C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

At first Allmon couldn’t tell whether he was the target of this laughter and his spirit quailed, but the man reached out, touched his shoulder once with a quick, guiding prod that was not unfriendly, and said, “Get on in here,” so Allmon entered the apartment, and the door closed on his old life.

The man was still half laughing, but the laugh was no longer in his appraising eyes: “So now you back and you wanna make bank. How old you now?”

“Twelve.”

“Damn, time fly! Why ain’t you come back sooner?”

Allmon shrugged.

“What, you can’t talk?”

He just shrugged again. “When I got something to say.”

The man grinned slowly and glanced at his compatriot. “Respect, respect. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

“You think you maybe got something for me to do?”

The man lowered his chin fractionally, peered at him. “Maybe,” he said, then his hands reached forward and clamped down on Allmon’s shoulders. “You can run, you know what I’m saying. But not like run !” And he threw back his head and laughed, a laugh that bounded out from his belly with so much eruptive force that tears sprang to his eyes, and for the first time Allmon saw in that broad, cold face a real warming. He felt the gears of his own heart scraping into motion.

Aesop wiped a hand over his eyes to stanch his laughter and eased onto a plastic seat at the kitchen table, his legs splayed and his elbow coming to rest on the table. “Motherfucking funny,” he said, and looked at Allmon sideways. He sighed and said, “When I’m like I need you to run Northside, I mean you need to run my shit. We cook over by the cemetery. You run from the factory to my boys, keep your eye on my lookouts, they let you know when the five-oh roll. But you got to work without drawing no attention to yourself. You understand what I’m saying? I don’t want you to run , motherfucker. I need you all calm and walking around and shit. Don’t be sneaking, don’t be nothing. You got to look like a niggah with no purpose.”

As he took in these words, Allmon’s face was calm and only a slight twitching at the brow betrayed any fear. But there was no real surprise; his head might be trying to play naïve, but his heart had made its decision weeks ago, and his body had brought him here on that underground resolve, which registered only as a vague plan to make some money.

From the table before him, Aesop picked up one small vial and rolled it between his fingers. “You run good for me, you make like a hundred a day.”

“For real?”

Aesop swagged his head, laughing with his friend and making mild fun. “For real.”

Allmon just ducked his head, abashed.

“Listen, Smartie,” Aesop said, and waited for him to look up. “You run hard, be sharp, you deal in a couple years. Then you make mad bank and chill on the corner, you feel me?”

“Yeah.”

Then the man’s face grew very still, his eyes hooded. He pointed at the table where his gun lay. He said, staring into Allmon’s eyes, “This my piece, Southern Comfort. ’Cause it comfort the Southern brother.” Then he grabbed at his crotch. “And this here my big dick. ’Cause it fuck all the white bitches. And that shit comfort the Southern brother too!” His eyes brightened and he laughed a raucous laugh and pointed at his friend in the doorway, who just smiled and shook his head ruefully with his arms crossed over his chest. Then Aesop turned to Allmon, suddenly serious again. “You think we all thugs? You think you a thug?” he asked.

Allmon didn’t know what to say. So he said, “You gonna give me a gun too?”

The man scowled. “I don’t need no schoolkid wannabe thug round here. I don’t do stupid and messy, you feel me? I need smart niggahs. I know Marie ain’t had no stupid kid. If you do math, know how to long-range think, understand psychology, all that shit, that’s valuable to me, because I’m a entrepreneur. I run a successful business here. For real, I run this motherfucking hood, I govern. Fuck the police, you know what I’m saying, I’m the mayor.”

Allmon nodded, but he was staring at that gun, at its cold black grace.

“So couple years, yeah, then you get your own gravedigger. But you too young for that shit right now. Ain’t no need, just a accident waiting to happen. Now run hard. Be sharp. Who knows, maybe you be my accountant someday. Get all the bitches you want.”

Allmon grinned.

The man leaned in. “But don’t fuck with me, little man.”

“Huh?” Allmon looked at him in alarm.

And then in the quiet voice that in one sentence would delimit his future and fence it tight: “Don’t fuck with me, or I’ll fuck everything you love. Every. Thing. Every. One. I’m the mayor and the mafia and the motherfucking love. Understand?”

Yes, Allmon understood, but he was already reaching out to shake the man’s offered hand. He’d already decided that life was a gamble and his best odds were in this house.

* * *

Marie never left the shotgun anymore, except to go to work, and when she returned, she slumped on the couch with her face to its back and didn’t move again unless she was forced to. She was beginning to miss more days than she worked, and she didn’t cook anymore. It took all of her energy — every ounce of self she possessed — simply to survive the pain that had engulfed her life. The change was breathtaking. This wasn’t the journey into adulthood she’d imagined as a young girl, the one that involved a husband and children. This was a journey with only one companion — illness — and it had taken from her everything that she understood as herself and replaced it with shattering pain.

Allmon carried on as best he could without her. He became the cook of the house, sticking to a plain white diet bought cheap at the IGA: potatoes, rice, white bread, corn, eggs, and milk. And while he cooked, while he playacted the normalcy of a steady home, he turned an increasingly worried, surveying eye on Marie. He began to discover thick clumps of her wavy hair in the shower. At first he thought, Probably straightening made it fall out, but he was kidding himself. Marie had straightened her hair once about a year ago and hadn’t done it again. He noticed how she no longer painted her nails or wore lipstick or did any of the things he knew a woman did if her spirit was tilted toward the world of men. And now her hair was falling off her head, and he could see the ground of her scalp through what was left. What he saw was ugly, and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t.

When he had saved three thousand exactly, he wrapped it in a rubber band and brought the roll to her, placed it on the coffee table. He said, “Momma.”

Slow, slow, with enormous effort that made his stomach wrench with misgiving, Marie rolled over on the couch. Her eyes were red, raw, her face distorted by unmanaged pain, her hands like claws clutching at her collarbone. For a moment she squinted at the roll on the table, uncomprehending, then she looked right at him.

Her voice was scratchy but clear: “No.”

Allmon reached forward and pushed the bundle toward her and nodded his head once, a stubborn assertion.

She shook her head. She shook it hard again and again. “Take that money back where you got it, Allmon, and don’t ever let me see it again.”

“Momma, you know I can’t take it back.”

Marie’s breath hitched. He couldn’t tell whether it was a gasp of astonishment or an aborted sob of a woman who’d long expected what was coming. Either way, she stared at Allmon through burning eyes and, despite the terrified pounding of his heart, enduring the stab of her complicated disappointment, he spoke up one more time. “It’s enough for the doctor and six months of rent.”