The Sport of Kings (43 page)

Momma. He was immediately assailed by the scent of rank mildew and stale cooking and something else, something lower and more personal, something animal, the odor of an unwashed person, her old, familiar smell enlarged and made pungent. Allmon stopped short in the doorway, hesitant as a first-time visitor, his pupils adjusting and one hand reaching forward in lieu of sight. First the marmoreal gleam of the linoleum, silver and gray, then the edge of old shag, then the sofa and Marie lying there with her back turned, her arms drawn up between her chest and the sofa back. His mind was jolted by time's tricks. Had she not moved an inch in two years?

Momma. He had said the word out loud, and she started from her sleep or her daze. She came round abruptly on the sofa, rolling her weight, which spread ungainly over the entire width of the cushion. Her old shape was all wrong in the dark.

“Allmon?”

He was prepared for a new world. He was prepared to stand in that doorway like a valiant soldier returned or like a husband, all solemn and sure. But he rushed into the room like a child, flinging down his bag and actually shoving the coffee table out of the way, and as Marie was struggling her way to a sitting position, he was on his knees before her, pressing his face into the side of her arm.

“I didn't know you were coming today. I thought it was tomorrow.”

“I'm home.”

“Babydoll.”

He looked up into her face as she was bending forward, like a groggy animal, struggling to orient in the woken world.

“Momma?”

He switched on the end-table lamp and looked at her, and it took all of his effort not to shrink. Something, some great force of life or death had come and distorted her. It was pressing her essence out of her, turning her into a balloon about to burst—her pendulous breasts and enormous, distended belly, even her cheeks, which were blooming with an unnatural, febrile red. Her eyes were cracked slats, and the few eyelashes that remained were mere black spikes. Her hairline had inched back from her temples, the lineaments of manhood forced upon her once feminine face. And worse, far worse, were the gross lines of pain etched on the face that had murmured once upon an endless time in the forever ago, Hush a bye don't you cry go to sleepy little baby when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses blacks and bays dapples and grays coach and six white horses, hush.

He sat back on his heels, surprised by the anger in his voice. “Momma, when's the last time you went to the doctor?”

“That's the first thing you say to me?” She turned slightly away, but her scold was shame, as if she couldn't look at the impossibly robust, vital, searching face of her boy not even in his prime. His very life burned her.

“Momma, what's going on? What's happening to you?”

“It's fine. Better now you're here.” Her voice was lower than he remembered, husky with disuse. She closed her eyes, and her lips pressed together.

“You still going to work?”

She just shrugged.

For a long moment he just stared at her, corralling love, rage, fear, and disgust into language. Then he said, “I'm here to take care of you. I'm gonna call that doctor we saw, gonna get you fixed up. Seriously. I promise.”

She nodded, looking straight ahead.

“We're gonna get back on our feet. I'm gonna get some cash. Don't worry about nothing.”

She didn't look at him, she didn't soothe him. She just rolled back to her position with her back turned, and her only reply was a sigh that had no more force than a hush song.

*   *   *

At 7:00, he was standing on the old, rain-slickened stoop. At 7:01, he was being ushered upstairs by someone he didn't recognize, some midget in a fucking Cleveland ball cap. At 7:04 Aesop was clapping his hand over his own mouth and crying out with feigned glee like he actually missed him, like he didn't have a hundred kids ready to join his army—“Oh shit! Smartie!”—shaking his head in amazement like here was the miracle of Lazarus, the last and greatest of all the miracles before the crucifixion, and he was actually witness to the kid crawling out of the tomb, still wrapped in his grave clothes, and gazing confusedly about at this world he thought he had left behind forever.

At 7:24 Allmon was back at work, this time as a dealer, this time with a beeper and a Glock 17.

*   *   *

The days were brief as the bursts from a flare, and the nights were long as everloving fuck. He was back at the Academy of Physical Education and couldn't miss a day or show up late without his PO riding his ass, so he played that game. But then he punched the crack clock at five and worked the streets, standing on corners, hitting a couple of reliable houses until eleven or sometimes on into the deepest hours of the night, what his father had once called—

Daddy, you like driving the truck at night?

