The Sport of Kings (35 page)

“Amen!”

“Wake them up out of the dream paid for with black blood!”

“Amen!”

“Jesus is the lamb! He sacrificed himself so this broken world would wake up and see the truth! You ain't sleeping when you with Jesus, children, you're RISEN, you're standing in the light!”

“Amen!”

“So stand in the light with Jesus!”

“Only Jesus!”

“Jesus!”

*   *   *

Marie kept her secret for three years; she held it in her hands. The secret wasn't fear, though she was terrified when they decreased her hours at the dentist's office, so terrified she'd taken the news without dignity, dissolving into jittery tears in front of the white man in his white scrubs. And the secret wasn't shame, even though she'd had to go down to the Ohio Department of Human Services on Central Parkway and withstand the interrogation with the monotone caseworker, then the information session with all the other hangdog applicants, most too ashamed to look up at one another. She left with her first month of paper stamps and a mouth full of sawdust. Write the word “failure” on the contract of her life.

It wasn't any of that. It was pain.

She'd come home that day from the Human Services office intent on fixing the one thing she could: the apartment. She filled the tub with sudsy water and pushed a scraggly mop over the old wood floors, removed all their clean dishes and washed them anew, replaced lightbulbs, polished their old television, which got three channels, and swept the tenement steps. It was when she went to return the broom to its closet that her hands rebelled, maintaining an iron clutch on the handle. Staring closely as if she could peer beneath the skin to the bone and sinew, she detected a strange, altered sensation—her knuckles felt spongy and swollen, as if packed with cotton wool. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and raised her hands up to see their reflection. Strange that they didn't look different, though the internal swelling beat with the beat of her inflamed heart. What was this? The strangeness didn't even have a name. It was like an infant, some newborn version of pain, something too fresh to know.

And then the building rattled with his approach: her boy was home, tumbling through the front door and trumpeting that word, that one word containing all the world's needs but never her own: “Momma!”

*   *   *

In the first scene of Allmon's tenth year, a girl dies in the cement garden. Her name was Gladys Gibbons, just a tiny little thing on the third floor opposite with skin the color of chalky, churned-up river water, a soft cheek and a pert ski-slope nose like a white girl's, maybe the kind with money. That nose made her a beloved pariah, as despised as she was envied by girls who didn't yet know what envy was. She had the stamp of difference on her face, and that stamp was a pass. The girls in her building put their hands to the skinny vale between her shoulder blades and shoved. Knocked her against banisters, into doors, down onto cracked sidewalks and onto her knees. She thought: I'm ugly. And there was no grown person to tell her otherwise. So the wind of natural confidence died.

A decent man knows how to comfort a wounded girl, but there's a kind of man who only wants the wounded, who can only desire the flagging child. A loved girl is bright like a lamp, and he'll fear that incandescence. But this girl: the one who thinks she's ugly, whose shoulders sag, who looks down more than up and never meets the eyes, the one who wears hurt like old clothes—she's soft and needful, penetrable. You don't have to work very hard to get inside a child like that. And you don't have to wait very long for her to hug you back, for her to parrot your words, for you to believe you're welcome inside. You'll be the lucky first to tell her what the world means by love.

Gladys ascended the back stairs, one after the other until that brief road ended, and she didn't pause to look down but stepped off the roof, twisting at the last, so she fell backward down. How high is too high? Forty feet. Allmon had just stomped out of the dank vestibule of their stairwell when she fell. She landed in front of him like a sorrow dream in daylight, faceup on the concrete, the back of her head flattened where her skull had broken and collapsed. Her lips twitched. Allmon lurched back into the shadow, swayed there like someone hypnotized, then turned and walked with wooden limbs up the staircase, seeing hearing saying thinking nothing until he was standing in the warm familiar mother world, his face blanched.

From many worlds away, he heard his mother's voice. “What's wrong, Allmon?”

