C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Only Reuben — a Currier & Ives on his pert Hell perch — stared openly.

“What ails the money man?” he whispered down his mount’s neck.

Allmon’s hands were visibly shaking as he struggled to adjust the bridling over the bridge of Hell’s velvet nose. Reuben peered at him with shrewd, hooded eyes. “Why, Allmon, you’re white as that bridle,” he said. “Perchance you’ve seen a ghost?”

Mack looked up from where he was adjusting Reuben’s stirrup higher. His eyes were narrow. “You and Henry have a chat?”

“Whatever do you mean? Is there a mystery afoot? Pray tell.” Reuben’s marionette head snapped back and forth from Mack to Allmon, its blunt jaw snapping.

Mack said, “Forge’s daughter died in childbirth. Lift your boot a second.”

Reuben’s eyes popped with delight, and he raised one rein-roughened finger to his lips. “One of their own died? Drama!” he whispered as they guided his mount out of the paddock, a man at each side. He leaned down and whispered into Allmon’s air. “I do believe this is what white folk call a Tragedy.” Allmon’s head was bowed as his hands trembled on the girth strap, so Reuben popped back on the saddle, swiveling in amusement. “Remember that time there was a big ole fire up at Garden State — remember that, old man? My, wasn’t that a big time.”

Mack grunted, his eyes trained ahead of him at the track where the sun threatened to warm the chill autumn day. “Be careful how early you rally, Reuben. She slowed up yesterday morning during exercise. Leave her some juice.” He tugged for the last time on the billet strap.

“Oh yes, Mr. Mack, those sure were the times,” Reuben said with a smile of sweet reminiscence. “Some kitchen critter lit up the place in the middle of a race, and that old wood grandstand, why, it went sky-high like a firework stand! Some folk died — oh, just workin’ folk, don’t let it trouble you none — but the take was still in the vault. Yes, indeed, Reuben’s purse was snug as a bug in a rug. Why, hello brute bettors, butchers all!” With a wave of his rough hand to the grandstand and his nose curled up in distaste, he was off with the lead pony, head high and shoulders square. Far along the curve they went, funneling one by one into the green and white clanking gate. When a green-jacketed handler secured the latch on the gate, he whistled in admiration at Hell and smiled up at Reuben. “You’re in tall cotton now, Reuben.”

“Cotton?” Reuben tucked into position, his eyes turned to sharp, side-slicing daggers. “Remember Fort Pillow, motherfucker.”

They exploded out of the gate like doves from a cote. Down the far stretch they flew, Hellsmouth flapping around at the rear, spending energy and spending time. Dragooned for the third time into this public humiliation, Reuben tucked his crop and let her drag her feet all the way to the quarter pole; he understood now she was just stalking her prey.

At the sloping curve, the bundled pack switched leads as one, shifting and settling out of their steady pace for a brief moment. A mount or two fell away or bore out. Reuben had been waiting lynx-eyed for the speed shift; tucked close to Hell’s withers, he staked a tenuous balance atop the brief irons and, with his silks billowing, flashed back the crop so it struck with a single, smart snap. Two things happened at once: Hellsmouth jetted forward with a locomotive force so sudden and propulsive that Reuben’s boots slipped the irons and he thumped onto her back with a jarring, graceless plop; and a shoe dislodged from the hoof of a bay colt ahead of them in traffic, so the aluminum ring flung threw the air like a boomerang, and just as Hell stretched low in her deepening forward lunge, it spun over her head and struck Reuben in the nose where he sat without irons on the filly’s back. In what the Laurel Park announcer would call “a testament to Walker’s athleticism and training and not impossible for competitors of this caliber” and what the backstretch would call “A GODDAMN FUCKING MIRACLE,” Reuben remained upright in the saddle, though his eyes rolled back to white, his head flopping grotesquely on his neck as the world went absent. Somehow his hands maintained their death grip on the reins and in less than two seconds, he was coming to, his feet reclaiming the irons by instinct, his bony rump risen high, his broken nose gushing blood down the front of his purple Forge silks. “Haw!” he cried woozily, and Hell responded to his fresh balance. She opened up beneath him, her stride extended to an almost magical length, so she was airborne a split second longer than any horse Reuben had ever ridden or the crowd had ever seen. She didn’t run at full stride, she leaped, her long body an airfoil. The horses around her — confounded colts under their desperate, whipping jocks — appeared to slow against her blistering speed, which only increased as she burned through the remaining pack, war-striped with Reuben’s blood and streaking over the line a full seven lengths ahead of the pack.

Pandemonium erupted as the rest of the field trickled under the wire. The crowds rose in a screaming burst and flash bulbs exploded, so Laurel Park was bright as a sun. Hellsmouth had barely broken a sweat under Reuben, who was busy recovering himself, swiping at his nose with his sleeve and neglecting even to raise a hand in victory. When they moved into the winner’s circle, he slapped away concerned hands, accepting only the silken houndstooth handkerchief of a competing owner, who said, “Well, there’s a broken nose and no doubt about it.”

Hermès silk was soaking up the crimson flow when Mack made it to his side and placed a steadying hand on his boot. Reuben leaned down, his eyes all business even as he fought a hard faint, his wide pupils black bottomless pots. “She look okay? She pull? Felt something funny at the wire.” He was slipping in a daze from the saddle.

Mack pushed him back upright with both hands. “She looked good, but it’s one hell of a picture you’re gonna take. You got goddamn mettle, Reuben, I’ll give you that.”

They were a strange admixture of animal and man: a gleaming thousand-pound horse topped by a bleeding bird of prey, stars whirling in his eyes, a trainer scowling under a white Stetson, and Allmon at Hell’s foamed mouth. His face conveyed not victory but a bleak abeyance, as if he didn’t know where he was, or how he came to be here. “Look here, look right here!” said the photographer with some impatience, because Allmon kept turning aside. He was looking for Henry Forge, who was nowhere to be seen.

Barely leaning, lest he faint and tumble into a heap of anorectic limbs, Reuben whispered from the catbird seat, “What do you say we have us a drink, soldier. Swap prison tales!”

Allmon shook his head faintly, his face whitewashed. “I don’t drink…,” he said, but the hesitation in his voice was plain.

“Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man. Smile for the camera, all and sundry!”

The eye of fame blinked and captured them.

* * *

“Sir, what can I get for you?”

Henry was staring past the stewardess, his gaze fixed on the fat, white cotton boll moon. It filled the whole of the opposite window, its planar seas and gradations clear in the rarefied heights of their flight. A jagged line was scribbled on its surface, a question that repeated itself again and again, scrawled in his daughter’s hand: Is there a difference between happiness and joy, and why can I feel neither?

“May I get you something to eat or drink?”

He should have been celebrating with Mack, holding court with the local news station, fielding questions from the Times and the Racing Form . He should have been telling Allmon the truth and setting the world back on its axis. Instead, he was returning to his grandchild as quickly as technology allowed. There was no time to waste. His life was caught in a war of attrition and Death was scattering his strongest troops: his singular focus and his old convictions.