C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

And then, laughing, Reuben hauled up his duffel bag, which was nearly as large as he was, and left, waiting until he was safely outside the dusty confines of the barn to light his Cuban cigar.

* * *

Even after six weeks of incarceration on limited rations and no exercise at all, the filly’s self-possession was total, unwavering, and irritating as all get-out. She snapped at anyone fool enough to walk down her shed row, butted her head against her stall wall, and snarled out her window at each passing February day. This horse knew who she was — and she’d had more than enough.

“Oh, fuck it,” Mack said, tired to death of his role as martinet. “Get this peccary head off her lead and into a porta-paddock. No more handwalking, no more coddling. I can’t take this crap anymore.”

She trained one wicked eye on Allmon when he entered the stall, but she didn’t bite. Still, Allmon managed her head, through which coursed a high, almost electric energy. She was a hurricane in a black barrel.

“Goddamn,” said Mack as he eased down slowly to a squat beside her, careful not to make a sudden movement. “Goddamn if I’m not a little bit scared of this filly. That’s a first.”

But the long, knobby leg was cool, and Allmon limped alongside Hell to a paddock constructed on the back of Mack’s broodmare barn, where a sun the color of old lemons was shrinking the snow. The instant she felt the bite of the February air, Hell’s nose rode high like a schooner on waves, and she began to skitter and dance to an old, unheard tune. Her tail snapped and her eyes shined with the bliss of the cold.

“Turn her loose,” said Mack.

“Really?” said Allmon, pausing at the paddock gate.

“Can’t never could,” said Mack, flanked by two assistants. Then he reached forward and unclipped the shank to turn Hell loose.

For a long moment, she stood perfectly still in the paddock, her black mane waving and twisting in the squirrely wind, her nostrils wide as the world, her ears pricked forward toward something far beyond the confines of the paddock.

“My God,” one of the assistants whispered. “Her legs are magnificent.” The filly’s ears swiveled back, then without so much as a tinge of hesitation denoting pain, she sank into those magnificent legs, her rump a boss of rippling muscle, and leaped forward like a deer from her quarters. Two strides and Mack was beginning to yell; three more and, without altering her speed or veering, Hell crashed chest-first into the metal rim of the pen, sending ripples of shock along its length until it bent under her force. She stumbled heavily against the resistance as if startled, then jerked away and spun around toward her handlers, her eyes lined with high white. Lips furled back nearly to her tattoo, she cried out a wild, shrill, enraged sound that pinned them all, except for Mack, who had flung his hat from his head and raced into the paddock, hollering, “She’s gonna charge! She’s gonna break her legs!” Allmon didn’t know whether it was an honest escape or merely to exercise her natural strength, but he was there inside of two seconds, ready when she leaped forward again, strings of saliva swooping from her bared teeth, her breath a wind shear against his face. She feinted left, then dodged right, but they had her circled. Allmon snatched hold of her halter and drew her head savagely around where he could gain a proper hold. Only then did he see the jagged wound that had opened across her breast, the thin marbled fat exposed beneath. With a start, he realized that Hell — competitor, champion, beauty, his future — was raw meat.

They managed two lunging steps forward with Allmon at the halter, whispering and cajoling and petting her with his voice. But Hell didn’t want sweet nothings; in a flash she traced a swift circle with her head and butted him with the long, blunt ridge of her nose. She sent him sprawling elbows akimbo into the dirt.

Allmon cried out, more from surprise than pain as Mack scrambled to restore a hold on the halter. She’d never snapped at Allmon before, never once tried to best him. Now he rose to his feet, his face twisted up with swift, furious offense.

It took the strength of seven to wrestle Hell back to her stall.

While Mack went sprinting for his cell phone, she stood there with her head high, blood running tracks down her front legs, squaring eyeball to eyeball with Allmon, who stood safely on the other side of the stall door. They both shook with grievance.

“Is that how it’s gonna be?” he hissed. “I’m the enemy now?”

She raised her lip.

“Well, then this is what you get!” He gestured with a lashing motion at the hay, the dim light, the stall, knowing full well that until the day she quit racing, when they retired her from the track and began forcing select stallions on her, that long-awaited moment when he, Allmon, would make a real life for himself with one of her foals, she would never experience a moment of freedom again.

* * *

Copied into the fourth notebook, from K. Aubere’s Limitless Variation and the Advent of Life :

For a billion years, there was little, only the brownish green scum of the seas. Nothing but basalt rock existed on a land deprived of oxygen and blasted by ozone. In the waters, life was a thin, primitive, fragile sheet. Single-celled, prokaryotic organisms clung to one another like magnetic bits of thread, accreting and forming these microbial mats. Photosynthetic organisms crowded to the top, striving for light, while their buried peers split the weaker sulfide bonds to survive.

But the wheel of the world was spinning, the mats mutating and diversifying, spreading throughout the seas. In a blink of the earth’s basalt eye, eukaryotic organisms emerged, algae-like with their organelles, tiny harbingers of complexity. Tissues and organs soon followed.

540 million years ago, Nature reached down, took up all her organisms, and cast them like dice. Invertebrate life tumbled throughout the seas, and in wild radiations, the ocean phyla appeared in startling profusion. Soon, the algae blossomed into plants, which marched out of the waters onto temperate land and blanketed the terrain from sea to sea with vegetation. Tiny animals then emerged to burrow and tunnel through earth’s undiscovered soils. The world was redolent with new bodies.

But why the sudden and dizzying acceleration of life in the Cambrian? Why then and not before? For 4 billion years, the rate of expansion had been placid, steady. The fossil record is slim, the cupboard nearly bare.

Freedom. Oxygen levels rose in the Cambrian, there was a cooling of the earth’s simmer, followed by a sudden, sigmoidal rise. In land’s abundant light, single-celled life strengthened and augmented, occupying new adaptive roles. The first land plants became coal forests that grew taller with each generation. The denizens of the seas grew to an inch, then a foot, then a meter in the form of terrifying fishes that established suzerainties in the depths. Extinctions shook the dynasties of the earth, cutting down classes and orders — though the phyla never vanished. They simply regathered their troops and when the Age of Reptiles began, dinosaurs thundered over carpets of insects and beetles, flowers and ferns. Mammals broke the trees and cut blazes, and then the apes appeared, and the ape men eventually stood up. They spread out from the bowl of Africa to Europe and Asia with crude tools in their hands and eyes evolved to gaze ahead at the horizon. But then Homo emerged out of the family Hominidae, and brought with him that very late and crude invention, the human brain. The rest, as they say, is history.

* * *

She wasn’t green anymore, she was seasoned, and she was enormous. The turf writers flocked around her at Gulfstream — Todd Greeney from the Racing Form , Jeff Burrow of Blood Horse , and all the rest. Mack hated the press; as far as he was concerned, fielding a single question was an unforgivable waste of his daylight, but the track management had requested it — hell, they’d all but demanded the press conference, so here he was, every pugnacious, impatient, hypertensive, contemptuous ounce of him. While Hellsmouth stood at attention with Allmon at her chin, Mack barked out her numbers in a blunt staccato: