C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Black woman: Well, I don’t know much, but I do know that if people like you would spend half as much time seeking better employment and education as you do crafting your stories, your children would be a whole lot better off. And that, Miss Marshall, is a fact.

(Defendant, still facing audience, concludes monologue:

I pray there’s a God — and he disowns you, you black bitch. )

* * *

A long time ago, she had called out, I’ve got a surprise for you! Your daddy’s coming home! But that was long, long ago — why was life so long? Now she called out with a voice that had lost even the memory of buoyancy, and her son came to her dragging his feet like he could intuit some imminent loss. He stood there before her, twisting on his legs the way he used to when he was younger, but he wouldn’t look up. He directed his dread at her feet.

God, the twisting! It set Marie’s teeth on edge, and she wanted to grab him, make him stop, force him to understand without having to say the words. Her eyes were burning with an acid that was driving her insane and, God, here was this child she had given life to and he had no sympathy for her at all, didn’t know her at all; children thought only of themselves and their own needs. Love and resentment infected her maternal heart in equal measure. She wanted her own mother so powerfully then, more than she ever had. It was such a goddamned lie that time healed all things!

She just said, “We’ve got no more food stamps.”

Allmon looked up at her in surprise. “How come?”

“That’s not your concern,” she said. “You’re the child; I’m the mother.”

He said nothing, but she saw him recede into the worried space behind his eyes. Where he had been twisting, now he just looked straight ahead. When her hand made a move toward him, he jerked away.

Her hand hovered in the space between them as she said, “We can’t stay here. I can’t afford it. We’ve got to get out by Friday.”

“Where we going?” he said smally.

“I don’t know,” was the only honest reply.

Tears filled his eyes and he said, half question, half accusation, a word he had never said in her presence before: “You fucked up.”

The involuntary strike of her open hand across his cheek coincided with her cry: “Don’t you speak to me that way! I’m your mother!”

Then, like a bird, he was gone in an instant. But it was only when he reached his bedroom and slammed the door that his composure, so tenuous, shattered. He abandoned himself to the tears that really belonged to the Reverend, tears that had been dammed up for months. He cried and cried until there were no tears left and when he finally looked up with swollen eyes, the sun had slipped low and flung the room into shadow. The sounds of Marie’s bedtime rituals were long past, so he rose. Then wall by wall, item by item, he worked to memorize every detail of the apartment, because he knew he would never be here again, and then he got down on his knees on the hardwood floor and prayed to his father, something he had never tried before. Please come. Please come this Friday and save us. And, balanced on the slenderest plank of hope, he waited on Friday for Mike to come — for Mike, for God, for anyone to save them, but nobody did come, because nobody does.

* * *

The only place to go was down — down past the useless, spinning wheel of Knowlton’s Corner, down near the Mill Creek, which stank of feces and oil, down where the neighborhood disintegrated at its shiftless edges into Cumminsville, a noplace crumbling under the black shadow bands of the viaduct and I-74, where the houses were shambling, filthy, and few, overshadowed by the behemoth brownfields looted of their industry, windows shattered by rocks and bullets, down into forgottenness where few families lived and the ones who did lived in decay, in the bowels of the city. What’s worse than Helltown? This.

Marie and Allmon took up residence in a tiny shotgun on Blair, a narrow side street three blocks southwest of Knowlton’s Corner. The tenant had just died of pancreatic cancer and the rent was $400, lowered a hundred dollars by the landlord — a distant cousin of the dentist Marie worked for. The house stood fifteen feet wide and three rooms deep: a dank front parlor and kitchen relieved only by a nicotine-browned window facing north, furnished with an orange, mildewed couch where Marie would sleep; a middle room, where Allmon would inflate a twin air mattress; and a bathroom in the back with a tiny square window that looked onto a tiny plot of shattered glass and nameless weeds. They had brought only what they could transport in the car, then the car was sold for two thousand dollars, and the money was gone in an hour, five months of rent prepaid. There was simply no way to move their old mattress or their dressers, which were left on the street and carried off by strangers. Allmon had brought his telescope, but he didn’t need a telescope to know that they had reached the edge of the world.

Allmon stretched a polyester sheet across his mattress, taped a Bulls poster to the wall, then set the Reverend’s telescope in the bathroom to train its eye up and out of the tiny window to see what could be seen. That first night the sun fell like something wounded, and a triumphant night came up in all directions.

Without his hearing, Marie stepped up behind him in the darkness of the room and with her gentlest voice said, “Allmon, I believe we’re going to make this place a home.”

Without surprise, without turning, without otherwise acknowledging her presence, Allmon said, “You believe what you want, Momma. I don’t believe in nothing.”

* * *

Hope and reality were at cross purposes. The new plan wasn’t good or bad, just a plan. After school was dismissed, Allmon got off the bus at Chase and counted the doorways as memory dictated until he found what he hoped was the one, then he slipped around back and knocked on the rear door. There was no answer. He knocked once more, rapping hard, and when still no reply came, he stepped off the back porch, squinting up at the redbrick edifice, his hope flickering and dimming. “Come on,” he whispered softly, but he realized it was probably a stupid idea anyway — kick the pavement, curse the sky, crawl back into the barrel of the shotgun—

“The fuck you want?”

He whipped around and detected dark bands of face through the pale slatted blinds on the eastern side of the building. He could barely mutter the words through his nerves. “Aesop around?”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“Hey.” A deep, calm voice from a second-story window; Allmon recognized the slow sound immediately. He craned his neck and saw a shadow delineated by interior light. “It’s cool. Come on up.”

In a moment he was through that back door and ascending the stairs, gathering his courage around him like a shawl, the clay mineral smell of a basement almost overwhelming him, a damp cool suckered from last night’s air. The creaking stairs led to a single wooden door, and he didn’t have to knock; it opened away from his fist, and the man was standing there in a wifebeater and black Bengals sweats, a suspicious look on his face.

“Duckie sent you over here?”

“Huh? Naw.” Allmon shifted awkwardly, staring at the doorframe, wishing suddenly he hadn’t come, but then blurting out, “This one time, I was walking around here and you was like, ‘You wanna make some money?’ and I was thinking maybe—”

“Oh shit — Smartie!” And the man placed both his hands on the doorjamb and leaned back so the muscles of his biceps leaped under the skin, and he hollered laughter. “I remember! That was so motherfucking funny, I was like goddamn — you was running so fast! Yeah, I remember you. Like Carl Lewis and shit. Oh my God…”