On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl

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       Copyright

      4th Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thEstate.co.uk

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

      Copyright © Shannon Pufahl 2019

      Cover image © Epics / Getty Images

      Shannon Pufahl asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

      Source ISBN: 9780008293963

      Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008293987

      Version: 2019-09-26

       Dedication

       For Dorthy Figgs—

       my grandmother and a first-rate card player

       Epigraph

       The declaration of love marks the transition from chance

       to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened.

      —ALAIN BADIOU, In Praise of Love

       An honest game has always been a great rarity.

      —HERBERT ASBURY,

       Sucker’s Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      I.

1. THE SEA

2. THE GOLDEN NUGGET

3. THE VALLEY

4. THE MEADOWS

      II.

       5. THE BLUFFS

       6. TIJUANA

       7. THE CLIFFS

       8. THE BORDER

      III.

       9. SWALLOWS

       10. PARADISE

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       I.

       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 СКАЧАТЬ