C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

And then the building rattled with his approach: her boy was home, tumbling through the front door and trumpeting that word, that one word containing all the world’s needs but never her own: “Momma!”

* * *

In the first scene of Allmon’s tenth year, a girl dies in the cement garden. Her name was Gladys Gibbons, just a tiny little thing on the third floor opposite with skin the color of chalky, churned-up river water, a soft cheek and a pert ski-slope nose like a white girl’s, maybe the kind with money. That nose made her a beloved pariah, as despised as she was envied by girls who didn’t yet know what envy was. She had the stamp of difference on her face, and that stamp was a pass. The girls in her building put their hands to the skinny vale between her shoulder blades and shoved. Knocked her against banisters, into doors, down onto cracked sidewalks and onto her knees. She thought: I’m ugly. And there was no grown person to tell her otherwise. So the wind of natural confidence died.

A decent man knows how to comfort a wounded girl, but there’s a kind of man who only wants the wounded, who can only desire the flagging child. A loved girl is bright like a lamp, and he’ll fear that incandescence. But this girl: the one who thinks she’s ugly, whose shoulders sag, who looks down more than up and never meets the eyes, the one who wears hurt like old clothes — she’s soft and needful, penetrable. You don’t have to work very hard to get inside a child like that. And you don’t have to wait very long for her to hug you back, for her to parrot your words, for you to believe you’re welcome inside. You’ll be the lucky first to tell her what the world means by love.

Gladys ascended the back stairs, one after the other until that brief road ended, and she didn’t pause to look down but stepped off the roof, twisting at the last, so she fell backward down. How high is too high? Forty feet. Allmon had just stomped out of the dank vestibule of their stairwell when she fell. She landed in front of him like a sorrow dream in daylight, faceup on the concrete, the back of her head flattened where her skull had broken and collapsed. Her lips twitched. Allmon lurched back into the shadow, swayed there like someone hypnotized, then turned and walked with wooden limbs up the staircase, seeing hearing saying thinking nothing until he was standing in the warm familiar mother world, his face blanched.

From many worlds away, he heard his mother’s voice. “What’s wrong, Allmon?”

No word, he pointed there there there over there her body was there, twitching like an electric wire, her eyes still open, black pupils busted to red sclera, staring at him. Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God his mother’s scream, it rose and fell, and then his own wail dashed over the edge of his teeth, and Marie’s scream was another woman’s and another’s, so the building was filled with screaming, and the stairwells beat their panicky rhythms, phones shrilled, sirens came spiraling over the viaduct, and his sweating mother was scooping him up, even though he was awfully big now, and folding him in half against her body as she sank onto the linoleum floor, saying, “Don’t look! Don’t look!” He tried not to look, but the memory of the dead girl was falling up, she was slipping into the scream stream.

“Oh,” said Marie, and it was such a groan, like childbirth. “Oh God, how can you let a girl hurt so bad … God, why can’t you protect the little children?” And then, as if the words came from another person: “Fuck this world!”

Allmon hid his head from the cursing.

Her voice belled with a righteous anger. “There’s a war on women in this world! They’re killing us left and right, and when they don’t do it with their own hands, they do it with ours!”

“Momma—”

“At least they’ll know now! Allmon, you got to go out with a bang if you want to send a message to this world! Make it so nobody can look away!” Then her words bent into a moan, and he could feel her huffing breath on his face. Allmon reached for her hand without looking, brought it up to his face, covered his eyes with her fingers pressed tight together. He didn’t hear her gasp from the pain of her swollen joints wrenched up in his grasp.

“Don’t look, please don’t look,” she said uselessly and too late.

He nodded but didn’t answer; inside he was busy passing his mind away to a sure set of hands that tucked it and ran. There was no goal, it just got farther and farther away until he couldn’t remember to watch for it anymore, and then the watcher was asleep.

* * *

Marie’s heart hurt, and it was no metaphor. There had been tinges and winces of pain, but when the muscle suddenly seized, it did so with such force that it sent her doubling onto her keyboard at work, blasting out nonsense letters, a message from the place she was going. She grasped instinctively at her chest as if she could wedge her fingers behind her ribs and cradle the offending organ in her hands. She rocked and moaned but was unable to utter a word. Searing pain steals language.

In a moment, the dentist’s arms were a band around her shoulders and she recognized the crude, jarring sunlight of the front vestibule. Then — in front of God and everybody — she was half carried, half dragged on a halting journey across two city blocks to a Northside doctor. She was dimly aware that she looked like hell and knew her mother would be horrified; as a girl, she wasn’t allowed out of the house with so much as a wrinkle in her homemade skirts.

Down the pain-crowded corridors of her mind, the dentist’s voice echoed, “I think she’s having a heart attack,” and some female in return: “We need to call an ambulance.” Only then did Marie struggle back into herself, pain overmanned by panic, to bellow, “No!” Then she was bent again, huffing, “An ambulance cost … a thousand dollars…”

Then she was seated and falling forward until she could fall no further, and she knew the doctor was with her, because she was leaning against his white coat. When he spoke, she groaned, and when he probed, she groaned again. With the whole of her being, she wished her mother were here to hold her.

When the coat spoke, its voice was warm, mellifluous, calm, unaffected. “Her oxygen is fine, and women don’t usually have heart attacks with these symptoms. My guess is pericarditis, possibly gallbladder, but we’ll need some X-rays. See how leaning forward eases it? That makes me think pericarditis. A dose-pack of prednisone should bring down the inflammation.”

“Well, that’s good,” said the dentist.

“Interesting fact — the heart continues to grow throughout life. It’s not much bigger than your fist.”

“No kidding,” said the dentist. “Your fist, huh.”

Her mind jolted round with a fresh pain. Two white men were watching her sweating like a pig with her body all wrenched up. No, her mother would not stand for that. Get up, Marie. Get up right this second and look smart! She struggled to mobilize her pain into action, but she simply could not.

“Marie, is this the first time this has happened?” said the doctor. “Do you have a history with this?”

She shook her head, dazed tears slipping soundlessly down her cheeks. Her shame was now total.

“Anything else I should know about?”

In the strict economy of pain, she made a small, terse gesture with one hand.

“What does that mean?”

“They hurt.”

“Your hands hurt?”

“All over. All the time. Every joint in my body hurts.”

“Ah, is that right,” he said. It was a long sigh, the sound of new understanding, and it made her feel suddenly, prematurely safe. Pain was a lock, and surely this doctor held the key. Suddenly, she didn’t want the man to take his hands off her shoulders; she didn’t care if she looked like hell. Her momma would just have to deal with that.