The Sport of Kings (26 page)

Henrietta watched with her hand over her mouth as a screen was erected around the horses.

The track ambulance spun up, followed shortly by the vet's truck with its mobile clinic, and three horse ambulances. A hundred thousand strong and mostly drunk, the grandstand waited in muted, tipply shock as one entered willingly, confused, and white-eyed into the ambulance, the other two euthanized and winched even before the weeping owners could say—still out of breath from racing down from their air-conditioned boxes—“Do the right thing.”

Only when a door slammed for the third time did Henrietta turn abruptly away from the rail. She had to find her father, who had surely left the box by now to find Seconds Flat. He would be furious, she knew; a second-place finish was a deep disappointment under the best of conditions, but with the best in the field down, it amounted to nothing at all. It added not one letter to the family name. Where was her father? Hands clutching his skull, no doubt, and cursing his fate.

*   *   *

“Slow down, Henrietta.”

He felt like an invalid with his daughter on his arm this way, all but held upright as they walked from the barn on the backstretch, where Seconds Flat, uninjured but to Henry's eye a wasted thing, was now being washed and hotwalked, and where the jockey had gripped his arm, saying, “She just flew, Mr. Forge! She flew over them like an eagle!” and where their trainer met them with not the proper solemnity but smiles of relief that they'd been spared—and second place!—though the man soon fell into a faltering silence when confronted with Henry, who looked out at the horseflesh all around them and, for one gaping moment, could not determine what he looked upon, or his place in it. His hopes were dashed, and his accrued wealth amounted to nothing. He gazed in wonder at his daughter beside him, at that chilly mantle she assumed at all times. She wore it so well, like some kind of birthright, cold in any weather. It was a strange thing to admire in your own child, to watch her perfect what you could not, that regal indifference.

Henrietta was guiding him past the stiles that demarcated the backstretch when he caught sight of a man he had been introduced to once. Akers, or Akins, his blasted mind could not remember which, but this man, this charlatan with what looked like a prostitute at his side, made his money from electronics stores and chicken restaurants,
this
man had a Derby winner in his stable.
This
man's stallion covered every game mare in North America for six months and then was flown south in late summer to cover the other half of the known world. It was ludicrous, preposterous, proof that life favored idiot strivers. It sickened him what stupid men could achieve in this life.

“Mr. Forge, hold up a minute.”

They were in the parking lot now, trying to find both their Mercedes in a lot of silver Mercedes. He was slow to turn, though he recognized the voice immediately. Mack Snyder. He'd seen him a hundred times on television, and occasionally in person from a distance. On any other day, he would have drawn himself up to his fullest, most self-assured height. Today, he looked like a man peering out from beneath a cowl.

The man came on, smiling slightly in a pinched way, but the smile didn't suit, like too-tight Sunday clothes on a roughneck. His shirt was damped through the armpits with sweat, and a bolo tie swung with an orange Zuni cabochon. He was a stocky man with a perpetually sunburned neck and hard, unkind hands pinched by two signet rings. When he held out one hand, Henry noted they were hard and calloused, but his nails were evenly clipped and perfectly clean.

“Mack Snyder,” the man said. Or the Hillbilly Horseman, as Bob Costas had dubbed him during his first Derby—and the sobriquet had stuck. If he'd shed some of the Letcher County syntax, his vowels were still broad enough to swim in. That roughcut voice rose and fell like the head of a rocking horse.

Henrietta touched her hand to Henry's upper arm, a protective gesture.

“Good to meet you,” said Henry.

“You're just the man I want to talk to,” Mack said, and for a moment he set his thin lips together, hard, as if he was hesitating, as if he was the kind of man who hesitated. “Listen,” he said, “I would congratulate you, but I'd bet you aren't the type who takes kindly to congratulations on a second-place finish.”

“Ha,” said Henry tiredly. Mack held up his hand as if to forestall further response. “Let me just say this: your filly ran a good race against the boys, and that's in spite of a hard bump and a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Always interesting when a girl doesn't know her place.”

Henry stood there listening, but he was beginning to focus with as much energy as absolute fatigue allowed. He waited.

Mack said: “She spends her energy, though. She's missing that smart gait her dam had, but you can see the resemblance once she settles in.” He nodded once, hard, agreeing with himself.

Henry cocked his head to one side. “You remember Hellcat?”

