C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Marie began to cry and pushed the money off the couch onto the floor and rolled over on her side on the couch again. Although she wouldn’t look at him or talk to him for two days, she didn’t say no again.

* * *

Doctor: Marie, how bad is the pain?

Marie: It’s so bad, I can’t think anymore.

Allmon: She can’t really open her eyes.

Doctor: Well, you came up negative for Sjögren’s for now, but you really need to see a corneal specialist. These things tend to appear in clusters. Have you been using drops?

Marie: They only help for like thirty seconds. I feel like I’ve got acid on my eyes.

Doctor: How are you still able to work?

Marie: I don’t have a choice. My bills …

Doctor: Well, I wish I could tell you more from your tests, but there are so many rheumatological diseases and it’s not completely clear which one this is. We’ll probably know more at a later date. It’s normal for it to take a decade to show up more clearly in the blood.

Allmon: What’s that mean?

Doctor: It means your mother has a lot of the soft criteria for lupus, but not the hard criteria. But we really don’t need to worry about that. We’ll treat the symptoms. The diagnosis isn’t really important.

Marie: No! The diagnosis is important! I can’t get disability without a diagnosis! I can’t keep going — I need that diagnosis!

Doctor: Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t give it to you. And, frankly, you probably don’t want to mess with disability anyway. Even with a solid diagnosis, they almost always reject my patients the first couple of times, and it can take years to get through the appeals process if you get through at all. And that’s with a lawyer who knows what he’s doing. For now, we’ll just get you on a cocktail of drugs and—

Marie: I don’t have insurance.

Doctor: Oh. I see. And with these medical records, you’re ineligible. Well … the only other thing I can suggest is that we get you started on prednisone. It’s cheap and it works. Of course, sometimes the side effects of the drug can be worse than the disease.

Marie: There’s nothing else?

Doctor: Not really. Lupus doesn’t get much research. Mostly, colored women get it. There’s really nothing else to do but take steroids. We’re all still following a script that was written fifty years ago.

* * *

On the bus ride home, Marie leaned against Allmon with her eyes shut. Jostling next to him, she realized for the first time that the hard press of his shoulder blade was a smidge higher than hers. He was almost tall now, he might even grow to be six feet, but he was still too much the little boy, too much the child. Soft. That was her fault.

“Momma, I don’t even know who I come from,” he said suddenly, his voice cutting into her thoughts.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, without opening her eyes.

“I mean, I don’t even know who Grandpa’s grandparents was.”

She sighed. “Allmon, honey, I can’t remember their names right now. The Reverend was good at remembering that stuff, not me. You grow up and you forget things.”

“See, that’s what I mean!” he said angrily under his breath, and the edge in his voice surprised her. She steeled herself against the pain, then opened her eyes to look at him.

Allmon crossed his arms and continued, “You don’t know who you are if you don’t know where you come from.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit!” Marie snapped with genuine irritation. “That’s just some black-pride Roots bullshit, and it’s always some black man saying it. You show me a black man who knows a single thing about real pride and I’ll give you a million dollars! Always thinking everyone hates them, always acting like thugs. Most white folks don’t hate you, Allmon; they just don’t care about you.” She made a dismissive sound and waved her stiff, swollen hand. Then her own words slotted home, and she thought, Maybe that’s worse.

“You ain’t even listening to me,” Allmon said sullenly, and turned away from her, looking so much like the little boy he used to be — hooded eye, puffed-out lip — that it caught her breath. She felt the whooshing of time like a physical thing speeding past her and wanted mightily to turn and hold her baby boy, her little lamb, say everything’s going to be all right. But she couldn’t. She closed her eyes again and sat up straight on the pole of her spine. She breathed deeply and said, “Allmon, you think you need to know about the past? Why? ’Cause you don’t know enough about hurting yet? You think you need to know how your great-great-great-grandfather Scipio got himself out of Kentucky only to hang himself? Really? ’Cause I think staring down the past won’t get you anywhere. You need to grow up fast. Focus on the here and now. I want you to take that test and get into a good magnet school. And listen to me now: Whatever happens, I don’t want you hovering over me, you understand? I don’t want to see you crying or carrying on or dropping out of school. Become a doctor or lawyer or something. I let you get away with being soft for a long time, but that’s over. Now you’ve got to be a man.”

He refused to look at her lest he cry. “Yeah, Momma.”

“Yeah, okay, then.” And she leaned away from him into the cold of the bus window, where the condensation dampened the flushing fever on her cheek.

* * *

He did as he was told; he rounded up what remained of his boyhood and forced it into a shadowy pocket of his heart. It kicked and pounded for a while, but he closed his ears to it and his spirit soon evanesced into wounded silence. Instead, he studied on Aesop (caps, glocks, swagger, wit, threat, diamond signet ring on his pinkie), who his mother didn’t know a thing about, but then she didn’t know anything about being a man, what it was to be in your body, how you were born into obligation. A man’s whole life was a haymaker. So he continued to run in the afternoons after school. Sure, you weren’t supposed to lie, to cheat, to bribe, to hit, to sneak. But increasingly, the world of rules was being shown up for what it really was, a rigged system, a fixed game. You should be good, definitely — but only until you couldn’t, until everything you loved was on the line. It just made him want to kill someone if he studied on that too hard. So the key was to not study on the truth — the madness in the center of everything that was called common sense in a white-ruled world.

Relax, Allmon. Relax, loosen your mind, free your body, it’s lunchtime. That’s when they let you out of the classroom, and you run silly and wild on the blacktop basketball courts, because you’re still a child even with your fourteenth birthday only weeks away. Your feet pound the pavement, you flail your longish arms, impressed with their new wingspan, you discover the interesting ways you’re growing into your body, just like you discovered the secrets of your right hand a few years back. Yeah, sure, maybe you got an average face, an average dick, but wonders never cease, and the best ones come from inside you. You feel smart realizing that, then Keeo’s talking shit — that kufi-wearing motherfucker never knows when to quit — and there you go, the two of you kicking across the court in a madcap fifty-yard dash, and you own him, you tear him up like a paper curler, reaching the chain-link fence five feet ahead of him and barely sweating, just taking your air in fitful bursts.

Suddenly, there’s a white man in your face and you rear back, startled.

“So you’re Allmon Shaughnessy,” the man said, holding a clipboard against his chest and staring you down. His drawl was surprising — thick, like beef stew over biscuits.

“Yeah,” said Allmon, trying to recover himself, trying to look cool. He realized now where he’d seen the man before; he’d been at their gym class last week, talking to their teacher and watching them run.