On Swift Horses

ONE

The sea

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.