On Swift Horses

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.

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