C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Mack leaned over. “Who’s your groom?”

Henry crossed his arms on his chest. “Allmon Shaughnessy.”

“Well, there’s your black Irish. Any good?”

And there precisely was the rub: “Better than good. Great with my stallions.” He couldn’t say otherwise.

“Where’d you get him?”

“From wherever they grow America’s criminals.”

Henry laughed but Mack didn’t smile. His eye twitched.

“Blackburn, apparently,” Henry continued. “Henrietta hired him.”

“Well,” said Mack, shrugging, “I got nothing against a man with a past. I don’t give a damn what you’ve done in your life, I don’t care what color you are — black or brown or illegal or whatever. I’ve had a few kids from over there.”

Henry raised a brow. “From where? Blackburn?”

“Yeah. They train up good grooms,” Mack said with another shrug. “How’s your filly?”

Henry broke into a radiant grin. “Amazing. Better and better by the day.”

“Well, if this kid is as good as you say, assign him to her. Send him to me when Hellsmouth is ready. I don’t mind the prison kids. They know how to fucking work.”

The light of new thought roosted in Henry’s eyes.

“You’re up,” Mack said with a nod in the direction of the dais.

The bidspotters paced slowly here and there, eyes sweeping over the sea of trainers, bloodstock agents, sheiks, and local hands. Henry stared hard across the lot of them. A flap here, a wave there and the bids rose, the spotters’ heads swiveling like the heads of owls, the patter of the auctioneer rising until the last umpish “Hiyah!” when Deep Spring sold for $200,000. The ringman led the jittery yearling away to the left, one gloved hand on the lead shank, the other on the deep neck of the colt. When the left door opened, Henry leaned forward, actually passing a hand before his eyes with some irritation as if shooing away gadflies and barely cognizant of the sale — yes, yes, there he was, grasping the lead shank, the man. Allmon Shaughnessy. Interloper, user, everywhere at once, brown as river mud.

* * *

She couldn’t stop thinking about the beaten colt. A phantasm, a shivering grotesque cramped in the corner of her eye, he vanished every time she turned to confront him. Again and again it happened, stoking her pulse, but each time it was some other dark horse from the sea of endless horseflesh: ripe but untested, ungainly but salable and all fresh for the auction — somewhere among them a sales topper, an avatar of free forward motion. Vets darted from one exam to the next, trainers stood like lighthouses in a fog of tobacco smoke at the glass doors, their watches flashing as they scratched out hip numbers. Henrietta put her own free hand to her forehead, feeling slightly unbalanced. The way that horse had turned to her voice in its stall with its black, burst-fruit eyes. Slashes across the atlas bone. She knew the velvet of a horse’s muzzle was as tender as the flesh of a woman’s inner thigh.

Allmon emerged as a solitary figure in the crowd, Deep Spring at his heels. Henrietta slowed. She was having trouble remembering how she had once spat at him from the catbird seat and put him in his place. What she remembered was the way he had grasped her arm at the training center, the surety and heat of that hold. Now she stopped altogether, staring: My God, his body was perfection. She had been avoiding it, but there was no escape. He was a mathematical proof of hard beauty, symmetrical and proportioned for perpetuation. The expressive organs of the face — the full lips and golden eyes — occupied an even third of his face between the smooth forehead, the wide expanse of jaw. The height of his head equaled the size of his hands, which now grasped the lead shank of Deep Spring. The strong length of his chest to the top of that head, the hair of which he now kept shaved to show the smart, round lineaments of the well-turned skull, was a quarter of his body, exactly the width of his chest to the crook of his arm and so also the diameter of his head. His body abounded in architectural relationships: From the knee to the ground equaled his forearms to the tips of his fingers. He stood eight heads high. His foot too was as long as his forearm, articulated now by the effort of managing an irritated horse, and, she knew, nestled in these symmetries, the foci of perfection: the cock and navel, the old compass points.

Her genes rattled stupidly, purposefully, when his eyes met hers.

They traded Deliria for Deep Spring. Her hand brushed his, or his hers, action and reception indecipherable. She could feel the wordless animal in her. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t really wanted her once. She still wanted him.

“Go well?” she said coolly.

Allmon nodded. “Two hundred grand.” They spoke in the measured, level tones of the unsure.

“To whom?” Her words mattered no more to her than the fleeting of distant bats. When Deep Spring tugged against his lead, she barely noticed.

Allmon shrugged. “Some Irish guy.” And then he seemed to realize that Henrietta was looking at him, that the temperature had changed, and looking up, he was confronted by an intensity in her face that caused him to step back right into Deliria’s shoulder.

A voice shattered their moment of public privacy. “Henrietta Forge!”

Allmon slipped away in an instant, his heart banging an abrading rhythm, as Henrietta peered under the arched neck of Deep Spring. She noted first the dusty Justins, dark jeans, a Wildcats jacket, then the blowsy face and rosaeic nose, the wondering eyes so wide that they showed white around the edges of the brown irises.

“Henrietta Forge? I believe it is you,” the man said. “You’re older, but I’ll be darned if you don’t look almost the same.” The man had rounded the front end of Deep Spring and stood gazing at her with a kind of helpless pleasure, shaking his friendly head in disbelief.

“I…,” she stalled.

“Dan Barlow,” he said, sticking out his hand.

“Barlow—”

“Jamie Barlow? My dad was your all’s farm manager from back in ’73 until—”

“Oh my God!” Henrietta cried, her eyes widening. “Old Barlow!”

“Yeah, that was my dad.”

“Oh!” Her gasp was quick and involuntary, the tiniest spear piercing the brittle veneer between past and present. One hand rose trembling to cover her lips as she took in the look of this man, stout and sure like his father, but redder and thicker about the middle. “Oh, how is your father? Tell me how he is,” she said, her words like a plea.

A mild surprise registered, and the man shifted his considerable weight. He passed a hand down his satiny jacket front. “Well, Dad passed back in ’93. Uh, he, you know, he didn’t last too long after Mother went, which was, shoot, back in … well, that was in early ’92, I reckon. I’m so sorry you didn’t know. I called your dad myself to give him the news.”

Old Barlow was dead? Her eyes filled with fast, unbidden tears. The man had always called her his strange bird, his funny valentine. He had looked at her as though she were the most interesting and precious person in the world. And never once had he told her who to be.

Now his son said, “That happens a lot, you know. One passes and the other can’t hang on too long. Dad always relied on Mother to keep him on the path. Maybe a little too much. Lost his spark a bit when she went. I think he didn’t have as much purpose without her.”

“I never visited him,” Henrietta said. “After he retired. I told him that I would.” Guilty tears threatened to spill down her face.

There was surprise on the man’s face again. He observed her tears. “Well, now,” he said, and inched closer and, with the awkward kindness of an aging bachelor farmer, slumped his heavy hand down on her shoulder and patted her stiffly but gently. “You were just a kid, just a little girl. You had no cause to worry about visiting an old man like that. Besides, Dad’s last couple years weren’t pretty. He wouldn’t have wanted you to see him that way.”