The Sport of Kings (64 page)

Henry peered at her from deep within the geography of his shattered mind. He shook his head faintly.

“Well, there's no rush, I suppose,” Ginnie said. “The right name will come when it comes. Until then, I simply can't allow you to eat alone. In fact, why don't we just go over to the house. Leave the casserole. There's plenty more where that came from.”

Henry wanted to retreat—his whole body was an open wound without hope of a scab—but he lacked the strength or volition to withdraw; he allowed Ginnie to guide him through his own front hall, down the sloping lawn of his childhood, across the black ribbon road to the Miller property. He hadn't set foot on their land since he was ten. God, had he once been a little boy with a father and a mother still alive? The years had flung themselves past him with stunning certitude and no mercy at all.

“Go right on in,” said Ginnie, bracing the screen door with her shoulder while snuggling the now sleeping child against her chest. Henry did as he was told and saw the inside of his neighbor's house for the very first time: the low ceilings and thread-worn furniture, pleasantly tattered Persians on the floor, pictures plentiful and cheaply framed. Two Cardigan Corgis charged from an inner bedroom and circled their legs with frantic joy as room followed upon tight hallway upon room—all dark and comforting as a rabbit warren—until they emerged into a kitchen, which glowed with soft lights. At a kitchen table pressed to the wall, a tall man sat stooped over a disassembled radio, his long fingers sorting rivets and washers.

“Really, Roger? On Rosie's tablecloth?”

The man glanced up, startled, then rose from his chair, standing nearly to the low ceiling at his full height. Whereas his wife's gray hair sprung from her head with all the vim of a forsythia bush, his was nearly gone, showing only thin, sun-battered scalp. Behind his head hung an engraved slab of cherry wood, which read,
Ruby Anniversary—Congratulations, Roger and Virginia!
This was a man whom Henry had seen for many years passing in a red pickup truck, but whose name he had never known. He seemed quiet, though not exactly shy. “Mr. Forge,” he said, “may I offer my condolences.”

“Look, Roger, look,” said Ginnie, wading through Corgis and holding out the baby in her arms. “Tell me this isn't the most darling thing you've ever seen in your whole life.”

Roger peered down his nose, considered the napping child, then the couple exchanged a long, signifying glance. With a voice so deep it had made dogs crouch and roll and whimper all his life, Roger said simply, “Very cute, indeed.”

“Here,” she said, passing the baby carefully into his arms, “I told Henry I couldn't bear to leave him over there to eat alone, so I dragged him over. Neighbors should support one another, you know.” She glanced meaningfully at Roger, who met her gaze with barely arched brows. “Now, I intend to feed the man. It's the very least we can do.”

“Certainly.” Roger cradled the child in the crook of his arm and swept the innards of the radio as well as a checkbook and bills and various pens off to the side of the table. With his free hand, he indicated the chair opposite. Then he and Henry sat while Roger rocked the child with the easy, practiced arms of a man who'd raised two children.

“Was your daughter married?” he asked with a glance down at the child.

“No,” Henry said, his voice barely a whisper.

“So, she was dating an African-American gentleman?”

Henry nodded dumbly; he didn't know what to say.

“Well, it's heartening to see the way times have changed,” Roger said, dandling the child. “The world used to be so ugly about these things. Even good folks … well, your father was a bit of a racist, wasn't he, Ginnie?”

“Oh, Daddy was a good man,” Ginnie said, “but yeah, maybe a bit. Nothing too crazy.”

“My folks were Quakers,” said the man, turning his warm eyes on Henry and not waiting for his response. “They taught me that God made of one blood all peoples of the earth. My mother actually had a cross-stitch of that, which hung in our foyer. And they lived that verse. Especially my mother. She was a very politically active woman.”

Ginnie moved smartly about her kitchen until she returned with plates heaped, saying, “But my daddy was kind too, Roger. He was. He just had some backwards ideas. You can't help the way you were raised.”

“Ah,” said Roger, and cocked his head, “but when you grow up, you have to take responsibility for your adult mind.”

“Well, anyway, enough about that,” Ginnie said, reaching out, “give me back that baby.” She situated herself at the corner of the table, where she could dandle the child with one arm and eat with her free hand.