Eh, nigger's hours.

All he needed was a solid week of work under the wheeling February sky cluttered with clusters of eyebright stars that made no sense, even less than their names—Betelgeuse, Rigel, the Pleiades and Hyades, the Orion Nebula, upstart Castor and Pollux—to raise some cash for a doctor. Then they'd get it sorted out. This was his herculean labor. This. He was supposed to be straight, he wanted to be straight, but if he looked too close the catch-22 started looking like a noose, like God himself had an APB out on him. So he refused to think. Instead, he worked the familiar streets of Northside, dealing and daring under the schizophrenic Marias, the sea of tranquillity, the sea of chaos, the sea of serenity, the ocean of storms, the ocean of indecision. Door to door on an earth not fixed, waiting for the sun not fixed, in the Milky Way, also not fixed. The goddamned galaxy itself hurtled through black useless space at three hundred kilometers per second toward no real destination, no real purpose. Every object was loose. In this mayhem, he gave himself one week.

*   *   *

Like that was ever going to work. He was back in it in every way—running, hanging with the crew, pocketing change, wearing a bomber Aesop gave him. He was even standing here in the kitchen again, cooking for Marie, just as he had before they threw him in 20/20 and packed him off to camp. Sly, sassy time messing with his mind, is it 1997 or 1995 or 1985 with Mike Shaughnessy about to walk in the door? No, it's now. It's Tuesday, you've been home five days, you're cooking brats and sauerkraut, it's just crazy how you slip into your old gambling seat at the casino, start stacking chips like you never even went anywhere. This is how addicts must feel raising a bottle to their lips after a long dry spell. He wasn't going to lie, being on the loop again felt damn good. Both awful and good. That was probably the definition of crazy.

“Momma!” he said in his bang-the-pot voice, too loud for the space. “Time to eat! Get up!” He turned and looked at her lying there, facing the couch back. Barely ever moving. Impatience was gasoline in his veins. You know what else was crazy? How he couldn't harness his mind, how it vacillated from compassion to … Fuck! He didn't know why she couldn't be tougher! How she'd ever let Mike Shaughnessy get away, why she didn't know how to fight—weren't women supposed to be so strong?—why wasn't she hard? Stand up and play the bitch! Their life could have been so different if she'd had a fucking backbone like the Reverend, then Allmon wouldn't have to run all over like a pretend thug, throw his life away, be the fucking man of the house—

He wiped a hand over his face, changed roles. He cleared his throat as he carried over a plate. “Momma.”

Leaning over her, he realized with some embarrassment that her gown had fallen away from the upper slopes of her breasts, the skin there inlaid with faded stretch marks. In the room nearly overridden by shadows, he saw that the irregular lesion she had on her right hand—scarlet red and scaled with a scurfy, livid white—was repeated across the skin of her upper chest.

“Momma,” he blurted out, and the sound of anger in his own voice made him want to smack himself. But his hand was still gentle as a child's when it touched her shoulder.

“Huh?”

“What the fuck is this? You got these all over?”

Marie came round slowly, turning clumsily, like she didn't know where she was, or what he was saying. She could barely open her eyes. “Why are you cussing at me?”

“How long you had these sores, Momma?”

He reached down and exposed the skin around her clavicle. From her throat, down her sternum into the ribbed vale between her breasts, her flesh was a mottled landscape of enflamed, crusted, flaking sores. Her body looked beaten, or rotten.

“Holy shit, Momma,” he said, rearing back. “The fuck is this? I'm calling a ambulance right now!”

That seemed to awaken her properly, and her hand shot out to grip his wrist.

“No!”

“Right now!”

She wrenched up his wrist with all the force she possessed. All her life blazed in her eyes, everything left. “Don't, Allmon. Don't. I'm telling you no. The ambulance costs a thousand dollars—maybe more. I'm fine.”

“Then I'll get a taxi!”

“No.”

“We got to do it, Momma. Listen—”

“No, you listen to me,” she said sharply. “I'm not going anywhere. I'm not on the hospital's charity anymore. I missed their deadline. I was sick, I was running some fevers for a week or two and couldn't get to the paperwork.”

