The Sport of Kings (65 page)

The jock leaned into those pinned-back ears. “Hush, my sweet little horseypie,” he whispered in a voice like chiffon, “you're gonna win big for this here jock, or I'll cut your throat cheek to jowl.”

Allmon reached up and dragged off the man who weighed no more than a girl, delivered him hard to his feet in the straw. “Get the fuck off my horse.”

“Your horse?” Reuben flickered his spiky lashes in astonishment, his hands on his bony hips. “
Your
horse? Don't forget, Almond Joy, that three people make the money around here—Henry Forge, Mack Snyder … and Yours Truly. Your horse, my ass.” He reached out and pointed at Allmon's face. “Mind your tongue, young man, saddle up in an hour, and let old Reuben show you how the doing gets done.”

*   *   *

Champagne Stakes, Belmont, October 2005, cloud-churning sky over an Indian summer, Mack marching at Allmon's side, his lips blanched white with game-day strain, his cheeks ruddled as ever. The will to win rendered the man a permanent blustercuss, and Allmon had learned quickly to wrap himself back up in a shroud of silence. It was easy. He was cold, permanently cold since the day he left Forge Run Farm. He marveled at how easy it was to look like a statue again, one that didn't look left or right. Except this statue had a mind, and it poked at him, whispering, She must be having that baby any minute. Your baby.

The day, the race, the horse. Hellsmouth was dancing up on her hoof tips, cresting her neck into a fulminating wave as she approached the other mounts in the emerald-green saddling paddock. “You got nothing,” Allmon muttered at them under his breath, knocking his mind into place. It was easy; the horses were an astonishment. Among the antic fillies and nerve-addled colts, there was charm and brio, founting talent and flaming speed. Skulls carved neat by nature, legs bred bold by owners, hides like autumn leaves. Here was the bay Wagnerian bass, the Carl Lewis sprinter, Sarah Bernhardt so divine, Solomon's gold, and Tesio's dream. But, listen, as sure as I write this, with Hell's perfect limbs and her big motor, they were just whistling in the dark.

Diminutive even among his coevals, Reuben was ready and waiting, turning this way and that with his crop in his hand, a tightly muscled bundle of expectation, bright and beady-eyed as any peacock. But he ceased all motion when Hellsmouth appeared, his gaze trained on his mount with an unearthly concentration, mean mirth all absent.

Allmon couldn't help himself. He said with a terse, dismissive gesture, “This new jock, I don't like him.”

Mack said, “If I had to like any of you sombitches, I wouldn't be in this line of work.” He pointed at Reuben. “That's the best rider you'll ever see on the skin of a horse, and don't you forget it.” He raised a hand to the paddock judge, then stepped to Reuben, over whom he towered at five-ten, and, with one hand to Hell's withers and his other slicing the air like a tomahawk, said: “Now do exactly how I said. Let her flop around out of the gate, that's how she goes. She likes to eyeball ass for a bit. You can hit her around the curve, but don't crop till you're solid. DO NOT CROP UNTIL YOU'RE SOLID, REUBEN. You got a rocket here, a classic deep closer, understand me? Not until you're solid.”

Reuben nodded once, his lips a firm line. Allmon saw none of the mean mirth he'd detected there earlier.

“Riders up!” The marching stopped, followed by a flurry of activity around each mount. Mack cupped his hands and tossed the jock onto Hell's back, where he landed with practiced ease, hands snapping up the reins and gleaming boots cocked acey-deucey. Mack said, “I wish to hell you'd got up here for a morning gallop. She's a handful. Tricky.”

Reuben leaned into Hell, nostrils widening as if inhaling the very stall-born essence of the horse. He said, “Oh, I'm trickier by half.”

Mack just ignored him. “Post assignment to good advantage. Four.”

The jock's carved face finally cracked a brittle grin of surprise. “Four! 'Twas ever thus!”

“No time for superstition, Reuben,” Mack muttered, but his brows drew tight as if to secure his eyes against the explosive pressure of his nerves. “Just keep your head in the game, and don't bring her back here without the mile.”

With a mock salute, Reuben said, “Me and little gal, we'll make a mockery of their bestest efforts,” and Allmon led off horse and rider under the ivied clubhouse into the shadowy tunnel. At the far end, the track loomed like a handicapper's heaven, lit by a sun just now punching through rarefying clouds and turning the hoof-churned track to silver. Allmon's blood quickened, his stomach a fist of fear. One wrong step on that track, one hard bump, and his whole life would break down with the horse. He swallowed hard to keep his lunch from flipping.

As the first mount emerged from the tunnel, a terrifying rumble rushed slowly through the grandstand, gathering force as it went—the sound of a thousand ships shattering at once, louder than God—so the horses danced in distress, pulling left and right or cantering forward, with only Hellsmouth displaying no signs of alarm. She raised her head and worked her capricious mouth, taking the crowd in round.
Vox populi vox Dei.

Against the roar and against orders, Allmon suddenly blurted, “Look, this horse, she's got a sensitive mouth. See her talking around her bit? She's always been like that, even when there's nothing stressing her. Lay off her mouth much as you can.”

His lashes fluttering, Reuben leaned down with a hard note of surprise. “And hark! I did hear the prattling of the American youth.”

Allmon ignored him. “No need to crop her. Every jock'll tell you the same thing—she runs hard when she wants to run and if you hit her, you just piss her off. She don't need pain to run hard.”

A grin, but Reuben's eyes narrowed to slats. “Where exactly are you from, little catfish?”

Allmon looked straight at Hell's billet strap, said quietly, “Cincinnati.”

“Of course!” the jock said. “I can hear the river in your mouth! It sounds just like the South.”

“Cincinnati ain't the South,” Allmon said briskly.

Reuben returned upright on his slip of a saddle and cackled to the crowd. “Not the South, folks! Not the South!” A slicing glance: “It's all the South, son.”

Then he winked and with a flick of his hand, he and Hell were parading to the gate on the far backstretch, a stolid palomino pony leading the way. It was only when Allmon and Mack stood aside so the next horses could pass that, suddenly released from the severe focus the Thoroughbred required, Allmon realized something was amiss.

“Where's Forge at?” he said. But he didn't really want to know. The sight of the man elicited a surge of feeling so complicated, it didn't have a name. And the thought of Henrietta was a one-two combo: desire and repulsion.

Mack, his eyes trained on the post parade, waited for the bleating of the bugler to quit. Then he placed his thick fists on his hips. He didn't look back at Allmon when he said, “I track the man's checks, not his whereabouts.”

Across the field, as mounts were slotted one by one into their stalls and while Reuben was drawing down his goggles, Hellsmouth skittered back with a violent shake of the head and a fractious cry. She wasn't some bird content with its cage, some laboratory rat. She was one thousand pounds of propulsive muscle, suddenly shadowboxing the sky and scattering her handlers like pins. Reuben was quick, he poured himself across her neck and rode the bucker as ably as any ropey rodeo kid from Cody or Cheyenne. When the green-jacketed handlers regained their feet and dusted themselves off, they placed all hands on her ass and shoved her into the metal stall. The crewman held her head with both hands and smiled nervously at Reuben. “Now you're in a tight spot,” he said.

Reuben ignored him, perched and ready for an emergency scramble to the side bars. The reins in a cross, he turned left and right, surveying the ranks: Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico; Colombia, Argentina, more Mexico. “Why, it's a brown battle royale!” he muttered, then tucked his face against Hell's neck, and the gate sprang.

Breaking from the four hole, Hell slopped and thrashed into the race like an overexcited dog, then settled straight away into a loopy, loping, embarrassing last. Even as the field began to jostle and strategize along the rail and the far outside, the filly couldn't be bothered and expended no run at all. Hell was smoking in the ladies' room and didn't give a damn.

On the far side of the track, Mack placed a hand over his heart and muttered, “So help me Christ, this horse is gonna kill me.”

Heeding instruction, Reuben rode calm, rump high, head low, a silhouette of hardboiled patience. At the quarter-mile pole, Hell had overtaken only one contender—and that a mere matter of chance as a gray pulled up favoring a leg—and was just beginning to angle wide. Reuben clenched his crop, flipped his filthy goggles, and growled once, “Come on, sister woman.”

But Hell just rolled along on her lovely little pleasure cruise. The air was fine with the lushest of breezes, the waters glassy and dotted with befruited islands—

“Goddammit!” Mack hollered from the rail. “Fucking graze for all I care! I fucking bought this pasture for you, asshole!”

It was a fast half mile when the pack passed the pole at just over 0:45. Angelshare, a rangy Runnymede colt, led by two lengths on the inside as Hellsmouth eased her way into ninth along the rump of Play Some Music. Boomie Racz, the curly, blonde up-and-comer, stooped over Music and whipped him when she suddenly sensed Hell at her heels. She flipped her goggles and doubled down, straining for a path through the traffic.

