On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Author:Shannon Pufahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

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THROUGH THE REST of that morning Julius sleeps in the cab of the truck, curled, bootheels caught on the edge of the seat and his toes hanging. He wakes shivering in the cooling afternoon. He opens the door and steps out and shakes the stiffness from his arms and legs. The sun is lowering in a long cut of light and he follows it to the edge of the lot and stands looking out at the skyline of the city. He thinks of the work ahead of him. He pulls the envelope from his pocket and thumbs through the money there. In his head he adds this money to the cost of the old Ford, then to the price of the lot and the plans and the lumber and the labor. He had never won that much at anything, never known anyone who had. It was the kind of luck that made tyrants of men and yet she had given it away. She might have kept the money for herself along with the house in Kansas but she had bought the house for Lee and let him have his dream and his fantasy and hidden the rest. He tries to imagine any reason for such a decision and he thinks again of the night in Torrance and the way he’d lost on purpose to protect himself from harm and he sees the edge of her choice but not the thing entire.

He peels off his torn shirt and puts on Ralph’s, which is nicer and cleaner and smells of the man’s aftershave. He leaves the truck and walks up the broad street back into the denser part of town. There, to pass the remaining daylight, he steps into a movie house showing a cabaretera. He pays a quarter for the movie and another for a lukewarm beer and sits in the darkened theater in the back. The few other men there sit far away from each other and slump down so that only their hands and noses are visible, their shiny foreheads. On the screen before him the ficheras flirt with the practiced ease of women who have never loved romance, who have always understood it as work, as a myth to make work tolerable. The machotes wear mustaches and wide-collared jackets, and when the ficheras uncross their ankles or sweep their long hair forward to cover their breasts the theater fills with sighs and then the furious sound of trumpets from the speakers hung low along the banisters.

Under the dim orange lights the men are all one color, a sameness that turns the theater into something nascent, like a perimeter of heaven, though some must be sunburned or pale as the plains or dark-eyed and brown-skinned. When Julius sees his hands around his glass or his faint reflection in the black wall he sees that he too is the same—the color of dusk across a mown lawn. Below him a boy sits alone, nine or ten years old, a souvenir Tom Mix hat covering half his face.

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