“Damn right, I don't ever forget a horse. Not a bad choice for Secretariat. Unconventional, sure, but not bad.”

“That's what I always said.”

The man nodded again. “The race didn't go your way—it didn't go anybody's way—but I think you got a strong filly worth working with.”

“Yes.” A soft grin of resurrection spread on Henry's face; he breathed in, almost imperceptibly.

Now Mack took a single step forward toward him, his shoulder effectively angling Henrietta from their conversation, though she stood mere inches away. He lowered his voice slightly. His attempt at small talk was over, the air was charged.

“Mr. Forge,” he said quietly, “do you know how big Secretariat's heart was?”

Henry nodded, but Mack continued. He spread his red hands for emphasis: “Twenty-two goddamn pounds.”

“What?” Henrietta said. She had never heard such a thing. It was hard to believe.

“And whose side does a monster heart like that come down through?”

Henry nodded again slowly, the light of recognition kindling in his eyes.

“That's right,” Mack said quietly, firmly. “Down the female line. I believe you're understanding me now, but let me be real straight. If there's one thing you need to know about me, it's I'm a straight shooter. I live a fast life and you don't want me for a best friend, but I
am
the man you want when you need plain speaking.” Snyder turned suddenly and positioned himself squarely in front of Henry again. Henry could smell the sweat of the man, but was pinned by the intensity of those eyes and the hands that rounded before him as if the man were holding a crystal ball between them. He said, “What these folks—what all these folks—are doing wrong is a result of one thing: failure of nerve. They get their piece of Secretariat, and they go fishing around in other lines trying to improve what was already perfect in the first place. They're milking tits on a bull. What do you think Danzig is bringing to the table, or Nearco? Nothing, that's what. You can't better what's already perfect, you can only water it down. Are you following where I'm leading?”

“I believe so—”

The man was not done: “It's a failure of nerve. Let me cut to the chase—if the old boy were alive today, we'd breed her right back to him. Seeing as that's not possible, we do the next best thing. We wait for the half brother with the best distance, maybe even a colt with a little Hellbent in the line if we can get it, and then we breed the best to the best. But we don't hope for the best like the rest of these yokels—we just wait three years, 'cause we know we got our ace in the hole.”

“Yes,” said Henry slowly. “Yes, I understand you.”

Mack fished a card out of his breast pocket. He handed it to Henry, his eyes slashing through Henrietta once before he said, “Call me or don't. It's your choice. But this is the most I'll ever bend your ear. I don't talk, I just get the job done. I cost more than that guy you're working with now, but I believe my record shows I can return dollars on your pennies.”

“I will consider what you're saying,” said Henry, though already the reserve of ambition was replenishing, almost as if the day had never happened. His hopes, like healthy horses, were scrambling to their feet.

“Well, I wouldn't expect less. But you ought to know there's a reason I'm approaching you, and it's not just because you got a very fine filly, which you do. Frankly, I think you've got balls.” He didn't apologize for his language, but tilted his head in Henrietta's direction. “I'm just telling the truth.”

They shook hands, and then the man was moving off as abruptly as he had come. Henrietta watched as he moved into the swarm of people, a contrary figure pushing against the bright, well-heeled crowd as it departed. Every single one of them instinctively stepped aside and made a path for him.

Henry was quiet, considering. “You know, maybe this is just what we need right now.”

For a moment, Henrietta was tactful. “They say he's hard on horses.”

“Trainers are butchers,” he said. “You just have to find the best one. But what do you think of him in particular?”

She watched the punchy figure disappearing now into the crowd. She thought of Seconds Flat, the way she had been as a foal, gentle as a harp. She remembered her tender mouth before the cold rolled steel of the snaffle bit, and the sight of broken horses on the track. She said, barely stifling the anger in her voice, “I think he's a fucking hillbilly.”

