The Sport of Kings (71 page)

It seemed Henry could actually feel the spinning of the earth as he said, “And did she love you?”

“Eh, you know,” the man said with a dismissive shake of his weather-roughened hands, then, “Let me tie up these guys … I'll show you a place she liked.”

With some effort he led the oxen to a line of old chestnut fencing that separated a fallow pasture from the clodded soil they had just turned. Using the plow lines, he secured the pair to the upper plank, which they sniffed and tongued with their ropy, inquisitive tongues, turning the wood dark with saliva.

Penn patted a sloping haunch and then they were off along the northern edge of the unturned field. At one point, without stopping, Penn grasped up a small rock from the soil and flung it out as far as he could into the field, the way a boy hurls a stone into a river to savor the violence in his own arms. He said, “I trusted Henrietta. She wasn't always nice, you know? You can't really trust anybody who wants to please you all the time— Hey, arrowhead.”

This time he stooped and grasped up a slate-gray chipped piece of flint, ancient and smooth-sided but still miraculously sharp. He handed it to Henry.

“Maybe she was kind of messed up. I don't know. No offense. I went in the marines when I was still a kid, and I came out just … Most people probably aren't worth much till they're messed up. But I could be wrong about that.”

The pair passed a black, sagging tobacco barn, a sink like a meteor hole, and trees skirted by bushes. There came a rustling in the depths of one thicket, then a dog leaped onto the path, bounding toward them with his tongue a loll and his tail a banner over his back. Penn patted the dog and pointed up ahead of them where spindly trees clung to a rocky outcropping. “Your daughter liked this spot. Jack, stay. Stay.”

Henry stepped carefully onto the rock outcropping and stood very still, gazing straight ahead into the bliss or abyss, feeling his feet on the earth even as his forehead penetrated porous clouds. The green earth sprawled before him, but it seemed more like mockery than beauty. He felt dizzy and barely rooted as all of space went sheering past his body with a horrifying velocity, which he'd not understood before. He sensed it now because grief had rent the beautiful fabric of his former self. He could hear time whistling through the hollows of his bones. Grief had sucked out all the marrow.

Henry swayed precipitously, so Penn reached quickly for the point of his elbow, then placed one steadying arm around his shoulders. They stood side by side like father and son, one just approaching old age and one middle-aged, both staring into open space.

Penn cleared his throat. “But me,” he said, as though the conversation had not stopped. “I just like to stand here and think. Standing up high like this, I feel like I can … like up here, you can see everything. It's the big view, you know. I feel lucky to have it. But what are you gonna do with a view like this? That's the question.”

It felt like a dare, a challenge between men, regardless of how gently, how thoughtfully it was proffered. Henry shrugged off Penn's protective arm and stepped out to where the rock and soil crumbled away and looked down over the careening edge. He looked and looked and looked. But in the interstices of the rock formations, in the distant canopy of the trees, in the land, he saw nothing, not even history. The entire natural world was composed of dirt and its senseless inhabitants. His frustration mounted to agony.

He whirled around, his face stricken, and he cried, “What did my daughter think of?”

Instinctively, Penn grasped Henry's forearms and pulled him in toward him, asking sharply, “What? Here?”

“Yes!”

If Penn found the question odd, he didn't show it. He continued to grasp Henry's forearms as he considered this very seriously. Then his face brightened with remembrance and he said, “She thought of you. I remember now. She thought of your family name.”

*   *   *

The fevers came and with them the dreams, so once the stars began their sardonic winking, he was rolling in her arms once more, his hips cracking against her coffin box, the lily-white baby hard as a bomb between them, then she was crying his name, which his dead mother had given him, or it was the sliver moon catcalling through the prison bars, and he was moaning himself awake in the jittery space between fever and wakefulness, thoroughly confused and baptized in sweat. He lay with dry eyes pressed to the crook of his arm, riding the tides of Hell's night breathing, the sound of her entrapment, his own: Get me out of this nightmare.

But there was something on the scent of harvested hay this early morning, a sharp, strange tune adrift on the barely moving air. He knew the source before his eyes could discover it in the dark—the little jock perched on a farrier's stool, an unlit cigar tilting jaunty from his lips, his hands patting a rhythm on his thigh.

