he thought his brother had meant it.
AT DAWN JULIUS wakes to find the Iowan crying into the pillow, almost choking, his sobs forced out so hard his slight shoulders pull backward, bunched in the middle like a pleat. Julius rises and goes to his bed and places a hand on his back until the sobs fade, and as the harsh desert light comes through the motel window the man turns his face up to Julius and says, “I’m sorry. It’s just the drink.”
Julius says he’s all right. For a while longer the man lies on his back looking up while Julius sits on the edge of the bed. Neither speaks and outside they can hear the swampcooler dripping onto the pavement. The man takes Julius’s hand in his and waves it back and forth in a kind of comic handshake and then drops both their hands to the bedspread. Then he rises and enters the bathroom. Julius lies down where the man had been and falls back into hazy sleep. He wakes to find the man gone. Under a plastic motel cup is a hundred-dollar bill, a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, every towel in the bathroom wet and crumpled on the floor. It is a lot of money and Julius knows that he has been paid not for the room or the booze but for discretion. He says aloud to the room, “I wish you hadn’t of done that,” then folds the hundred into a tight square and puts it inside his boot. Should he see the man again he will return the bill, moist and reeking of his feet.
He steps out. The afternoon rinses the desert in brown light. He finds a cardroom dealing five-card, but the play is slow and stupid so he goes back to Binion’s and tries his hand at faro. For a solid hour he wins more than he loses and while he’s still in the black he cashes out and takes his winnings down the street to El Dorado. There he plays a game called high-low at a dollar a hand and cashes out well ahead. At the Lucky Strike the hotel’s full, same at the Apache, and Binion’s is ten bucks for a single, so Julius walks back through the fringe to the Squaw. The deskman takes him to the same room he’d had the night before. The sheets have not been changed, only tucked in at the corners, the bedspread tossed loosely over the pillows. He tries to sleep in one bed and then the other, and when he can’t he lifts one bedspread and shakes the ash from it and drops it on the floor. He lies on half and pulls the other half over himself. When he wakes up in the morning he has seventy-five dollars and a stack of uncashed chips and the Iowan’s bill. He showers and shaves and steps out into the bright day. He asks the deskman to switch him to a single room and pays for a week in advance.
FROM THE WINDOWS of their hotel rooms, visitors to booming Las Vegas may witness two competing wonders. On the desert floor Lake Mead accumulates, covering the brown valley. Two years of good snow in the mountains have swelled the banks, and in the afternoons tourists gather along the high ridge of Hoover Dam to watch the men sluice open the valves. Some say the walls of the dam are cemented with the bones of pack mules and men, probably rope too, Julius thinks, miles and miles of rope. And teeth. Empty carafes of coffee. Chewed and discarded fingernails.
But in the sky to the west of the dam is the real attraction. There mushroom clouds draw tourists in from less auspicious places, crowded cities in the east, farm towns north and west. On the rooftops men in tuxedos sip Atomic Cocktails with their sighing wives. They smoke smuggled cigars and ignore the news from Washington, the warnings of radioactive fallout, the strange, scraped feeling behind their eyes. These bombs, after all, are not meant to hurt them. Makeshift signs announce their names—Diablo, Hat Trick, Candy Boy—propped among the other dazzling junk of the city. On bomb days the pit bosses lure the gamblers outside, early morning before the desert sun appears and whites out the horizon where the bomb will lather, sometimes long into the day. On these mornings the casinos quiet, a spreading silence that echoes, inversely, the seismic gnash of the bomb outside.
In this setting Julius is not anyone in particular. He is not the tuxedoed men nor the lovers of those men and playing poker or twenty-one in the windowless rooms excites no one’s suspicion and in the morning the street is still alive. Unlike in Los Angeles or Ventura or Long Beach he is not guilty of anything. In other cities where he’s slept or turned cards or met men, he might have to slip out a side door or wait in an alley, but not here. To him, the neon and the money and the bombs are the marks of a city far ahead of the times. The tourists play poorly and Julius cleans them out and they shake his hand after and thank him and the cops sit with loosened ties at the same table. He sleeps during the day and eats when he wants to.
So he stays. Two weeks pass. He keeps his room at the Squaw a half-mile off Fremont Street. He plays faro until noon at a locals’ casino run by Mormons and stashes his winnings in a rolled sock in the ceiling panel of his room. The Mormons run a nice joint though they themselves are merely rumors. Julius has heard they live out past the city limits in a compound with eight-foot-high fencing and a swimming pool treated with saline, to simulate the great stinking lake gifted to them by God. He stops sometimes at the train station and fishes out a dime and thinks of his brother and Muriel but he does not call them, and soon so much time has passed he worries they will resent or even forget him, and he dreads this imagined moment, the silence after he says his brother’s name.
One morning he leaves the tables and steps into the dawn street and when he looks ahead to the horizon he sees a fist of fire reach up from the earth and soften into smoke. It is many miles away and the sound reaches him several moments later, a muted bang like a rock hurled against the side of a barn, and he thinks of how his brother, when they were children, would hook a thumb inside his cheek and pull it out to make a popping sound, to indicate that something had gone smoothly. Above him on the rooftops of the casinos a cheer goes up, peculiar, muffled, cautious even, and Julius looks above to see the tiny heads of men and women balanced against the easements, some even forcing their heads through the big looping letters of neon signs. The sky brightens suddenly then, as if the bomb has accelerated the dawn, and washes the buildings and the blinking signs in white until they seem almost to have disappeared. It is as if everything has frozen, as if they have all been returned to the desert unfettered by worry or language, base elements, the faces dissolving in the bright light until they are featureless, each face turned toward the horizon in the same astonished, straining way. He feels suddenly part of something, among these people for the first time.
That night he climbs to the Binion’s roof and sits at the edge with his smoking hand out in the night. He’s never really been on his own before and here it is easy. In the long western evening the booming city makes its careful transition. First the night birds and then the cars quieting and then the brief wind before sunset and the streetlights clicking on, until in a few silent spaces Julius can hear the peculiar hum of the desert. The bombcloud is still visible as a gray paste across the surface of the low moon, flattened now and stretching a hundred miles. He reaches his arm out across the alley and trails his hand through the air. He’d grown up in a shakeshingle ranch and had gone from there to the navy, where he’d never spent a night above the ground. From this height the city seems to belong only to him. He remembers an afternoon in childhood when he and Lee discovered an uncapped silo filled by years of rainwater. They had climbed the ladder and looked down into the hole from the rim, a hundred feet above the ground. The reflection of their own heads in the water was framed by the circle of light coming in, the circle turned black on the surface of the water like a negative and burnished around the edges, as if they stood inside an eclipse. For a moment he wishes for his brother and the future they’d imagined together. He looks out at the desert landscape and thinks of that silo and the memory covers the sight of the moon and the dispersing bomb so they are layered like bits of film, the dark of that water and the light inside it lifted through the bare mountains, so looking out he has a sense of boundless time. He flicks his cigarette up and out so it arcs into the alley. When he looks again the vision has dissolved. His brother has never been here and is not coming to take him home and if he walks through Las Vegas at dawn there is no one who cares to know it, no one waiting in a Torrance alleyway to steal back what they’ve lost. A man like Julius at the tables with his money in plain view. Here there are rules, and they are known, and you can win fifty bucks on a low-card straight fair and square, no hustle, just luck. What comfort in playing against the house and not against men.
A FEW DAYS later Julius walks into the Golden Nugget and sits next to two men smoking spiced cigarettes at the polished bar. For a while they make small talk until Julius learns their occupation. For weeks now he has watched the pitmen and the bosses run the casino floors and the sporting desks, men with quick eyes, and though they watch him and count out his chips he has never spoken to them. He asks the smoking men how a man might find such work. In turn they ask him what skills he has to offer. He is amazed they want to know.
He says, “I know how people steal. And I also know why they do.”
The men look so much alike they could be twins. Each turns his head to the mirror behind the bar as if searching for some message in the glass and then turns back to him. They remind Julius of a pair of sister cats they’d had when he was a child, indistinguishably marked and moving as one body as only animals can, sitting under the oak tree by the bunkhouse snatching birds from the air. He recalls the long faces of those cats, their eyes bubbled and transparent from the side, as he looks at the two smoking men.
“But you yourself do not steal,” says the man closest to him.
He places his fingertips together and looks at Julius over his tented hands. Julius leans toward him on the stool so his arm lies flat against the bar. He’s had a few drinks and is flush with dollar chips.
“Partly I know how people steal because I have stolen, I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “But it seems to me that this ain’t the place to steal, and I’d like to be on the right side of that.”
The men consider this. They take in Julius’s slim frame, his worn-down boots mud-splattered, the length of his hair. Julius has a warm feeling of acceptance, a sense that the men see not a thief or a sailor but someone born to a better fate.
