On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl

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       The valley

      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 СКАЧАТЬ