Читать книгу On Swift Horses - Shannon Pufahl - Страница 13

Muriel loves best those days when there are no races and the horsemen tell stories of fiasco and anomaly. At the lounge one afternoon she hears of a claiming race some years before, when a six-year-old broke a Del Mar track record and promptly dropped dead. Another, in which a redhaired boy from Montreal rode with his broken leg taped to the saddle girth. Or the story about the potbellied paint named Gingersnap who made such fast friends with an Angus bull that the two could not be separated and had to travel cheek by jowl in a special trailer widened for them.

Or, better: The horsemen in their leisure speak of things that cannot happen, that simply won’t. There will never be another Seabiscuit, not because he was built by God, as the papers said, as the trainers claimed, but because the universe allows only so much improbability. Nor another corker like the half-bred filly Quashed, who beat a Triple Crown winner by a short head over two and a half endless miles. Likewise the storied beasts of another era, National Velvet and Sergeant Reckless, warhorses on the eastern front, creatures from a dream an entire culture had once shared and woken from.

Through March of 1957 Muriel plays the late afternoon races ten dollars at a time. The winnings are limited by the stakes, which are mean and provincial, and though she knows now the names of stables and jockeys and colts gone early to stud still each new detail excites her. Each new detail is a familiar shape in a dark room. The high stakes are coming when the spring season opens, and most days the men drink more and longer and sit with their knees spread wide and out from the tables, taking account of the odds.

“Hoo now, in a couple weeks we’ll have some real money in play,” says the man with the mustache.

“Just think about that Lakes and Flowers race last spring at Hollywood Park,” says another.

“God that was gorgeous.”

“Like watching a sunset, but faster.”

“You got all the same riders as that race coming to Del Mar, and almost all the ponies, but no Misrule and no Porterhouse, so our field will be smooth as honey.”

“We’ll see where the odds end up. Eight races, I’ll be damned if one of them doesn’t come in double digits over the stilt.”

The old jockey called Rosie, given to water metaphors, says, “Tide’s coming in, bringing glad tidings.”

“Since when do tides bring that?” says the mustache.

“It’s called a pun, friend,” Rosie says darkly, but all the men laugh because the future is so bright.

AT HOME Muriel is distracted. One night she burns the meat and then the bread and when Lee touches her arm she cries out because she had forgotten him in her speculations. Lee tilts his head but says nothing and together they walk to the diner around the corner. Muriel feels a restful invisibility there, among the other patrons, who eat and talk and worry not at all about horses or progress or the passage of time. Lee orders pie and when the woman brings it he cuts the piece down the middle and slides the smaller half onto his saucer and pushes the rest across the table and Muriel makes a show of eating it and then a show of being full. When he’s finished his half and a third cup of coffee she pushes the plate back, barely touched. He winks at her and calls the waitress for the coffeepot and when she doesn’t acknowledge him he takes the cup and stands at the counter for a long time. The radio behind the counter plays heartache music. He holds his cup out like a pauper and finally the woman fills it. When he sits to eat he says, “Can’t have pie without coffee,” as if he were apologizing for this mere fact, for both the waitress and himself.

After dinner they walk back to their building and as they cross the common foyer they can hear the ringing phone. Lee wings the door open and takes the hallway in three long steps and Muriel listens for his reaction. He waits only a moment before he hangs up and turns to her and threads his fingers behind his head. He says that some husky voice has offered him life everlasting.

“That’s what she said.” The hands behind his head like a man being marched somewhere terrible. “Over the telephone, no less.”

Inside the apartment the smell of burned bread is chalky and unpleasant. Muriel opens the window above the sink.

“How long’s it been?” she asks.

“A month now.”

“Has it ever been this long before?”

“Not that I recall.”

Through the open window come the sounds of the street below, cars idling at the curb and voices from the sidewalk and between these noises the high call of gulls making a last round before the full darkness. Lee cracks a beer and sits at the table and takes a drink.

“I guess he’s doing fine on his own, wherever he is. Los Angeles or wherever.”

He tips up the can and looks at her over the rim like a man making a point and when she doesn’t answer he rises. He stands with his back to the counter.

“I guess you don’t think so,” he says.

“I don’t know what I think,” she says.

And she doesn’t. She remembers Julius’s voice down the line and what she’d told him about the races. She feels foolish, knowing she was not believed. Julius had not called since then. Lee looks at her as if he hopes she might speak again and explain away his worry or his bitterness but she says nothing more. Instead she goes to him and takes the beer and drinks and hands it back. It pleases him when she does things like this, simple things that suggest their shared lot in life, an easy intimacy.

“I told you he was always disappearing, even before our old dad was gone,” he says. He hands the can back to her and she jigs it to judge its fill and drinks all but the last swallow.

“But it turned out all right before,” she says.

“But it always happened again.”

He crosses his arms and leans against the counter. Muriel cracks another beer and hands it to Lee and takes one for herself.

“We’ve been here nearly seven months,” Lee says. “I’m not sure what else I can do.”