Henry stared down at his plate piled high with beet salad and venison casserole, buttered sweet potatoes and rosemary bread still steaming from the oven. Ginnie had filled his glass with sweet tea. It occurred to him that he had not been hungry in a long, long time. Then hunger moved him, and he fell on his food like an animal, even though he felt it as a betrayal. His heart was broken, yet his body was ravenous. He ate and ate and ate. After some time, he sat swaying over the remains of stew and bread, his eyes glazing with tears that pricked like a thousand needles. He wanted to say something, but he could not release the clamp on his throat.

Roger stood to offer privacy and moved to the rear door, both dogs at his heels, and slipped a pack of American Spirits from his breast pocket. He wavered on the top step, about to move down onto the grass, but when his wife appeared not to notice, he remained where he stood and lit a cigarette.

Ginnie, who was planting kiss after kiss on the child's sleepy forehead, said, “Why, I believe he has your nose. Yes, if I'm not mistaken, I believe so. Roger, I can see you standing right there. Don't think I can't.” Then she looked up at Henry with unvarnished delight. “You always did have a proud nose like the horses we used to have, those Walkers you sold Daddy back in the day.” She hefted up the child, who swooned with his lips pouted out. The sloped nose was indeed a miniature replica of Henry's.

Ginnie gazed with unblinking eyes at Henry. “I do wish I had known Henrietta better. Perhaps I could have been … a better neighbor.”

Under her bright, direct gaze, Henry was silent. How miraculous that Henrietta could be spoken of and yet not exist. Remorse had become more real than she.

“I didn't see her very often, but I always found her to be”—Ginnie seemed to be rooting about for the right word—“very interesting. And just look at her baby. What a treasure.” Flicking his half-smoked cigarette into a Folger's can, Roger returned to the kitchen, gazing steeply over his wife's shoulder at the child in her arms.

Ginnie waved one hand irritatedly. “Roger, you smell like cigarettes. Good Lord.” Then, turning to Henry, she said, “If you ever have some trouble with him, you just bring him over. Roger has a way with colicky babies.”

With a glint in his eye, Roger said, “I know when to be quiet.”

Ginnie made a dubious sound in her throat.

“Well,” Roger said, “I'm glad we had this … supper together. Neighbors should break bread together.”

Ginnie nodded firmly, while Roger settled himself back into his creaking Windsor. Stroking a Corgi on its head and gazing curiously at Henry, he said gently, “So, how's that fine horse of yours doing, Mr. Forge?”

Henry, who had been absorbed in the mysterious face of his grandson, could only look up at Roger in astonishment, as if he couldn't remember his own name or how he had come to be here. When he spoke, his words were rusty like the hinges on an old door. He whispered, “My horse?”

*   *   *

One little jockey in the hot tub; one little jockey on the phone.

One little jockey in the kitchen; one little jockey still at home.

One little jockey with his agent; one little jockey in the box.

One little jockey puking salad; and one little jockey—imp, raconteur, pissant, tricky truculent slick, Reuben Bedford Walker III of provenance unknown and character indeterminate, five feet three inches tall, 3 percent body fat, and 118 pounds—barreling out of the jockey room, his valet hollering at his back, in search of the animal only seen from a distance under other jocks, but what an animal!: sixteen exquisite hands at the withers, a deep barrel chest with iron shoulders, and a head of black chiseled marble cracked by a white chine blaze; black satin tail and legs that screamed RUN MOTHERFUCKER. She was a black, cresty-necked filly who bit handlers, broke jocks, and rammed in fractions like a new Secretariat, what Mack Snyder called his perfect thing, the kind of filly that got hotter and hotter until she burned up the Triple Crown and retired to the mommy track; wife, mother, and one-night stand all in one.

Reuben careened along the back stretch, that theater of quarrel and striving and hungover work, of labor white and brown and poor all over, of motormouth agents and trainers chewing out assistants, of milkshaking vets hauling gear bags—

“Heya, Reuben!”

“Why you back here? Ain't you got a race?”

“Your valet's looking for you!”

He acknowledged them with not so much as a flick of a hand, or a cock of a brow, but slipped the corner of Barn 23, the first of Mack Snyder's four. Along the sun-dappled shed row above all the pillow talk muttered into equine ears, he could hear the big filly knickering her pleasure as she was combed.

