C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“Cara.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.”

“Diane.”

“All right. Shit.”

Marie stared in sudden consternation at the fan, watching tendrils of smoke slip into its draw. Then she said, “And that girl with the twins I always see out on Knowlton’s Corner. I don’t know her name. I see her out with that big stroller.”

Beanie reared back. “Oh!”

“What?”

“That bitch? Oh shit! That bitch a one-woman jizz factory, she got dicks clocking in and out every hour of the day. She ain’t got no man, Marie — she got a pimp!”

“What? No! She’s a prostitute?”

“You ain’t know that? Goddamn, Marie, you so ignorant!”

“But — I, I can’t help it — I grew up in church!”

Both women howled. And once started, they couldn’t stop, so Beanie had to fling her cigarette out the window and stomp her feet, and Marie ended up slipping off her chair onto the floor, leaning her head back onto the chair seat to cry. Then she was too weak from laughter to stand, so Beanie had to stand over her and, hauling her up with both hands, said, “Well, get Allmon on down to church then. Get him a dose of the Reverend.”

* * *

The Reverend lived in an old four-story brownstone on Sycamore, one in a row of five on the block, all in a state of disrepair. The façade was pink as adobe punctuated by black architraves that made pointy eyebrows over windows and black shutters, a few of which swung loose and hung precariously by a single hinge, threatening passersby below. The stoop was concrete, the corbel and cornice painted gray to look like stone. The peeling house rained old paint flakes on the stoop, where once upon a time, when Marie was young, there had been rectangular planters filled with geraniums and oxalis. When her mother died of cancer, the planters and their flowers had disappeared. Now there was nothing on the stoop but the deep wear in stone of a hundred thousand footsteps impressed over the course of a century and more. It swooped gently like the seat of a cold gray saddle.

Marie and Allmon drove up Sycamore in the Escort Mike Shaughnessy had left them, but it was hard to find a spot downtown, so they parked down a side street barely wider than an areaway, crowded with black trash bags and tires and forsaken furniture. As Marie cut the motor, three men who had stood huddled together at the end of the alley scattered like jacks.

“I don’t miss living down here,” she sighed, but her eyes were on Allmon in the rearview. “Honey, listen to me,” she said, pinning him with a serious gaze, “I need you to get some Jesus here, all right?”

He nodded.

“That’s all I’m asking of you.”

“Okay.”

She held up a finger. “And I don’t want any talk about your daddy. You hear me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ain’t no uh-huh. I’m serious. Yes, Momma.”

“Yes, Momma,” he said.

When they rang the doorbell, a Chinese man answered the door. Marie started back in surprise. She looked at him without saying a word, this pint of a man with long, thin hair like a horse’s neglected mane, who wore an old white painter’s jumpsuit splattered with bright color. He was ageless, bedraggled, a man who hadn’t bathed in a long while and who probably didn’t care. He took one look at them and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m Marie,” she said, indignant. “Who are you?”

“Oh, ha!” the man cried. “The Reverend’s daughter, Marie. Of course! Come in, come in. I’m new here. I didn’t realize.”

He waved them into the building with two quick flaps of his hand, and they entered the soaring foyer, where the balustraded staircase rose steeply to the second floor. Above, the drift of radio chatter and men’s voices. The bang of something dropping and raucous laughter.

“I think the Reverend’s in his office. Yeah, there he is. Listen, if you’re staying the night, I’d like to share with you my witness, how Christ changed my life.”

“Uh-huh,” Marie said, steering Allmon toward the parlor.

“I was a dead man walking before I let him in my heart. I used to live down on Broadway; you can’t even call it living what I was doing. But I’ll tell you all about it later. It’ll be a warning for your kid.”

“Yeah, okay, sure.”

The man ushered them over the threshold into the parlor of what had once been a grand Cincinnati row house, now a fraying thread in the tapestry of the city. The Reverend presided, stiff and upright, in his usual place on his busted crimson leather chair, his Bible open on his lap. All over the chair, white stuffing like cotton bolls extruded from seams and tears and from under duct tape patches. When the Reverend looked up and saw them, he closed his Bible, laid it aside, and stood. He was tall and broad with nothing extra on him, shoulders like a box under his neatly ironed secondhand shirt, which was tucked in tight and buttoned to its starched collar. His enormous hands hung at his sides, the fingers fidgeting subtly, forever in motion, his old gold wedding band catching the light dully. It was not so much the man’s size that commanded attention but his head and face — the tight, short hair sprinkled with gray above an enormous forehead, dark as a chalkboard with deep lines written across its surface. His nose was wide and sloped steeply beneath the heavy, mannish brows that Allmon had inherited. And set deep, deep beneath those brows, tawny eyes burned bright as lanterns. The Reverend never just looked; his eyes bored into the object of his concern.

“Hi, Daddy,” said Marie with a pittance of a voice, sounding not much older than her boy.

The Reverend nodded. “Always late. You missed supper.” His voice, enormous even when conversational, filled the shape of the room. His aurous eyes dismissed her with an unreadable expression, then settled on Allmon. Allmon smiled up into that familiar face, which did not smile in return. Nothing was said for a long moment, but just as Marie was drawing her breath to speak, the Reverend intoned, “What’re you doing to this child’s head?” After fifty years in the Queen City, rural Arkansas still rolled off his tongue.

“What?” said Marie, and she reached down to touch Allmon’s hair, which had grown all out of order like a hedge unchecked. “It looks good. I like it like this. It’s kind of free.”

The Reverend cocked his head and when he spoke, every word was slow, declarative, his vowels as broad as fields. “May I remind you there’s a difference between free and sloppy? You think your child looking unattended-to is free? Folks see a child like that, they think he doesn’t have a mother. They see a just-so Negro. May as well give him a dashiki and a blunt.”

“Daddy!” said Marie, laughing. “Four-year-olds don’t need to look like lawyers. I mean, what decade is this?”

“Apparently, the decade where don’t nobody care if their children look homeless. This business … this ain’t even in style.” A derisive flap of his enormous hand.

“In style? You really think you should be lecturing me about what’s in style?” Marie turned left and right to appraise the Reverend’s holdings, which amounted to a wrecked house, dilapidated vinyl furniture, a parlor room with books to the ceiling, and two identical Goodwill suits. She sighed. “Anyway, you know, some people like it.”

“Like who? Like White Mike, that’s who!” The Reverend turned his back to them and raised up his hands in exasperation. He took a few halting steps toward his chair and said, “Jesus help me learn there ain’t no sense arguing when the milk”—and here he paused between each word—“done. Been. Spilt.” Then he lowered himself into his chair with pronounced fatigue, like a man much older than his sixty-five years, and said, “Y’all just sit down now. Just sit down and visit and no more bickering.”