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“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 watches him come. There is no breeze and the bowed glass is waxed by the heat. Henry pauses at the crossing to brace himself against the scaffold for a moment. He reaches out, one hand on the railing and the other pressed suddenly into Julius’s bare chest, his palm squarely in the cleft of Julius’s rib cage. Then he looks at Julius. “Oh,” he says and sinks to his knees, his arms bent so his elbows press into Julius’s thighs and his thumbs hook the flat bones in Julius’s hips. Henry leans his head on Julius’s waist, his cheek turned to the copper snap of Julius’s jeans, and to keep him from falling Julius takes his shoulders and his fingers slide in the man’s sweat. Julius leans as far as he can backward, the scaffold against him. He starts to say, “Now come on.” Henry’s hands fall away and he twists sideways to retch over the scaffold railing and Julius does not wait or offer comfort but turns back. As he walks along the catwalk to the other side he can feel Henry’s palm still there in the center of his chest, like a footprint rising slowly from the stubble of a mown field.
When his shift ends he waits until he hears Henry’s boots on the stairwell and keeps waiting long minutes after the door has banged shut below. It is a quarter past four when he finally collects his boots. He thumps them on the heels to evict mice or spiders and finds the Iowan’s bill there. It’s damp and when he unfolds it, it smells of sweat and cigarettes. He folds it again and puts it back. Downstairs he clocks out but makes a note in the margin that the last fifteen minutes should go unpaid.
Outside a cooling rain has come and gone and the streets reflect the neon in shallow pools at their edges. Julius turns toward the Squaw and is ducking down a side street when Henry catches him.
“Surely you ain’t going home,” Henry says.
“You mean my room or where I’m from?”
Henry laughs. “Home for the day, bud.”
“Well, I was planning on it.”
“Too hot to be cooped up.”
“A lot cooler now.”
“I owe you a drink, for before.”
The man looks so earnest, so genuinely embarrassed by his own weakness in the heat, that Julius knows he cannot refuse without revealing something about himself. He remembers the shape of the man’s shoulders where he’d touched him, square and ordinary now beneath his shirt. Together they walk down the wet streets and find a tourist bar and order the only kind of beer they have. Julius keeps an eye out for the bosses or any other men who might know them, who might think them in collusion or worse. For a while they talk about the weather and that night’s gambling and the sad landscapes of their childhoods. Henry is from the Central Valley and spent many summers in the fields there.
“I settled for Henry because no one could say Javier,” he says.
When Julius asks why he’s come to Vegas and how long he’s worked the peek, Henry says, “I guess they figure I can’t be much of a cheat,” and raises the injured arm.
“No, I guess you ain’t no palmer,” Julius says.
“Ain’t much of anything.”
Henry smiles and Julius sees something else about him.
“But I bet you play all right.”
“If you mean playing the goat or maybe by ear, because that’s all I’ve ever done till now.”
“I sure wish there was more poker, and not just in them cardrooms,” Julius says.
“House ain’t got no motivation for it. You play it overseas?”
Julius nods.
“What’s your game here?” he asks.
“Twenty-one,” says Henry.
“That so.”
Henry lowers his eyes.
“I know what people think about blackjack players.”
“How many blackjack cheats have you seen from that attic, just this month?” Julius says.
“Blackjack gives a man the edge, that’s true enough.”
Henry looks at him a long moment and Julius looks back and each is reminded of the other’s nakedness. Julius can feel this memory like a shape between them.
“You got people?” he asks.
“Oh, some,” Henry says.
Julius nods. Behind the bar the long mirror snags the orange discs of overhead light.
“I’m supposed to be in San Diego,” Julius says.
“How’s that?”
“With my brother. We planned on it, when we was overseas. I think mostly he wants to keep an eye on me. Nice weather though, and in San Diego you can build a house in the river valley for a song.”
“I know about California.”
“I guess you do.”
“How come you ain’t there then?”
