C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Or is all this too purple, too florid? Is more too much — the world and the words? Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry, leached of excess and honed to a single, digestible point? Have I exceeded the bounds of the form, committed a literary sin? I say there’s no such thing — any striving is calcined ash before the heat of the ever-expanding world, its interminability and brightness, which is neither yours nor mine. There aren’t too many words; there aren’t enough words; ten thousand books, all the world’s dictionaries and there would never be enough; we’re infants before the Ohio coursing its ancient way, the icy display of aurora borealis and the redundancies of the night sky, the flakes of snow common and heartbreaking; before the steady rocking of a man and a woman, the earthworm’s curling, the leopard killing the mongoose killing the rat over the ant in its workmanlike machinations, the anonymous womb that knit the anonymous, the endless configurations of cloud, before the heron, the tern, the sparrow, and the wily peacock too, the peacock turning and splaying his designs, each particular shimmering feather a universe invested with its own black sun, demanding, Look before you die, Look — Don’t turn away for fear you’ll go blind; the dark comes down soon enough. Until then, burn!

* * *

It sounded like a bad joke, how Mack came from a place called Holler — too backwards to even have a proper goddamned name. Way out in Letcher County past Whitesburg under a ridge as tall as any New York skyscraper. Holler. I mean, goddamn. Holler for help was more like it. Too far in to get penicillin when you were sick or to get out when your daddy was drunk and tumbling down Jericho. He came from a family where almost nobody gave a damn if you didn’t go to school, where you were eight the first time you got sick on spruce moonshine. Excepting his dear mother, who loved all her children gay or straight or green, his clan was full of shrew-faced mamaws that ruled the roost and men so cowed they could have been cattle. A stereotype of a stereotype, that was Holler. Even the word was arsenic on his tongue. Of course, it wasn’t politically correct now to talk about the mountains that way — a bunch of self-righteous cockroaches would crawl through the Internet and infest your inbox, call you a traitor to the ones you left behind. But that was all a song and dance to look better for the Yankees, and Mack liked Yankees about as much as he did mountains. Sure, people liked to wax romantic about down home, about places like Holler or Crine or Sundown — Mama’s cooking and eighty-seven-verse ballads and awshucks I ain’t knowed we was poor, that whole whitewash — but they only indulged it once they’d got out. Then they’d forget about the beatings, everybody dying too young from drugs and car crashes on mountain roads, the hellfire, the damnation, the everloving ignorance. Sentimental memories were just a way of apologizing for being the kind of asshole who escapes. And escape Mack had.

He was pretty sure they’d flung him up on a nag straight out of the womb. Just a spraddle-legged little fucker on the back of a bow-back mare, taking jam and pork cuts to his cousins over in the next holler, fetching mail in Holler proper for Mother and Daddy, making himself a general nuisance by egging on anyone with a horse or a mule to race down the length of Big Hammer Holler, from Mine no. 11 down to the cluster of Union graves at the far end (his clan ran Jefferson, opposition to most of the county, which just figured). He was always sneaking up on somebody’s horse, riding hogs for fun, telling folks he tamed a deer and rode it too, which was bullshit of course, but the story got so big, so reckless, he couldn’t remember if he’d rode the thing or just told the tale. Didn’t matter. It made him a minor legend, so somebody had actually heard of him on the Alabama Circuit when he went down there begging to ride — a fourteen-year-old with cannonballs in his Wranglers. But he conquered that rinky-dink show pretty fast and then headed west with a boyfriend who only made it as far as Peoria before Mack left him on the side of the road, and then he rode quarter horses in Wyoming until he got thrown hard and was busted up for three solid months. That’s when he switched over to training, which was a natural progression, seeing as he was constitutionally incapable of getting along with people, much less taking orders from them. Soon enough he tore the Old West a new asshole and got bored again, ended up back in Kentucky. Of all places. Eating where he used to shit, he supposed, but he never went back to the mountains. He stayed in Lexington with his scratchy, undiluted Letcher County accent, and when people called him a hillbilly, he flexed his wrist under his Rolex and curled his toes in his custom Lucchese boots and thought, You have no fucking idea.

Mack slowed down for nothing but whiskey and his dear mother, whom he’d brought up to a Lexington retirement home pretty much the instant his daddy died, and just now he was charging at his customary speed through Henry’s stallion barn, looking for the manager’s office. Henry had said he would be there first thing in the morning. They were planning to roll through footage together, debate the new prospects for Seconds Flat, talk about siblings going to stud. He didn’t do it like this for everyone; he was in the enviable position of choosing whom to work with so closely, but few were as driven as Forge. Henry was a man who never called it “the game,” and Mack appreciated that. If you were born in Letcher County, you knew that nothing involving more than fifty bucks was a game.

He heard the sounds before they registered, but hell, it was February and every horse he encountered was cock-addled or in estrus, and his poor brain was echoing with the sounds of breeding or grooms talking about breeding or his own thoughts on breeding, so he didn’t realize what it was until he saw it, though he certainly should have; his body already knew. He heard that sound of someone moaning low, and the slapping of skin that made his dick move before his brain could get involved. He only stood there at the office door for maybe two seconds — the fools left it cracked! Or maybe they got off on that, who knows — but it seemed just shy of an eternity: the black guy moving over a white woman who had turned her face away, but whose hair was unmistakable as she moaned and gripped the groom’s buttocks, so it stood out in his mind later with all the startling, upending stark of a photographic negative. It was only when he had stepped smartly and immediately away, when he was marching off to the house, realizing Henry had meant that office, that he understood exactly what he’d seen.

At the far end of the shed row, he laughed once, a harsh, surprised sound. Mack wasn’t a cruel man — well, he’d been accused of cruelty by a couple of employees, but mostly he was just impatient — but, more to the point, he appreciated a good joke. Especially at another man’s expense. A wealthy man? One who paid him to be the best, all the while thinking he was a step above on the ladder? He felt a twinge of compunction when he thought of those kids just having their suds-in-the-bucket fun … But yeah, this was pretty goddamn irresistible.

Which is why he was grinning over Henry’s head when he stepped into the house office, why he could barely tuck away that grin as they watched the seven prospect videos, and why he ended up saying something, even though he really knew he shouldn’t, even though he felt a tiny twinge of almost-regret.

It didn’t stop him. He was a risk taker, just like Henry Forge. “Tell me again the name of that black kid you got working for you, Henry.”

“Allmon. Why?” said Henry from where he was switching off the DVD player and straightening up to see him out.