ON SWIFT HORSES
Shannon Pufahl
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Shannon Pufahl 2019
Cover image © Epics / Getty Images
Shannon Pufahl asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008293963
Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008293987
Version: 2019-09-26
For Dorthy Figgs—
my grandmother and a first-rate card player
The declaration of love marks the transition from chance
to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened.
—ALAIN BADIOU, In Praise of Love
An honest game has always been a great rarity.
—HERBERT ASBURY,
Sucker’s Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
I.
II.
III.
At the Heyday Lounge the horsemen think they are the only gamblers. They file in each morning, their shoes dusty and their pockets jangling with coins, like parishioners. They sit in a dark corner under a single blade fan, a plantation relic hauled from the lounge owner’s Southern home to this coastal city thirty miles from Mexico. Above them the fan has the look of salvage but it makes no sound, and though it keeps the flies from their faces and necks and midmorning cocktails they do not notice it.
Every weekday the men come. They speak openly because they believe the lounge owner to be simple—which is true—and Muriel, their waitress these long mornings, to be a woman and therefore incapable of both memory and complex reasoning. It does not help that she is young, that she looks like the empty plains she comes from, flat and open and sad. She and Lee, newly married, have been in San Diego only a few months and are learning slowly how to be modern, and though she has always worked it is fair that the horsemen take her for a housewife forced into labor by circumstance. They could not know from her wide shoulders and square waist and rural modesty that she had taken the bus from Kansas on her own, that she could play cards and drive a car, or that she’d left behind a house she owned outright, to come here.
So they wave their hands at her and call her sweetheart from across the room and order their drinks with pointed enunciation as if she were hard of hearing. Though she remembers not only their drinks but the clip of their mustaches, the red-rimmed dimness of their eyes, she writes the orders down on a notepad and hands the paper to the bartender. The horsemen are retired trainers from the furlongs at Del Mar or bookmakers for rich men in the coastal hills. A few are ex‑jockeys, burned out and overweight, unsure what else life might have to offer them. They talk as men do, confident and gently adversarial, about the coming race day, the horses off their feed, the jockeys with tapeworm, the cup and feel of the track. They set long odds and argue over them.
For a few months Muriel listens. She writes down their private speculations and begins to join their language to its objects. When her shift ends at two she