“Reuben,” Allmon said confusedly, the dream of alarm still in his mouth. He sensed the great shadow of Hell's head as it swung, curious, over the door.

“Fret not,” said the jock, crossing his wiry legs. “I was just a-wandering through on my way to Hialeah, thought I'd say hello to the Barbary horse and the Cincinnati Kid—and here I find you just a-moaning and a-crying in your sleep, a right sorry sight to be sure.” Reuben scooted his stool closer, his eyes shining in the moonlight. “What ails you, my little nut? There's a rattle in your chest and a tear in your eye.”

Allmon's tongue was thick, a grotesque muscle suddenly unfamiliar in his mouth. It required all of his energy just to mutter, “You got something for pain?”

“Do I have anything for pain!” Reuben chuckled. “I am La Pharmacie du Quartier Hoss, but, why should I share with you? I came by my contraband honestly. Anyway”—a pinch of a grin—“are you not by your own admission a confidence man of great renown? Surely you have your own pick-me-ups?”

Allmon just groaned in frustration, one hand a hard lace over his forehead.

“No?” Reuben turned his head practically on its side. “Forsooth! What kind of deal did you strike with the old boss man, anyway?”

“No money till the end of the season.”

Reuben's voice was low and without game. “How much exactly?”

Allmon told him.

Reuben crowed. “I wipe my ass with that!” Then he fairly tripped coming off his stool and stood tall, which wasn't tall at all, barely a child's height under Hell's chin. He held his arms wide, and Hell knocked her teeth once in irritation. “That's your infamous deal? That's what they taught you in the cement tower? No cash on the barrelhead, and gain all a gamble—on a persnickety bitch with a monster-truck ass, but toothpick bones and a bad attitude?”

“She's going all the way, and you know it,” Allmon snapped, because she had to, and she would. For a moment he looked up at her towering darkness in the night, her breadth and height. He felt that for all his lifelong striving and desperation, he had nothing comparable to her enormous, innate power. All he had was his biography running through his veins, a biography that consisted of a single word:
Want.

Reuben sighed. “Well, you've upset the apple cart, Allmon, yes indeed, and made yourself a wen on the scalp of a founding father.” His voice grew cold as he sidled over. “But you're like the hillbilly who kills Old Master for forty swampy acres and a half-starved mule. Was that your biggest, baddest, blackest, ballsiest dream?” He looked down his nose in disdain.

“You don't know nothing.” The words emerged as a deep, furious growl.

Reuben wagged his finger. “Nothing? You sure? I see the pink in your cheeks! The limp in your gait! Something tells me you've got the flushing disease—a precious gift from your mama, perhaps?”

“You best back the fuck up.” This time the growl was deeper, crueler. But rough words couldn't erase a knowing that was very deep like bones at the bottom of the river. The movement of the river passes through their hollows, leaving them undisturbed, witnessed only by bottom dwellers. But Allmon hadn't reached the bottom yet.

“Admit it,” Reuben hissed. “I know what I know! Yet here you are waiting for money like some brother on a street corner begging for change, when—ye gods!—time itself is the only currency! You ain't earned your black badge, Boy Scout! Sitting here like a goddamn naïf!”

Allmon actually made a move to rise, but he was so woolly and woozy with fever, Reuben required only a hand to his shoulder to press him back down on his cot. “Busy playing the horse's mammy,” he continued, “thinking you got years to eat and ages to shit! You need a better dream, young man, one that won't fester, that won't start to stink.”

Allmon slapped his hand away. “I lost everything! My momma died, my granddad! My…” He paused, whipsawed by the hellish feeling that consumed him at the thought of Henrietta. It had been sickeningly hard to learn any delight. And now delight had become the mother of rage. He held his arms out to either side. “They sent me up for trying to survive! For trying to make my way through their white fucking maze. You understand what I'm saying? They made it a crime for anybody to survive in the world they made!”

“So, why hasn't your suffering schooled you? Because you won't tell the tale, that's why! You're too busy trying to shit out prison instead of digesting it, letting it make you stronger! You got to build your blood, son!”

