The Sport of Kings (49 page)

While Seconds Flat remained prone, the filly blinked and pawed forward, struggling to acclimate to the pungent, chilly world of the barn. She gathered her spindly legs, situating them beneath her girth, and sloped up to a stand, her surprised hind legs following unsteadily on her fore. After an awkward, lurching step, she discovered her balance and stood before them.

All around, sharp indrawn breaths.

Even with moony newborn eyes and soaked with amniotic fluid, the stark, crystalline beauty of the animal was clear. She had a fine head with a sharply dished nose and an intelligent, curious face. A coat of miscegenated depth, neither black nor brown with a white marking between her eyes—not a star, almost an aborted stripe, a slash of white like a fissure. Her new body was large and muscular for a foal, the legs straight and strong and full of run. On each pastern a skinny low sock was visible, a mere striping of white above the coronet, so her hooves appeared rimed with ice. She observed them with preternaturally alert eyes.

“My God,” said Henry, startled. “She's gorgeous.”

He reached over then and touched the small of his daughter's back—that too-intimate touch again. Lou saw it from the corner of her eye, but only stared down hard at the foal, a sense of unease rising like gall, but she reminded herself that the intimacy of other families was not something she understood, their lives so separate they might as well be distinct species. Her own family was something of a black Irish carnival.
I do not understand what I do not understand.
It was a thing she often said when her husband was itching for a fight. It irritated him to no end, but it was the truest thing she could say. Lou, how can you reconcile eating meat with all your veterinary work? I love animals and I love myself, but I didn't invent the circle of life.
I do not understand what I do not understand.
Lou, how can you trust your husband since he's an ex-addict—aren't you always worried about a relapse? I love my husband and that's that.
I do not understand what I do not understand.
Lou, how can you spend so much time around Dad, that pain-in-the-ass son of a bitch never shuts up! I love Dad. If I didn't talk to assholes, there'd be no one left to talk to.
I do not understand what I do not understand.

From a conserve of strength always remarkable in an animal after parturition, Seconds Flat was rising, the placenta ejecting in a stringing mass down onto the straw, that draped gray membrane inlaid with calcareous white strands. Intact and breathing well with the process of ejection complete, her life would return to normal soon. Lou planned to give the new mother a week of involution and repair before her first postnatal uterine exam. But for now her work here was done and, and with a disquiet urging her on, Lou was eager to get off Forge land.

She shrugged into her coat and slipped out the door with only the quietest goodbye, then paused in the emergent morning when she saw a black man walking a mare across the brick chip lane about fifty feet away. Surprise arrested her movement. In her entire life—forty-three years—she'd never seen a black person on these premises—never a farrier, never a visiting groom, certainly not a Forge employee. She was staring openly when Henrietta strode purposefully from the barn, headed in the direction of that man. She nearly ran into Lou.

The warmth of the birthing chamber behind them, Lou could feel the chill radiating off the girl—like an impersonal dislike for everyone and everything—no less real for being unspoken. But Henrietta surprised her by saying, “I want to thank you on behalf of my father. He's disappointed it's not a colt, but I think even he realizes this is an extraordinary filly. She's an evolutionary gem.”

Lou cleared her throat and surprised her back. “Actually, horses are the product of an evolutionary failure.”

“My father's— Wait, what?”

Looking at the surprise on the young woman's face, Lou said gently, “Horses may be the most beautiful animals on earth, but— Hold on.” Her cell phone was buzzing in her pocket with a text that read
Come back to bed. Those people are craaaaaazy …
and with haste, she said, “I'm going to head out, Henrietta,” then she checked the lock on her Bowie slide-in and yanked open the door of her Toyota.

Breathe.

For a moment, she thought the better of leaving so abruptly—after all, this was a girl whose mother had all but abandoned her as a child—and turned back, but Henrietta was already striding away under the screaking of morning birds, moving in the direction of the distant stallion barn, or perhaps the man Lou had seen, momentarily passing the amber doorway where Henry was staring, enraptured, at the perfect foal being gentled by its exhausted dam, all while the sun rose with a pitiless red and the shuttle rattled across the ancient loom and, somewhere, Maryleen sharpened her pencil to a knife's point and began to write.

