The Sport of Kings (51 page)

“Can you walk?”

He turned, but her face was distorted by his fun-house pupils. He took one wobbly, wasted step.

“Let's go outside,” she said, “and get some fresh air. Try not to bleed on everything.”

She had one arm wrapped around his shoulder as she led him out of the barn into the shocking, undiluted light of day. Allmon could barely open his eyes against it. When they didn't stop immediately, when he sensed their general trajectory toward the white farm truck, which was parked in the precipitous noon shadow of a barn wall, he began to resist.

“Let's get you to the hospital,” Henrietta said.

Allmon didn't reply; he just wrenched his arm out of her hands and shoved his back against the barn wall, inadvertently knocking his head against the boards. The air went out of him in a surprised puff.

“Whoa,” Henrietta said, watching as Allmon sank down against the spiky grain of the wall, breathing hard, blood still trickling. He squashed bright splashes of marigold beneath him as he sank into the mulch.

“No, no, no, no way,” he said.

“You really should.” Henrietta curbed her tongue and didn't say, It's more for our protection than yours. She said it through the distraction of the sharp smell of his sweat and the muskier underlying message of his body.

“No!”

The word burst from him, as hard and abrupt as a bark, but it was the unexpected look on his face that truly surprised her—ferocious, but with some mysterious, angry passion. There was no arguing with it. So, perplexed, Henrietta sank down on her haunches and took his face in her hands. When he tried to pull away, she snapped, “Stop.” Then, gentler: “You've got a pretty deep scrape. I think either Acheron hit your nose or you bumped it on the wall. Either way, you'll have a black eye tomorrow.”

He made a dismissive face.

“Well, you need to stop the bleeding.”

She made a move as if to rise, but he wrenched his polo up in his fist and pressed it as a bundle to the side of his head. The skin of his belly was exposed to the cool air and in a moment he was covered in goose flesh.

Henrietta was unsure what to do then, half-risen, but then settled beside him in the mulch with her forearms resting on her knees and her fingers shredding the delicate lace of a fern's leaf. For some time, they simply sat there in the sunlight until she said, “Are you tired of us yet?”

“Who?” he muttered.

“Southerners.”

He was kind of dizzy; he had no idea what she was talking about. His disordered breathing had just begun to settle into its regular rhythm.

“We're incredibly annoying,” she said, watching as one of their colts was led out of his paddock by a long-term employee. “If you can listen to our tall tales for more than fifteen minutes, you're a saint. But it's all just rocksalt and nails.” She looked at Allmon sideways. “I'll let you in on a little secret: we're just an insecure species in a vanishing ecosystem. A conquered nation. The only power a Southerner really has is to never forgive and never forget. It's not worth much.”

Allmon closed his eyes to stave off nausea, which Henrietta saw only as a dark listening, a quiet absorption that fed something in her.

“Honestly, though?” she said. “I think Northerners are worse than Southerners. They think they're better than us because they survive the world's shittiest weather and they're convinced of the religious retardation of the South. They're ignorant but arrogant. Southerners, on the other hand, know perfectly well they're ignorant; the problem is they're proud of it.” She cleared her throat. “My mom had the right idea—she just left the country.” Henrietta looked down; there was much more than an ocean between them now after all these years. Monthly phone calls were the height and breadth of it.

If she wasn't going to stop, he might as well get something out of it. Allmon said, “When'd your father get this place?”

She sighed, capping her head with her hands and looking out wearily at a paddock. “A long, long, long time ago.”

Carefully, he said, “What's he like?”

She looked at him with irritation. She didn't want to talk about her father.

“Ask me why I do what I do,” she said suddenly.

“What do you mean?” He tried to turn his head, but pain swamped him and he cringed. He maintained the pressure of the polo to his temple.

“Why do you think I do what I do?”

Allmon didn't have to hesitate. “'Cause you got family.”

“It's less noble than that,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe it's because my father didn't want me to go to college, and my mother left me here to my own devices, and I don't know how to do anything else.” Another sigh and then she said, “So have you figured out that my dad's a huge racist?”

