C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“This is sounding autoimmune. I think you’ll need to see a rheumatologist, someone who specializes in inflammatory and rheumatic diseases.”

She whispered, “Any take … low income?”

“I honestly wouldn’t know about that.”

Her momma, Claudia Jeane Rankin Marshall, daughter of Momma Rae, painter of nails, braider of braids, curler of bangs, the one who made her look smart, was trying to cover her mouth, but she struggled away and said, “All I have is seventy-five bucks. I need help.”

Oh, Marie. How could you?

“I can give you prednisone,” the doctor said with that warm, mellifluous, calm, unaffected voice. “But that’s really all I can do. I’m just a doctor. I didn’t make the system and I can’t change it.”

* * *

They made you memorize it for gold stars, even before you could spell the words, even if you were the king of Capitoline Elementary, high on your limestone throne with your pencil scepter in hand and your crown perched on the out-of-bounds Afro your grandfather despises. Allegheny, Monongahela, Beaver, Little Muskingum, Muskingum.

He could just see it when he was twisted around at his desk like so, his chin almost on his shoulder. There it was: muddy, milky, marvelous brown. Little Kanawha, Hocking, Kanawha—

“Almond — sorry, Allmon. Allmon.”

Guyandotte, Big Sandy, Little Sandy. Did they still have names once their bodies entered the body of the big river?

Two gentle hands — on the king? — pulled him round, though he came slow and with much resistance as if there were rust on his hinges, and his head turned last to look blankly at Frau Meier. With a start, he realized all the other children had left the room; the day was done.

Scioto. Little Scioto. Little—

“Allmon, you’re not in trouble. I just want to have a little chat.” Frau Meier’s blonde pageboy curled tight under her chin, and the irises of her eyes were two different colors. “I’ve just been a little concerned about you lately. Where do you live? Are you and your mom up here in Fairview Heights?”

“Northside,” his mouth said, but his ear was watching the river as it wound through the green-grass hills of Kentucky — the river like a snake. Little Miami next.

“Ah, Northside.” She sighed, nodded, looked down; she didn’t appear surprised. “I drive through Northside every day on my way to work. I always think of it as less a neighborhood than a collection of bars and used-furniture stores. It was a wild part of town back in the day. Do you know what they used to call it? Helltown. Because it’s where men would go to … well, drink after work, I guess.”

Allmon looked at her blankly.

“What does your mother do down there?”

He shrugged. “Sleep on the couch.” Licking, Great Miami.

Frau Meier’s laugh was a hiccup — a proper laugh aborted by the solemnity of the child’s distracted face. She leaned toward him earnestly.

“Allmon, I’m very concerned about this story assignment you wrote.”

He tried very hard to corral his attention and draw it round to his teacher. She was holding the story he’d written about the little girl who fell — a true story! With a touch of embellishment, of course. Still, he sought the Salt River and wondered how someone could paddle a river of salt granules.

“‘Gladys lived up the top floor,’” she read. “‘A raper throwed her off … Who done that?… He be like … They be like…’” Her voice drifted. “Almond. Did you make this up? Did this actually happen?”

He studied her face and tried to discern his answer there — was he in trouble or not? He opted for the safest course: he gazed out the black-silled window, past the fossil-strewn embankment with its aluminum fencing, down the crumbling escarpments to where the Kentucky and the Green flowed anonymously past.

“You’re not in trouble, Allmon,” Frau Meier said again, and then, as if to prove the point, she permitted a silence to grow between them while she studied him, deciding her next move. She watched a tiny pulse beat madly under the skin of the boy’s torqued neck. What was he looking at so intently?

“Well,” she said softly. “You can only know someone as much as they let you know them. But this I can fix; this I can fix.”

There was a rustling of paper and she pried the pencil out of his sweaty fist. When he dared a glance, she was scribbling something on the back of his story — pencil marks over the red marks showing through from the other side.

“First, verb-noun agreement. This is very important if you’re going to learn to communicate properly:

“I am

“You are

“He/She is

“It is

“They are

“We are

“Allmon, it’s never I be or They be or We be. No one will understand you if you say that.”

He stared down at the paper mutely. He tested “Be” in his mouth, chewed on it, rolled it between his teeth. Suspicion centered between his brows. But the Green and the Wabash be there — not sometimes, not used to be. Always. Always. Be.

“From now on, I want you to look up every single word before you write it down. And I’m going to make that possible. This is my gift to you, Allmon. I’ve used this since I was in college.”

Saline and Cumberland, don’t forget those.

She hefted a red, hardbound dictionary onto his desk, marked and well thumbed, and even as she was slipping his story with its corrections between its thin pages, he was pulling it across the desk, drawing it into his chest. He was going to look up the spelling of the Tennessee River.

Frau Meier laid a staying hand, perfectly cool and white, over his. He stared at it. “The truth is I found your story very disturbing. There were things I’m not likely to forget. But I really liked how you wrote about all the funeral roses. You know, under all this mess”—she made a wave of her hand to encompass his spelling, his be’s, the whole of his talk—“there might be a poet in there.”

Then she was rising, towering over him, releasing the king of Capitoline Elementary, and he was standing up perfectly straight, even with the weight of the dictionary tugging him down. Heavy like a river.

I am not. I be.

Through the window, he caught one last glimpse of the Cache, which was indistinguishable from the Ohio, which imprisoned it.

* * *

Childhood is the country of question marks, and the streets offer solid answers.

An ungoverned wind, a bulldog wind, swung heat through the streets of Northside, cranking the dial for an early summer. Allmon got off the bus a few blocks from home, walked those streets at a half pace, wind brushing his cheek, tangling in his hair. He held his new prized dictionary to his chest. He delighted in the familiar — the trash was confetti, graffiti the truth, church steeples accusatory fingers, the winter-worn sidewalks cracks in the heart. The young hand draws fresh maps on broken landscapes. But the grown man tells tales too. When he says we didn’t know we were poor, it’s not the truth; it’s code for my mother raised me right, she loved me and love is a shield. When he looks back on the Northside of his youth, his nostalgia is anger, and his yearning is hate. That’s the building where the cops shot Raejohn, that’s where I spent every summer night eating ice cream on the stoop. The old men were pickled on malt liquor, my mother was a warrior, up on Apjones I learned to drive in a stolen car, that’s when you could walk through the hood and hear the Reds game the whole way—

“Young.”

Allmon turned.

A man stood on the stoop of a row house on Chase, a beeper in one hand and a Pepsi in the other. He stood under the coping out of the sun, so at first Allmon saw only the glint of his gold ropes, but as his eyes adjusted, he noted the wide, full lineaments of a bold face, the thick nose and light green eyes — calm, cold, appraising — and turned on him.