“We’ve seen you around,” one says.
“You play aboveboard, we like that,” says the other.
They offer him a job running pit surveillance and he takes it, shaking each man’s hand firmly but waiting until he is a few blocks off Fremont and nearly to the Squaw before he smiles.
He returns that night and climbs a set of narrow stairs to an attic above the floor of the Golden Nugget. The stairs lead out to catwalks along the walls and through the middle of the attic, touching just off-center above the casino pit below. The catwalks are scaffolded and set so close to the ceiling Julius feels his hair brush against it. Every ten feet a two-way mirror is set into the attic floor, so the man walking the catwalk can look through them and watch the players below. Large fans front and back send in a hot breeze. Julius walks to the center and looks down at a craps table. He sees only the players’ hands, some fat-fingered and hairy, nails untrimmed, others slender and graceful. A man at the edge of the table leans forward to take the pot and for a moment looks up and Julius nearly turns away. But the wide shadowy sheet of glass bows down and out, convex, so the man looking up sees not Julius’s silent gaze but his own face, arched and upside down, as if he is staring into the curved back of a spoon. Julius himself has seen these windows from below, and though he’d assumed he was being watched he had not really considered all this, that above him was a network of paths and railings, made for watching. The whole thing seems to him so ingenious he nearly laughs aloud.
For an hour he moves between the windows watching the action at craps and blackjack. He sees nothing unusual, though from above the character of each game is changed and made piecemeal, divided into possible cheats or cons, and these are different from the things a player would suss out, by virtue of being punishable. Watching the games this way impresses him. In Los Angeles a man like him would never be trusted with such a job.
When he moves toward the center of the scaffold he sees in the distance a dark figure. Julius stops and waits. The figure comes closer and in the light cast up through the windows Julius sees the man’s boots, then his nubby trousers.
“You’re new,” the man says as he approaches.
Julius nods. They stand facing each other over the lighted window. The man is tall and dark-haired, Julius’s age or a bit younger.
“Henry,” says the man.
Julius says his own name and puts out his hand. The man’s hand is rough but his handshake is light and quick. He holds his other arm against his waist and in the pale light Julius sees it is ripped in scars.
“First time?” the man asks.
“It is,” Julius says.
“What do you think so far?”
Henry does not seem cruel to Julius though his appearance would suggest it, so Julius says what he thinks.
“You play?” Julius asks.
“Sometimes,” says Henry.
“This sheds some light on that, huh.”
“It does,” Henry says. “Seeing it this way is like watching yourself make love.”
Julius laughs and nods, then he reaches up to cover his mouth against the sound and because his missing tooth makes him suddenly sheepish.
“Instructive,” he says, through his hand.
“But a little ruinous,” says Henry.
“That’s right,” says Julius.
He drops his hand and looks at the man a long moment. The look goes on until Henry laughs and Julius laughs with him but then the laughter turns and stops. In this silence Julius becomes again self-conscious and looks away at the floor and then at his own hand on the railing. Henry says, “Welp,” and goes on his way to the other side of the casino loft.
Every few hours Julius and Henry pass each other at the place where the scaffolds cross over the pit below. Henry raises a hand or makes a hasty salute. The breeze across the center cools and dies. Below the tables thin out. On the third pass Henry stops a moment and makes a joke about a woman at the corner craps table, and suggests Julius take a look down her dress, and Julius says he will.
At four A.M. Julius descends the stairway and punches a clock in a back room filled with bank bags and boxes of casino matches behind mesh cage. This room, too, is covered in two-way glass, and an iron door with a sliding bar lock leads to another room. As he marks his pay card, a man in a seersucker suit slips out and closes the door promptly and soundly. From inside the lock is turned again. The man in the suit catches Julius’s gaze and holds it for a long moment, until his eyes begin to seem distant and opaque to Julius, like the two-way glass, as if somewhere inside the man there is another man who looks out, watching him. This must be the pit boss, Julius thinks. The man walks away without speaking.
Outside a yellow paring of sunrise. Julius walks all the way to the end of Fremont where the train station is busy with people. Beyond the station the brown scrubby plain rises into a rim of mountains. Julius steps into a phone booth, fishes out a nickel, and dials his brother’s number. For a long time the phone rings and Julius listens to the jangling bell until the sound becomes the backdrop to a thought he’s having. He thinks of the bomb he saw, and his new job. He wants to tell his brother these things but he isn’t sure where to start. But the fact of his brother seems suddenly necessary, some confirmation that his voice is welcome and known. He recalls the last time he saw Lee, in Okinawa, and feels a hollow feeling of doubt, which passes, which turns to envy and then to fear. Julius hangs up before the call rings out again.
Back at the Squaw he lies awake a long time thinking of the games he’s seen and the men’s hands below him and their various shapes, the half-moons of nail beds catching the neon and the man Henry’s scarred arm, until the daylight breaks fully through the curtains.
CASINOS MAKE SOME GAMBLERS forget the complications that attend money. As he walks the scaffold Julius considers the dark enclosure of the casinos, the money traded for chips and markers, the absence of clocks in any pit or cardroom, nothing closing or changing, breakfast buffets in the middle of the night. All the strategies for disrupting time, for breaking the link between cause and effect. But now it is Julius’s job to resist these things. The peek gives him perspective. He paces the catwalk looking for drunks, card palmers and dice loaders, cheaters of all kinds. He spends the most time above the blackjack tables. Blackjack is the only casino game where the gambler can get an edge over the house and for this reason it attracts cheaters of all kinds. Card markers and sleeve-men, confederacies of slack players who fake dim-wittedness to pass good cards to their partners or bust out better players waiting for the drop. Of course they know he is watching. At the tables they listen for his boots above, trying to gauge the distance before palming an ace or passing a queen, and in this way he becomes a part of the games below and the methods of the cheating men.
Each night between eight and four Julius is their steward. He thinks of himself this way. His job is to watch the players and nothing more. He does not administer punishment, only speculation, only what he believes he sees. Mostly he watches the players’ hands. Those with square or short or clumsy hands may mark but they do not palm. They are not built for it. The slender-fingered men, short nails buffed pale, no rings, wide cuffs touching the clefts of their palms—if those men start to lose, Julius will stay at the well above them past the time he is supposed to move on. Losing, for the best of them, is its own kind of strategy. He reports each suspicion with diligence to the two cat-faced men and collects his check at the end of each week. With the money he makes he pays for his room and his cash-ins and eats steak for breakfast and March starts to fade away. He sleeps through the warming afternoons and wakes with a feeling of purpose.
Then, at the beginning of April, the heat comes and covers the city in a shimmer. The casino attic is so hot Julius can feel his heart straining against his ribs. Sweat drips from his nose and brow and from his fingertips as he paces the catwalk. After an hour he takes off his boots and socks and unbuttons his shirt and wets a hotel towel and wraps it around his neck. He sips from a flask of whiskey and smokes to distract himself.
Before he and Henry are due to switch sides Julius rewets the towel with a cup of water already tepid. He leaves his shirt open and tucks the tails into the back of his jeans and walks to the other side. Henry walks slowly toward him and waves dully and does not call out. He is shirtless, covered in sweat, sheets of it over his face and neck. Julius watches him come. There is no breeze and the bowed glass is waxed by the heat. Henry pauses at the crossing to brace himself against the scaffold for a moment. He reaches out, one hand on the railing and the other pressed suddenly into Julius’s bare chest, his palm squarely in the cleft of Julius’s rib cage. Then he looks at Julius. “Oh,” he says and sinks to his knees, his arms bent so his elbows press into Julius’s thighs and his thumbs hook the flat bones in Julius’s hips. Henry leans his head on Julius’s waist, his cheek turned to the copper snap of Julius’s jeans, and to keep him from falling Julius takes his shoulders and his fingers slide in the man’s sweat. Julius leans as far as he can backward, the scaffold against him. He starts to say, “Now come on.” Henry’s hands fall away and he twists sideways to retch over the scaffold railing and Julius does not wait or offer comfort but turns back. As he walks along the catwalk to the other side he can feel Henry’s palm still there in the center of his chest, like a footprint rising slowly from the stubble of a mown field.
When his shift ends he waits until he hears Henry’s boots on the stairwell and keeps waiting long minutes after the door has banged shut below. It is a quarter past four when he finally collects his boots. He thumps them on the heels to evict mice or spiders and finds the Iowan’s bill there. It’s damp and when he unfolds it, it smells of sweat and cigarettes. He folds it again and puts it back. Downstairs he clocks out but makes a note in the margin that the last fifteen minutes should go unpaid.
Outside a cooling rain has come and gone and the streets reflect the neon in shallow pools at their edges. Julius turns toward the Squaw and is ducking down a side street when Henry catches him.
