“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.
Lee finds a cigarette and lights it and blows the smoke hard toward the open window. He says, “You know, after I’d been let off here, in San Diego, I couldn’t find him for two weeks. He’d been back himself already a month. I was sure of his date because I had a friend in the same crew and he told me they’d come back. Two weeks.” Lee holds up two accusing fingers. “Then finally he got my number from somewhere and he called me. He’d spent all the money he had and he asked me to wire more to a motel in Palm Desert. This was before you got here, you was probably on that bus in Arizona or someplace.”
For a moment Muriel looks at him without speaking. He holds out the cigarette for her and she shakes her head and reaches for the pack and lights her own.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” she says.
“I didn’t see why it would matter to you.”
“I thought you all got back at the same time,” she says. She turns away and blows her smoke into the room.
“Well, we didn’t.”
She knows he wants to say more but she doesn’t want him to say it. She doesn’t want to know any more than she already does. She thinks of the time passing and Lee’s worry. She sees him need her more because of all this. She steps forward and kisses him and before he can speak again she presses him toward the bedroom and unbuttons his top button and asks for his haste and his force.
THE NEXT DAY, Muriel stands at the end of the bar with a newspaper crossword folded neatly, jotting notes in the margins. In a week the season will open, and the undercard and then the Monday stakes are thick with good horses and riders known for putting on a show. For now the track is fast and the weather fine and the men speculate openly. Rosie is thinking through the chances of a newcomer named Willie Declan, who by all accounts will mount the favorite.
“You know the line, water everywhere and nothing to drink. That’s how Declan is on that California Star,” Rosie says.
“Hardly matters in that field. In with all those real riders, he’ll be as lost as a girl,” another man says, and drains his glass.
W. D., Muriel writes, lost at sea. But the horsemen are not done with Willie Declan.
“He’s a cement brick,” the mustache says. “Sure you can fit him in your hand, but you can hardly lift him.” He gives the table a look.
“But the hunnerd-granner,” says Rosie, who always stands up for the jocks.
“In the hundred-grander he ran on Whittleman’s Bitty King, and that was a gift of a fine match. Bitty could’ve carried a Mark 7 and won on slop.”
“But you can’t say Declan isn’t ready for a big race like this.”
Rosie again, and at this a few of the men make kissing faces at him.
“Maybe not. But I can say that he’s been a little light after that flu he had, and with Roustabout kicking up the way he is these last weeks no one will beat him who won’t ride the rail for a halfie.”
“I’ll wait for positions. At six Declan could take two from the rail, especially if Sayonara gets anywhere under five, and Declan could squeeze in that way. That’s how I’d run it, I’d sail the inner harbor,” says Rosie, but his voice is lowering now. He is fifty years old and still fit but he carries some sorrow the other men find disquieting.
“I’m sure you would but that don’t mean you can,” the mustache says, and leans across the table and flicks Rosie on the chin.
The talk goes on this way. At this first stage the odds are fluctuating, and a late El Niño rain would bring a scratch or two, from the finer runners whose trainers won’t race them on mud. Anyone glancing at Muriel’s notes would see a set of names and numbers and track slang coded into her own shorthand: ’Nara if under five see W. D. Whittle on the wire if cuppy. Too Young 4–8.