On Swift Horses

“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.