“Surely you ain’t going home,” Henry says.
“You mean my room or where I’m from?”
Henry laughs. “Home for the day, bud.”
“Well, I was planning on it.”
“Too hot to be cooped up.”
“A lot cooler now.”
“I owe you a drink, for before.”
The man looks so earnest, so genuinely embarrassed by his own weakness in the heat, that Julius knows he cannot refuse without revealing something about himself. He remembers the shape of the man’s shoulders where he’d touched him, square and ordinary now beneath his shirt. Together they walk down the wet streets and find a tourist bar and order the only kind of beer they have. Julius keeps an eye out for the bosses or any other men who might know them, who might think them in collusion or worse. For a while they talk about the weather and that night’s gambling and the sad landscapes of their childhoods. Henry is from the Central Valley and spent many summers in the fields there.
“I settled for Henry because no one could say Javier,” he says.
When Julius asks why he’s come to Vegas and how long he’s worked the peek, Henry says, “I guess they figure I can’t be much of a cheat,” and raises the injured arm.
“No, I guess you ain’t no palmer,” Julius says.
“Ain’t much of anything.”
Henry smiles and Julius sees something else about him.
“But I bet you play all right.”
“If you mean playing the goat or maybe by ear, because that’s all I’ve ever done till now.”
“I sure wish there was more poker, and not just in them cardrooms,” Julius says.
“House ain’t got no motivation for it. You play it overseas?”
Julius nods.
“What’s your game here?” he asks.
“Twenty-one,” says Henry.
“That so.”
Henry lowers his eyes.
“I know what people think about blackjack players.”
“How many blackjack cheats have you seen from that attic, just this month?” Julius says.
“Blackjack gives a man the edge, that’s true enough.”
Henry looks at him a long moment and Julius looks back and each is reminded of the other’s nakedness. Julius can feel this memory like a shape between them.
“You got people?” he asks.
“Oh, some,” Henry says.
Julius nods. Behind the bar the long mirror snags the orange discs of overhead light.
“I’m supposed to be in San Diego,” Julius says.
“How’s that?”
“With my brother. We planned on it, when we was overseas. I think mostly he wants to keep an eye on me. Nice weather though, and in San Diego you can build a house in the river valley for a song.”
“I know about California.”
“I guess you do.”
“How come you ain’t there then?”
“Too hard to tell.”
“But you could tell it to me.”
Henry smiles at him and Julius smiles back. He thinks of Muriel’s house in Kansas and his brother’s happiness. That Christmas Eve in the winter wheat talking about everything. The last time they were all together on earth.
“Too hard to tell,” Julius says again, and Henry laughs and shrugs and lets the mood change.
Soon they leave that bar for the Moulin Rouge. There Henry moves out onto the dance floor like he’s at a wedding, a wedding long put off and finally consummated under duress, legs moving in an ecstatic shuffle surely picked up in the grange halls of his youth, but even in his joy and his relief Julius knows he is withholding. At first he is alone, but when a slow song begins he finds a woman on the edge of the crowd. Julius drinks and watches. Henry’s cheek rubs against the forehead of the woman he holds, so close and so often that Julius can’t help but imagine the feel of it, the smell in Henry’s hair of tobacco, sweat, the raw wood of the attic catwalk. He knows what will happen next and he is not sure he wants it all again. He stands and steps outside. It is just past dawn, the heat already beginning to return. The streets are still crowded with men. The soggy bunch of the bill in his boot irritates him and to have something to do with his shaking hands he pulls the boot off to shift it. He worries that maybe all he’s ever really liked are the moments in which love was uncertain, when he could arrange himself in postures of ready seduction, in bed or half-dressed or letting a button linger under his hand, or, before any of these, leaning inside a doorway or stepping off the curb to cross a street where a man stands waiting, the look between them as he walks, the moments when he could still turn away, the private, erotic knowledge that one is the object of another man’s long gaze. He recalls other men from years or months before, men in the service or men who left the city in a rush or men who fell in love with women. He remembers the man from Iowa and his shaking back and the little snatches of song they sang. And his disgust is instructive, palliative. He does not have to worry over his own weakness then, when so many other weaknesses are apparent.
Finally Henry comes outside and looks up and down the street and sees him and waves. Julius pulls the boot back on, his sock bunched in the bottom and his jeans half-inside the shaft, and walks that way to his room at the Squaw, sending Henry through the parking lot ahead of him to wait in the alcove, then leaving the door unlocked while he takes off his shirt and jeans so Henry can scan the area before entering. But Henry does not wait, and before Julius can get his shirt undone Henry has banged through the unlocked door and turned Julius by the elbow and kissed him.
THREE (#ulink_02ce4ea7-1c7f-5815-96cc-6fd999526d61)
The valley (#ulink_02ce4ea7-1c7f-5815-96cc-6fd999526d61)
Muriel loves best those days when there are no races and the horsemen tell stories of fiasco and anomaly. At the lounge one afternoon she hears of a claiming race some years before, when a six-year-old broke a Del Mar track record and promptly dropped dead. Another, in which a redhaired boy from Montreal rode with his broken leg taped to the saddle girth. Or the story about the potbellied paint named Gingersnap who made such fast friends with an Angus bull that the two could not be separated and had to travel cheek by jowl in a special trailer widened for them.
Or, better: The horsemen in their leisure speak of things that cannot happen, that simply won’t. There will never be another Seabiscuit, not because he was built by God, as the papers said, as the trainers claimed, but because the universe allows only so much improbability. Nor another corker like the half-bred filly Quashed, who beat a Triple Crown winner by a short head over two and a half endless miles. Likewise the storied beasts of another era, National Velvet and Sergeant Reckless, warhorses on the eastern front, creatures from a dream an entire culture had once shared and woken from.
Through March of 1957 Muriel plays the late afternoon races ten dollars at a time. The winnings are limited by the stakes, which are mean and provincial, and though she knows now the names of stables and jockeys and colts gone early to stud still each new detail excites her. Each new detail is a familiar shape in a dark room. The high stakes are coming when the spring season opens, and most days the men drink more and longer and sit with their knees spread wide and out from the tables, taking account of the odds.
“Hoo now, in a couple weeks we’ll have some real money in play,” says the man with the mustache.
“Just think about that Lakes and Flowers race last spring at Hollywood Park,” says another.
“God that was gorgeous.”
“Like watching a sunset, but faster.”
“You got all the same riders as that race coming to Del Mar, and almost all the ponies, but no Misrule and no Porterhouse, so our field will be smooth as honey.”
“We’ll see where the odds end up. Eight races, I’ll be damned if one of them doesn’t come in double digits over the stilt.”
The old jockey called Rosie, given to water metaphors, says, “Tide’s coming in, bringing glad tidings.”
“Since when do tides bring that?” says the mustache.
“It’s called a pun, friend,” Rosie says darkly, but all the men laugh because the future is so bright.
AT HOME Muriel is distracted. One night she burns the meat and then the bread and when Lee touches her arm she cries out because she had forgotten him in her speculations. Lee tilts his head but says nothing and together they walk to the diner around the corner. Muriel feels a restful invisibility there, among the other patrons, who eat and talk and worry not at all about horses or progress or the passage of time. Lee orders pie and when the woman brings it he cuts the piece down the middle and slides the smaller half onto his saucer and pushes the rest across the table and Muriel makes a show of eating it and then a show of being full. When he’s finished his half and a third cup of coffee she pushes the plate back, barely touched. He winks at her and calls the waitress for the coffeepot and when she doesn’t acknowledge him he takes the cup and stands at the counter for a long time. The radio behind the counter plays heartache music. He holds his cup out like a pauper and finally the woman fills it. When he sits to eat he says, “Can’t have pie without coffee,” as if he were apologizing for this mere fact, for both the waitress and himself.
After dinner they walk back to their building and as they cross the common foyer they can hear the ringing phone. Lee wings the door open and takes the hallway in three long steps and Muriel listens for his reaction. He waits only a moment before he hangs up and turns to her and threads his fingers behind his head. He says that some husky voice has offered him life everlasting.
“That’s what she said.” The hands behind his head like a man being marched somewhere terrible. “Over the telephone, no less.”
Inside the apartment the smell of burned bread is chalky and unpleasant. Muriel opens the window above the sink.
“How long’s it been?” she asks.
“A month now.”
“Has it ever been this long before?”
“Not that I recall.”
Through the open window come the sounds of the street below, cars idling at the curb and voices from the sidewalk and between these noises the high call of gulls making a last round before the full darkness. Lee cracks a beer and sits at the table and takes a drink.
“I guess he’s doing fine on his own, wherever he is. Los Angeles or wherever.”
