C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

* * *

Pain is an alien being in your being. You think: How did this other life get inside me? This isn’t a stubbed toe, or indigestion, or the vigorous ache of a fever that rattles your bones but then passes in a week. No, you can’t kid yourself any longer; this is permanent, this is disease. Somewhere in these last few weeks, knowledge has pressed itself through the cracks of Allmon’s concrete heart, and now it can’t be routed out, neither the knowledge nor the disease. The world took everything from you, then found more to take, and now it’s going to invade your entire body, crowding your insides and diminishing what was once you until all that’s left will be the memory of how it once felt to live as a self without pain in the body you possessed — or you thought you possessed — as a long-ago child. A child who still had a mother. Marie.

“Young man.”

Allmon started and looked up from where he was wrapping Hell’s leg with what strength was left in his wrecked hands. A small woman had appeared on the other side of the stall chain; she stood utterly upright with a stern, martial formality, a black handbag gripped in a hand that looked more like old, creased iron than flesh. Her eyes were strangely heated when she said, “You are the groom of Hellsmouth? You work for Henry Forge?”

If it had been a white person, he would have said, Who wants to know? But to her, he just said, “Yeah.” And then he rose up slowly, a flicker of hurt on his face that appeared almost like anticipatory grief, as though the executioner had finally come. He took a hesitant step forward.

“Oh, young man.” The woman lowered her chin fractionally and smiled up at him without smiling. “Do I have a story for you.”

* * *

Allmon stumbled from the barn on inflamed hips and crumbling knees, desperate for air without chaff and mites, desperate for the cool remnants of the afternoon’s light rain. Through his tangled, terrible, scorched mind he could see the horses crisscrossing the Downs, dark and rangy and terrifically strong, stark as ink stains in the mist. A sudden resentment rose for the freshness of their young, ignorant lives, and he looked down at his own blasted body with a wholly different wonder. Prison had broken him and though he’d patched his pieces together, the mortar was crumbling.

He thought of Henrietta, but he pushed her away. She hadn’t taken his life, but she’d taken his fucking dignity. She was a cheap trick, a white slap, another humiliation to endure. He hated her.

Given a chance, these white motherfuckers will always take your black life. Always.

He began to stumble along after one of the sauntering colts, as though it offered escape, but there was no escape, not from the sick story he had just heard. Forgetting wouldn’t work this time. You tried to close your ears to time, but it was louder than ten thousand horses thundering across the plains. Time told stories that busted your eardrums and made them bleed. The Forges had murdered a man, the woman had said. Of course they had. Of course! He felt the righteousness of his vindication like a sun in his chest; it transformed and shined light on the guilt that had been torturing him. He had always known what the Forges were, but in Henrietta’s deceiving arms, he’d allowed himself to ignore it! Of course, he’d known; he’d spent his whole life on the run from a fucking lynch mob.

Allmon felt the vibration of the swelling crowds before he could see them and veered away from the track toward the parking lot, but the crowds were there too, chattering and smiling and moving along in their finely cut suits, outrageous hats on display. Smug, self-satisfied, like they had actually earned their wealth honestly and not by standing on the necks of others. Allmon stopped at a gate, breathless. None of them even noticed him in his stained polo and manure-caked boots. He was a bland, brown, weathered rock, and they were a gorgeous stream flowing past.

Allmon’s features were wrenched by a wrathful pain so pure, so ultimate, it was like the heat off a stove, so hot it was icy. He couldn’t tell any longer whether it was pain of the body or of the spirit. He fished in his pocket for his Vicodin, and the tablets jangled there like chalky coins.

You got the flushing disease?

He needed a doctor; he knew that. But these disunited states had turned the complex math of a human life into the simplest number: You got enough money for insurance? Insurance cost what he made in two weeks, and they made you pay a five-thousand-dollar deductible before you got any help. Then you could only go to certain doctors or you had to pay even more … He knew the fucking rigamarole. He knew.

This world breaks your bones, and some breaks are permanent.

He turned back toward all the barns, which were laid out all orderly like graves behind the track. Hellsmouth was waiting; the Derby was only minutes away. The critical importance of the race only grew in his mind. Everything — his whole life — hinged on it.

Oh God, he suddenly prayed with every pain-ridden fiber of his being, knowing full well God was Momma, because when he prayed to him now, all he could see was her face in his mind, her nose, which was his own, and her wide smile, her chestnut eyes, the face of her youth, which was his infancy, the face he had loved above every face on the earth — even more than the Reverend. The Reverend! He was there too, the hammer of his preaching, the unrelenting ground of his living. He hadn’t thought of the man in years, because he’d left them, and Allmon had never forgiven him for that. Now they were the prayer, the entirety of his breath and blood: Please, God, let this horse win. Let me finally get on the outside. Winning is justice — my salvation and revenge.

* * *

The twin spires of Churchill Downs loomed overhead, their flags snapping with the brisk violence of the weather. There had been a heavy rain and now the day turned astonishing in its beauty, the clouds all piled and red-tipped like a sun-shot mountain range inverted, streaming red and gold in every direction. Under that play of light, all the minuscule players — the jocks, the trainers, the grooms, the fans, the horses — made their moves. When the human world is rotted away like an old walnut, that light will remain.

Henry had left the diaper bag in the car along with the stroller folded in the trunk, his suit jacket crumpled on the passenger seat. The ground was still wet, puddles everywhere, and it looked as though it might start raining again at any moment. Henry barely noticed. He simply held Samuel, the child sound asleep with his cheek on Henry’s shoulder.

Twenty minutes to post. Where in this carnival was Hellsmouth, his darling destrier, brightest and best, his black beauty hopped up on painkillers, his glory runner, model of the reliability of heritability, his once perfect thing? Where was his daughter?

Natural selection isn’t everything. We still don’t understand the principles of organization. The mystery is intact.

I am not a meme but a mutation.

Life is a chain of affinities.

Nature hath made of one blood—

In his mind, he cried out, Why are you torturing me, daughter?

I’m not torturing you — I’m at peace. Why are you torturing yourself?

“Henry.”

“Henry!”

He whirled before his mind came round, his eyes confused and slow to discover a resting place: Louisa, his home vet, standing in front of him in the milling crowd, her face so easy and calm, as though life weren’t a madhouse. Was it possible that anyone could actually be as untroubled as she appeared to be? At her side was her young daughter — maybe twelve and slender as a stalk — clinging to her side in a childish way, her limbs entangled jealously with her mother’s, who managed her gently, one arm wrapped in a protective gesture over her shoulder. The girl’s hair fell in a glassy brown sheet to her lower back as she gazed up at Henry in curiosity.