Allmon reared back slightly, almost laughed from a whole different kind of discomfort.

She shrugged. “He's from a different generation. We're not all like that.”

It took every bit of his strength and self-control for Allmon not to roll his eyes. Oh man, white girls and their … His mind paused. He leveled a long, considering glance at the house. This information felt like a little key in his pocket.

He was quiet so long, it was as if he'd forgotten Henrietta. She chewed on her pink lip, her face querulous. Then she looked in the opposite direction, away from the fences and horses, toward the generative east and the earth that lay rumpled there like something discarded. She said cryptically, “It used to be wild here. And green.”

Green, exactly! His first day on the farm rolled around again like a bright white horse on a carousel: the green had hurt his eyes like it was hurting them now; everything was lime and kelly and forest, with trees and grass and streams in every direction, just so much … green. These folks—people like her—could walk out into all that green anytime they wanted because they owned it. Green was white.

“Are you feeling much pain?” she said, then she reached out and, in a gesture that felt unfamiliar to both of them, gently touched his shoulder.

He surprised her by laughing abruptly. Not just a chuckle, but a laugh that transformed from a cough to a rough sound that rolled out of the center of him. His shoulders shook and tears sprang suddenly to his eyes.

“What?” she said warily.

“You think this is pain?” he said. “Shit. Let me tell you, when I was in two months, I saw a man get killed right beside me. Like far away as you are. We was—were walking down the hall to the yard and some dudes were coming back and this brother in front of me reached out with a shank and just sliced this other dude's belly open. Like left to right and up. Opened up his belly and his guts came out.”

“Jesus,” said Henrietta in a whisper.

Allmon didn't even notice. “Your guts ain't red like you think they'll be. They're gray. And not big.”

Then two things happened at once: he realized Henrietta was staring at him with a gaze as bright as a shadeless bulb, and he remembered his vow to never breathe a word of his life inside. He clamped his eyes shut and she said, much to his surprise, “Your life has been hard.”

Set against the backdrop of his existence, it was absurd undertalk and should have made him angry, but it didn't. It was just simple, true. When she reached forward and lifted the polo away from the cut to check the bleeding, he didn't open his eyes, but he didn't resist. She said, “Do you know who Darwin was?”

Now he opened his eyes and looked at her sharply from the side.

“Right, sorry.” She cleared her throat. “Well, there's this story about Darwin that's always stuck in my mind. You know, he came up with the theory of evolution in part because of finches he studied from the Galápagos Islands. But when he first got to Chatham Island, it was really more a disappointment than anything. It looked to him like … a furnace, like a geological furnace. It looked stripped of life; there was ash on the air and it was inhabited mostly by lizards. But it was in a place that first struck him as a hell on earth that he found the key to the best idea anyone ever though up. He found the key to life.”

Allmon was listening carefully, but Henrietta suddenly shrugged and looked away, as if she too had divulged something a little too personal and now felt rather foolish.

“It looks like you've stopped bleeding,” she said suddenly. “You can get a clean shirt in the office. If you need to take an early day, that's fine.” Then she rose and was moving abruptly away into the sweet, Southern glamour of the property—barns like summer blacktop, coins glittering in the streams, and, of course, the house: solitary, steeped in morning light, proud, and perfect. A thing built to last. How he burned to go inside.

“Hey!” Allmon called out, sitting up straighter, the sudden movement striking his nose and forehead like a fresh blow.

Henrietta turned and lowered her head. “What?”

“You should come back and talk to me sometime. You got interesting things to say. I appreciate that.” And he smiled the first smile she'd ever seen on his face, however unsettling.

*   *   *

He made a point to watch her from across the fields, from the far end of the barn, from the next stall. And when she turned to look, he didn't turn away.