*   *   *

It's 1945 and the farm is an old man, and the old man is a babe in arms. It's 1950 and the servants are stealing the silver, his mother riding easy on a trotter; 1973 and the Old Man is a downed timber in a casket; 1976 and She is the seed flowering once again; 1980 and the Old Man is a husk, nothing but a rotted memory, and you're running the show. Now it's 2003, and what has really changed? Black is priapic drive, confidence man, skin-shifting fright, hellion, killy on a hook and his daughter is biting.

Henry stared at the filly before him, all pert and innocent on stalk legs borrowed from a dam and sire of the same line, a tight constellation of traits to be passed along in due order—perhaps only four short years. Henry's whole life, every breath of his lungs, every firing of every synapse, was a wordless plea for an enormous heart. This shock of a filly was the horse he'd waited for for sixty-one years. She was inbred to perfection, and he knew it with his whole body. And yet where was his daughter, his right hand? He stalked to the sliding barn door and stood at the edge of a feeble white morning.

Rage simply erupted from him. “Henrietta!”

The early light was silent.

He could hear his life echoing emptily around the farm.

Maybe little girls think their fathers don't notice when their hearts raise a cold shoulder. Or maybe—trickle of cognition—maybe it was meant to be noticed. His own reckless young self cast a shadow across the clear vision of a backward glance. That was the game of youth, wasn't it—murdering one's father? At first, the horses, like any weapon, are mere handmaidens to the battle; only later, in the maturity of open war, is the weapon transformed into an art itself. From the lowest calling to the highest. But Henrietta's was a ridiculous game, not even a battle. And he could beat her at it; after all, he had played it before and knew all the tricks. Some men win women with animal brawn, but the fittest is the smartest, the wiliest. Odysseus with his craft and his cock in his hand. A father was born for himself, and his son was himself in perpetuity,
et alii
. The First Cause was existence itself, and the body made morality a servant of survival. He knew how to play on her weakness for his name's sake, and he knew her weakness because he had made it himself.

“Henrietta!”

*   *   *

It was the smell of him that had slain her.

The first day he'd shown up for work, she'd noticed it as she led him to the stallion barn where he would groom. A cutting scent of his body so strong that at first she found it almost distasteful, like sun-ripened sweat on the body too long, until it wended past her nostrils into her lungs and turned to a strange distraction. Then it moved along the corridors of her mind to rooms deeper than thinking: indisputable. It made promises that her whole body responded to with assent.

She was seeking him out in the stallion barn, where he would be mucking stalls in the cool of the morning. She went ostensibly to tell him about the foal, but in all honesty, she couldn't help it, she felt she had no choice, her body was ferrying her there, the selfish hum of the blood rising in pitch. She wanted to open his exotic mouth and press herself into it, to discover what he was naked. But braided into a moment's fantasy of entanglement, painfully expressed in her breasts and between her legs, resided a subtle, old confusion.

“Henrietta!”

Goddammit. The oaken barn shrank to the size of a bird's cage. Henry Forge, father and keeper. She paused at the door and sighed. What did she know? That the horse has true and false and floating ribs. That it has 205 bones in its body, the chestnuts on the backs of the limbs being remnants of the ancient horse alive in the modern; that, like a human, the horse sweats when it's nervous. That I am as trapped as any Thoroughbred.

She walked back across the gentle sloping lane, alongside the apple orchard, past the rear outbuildings, the old whipping post hidden, a hand clapped over its mouth in the thicket, into the broodmare barn.

The tableau remained as she'd left it—potentate presiding over his horse. The filly was dewy and uncertain as she suckled at the heavy teat of Seconds Flat. An evolutionary failure? Is that what Lou had said? But, God, look at the thing! This foal was a golden mean: a straight nose with bold nostrils, curious eyes, a deep chest with a short back and elegant through the fores and gaskins. Henrietta's irritation evaporated in an instant.