He tips up the can and looks at her over the rim like a man making a point and when she doesn’t answer he rises. He stands with his back to the counter.
“I guess you don’t think so,” he says.
“I don’t know what I think,” she says.
And she doesn’t. She remembers Julius’s voice down the line and what she’d told him about the races. She feels foolish, knowing she was not believed. Julius had not called since then. Lee looks at her as if he hopes she might speak again and explain away his worry or his bitterness but she says nothing more. Instead she goes to him and takes the beer and drinks and hands it back. It pleases him when she does things like this, simple things that suggest their shared lot in life, an easy intimacy.
“I told you he was always disappearing, even before our old dad was gone,” he says. He hands the can back to her and she jigs it to judge its fill and drinks all but the last swallow.
“But it turned out all right before,” she says.
“But it always happened again.”
He crosses his arms and leans against the counter. Muriel cracks another beer and hands it to Lee and takes one for herself.
“We’ve been here nearly seven months,” Lee says. “I’m not sure what else I can do.”
He closes his eyes and opens them again. Muriel thinks of that Christmas Eve and the men’s plans. How Lee had told her, as they lay together in her mother’s room, that he would always take care of Julius. He’d said this the way any courting man might, as a stay against his own misfortune. She knows that Julius’s absence changes what he’s able to declare about himself.
“It isn’t your fault,” she says to him.
“You tell that to our old dad. Not that you could’ve even when he was alive.”
Muriel nods remotely. She puts her head on his shoulder and sighs pleasantly, though his smell and this contact are at odds with her thoughts.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I caught Julius on Kansas Avenue in a bar the Del Monte guys used for faro?” Lee says.
“I don’t think so.”
“Our father was not dead but nearabouts. I guess I was eighteen then because it wasn’t long after this that I signed us both up, though Julius was too young. I was out looking for him, down in the factory bars, and in the third or fourth one I tried there he was in a pair of overalls, cleaning the heads. You wouldn’t believe the filth of that place. And it turned out he was working off a debt and he didn’t want to tell me, because he’d stolen from that bar, right from the till, to play into their card game.”
In the hallway the phone rings again but Lee does not move toward it. Soon someone else answers, speaking in a scolding voice.
“I’m not sure I realized it then, but I did soon after—my brother knew things I didn’t, he had passions of his own,” he says. He makes a face. She thinks of the story Julius told of the rabbit man and how he’d held her look for so long across the table. She does not share Lee’s fraternal resentment but she does feel betrayed, and also that she has been the betrayer. She had told Julius her secret and sent him that money and after that he disappeared. She wonders if her confidence was a kind of permission, the way even bluffs could close the distance between people.
Lee finds a cigarette and lights it and blows the smoke hard toward the open window. He says, “You know, after I’d been let off here, in San Diego, I couldn’t find him for two weeks. He’d been back himself already a month. I was sure of his date because I had a friend in the same crew and he told me they’d come back. Two weeks.” Lee holds up two accusing fingers. “Then finally he got my number from somewhere and he called me. He’d spent all the money he had and he asked me to wire more to a motel in Palm Desert. This was before you got here, you was probably on that bus in Arizona or someplace.”
For a moment Muriel looks at him without speaking. He holds out the cigarette for her and she shakes her head and reaches for the pack and lights her own.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” she says.
“I didn’t see why it would matter to you.”
“I thought you all got back at the same time,” she says. She turns away and blows her smoke into the room.
“Well, we didn’t.”
She knows he wants to say more but she doesn’t want him to say it. She doesn’t want to know any more than she already does. She thinks of the time passing and Lee’s worry. She sees him need her more because of all this. She steps forward and kisses him and before he can speak again she presses him toward the bedroom and unbuttons his top button and asks for his haste and his force.
THE NEXT DAY, Muriel stands at the end of the bar with a newspaper crossword folded neatly, jotting notes in the margins. In a week the season will open, and the undercard and then the Monday stakes are thick with good horses and riders known for putting on a show. For now the track is fast and the weather fine and the men speculate openly. Rosie is thinking through the chances of a newcomer named Willie Declan, who by all accounts will mount the favorite.
“You know the line, water everywhere and nothing to drink. That’s how Declan is on that California Star,” Rosie says.
“Hardly matters in that field. In with all those real riders, he’ll be as lost as a girl,” another man says, and drains his glass.
W. D., Muriel writes, lost at sea. But the horsemen are not done with Willie Declan.
“He’s a cement brick,” the mustache says. “Sure you can fit him in your hand, but you can hardly lift him.” He gives the table a look.
“But the hunnerd-granner,” says Rosie, who always stands up for the jocks.
“In the hundred-grander he ran on Whittleman’s Bitty King, and that was a gift of a fine match. Bitty could’ve carried a Mark 7 and won on slop.”
“But you can’t say Declan isn’t ready for a big race like this.”
Rosie again, and at this a few of the men make kissing faces at him.
“Maybe not. But I can say that he’s been a little light after that flu he had, and with Roustabout kicking up the way he is these last weeks no one will beat him who won’t ride the rail for a halfie.”
“I’ll wait for positions. At six Declan could take two from the rail, especially if Sayonara gets anywhere under five, and Declan could squeeze in that way. That’s how I’d run it, I’d sail the inner harbor,” says Rosie, but his voice is lowering now. He is fifty years old and still fit but he carries some sorrow the other men find disquieting.
“I’m sure you would but that don’t mean you can,” the mustache says, and leans across the table and flicks Rosie on the chin.
The talk goes on this way. At this first stage the odds are fluctuating, and a late El Niño rain would bring a scratch or two, from the finer runners whose trainers won’t race them on mud. Anyone glancing at Muriel’s notes would see a set of names and numbers and track slang coded into her own shorthand: ’Nara if under five see W. D. Whittle on the wire if cuppy. Too Young 4–8.Roust at center post breaks ’Nara.
The week goes on. The odds begin to calcify, then a horse falls ill and a jockey gets bumped and another disappears for two days downtown. The men grumble and reset their charts. The hot clear weather brings a strange nothingness: no moths against the screens, no hum of insects, neap tides quiet all night. Instead there is a permeating blueness like the inside of an eye. The heat brings people out of the houses and shops and back rooms. Along the narrow streets of Muriel’s neighborhood, workmen cart flowers and crates and white heaps of ice. In the tiny front yards women dump wash water into short stemmy stands of geraniums. The children spill from stoops and curbs in overalls and short sleeves, the coastal sun catching them and turning them divine, in that instant freed by the sun from work and peril. Their mothers in dresses the color of unready peaches, sweating over the wash.
Downtown the dice players and cigarette men and men in tight pants, shirts unbuttoned to their navels. Walking from home to work is like passing between two worlds. Muriel finds herself one afternoon standing a long time in front of a shop window, thinking about the races. Behind her a newspaper vendor and two men in denim jackets are reflected in the window. The men are young and she can smell their cigarettes and their cologne. She looks up at the store window and draws herself away from their attention. She remembers her mother in the summer cooking chops and onions in her underwear while a man sat fully dressed at the table, watching her. The way this distinction between them, between nakedness and not, seemed to confirm something her mother believed about love: that vulnerability existed only in asymmetry, that two people could not be vulnerable together. Her mother believed if she gave men this small advantage she would not be harmed.
In the shop window a large television plays a game show. A man in a glass booth on a soundstage gazes outward in concentration while a clock ticks away in the corner. Muriel thinks of Julius and where he might be and why he hasn’t come. The show gives way to an ad for Convair, a woman standing with a suitcase in her hand watching an airplane take off. Though she can’t hear the TV Muriel realizes she is hearing an airplane and she looks up and sees a real airplane in the sky, reflected in the store window. She turns and tracks it as it flies over the city headed east. This confluence seems like luck or validation or something mystic. When she turns back to the television the plane is gone, but the other plane is still reflected in the window, as if it had flown off the screen and into the actual sky. She imagines the airplane flying past the rough buildings of this city, over the vendor and the smoking men and the mothers in their collared dresses. Out past the central mountains, then further east across the desert and into the scrub, rich and minty and full enough to hide a child, then over the irrigation circles and tired motels of her youth and down into the endless prairie and over her mother’s house. The plane disappears in this direction and the sound goes and then it is just the men and the contrail, reflected in the glass.
That night, after Lee has fallen asleep, she peels open the envelope and counts the money there and thinks through the odds. She does a bit of math on the envelope flap. She thinks of Lee’s story, of Julius in overalls working off a debt, and then about his discharge. She worries she’s misunderstood them both. She thinks of Lee standing so long at the counter with his coffee cup, waiting for the woman to fill it. She studies the envelope and her arithmetic and she’s not sure what she might need the money for, only that she does, only that winning would prove something vital that she cannot otherwise prove, and that no one else can see.
THAT WEEKEND Lee borrows again the boss’s Lincoln and drives them through downtown and across the river to see the interstate. In another year it will be complete, running along the edge of Mission Valley; they can see its elevated form now, the men hanging overhead, the black dust from the columns. Lee stops the car along the curb and he and Muriel look up at the cranes and the skirts of rebar, the figures held by flat ropes. The general feeling of the time is that such a marvel is deserved, as marvels are deserved all over the West.
They drive on, past lemon and orange and avocado orchards, hidden inside the city as if cupped inside its palm. The orchards are surrounded on all sides by a network of cul‑de‑sacs and graveled lots and as they pass Muriel watches the rows of trees flare by the window, interrupted by patches of cleared land and glimpses of the river running low, gridded through with new roads not yet paved. She looks at Lee and in this light he has the chromed look of a photograph, peering ahead at the driveways and ghosted streets. They pass a cowfield, a roadside lean‑to stacked with eggs, a sign offering jarred local olives, then again into the not-yet neighborhood.
Muriel knows where they are going and though she might have expected it still she feels deceived. In a half-mile the road turns back to gravel and curves south to the river. Lee stops the car and they get out to stand along the dirt margin. He turns to Muriel and smiles. He gestures across the lot in front of them, marked off by twine and stakes of wood, then marked off again by small flags stuck in the ground between the stakes. The back of the lot disappears in a tangle of blank ash and scrubby bushes, and below this hidden limit is a soft bluff that drops into the river, which they can hear from where they stand. Lee takes her hand in his.
“This tract is the best of them, two thousand for the land and the specs, then I bet we could build out for another six. Hardly anything, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering how fast all this land will go. What it will cost in another year.”
Lee’s voice lifts into insistence. He looks at her and she looks back. The fact of her mother’s house in Kansas rises up between them.
Lee says, “We could get at least six grand for that house, you’ve got to know that’s true. And we got a couple hundred bucks already.”
She holds his gaze until he looks away and across the lot to the river beyond.
Finally she says, “But you promised your brother you’d do this together.”
“And do you see my brother anywhere?”
His tone is wounded. He holds her hand just long enough to offer his forgiveness but not his surrender and then he lets go.
He says, “This place, California, it’s indifferent to the past. All the people and the cities and the ocean and all of it.” He waves an arm to indicate distance. “All the sailors coming back and the factories and the folks coming over the border. In another year there won’t be nothing to buy and then where will we be, we’ll have to go all the way backwards.”
Muriel does not respond. The sunlight is muted inside the trees and the wind shakes them. She can see dust brought loose and drifting above the crowns of the trees. Lee puts an arm around her and when she stiffens he squeezes her lightly and drops his arm. As if to remediate this failed gesture he gathers himself and says, “You know, that last time me and Julius saw each other, on Okinawa. We had two days of R and R and we met in a village where all the men went, from the stations. This was last year, May, it’s still so cold there in May we sat bundled head to toe even inside the bar, you could hear the wind outside. I thought he was being strange but I couldn’t figure why and then we met this other fella from his station and things got real strange then.”
Lee pauses and looks at her then looks away. Muriel has not heard this story before. He lowers his eyes against the vista and folds his hands across his beltline and toes the dirt and decides to say the next thing.
“Julius beat that fella pretty bad and we got eighty-sixed. Walked a mile in that cold afterward, just shaking and not talking. Then we sat in the train station and waited for morning, and it came out then that Julius was in trouble for something, he’d been caught in the barracks with some other man. I assumed smoking grass or gambling but then a few weeks later they put him on the Saratoga, even though he only had a few months left. In Long Beach they gave him a general discharge and half-pay and nothing for the leave he hadn’t taken. I heard this from that same friend’s cousin. Of course I don’t know what he did but sure thing it was worse than poker.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asks.
“You know what he said, when he finally called?” Lee says. “He said it was good I was marrying you. He said, that sad girl, she needs someone to tell her what to do.”
Muriel crosses her arms and will not look at Lee, whose gaze is imploring. He wants to be forgiven right away for saying this, he wants her to understand he is only the messenger. Yet she catches in his tone a savage relief. He could not abandon his custodial role but it might be taken from him. He might be glad to have his brother disappeared. She hadn’t known this before and it frightens her.
Muriel turns from him and walks to the road and waits. Lee walks down to the bluff and stands a moment looking out. He leans to touch the wooden stake and then the line of twine that runs out from it, his fingers light along the top like someone making a sense memory. He’d been a poor child and knew the value of things. For a moment she’s not angry, thinking about how poor he’d been.
When he turns around he has summoned his dignity and he lifts one hand to wave it all away. They get in the car without speaking and Lee drives slowly along the road to keep the gravel from flying up and chipping the paint of his boss’s Lincoln. When they pass the sign for olives Muriel asks to stop. Lee turns into the dusty yard and parks but does not cut the engine.
Muriel steps out of the car and climbs the porch and knocks but hears no movement; after a moment she knocks again, but still no one comes. She leaves the porch and shrugs to Lee but she’s not yet ready to get back in the car, she wants first to succeed at something. She turns and walks around the house, toward a set of outbuildings and chicken coops in back. Behind an empty corral she spots a barn with an open door and a tidy interior, and as the light changes Muriel understands that someone is inside. She calls out.
In the doorway of the little barn appears a young woman in a man’s striped overalls, cuffs pinched inside her boots. She raises one hand in the air without waving it, moving out of the doorway in quick steps like a child, into the dusty yard.
“You lost?” she says.
The chickens come clucking toward the fence and gather in a line and stare out at Muriel. Their sudden synchronous movement is comic. The woman in the overalls smiles and turns to shush the chickens.
“They’re like watchdogs,” Muriel says.
The woman says, “Dogs aren’t so humorless.”
Muriel takes another step toward the birds and they move back a fraction and as if a centerline had been drawn between them they part and peel off into their grainy little courtyard. As they totter away, they turn their small heads back suspiciously.
“I see what you mean,” Muriel says. She thinks of the horses moving as a wall from the gate, then fraying off as the race finds its character. Animals were strange in this way, their sameness, their single-mindedness. The woman asks what Muriel needs.
“Your sign,” Muriel says, and with her thumb points back toward the road.
The woman makes a noise of understanding. Muriel takes in her slight frame. She is dark-featured and short and surely native to this place, the kind of woman her mother might have known when she was cleaning offices downtown, with whom she might have had coffee or cold sandwiches.
“That’s for García’s, next house over.”
Muriel thinks to apologize but the woman turns in a long stride toward the house and waves with one arm. Muriel follows, and though she is confused there is some pleasure in this, the casual submission to a stranger’s command, after the conversation with Lee. On the back step the woman heels her boots off and holds the screen door for Muriel to enter. Inside the house Muriel sees no sign of another person. The walls are bare and the rooms divided by thin curtains like bedsheets and along the floor are books stacked at various heights. A lamp lights a corner where an armchair sits though the rest of the room is without furniture. She cannot see past the curtains to the rooms in the back, though she feels by some intuition that they are empty.
“Not much of a decorator,” the woman says, a wave of her arm taking in the bare room and the perimeter of the house and the dry mums along the porch. For a moment Muriel sees herself as she imagines this woman does, as Julius apparently does, as someone simple and apologetic and easily led. They walk into a bright kitchen that faces the road. Through the window Muriel can see Lee in the car, his eyes closed against the sun, and beyond him to the river and the fields and the marked-off lots below. The woman looks out the window, over her shoulder, and Muriel sees her see the idling car and the square shape of her husband.
“Looking at land,” the woman says. Her voice is deep and softly accented, Muriel notices now that they’re inside.
“We are,” Muriel says.
“Now’s the time, I hear.”
Muriel catches in the woman’s tone a light resentment and understands then that she has been read as something else, that the woman sees not a Midwesterner or a waitress but a different kind of foreigner, a nice dress and a wide car coming in from town. She feels a refusal, a sense of herself as changed by the woman’s presumption.
“My husband wishes it was,” she says.
The woman turns from the pantry to look at Muriel.
“He’s out there pouting now.”
The woman registers no shock. Instead she collects a jar and hands it to Muriel.
“Is it land he’s upset over or some other reason?” she asks. She puts both hands inside the bib of the overalls.
Muriel tries the lid and can’t budge it. “He’s got all sorts of problems,” she says, and holds the jar out.
The woman regards it. “You think you can solve them with olives?”
“I’ve never had an olive, so I don’t know, but I thought I’d give it a shot.”
The woman drops the bib and takes the jar from Muriel. “That’s big of you,” she says.
She works at the jar lid with some force. A stalling quiet then, as they stand in the bright kitchen. Muriel has never learned polite talk. Her mother knew that people walked into the conversations you left open for them, that a small silence could change the course of a life. Never ask a man about his day, she often said. And because she never did, men told her all manner of other things, their secrets, their terrible fears.
