C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“Height: 16 hands, ¾ inches.

“Point of shoulder to point of shoulder: 16 inches.

“Girth: 74 inches.

“Withers to point of shoulder: 28 inches.

“Elbow to ground: 37½ inches.

“Point of shoulder to point of hip: 46 inches.

“Point of hip to point of hock: 40 inches.

“Point of hip to buttock: 24 inches.

“Poll to withers: 40 inches.

“Buttock to ground: 53½ inches.

“Point of shoulder to buttock: 68 inches.

“Circumference of cannon under knee: 8¼ inches.

“Point of hip to point of hip: 25 inches — she’s got a big ass.

“All right, now you know the numbers. Clearly, she’s huge.”

Greeney squinted, tilted his head, and said, “Mack, you’ve waited for the Florida Derby to race her. It’s pretty clear you’re going straight for races that offer you a hundred points and not messing around with smaller stakes. Why are you getting such a late start? Is there something we don’t know? You’re not exactly known for being conservative.”

Mack reached up and touched the pale brim of his hat, forming a brief shield over his features, then he squared up and stared down his interlocutor as though an epithet had been hurled in the general direction of his mother. “First off, I’m a registered Republican, and I’m conservative as fuck. Second, there’s nothing wrong with my filly. She’s a hundred percent. Actually, this filly’s two hundred percent.”

“Then why’d you—”

“Because,” Mack said, his lips thin, “I’ve got nothing to prove. I know where she’s headed.”

“Is she breaking from the gate any better?”

Mack grimaced. “No, that’s still a shit show.”

A writer from the Herald said, “She’s still running from behind?”

“Listen, yeah,” Mack said, then sighed, hands to his hips. “What you guys don’t understand about women is a lot. Smart women, they get bored easy. This one here, she’s so much better than the rest, she has to manufacture her own challenge. If she didn’t come from behind, she’d fall asleep on her own goddamn feet.”

Greeney again: “But do you feel she’s gotten enough conditioning to come back with the kind of performance she was capable of last year? We’ve all watched a lot of juveniles burn out in their third year. You think she’ll be ready without warm-ups?”

Mack’s patience was about sapped. He jutted out a blunt finger into the air in front of his chest with all the cocked force of a small revolver. “This filly just burned up five furlongs in fifty-eight and a half,” he spat. “You could cut off one of her goddamn legs and she’d still run faster than that bowlegged hack Angelshare.”

Greeney was shaking his head, a grin twitching about his lips. “Can I quote you on that?”

“Go ahead and quote me. I think we all know I’m not gonna die of natural causes.”

They broke up laughing.

But one voice pierced the laughter. “Yeah, I’m not buying it.” It was Jeff Burrow, tipping his ball cap up from the springy mass of his graying brown hair. He’d worked the track for thirty years, and there were numerous things he was afraid of, including his semper fi father-in-law and butterflies, but Mack Snyder was not on that list. “Let’s stop beating around the bush. You’re hard on horses, everybody knows it. Your filly’s big as a boat, that’s great, it’s impressive. But she skipped all the spring prep races, and now you bring her to Florida with a busted-up chest. How do you know you’re not setting her up to be another Ruffian?”

Mack started at the reference. Everyone could see the war on Mack’s face as he struggled to manage dueling armies of blustercuss and knickertwist. His normal raw porcine pink bloomed to a beefy red. He stepped toward Burrow with that finger still extended and the safety off, but, as if on cue, in a massive show of bravado, Hellsmouth sank into her heavily muscled quarters and reared high, rolling her hooves above the heads of the gathered men. Without a beat, Allmon scrambled to manage her.

Mack laughed a gravelly laugh and turned his pointing finger toward his horse. “How do I know? I know because I’m in love with her. And I never loved anybody that didn’t know how to fight.”

* * *

She was frothing in the post parade and fractious in the gate, whinnying for free rein and snarling at the bars of the five slip. Reuben eased his bones off the rails and situated himself on her back, snugging up his knees and fixing tight his goggles. He pressed the red crop under his arm, licked his lips, and surveyed the dirt track before him. He’d been waiting all winter like Hell’s war wife and here they were, reunited at the edge of a triumphant future. Hell had been crushing furlongs — absolutely demolishing them — in her morning workouts all week. She’d drawn the faithful railbirds with their cameras at dawn; she’d made the chief clocker stutter with excitement. Now she was tossing her black braids, banging her rump once against the rear door. She was more than ready, she was bursting out of her skin.

“Come out,” Reuben whispered, staring through the crack in the gate. “Come out for blood.” Now the jocks balanced their mounts. The sun was streaming light so loud they could hear it like a banging drum. When the burn of expectation mounted to out-and-out pain, the bell shrilled, and the gate clattered wide. An earthquake cracked through the stands, and the Florida Derby was on.

In a move that made the announcers shout, Hell broke clean as new glass beneath Reuben. She sheared out so suddenly without her usual sink and bob that he had to snatch manically at the roots of her braids and tuck hard to remain aboard. Was it only yesterday morning that she’d shambled out of the gate with her old loose-limbed stride? This was altogether new, how she plunged past the charging field inside of three paces, long before the first turn. Gone was her adolescent chop and her early wastrel furloughs. In their place a deep and powerful lunging had asserted itself. With every stride, she reached further forward, her nose piercing the air with a fresh and dreadful aggression. It was as if a new horse were unfurling under Reuben; he recovered his wits, doubled down upon her, one ear thrilling to the warrior report of her hooves.

The crowd didn’t wait for the turn, they rose in a jolt at the ⅞ pole, every eye locked on the charging filly as she took possession of the field. She was too strong to be pretty, but she had something in her new maturity far better than beauty: dignity. The colts all felt her occult energy; they sensed it like a shadow tilting over them and dropped away as if they’d slowed up, though in reality they only charged the harder. As the stunned field wound out of the turn and into the straightaway, never once did Reuben think to raise his crop to tap her on a shoulder or quarter. Hell was riding a wave of her own power and needed no spur to draw the first four lengths between her and Angelshare, which was when Reuben first became aware of the unearthly roll of sound ripping across the grandstand. “The devil’s on his long black train,” he muttered as four lengths turned to seven. Seven to ten, and her wave began to crest and unfurl with unmitigated strength. She was pulling further away and the words of the announcer were unclear, but Reuben knew the man was yelling. Poured across her back, he spared a thought to reserve her — go easy on that delicate bone — but he didn’t or he couldn’t as she rolled out her most destructive, punishing stride, now extending sixteen lengths from Angelshare and closing in on Secretariat’s coppery ghost, so she was practically on his tail when she rolled thunderously under the wire twenty lengths ahead. She had slain the colts and flung dirt in their eyes, but her victory and Reuben’s wild yell and the shattering cries of the crowd didn’t alter her course; she continued to accelerate past the wire, her sweat unbroken, her huge heart untested. Reuben cawed and whooped and finally had to stand in the irons, hauling savagely on the reins. Hell whinnied and jerked her neck, arguing strenuously against her restraints, but finally, with an angry cry and a churlish toss of the head, she eased to a hard gallop. Now Stop the Music, poor fool, pulled up alongside her in his cooldown loop. Hell turned to him, her lips curled, her eyes like globes of a newly charted world. As the cameras rolled, she snaked out and bit the gelding savagely on the tender flesh of his ear. Both jocks cried out, wrestling for space, until Hell finally galloped away, a spring in her step and blood in her mouth. The season was on.