C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

They attained the cooler air of the outer hall and passed through the main double doors where the sky yawned empty of rain, where the soaked ground glittered, and the dusty smell of horseflesh was swamped by the damp breeze. In the distance, beyond the roiling press, straggling fans still walked the grounds, boisterous hats weaving through the parking lot, where drunks were draped like amorous ragdolls on tailgates. Henry knew somewhere, probably in the back of some van, the garland of red roses was beginning to brown. Time is a horse you never have to whip.

As they pushed through the turnstiles, Lou finally gripped his arm, saying, “Henry, are you really doing this?”

Henry’s mouth was empty as an urn. He kept walking in the direction of Barn 23.

Hellsmouth sensed them through the ground before she saw them. She’d been hotwalked and cooled out and was now done with her photos, all her showing out. Something was over. Her body was loose-limbed, sleepy, yet she wasn’t exhausted, only resting. She was drifting in and out of fleet dreams under the hands that dried and curried her, that rubbed cream into her hide and made her shine.

Suddenly, her ears straightened and swiveled. Her tail twitched minutely, then whipped, and in a single agitated movement, she swung her dark, articulate head across the chain at the gate of her stall, her lips risen fretfully over her teeth, her mouth working.

Henry Forge and the horse stood eye to eye. For a long moment, they breathed each other’s breath. Henry fought the urge to draw back away from the reality of what he saw, the reality of this horse, what he had not let himself see before. Hellsmouth was bold as life, but her brittle bones were no match for her power. The creative vitality of her gait, the tremendous heat of her racing engine fueled by her competitor’s blood, that fierce physical ambition, which was wholly natural to her and as inextricable as her limbs, would come at the expense of her life. She would break. A competitor like Hellsmouth could never stop of her own accord. She was not just unwilling but actually unable to save herself.

“Load her up,” Henry said.

Allmon, standing at the filly’s head, made no immediate move. He’d also sensed Henry’s approach, watched his whiteness intrude on the private warmth of the stall. Now his eyes were locked on Henry’s, but he wasn’t watching the realizations coalesce moment to moment in the man’s eyes; he saw the darker shadow of a man dangling in his pitch-black pupils. Allmon flushed with hate that rose like a cold fire from his feet to the very follicles of his hair.

“Load her up,” Henry said again. “I’m taking her home.”

But Mack was there first. “No, no, no, no, hold on!” He was shouldering his way through the press, which had gathered, bearing down on their small circle of man and beast. “Nobody’s going nowhere! Just hold on one fucking minute!”

“I said load her up!” The words erupted from Henry, startling Allmon from his hateful reverie. He realized quite suddenly what was being demanded of him and he stepped forward, his movements a rude assertion, eyes wide and lips parted for rebuttal, but Mack was on the warpath.

“Don’t do this, Henry,” the trainer said, grappling for Henry’s elbow. “Just calm down—”

Henry whirled on Mack, his face finally ablaze with all the passion absent ten minutes before. “I won’t race her anymore, Mack. You’ll break her!”

If Mack was looking for acquiescence, he wasn’t going to find it. He stepped into Henry, his bewilderment wrapped in rising anger and his hands working wildly, uselessly between them as if gesturing for words out of the charged air. “Nobody’s breaking anybody!” he spat. “She’s a goddamned racehorse! Let her do what she does best!”

“Not like this! Not this…!”

“Yes, yes — actually, fucking just like this!” Mack rejoindered, his head hobbyhorsing on his ruddy neck, his arms wide so the press nearest him could smell his sweat. “Henry, this horse was born to run! What the fuck are you talking about?”

Allmon looked from Mack to Henry, then back to Mack. Systolic waves of shock began to roll through his torso. It began to dawn on him what was happening here, what Forge was doing. This wasn’t the plan, this sure as hell wasn’t the deal, and if what seemed to be happening actually happened, then he had survived his fucking life, had scrambled and fought, for nothing. Nothing.

“She runs because we made her to run,” blurted Henry, “not because—”

“Made her to run…?” Mack snapped, sputtering like a jalopy. “Okay, Henry, okay, okay! Maybe because we”—he fumbled wildly, he couldn’t wrap his mind around the goddamned absurdity of the foreign words about to come out of his mouth—“because we made their nature, doesn’t make it any less their … what the fuck, Henry! What are you doing to me here?”

But Henry had turned his back on Mack, stonewalling him better than any ex-boyfriend ever had, and now the damn baby was whimpering behind him, and the press, those jackals, didn’t know where to look any more than Allmon did, and Mack’s eyes were apocalyptic as he tried to discover the final word, the persuasive knife that would slice straight through the insanity to the common fucking sense. “Henry Forge! Listen to me now! A filly like this — she’s a bullet out of a gun! You pulled the trigger three years ago and you cannot — LISTEN TO ME, YOU CANNOT STOP THE BULLET NOW! All you’ve got to do is just stand back! Stand back and let her happen, Henry.”

There was a long moment of silence as Allmon and the press leaned in, collective breath on hold.

“I’m asking you to load my horse,” said Henry, very steely and very quietly in Allmon’s direction.

Allmon, silent until this very moment, leveled Henry with a brute stare. “Over my dead body.” But the words were stronger than his hope and crumbled on his tongue like old tabby, because two things happened at once: he realized suddenly that his previous maneuvering was a farce, that his name on a dotted line was worth less than an afternoon’s dream, that it was always men like Forge who controlled everything in this world; then Lou stepped into his line of vision, baby in her arms. At first Allmon spared only a fleet glance for the way her right hand cradled the child’s head all sprung with plump curls that framed his wide-eyed face. But then he noted the soft darkness of the face. Blood stalled in Allmon’s veins. Instant recognition: loose curls and those eyes. He knew them from photographs of himself as a baby, photos that had disappeared along with everything else, thrown away by strangers when his mother died. His lips parted in shock, and his wide eyes slid back to Henry and locked in place like the old prison door.

Henry had been watching. They shared a long stare in which a hard reckoning began to unfold, and then Henry said, simply, “Yes.” Henry reached forward and slipped the reins from Allmon’s hand, but Allmon jerked his hand away as though Henry’s touch were a snake. The purity of his astonishment transformed his face into that of a child’s, the Allmon of a hundred years ago.

When Henry spoke again, his words were softer. “I’ll load her,” he said, and then he passed a cold, hard ring into Allmon’s trembling hand. His car keys. “Why don’t you bring my car to the farm tomorrow. I’ll do my best to explain.”

Without further ado, he left Allmon where he stood frozen and led the big girl out. Though her ears were plastered back and her lip curled, she strode purposefully from her confines, her head high as the cameras captured the cut of her balletic leg, the muscle showing stark from the day’s dehydration. She took all of Allmon’s breath with him as she went, and he fumbled without oxygen for the scraps of truth to form the whole. But the whole was hell. If this child was his, then Henry had lied to him for six months. If this child was his, then he had never been betrayed by Henrietta; in truth— in truth —the betrayal was all his own. He had used her like meat and then left her to rot. I am Mike Shaughnessy’s son after all. Suddenly, woodenly, he began to move in the direction of the baby, of the horse, of whatever remained of his broken and blasted life.