Next to the sink is a small pair of scissors. A single coffee cup on the pine table next to a hand mirror. The woman’s hair is in two braids and the ends are as straight and dark as the edge of a nailbrush. It is easy somehow to imagine her leaned against the counter, the bite of the scissors and the hairs falling along the lip of the sink. Muriel feels a shift in her perception, a sudden longing for woman’s solitary act. Though Lee has not opened his eyes, she moves to one side of the window where she can’t be seen.
“There’s a story about this valley,” the woman says finally. She waits for Muriel’s interested look and Muriel gives it. “I’m sure you saw the fruit orchards. Was oranges and lemons and walnuts, get shipped out to Ohio and whatnot. But those are going too, for the tracts, but that’s neither here nor there. Because what I mean to say is that not that long ago you’d have seen olive trees too. And olive trees have thin leaves like fingers, bright green on one side and pale on the bottom, seeming too small for how the trunks grow, which is twisted and thick, so an olive tree is like two things put together. I say this because if you haven’t had an olive probably you’ve never seen an olive tree either, or you didn’t know you had.”
The woman pauses. Muriel remembers with pleasure the effusive, sudden talk of country people, after so long in the city. She nods to keep the woman going.
“So. Used to be this valley was full of them,” the woman says. “They say when the Spanish came they looked down into the valley from the Lagunas and saw the leaves blowing and they thought the ground was changing color. And though they knew olives, it still took them a while to come down here, the sight was so strange.”
She removes the lid and fishes one finger along the inside of the jar and flicks an olive into her palm. “If only they’d stayed up there looking down, but then I wouldn’t be here I guess,” she says. She holds the olive out to Muriel. Muriel takes it and puts it in her mouth. The taste is salty and the texture is fleshy, disorienting, but under the saltiness something plummy, rich as jam.
“There’s a pit,” the woman says.
Muriel finds it and spits it into her palm.
“What do I do with it?”
“I usually toss mine in the yard.”
“But then it might grow a tree.”
The woman laughs as if Muriel has finally surprised her. “But that’s not the end of the world,” she says.
Lee’s voice on the porch, then, and the women turn from each other. The woman hands the jar of olives to Muriel without replacing the lid, then hands the lid to her. She opens the door and moves out onto the porch in her bare feet and Muriel follows. Lee moves back to stand on the steps.
“We could also use some eggs, if you’re going to shop,” he says to Muriel.
“I’ve got those. Laid this morning and warm yet,” the woman answers. She leans her shoulder neatly against the porch rail. Muriel hides the jar behind her back. In her closed hand the olive pit feels like a pressed thumb. Lee nods and the woman moves past him into the sunny yard. She takes a container of eggs from the small hut by the fence and walks back toward them.
“What do we owe you, then?” Lee asks.
“Oh. I can’t sell the olives to you, surely. It wasn’t really me you wanted,” she says.
She stands now below them in the yard and raises her hand to her forehead against the sun.
“Then we’ll have to overpay you for the eggs,” Muriel says.
Lee takes the eggs and heads back to the car, and once he’s past the woman she looks at Muriel and makes a condoling face. Muriel dips into the jar and takes another olive and eats it. She spits the pit over the porch rail. The woman says, very quietly, “You’ve got it now.”
Muriel lids the jar and hands the woman a dollar, then ducks into the idling car. The woman watches them back out of the drive and turn away.
BY THE TIME they’ve returned the car and walked back to the apartment the sun has lowered in the sky, throwing the buildings and the power lines into ashy shadow. Muriel makes a quick dinner and hard-boils half the eggs. Once they’ve finished eating and put out the next day’s work clothes the mood has softened between them, and Lee turns on the radio and pours them each a glass of beer. They play three hands of gin and Muriel lets Lee win them all.
Later, as she lies sleepless, Muriel thinks of the woman and her tidy house. She thinks of the trees, grown so tall by the river. She remembers the story Julius told that Christmas, of the burned paintings in Korea, and then she thinks of her mother’s funeral. Her mother had been buried without service in the Protestant cemetery a mile from their house. There was no bidding prayer and no eulogy, just the two pallbearers and a few of her mother’s friends. It was almost September but the long heat of that summer carried through the season without ease. Nothing would settle. No rain, and the dust gathered in the air and hung there. The machines in the fields nearby turned up contrails of dust that lingered in lines a half-mile long. The heat collected in the bright spaces between the trees and birds and squirrels dodged through them as if through barn-fire. While the casket was lowered Muriel looked out at the blazing landscape. Through the hanging dust the sun was setting, and the red light cast up and caught in the dust and waved like flame, and that was the end of things.
Next to her now Lee sleeps soundly and she can feel his heat in the room. She remembers Julius’s serious look as he told them about those paintings, his fingers tented together. What’s the harm in landscapes? he said. That’s what I can’t get over. Then his wide grin. When he finally calls, she thinks, I will ask him to tell that story again.
A FEW DAYS later Muriel leaves the Heyday in a loose dress, a sweater over her shoulders and her hair pushed back by sunglasses. She takes the bus as far as Twelfth Street and walks the rest of the way, nearly all her money folded in a piece of brown paper and pressed inside the elastic waistband of her dress. She imagines the odds will change one more time but not by much. Judging from the clear weather and the positions and the horsemen’s last details she has a good number for the bay in the seventh race, and several others in the earlier stakes races. A chancy amount to win in the first five, plus a little luck on a series of boxes in the later runs would end the day well ahead, if the odds hold and the win pool clocks out where the horsemen predict. She has calculated each possible win to pay out below the tax limit. What she might do with the winnings she hasn’t considered. The money has been abstracted into something else, something terrifically unlike her. Carrying it inside her dress she feels the way she imagines a saint might feel, with a secret that is also a piety, a kind of goodness that holds its own in the world. She could lose every race this season and still have enough to start over.
The track is crowded with the better class of gamblers, the fine-hatted women and men in linen suits, those for whom the horses carry history and status. These people will know the names of owners and foals and which stallions have come to stud. Among this crowd she will not be noticed because she is no one important. She wins the first two races and this does not surprise her, so before the third race she buys a drink and bets both the winner and the perfecta, which leaves more to chance but also more to gain. When these come through she feels the prickly blood in her ears and the drink falling quietly through her and she takes one ticket to the south windows and the second to the east so no single cashier will know how much she’s won. She keeps out half the bills and folds the others into a tight square and closes it in the brown paper. Then she buys another drink and bets less than planned on a win-place-show, but she wins this race, too. This last-minute change, determined by an unlikely win in the previous race, makes Muriel feel conspicuous. She considers sitting out the fifth race. The day is warm and the crowd raucous and changeable, the clear feeling of the day is hazardous. Beside her in the upper section a man and a woman who is too young to be his wife lean into the shade with their legs entwined. Below them a fist of sailors with their hair undone and falling into their eyes. All around the track are postures of similar intemperance. Yet she is calmed by a sense of isolation from any other world. There is only now the heat of the day and the smell of the horses and the lived fact of her presence here. Suddenly she can do anything she likes. She stands and bets a win and another exacta, then moves quickly to an empty seat along a row of couples. Among them she will be invisible, and any seat next to her will be presumed to belong to her husband, off at concessions or at the mutuel window.
She wins that race and the race after. Now the square of bills is too large to be folded again, so she peels away a quarter of it and holds it without counting, because she can guess how much is there. The next race is the one she’s waited for. With this stack of money she rethinks her strategy. To bet the whole amount would produce too big a win, so she takes a third of it to the east windows, a third to the south, and the rest downstairs to the front, and in that way makes three separate bets, all according to the horsemen’s talk and her interpretation of it. All in all a two-thousand-dollar stake. She knows this caution is its own kind of risk, that anyone watching would find such behavior suspicious, or that another gambler with the same tactic could take notice of her. But she cannot bring herself to name the full number for a cashier. To tell a stranger such an amount seems to her less an act of hubris than an admission of startling freedom. That she could hand that kind of money to improbability.
She waits another fifteen minutes for the post. The crowd bristles and the breeze has whipped in from the ocean and brings with it the intricate, living smell of the offing. Finally there’s Willie Declan on the big bay called California Star, coming to post in the sixth position with Sayonara looking grim in the third. She checks the odds one last time though she knows them. Around her the crowd has quieted and as the horses enter the stalls she has a strange feeling of doubling, the horses and their riders lined neatly behind the starting gate, the crowd lined in their rows to watch. A sensation like the tremor of a cask. The horses break in a wall and move toward the inside track and as the horsemen have predicted Declan finds the rail and squeezes Sayonara out and behind him. The field stretches wide, Declan keeping Sayonara at a length, then a half-length, then holding, and then a surge and Sayonara falling back again. The race continues without change or spectacle and when Declan takes the race by two lengths she doesn’t move. Sayonara is second, and the clip-legged roan is third, behind the other two by a distance. She’s won each bet she made.
