C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Shhhhh.

God’s finger touched her and she slept.

His mother was so still. For a moment, grief and uncomplicated love flared in his eyes, and the roulette swung, and he was a boy again with a mother at home and a father due in any minute on eighteen wheels. The tenor of his grief shifted downward. Tears were acid on his eyes.

The funeral was held in the smallest parlor of the Chase Brothers funeral home, in a small space carved from a larger room by partitioning walls made of a heavy gray nylon. The sitters were seated on folding chairs; someone got up and left before the service even began. The service itself consisted of just a minister standing before that unreality in the casket, which was his mother, Marie Marshall, daughter of Damien Emerson and a grandmother Allmon had never met, all gone now. With horror, he realized he could no longer remember the Reverend’s voice, only his righteous anger. What had he said to him that night? The night he died and went away from Allmon forever, evaporated into nothing, leaving him alone in the world—

The preacher, paid for the occasion from Marie’s minuscule life insurance policy, said, “What do we do when we lose someone too soon?”

no idea

“What words do we cry to heaven in our grief?”

no words

“Even in the midst of grief, we must know that Christ is watching.”

not really no

“Because what do we believe?”

nothing

“We believe that Christ raises all believers from the grave.”

nothing

“Until then, the dead are alive in our memory and in heaven, thank Jesus.”

nothing

Bow your heads and pray. The Lord is my nothing , I shall want nothing. He maketh me to lie down in nothing , he leadeth me beside nothing , he restoreth nothing yea, though I walk through the valley of nothing , he leadeth me in the paths of nothing for the sake of nothing and I will lift up mine eyes unto nothing —from whence cometh my help? My help cometh from nothing which made nothing and nothing , oh nothing , why have you forsaken me? Why do you take your little ones and bash them against rocks — where can I go from your nothing ? Where can I flee from your nothing if I go up to the heavens you are nothing if I make my bed in the depths youarenothingandJesusneverdidcomebecausenooneeverdoesamenhavemercyuponyournothingamen

* * *

He stood alone in the waiting room adjacent to the showing parlor. He wavered before the foggy window that looked out onto Hamilton Avenue and breathed in the gaseous scent of the paperwhites splayed on the sideboard beneath the damp sash. Leaning forward slightly against the cold, wet window, he stared into the street. The snow had turned to mush, cast gray by the weak, borrowed light of winter. Cars slushed by, fanning blackened snow. The people all walked with their heads down. The world looked like old wallpaper.

In these streets, he looked for his prospects and found none.

He turned slightly to gaze back into the other room at the paltry mourners and the woman — that old relative who said her name was Sophia — was turned in her seat and looking at him with such a deep and abiding intensity that he had to turn away. Grief was a hand at his throat. Don’t cry. Think. He could barely even do that. He stared into the streets, reading the script and intuiting the ending. These were the killing grounds, he knew that, a cemetery for boys like him. If he stayed here, he had no options but one: to become what Aesop had told him he would become, what he himself had chosen as a twelve-year-old, before he even knew what choosing was. His fate seemed set. How could he escape this life? Every day they spun the wheel of death and someday the ball would fall in his unlucky pocket, probably sooner rather than later. Except … He looked over at the old woman who was watching him, his own gaze as intense as hers suddenly, then he leaned in toward the street, listening. He pressed his ear to the glass. The street spoke.

His PO came up beside him, wrapped an arm round his shoulder again, saying, “You’re doing great, Allmon; just get through this day. Just make it through this, and then you can—”

He turned to her with a ferocity in his eyes that stopped her short. “Get me out of here,” he said.

“Now? Okay, sure, we can go if you really don’t want to stay. I can get you something to eat.” But her steadying arm remained around him.

“No,” he said urgently, shaking off her reassuring touch. “Get me the fuck out of this neighborhood. Get me out or I’m gonna be a statistic.”

“What? Allmon. No, Allmon, listen, this is grief—”

“You listen! That woman over there, she said I could come live with her in Lexington. She’s my granddad’s second cousin or something. Let me do that! Let me go!”

“What? Who? Okay, Allmon, wait — if she’s a relation, we can talk about that, but right now you’re under Ohio jurisdiction, and if you move to Kentucky, there are legal issues that take—”

“No!” he cried, and all heads in the room turned. “Now! Get me out of this fucking neighborhood! Get me out of here, or I’m gonna die here too!”

“Allmon—”

“NOW!”

* * *

The bus crossed the river as it flowed under the Roebling Bridge, and then they were on Kentucky ground. Cincinnati was a sheer wall of light behind them, disappearing behind the cut in the hill as 75 curved south into foreign ground, the land of forgetting, the place where nothing had existed for Allmon before. He shuts his eyes and only sees Marie. Open, and the land is green and rolling like the rolling of the sea you’ve only seen on TV. Close, you can hear someone’s private music pounding across the aisle; beneath the bus your one duffel bag, that’s all. Open, and this is Crittenden. Close, open, this is Georgetown — you’ve never even heard of it. You wonder if they have an accent here, like the Reverend had a fierce accent. What was the name of his father and grandfather? All you can remember is the word Scipio, but you forget who that was if you ever knew. Drift off for a second, wake with a guilty start to the sound of your mother saying, Allmon, what have you done? It’s like she knows you left the old telescope in the house on purpose. Only an idiot would do that, or someone intentionally trying to get lost.

* * *

In the closing scene, the lady’s house is arrayed in lavender from the kitchen curtains to the soft toilet seat that puffs air when you sit on it. Tiny hand-crocheted doilies underlay white plastic lamps, and clear plastic covers the two sofas from Rent-A-Center. The carpets smell of lilac carpet cleaner, and they’re so thick, he can’t hear the sound of his own feet as he steps across them, almost as if he doesn’t exist anymore, as if he’s lighter than air. On the lady’s hearth lies a taxidermied cat, before which he stops and stares. He’s so numb, he can’t even be terrified of it.

The lady called Sophia — second cousin by marriage once removed and adopted on top of that — was bustling around him, taking his duffel stuffed with his few belongings, taking his jacket. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you losing your mind?

“Your cat…,” he said, lacking even the energy to point.

“Oh.” She smiled. “You don’t get rid of your baby just ’cause he passes on!” And then she had him by the elbow and was guiding him into a tiny bedroom, where two twin beds were dressed in sweet violet coverlets with pink heart pillows that said Home Is Where the Heart Is , and she was showing him the tiny closet and the empty dresser drawers, saying, “This is your room.”