On Swift Horses. Shannon Pufahl

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СКАЧАТЬ hands, some fat-fingered and hairy, nails untrimmed, others slender and graceful. A man at the edge of the table leans forward to take the pot and for a moment looks up and Julius nearly turns away. But the wide shadowy sheet of glass bows down and out, convex, so the man looking up sees not Julius’s silent gaze but his own face, arched and upside down, as if he is staring into the curved back of a spoon. Julius himself has seen these windows from below, and though he’d assumed he was being watched he had not really considered all this, that above him was a network of paths and railings, made for watching. The whole thing seems to him so ingenious he nearly laughs aloud.

      For an hour he moves between the windows watching the action at craps and blackjack. He sees nothing unusual, though from above the character of each game is changed and made piecemeal, divided into possible cheats or cons, and these are different from the things a player would suss out, by virtue of being punishable. Watching the games this way impresses him. In Los Angeles a man like him would never be trusted with such a job.

      When he moves toward the center of the scaffold he sees in the distance a dark figure. Julius stops and waits. The figure comes closer and in the light cast up through the windows Julius sees the man’s boots, then his nubby trousers.

      “You’re new,” the man says as he approaches.

      Julius nods. They stand facing each other over the lighted window. The man is tall and dark-haired, Julius’s age or a bit younger.

      “Henry,” says the man.

      Julius says his own name and puts out his hand. The man’s hand is rough but his handshake is light and quick. He holds his other arm against his waist and in the pale light Julius sees it is ripped in scars.

      “First time?” the man asks.

      “It is,” Julius says.

      “What do you think so far?”

      Henry does not seem cruel to Julius though his appearance would suggest it, so Julius says what he thinks.

      “You play?” Julius asks.

      “Sometimes,” says Henry.

      “This sheds some light on that, huh.”

      “It does,” Henry says. “Seeing it this way is like watching yourself make love.”

      Julius laughs and nods, then he reaches up to cover his mouth against the sound and because his missing tooth makes him suddenly sheepish.

      “Instructive,” he says, through his hand.

      “But a little ruinous,” says Henry.

      “That’s right,” says Julius.

      He drops his hand and looks at the man a long moment. The look goes on until Henry laughs and Julius laughs with him but then the laughter turns and stops. In this silence Julius becomes again self-conscious and looks away at the floor and then at his own hand on the railing. Henry says, “Welp,” and goes on his way to the other side of the casino loft.

      Every few hours Julius and Henry pass each other at the place where the scaffolds cross over the pit below. Henry raises a hand or makes a hasty salute. The breeze across the center cools and dies. Below the tables thin out. On the third pass Henry stops a moment and makes a joke about a woman at the corner craps table, and suggests Julius take a look down her dress, and Julius says he will.

      At four A.M. Julius descends the stairway and punches a clock in a back room filled with bank bags and boxes of casino matches behind mesh cage. This room, too, is covered in two-way glass, and an iron door with a sliding bar lock leads to another room. As he marks his pay card, a man in a seersucker suit slips out and closes the door promptly and soundly. From inside the lock is turned again. The man in the suit catches Julius’s gaze and holds it for a long moment, until his eyes begin to seem distant and opaque to Julius, like the two-way glass, as if somewhere inside the man there is another man who looks out, watching him. This must be the pit boss, Julius thinks. The man walks away without speaking.

      Outside a yellow paring of sunrise. Julius walks all the way to the end of Fremont where the train station is busy with people. Beyond the station the brown scrubby plain rises into a rim of mountains. Julius steps into a phone booth, fishes out a nickel, and dials his brother’s number. For a long time the phone rings and Julius listens to the jangling bell until the sound becomes the backdrop to a thought he’s having. He thinks of the bomb he saw, and his new job. He wants to tell his brother these things but he isn’t sure where to start. But the fact of his brother seems suddenly necessary, some confirmation that his voice is welcome and known. He recalls the last time he saw Lee, in Okinawa, and feels a hollow feeling of doubt, which passes, which turns to envy and then to fear. Julius hangs up before the call rings out again.

      Back at the Squaw he lies awake a long time thinking of the games he’s seen and the men’s hands below him and their various shapes, the half-moons of nail beds catching the neon and the man Henry’s scarred arm, until the daylight breaks fully through the curtains.

      CASINOS MAKE SOME GAMBLERS forget the complications that attend money. As he walks the scaffold Julius considers the dark enclosure of the casinos, the money traded for chips and markers, the absence of clocks in any pit or cardroom, nothing closing or changing, breakfast buffets in the middle of the night. All the strategies for disrupting time, for breaking the link between cause and effect. But now it is Julius’s job to resist these things. The peek gives him perspective. He paces the catwalk looking for drunks, card palmers and dice loaders, cheaters of all kinds. He spends the most time above the blackjack tables. Blackjack is the only casino game where the gambler can get an edge over the house and for this reason it attracts cheaters of all kinds. Card markers and sleeve-men, confederacies of slack players who fake dim-wittedness to pass good cards to their partners or bust out better players waiting for the drop. Of course they know he is watching. At the tables they listen for his boots above, trying to gauge the distance before palming an ace or passing a queen, and in this way he becomes a part of the games below and the methods of the cheating men.

      Each night between eight and four Julius is their steward. He thinks of himself this way. His job is to watch the players and nothing more. He does not administer punishment, only speculation, only what he believes he sees. Mostly he watches the players’ hands. Those with square or short or clumsy hands may mark but they do not palm. They are not built for it. The slender-fingered men, short nails buffed pale, no rings, wide cuffs touching the clefts of their palms—if those men start to lose, Julius will stay at the well above them past the time he is supposed to move on. Losing, for the best of them, is its own kind of strategy. He reports each suspicion with diligence to the two cat-faced men and collects his check at the end of each week. With the money he makes he pays for his room and his cash-ins and eats steak for breakfast and March starts to fade away. He sleeps through the warming afternoons and wakes with a feeling of purpose.

      Then, at the beginning of April, the heat comes and covers the city in a shimmer. The casino attic is so hot Julius can feel his heart straining against his ribs. Sweat drips from his nose and brow and from his fingertips as he paces the catwalk. After an hour he takes off his boots and socks and unbuttons his shirt and wets a hotel towel and wraps it around his neck. He sips from a flask of whiskey and smokes to distract himself.

      Before he and Henry are due to switch sides Julius rewets the towel with a cup of water already tepid. He leaves his shirt open and tucks the tails into the back of his jeans and walks to the other side. Henry walks slowly toward him and waves dully and does not call out. He is shirtless, covered in sweat, sheets of it over his face and neck. Julius СКАЧАТЬ