The Sport of Kings (36 page)

“Well,” she said softly. “You can only know someone as much as they let you know them. But this I can fix;
this
I can fix.”

There was a rustling of paper and she pried the pencil out of his sweaty fist. When he dared a glance, she was scribbling something on the back of his story—pencil marks over the red marks showing through from the other side.

“First, verb-noun agreement. This is very important if you're going to learn to communicate properly:

“I am

“You are

“He/She is

“It is

“They are

“We are

“Allmon, it's never I be or They be or We be. No one will understand you if you say that.”

He stared down at the paper mutely. He tested “Be” in his mouth, chewed on it, rolled it between his teeth. Suspicion centered between his brows. But the Green and the Wabash
be
there—not sometimes, not used to be. Always.
Always
.
Be.

“From now on, I want you to look up every single word before you write it down. And I'm going to make that possible. This is my gift to you, Allmon. I've used this since I was in college.”

Saline and Cumberland, don't forget those.

She hefted a red, hardbound dictionary onto his desk, marked and well thumbed, and even as she was slipping his story with its corrections between its thin pages, he was pulling it across the desk, drawing it into his chest. He was going to look up the spelling of the Tennessee River.

Frau Meier laid a staying hand, perfectly cool and white, over his. He stared at it. “The truth is I found your story very disturbing. There were things I'm not likely to forget. But I really liked how you wrote about all the funeral roses. You know, under all this mess”—she made a wave of her hand to encompass his spelling, his be's, the whole of his talk—“there might be a poet in there.”

Then she was rising, towering over him, releasing the king of Capitoline Elementary, and he was standing up perfectly straight, even with the weight of the dictionary tugging him down. Heavy like a river.

I
am
not. I
be.

Through the window, he caught one last glimpse of the Cache, which was indistinguishable from the Ohio, which imprisoned it.

*   *   *

Childhood is the country of question marks, and the streets offer solid answers.

An ungoverned wind, a bulldog wind, swung heat through the streets of Northside, cranking the dial for an early summer. Allmon got off the bus a few blocks from home, walked those streets at a half pace, wind brushing his cheek, tangling in his hair. He held his new prized dictionary to his chest. He delighted in the familiar—the trash was confetti, graffiti the truth, church steeples accusatory fingers, the winter-worn sidewalks cracks in the heart. The young hand draws fresh maps on broken landscapes. But the grown man tells tales too. When he says we didn't know we were poor, it's not the truth; it's code for my mother raised me right, she loved me and love is a shield. When he looks back on the Northside of his youth, his nostalgia is anger, and his yearning is hate. That's the building where the cops shot Raejohn, that's where I spent every summer night eating ice cream on the stoop. The old men were pickled on malt liquor, my mother was a warrior, up on Apjones I learned to drive in a stolen car, that's when you could walk through the hood and hear the Reds game the whole way—

“Young.”

Allmon turned.

A man stood on the stoop of a row house on Chase, a beeper in one hand and a Pepsi in the other. He stood under the coping out of the sun, so at first Allmon saw only the glint of his gold ropes, but as his eyes adjusted, he noted the wide, full lineaments of a bold face, the thick nose and light green eyes—calm, cold, appraising—and turned on him.

Unhurried, on the low, the man said, “What you got there?”

Allmon tried to peer behind him into the house, into the clubhouse darkness where he detected the dampened, private sound of grown men's voices. His crew. But he couldn't see anything. He just said, “A dictionary,” and hitched the book higher onto his chest.

The man's mouth half smiled. “Ah,” he said, “we got a smart niggah up in here. You got a name, Smartie?”

“Allmon.”

“What you eleven, twelve?”

“Nine.”

“Oh, damn,” the man said, and laughed a baritone laugh under his breath. “I thought you was older than that. You look older.” The man licked his upper lip, then bit it and gazed up the street, squinting as if he were turning something over in his mind. Then he said slowly, “You know who I am?”

Allmon shook his head, and the man just grinned. “I'm Aesop. And I seen you running all over this neighborhood, all over this motherfucking place. That's some nice speed you got—you gonna play ball?”