She said, “God, that's a beautiful foal. Totally black.”

Watching her, Henry said, “Seal brown.”

“No, it's black.”

“Daughter, I wonder if you're color-blind.”

Winter was in residence: “Maybe I am.”

“Come here,” Henry said abruptly.

She didn't move.

“Come here.” And without waiting for her response, he drew her to his side and kissed her hard on the cheekbone, and she thought, Coals are black, but when lit they shine bright as roses. You taught me that.

*   *   *

Allmon lived for the daylight. For four months, he'd shivered nights alone in a back room of the old Osbourne house on the far side of the bowl, barely able to close his eyes, the night still something to be survived. Every night was the first time you walked along the tier of your unit, peering terrified into your cell with its skinny steel bed and steel toilet attached to a steel sink. There's a little window that doesn't open out and next door a big swinging dick on the top bunk jacking off under fluorescent light. You still want to sleep on the concrete under your bunk, anus to the wall, a shank fashioned from a Coke can in your right hand—stopstopstopstopstopstop

Don't forget to forget what they made you do.

His mind clamored for space, but his body hated it. His body wanted three walls and a door that couldn't be locked. The day they transferred him out of Bracken into the open world of minimum security, where he could see the trees and the grass, it made his mouth go dry. His first insane instinct was to get back into the pen with the loudspeakers and screaming, the beatings, the hole, the labyrinth of gangs, all the hustlers, even the Aryans, the murderers, the thoroughgoing motherfuckers of every conceivable stripe. For one mad moment, he'd seriously thought about how he could deliberately fuck up and get sent back in. It didn't make any sense, but it had been many years since anything made sense. They forced your hand, turned you into a man your own mother wouldn't recognize. The walking dead.

So he quit sleeping alone in the back room at the Osbourne house, took his sleeping bag up to the stallion barn, and bedded down in the tack room under a peg rack of saddle blankets, surrounded by the stamping snorting urinating sound of animals. It reminded him of minimum, where fifteen men slept in one room. He stayed there, because he needed his rest. More: he needed his wits if he was going to plunge his hands into the white world, if he was going to learn to draw up their rivers of wealth and drink it, like he'd seen a crazy nigger in the pen do—slit the throat of a white dude and opened wide his mouth to catch the blood spurting from his artery. He could think of that now without shuddering, because

There were stars overhead, but he wasn't looking up.

There were graves under his feet, but he wasn't looking down.

The mask looks straight ahead. Don't forget to forget.

He spent those first months in prison rearranging the components of his face so it looked like a man's and could not cry any longer, then the body froze to match his face, hardened by the cold that comes when grief itself dies. His body survived that first year inside, but that brought no relief, because the mind was still alive and spawning thoughts like cockroaches. Real survival is learning to misremember disremember unremember everything as you follow orders, scramble, bargain, fight. Especially fight. Survive by any means necessary and just deal with the shame, because they left you no other choice. So what if your own heart bled out over time? Eventually, when they sent him across state to minimum, emotion was nothing but a long-dead sensation of a long-dead body. Then they told him that he could rub horses, pull himself up by his bootstraps, distinguish himself, play the sport of kings. He wasn't naïve or romantic, he saw through it pretty quickly: horse is just a different kind of drug, horse is heroin. See, the rich hustle too, but they think their gambling is just a game without real consequence. He, however, would go in with his eyes open. So he read everything he could get his hands on, he studied hard, and then they selected him, because he alone knew the difference between hot and cold horses, snaffle and spoon bits, the Byerley Turk and Godolphin Arabian. He knew the meaning of prey animal.

The first day of his life was February 14: They led them all out to the barns in pairs like animals to the ark, the old cooled-down hats and Allmon, the youngest, now twenty-two. A white man was standing there, an ex-trainer, with a massive chestnut on a lead, a reschooled Thoroughbred. The man's words were the first words of Allmon's life: