The Sport of Kings (73 page)

*   *   *

Old-timers were rooted to their seats that day. Tip-sheet hawkers gaped and the railbird kids were half-cracked with joy. The seasoned press? Some shed tears they'd held in reserve since 1973. Greeney, hunched over his laptop with his
Racing Form
deadline like a hand pressing on his chicken-fried, middle-aged heart, typed a sentence with stubby fingers, then erased it, typed, dragged, typed, erased. Finally, tapping his electronic cigarette against the black rim of his laptop, he could find nothing to declaim but this: They said it was an impossibility to rediscover the speed and poise of runners past. They said the golden age of racing was over and gone, the sport nothing but a relic from a forgotten time. But Hellsmouth, the unbeatable filly bred by Henry Forge of Paris, Kentucky, trounced the field here today at the Besilu Stables Florida Derby. The big girl did it by a towering twenty lengths at 1:44, destroying the standing record of 1:46⅘. To all the lucky fans who witnessed this historic Gulfstream race, one thing was perfectly clear. Hellsmouth didn't win because of Forge's brilliant breeding choices; she didn't win because of Snyder's unusually strict racing regimen or because she finally broke from the gate like a world-class athlete. No, reader, this horse won because she's a monster. My eyes are on the Triple Crown, and my money's on Hellsmouth. The superhorse is back.

*   *   *

No sooner was she crowned with laurels, no sooner was her name in lights, than she went hot. When Allmon's hand first touched her leg, he couldn't tell whether it was his own high fever or hers. But no—she was a burning stove compared to him. In an instant, Allmon's heart was lodged in his throat, and sweat prickled at the corners through his eyes. His hands fumbled again at her leg, but no doubt about it now: she was swollen along the old injury.

Two minutes later Mack was careening into the stall, his cell in his hand, steam pluming from his ears, his white-man lips gone even thinner. Another two minutes and Jameson was there, that old vet, that administrator of milkshakes and cobra venom, of steroids and Equipoise. He and Mack conferred, they rubbed their stubbly jaws with lined hands, their hooded eyes met, and they nodded. Then Jameson, who had advised his multitude of like-minded hacks in other barns, who then churned out similar prescriptions like monkeys at typewriters, reached into his gear bag and produced a syringe. Allmon stood there, eyes wide, not sure yet what he was watching.

Sensing his hesitation, Jameson looked up from where he was tapping the syringe. “It's just painkiller,” he said. “We should all be so lucky.”

There was a tiny, sharp moment, like the head of a pin, when Allmon felt an almost insuperable urge to reach out and stay the man's hands, and thought: Not this way. If she's hurting, don't run her. But then the pin dropped, and the whole of his history rose up and his eyes grew hard. Yes, it's better to not feel. Absolutely. Then Jameson jabbed the syringe into Hell's warm flank, rubbed the spot with a practiced, calloused hand, and grinned a knowing grin. Allmon couldn't return the smile, too busy strangling the voice that asked, Is this really what you want? To crouch in the shadow of that tree and divvy up her earthly possessions: her bridle, saddle, her blanket, and her whale's heart? Is this really what you want?

*   *   *

Jeff Burrow had only one simple question: “Is she sore, Mack?”

Mack said, “Nope.”

Burrow said, “Well, that's interesting, because your hotwalker said she was limping.”

Mack said, “Thanks for the tip. I'll fire my hotwalker.”

Burrow said, “You gonna keep her nominated for the Derby?”

Mack said, “What do you think?”

Burrow said, “I think she might—
might
—make it through the Derby, but from what I hear Jesus doesn't hand out Derby wins like party favors. Even for those who pray at the altar of cortisone and Winstrol.”

Mack sniffed hard, scrunched up his eyes. He put his thick hands on his Wranglered hips. He had a backcountry bon mot just waiting there on the tip of his tongue, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was, “Fuck you, Jeff. On behalf of my horse, who has more talent in her hoof than your entire family tree. One hundred thousand fucking percent fuck you.”

*   *   *

A wild desire had overcome Henry Forge, as strong and strident as the surges of spring. The hard labor of winter was done, and the sun was beginning to ripen the world. When March winds were winding up and early daffodils punctured the fluorescent soil, Henry could contain the urge no longer and called Penn, who said, “Yeah, I've been a little covered up, but this is good timing. Now's sort of the sweet spot.”

He drove up on a Saturday afternoon, his rust-scabbed Toyota coughing exhaust up the long Forge drive. The closer he drew, the slower he drove, eyes widening behind the wheel as he absorbed the patrician heights of the house, the barns bright like snow blindness, stark equine silhouettes in the distance where the land swept down into a bowl bisected by a stream. Holy shit, he thought, taking it all in. She really did come from money.

He found Henry waiting there as still as a cenotaph on the el porch as if he'd been standing there the whole day, or possibly his whole life. At first, Penn was struck by the similarity again between this father and the woman he had known—the slim, elegant frame, the coppery hair. Then he noticed the child in Henry's arms. From his erect perch against Henry's chest, the boy sported all the wide, bright-eyed curiosity of a seal. He was fine, fat, and waving his chunky arms at the sunshine in obvious delight. Penn didn't care one way or another about babies, and yet … this was Henrietta's child, all that was left of her. She had died bringing him into the world. Should he hate it? Perhaps. But when he approached and the child laughed at him for no reason that any grown man could grasp, Penn smiled. He couldn't quite muster a laugh.

The two men met again, and they shook hands properly this time. Then, in silent, mutual agreement, they walked southward, Henry on the el porch and Penn along a tended bed of eager, nodding daffodils. When he reached the banister, Henry lowered Samuel so he could stand his slippered feet against the wood and said, “This is the space I described on the phone.” Then he bent to kiss Samuel's curly head and, at the same time, pointed out toward the apple orchard and the slim clearing between the last budding trees and old windbreak, forty years in its growing, durable now as any chestnut fencing.

Penn stood there with his hands on his thick hips, chewing his lip and taking measure this way and that. He said, “Well, if you want to grow your own food like how we talked about, you've got plenty of room.”

“I've thought about it, and I've decided I'd like to do more than that. Feed more than us.”

“Really?” said Penn, dubious, looking around and wondering, How many folks could there be to feed? Forge didn't seem like the type who wanted to start a CSA or something.

“And flowers,” Henry said.

“Flowers? Sure, well, it's March, I could … maybe lay in some pansies if you want.”

“What else?” Samuel raised a sudden squall, so Henry drew him back to his chest, where he was nestled easily, his little cherub's face turned into his grandfather's chest.

“Well…,” Penn said, studying the idea for a moment. “You could maybe transplant in viola, some Lenten rose. But most early flowers … they're bulbs, you know. You plant them in the fall when everything's going to seed. Now in a month … I could lay in just about anything you want. Make a real flower garden.”

“Yes, I want a field of flowers. My grandson will like that.”

Penn smiled, but he was silent as he looked on the pair. There was something he didn't quite trust about the older man. Not that he was a bad guy necessarily … just not fully formed or something. Did he want to grow a garden, or did he want to be the kind of guy who grew a garden?

Eh, what did it matter? Penn shrugged in his mind. He was watchful and methodical, the guardian of his own opinions, of which he had more than a few, but ultimately he would help out anyone in need. It's how his dumb ass got sent to war.

“And I'd like to prepare additional space for next year.” Henry stepped down off the porch, so that he stood shoulder to shoulder with Penn. “Put marigolds and petunias in after the freeze.”

The younger man's head ticked to the left. “Sure,” he said, “but if that's what you want, you're gonna need more room. What's with these bushes?” He gestured to his right.

“That's a windbreak.”

“Well, it's in the way. You need it?”

Henry hefted his grandson higher onto his chest and, brow crumpled, watched as the boy busily gummed his own fist. He smelled like sunlight and the warm, particular, inimitable scent, which was his own person. His eyes were bright and impossibly untroubled. “Perhaps not,” Henry said softly.

“But you'll need a backhoe.”

“I have a backhoe.”

“Well,” said Penn with a smile, shaking his head slightly. “All right. Show me where the backhoe's at.”

So, they worked together, he and Penn. First Henry laid out a checkered tablecloth upon which Samuel rolled and made his froggish motions in the sun, a shaker clutched in his hands. One eye to Samuel, Henry helmed a rototiller that chewed its lurching way through the tender lawn, as Penn, perched on the sun-busted seat of the backhoe, began to extract the edges of—

—my God, I get so tired sometimes, I can't tell you how it was. I try to cut to the pith with the blade of my life, but it's a dull blade from a common kitchen. My people came out of the mountains to Ohio; my grandfather was born in a tent near the oil wells, and my parents were poor. I'm not beautiful or clever; all I can offer is the brief portrait of a spring's plantation, the smell of the sweat of labor, the color of a child's eye, and sometimes not even that. What can you do? You can't pray for yourself. The gods disallow it—

“Hey! Henry!” Penn had ground the backhoe to a halt and was twisted back and around with one hand gripping the bucket seat, the other on the wheel. “What is this? You want it out?”

Henry left his post at the rototiller and picked his way along the fresh soil until he rounded the edge of the remaining windbreak. There the thing jutted out of the earth like an arrow pointing to the sky. For a moment, Henry could not configure the object in his mind, could make no sense of its height, its brown hue, the wood patina like rot. Then, when memory finally slid home and he realized it was the old whipping post, he couldn't speak, couldn't blink. Time rolled back his eyelids and pinned them to his skull.

He whispered something barely intelligible.

“What?” said Penn, leaning down. “You want it out…?”

Henry drew in one tremble of breath, made a roundabout gesture with one hand. When Penn just shook his head in confusion, Henry raised his voice. “Leave it there,” he said. “Make a scarecrow of it.”

Penn grinned slowly, then nodded. “For the garden. Right. Yeah. We can dress it up in some of your old clothes or something.” Then righting himself on the seat of the backhoe, he brought the engine back to life and managed to uproot the rest of the tangled thicket without disturbing the post where it remained, leaning like an old ruin, dark and scarred, a remnant of centuries-old hickory and hurt.

But Henry could not continue in his work. He turned his back on the post and walked the freshly fertile ground to Samuel, who was now gnawing fistfuls of fresh grass. As Henry plucked grass from his lips, the child began to whimper and then wail in outrage. Henry lowered himself to his knees, grasping the child's crabby face in his hands and looking down at him with bright sadness and satisfaction. Again, he reckoned with the full enormity of the change in himself. The change was a disturbance and more: a deeper, astonishing resolution. For a moment, in the golden almost-liquid beauty of the afternoon, he felt that his daughter had finally fallen silent. Her mouth was shut, the ink in her notebooks dry. His grief felt less like the crushing of his chest and more like the memory of the crushing. Was the worst of his pain over? Was that possible?

Henry walked to the kitchen to make a gold rush for two: bourbon with lemon and honey over ice. He passed the site of the original kitchen fifteen yards from the house, a kitchen that was razed when they filled in the old ice well. He had been seven then, just a kit in the yard, his mother a minx. He passed a hand over his eyes, weary and wary of his old mind.

As he arranged two icy tumblers on an old silver tray, a gem Lavinia had bought at auction in Nashville on a horse-buying trip, the landline shrilled. His hand jerked, and a tumbler shattered to shards in the white ceramic basin of the sink.

When he grasped up the receiver, the voice—firmly lodged in the nose and unmistakably northeastern—said: “Mr. Forge? Hello, I'm so glad to have reached you. I'm the assistant to M. J. Deane. I'd like to congratulate you on your amazing horse.”

“Thank you very much.”

“I'm sure you're getting more interview requests than you can field, but my employer would very much like to interview you for a book on Kentucky history and horse racing. Would you be at all interested in participating?”

Henry was silent for a moment, trawling through the recesses. The name flicked at the edges of familiarity.

Into the silence the woman said, “Deane writes mysteries, but also general nonfiction. Perhaps you have read some of the books, or at least seen them around. Or articles in
The New Yorker.
On cuisine, mostly.”

The food articles—yes, that rang a bell. And, of course, he realized now, he'd seen the books in airports. With one careful hand, he reached down to arrange the glass shards, which littered the sink. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I believe we can work something out.”