He closes his eyes and opens them again. Muriel thinks of that Christmas Eve and the men’s plans. How Lee had told her, as they lay together in her mother’s room, that he would always take care of Julius. He’d said this the way any courting man might, as a stay against his own misfortune. She knows that Julius’s absence changes what he’s able to declare about himself.

“It isn’t your fault,” she says to him.

“You tell that to our old dad. Not that you could’ve even when he was alive.”

Muriel nods remotely. She puts her head on his shoulder and sighs pleasantly, though his smell and this contact are at odds with her thoughts.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I caught Julius on Kansas Avenue in a bar the Del Monte guys used for faro?” Lee says.

“I don’t think so.”

“Our father was not dead but nearabouts. I guess I was eighteen then because it wasn’t long after this that I signed us both up, though Julius was too young. I was out looking for him, down in the factory bars, and in the third or fourth one I tried there he was in a pair of overalls, cleaning the heads. You wouldn’t believe the filth of that place. And it turned out he was working off a debt and he didn’t want to tell me, because he’d stolen from that bar, right from the till, to play into their card game.”

In the hallway the phone rings again but Lee does not move toward it. Soon someone else answers, speaking in a scolding voice.

“I’m not sure I realized it then, but I did soon after—my brother knew things I didn’t, he had passions of his own,” he says. He makes a face. She thinks of the story Julius told of the rabbit man and how he’d held her look for so long across the table. She does not share Lee’s fraternal resentment but she does feel betrayed, and also that she has been the betrayer. She had told Julius her secret and sent him that money and after that he disappeared. She wonders if her confidence was a kind of permission, the way even bluffs could close the distance between people.

Lee finds a cigarette and lights it and blows the smoke hard toward the open window. He says, “You know, after I’d been let off here, in San Diego, I couldn’t find him for two weeks. He’d been back himself already a month. I was sure of his date because I had a friend in the same crew and he told me they’d come back. Two weeks.” Lee holds up two accusing fingers. “Then finally he got my number from somewhere and he called me. He’d spent all the money he had and he asked me to wire more to a motel in Palm Desert. This was before you got here, you was probably on that bus in Arizona or someplace.”

For a moment Muriel looks at him without speaking. He holds out the cigarette for her and she shakes her head and reaches for the pack and lights her own.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” she says.

“I didn’t see why it would matter to you.”

“I thought you all got back at the same time,” she says. She turns away and blows her smoke into the room.

“Well, we didn’t.”

She knows he wants to say more but she doesn’t want him to say it. She doesn’t want to know any more than she already does. She thinks of the time passing and Lee’s worry. She sees him need her more because of all this. She steps forward and kisses him and before he can speak again she presses him toward the bedroom and unbuttons his top button and asks for his haste and his force.

THE NEXT DAY, Muriel stands at the end of the bar with a newspaper crossword folded neatly, jotting notes in the margins. In a week the season will open, and the undercard and then the Monday stakes are thick with good horses and riders known for putting on a show. For now the track is fast and the weather fine and the men speculate openly. Rosie is thinking through the chances of a newcomer named Willie Declan, who by all accounts will mount the favorite.

“You know the line, water everywhere and nothing to drink. That’s how Declan is on that California Star,” Rosie says.

“Hardly matters in that field. In with all those real riders, he’ll be as lost as a girl,” another man says, and drains his glass.

W. D., Muriel writes, lost at sea. But the horsemen are not done with Willie Declan.

“He’s a cement brick,” the mustache says. “Sure you can fit him in your hand, but you can hardly lift him.” He gives the table a look.

“But the hunnerd-granner,” says Rosie, who always stands up for the jocks.

“In the hundred-grander he ran on Whittleman’s Bitty King, and that was a gift of a fine match. Bitty could’ve carried a Mark 7 and won on slop.”

“But you can’t say Declan isn’t ready for a big race like this.”

Rosie again, and at this a few of the men make kissing faces at him.

“Maybe not. But I can say that he’s been a little light after that flu he had, and with Roustabout kicking up the way he is these last weeks no one will beat him who won’t ride the rail for a halfie.”

“I’ll wait for positions. At six Declan could take two from the rail, especially if Sayonara gets anywhere under five, and Declan could squeeze in that way. That’s how I’d run it, I’d sail the inner harbor,” says Rosie, but his voice is lowering now. He is fifty years old and still fit but he carries some sorrow the other men find disquieting.

“I’m sure you would but that don’t mean you can,” the mustache says, and leans across the table and flicks Rosie on the chin.

The talk goes on this way. At this first stage the odds are fluctuating, and a late El Niño rain would bring a scratch or two, from the finer runners whose trainers won’t race them on mud. Anyone glancing at Muriel’s notes would see a set of names and numbers and track slang coded into her own shorthand: ’Nara if under five see W. D. Whittle on the wire if cuppy. Too Young 4–8. Roust at center post breaks ’Nara.

