C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

“Tell me where you come from,” she said.

How can I tell you? No one ever told me.

“What were you like as a child?”

Ugly.

“What’s your mother like?”

A tisket a tasket, a gray and glossy casket.

Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me

Shut upShut upSHUTUP!!!!!!

The real questions were his, shining around him like a whitened, heated aura, and he tried to hang on to them with what remained of his dwindling reserve: How much is that house worth, how much are you worth? How come you think you deserve all this when I don’t? I had a white father too, but nobody’s handing me shit. How much do you think I need to buy one good mare and one share of the best stud? What were you doing the year I turned seventeen? How much do you think I’m ever gonna tell you about my life inside? Nothing, that’s how much. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Because you deserve nothing.

But it was as if she wanted to eat even his silence. She grasped hold of his empty answers, invited them into her, begging him for pleasure or perhaps something else that had begun in the shape of pleasure but was swiftly outgrowing it. She was moving steadily over him, asking and asking and asking to be let loose from the awful hames that constricted her, and then she was coming with great cries and convulsions into openness without care for who heard or knew. She wanted it all — the heavy, burdened brow, his face like a secret, his dark, long chest with its trembling inhalations, his cock, the contours of which she could draw with her tongue. And sometimes as she was moving over him, Allmon’s body betrayed him and he was suddenly lost, swimming in the new space that opened up between two bodies but that aroused a terror even stronger than desire — he was losing his purchase on his old resentments, and he couldn’t relearn his resistance. Something was growing in him too. In desperation, he tried one last trick: he learned to play the old, instinctive game of postcoital sleep, so that when she resumed her questions, finally asking, “What was it like in prison, Allmon?” his only reply was silence, and when she turned her head to inquire again, he was asleep, his chest so still, it appeared he was dead.

* * *

But he couldn’t last; he broke. She came to him one morning at seven, an hour set brazenly in the light; he realized she had walked straight across the property, abandoning any need for privacy, his or hers. She had always been so secretive before, and yet here she came, tugging off her clothes in the daylight, naked before she was even on his bed.

“Allmon,” she said, and that too struck him as a new curiosity, the way she said his name. It was big and round like a dipper that could hold him. When he looked at her face, he saw what looked like wonder or the joy of discovery, something as bold as the morning light itself. It jarred him; he looked away. But she reached with both hands and turned his face toward her, so he could see her as she undressed him. It was so clear that she was taking joy in this — in him — but that was too much, almost repugnant. He tried to turn away, but then she climbed over him and pressed him into her. She was entirely concentrated, her body so open, they were soon one strong rhythm, and he felt he was becoming her or maybe the other way around. Then she was pulling him over her, and it was Allmon who was making sounds now, release pressing up through reluctance, some kind of desperate song as she was saying please, please, please like the only thing she wanted in this world was for him to come inside her with nothing between them, and the rise and fall was coming — but it wasn’t orgasm this time, it was the other wave, the great worst wave from forever ago, suffocating and dreadful, about to crest over him now, and he was off her in an instant, hunched over and dry heaving beside her, his body wracked.

“My God,” Henrietta said, too surprised at first to move, jerked from the sex and the warmth into the cold. Then she recovered herself and reached out for him, but Allmon extended one forearm and pushed her back, shaking his head like a wounded bear.

“No,” he choked, swallowing hard, struggling to hold himself in.

“Allmon.” Henrietta’s voice was soft — that change had come once they started having sex; it was a woman’s voice like he had never heard before. “Allmon, what’s wrong?”

He just shook his head, back and forth, back and forth, hunched. Henrietta lay there on her side and observed him for a moment, the only thing he would allow her to do. She took her time considering all the confounding details of his downcast face, then said, “Allmon, tell me why you’re not free with me.”

It was so unexpected, so absurd, he laughed from his hunched position — but it was an ugly sound, like a bark. Wholly dismissive.

“What?” she said, but not rearing back.

When words came, they were as cutting as any knife blade: “White people—!” he blurted.

“White people what?”

He was ready — even wanted — her words to be sharp too, but they weren’t, and when he looked over quickly at her face, it remained open, curious. He didn’t know whether to believe in the openness he saw there, or whether it was some kind of trick.

“Y’all don’t get it. You really don’t,” he muttered, hate now beginning to stanch his tears.

“Get what?” she said. “I don’t understand you.”

When he spoke, he spat. “No, you don’t!” His words were launched arrows. “Y’all fuck up our lives for fucking hundreds of years and then tell us we aren’t free? What the fuck! Can you even hear yourself?”

Henrietta didn’t defend herself, and he didn’t know what to do if he couldn’t get her to fight, to hate him back. So he waved his hand abruptly, confusion suddenly present, regret tannic like blood in his mouth. “I don’t even know if I mean you anymore,” he said, but he did, because she was like a white pebble on a white beach that ran all the way around the world, containing all the oceans she had seen and he hadn’t.

Henrietta’s touch interrupted the roiling of his mind. Something was moving in her, emerging out of shadow into consciousness. She was seeing the real Allmon, and she knew it. Her hand was light when it stroked the hard slope of his shoulder, then tugged insistently at his arm.

“Tell me about prison,” she said, but her words were salt in that wound.

He didn’t even hesitate. “No. That ain’t never gonna happen.”

“Why not? Don’t you trust me?”

He shook his head. “I can’t trust myself.”

“Trust yourself to what?”

Still looking at the ground, he said very deliberately, “If I said my life out loud, I don’t know what I’d do. So don’t push me.”

She didn’t. When she did finally speak again, she said simply, “Allmon, I just don’t want you to be unfree with me.”

He made a hateful, smirking face.

“What’s the most unfree thing about you?”

He half laughed, still dismissive, but wouldn’t look at her face. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about. Forget it. Seriously.”

“Allmon, what’s still holding you prisoner?”

The blood rushed to his face. It came so fast, he felt dizzy. He shook his head, looking at the ground.

“Tell me. Please,” she said, and only held him more firmly when he tried to pull back from her hand on his arm.

“Fuck,” he said, blinking. His voice was thick.

“Tell me.”

Suddenly, he rocked back on his heels, naked there beside her, his arms raised. He looked furious when he pounded once at his chest, a single thud. “Hurt!” he roared, like she had caused it.

Henrietta wasn’t afraid of his anger but was totally confused. “Hurt? Like physical pain?”