On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