C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“You take the risk,” Allmon said, “because a legacy is forever. They can take everything else away from you.”

Henrietta’s smile was small, barely a crack under her flushed cheeks. “That’s where you’re wrong. They can take your legacy too. There’s nothing permanent in this world.”

He stiffened up, wanted to say, You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you don’t know how much those words weigh, but before he’d even decided to keep his mouth shut, she had risen with some impatience and stood close to him under the light. “Do you know what I want?”

A sidelong glance at the door, and she looked too, checking to see whether anyone was there. Only a vacancy, so she stepped over some of the tack toward him.

She said, “People spend their lifetimes pursuing things that don’t even really give them pleasure in the end — just the admiration of strangers. I think that’s a fucking waste.”

He glanced up, startled, but she was sinking down onto her haunches before him and staring into the shadows where his eyes were recessed, inaccessible. The shadows excited her terribly. She said, “There are three things I like the most about fucking. I like the first moment, when you push your cock in and I can feel everything — everything — intensely. Men like to say that women don’t have much sensation, but that’s not true. That’s just a lie they tell themselves.”

Allmon’s hands had come to a standstill on the leather as if soldered there. She could tell he was hardly breathing, and there was the faintest trembling along his neck.

“Give me that,” she said, taking up the bridle. Then she rose and in a moment had turned and settled herself backward on his lap, nestling his legs between hers and settling in against his groin. She laid the leather aside and said, “The second thing I like is to fuck like this.” And she rocked back into him just barely, listening for the sure-inevitable-easy-math-look-ma-no-hands sharp intake of his breath. He was inert under her as if all his nerves were severed. “I like this because I can feel the big ridge on the head of your cock against the front. When I do it like this”—now she was rocking against him with aching slowness—“I can build up until you’re begging me, you’re fucking begging me to fuck you harder, and you’re trying to get deeper, but I keep fucking you shallowly just like this, even though you’re begging me, begging me to fuck you deeper, and this”—she grasped up his hands, forcing them up her shirt to where her elastic bra could be simply pushed aside—“you have to fucking grab my nipples; no, grab them, that’s what I like — grab me harder”—and she placed her fingers over his and forced them down hard around her nipples, rocking harder when she said—“and then when I come on your cock, I’ll finally let you fuck me really deep, but only when I say so.”

She leaned back into him fully then, wound her neck against his, so she could smell him, so that natural-order home scent of him filled her nostrils, and her breathing was rough when she said, “That’s what I like.”

And then she was off him in an instant, adjusting her bra and pulling down her T-shirt, turning abruptly and handing him the bridle, which he took up numbly, confusedly in one hand.

“But I’m discovering there’s a third thing I like,” she said, “and that’s waiting for it. But trust me when I say I don’t like to wait too long. What is it you want, Allmon?”

He was hard, so it wasn’t entirely a lie when he looked straight into her eyes and said, “You.”

* * *

Because there is hunger. Like any desire, it’s only temporarily satisfied, which calls into question the reliability of satisfaction and whether such a state can be said to exist at all. Anything we eat knows us more intimately than a lover. Not merely the inside of our mouth but the esophagus, stomach, alimentary canal, upper and lower colon, sphincter. Everything we desire, we shit out and leave behind.

So there is thought, which is ought and should and will. It’s a great mill wheel spinning in the mind, all the minutiae of the world swept along in the millrace, plundered and broken by the wheel, detritus to drift away. The wheel spins and spins and spins, going nowhere, despite ceaseless activity.

The amygdala is the seat of elemental emotion. Shaped like an almond, it lies behind the smooth skin of the forehead, the cranium, the rapid eyes. When sensing threat, the amygdala stimulates a cascade of hormones for flight or fight. In a thousandth of a second, this is done.

But before the action, before the clamor and heat of the fight, there is a pause. The body freezes, the slower neocortex not yet aware of danger. In the pause, the body gathers its energies, prepares itself. As of yet, there is no action. But this quiet state is only temporary.

There is also love, which looks like hunger but is not. The fewer words said about it, the better. Language is the charnel house of man.

* * *

Allmon crept into the dark stall. He waited until the nightman had fired up the 250, gassed the thing once for good measure, and the lights had fallen away into the black pit of the bowl before rising on its other side near the old manager’s house.

Why are you here? Henry had asked.

Allmon touched the animal on its soft, bony head, found the tufted tip of its ears, its subtle sway back and rough tail. Then, careful not to hug on the delicate neck, he bent over and simply wrapped his arms around the chest and rump like he had that first bridling day. He took care not to burden her with any of his weight. This hurt his back, but the animal was warm and passed its heat along without grudge. Then it grew curious and wended its neck back toward him. He felt the warm shallows of breath against his side. In and out, in and out, and for a few moments he didn’t realize the press and lull was in him too, that it too was rising, rising steadily until the wave overcame itself and, with crushing force, swamped him. Suddenly he was drowning in the old grief again: he would give anything — anything — to have his momma back for two minutes, one minute, even thirty seconds! Anything! They could cut off his fucking legs if it meant he could hold her hand just one more time! Nothing was anything without her. He was a drowned man.

Then, restoring some of the sand under his feet, the wave receded as he had long ago learned it would, and he straightened up slowly, ancient tears in his eyes, but not on his face. Why was he here? To grasp the very things that had been stolen from him, the things he wasn’t allowed to touch.

* * *

So you go on working your job, the old life and all of its emotions packed carefully away, trying to keep yourself steady, because the girl’s coming back, the redhead, the thin-lipped girl, some kind of future. There’s something about her, something interesting, but to do this right, you need to be hard in every sense of the word. You’ve got something she wants, she’s got something you want. You prepare yourself with carnal thoughts, which slip from your brain pan in bubbles. You see that from the top of the room where you take your ease, watching your body below rise up from its sleeping bag, which smells of your own distinct months-long musk. She swivels those little hips through the door, the boss girl, the employer, the owner’s baby girl. You don’t know exactly how to do this, but you’re going to do it, definitely yes. That girl is a door.

A harsh whisper: “Where’s your father at?”

The white girl just shrugs, like she’s slipping a weight off her shoulder. “I’m not my father’s keeper.”

Then she forms a noose of her arms and slips it over his head, drawing his body near. From way up there, his breath catches as he leans down, watching very carefully. He wants to see this, how a man and a woman do this. He kissed some girls as a kid, but he was shy and stupid. This is what a real kiss looks like. It makes sounds that discomfit, but it fascinates. Until she slips her hand down the front of his night drawers and he concentrates up there, wills his life to life — really, now is the time, really (!), but no matter how she touches it, it remains soft and cute as a mole. Then the breeder, the enthusiast, the appraiser really goes to work on him, and his mind could explode with the force of his effort; he’s a man; he’s supposed to leave coins in her purse, cream in her cup, diamonds in her ring. She raises his hand to her breast, but her body is so cold to him, he wants to snatch his hand back. Maybe it’s the way his body jolts or maybe because it’s been too many minutes now, but her snowy papery white face, which had been peering so intently into his, proceeds through a string of subtly drawn transformations, from confusion to vague disbelief to consternation and now flaring indignation. When he says, dully, “I don’t know why I…,” she peers at him. “Is this always a problem for you?” “Naw, I just … it’s not my fault, I don’t know.” She draws back her hand, real offense on her face. “Are you saying it’s me? Are you gay or something?”