C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Roger peered down his nose, considered the napping child, then the couple exchanged a long, signifying glance. With a voice so deep it had made dogs crouch and roll and whimper all his life, Roger said simply, “Very cute, indeed.”

“Here,” she said, passing the baby carefully into his arms, “I told Henry I couldn’t bear to leave him over there to eat alone, so I dragged him over. Neighbors should support one another, you know.” She glanced meaningfully at Roger, who met her gaze with barely arched brows. “Now, I intend to feed the man. It’s the very least we can do.”

“Certainly.” Roger cradled the child in the crook of his arm and swept the innards of the radio as well as a checkbook and bills and various pens off to the side of the table. With his free hand, he indicated the chair opposite. Then he and Henry sat while Roger rocked the child with the easy, practiced arms of a man who’d raised two children.

“Was your daughter married?” he asked with a glance down at the child.

“No,” Henry said, his voice barely a whisper.

“So, she was dating an African-American gentleman?”

Henry nodded dumbly; he didn’t know what to say.

“Well, it’s heartening to see the way times have changed,” Roger said, dandling the child. “The world used to be so ugly about these things. Even good folks … well, your father was a bit of a racist, wasn’t he, Ginnie?”

“Oh, Daddy was a good man,” Ginnie said, “but yeah, maybe a bit. Nothing too crazy.”

“My folks were Quakers,” said the man, turning his warm eyes on Henry and not waiting for his response. “They taught me that God made of one blood all peoples of the earth. My mother actually had a cross-stitch of that, which hung in our foyer. And they lived that verse. Especially my mother. She was a very politically active woman.”

Ginnie moved smartly about her kitchen until she returned with plates heaped, saying, “But my daddy was kind too, Roger. He was. He just had some backwards ideas. You can’t help the way you were raised.”

“Ah,” said Roger, and cocked his head, “but when you grow up, you have to take responsibility for your adult mind.”

“Well, anyway, enough about that,” Ginnie said, reaching out, “give me back that baby.” She situated herself at the corner of the table, where she could dandle the child with one arm and eat with her free hand.

Henry stared down at his plate piled high with beet salad and venison casserole, buttered sweet potatoes and rosemary bread still steaming from the oven. Ginnie had filled his glass with sweet tea. It occurred to him that he had not been hungry in a long, long time. Then hunger moved him, and he fell on his food like an animal, even though he felt it as a betrayal. His heart was broken, yet his body was ravenous. He ate and ate and ate. After some time, he sat swaying over the remains of stew and bread, his eyes glazing with tears that pricked like a thousand needles. He wanted to say something, but he could not release the clamp on his throat.

Roger stood to offer privacy and moved to the rear door, both dogs at his heels, and slipped a pack of American Spirits from his breast pocket. He wavered on the top step, about to move down onto the grass, but when his wife appeared not to notice, he remained where he stood and lit a cigarette.

Ginnie, who was planting kiss after kiss on the child’s sleepy forehead, said, “Why, I believe he has your nose. Yes, if I’m not mistaken, I believe so. Roger, I can see you standing right there. Don’t think I can’t.” Then she looked up at Henry with unvarnished delight. “You always did have a proud nose like the horses we used to have, those Walkers you sold Daddy back in the day.” She hefted up the child, who swooned with his lips pouted out. The sloped nose was indeed a miniature replica of Henry’s.

Ginnie gazed with unblinking eyes at Henry. “I do wish I had known Henrietta better. Perhaps I could have been … a better neighbor.”

Under her bright, direct gaze, Henry was silent. How miraculous that Henrietta could be spoken of and yet not exist. Remorse had become more real than she.

“I didn’t see her very often, but I always found her to be”—Ginnie seemed to be rooting about for the right word—“very interesting. And just look at her baby. What a treasure.” Flicking his half-smoked cigarette into a Folger’s can, Roger returned to the kitchen, gazing steeply over his wife’s shoulder at the child in her arms.

Ginnie waved one hand irritatedly. “Roger, you smell like cigarettes. Good Lord.” Then, turning to Henry, she said, “If you ever have some trouble with him, you just bring him over. Roger has a way with colicky babies.”

With a glint in his eye, Roger said, “I know when to be quiet.”

Ginnie made a dubious sound in her throat.

“Well,” Roger said, “I’m glad we had this … supper together. Neighbors should break bread together.”

Ginnie nodded firmly, while Roger settled himself back into his creaking Windsor. Stroking a Corgi on its head and gazing curiously at Henry, he said gently, “So, how’s that fine horse of yours doing, Mr. Forge?”

Henry, who had been absorbed in the mysterious face of his grandson, could only look up at Roger in astonishment, as if he couldn’t remember his own name or how he had come to be here. When he spoke, his words were rusty like the hinges on an old door. He whispered, “My horse?”

* * *

One little jockey in the hot tub; one little jockey on the phone.

One little jockey in the kitchen; one little jockey still at home.

One little jockey with his agent; one little jockey in the box.

One little jockey puking salad; and one little jockey — imp, raconteur, pissant, tricky truculent slick, Reuben Bedford Walker III of provenance unknown and character indeterminate, five feet three inches tall, 3 percent body fat, and 118 pounds — barreling out of the jockey room, his valet hollering at his back, in search of the animal only seen from a distance under other jocks, but what an animal!: sixteen exquisite hands at the withers, a deep barrel chest with iron shoulders, and a head of black chiseled marble cracked by a white chine blaze; black satin tail and legs that screamed RUN MOTHERFUCKER. She was a black, cresty-necked filly who bit handlers, broke jocks, and rammed in fractions like a new Secretariat, what Mack Snyder called his perfect thing, the kind of filly that got hotter and hotter until she burned up the Triple Crown and retired to the mommy track; wife, mother, and one-night stand all in one.

Reuben careened along the back stretch, that theater of quarrel and striving and hungover work, of labor white and brown and poor all over, of motormouth agents and trainers chewing out assistants, of milkshaking vets hauling gear bags—

“Heya, Reuben!”

“Why you back here? Ain’t you got a race?”

“Your valet’s looking for you!”

He acknowledged them with not so much as a flick of a hand, or a cock of a brow, but slipped the corner of Barn 23, the first of Mack Snyder’s four. Along the sun-dappled shed row above all the pillow talk muttered into equine ears, he could hear the big filly knickering her pleasure as she was combed.

“Hail, fine Ethiope!” cried the tiny man, and Allmon spun where he stood at the rear of the filly. In that most reliable of stage moves, he looked forward before looking down, and in the delay the jock had slipped under his arm like an otter in silks, crying, “What a balm for the old cryballs you are! A noble Ebon tires of these Caucasians with their corpsy skin and tea-stained hair, their awshucks and awdangs, their pallid faces — fucking tallow! Don’t get me started on the wetbacks. Oooooh…” His words whistled up the flue of awe: “Hellsmouth, as I live and breathe.”