On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl

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      Later, they lie together a long time. The supper hour has come and gone and the city has quieted. The phone in the hall rings a long time before Lee finally rises to answer it. Muriel hears him wish his brother a happy Christmas and say that they should be together, that Julius should come soon. Muriel stands and goes to the window that looks down into the alley between their building and its twin. She can feel the cold outside the window against her bare skin. She lights a cigarette and lifts the window. The streetlight falls into the alley and over the dry bricks and a few birds fly soft and quick across the entrance and toss small hand-shaped shadows against the alley wall. She recalls a boyfriend her mother had, sometime in the forties, who sold lightbulbs door‑to‑door. To persuade housewives and old widows, he cast against their walls the silhouettes of butterflies and rabbits and men in tall hats. After dinner, in those few months her mother loved him, that man taught her to twist her fingers into cheerful creatures. He had been kind, slimly built. The bulbs he sold made bluish light and glowed through the flesh of his hands. For a moment she thinks that man must be sitting somewhere against the wall of this alley, making birds with his fingers. In the hallway she hears Lee ask his brother if he needs any money and then his long sigh.

      THE NEW YEAR comes and the weather hardens. Muriel adds more and more of the winnings to her tips and blames the extra money on holiday cheer, on the business brought in by the last of the men back from Korea. Lee folds the bills into eighths and stores them like hock in a coffee can. On Sunday nights he counts them out. Then, as the fairground lights on the racetrack’s edge disappear, as spring comes, the horsemen begin to lose and Muriel does too. At the lounge the men sit grimly late into the day. They wonder if they’ve lost the touch. They worry they’ve misread all the signs. The feel of the track has left them, perhaps as punishment for their arrogance. They have no feel for jockeys and turf conditions, no joy for horses at all. They spit on the floor and smoke cigarettes until the fan above merely pushes the smoke back and forth, like a machine for making waves.

      They have had all these conversations before but Muriel doesn’t know that. In this new reality she becomes reckless, betting conspicuous amounts on odds‑on favorites for little gain, just to remember the feeling of winning. She comforts herself by thinking she has solved the problem of her dishonesty. In the lazy Susan there is less than two hundred dollars; a few more weeks of padding her wages and it will be gone. She feels determined to lose the rest of it, as a kind of retribution or for the sake of some strange neatness. She thinks the word, neatness, as if she is tidying up the kitchen or ironing a dress.

      Then the track is closed for two weeks. When it reopens, the turf is newly surfaced and smooth as hair. The horses have been traded out, some up from Santa Anita and others from the Canadian circuits, the jockeys rested and sweated out to make weight. On Fat Tuesday the races stretch through the afternoon and she drinks too much. She wins two races in a row and is flushed. Yet even with the drink she feels self-conscious and the crowd is tight around her. It is unusually warm and the track has been decorated with bunting and palm fronds tied into hearts and sprays like hands.

      The last race is a special stakes and by evening the crowd has swelled. Women fan themselves with the palmhands and dab their temples with bits of ice. Muriel stands next to a woman from out of town, who tells her husband in an accented voice what to bet. Both Muriel and the woman have a decent bounty on a horse called Flood to win and they discuss his chances as the horses come to post. The horsemen have picked him, though they think he is too young and jumpy as a virgin. As the race begins, the foreign woman flicks Muriel’s arm with her fingers and winks.

      “This is us,” she says, nodding to the track.

      The horses burst free and the race comes together. Next to Muriel the woman bounces on tiptoe. When Flood wins by a length, the woman turns and puts a hand on Muriel’s shoulder and kisses her lightly on the mouth. The strangeness of this kiss makes Muriel laugh. Her mouth opens around the sound and her teeth scrape the woman’s big straight teeth—horse teeth, Muriel thinks, and laughs again. The woman laughs back at Muriel and Muriel can taste mint and whiskey on the woman’s lips. Had Muriel said it out loud, horse teeth? They both pull away. For a moment the woman’s eyes catch hers with a wince, then turn softer, turn down, and she raises her glass and jiggles the ice and mint and says, “Time to repent.” She licks her lips, then wipes them with her fingers. The horses settle with their pit ponies, the air heavy with the heat of their bodies, and the noise of the track returns. The woman’s husband fans his wife with his hat and asks if they have won. The woman does not answer him but looks again at Muriel and Muriel does not know how to look back at her. Then the woman turns to her husband and flashes her ticket and flicks Muriel’s arm again as she walks away. Muriel is careful not to watch the woman though she wants to see her full height, the shape of her legs.

      She carries this desire to the bus stop and downtown, then through the streets with Lee, past the oblate sea and the colorful houses, stopping in a pub for a drink and another at home. They leave the radio on as they make love, Lee’s astonished face next to hers on the pillow, a soft fold in the dim light. Her tough man, undone. He says, Muriel, we should have a child. He whispers into her hair, Muriel, don’t ever leave me. She knows after these months together to expect this as she expects his deference, and so she lets him murmur, touches his temples and his thick eyebrows with her fingertips until he falls asleep. She is like a parent then, not resentful but protective. The bedside clock ticks on the nightstand and the sheets scallop at the edge of the mattress.

      When he is fully asleep she takes the money from the inside of her shoe and puts it in the envelope in the lazy Susan. Suddenly it seems there is too much of it. She’d won not a third of her money back, but she has a feeling of great prosperity. She knows this feeling would please the men at the lounge. That they would say she’d cut her teeth. That in gambling there is a plateau, a period of time when progression ceases, when exhaustion sets in, and then the odds shift. You win and you are alive again. She could play another month or longer if chance runs her way.

      LATER, THE PHONE RINGS and wakes her and when no one picks it up Muriel rises from the bed and steps quietly into the hall to answer it.

      When Julius hears her voice he laughs so sharply she has to pull the receiver from her ear. She brings the phone back and says Julius’s name and finds she is grinning in the dark hallway. She asks him when he’ll join them and he says, “Oh soon now, not long.”

      “You mean it?” she asks.

      “You bet,” he says.

      She asks him what it’s like in Santa Barbara or Ventura or wherever he is and he says, “Girl, you wouldn’t believe it,” and then he starts to sing a song about the badlands and how dark they are even in the morning. On his end of the line a siren spools out and when it stops she hears he’s still singing and she listens until he can’t remember the words and then she asks him if he’s been eating and how the weather is and anyplace they might send a letter. He asks if she’s been winning at cards and when she says she tried to teach Lee how to play hearts he says, “No trick-taking games, he’s not brutal enough for it. You better stick to war.”

      Through the wall she can hear Lee snoring. In the kitchenette the radio plays the Grand Ole Opry. She slides down the wall smiling into her hand until she sits with her legs in front of her and her bare feet shooting into the hallway and disappearing into the dark. What a strange miracle to talk on the phone for no particular reason. They talk for ten minutes, then twenty, until Muriel begins to worry about the coins Julius is dropping for the line. She tells him he shouldn’t waste his money and he says it’s no waste at all but then he seems to remember his purpose and asks after his brother.

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