Across the finish line the horses cool at a trot, then the pit ponies are led out and the horses become mere animals again, snorting and tightly controlled and walking along the outside rails. She thinks suddenly and for no reason she can name of the chickens at the woman’s house in the valley and their coordinated movement, then of the moment she has imagined but not seen, of the woman leaned back, her braid brought in front of her shoulder to be trimmed. Something in this image makes her furious and light-headed. A quick calculation of the winnings alarms her and she looks around at the loosening crowd, some people leaping and some sitting resolute, a group of old men turned toward each other and away from the track, and waits for someone to notice her. As she waits she finds the inside seam of her purse with her fingernails and starts to work it, scraping at the thin lining until she breaks a hole. Without looking down she rips away at the seam until she’s made a pocket in the side of her purse. She places the fold of money in it and hides the bulge with the newspaper she’s brought and then the ball of her sweater pressed against it. Her face and arms are cold though she is sweating openly. None of the races has been remarkable. They will not enter legend or be spoken of in any way except personally, when years from now someone here remembers the afternoon at Del Mar in 1957, when he was on leave, or before there were children, or because it was his birthday.
Finally, when the crowd’s energy has lessened and people have turned back toward the turf or their companions, she makes again her careful rounds to the separate banks of windows and puts half of the winnings in the hole in her purse and the other half down the front of her dress. Now the trouble is in getting home. Certainly she will not stay for the last races. Though she’s made no outward sign she knows that any woman leaving alone on a day like today is an easy mark, and anyone might have been watching her. She crowds in behind a married couple pressing through the turnstiles and follows them out to the parking lot, then at a distance through it. When they peel away to find their car she moves swiftly forward, where another group of people is halted at the crosswalk, which clears for them to cross the turf road and onto Via de la Valle.
Then she is alone. With the scarf she wipes her brow and neck and brings it to her eyes as if she might cry into it though she does not feel like crying. She is not the type to search the peculiar for signs or omens but she cannot help the feeling now that some veil between worlds has been very slightly lifted, that she stands exposed on the weedy street corner. Across La Valle she can see the crowds of people outside the bars, everywhere in the coastal wind are halves of tickets and racing forms. It is seven o’clock in the evening. She knows she should move toward the bus station before she misses the seven-fifteen through downtown and is stranded for an hour among the crowds.
She turns toward the stop but walks slowly and only when she sees the bus does she move all the way under the metal shade. For twenty minutes she rides in a state of watchful anticipation. Through the windows the city goes by. Housing grids and cleared ground breaking open the late daylight. The heavy flicker of palm trees. She thinks back to the bus ride from Kansas, five days across the Plains and then the Rockies, down into the great valleys of the West, the young men on their way to the naval yards and on to Japan, retching out the slits of the bus windows, sick before they’d even seen the ocean. Then the day she was married, witnessed only by the court clerk, because Julius had not come. She should have known then—she might have changed her mind. The progress of things like a pitcher tipped downward to fill a glass. How quickly it had all happened.
She gets off a few stops early and stands under an awning not knowing what to do. Though she is far from the track now, she still has the feeling that anyone can look at her and know exactly what’s happened. Across the street and down another block she sees the Radford Hotel, four stories high and unfancy, but decent, and in this decent neighborhood. She walks to the light and crosses at the crosswalk, then down the next block, keeping to the storefronts and in the shade thrown by the buildings. The sun is low now and falling away. At the desk she signs her maiden name in the log and is given a key for a room on the third floor. Once in the room she closes the door and turns over the dead bolt and the brass hook.
She lifts the skirt of her dress and pulls out the money there, then takes the rest from the lining of her purse and drops the pile on the bed. Nearly ten thousand dollars—she knows it to the cent. She lights a cigarette and looks from the bed to the window facing the street, then back along the wall, as if she is searching for some rent or weakness. She is surprised to see a telephone on the nightstand. She could call Lee and tell him she’s taken an extra shift and then she could sleep or stay well past dark, but he might want to come by for her. On the bed and away from her the money is frightening and actual. She should have stopped after the third or fourth race. She sits on the edge of the bed and finishes her cigarette, then lights another. She lifts the receiver and asks the front desk for a line out, and when the tone comes she dials the number in Los Angeles, where they’d last reached Julius. After a dozen rings a man answers.
“Julius?” she says, though she knows already that it isn’t him.
“Maybe so,” says the man in the menacing voice men use to charm women. “Depends what you’re after.”
She thinks suddenly that what has spooked her is not good luck but the vivid fact of luck itself. Even with all her preparation and the long knowledge of the horsemen, her account of the weather and the odds, only preposterous chance could have led to this result. And if there was such good luck in the world, and if it could outpace her own agency and her own knowledge, then bad luck must be the same, and no luck, too. She has been seen and accommodated by luck, and she wants out of its sight line.
“What gives, sweetheart, you need some kind of advice?” the stupid man on the phone says.
She hangs up without speaking and lies on her side facing the curtained window. Her mother’s house and her mother’s grave are five days’ drive and if she called the Carter boy she is sure he’d open the windows and sweep out the eaves, though what she would do after that she can’t say. She could do anything she wanted now but she doesn’t know what that might be. She cannot describe her disappointment and can imagine no one to whom it would matter.
She closes her eyes and lies still a long time. She thinks of her mother’s house that Christmas Eve. In her memory the night deepens over the wheatfield as she and Julius sit turning cards in the kitchen. They have drunk all the wine in the house and Julius is turning up cards and explaining them. He says he once knew a man who sang so beautifully that other men wept even many days afterward. He tells her about the rabbit man and another man he knew who memorized the scientific names of flowers and all of these men seem to her unlike any she has known before. Like him they are receptive and lovely and out of place, not her mother’s men or her mother’s romance but something altogether else.
“Where do you find such people?” she asks.
“Oh everywhere, everywhere,” he says, and raises his arms above his head and opens them out as if marshalling a symphony. She wants a better answer but she does not know what question will prompt it. In his conducting motion she sees the basic contours of another world.
Julius shuffles the cards and lays them out. He says, “This is the bedpost queen,” and shows her the queen of spades with the jeweled scepter upraised and amative. He turns up the king of hearts and says, “And this is the suicide king,” and when he asks her what it feels like to be in love she says she wouldn’t know then realizes what she’s said. But he laughs simply, then he lets his face sallow and says very seriously, “If the next card I turn up is a diamond or a seven we’ll build the house on a hill so we can see the sea.” He reveals the eight of clubs and they both look at it on the table and then he flicks it with his fingernail so it sails off the edge and he turns the next card and the next until they have the jack of diamonds.
When she woke the next morning he was still at the kitchen table playing solitaire with the radio on low and she stood a long time in the next room listening to him sing along. For months she had risen from her mother’s bed and bathed and made coffee and gone to work and waited on the mail. She woke often from dreams about birds. And still she was no closer to understanding what she might do next. When finally she entered the kitchen Julius smiled and wished her a Merry Christmas but there was no indication on his face of what they’d shared. She’d thought then that he was trying on propriety, that the drink had turned and muted the feeling between them, and that was all. But now she knows he thought her sad and aimless, and too innocent for what he’d told her. The next evening the men left and sailed back to Japan and since then she had talked to Julius only once and he had never answered her letter. When she’d told him about the horses, he hadn’t even believed her.
Now, beyond the wall of the hotel, the sounds of the city are muffled and blank and what life exists there is expressed only as a tapping, a constant interval of noise, undifferentiated. She presses up on her elbows. Then she turns to sit cross-legged and takes up the pile of money and begins to arrange the bills by denomination. As she does she rotates each and stacks it so it matches the corners of the bill below. Then she counts it out, first the big bills then the small. She finds a sheaf of hotel paper and rips off three sheets and divides the bills into two big stacks and a smaller third and folds them inside, creasing the edges of each sheet to make an envelope. She slips these into the pocket she’s made in her purse and presses the edge of the ripped lining up and under the seam. Then she leaves the room and takes a narrow stairway back down and out a side door that leads to an alley. She walks the eight blocks home, catching with soft eyes the shapes of men and shopkeepers in her periphery, feeling the weight of the money the way one feels the imminent coming of rain.
At home she meets Lee’s fretting look at the door and tells him a story about a missed bus, about having to walk several blocks from the restaurant to take another line, one that wound through the Stingaree at summer dusk and from whose windows she could see the men playing dice against the brick fronts. She knows he’d worry about her in that neighborhood, but now that she’s home safe they can laugh about it, and she wants this laughter, this after-danger easing, to calm her. It does not occur to her that she wants to hurt Julius but his absence has turned into a justification, and she wants this day and what she will do next to stay the way a secret should, unavowed, and belonging only to her.