No word, he pointed there there there over there her body was there, twitching like an electric wire, her eyes still open, black pupils busted to red sclera, staring at him. Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God his mother's scream, it rose and fell, and then his own wail dashed over the edge of his teeth, and Marie's scream was another woman's and another's, so the building was filled with screaming, and the stairwells beat their panicky rhythms, phones shrilled, sirens came spiraling over the viaduct, and his sweating mother was scooping him up, even though he was awfully big now, and folding him in half against her body as she sank onto the linoleum floor, saying, “Don't look! Don't look!” He tried not to look, but the memory of the dead girl was falling up, she was slipping into the scream stream.

“Oh,” said Marie, and it was such a groan, like childbirth. “Oh God, how can you let a girl hurt so bad … God, why can't you protect the little children?” And then, as if the words came from another person: “Fuck this world!”

Allmon hid his head from the cursing.

Her voice belled with a righteous anger. “There's a war on women in this world! They're killing us left and right, and when they don't do it with their own hands, they do it with ours!”

“Momma—”

“At least they'll know now! Allmon, you got to go out with a bang if you want to send a message to this world! Make it so nobody can look away!” Then her words bent into a moan, and he could feel her huffing breath on his face. Allmon reached for her hand without looking, brought it up to his face, covered his eyes with her fingers pressed tight together. He didn't hear her gasp from the pain of her swollen joints wrenched up in his grasp.

“Don't look, please don't look,” she said uselessly and too late.

He nodded but didn't answer; inside he was busy passing his mind away to a sure set of hands that tucked it and ran. There was no goal, it just got farther and farther away until he couldn't remember to watch for it anymore, and then the watcher was asleep.

*   *   *

Marie's heart hurt, and it was no metaphor. There had been tinges and winces of pain, but when the muscle suddenly seized, it did so with such force that it sent her doubling onto her keyboard at work, blasting out nonsense letters, a message from the place she was going. She grasped instinctively at her chest as if she could wedge her fingers behind her ribs and cradle the offending organ in her hands. She rocked and moaned but was unable to utter a word. Searing pain steals language.

In a moment, the dentist's arms were a band around her shoulders and she recognized the crude, jarring sunlight of the front vestibule. Then—in front of God and everybody—she was half carried, half dragged on a halting journey across two city blocks to a Northside doctor. She was dimly aware that she looked like hell and knew her mother would be horrified; as a girl, she wasn't allowed out of the house with so much as a wrinkle in her homemade skirts.

Down the pain-crowded corridors of her mind, the dentist's voice echoed, “I think she's having a heart attack,” and some female in return: “We need to call an ambulance.” Only then did Marie struggle back into herself, pain overmanned by panic, to bellow, “No!” Then she was bent again, huffing, “An ambulance cost … a thousand dollars…”

Then she was seated and falling forward until she could fall no further, and she knew the doctor was with her, because she was leaning against his white coat. When he spoke, she groaned, and when he probed, she groaned again. With the whole of her being, she wished her mother were here to hold her.

When the coat spoke, its voice was warm, mellifluous, calm, unaffected. “Her oxygen is fine, and women don't usually have heart attacks with these symptoms. My guess is pericarditis, possibly gallbladder, but we'll need some X-rays. See how leaning forward eases it? That makes me think pericarditis. A dose-pack of prednisone should bring down the inflammation.”

“Well, that's good,” said the dentist.

“Interesting fact—the heart continues to grow throughout life. It's not much bigger than your fist.”

“No kidding,” said the dentist. “Your fist, huh.”

Her mind jolted round with a fresh pain. Two white men were watching her sweating like a pig with her body all wrenched up. No, her mother would not stand for that. Get up, Marie. Get up right this second and look smart! She struggled to mobilize her pain into action, but she simply could not.

“Marie, is this the first time this has happened?” said the doctor. “Do you have a history with this?”

She shook her head, dazed tears slipping soundlessly down her cheeks. Her shame was now total.

“Anything else I should know about?”

In the strict economy of pain, she made a small, terse gesture with one hand.

“What does that mean?”