“Too hard to tell.”
“But you could tell it to me.”
Henry smiles at him and Julius smiles back. He thinks of Muriel’s house in Kansas and his brother’s happiness. That Christmas Eve in the winter wheat talking about everything. The last time they were all together on earth.
“Too hard to tell,” Julius says again, and Henry laughs and shrugs and lets the mood change.
Soon they leave that bar for the Moulin Rouge. There Henry moves out onto the dance floor like he’s at a wedding, a wedding long put off and finally consummated under duress, legs moving in an ecstatic shuffle surely picked up in the grange halls of his youth, but even in his joy and his relief Julius knows he is withholding. At first he is alone, but when a slow song begins he finds a woman on the edge of the crowd. Julius drinks and watches. Henry’s cheek rubs against the forehead of the woman he holds, so close and so often that Julius can’t help but imagine the feel of it, the smell in Henry’s hair of tobacco, sweat, the raw wood of the attic catwalk. He knows what will happen next and he is not sure he wants it all again. He stands and steps outside. It is just past dawn, the heat already beginning to return. The streets are still crowded with men. The soggy bunch of the bill in his boot irritates him and to have something to do with his shaking hands he pulls the boot off to shift it. He worries that maybe all he’s ever really liked are the moments in which love was uncertain, when he could arrange himself in postures of ready seduction, in bed or half-dressed or letting a button linger under his hand, or, before any of these, leaning inside a doorway or stepping off the curb to cross a street where a man stands waiting, the look between them as he walks, the moments when he could still turn away, the private, erotic knowledge that one is the object of another man’s long gaze. He recalls other men from years or months before, men in the service or men who left the city in a rush or men who fell in love with women. He remembers the man from Iowa and his shaking back and the little snatches of song they sang. And his disgust is instructive, palliative. He does not have to worry over his own weakness then, when so many other weaknesses are apparent.
Finally Henry comes outside and looks up and down the street and sees him and waves. Julius pulls the boot back on, his sock bunched in the bottom and his jeans half-inside the shaft, and walks that way to his room at the Squaw, sending Henry through the parking lot ahead of him to wait in the alcove, then leaving the door unlocked while he takes off his shirt and jeans so Henry can scan the area before entering. But Henry does not wait, and before Julius can get his shirt undone Henry has banged through the unlocked door and turned Julius by the elbow and kissed him.
THREE (#ulink_02ce4ea7-1c7f-5815-96cc-6fd999526d61)
The valley (#ulink_02ce4ea7-1c7f-5815-96cc-6fd999526d61)
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 isn’t your fault,” she says to him.
“You tell that to our old dad. Not that you could’ve even when he was alive.”
Muriel nods remotely. She puts her head on his shoulder and sighs pleasantly, though his smell and this contact are at odds with her thoughts.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I caught Julius on Kansas Avenue in a bar the Del Monte guys used for faro?” Lee says.
“I don’t think so.”
“Our father was not dead but nearabouts. I guess I was eighteen then because it wasn’t long after this that I signed us both up, though Julius was too young. I was out looking for him, down in the factory bars, and in the third or fourth one I tried there he was in a pair of overalls, cleaning the heads. You wouldn’t believe the filth of that place. And it turned out he was working off a debt and he didn’t want to tell me, because he’d stolen from that bar, right from the till, to play into their card game.”
In the hallway the phone rings again but Lee does not move toward it. Soon someone else answers, speaking in a scolding voice.
“I’m not sure I realized it then, but I did soon after—my brother knew things I didn’t, he had passions of his own,” he says. He makes a face. She thinks of the story Julius told of the rabbit man and how he’d held her look for so long across the table. She does not share Lee’s fraternal resentment but she does feel betrayed, and also that she has been the betrayer. She had told Julius her secret and sent him that money and after that he disappeared. She wonders if her confidence was a kind of permission, the way even bluffs could close the distance between people.
