C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

* * *

In the morning, his mind undressed by sleep, he padded along the old cupped floorboards to the kitchen, where he found Marie standing at the stove. The two casement windows on either side of her fired the room with sun, banking her into silhouette, as if she were standing in a tunnel of light. Her hair, inlit with red, curled out to one side, the other side still smashed tight to the shape of her head from sleep. Her right hand gripped the chrome handle of the oven door with whitening strength.

“Daddy here?” said Allmon sleepily.

She didn’t turn around, her hand on the stove didn’t move. He stepped forward then, and with a tiny motion he touched her hip, a touch as soft as a cat’s paw. Her hand came to life then, springing off the stove and smacking his own hand away with such force that he was too startled to cry out, he just hopped back, drawing his wrist to his clavicle and staring up at her in shock, pupils huge with misgiving.

“I don’t need a man touching on me right now!” she hissed. Her eyes were deep as a bruise, her face stripped of everything that made it her face except its familiar shape.

“I mean, why?” she blurted suddenly, then her voice rising: “I just want somebody to tell me why!”

Allmon only stared.

“What’s wrong with me?” she cried. “I do everything right, I have his baby, I love him! No one loves him like I do! What’s wrong with me? He can’t stand my ugly face? Who’s here for me? Who? Tell me!” She was sinking down and crying openly, sobbing great senseless, wracking sobs, her T-shirt catching on the stove knob as she slid down, so it raised up over her soft belly, showing the white striping of old stretch marks. One hand clutched the folds of her belly and one hand held her breast, low-hung and braless behind the T-shirt, her legs sprawled crookedly before her.

“How come I have to do all the loving? Huh? Just tell me that! You all take all of me! And you don’t give anything back!”

Allmon bumped back into the doorjamb, turning to flee as her anger collapsed into tears. “I just want my momma back. How come God’s got to take everybody away from me? How come everybody just goes away and leaves me alone?”

Allmon’s feet were agents of release, they sped him down the back staircase and spilled him out into the cement garden. There it was cool, a good place for tears. The chained Rottweiler looked up at the sound of Allmon’s crying and grinned, his caramel brow dots bouncing. Looking up, Allmon saw only the grimy redbrick enclosure on all sides and then a perfect square of crayon-blue sky without cloud. There were no birds flying there. He stared so long, the shed tears ran into his ears. Finally, a woman’s voice said, “The hell is wrong with you, child?” and when he turned to see who had said it — a woman whose tremendous girth filled her entire kitchen window as she leaned down to peer at him — a bird flew directly over his head in the patch of blue. It flanked suddenly, swerved down, and perched on a water tower, glowering at the blaring traffic below and executing a tiny side step that looked like an aborted dance. Then it proceeded to sing a song louder than any country cousin, because it had so much to sing against. No creature comforts here. A bird’s only defense is its own body and that you can break with your hand.

* * *

That afternoon, when the mood was settling like ashes on a burned-out fire, their neighbor Beanie came visiting, blunt tongue and motherwit at the ready. She wore her sweats pushed up under her chubby knees and a Bulls jersey with armholes so deep, her white bra showed. Her hair terraced down from her crown in a series of tight rolls that graduated in thickness until the final curl at her nape was thick as a toilet paper roll. She wore one or two gold-toned rings on every finger, and they glinted as she smoked; she always smoked. She found Marie at the kitchen table, staring into the window fan with a scraped plate of food before her.

“Where’s my favorite baby boy at?” Beanie said.

“I don’t know,” Marie said softly.

Beanie chuckled. “You know that child got a fierce face. Gonna scare the hell out of some white folk when he gets grown. Bone structure, you know what I’m saying. Bone motherfucking structure.”

The corners of Marie’s mouth lifted, but she couldn’t smile. “I was awful this morning, and he ran off. He’s probably out back. I can’t blame him.”

Beanie eased down heavily into the other chair with her legs stiffed out before her. “Okay, look at me. Look at me, girl.” Marie glanced up warily, as if expecting a blow. “I’m sick to death of you crying over this motherfucker. You know I am. This shit getting to be like clockwork.”

Marie wiped her nose on her hand. “He promised to take Allmon to the carnival, and then he just sat right there on that couch and drank himself silly.”

Beanie made a sorry sound in her throat and shook her head.

“He couldn’t even sit up straight, he was so drunk, and then he tells me he got some girl pregnant in Chicago, and he’s moving to Chicago now. And I was like, ‘Do you love me?’”

“First, don’t be asking no man if they love you. ’Cause that’s just pathetic.”

“And all he said, you know what he said? He was like, ‘I love you, but I got a sweet tooth.’”

“Mike, the white boy?”

Marie nodded.

Beanie sighed. “Who even knew white boys was worthless as these niggers up in here.”

“He left me his car. But I don’t even care. Beanie, Allmon shouldn’t have seen me like that.”

Beanie sighed. “Yeah, well, somebody’s got to put you in check. You act too soft all the time. You let a man run all over—”

Marie laid her hands down flat on the table, her face all affront. “Now you sound like the Reverend saying I act like a white girl.”

“Ew, nasty!” Beanie held up a shielding hand. “I ain’t meant it like that, ’cause I ain’t that mean. I ain’t never met no white girl over age thirteen I’d save out a burning building.”

Marie sighed and looked hopelessly around her. “It’s like I got to be some tough-ass bitch to actually be black around here—”

Beanie’s head cocked hard. “Who you calling a tough-ass black bitch?”

She got what she was looking for. Marie bowed her head and laughed through her nose, then swept up Beanie’s free hand in her own. “I’m just saying … it’s like somebody’s always ready to tear me down for just being me. The Reverend thinks I act like some whiny white girl, men think they can walk all over me if I just act myself instead of playing some hard-to-get game, and all these girls here act like I’m a race traitor ’cause I was with Mike—”

Beanie waved her hand. “Oh, it don’t make them no nevermind, they’re just talking shit, ’cause that’s what assholes do—”

“No, it’s a fact, and you know it. It’s like you’ve always got to playact and pretend to be someone else to get love in this world. Well, I don’t playact with men. I don’t try to seduce people. I’m just me. And so everybody’s out there tricking people into falling in love with them, and I’m all alone.”

“How come that is, you think?”

Marie stared straight into her eyes. “Because they’re cowards. Men are cowards.”

Beanie waved smoke away from Marie. “Okay, well, you ain’t got to playact. Ain’t nobody saying that. Just … just don’t nobody want to see you crying over these spineless, tired, worthless motherfuckers. Ain’t nobody ever told you ain’t no man alive worth crying over?”

Marie closed her eyes, said, “Children need a father.”

“Okay, see now that offends me a little bit,” said Beanie, pulling back her hand. “Both my girls is doing good, and where’s their fathers at? Where’s Derron at? Who the fuck even knows. At least we all know where Omar’s at, you know what I’m saying. But both my girls doing good, star students at SCPA, playing in band and doing ballet, all that. Marie,” she said, but more gently, with a sigh, “you don’t need no man. Open your eyes and look around you. Who you see in this building with a man? Who?”