Under that careful, watchful gaze, the child shrugged but blushed hard.

“You black, you tall, you play ball, right?”

Shrugging again: “Yeah.”

“So you Marie's little man?”

Allmon's eyes widened in surprise. “Yeah.”

Now the man leaned toward him slightly, his head cocked. “You want to make some rolls?”

“Huh?”

The man's mouth laughed like it was funny, but those green eyes were serious, steady, and sharp. “M-o-n-e-y. Spell it in your dictionary. You want to make some c-a-s-h?”

“Yeah,” said Allmon, startled, an electric grin jolting across his face.

“Then I got a proposition for you, Smartie. But first I got to see how you run for me.”

“Run? Like now?” said Allmon, the meaning whipping right past him.

“Yeah, all right. Like now,” the man said, laughing in his throat, his tone half-mocking as he glanced behind him into the shadowy building.

When he turned around, Allmon was gone. He had taken him at his word and sprang away from the stoop with impulsive delight, clutching the red book as a marathoner's bib and tearing down the street, leaving only the impress of his speed in his place. He was going to run over to Mad Anthony, down to Knowlton, then back up Fergus to Chase, where the man would be waiting, where the man would say, “Young, you mad quick,” and then hand him a ten-dollar bill or something. He'd never realized how fast he was before this moment. Even with the dictionary at his chest, he was fleet, particular, his knees pumping in perfectly timed intervals. He was rounding the corner onto Knowlton, barely out of breath, when his foot slid on something and he nearly went down in front of a shotgun house, so he had to catch himself with one hand on the gate, crying, “Whoa!” but it was really more of a screech, a girlish sound, so he looked around, abashed. When he took a step, his shoes clicked. He limped around the corner of the black wrought-iron gate, so he could stand on a patch of grass, out of the brilliant afternoon light. With the dictionary perched on his hip like a baby, he twisted his leg so he could rest his left foot on his right knee and inspect the bottom of his shoe.

“Oh, dag,” he said. Lodged into the sole of his high-top, which had come to him in almost perfectly new condition on a very lucky day from Goodwill, was a two-inch-wide curved shard of green glass. It looked like a piece from a Mountain Dew bottle. With extreme care, so he wouldn't slice his fingers, he pried the convex glass out of his sole. Then, after carefully inspecting the curious gradation of green along its sinuate edge, he flicked the shard out into the street, and just as he was about to turn back, just as he was easing his leg from its awkward position so that he could properly balance his weight on both feet, and he was wondering whether the man would still give him money, a woman appeared on her tiny porch, pointing at him, her face cinched up with hate.

“Nigger, get off my lawn!”

He sprang back in shock before his face even came round. At first, all he saw was her mouth, a rictus of scorn. She didn't know him, but then she seemed to realize his age, and some contrition, or the ghost of contrition, arose there. He saw it in her eyes. But her finger still trembled with accusation in the air.

Before thought, before decision, his body took off at a frightful pace down Knowlton.
Nigger.
He ran with his mouth open and the dictionary clutched to his
nigger
chest. Across Langland without looking to either side, then Hamilton, where he had to dodge one car that screeched, the driver jerking forward with her palm to her chest. He came sprinting up to the apartment, on the back side of the block up to the building where Gladys threw herself off the top, round the side of the building and someone who knew him called out his name hey
nigger
why you running, God there was trash everywhere why didn't anyone use trash cans white folks did then three guys standing out front the building in conversation he was normally afraid of them but today he cried “Move!” and they laughed uproariously as he runs up the stairwell in through the front door slams it wakes his mother they think she's
a nigger too
sleeping on the couch in the middle of the afternoon, Allmon! she says, Can't you respect I'm sleeping? He has to pee so bad it stings but he can't do it can't go into the bathroom where you can look into the mirror at yourself he just stumbles into the bedroom where there's no light on and there's no windows so when he shuts the door and feels his way to the bed he lies down his blood is up flying he's still running his legs spasming he lays his migraine head on his pillow for rest he's a crier not anymore he is not crying
—
he reaches out snaps on the bedside light shocks the room and opens his new dictionary smudged and leafed by the white lady's hands flips through the pages for what he is looking for and reads niggler niggle nigging niggery niggerwool niggerweed niggertoe nigger-shooter nigger pine nigger in the woodpile nigger heaven niggerhead niggergoose niggerfish nigger daisy nigger chaser nigger bug nigger baby and finally there it is
nigger
: to divide by burning.

