C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

* * *

Henry jabbed at the remote control in a daze. He rewound the DVR again and again, Samuel gnawing sloppily on a teething toy at his side, oblivious to what had just occurred. The last time Henry had felt such stupefaction, they had heaped dirt on his daughter’s casket. With this race, he’d been so close to the maximal, he’d felt victory was already accomplished. Now the vagaries of chance circled round him once again, chirping and pecking at the pebbles under his feet, their musty wings unsettling the dust and leaving him to shift with apprehension. Hell’s perfect record was broken. Someone help Henry: If Hellsmouth is not his perfect thing, then what exactly is she? What if she isn’t his at all, or worse, not a thing at all? What if she—

* * *

Did you see her body tumbling from orbit, all out of order? Call it a loss if you want, but did you notice how, like something breaking apart upon reentry, she grew even brighter as she came apart?

This many times my heartbeat

16¾ 16 74 28 37½ 46 40 24 40 53½ 68 8¼ 25

an ungoverned thing,

when I end circles,

there is a remove like sleep but

I am still the center

I am worse

I am undivided

* * *

I’m sorry, I know you want more and there is more and you deserve it, but this is all I have. I’m a beggar. I was pitched out of my mother onto a dirt floor, and all I was given at birth was two fistfuls of language.

* * *

HawHaw! cries the half-cocked jock. Y’all think I’m down for the count, this little coyote? Why, my filly’s tricky, there’s gunpowder on her breath! Your story’s a bore, your limits my delight! You set out your words like the farmer sets out his traps! But my eye is keen and my sense is uncommon; I watch the other kits get snatched up in your traps. They wail and moan and gnash their foxy teeth. They chew off their own limbs for freedom, the fools! But me? I’m mind, I’m wind! I’m wise, little girl, you can’t fathom me! I turn tables, debunk, redefine, and rout. I slip your constraints and shit on your traps! While you tipple your applejack and tap out your tale, I feign, fib, fabulate— How now, I climax revenge! Contradict, appall, instruct, assassinate! I rise like a raven from the black of your page. I’ll strip the very meat off your aching hands, little scribbler!

* * *

Mack: Okay, everybody calm the fuck down. I never wasted a minute of my life on worry and neither has that goddamn horse. Buy your burgoo, place your bets, and watch her do what she does. Jesus Christ almighty— Enough.

* * *

The tall-case clock announced noon.

The writer didn’t come to the kitchen door as Henry had instructed, but parked at the front entrance of the house and knocked on the front door shining with spar varnish and crested by high mullion glass, cut to fit perfectly two hundred years before. Through the rilled sidelights, Henry detected a figure. When he drew open the door, a black woman stood there.

She was short as a child but held herself with a military erectness. Her face was plain, severe, falsified neither by smile nor makeup. Perhaps seventy, perhaps more, she cut an unforgiving figure — gray hair scraped back into a tight bun, cheekbones made for cutting glass. Her shapeless gray silk blouse was buttoned to the neck and tucked into an equally shapeless black skirt that fell without a hint of sensuality to her calves. On her feet: black orthopedic shoes with fat soles. She looked like a nun.

“You are M. J. Deane?” Henry said, a soft suspicion that looked very much like humor wrinkling his brow.

“I am.” Two little words, but all of the South.

“I’m Henry Forge.”

She looked steadily at Henry with eyes so dark it was impossible to determine where the pupil ended and the iris began. When they shook hands, the woman’s hand was cool, dry, and weathered as an old cornhusk — but firm, almost too strong. The intensity of her gaze bordered on the familiar.

“I’m afraid I have only one hour,” said Henry. “I’ll need to get to Louisville as I believe I mentioned to your assistant.”

“Hellsmouth,” the woman said slowly, her voice low and throaty with age. “I have followed your little horse very closely.”

“It’s been a good racing season. Two good racing years.” Even as Henry smiled, sweat sprung prickly across his back and under his arms. Outside, there was an urgent, early heat. His May dams drowsed with foals in thick shade, the tack already sprouted mold, the pawpaws were coming on. Kentucky was overripe and it was only the sixth of May.

The little woman moved past Henry, a large purse swinging from her arthritic fingers by glossy straps, a purse that even he, who knew nothing of fashion, recognized as an artifact of tremendous luxury. The boxy satchel — perhaps alligator — was secured by a small gold latch and stamped with its provenance in gold letters too small for him to read.

The woman stepped smartly into the parlor, then paused at the coffee table set for tea that separated the two Chippendale camelbacks. She took slow survey of the room, especially the Aubusson beneath her feet, its dun, gray, and tawny Gallic medallion edged with aubergine like bloodlines running through its pale arrangement. Then she lowered herself onto the divan.

“What’s that?” she said abruptly, pointing with a knobby finger above the hearth.

“Columbia jays,” Henry said, but looking at her, not the print. “Audubon, first folio. I bought it in Philadelphia and brought it back to Kentucky.”

“Is it a real one?”

Henry was almost too distracted to be offended. He was realizing suddenly that she’d walked ahead of him into the parlor prior to any invitation. He suffered a strange and phantom sense of displacement, as if he had suddenly walked out of his own story and into someone else’s.

He didn’t serve her. He merely gestured at the tea service, which she also ignored, the exquisite purse now perched on her knees with all the stately presence of a sleek black cat.

Henry said, “So you’ve written books on horse racing…?”

“No, I have not,” said the woman. “I spent my life writing mysteries. And I made a king’s fortune doing it. Then, one day I decided it was time to write nonfiction.” She looked at him evenly, coolly. “It was time to tell the truth.”

Outside the willows and the lilies and the buck roses were drooping in the voluptuous air. Henry said, “And where does your family come from?”

A cocked brow. “They come from here. But I would not call this place my home.”

Jarred by a distinct sense of unease, Henry crossed his arms. “And why is it that you publish under your initials?”

Now the woman stared directly into his eyes. “’Cause I ain’t nobody’s business.” The drawl, the slide into dialect, caused his hair to stand on end.

Henry said very slowly, very clearly, “You came to talk to me about horses and the racing life. Well, now you’re here.”

“I never said that.”

“Your assistant told me—”

“Henry Forge,” she said, and she cocked her head ever so slightly, “do you not remember me?”

Henry sat back into a moment of silence. From somewhere distant came the quiet inflection of hooves passing along the earth, then nothing. The woman smiled a smile that became colder as it grew, the shape of hate nursed over the course of a long and difficult life. Then she said: “Your father, John Henry Forge, was responsible for the death of Filip Dunbar; I know this because you told me yourself on the morning of January second, 1954. Filip was the lover of your mother, Lavinia. I know this because I saw them with my own eyes. You could never be convicted of anything in a bodyless crime; I realize that. It was your father who committed the crime. But I have the power to ruin the Forge name. That I can most certainly do. And I suspect for you that would be an end more permanent than actual death.”