“They hurt.”

“Your hands hurt?”

“All over. All the time. Every joint in my body hurts.”

“Ah, is that right,” he said. It was a long sigh, the sound of new understanding, and it made her feel suddenly, prematurely safe. Pain was a lock, and surely this doctor held the key. Suddenly, she didn't want the man to take his hands off her shoulders; she didn't care if she looked like hell. Her momma would just have to deal with that.

“This is sounding autoimmune. I think you'll need to see a rheumatologist, someone who specializes in inflammatory and rheumatic diseases.”

She whispered, “Any take … low income?”

“I honestly wouldn't know about that.”

Her momma, Claudia Jeane Rankin Marshall, daughter of Momma Rae, painter of nails, braider of braids, curler of bangs, the one who made her look smart, was trying to cover her mouth, but she struggled away and said, “All I have is seventy-five bucks. I need help.”

Oh, Marie. How could you?

“I can give you prednisone,” the doctor said with that warm, mellifluous, calm, unaffected voice. “But that's really all I can do. I'm just a doctor. I didn't make the system and I can't change it.”

*   *   *

They made you memorize it for gold stars, even before you could spell the words, even if you were the king of Capitoline Elementary, high on your limestone throne with your pencil scepter in hand and your crown perched on the out-of-bounds Afro your grandfather despises. Allegheny, Monongahela, Beaver, Little Muskingum, Muskingum.

He could just see it when he was twisted around at his desk like so, his chin almost on his shoulder. There it was: muddy, milky, marvelous brown. Little Kanawha, Hocking, Kanawha—

“Almond—sorry, Allmon. Allmon.”

Guyandotte, Big Sandy, Little Sandy. Did they still have names once their bodies entered the body of the big river?

Two gentle hands—on the king?—pulled him round, though he came slow and with much resistance as if there were rust on his hinges, and his head turned last to look blankly at Frau Meier. With a start, he realized all the other children had left the room; the day was done.

Scioto. Little Scioto. Little—

“Allmon, you're not in trouble. I just want to have a little chat.” Frau Meier's blonde pageboy curled tight under her chin, and the irises of her eyes were two different colors. “I've just been a little concerned about you lately. Where do you live? Are you and your mom up here in Fairview Heights?”

“Northside,” his mouth said, but his ear was watching the river as it wound through the green-grass hills of Kentucky—the river like a snake. Little Miami next.

“Ah, Northside.” She sighed, nodded, looked down; she didn't appear surprised. “I drive through Northside every day on my way to work. I always think of it as less a neighborhood than a collection of bars and used-furniture stores. It was a wild part of town back in the day. Do you know what they used to call it? Helltown. Because it's where men would go to … well, drink after work, I guess.”

Allmon looked at her blankly.

“What does your mother do down there?”

He shrugged. “Sleep on the couch.” Licking, Great Miami.

Frau Meier's laugh was a hiccup—a proper laugh aborted by the solemnity of the child's distracted face. She leaned toward him earnestly.

“Allmon, I'm very concerned about this story assignment you wrote.”

He tried very hard to corral his attention and draw it round to his teacher. She was holding the story he'd written about the little girl who fell—a true story! With a touch of embellishment, of course. Still, he sought the Salt River and wondered how someone could paddle a river of salt granules.

“‘Gladys lived up the top floor,'” she read. “‘A raper throwed her off … Who done that?… He be like … They be like…'” Her voice drifted. “Almond. Did you make this up? Did this actually happen?”

He studied her face and tried to discern his answer there—was he in trouble or not? He opted for the safest course: he gazed out the black-silled window, past the fossil-strewn embankment with its aluminum fencing, down the crumbling escarpments to where the Kentucky and the Green flowed anonymously past.

“You're not in trouble, Allmon,” Frau Meier said again, and then, as if to prove the point, she permitted a silence to grow between them while she studied him, deciding her next move. She watched a tiny pulse beat madly under the skin of the boy's torqued neck. What was he looking at so intently?