C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“Sir, is there anything you need?”

Need? Yes, he needed to know that his grandson had eaten well, that he was sleeping in peace, that he would be kept safe from all the dangers of the world. To his own astonishment, his chest was full of the most blissful emptiness, wherein he discovered only one thing: Samuel. He realized this was love. It had nothing to do with his happiness, which was nonexistent. He wasn’t sure yet about joy.

* * *

In a Thunderbird the color of money, Reuben rolled them round to a shack way out in the deeps of Howard County, west of Clarksville, what might have been a speakeasy or a juke joint back in the day, but aslant now and barely standing, filled to busting with grooms, hotwalkers, and a few slumming jocks. Thick light streamed through frosty porthole windows and a general din pulsed the walls. When Reuben burst through the tavern door with Allmon at his heels, reluctant and wary as a deer, they were nearly thrown back by an odorous wall of rank armpits, sodden bar mats, urinal cakes, and unmopped floors. At the sight of Reuben’s wizened mask of abuse — grotesque purple nose and great slices of bruise beneath his eyes — all heads swiveled round. Then the room loosed a drunken roar, raising fists and pint glasses, and Reuben raised triumphant matador arms.

“Doo-dah!” he cried, sashaying into the crush of handshakes and shoulder slaps. He tossed back a sly whisper to Allmon, “Tap, tap, Endman. Give them what they think they want, but keep your eyeballs open.”

As expected, theirs were the only black faces in the room.

“How’s that nose, Reuben?”

“Nought but a scratch!” he said, squeezing his way toward a tiny four-top.

“Had it coming, Reuben! No broke bones in two years—”

“Them’s the wages!” He pointed an impossibly misshapen finger at the nearest barkeep. “Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses!” Allmon had barely found a chair when sloppy shots were slung before them. He eyed the glass, eyed Reuben’s dangerous grin, and, with the new reality snapping at his heels, drained it. What else was there to do? He felt smoke curl out of his nose. When the smoke cleared, there was only Henrietta’s face before him. Allmon bowed his head, breathless.

Reuben leaned across the table, the dim overhead lights casting mean shadows across his mangled face. “How are you liking our dirty business, prison kid?”

Allmon remained motionless, his eyes down. “On my way up.” The words were outside of him as if belonging to someone else. He suddenly wanted his own mind, and all of its life-roughened texture, to be shredded away. He wanted desperately to be drunk.

“On the house — congrats, Reuben!” The barkeep sloshed down a second round.

Shot glass to his puckered lip, Reuben said, “Well, tell me then — why dost thou bow thy head and wring thy hands thusly?”

Allmon looked up; he’d been unaware of the clustered knot of his fingers, how he kneaded them from the thick knuckle to the nail tip. There was a tiny fissure of anguish between his brows.

Reuben narrowed his sly eyes. “Do I detect a note of worry over the death of … hmmm … a little white gal, perhaps? I swear you went pale as a paddy earlier today! Was she your precious little fig? Did she catch your cock one day when she was out angling for exotic fish? You know how white girls love to gnaw on Negro dick now and agai—”

“To Reuben!” someone cried before Allmon could rise and separate Reuben’s head from his neck. Reuben smiled into the crowd with wide eyes and a feint of delighted surprise. But the smile was cut from cruel cloth.

A man stumbled into his side with a bear’s embrace. “Nobody can bring down this son of a bitch, not even a flying horseshoe and Boomie Racz! Toast! Toast!” And the cry was raised again, and now two grooms — Barney and Truss — slid into the other two empty seats with yet another round, but even as their glasses sparked empty beneath the tavern’s grimy lights, Reuben leaped to the seat of his chair and, with hands to his Pan hips, cried, “Toast? Why, sure! I’d like to take this opportunity to praise an old friend who holds me tight and never lets me go! Raise a glass to Jeff Davis — may he be set afloat on a boat without compass or rudder, then that any contents be swallowed by a shark, the shark by a whale, whale in the devil’s belly and the devil in hell, the gates locked and the keys lost, and further, may he be put in the north west corner with a south west wind blowing ashes in his eyes for all ETERNITY. Say aye if ye mean aye!”

“Aye!” Sloshing glasses punctured the smoky air above their heads. Reuben perused the scene with a sharp, slaten eye.

“Are you happy, Reuben? Your purse is getting fat!”

He grabbed at his cock. “It is!”

“Speech!”

He leaned down and pounded his fists once, twice on his table and rocketed upright. “Speech?” he cried. “Why, no soul wants to hear a speech tonight! Let’s play a game instead!” He swooped up his drink, threw it back, and the bar followed suit. With flint whimsy, Reuben hollered over the din: “Fellers and fellerettes, free shots for the winner of the interlocutor’s quiz!” He stomped about in a small circle on his chair as if it were a dirty shingle. “Tell this here jock, why are there no Thoroughbreds of ebon hue?” He gazed around, then tossed up his hands. “Black, you idiots, black!”

“There are!” called someone near the tap.

“Nyet! Not jet! Not one of you critters has seen a true black on the track!” And it was true; they hadn’t.

“I’ll drink it myself, then,” he snarled, and upended his shot. “All the pretty horses descend from the black, but interbreeding dilutes the majestic purity! Now the blackest black is merely muddy brown!” His chin crumpled under a swooping fishtail frown, but he winked at Allmon.

“Another!” someone yelled. “I ain’t drunk yet!”

“Yes, yes, let me amuse you, please,” Reuben hissed. Then, trumpeting through the tight embouchure of his lips: “Yokels! Riddle me this: How came I to be a tin soldier? Where are my esteemed brethren? Black predecessors once ruled this unruliest of sports!”

Proudly, as if coughing up a pearl, their neighbor slapped the table and blurted, “Jim Crow.”

A flap of a disdainful hand. “I see you know your minstrel show, but no, no, Paddy, no. Once upon a glorious time, we won every Derby, snatched every purse. But the vain rascals of the North conspired against the Sons of Ham. They staged a coup! And the Negro, once so dominant, was ousted! Why, Willie Sims himself had to grovel for a ride! Sorry, no shots for my dear friends … not tonight anyway!”

“Ahahahahahaw!” The room roared and they drank and Reuben glowered through snaky eyes, slipping down from his dais perch and plopping into his seat.

The room was full pickled, and Allmon too. Five shots in, there ensued a fabulous unraveling. As he sat marveling at the curiously dead weight of his tongue, thinking it a relief to be freed from memory, he was dragged up from the table by one elbow and yanked gracelessly again through the roiling, rowdy crowd. Reuben was a tiny man, but all muscle and trouble.

Back at the half-empty table, Truss shook his head and leaned blearily toward his companion. “Man, I get sick of that shit.”

“What?” said Barney.

“It’s always black this and black that,” said Truss. “Like bad shit didn’t happen to anybody else.”

Barney nodded. “I know. Things have changed.”

“I mean, there were white slaves too. People forget that.”

“Yeah, people totally forget that.” They clinked their glasses and sloshed whiskey.

The season ripped the door from Reuben’s hand, the wind as cold as Christmas. He and Allmon stumbled into a night of river-bottom black; yes — overhead the faint stars wobbled like the light of steamboats spied from below. Allmon looked at their vague and nameless number, his head beginning to spin on what remained of his sober sense. Ungoverned, his tongue blurted, “Eight years ago, I lost every … but I got a deal … I’m the devil.”