*   *   *

She drove east toward home, toward the fulsome springtime mountains, but even their ancient presence wouldn't be enough today, because—my God, now that she was alone, she could let loose the wail in her mind—everyone seemed out to break the world. It wasn't just horses that humanity was destroying, but everything they chanced to lay eyes upon—even the world's oldest mountains, which were just now appearing on the horizon. What comfort could be found in them today? Humans were reducing those hills to slag. They'd been hellbent on destruction almost from the time of their arrival, tunneling deep into the mountain walls or sloping in at the surface or downshafting like wellers in search of black water, because the old country had wanted chugging trains in all directions and delicate, filmy cages for tungsten filament. They called for the farmer and hunter and drew them to rickety, newborn towns with promises of canned food and a wife in white cotton; the promise of promise itself. So down trappers and diggers and spraggers, down drivers and mules that brayed in their underground stables, their cries echoing hoarsely in the bord-and-pillar chambers that the blasts and the timbermen built. Down vein after slit vein, down into night, down into blackness without recourse, down where they chipped and picked for decades before the next generation arrived with their rotating drums and toothed bits to chip the coal; then the shearing longwall machines, which collapsed the mine shaft as they moved. Those early miners emerged from the driftmouth, black as coal and poor as dirt. Desperation breeds dreams, and dreams trade for desperation in the company store, no tab. The only cash in town is a man's life.

Calm yourself, Henrietta, is what her father would say. You are expected at home.

But, after what she'd seen today, she didn't want to see any foals fresh in their fields, didn't want to watch them run their rounds, didn't want to press repeat. Right at this moment with the mountains before her, she couldn't quite figure how she and her father were any different from the kings of coal who sent miners underground, who underpaid and overworked them, who sentenced them to suffer from black damp, white damp, after damp, stink damp, fire damp, and necrotic lungs and basic want. Miners who died when the roofs failed over them, having long forgotten their native terror of the underground. The bosses got those men coming and going, because aboveground it's death by a thousand cuts as the slag finds streams, the mine tailings drain acid to aquifers, dams break and slurry spills in black apocalyptic floods, and the men drink it and the women cook with it and the children play in it. And the country just flies high over Kentucky as they travel coast to coast, tracing the same route Henrietta and her father took when they bought horses. Kentucky looks like nothing to the coastal eye, just anonymous mountains that subside and slump into a thousand depressions over countless coal-black bodies, the men and the animals alike, both infinitessimally small from the sky, the black bodies of men and animal bodies, the body called mine, or man's, mines, men—

You are expected at home, Henrietta.

She thought suddenly of sporting plants, how their tiny offshoot buds assume a character so different from their parent plant, emerging as a genetic anomaly from a shared root family. They occur rarely in nature, because—it seemed to her then—all the busy machines of evolution conspired for similarity. Sameness is safe. Sameness is survival itself.

Suddenly, Henrietta cranked the wheel to the right and with a savage kick to the gas singed blacker marks onto the black interstate. The whining engine overpowered thought as she sped down 75, passing cars and trucks and horse trailers and the vast farms with their overwrought houses, which seemed to wriggle and wave luridly in their ostentation. She had half a mind to drive down to the old town of Berea and hike in the foothills of the springtime Appalachians—that was a beauty without thumbprints, where the mountains were not blasted, there the spring grass would be punching up like knife blades through the soil—but ten minutes later, after darting erratically through the interstate traffic, she exited on a whim at Man O' War. To her shock, she discovered that the old Hamburg Place stud farm, where so many extraordinary horses—Nancy Hanks; Plaudit; Lady Sterling, dam of Sir Barton—were buried, was being leveled and graded. She hadn't been here in ages. How was this possible? The farm was an institution, a monument to the sport that had not built the town but had made it matter. A low string of buildings, what appeared to be an outdoor shopping mall, was being erected over that fertile bluegrass soil, now degrassed and drained. She idled the car at the edge of the construction site, watching the enormous mechanical birds swooping for soil and spitting it out again—detritus now—in red, cloddy heaps behind the rising structures. The birds flying lazily, searching for prey, swinging low on the steel wing and snatching. She thought soon all the land would sound like nothing, and no one would know it had once made sounds, that small civilizations had thrived in the grass. It would never register with life again. And what was coming? Concrete. Glassed fronts and sale signs and cash registers. And with it all, people in a torrential surge, carnivorous men and women looking to smear their skin with colors and creams, to bleach their hair, to shave their hides, to cinch themselves breathless in order to think themselves beautiful. The idea of it redoubled her horror at the day and its losses. But the indignation was easily banked by resignation. What was the point in mourning what couldn't be stopped? And it truly was unstoppable, the swollen stream of humanity's consumption, strong enough to take the old horses' bones—animals so perfect they had become things of myth—and displace them forever, God knows where. No, wait, right there, hidden in trees, at the edge of a Walmart parking lot.