Now the school of horses swung around the turn as if caught in a sweep net, Angelshare faltering off his pace for a moment as he changed leads and Scintilla charging to overtake him with Chief Contender hot as breath on his neck. Only now, as if realizing suddenly that she was hungry and food awaited, Hellsmouth began to stretch out under Reuben and reach for sunlight as she curved around the field. Wary and shrewd, Racz stayed so close that Play Some Music bumped Hellsmouth, shoulder against shoulder, not once but twice. Reuben snarled and shoved and battened down the hatches just as the group emptied into the stretch for the final quarter mile, the four leads now charging neck and neck.

Reuben was done waiting. With an electric strike, he flung back his crop, and with a single stinging lash made contact with the filly's rump. Her muscles leaping beneath her skin, Hellsmouth exploded out of her gait with such vicious power, her first free stride made the previous three-quarters of a mile seem nothing but a lark. As she shot forward she bore in toward the rail and delivered one fast, teeth-rattling bump to Play Some Music. While Racz cropped and corrected her faltering bay, Hellsmouth drove to the wire with a stride so long and self-assured, so dazzlingly late, that the grandstand rose as a single entity, driven up by a surge of energy that seemed to come from the very center of the earth. Farmers three miles distant heard the cry when, fully extended with her limbs threatening the limits of form, Hell shot under the wire. Play Some Music followed in two solid lengths, but as the crowd threatened to deafen man and animal alike, Mack was already clutching his skull at the sidelines.

“Don't fuck me, history!” he cried. “I'm too old for this!”

The inquiry sign began to flash.

“No! No! No! No!” His fists were uncorked grenades, the crazy in his eyes unleashed. “NoNoNoNONONONONONONONOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Reuben and Racz were off their mounts in a second, hustling, then running, and now sliding through the office door of the stewards, side by side, panting and pointing.

“He bumped me hard on the straight!”

“She bumped me twice in the turn!”

“We'll watch again,” said the steward from the Jockey Club.

“We barely touched him on the turn!”

“I can't prevent a lead switch!”

“Hold on,” said the steward from the Racing Association.

“It's a miracle Hellsmouth even stayed up!”

“I couldn't take down your filly with a bulldozer!”

“Ruling stands,” said the steward from the Gaming Commission.

Aboveground, the lights stopped flashing and the crowd lost its mind.

Which is how Reuben came to be photographed victorious atop Hellsmouth in the winner's circle at Belmont, Allmon at her halter. In the photograph, Allmon looks taller than he is, chin high and proud, but eyes like dark wounds, peering through the camera, past the trainers, the jocks, the drunks, the bettors, the stoopers, the stewards, to a woman he can't see, but whose details can't be erased. He shakes his head, so the image is blurred.

“Just like 1972,” Mack mutters. “I thought history had us by the short hairs.”

Reuben puffs out his bird chest and stares down his nose. “I don't repeat history,” he says, “I make history, and I'm never riding the bitch that easy again.”

*   *   *

There's the front of the house, and there's the backstretch, and never the twain shall meet. Allmon was no more than a migrant worker, no different from the Guatemalans and the Peruvians he groomed with, moving from track to track, following the racing season, following Mack. Like all the rest, he slept in unventilated cinder-block dorms with dingy, mold-streaked walls and sputtering lights, quarters where you couldn't run an air conditioner, because the barns weren't set up for the voltage, so you sweated in the swampy ninety-degree nights and watched the other grooms swoon and puke from the heat. You drew flies like any other animal. A couple of the skinnier guys ended up with dysentery. There were track doctors, but they basically dispensed Vicodin and sent you on your way, and unless you were dying, you didn't get a day off. So you slept in your sweat, bought your food at the 7-Eleven or some Mexican dive, and you worked.

The filly was winning stakes races, but that didn't change Allmon's four o'clock mornings at the barn, going round on a carousel of tack and groom: bandage work, leg checks, scrubbing off poultice wrappings, taking temps and mucking, filling waterers and haynets, laying down fresh hay. He passed mounts to exercise riders, tidied the shed row, washed and groomed again, iced and rewrapped million-dollar legs. If it was race day, that meant rounds after lunch. Otherwise, the vets came in and doped the horses from their grab bag of steroids, then there was more schooling and walking and feeding, and when evening rolled around, Allmon draped them with blankets nicer than any he'd ever owned. For doing this, he made $350 a week, maybe a hundred extra when Hell placed. He spent his first paycheck on a sleeping bag and a .45 1911 automatic he bought off a guy at the track who used to be a marine, just something cheap he could keep close. You couldn't trust anybody anywhere anytime; he knew that. Though sometimes he also knew in the subterranean passages of his heart that he was the least trustworthy of all.