The week goes on. The odds begin to calcify, then a horse falls ill and a jockey gets bumped and another disappears for two days downtown. The men grumble and reset their charts. The hot clear weather brings a strange nothingness: no moths against the screens, no hum of insects, neap tides quiet all night. Instead there is a permeating blueness like the inside of an eye. The heat brings people out of the houses and shops and back rooms. Along the narrow streets of Muriel’s neighborhood, workmen cart flowers and crates and white heaps of ice. In the tiny front yards women dump wash water into short stemmy stands of geraniums. The children spill from stoops and curbs in overalls and short sleeves, the coastal sun catching them and turning them divine, in that instant freed by the sun from work and peril. Their mothers in dresses the color of unready peaches, sweating over the wash.

Downtown the dice players and cigarette men and men in tight pants, shirts unbuttoned to their navels. Walking from home to work is like passing between two worlds. Muriel finds herself one afternoon standing a long time in front of a shop window, thinking about the races. Behind her a newspaper vendor and two men in denim jackets are reflected in the window. The men are young and she can smell their cigarettes and their cologne. She looks up at the store window and draws herself away from their attention. She remembers her mother in the summer cooking chops and onions in her underwear while a man sat fully dressed at the table, watching her. The way this distinction between them, between nakedness and not, seemed to confirm something her mother believed about love: that vulnerability existed only in asymmetry, that two people could not be vulnerable together. Her mother believed if she gave men this small advantage she would not be harmed.

In the shop window a large television plays a game show. A man in a glass booth on a soundstage gazes outward in concentration while a clock ticks away in the corner. Muriel thinks of Julius and where he might be and why he hasn’t come. The show gives way to an ad for Convair, a woman standing with a suitcase in her hand watching an airplane take off. Though she can’t hear the TV Muriel realizes she is hearing an airplane and she looks up and sees a real airplane in the sky, reflected in the store window. She turns and tracks it as it flies over the city headed east. This confluence seems like luck or validation or something mystic. When she turns back to the television the plane is gone, but the other plane is still reflected in the window, as if it had flown off the screen and into the actual sky. She imagines the airplane flying past the rough buildings of this city, over the vendor and the smoking men and the mothers in their collared dresses. Out past the central mountains, then further east across the desert and into the scrub, rich and minty and full enough to hide a child, then over the irrigation circles and tired motels of her youth and down into the endless prairie and over her mother’s house. The plane disappears in this direction and the sound goes and then it is just the men and the contrail, reflected in the glass.

That night, after Lee has fallen asleep, she peels open the envelope and counts the money there and thinks through the odds. She does a bit of math on the envelope flap. She thinks of Lee’s story, of Julius in overalls working off a debt, and then about his discharge. She worries she’s misunderstood them both. She thinks of Lee standing so long at the counter with his coffee cup, waiting for the woman to fill it. She studies the envelope and her arithmetic and she’s not sure what she might need the money for, only that she does, only that winning would prove something vital that she cannot otherwise prove, and that no one else can see.

THAT WEEKEND Lee borrows again the boss’s Lincoln and drives them through downtown and across the river to see the interstate. In another year it will be complete, running along the edge of Mission Valley; they can see its elevated form now, the men hanging overhead, the black dust from the columns. Lee stops the car along the curb and he and Muriel look up at the cranes and the skirts of rebar, the figures held by flat ropes. The general feeling of the time is that such a marvel is deserved, as marvels are deserved all over the West.

They drive on, past lemon and orange and avocado orchards, hidden inside the city as if cupped inside its palm. The orchards are surrounded on all sides by a network of cul‑de‑sacs and graveled lots and as they pass Muriel watches the rows of trees flare by the window, interrupted by patches of cleared land and glimpses of the river running low, gridded through with new roads not yet paved. She looks at Lee and in this light he has the chromed look of a photograph, peering ahead at the driveways and ghosted streets. They pass a cowfield, a roadside lean‑to stacked with eggs, a sign offering jarred local olives, then again into the not-yet neighborhood.

Muriel knows where they are going and though she might have expected it still she feels deceived. In a half-mile the road turns back to gravel and curves south to the river. Lee stops the car and they get out to stand along the dirt margin. He turns to Muriel and smiles. He gestures across the lot in front of them, marked off by twine and stakes of wood, then marked off again by small flags stuck in the ground between the stakes. The back of the lot disappears in a tangle of blank ash and scrubby bushes, and below this hidden limit is a soft bluff that drops into the river, which they can hear from where they stand. Lee takes her hand in his.

“This tract is the best of them, two thousand for the land and the specs, then I bet we could build out for another six. Hardly anything, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering how fast all this land will go. What it will cost in another year.”

Lee’s voice lifts into insistence. He looks at her and she looks back. The fact of her mother’s house in Kansas rises up between them.

Lee says, “We could get at least six grand for that house, you’ve got to know that’s true. And we got a couple hundred bucks already.”

She holds his gaze until he looks away and across the lot to the river beyond.

Finally she says, “But you promised your brother you’d do this together.”

“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.

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.