And she drove all over the West, really, from one gambling mecca to another often alone. So she also taught me how to stand there and look serious and adult so that I wasn't caught.
And, you know, she took me to Las Vegas very often when I was a kid and taught me how to play poker and slots even though I was under age. PUFAHL: My grandmother was in many ways a woman ahead of her time.
SIMON: Where do we see your grandmother in Muriel? PUFAHL: Yeah, she and her husband, they've recently married and she gets a job, you know, empty and ashtrays and filling drink orders and begins to eavesdrop on these retired bookies and trainers and picks up tips from them, which she then uses to gamble secretly at the Del Mar racetrack. SIMON: The book opens with a beautiful scene at the Heyday Lounge in San Diego among a group of guys who play the ponies and then that's when we meet Muriel the waitress who's overhearing them. "On Swift Horses" is the novel by Shannon Pufahl, who joins us now from the studios of KAZU in Pacific Grove, Calif. And in a way, her debut novel is a celebration of her grandmother embodied in a couple of its characters in a story set in the 1950s among dusty-shoed gamblers, boys back from war and the girls they marry, fleet horses, slick card sharks, unfinished highways and the beckoning West. Her family lived in rural Kansas, but Shannon's grandmother who was a brilliant poker player took her on sojourns to Las Vegas. Through the parks and plazas of Tijuana and the bars and beaches of San Diego, On Swift Horses mesmerizingly charts the journeys of Muriel and Julius on their separate quests for freedom, new horizons and love.Shannon Pufahl began a novel the year that her grandmother died. As tourists gather on roof tops to watch atomic clouds bloom in the desert, Henry and Julius's love burns in the shadows – until one night Henry is forced to flee. There he meets Henry, a blackjack artist and a man who shares Julius's passions, and his secrets. Julius has found himself in Las Vegas, where his gift for gambling leads him to a job patrolling the boards above the casino tables, watching through the cigarette smoke for chancers and cheats. Instead it is Lee's brother, Julius, a thief and Korean War veteran – and someone she has only met once – whom she longs to tell, and who has struck a spark of promise and possibility inside her quietly ordered life. When she begins, secretly, to bet on the horses and, shockingly, to win, she feels strangely unready to share her good luck and its origins with her husband Lee. As she pours coffee and empties ashtrays, she eavesdrops on her customers, the ex-jockeys and trainers of the Del Mar racetrack. Muriel, newly married and newly orphaned, works as a waitress in a San Diego diner. Popular Crime & Action Series Expand submenu.
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