*   *   *

Lou had come again with her quiet hands and reassuring voice, checking the articulate muscles of the foal's neck, palpating her velvet jaw, walking watchful circles, probing the recesses of her mouth back to the slick muscles of the jaw. But there was nothing to be found except the undeniable fact of excellence; the foal was exceptionally fine. The mouth problem was not a problem at all, just a tic.

And yet Henry was uneasy. He called Henrietta down after Lou left, fretting and insisting that she see it herself.

He said, “Her dentition is perfect, her bite is good. But look.”

Henrietta watched as the foal, now almost ninety days old, turned aside, fixing them squarely in the big globe of her brown eye, then tossed her head with her mouth working. Her lips curled out and back twice, then fluttered loosely, almost comically on the breath.

“Good God,” she said, “is she grinding her teeth? Is she in pain? These inbred horses—”

“No, no. Lou said she's just working her lips and jaw.”

“So she's just mouthy.”

“I don't like it,” Henry said, folding his arms across his chest. “And I don't like that she still doesn't have a name.”

A small smile grew on Henrietta's face. “Why, Henry Forge, maybe she's trying to talk to you.”

“She needs a good name. She's going to be a beast.”

“I wonder what she's saying…”

“Bold Ruler was tough and Nasrullah was wild, so—”

“Oh!” Henrietta said, laughing.

She's out of Hellcat by Secretariat

Out of Seconds Flat by Second Chance

She speaks just like Xanthus, Achilles' charger

This is Hellsmouth, Father

“Let's name her Hellsmouth.”

*   *   *

Henrietta didn't wait very long; it was nature. It was the epithelium, dark with melanin, stretched taut over the soft architecture of muscles, striated and smooth, the fine wiring of the nervous system firing north and south, east and west; it was all that living bone, full of mineral and marrow and run through with red coal seams; bones stacked neatly to craft his six feet; the golden eye under the ledge of his brow under the strong vault of his cranium, its twenty-two bones so neatly placed they seemed arranged by hand; it was the curvy stack of the spinal column, the aborted wings of the scapula, the sharp clavicles and the belling ribs; the long fall of the arms; the hands and the feet, each a bony masterpiece of locomotion wrapped for travel in four muscular layers; the long pinnate muscles along the tibia, the strong bunching along the thigh; it was the basin of the pelvis, false and true, and the organs of generation, conducted by muscles and ligaments and fibers, the hanging scrotum, the vesicles, the prostate and Cowper's glands; and the sheathed root of the penis, the defiant, erectile body, the tender extremity with its timeless tunnel back to the seminal testes with their millions upon millions waiting in the dark.

She found him seated on an old mustard bench in the tack room, the bare bulb above him directing bright light onto his body but carving drastic, obscuring shadows onto his face. Tack was spread in all directions on old saddle blankets. A gallon of thick conditioner lay open and Allmon reached his hands into it, scooped out the white grease, and then worked it into the old bridles and saddles, their hides thirsty from neglect.

She saw him start when she upended an empty meal bucket to sit opposite him as he worked over the noseband of a bridle. He glanced at her askance and saw her scorched earth eyes. She seemed to burn at a higher temperature than everyone else. It made sweat prickle on his neck.

“You done working?” He'd saved up interesting things to tell her, but he couldn't find any of them now. His confidence seesawed.

“Yes,” she said. He nodded slowly, intent on his project, but her gaze was just steady, unrelenting, and she saw it clear as day when his breathing grew uneven.

“Tell me something,” she said.

He waited, the muscles of his shoulders bunched so tight his hands felt numb. Some premonition pinched the nerves along his broad back. He'd been looking for an in; was this it?

“You've spent some time with my father by now. What do you think he wants the most?”

It wasn't what he was expecting. He looked up quizzically as if she'd just offered up a riddle.

“Tell me as someone who's only just met him. Does he want a legacy, a family, a … what?”

Allmon actually stopped what he was doing and considered what she was asking. His voice was very quiet when he said, “A legacy. He wants folks to remember he was like a great man.”

Henrietta sighed. “Why do men care about that so much—to the extent where they're willing to breed horses to their own siblings, their own mother?”