“I ain't your fucking son and my life ain't your business,” Allmon snapped.

Reuben sighed. “Really, why must Queen Reuben come and do the dirty labor for the hesitant, lumbering Sons of Ham? Good thing Reuben's a practiced critter! Good thing he always has a stump speech at the ready!”

With gutting purpose, Reuben peered into Allmon's bleary, feverish eyes, and the groom sensed suddenly that the little man before him had changed not merely in demeanor but more fundamentally in appearance, having grown so that he was staring down at him, a man on stilt legs his tongue had constructed. Here was not the grinning jock of jokes and jabs but the calm, cold preacher on the circuit, cruel as God. It silenced whatever retort was forming on Allmon's lips.

Reuben said: “Now listen and listen good because I'll only say it once: I am the devil's midwife, the Messiah come in shape no bigger than a black man's fist in the face of the Kentucky colonel man. Drawn darker than a stub of burnt cork, he straddles the black brain as it sleeps awake. His silks are sound from the pickers' jubilee; the fine helmet of the overseer's skull; reins from the braids of white bitch bitties; black boots from the flays of baying backwater hounds; his crop right snatched from the Southern whipping hand, its handle fashioned from fingers that when felled, grabbled up Mississippi mud like velvet cake.”

“What in the holy fuck,” said Allmon, his anger stalling.

“Shhhhh,” hissed Reuben, slipping closer with a finger to Allmon's lips. “He speeds upon a filly dark as lampblack made by some master behind hell's white fences, time out of mind the measure of all things. And on this destrier he gallops night by night through Jim Crow's brain, so he stills his pattering feet; so Brudder Bones and Tambo cease their infernal noise; over Miss Lucy Long's lips, those flaps of deceit that divest blackest words of their very meaning and whitewash thuggery with hijink cheer. Sometimes he gallops over Zip Coon's brow and then naked, Zip stands like a new man born of rage. And sometimes he comes with the great black book, bedeviling the black pastor, who, pilfering the plate, forgets the kingdom's to be had on earth as in heaven. Sometimes he rides like a dull knife over a soldier's neck and then he dreams of cutting fancy throats; of manacles, chains, whips, and iron collars; of ocean five miles deep. Awake, Reuben whispers in his ear, at which he starts and wakes and, imagining he is going somewhere anon, sleeps again.”

Allmon shook his head. “You need to recognize you're crazy.”

Reuben just batted away his words. “You are the benighted soldier that plaits the manes of horses even in the night, mere servant of the pale king's tresses which once untangled some reparation bodes. You are the one, when daughters lie on their backs, who frightens, fucks, and forces them to bear, making them mules strapped to their heavy carriage. It is you—”

“Fuck you.”

Reuben rose abruptly. “I speak of your ambition, which is the heap of a moving bowel, bleached white at the core as Dinah Roe. Horseshit has trampled old memory, which woos even now the black bosom of the North, but you, being angry, stiffen your resolve and turn your face to the fruit-swinging South.”

Allmon laid an arm over his face, pressed a hand to one ear. He couldn't tell whether he was asleep or awake. Maybe he'd never emerged from sleep at all.

Reuben just leaned down and whispered his conspiracy: “I hope too early, for my mind imagines some marvels soon hanging from those boughs, shall perfectly begin this late, aggravated date with Reuben's stump speech, and expire the term of some regnant lives, closed in a white breast, in some show of consequence or fate. But the devil or Christ that steers the course, direct his sail. On sleeping soldier!”

And then, laughing, Reuben hauled up his duffel bag, which was nearly as large as he was, and left, waiting until he was safely outside the dusty confines of the barn to light his Cuban cigar.

*   *   *

Even after six weeks of incarceration on limited rations and no exercise at all, the filly's self-possession was total, unwavering, and irritating as all get-out. She snapped at anyone fool enough to walk down her shed row, butted her head against her stall wall, and snarled out her window at each passing February day. This horse knew who she was—and she'd had more than enough.

“Oh, fuck it,” Mack said, tired to death of his role as martinet. “Get this peccary head off her lead and into a porta-paddock. No more handwalking, no more coddling. I can't take this crap anymore.”