On Swift Horses

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

The Golden Nugget

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.