*   *   *

In the morning, when his mother said, “Allmon, why are you looking like a zombie?” he had a one-word answer at the ready, but it pooled like hemlock on his tongue. He couldn't open his mouth or it would spill out.

He made a halfhearted gesture toward school, taking up his backpack and leaving the apartment, but he just circled the block with its cement heart, and when he was sure that Marie had dragged herself to work, he climbed the stairs again, unlocked the apartment door, and lay on the couch for four hours straight. He stared at the television the entire time, watching horses run in meaningless rounds. He didn't get up to eat or even pee.

Then at one, he rose and left the apartment, waiting no more than a minute on the corner before the number 17 bus came drafting up. He was undersized, dishevelled, and groggy, so the driver looked at him askance, but took his change and with some kindly misgiving said, “You all right?” Allmon just nodded, his eyes flat.

In fifteen minutes he was downtown, standing on his grandfather's stoop, pressing the bell repeatedly and with such force, the color drained from his fingertip.

It was the Reverend himself who answered the door. He looked down at the boy in honest surprise, his nostrils flaring once, and said, “It's a weekday. How come you ain't in school, boy?”

Allmon had no words of excuse. He just stared ahead, not daring to look up into the Reverend's face, only at the buttons on his shirt. His lips formed an inscrutable line.

“Well, get in here,” said the Reverend, and reached forward and cuffed the boy lightly on the back of the head, where the skull sloped to the neck. He came into that old house, which smelled like the decay of another century and like the lives of men when there were no women around. It was the smell of work, loneliness, boredom, and old books. And of cheap food pitifully prepared.

Then he was in the parlor, then he was at the vinyl couch, sinking, offering up his weight to the first thing that would hold him. He curled half on his side with his hands pressed flat against his chest, his slim legs tucked up. Boy as turtle.

“What on earth…”

Allmon could not reply, his tongue was thick and risen against his soft palate as if something were choking there. On his face, an old riddle was working itself out. The Reverend loomed over him, his thorny presence a comfort: the penetrating stare, drawn brow, the perpetual climate of mild irritation on the old man's face.

“Boy.” In the Reverend's voice, the first leavening note of concern. He took stock for a moment. Despite the appearance of surprise, the Reverend wasn't surprised, not in the deepest parts of him. He was a man who had come to expect the worst, who had learned to almost enjoy the arrival of disasters, because those things tested ultimate faith, and he had that in abundance. He distrusted ease, which was the bedfellow of sin. Of course, there had always been the suspicion that a day would come when the boy would show up half-broken about something. Because the boy was too tenderheaded by far, just like his mother.

“Don't cry,” the Reverend said, but he sat down heavily beside the boy and, with a gruff hand, patted him twice on the behind. It was his brand of gentle. “Sit up,” he said.

Allmon didn't sit, but he rolled further onto his side with his knees still pinched up. His face, always preternaturally mature, appeared ashen and old with the look of no blood. That did not surprise the man either.

“Now,” said the Reverend. “Now … I know what's pressing your spirit down. You're sad your momma's sick.”

Allmon's heart stopped in his chest.

“I don't know, child,” the Reverend said heavily, and scratched at the white stubble sprouted along his jawbone. “They call it lupus or rheumatoid or what have you, call it what you want. But I say, autoimmune? You're talking to a literate man! I know what the word means!—means your body's tearing its own self down. Now, if your body's tearing itself down, only reason is because you ain't tended the body, which is the temple of the Lord, the vessel. If you give the body care, the body will flourish, and that's the truth. Only person can tend that body is you.” He jabbed the air with a pointer finger like a man poking angrily at dying coals.