On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl

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СКАЧАТЬ pressed suddenly into Julius’s bare chest, his palm squarely in the cleft of Julius’s rib cage. Then he looks at Julius. “Oh,” he says and sinks to his knees, his arms bent so his elbows press into Julius’s thighs and his thumbs hook the flat bones in Julius’s hips. Henry leans his head on Julius’s waist, his cheek turned to the copper snap of Julius’s jeans, and to keep him from falling Julius takes his shoulders and his fingers slide in the man’s sweat. Julius leans as far as he can backward, the scaffold against him. He starts to say, “Now come on.” Henry’s hands fall away and he twists sideways to retch over the scaffold railing and Julius does not wait or offer comfort but turns back. As he walks along the catwalk to the other side he can feel Henry’s palm still there in the center of his chest, like a footprint rising slowly from the stubble of a mown field.

      When his shift ends he waits until he hears Henry’s boots on the stairwell and keeps waiting long minutes after the door has banged shut below. It is a quarter past four when he finally collects his boots. He thumps them on the heels to evict mice or spiders and finds the Iowan’s bill there. It’s damp and when he unfolds it, it smells of sweat and cigarettes. He folds it again and puts it back. Downstairs he clocks out but makes a note in the margin that the last fifteen minutes should go unpaid.

      Outside a cooling rain has come and gone and the streets reflect the neon in shallow pools at their edges. Julius turns toward the Squaw and is ducking down a side street when Henry catches him.

      “Surely you ain’t going home,” Henry says.

      “You mean my room or where I’m from?”

      Henry laughs. “Home for the day, bud.”

      “Well, I was planning on it.”

      “Too hot to be cooped up.”

      “A lot cooler now.”

      “I owe you a drink, for before.”

      The man looks so earnest, so genuinely embarrassed by his own weakness in the heat, that Julius knows he cannot refuse without revealing something about himself. He remembers the shape of the man’s shoulders where he’d touched him, square and ordinary now beneath his shirt. Together they walk down the wet streets and find a tourist bar and order the only kind of beer they have. Julius keeps an eye out for the bosses or any other men who might know them, who might think them in collusion or worse. For a while they talk about the weather and that night’s gambling and the sad landscapes of their childhoods. Henry is from the Central Valley and spent many summers in the fields there.

      “I settled for Henry because no one could say Javier,” he says.

      When Julius asks why he’s come to Vegas and how long he’s worked the peek, Henry says, “I guess they figure I can’t be much of a cheat,” and raises the injured arm.

      “No, I guess you ain’t no palmer,” Julius says.

      “Ain’t much of anything.”

      Henry smiles and Julius sees something else about him.

      “But I bet you play all right.”

      “If you mean playing the goat or maybe by ear, because that’s all I’ve ever done till now.”

      “I sure wish there was more poker, and not just in them cardrooms,” Julius says.

      “House ain’t got no motivation for it. You play it overseas?”

      Julius nods.

      “What’s your game here?” he asks.

      “Twenty-one,” says Henry.

      “That so.”

      Henry lowers his eyes.

      “I know what people think about blackjack players.”

      “How many blackjack cheats have you seen from that attic, just this month?” Julius says.

      “Blackjack gives a man the edge, that’s true enough.”

      Henry looks at him a long moment and Julius looks back and each is reminded of the other’s nakedness. Julius can feel this memory like a shape between them.

      “You got people?” he asks.

      “Oh, some,” Henry says.

      Julius nods. Behind the bar the long mirror snags the orange discs of overhead light.

      “I’m supposed to be in San Diego,” Julius says.

      “How’s that?”

      “With my brother. We planned on it, when we was overseas. I think mostly he wants to keep an eye on me. Nice weather though, and in San Diego you can build a house in the river valley for a song.”

      “I know about California.”

      “I guess you do.”

      “How come you ain’t there then?”

      “Too hard to tell.”

      “But you could tell it to me.”

      Henry smiles at him and Julius smiles back. He thinks of Muriel’s house in Kansas and his brother’s happiness. That Christmas Eve in the winter wheat talking about everything. The last time they were all together on earth.

      “Too hard to tell,” Julius says again, and Henry laughs and shrugs and lets the mood change.

      Soon they leave that bar for the Moulin Rouge. There Henry moves out onto the dance floor like he’s at a wedding, a wedding long put off and finally consummated under duress, legs moving in an ecstatic shuffle surely picked up in the grange halls of his youth, but even in his joy and his relief Julius knows he is withholding. At first he is alone, but when a slow song begins he finds a woman on the edge of the crowd. Julius drinks and watches. Henry’s cheek rubs against the forehead of the woman he holds, so close and so often that Julius can’t help but imagine the feel of it, the smell in Henry’s hair of tobacco, sweat, the raw wood of the attic catwalk. He knows what will happen next and he is not sure he wants it all again. He stands and steps outside. It is just past dawn, the heat already beginning to return. The streets are still crowded with men. The soggy bunch of the bill in his boot irritates him and to have something to do with his shaking hands he pulls the boot off to shift it. He worries that maybe all he’s ever really liked are the moments in which love was uncertain, when he could arrange himself in postures of ready seduction, in bed or half-dressed or letting a button linger under his hand, or, before any of these, leaning inside a doorway or stepping off the curb to cross a street where a man stands waiting, the look between them as he walks, the moments when he could still turn away, the private, erotic knowledge that one is the object of another man’s long gaze. He recalls other men from years or months before, men in the service or men who left the city in a rush or men who fell in love with women. He remembers the man from Iowa and his shaking back and the little snatches of song they sang. And his disgust is instructive, palliative. He does not have to worry over his own weakness then, when so many other weaknesses are apparent.

      Finally Henry comes outside and looks up and down the street and sees him and waves. Julius pulls the boot back on, his sock bunched СКАЧАТЬ