THE NEXT DAY the horsemen gather at the lounge later than usual, in black suits too big or small, depending on each man’s age and density. Someone they know has died—Gerald, they say, though Muriel does not recognize the name—and rather than the previous day’s big races they speak of the man’s funeral, where they have just been. Three nights ago a vice raid over by the railyard cleared the streets and sent men to jail or worse. The man they’re mourning was involved in some way, though no one says how. She sees that the jockey Rosie is missing.
“That’s what men like that can expect,” someone says.
Above them the plantation fan presses the air through the unseasonably warm day.
“Some asshole will always say Well now at least he didn’t suffer. And I’d say, then you didn’t know Gerald, because if there was ever a sufferer it was him—and it’s not like I’m speaking ill of the dead when we all talked this way about him when he was alive.”
The men speak quietly, as if this loss is a secret unlike the other secrets they tell.
“I hate to imagine Rosie’s sorrow, though he brought it on himself. So did Gerald. And whosoever is deceived thereby, is not wise,” says the man with the mustache.
“What will happen to the Chester Hotel, you think?” says someone else.
“Same as any of those degenerate places. It’ll come back or it won’t.”
“You suppose all them boys ran into the sea, to get away?”
“Is the Chester down by the sea?” one of the younger men asks.
Dark and cautious laughter, and then the man with the mustache says, “You’re saying you’d like to know, huh?”
The young man lifts his chin and narrows his eyes and says nothing more. Another man says, “It’ll come back. That building’s a hundred years old and I bet them type of boys have been there just as long or longer.”
The tables at the front of the lounge are empty; three men at the bar each sit one stool apart from the next, like strangers in a movie theater. One reads the paper and the two others talk about politics with their stools turned in toward the empty seat between them. Muriel’s purse is tucked under the bar and hidden. She wishes the horsemen would speak of the races and say if they’d won as she had, but she is also relieved when they don’t. She tears out the racing form and writes down the man’s name and the name of the hotel, and then Rosie’s name and then one hundred and by the sea, as if she were taking notes for the next day’s post. The morning has drawn slowly and the men show no signs of leaving and Muriel waits. She feels like waiting might be the only thing left for her to do.
She considers the man’s funeral and wonders if there had been horses there pulling the funeral cart, the coastal cypress decked in lace bunting, to make death seem like what it is, a return to the past, and in her mind the coffin holds the stranger Gerald as he might have been in his youth, lean and quick and ready. She folds the racing form into fourths and slips it into the pocket of her purse, with the money, as if for posterity.
When her lunch break comes she takes the bus ten blocks north and gets off near a service station perched just back from the street. Inside she buys a candy bar and then walks around the back of the station to a dim restroom and steps softly in. She dons again the slacks and striped shirt and broad-brimmed hat, careful not to touch the walls or the grimy sink of the restroom. There is some thrill in this that is almost erotic, parts of her body bared a bit at a time yet held away from the parameters of the room, as if she is undressing for someone she hopes will look but whom she won’t allow to.
At the bank she waits in line with the other men and women missing lunch for their small errands. When it’s her turn she slides two of the folded sheets of hotel paper through the window and asks for a cashier’s check for seven thousand dollars, made out to George Lee Sims and Muriel Sims, and says she’d like the check postdated, ten days from now. When the teller complies Muriel lets her hands drop from the strap of her purse and relaxes. She sees the check is as she’d hoped, printed in the corner only with the bank’s name and the address of its headquarters. Then she asks for another, made out to the property tax board of Kansas, and fans a dozen twenties on the counter, thinking that this young teller cannot know what she wants or why she is here or that her mother died in the undignified middle of the day.
She puts the two checks in her purse along with the receipts and turns to leave the bank. She waits until she is outside and several feet past the bank windows to walk more swiftly, down two more blocks to a post office, thinking that she was right about cash, that there are no real questions to ask about it, since it might come from anywhere but only ever means what it means. Inside the post office she buys three security envelopes and a plate of stamps. She writes a quick note to the tax board explaining that the check is prepayment for this year and next. Then another note to the Carters, asking them to tape the windows and drip the taps, along with four twenties folded tight, to cover another year of maintenance. She addresses the envelopes and stamps them. Then she places the seven-thousand-dollar check inside the torn lining of her purse, careful not to fold or crease it. She fills the last envelope with the rest of the cash and the racing form and the receipt from the post office and conceals this, too. Later she will sew the seam closed again and when all is settled she will find a hiding place.
Outside she removes her sweater and sits at a bus stop. From her purse she takes the last hard-boiled egg and rolls it gently against the bench to crack the shell and then peels it. In a few weeks the receipt from the tax board will arrive, and she’ll use this envelope for the big check, to make it all seem authentic. She imagines the moment she hands the check to Lee, and the relief he will feel. Now there would be a fine lawn and Sunday dinner and gracious talk about the meal and she and her husband would have the quiet life they had never been afforded when they were younger and unmarried, still living with their parents in those forgotten towns. Maybe they came out west only to claim a past denied to them, and not, after all, a future free from such notions.
She tries to imagine what her mother might think of this deception and she can’t. She’ll still have the house and her own money but she is giving up something more crucial and her mother would have seen that. Muriel has been so lucky and now she is beholden to luck and that leaves her utterly alone. If she gets away with this she will never go to Del Mar again. She promises this to herself. And if finally Julius does call, she would say nothing of paintings or horses or even say his name.
FOUR (#ulink_7c09d48d-0f4b-5d4d-81f2-351f31ad106b)
The meadows (#ulink_7c09d48d-0f4b-5d4d-81f2-351f31ad106b)
Henry in the hem of neon between the alley and the street. At night in the dim light of the peek, hair and eyes so dark they disappear, so that Julius sees only the bright buttons of Henry’s shirt and a flash of fingernail as he approaches the place where the catwalks cross. Henry in the morning at the Squaw Motel, curled inside the weather of some dream, Julius awake and watching him, knowing he must leave soon before daylight finds them together. Some nights a tenderness so great there is no way to touch Henry softly enough, other nights coarse and silent and sleepless.
Each morning Julius leaves the room with a telling joy he must tamp before the day begins. Once outside the room and through the lines of parked cars he turns onto Second Street and walks along the treeless grid of empty lots, taking the long way downtown. He feels wonderfully alone. That is what love feels like to him. As if finally he’s touching the very outside of himself, pressed against the limits of his body, singular, replete. The early dawn milled down to the low horizon is a blasted white; years from now, whenever he thinks of that view or sees it again, he will be rushed back to this moment in his life, and forever it will feel like love to him, that kind of bright sky.
Their affair stretches through the end of the spring and then the monsoon season. At night, the peek cools so fast that the chill sometimes catches them in shirtsleeves, skin pricked against it. Then the bitter summer comes, and they walk between the glass windows barefoot, their hair drenched with sweat. One night, early in July, Julius stands at the window watching a man below win every other hand of blackjack, sometimes losing two in a row but rarely. He watches the man a long time. As he watches, he tries to find the one piece that gives the pattern away. There is always one thing that people fail to conceal. He’s seen a man rise from the table after a profitable night only to see him again an hour later splitting chips with the dealer. He’s seen men lean back in their chairs and reveal aces tucked into their belts. Once, two cowboys—so fresh from the train they sat at twenty-one with their duffels under their feet—played for an hour before Julius saw the thing he needed: not the pattern of their cheat but the interruption in it, one cowboy marking wrong and busting his friend, who snaked his eyes so briefly at the first man that Julius knew exactly the game they were running.
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Shannon Pufahl
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Спорт, фитнес
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Set in 1950’s America at a time when people stopped looking west and started looking up: a breathtakingly beautiful debut novel of revolution, chance and the gambles we take with the human heart. Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack. When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband Lee. Instead it is Lee’s brother, Julius, a thief and Korean War veteran – and someone she has only met once – whom she longs to tell, and who has struck a spark of promise and possibility inside her quietly ordered life. Julius has found himself in Las Vegas, where his gift for gambling leads him to a job patrolling the boards above the casino tables, watching through the cigarette smoke for chancers and cheats. There he meets Henry, a blackjack artist and a man who shares Julius’s passions, and his secrets. As tourists gather on roof tops to watch atomic clouds bloom in the desert, Henry and Julius′s love burns in the shadows – until one night Henry is forced to flee. Through the parks and plazas of Tijuana and the bars and beaches of San Diego, On Swift Horses mesmerisingly charts the journeys of Muriel and Julius on their separate quests for freedom, new horizons and love.