“Somebody'll take you.”

“Who? We'll end up with crazy bills! You can't ever escape those bills!”

“Momma—”

“No!” she said, and then: “Listen, it comes and goes. Sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's not so bad. It'll pass like it always does. It hurts, but I'm used to it. I'll take a shower and it'll help.” And she tried to struggle up and appear more alert, clamping the fabric of her gown between her breasts. “I'm just tired and need to rest.”

“This is crazy,” he said.

“Allmon”—and she looked up at the ceiling as if seeking for the words there—“go … do what you do. I'm not even going to judge you. You're young, you're free, that's the greatest gift. Go be in the world. I'm not young anymore. I don't even want all that anymore. I just need rest. I just … Don't you owe me that?”

“Owe you what?” He couldn't make sense of her.

Her eyes burned into him. “You owe me your good life. I mean, give your whole life to good things. Help others.”

“Shit … I…,” he stammered, looking stricken. “I don't even know what good is most of the time, Momma.”

She smiled. “Whatever helps people. The ones you love. That's the good. That's why I'm saying go on.”

“I don't know.”

Now she was rolling over on the couch again, face to the back. “I can't rest with you looking over my shoulder and worrying me to death. Go on, Allmon. I just need to rest my eyes a while.”

He backed away from the couch, knowing he was being ordered out. He reached the door and opened it half-unwilling, terrified yet somehow, strangely, sadly, in the deepest part of him, eager to go. As he stood there hesitating, Marie said, “But don't walk out of this house without saying I love you.”

He looked back somberly over his shoulder and said, “I love you, Momma.”

*   *   *

The pain—once as small as a mustard seed—had grown so large, it had become her. She'd been young once and full of light, pure! She had been so full of love as a girl. She had adored her mother, her father, and Mike Shaughnessy. With compunction, pity, longing, desperate fear, and a rivertide of longing, she remembered the girl she had been, the body she had once lived within, so hopeful, so light and slim; long before her period and the swelling of her breasts, she had been free. Then the ironclad change of womanhood had been forced upon her, and it had taken so much from her. It had made her breasts hurt, her guts wrench, it had made her bleed. Then the boys had pinched her swelling breasts, the black boys on her block grabbing her with their eyes before they grabbed her with their hands, even though she wasn't really pretty, maybe they touched her more because she wasn't pretty, like a vase of no value a man can handle carelessly (you look better in the dark); men are only awed into good manners by women who are like art, and she wasn't art. How she had longed for a clean-speaking, sensitive boy who didn't act or talk black, who didn't grow up in the neighborhood, but when she found that white boy, he used her only to feel good, and a baby—a whole new life—was what he called an “accident.” He used to say he loved her body. He never said that about her face, and while she was pressing all her hope against him, he'd already been looking for the next girl.

Her momma was the only human being who ever truly loved her. Her father cared more about the suffering of strangers than he ever cared about her. But she'd taken her mother's love for granted all the days of her life. Claudia Jeane Rankin Marshall had raised her and watched her grow into her late girlhood with pride—but only now did she recognize the wholeness of that love. She'd said, Momma, I'm scared to grow up. Because the boys were hanging around like vultures, and her momma had pet her head and said, I understand, baby, I understand. And she had understood! But the cancer moved into her body when she was forty-two years old, and then she was gone in a moment, so Marie was all alone, and no one knew how pretty she was on the inside or how she longed, prayed, oh, how she had prayed to God, please bring me a man—in her mind he was white and clean-speaking and good and didn't look or sound like he was from the neighborhood—who will love me. Please.

Her temperature was rising, is rising, the wick burning brighter as it burns low, fighting for life in an invisible draft. God, I brought a boy into this world for the love of Michael Shaughnessy and gave him his name. But he left anyhow. Daddy always told me wind is the breath of God, and woman is a flame bent in the wind towards man: Why did you curse me with this female body? I'm begging that you free me of it, make me anything but a woman in heaven. Make me an avenging angel, so I can look down on the world with inhuman strength and no feelings at all. Make me an animal, so I won't know anything. Make me a man, so I won't give a damn about anyone.