C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Reuben’s whole body grew utterly still, except for his fingertips, which twitched, and his eyes, which grew full of unfathomable things. With the speed of a striking snake, his arm swept through the crook of Allmon’s arm. The taller man was jerked from the barn wall with a hissing command and inhuman strength, which was the hard secret of the jock’s body: “Come along, my little wingnut. Come with me.” A mismatched pair; Reuben tugged him toward the border of a parking lot, away from prying eyes, but no one was watching them now, they were of no interest to anyone; no one cared now that the superhorse was gone.

When Reuben spoke again, his voice was winsome and savage in equal measure. “Now hear this,” he said. “The story’s not even over and you’re already telling it wrong! That’s the problem with you — you never learned to tell a story slant, never learned to tell your own. Why, not once have you wooed me with swashbuckling tales of your days on the streets, your adventures in prison! You’re too obedient by far, dragging your chains in resignation! Even when they’ve snatched your darling mtoto!” The jock shrugged and sighed. “But what can old Reuben do? Some are born to be kings, and some are content to be jewels on the king’s sleeve. Maybe it’s in the blood.”

Allmon didn’t listen with his old defended silence, his brooding brow shielding his eyes and overhanging his heart. He whirled to face the jock. “Why you always schooling me? I don’t need your fucking lectures! Do this, do that, talking nonsense. You don’t know shit about me!” But behind his words, he thought: Blood? My blood is poisoned. Momma gave me bad blood. A dying man wouldn’t drink my blood to save his own life.

Reuben reared back on his booted heel, the lines of his starved face like knife tracks down brown bread. “Is that right? I don’t know you? You think Reuben is a four-foot fool and ignorant as all that? Why, you’re transparent as glass! You’re nothing but a little nug of amber, and old Reuben can see clear through you to the other side!” He pressed his face up toward Allmon’s. “You think I don’t know the sobstory streets you grew up on? I smell government cheese on your breath, you got blisters on your thumbs from selling cut-rate crack! Concrete clefts in your eyes, bones broke by the police! Your daddy’s fled and your mama’s dead! You turned your back for one second and they stole your baby just like they always do! You think Reuben’s ignorant? Well, maybe you need to recognize just how much I recognize!”

Allmon was already talking over Reuben’s talk, features smeared with disgust and alarm. “That’s all you think I am? That’s it?”

Reuben waved a dismissive hand. “One man’s stereotype, another man’s award-winning performance. So you followed the script designed to mold you. They call you a brute born to a single mama, raised on welfare, sent to juvie, then prison, a man who walks out on his child and now shovels shit. Oh, you want their approval, but from now till eternity, they’ll feed you just enough scraps off their plate to keep you hanging around their knees with your tongue lolling out. You won’t starve to death, Allmon, but you’ll always be their bitch.”

Allmon roared, “I got nothing! All I’ve been doing, I’ve been trying to survive! The rules help them, not me! I didn’t make this world, but I got to survive in it! The game wasn’t designed for nobody but them to win!”

“Shhhh, I get it, I get it,” Reuben whispered, glancing over his shoulder to determine the limits of their privacy. Then with something that looked like compassion, he said, “You think I don’t understand the dreams you nurse in that big old coxcomb of yours? Think I don’t know you pissed your drawers the first time you laid eyes on these big old Kentucky mansions with their pretty horses running rounds? Their frosty girls and money-colored grass? Oh, but you didn’t just want the money, did you, my dear? Oh no — Allmon Shaughnessy wanted the dream!” Reuben searched for ammunition in Allmon’s distressed face. “The dream of the Deep. Dark. Southland.” He paused with the tip of his pink tongue between his teeth. “Well, has Reuben got the shock of a lifetime for you, Yankee Doodle Doo. Kentucky ain’t the Deep South; it’s the minstrel of the United States! Just a white nigger dandied up and trying to pass as an aristocrat! Haw!”

Allmon pressed a hand to his forehead as if to ward off the dim aura of a migraine. “I don’t even want to know what you’re talking about now.”

But Reuben was six feet tall and rising. There was no stopping him. “This land right here under your clumsy-ass feet? Why, this here’s the No-Man’s-Land, the Borderland, the Dark and Bloody Ground, the In-Between, the Slaughterhouse, the Wild Frontier — the original Nameless Place! But they won’t tell you that in school, no sirree!” Reuben spread his skinny arms as if to gather his powers. “See, back in the good ole cotton-picking days, all these plantations here — yes, my little almond, these plantations you so lust after — they grew corn to the eye and horses to the sky. Hickory-boned colts put cash in Kentucky coffers. But this here Commonwealth had a PR problem, didn’t they? The piss-yella Yanks were scared to death of our dark idyll, our low-down disordered hell! A hundred and twenty counties of bourbon and murder, thick with backward woodsmen and outlaws fond of affrays and fucking, an uncivilized land of barkers and daredevils and gunslingers, horse raiders and assassins, barn burners and Klansmen. A damnable district of dopers and dastardly deeds — whippings and murders and baleful butchery! Kaintuckee meant scrapings from the devil’s boot!” He yelped a sharp rebel yell.

“Why, there wasn’t one man in a hundred willing to brave our races for fear of getting shot, so they started building tracks in New Jersey and New York. Pimlico purses got plump, Saratoga got sass, and the races ran like a Longines. Now, the perfidious paddy jocks wanted their share of the take, because we brothers were the best, and they couldn’t gain a nose against us. So what do you think they did? Why, they staged a coup, of course, and blocked us from our own best game — they ousted us! Soon money was a river running north. Woe and lamentation! The Borderland went bust!”

Reuben leaned in. “So, what’s a sweet little state to do in the face of bad press?”

Allmon didn’t want to hear any more. He was growing increasingly ill with every word.

“Why, you spin, my little catfish. You spin like an ad man on Madison Avenue. Slap some columns on your farmhouse and paint it all white, get you some Spanish moss, rustle up an ancestral line and hire a noble Negro for a portrait, a sorry brother still bowing to the Lost Cause, scraping his bitchass snout on the ground. And marvels never cease! It works”—Reuben hissed and winked and drawled slow—“’cause don’t nobody know they history.”

A pinprick pierced the skin of Allmon’s mind. The Reverend was right; I never should have crossed that river.

Reuben crowed in delight. “Yes! The Confederacy rose again for the very first time! Everybody forgot the Dark and Bloody Ground wasn’t ever the Deep South at all, just a yellowbelly borderland of hellraisers and cowards. Most never fought for ole Jeff Davis a day in their lives! Kentucky didn’t secede till the war was over! But hang your stars and bars, muddle a mint julep, stick a lawn jockey on the drive, and everybody forgets what there is to forget! The revelation of reinvention — it’s the great white hope! The real American dream! Ain’t no fact in this world like a white man’s tall tale!”

Allmon stared down at the ground in wonder, the words transforming into fresh horrors in his mind. Reuben reached up one iron-rough hand and grasped his shoulder. It remained steady as he spoke, his voice now thick and heavy as a comfort. “But you didn’t know, my friend. For that old fiction, they got a man to sign away his life. Got him to sign away his baby boy.”