On Swift Horses

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?”