“Hail, fine Ethiope!” cried the tiny man, and Allmon spun where he stood at the rear of the filly. In that most reliable of stage moves, he looked forward before looking down, and in the delay the jock had slipped under his arm like an otter in silks, crying, “What a balm for the old cryballs you are! A noble Ebon tires of these Caucasians with their corpsy skin and tea-stained hair, their awshucks and awdangs, their pallid faces—fucking tallow! Don't get me started on the wetbacks. Oooooh…” His words whistled up the flue of awe: “Hellsmouth, as I live and breathe.”

Pure instinct caused Allmon to grab the man by his wiry arm and haul him hard round. Hellsmouth stirred sidewise as Allmon took stock of the man's face: hard as a train with a tough jutting jaw like a grille. Lips curled churlish and coy under deep-set eyes with mini-Hells spangling in their depths. All muscle and barely more, he was eight feet packed into four, his sharp body sinewed by starvation and the sweat box.

“So intimate?” the jock snarled. “You don't even know my name, soldier.”

“Get out,” said Allmon.

The man jerked back his arm. “Oh, you don't get to tell Jimmy Winkfield to get out, no sirree. You don't tell Isaac or Oliver to skedaddle!”

Someone tossed over a stall: “Don't listen to that fucker, Allmon!”

The jock tossed right back: “Hush, vile and greasy interloper! You stink of river water and
queso
!”

From over the stall: “Listen, asshole—”

“Coital sludge! Slander not this ancient tongue! I am presently engaged in the business of horseflesh and perhaps other flesh, and your intrusion is an unforgivable offense!”

The little man whirled back to Allmon, his hard eyes aflirt as he thrust out rough rider's hands. “Reuben Bedford Walker,” he said. “The Third, mind you. Not the first, a pederast, nor the second, a wife beater, in fact none of the priors, but in all likelihood the last. Until men grow pussies. Which, Lord have mercy, they might! It's a fabulous new age. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Allmon Shaughnessy.”

Without a clear course of action, because the man's voice was a wily wend of place and time, threading old centuries up through the chinks and fissures of newer ones, his words swift in one ear and then tangling in the disordered avenues of the other, Allmon took the hand up automatically, but it turned soft as a silk scarf caressing his inner wrist even as he was saying, “Where'd you get my name?”

Reuben grinned. “Don't be so modest, little Almond. Everyone knows the prison kid with the good hands and the sorrowful face. Carrying a burden of mysterious origins! Nigh on a horse whisperer, they say, an old island conjurer, got the Nawlins voodoo touch, one of those old 'tation niggras—a natural! Where do you come from, and where have you been? We all want to know. You're a curiosity, my man!”

As he pattered, the jock, dressed only in his silk breeches and a white tank, was squeezing past Allmon toward Hellsmouth, inspecting, mean dreaming, and counting coins.

“The fuck you think you're doing?” said Allmon.

In his finest Tom, Reuben drawled, “Me and dis hoss here, we gone cut us a fine caper, Lawdy yes! I jess been beggin' ole Massah Snyder, lemme leg up dis pony! And now I gone do it! So liff a poor niggra, son.”

Shapes were shifting in the man's mouth. Allmon could only stare at him in alarm and distaste.

“Did you hear me, young man?” said the jock with a voice fresh, level, and boss. “Offer your superior a lift.”

“You fucking kidding me?” said Allmon, incredulous. “She broke the leg on her last jock in the gate at—”

“I am perfectly aware of Señor Alano's miscalculations, believe you me.” Reuben's voice devolved to hiss, “Now toss, Hoss.”

If he'd looked a grown man, Allmon would have bristled. If there'd been actual physical threat behind the words, he would have fought. But as it was, he knew this was the jock who'd missed the morning breeze because of a delay at the Los Angeles aiport. Not sure what else to do, he lifted the man onto Hellsmouth as if he were no more than a sack of cornmeal.

Now it was Hellsmouth's turn to object. The two-year-old was already expert at shedding riders with a lightning-strike hump and dump. Now, true to form, she bristled and jumped like a goat, but the jock went nowhere at all, stuck like glue. When she went to rear, Allmon's hands were quick at her mouth and her neck at the withers. Bracing the wide brain pan, he caught and calmed her, though her mouth continued to work suspiciously, snarling.