The Sport of Kings (67 page)

“Cotton?” Reuben tucked into position, his eyes turned to sharp, side-slicing daggers. “Remember Fort Pillow, motherfucker.”

They exploded out of the gate like doves from a cote. Down the far stretch they flew, Hellsmouth flapping around at the rear, spending energy and spending time. Dragooned for the third time into this public humiliation, Reuben tucked his crop and let her drag her feet all the way to the quarter pole; he understood now she was just stalking her prey.

At the sloping curve, the bundled pack switched leads as one, shifting and settling out of their steady pace for a brief moment. A mount or two fell away or bore out. Reuben had been waiting lynx-eyed for the speed shift; tucked close to Hell's withers, he staked a tenuous balance atop the brief irons and, with his silks billowing, flashed back the crop so it struck with a single, smart snap. Two things happened at once: Hellsmouth jetted forward with a locomotive force so sudden and propulsive that Reuben's boots slipped the irons and he thumped onto her back with a jarring, graceless plop; and a shoe dislodged from the hoof of a bay colt ahead of them in traffic, so the aluminum ring flung threw the air like a boomerang, and just as Hell stretched low in her deepening forward lunge, it spun over her head and struck Reuben in the nose where he sat without irons on the filly's back. In what the Laurel Park announcer would call “a testament to Walker's athleticism and training and not impossible for competitors of this caliber” and what the backstretch would call “A GODDAMN FUCKING MIRACLE,” Reuben remained upright in the saddle, though his eyes rolled back to white, his head flopping grotesquely on his neck as the world went absent. Somehow his hands maintained their death grip on the reins and in less than two seconds, he was coming to, his feet reclaiming the irons by instinct, his bony rump risen high, his broken nose gushing blood down the front of his purple Forge silks. “Haw!” he cried woozily, and Hell responded to his fresh balance. She opened up beneath him, her stride extended to an almost magical length, so she was airborne a split second longer than any horse Reuben had ever ridden or the crowd had ever seen. She didn't run at full stride, she leaped, her long body an airfoil. The horses around her—confounded colts under their desperate, whipping jocks—appeared to slow against her blistering speed, which only increased as she burned through the remaining pack, war-striped with Reuben's blood and streaking over the line a full seven lengths ahead of the pack.

Pandemonium erupted as the rest of the field trickled under the wire. The crowds rose in a screaming burst and flash bulbs exploded, so Laurel Park was bright as a sun. Hellsmouth had barely broken a sweat under Reuben, who was busy recovering himself, swiping at his nose with his sleeve and neglecting even to raise a hand in victory. When they moved into the winner's circle, he slapped away concerned hands, accepting only the silken houndstooth handkerchief of a competing owner, who said, “Well, there's a broken nose and no doubt about it.”

Hermès silk was soaking up the crimson flow when Mack made it to his side and placed a steadying hand on his boot. Reuben leaned down, his eyes all business even as he fought a hard faint, his wide pupils black bottomless pots. “She look okay? She pull? Felt something funny at the wire.” He was slipping in a daze from the saddle.

Mack pushed him back upright with both hands. “She looked good, but it's one hell of a picture you're gonna take. You got goddamn mettle, Reuben, I'll give you that.”

They were a strange admixture of animal and man: a gleaming thousand-pound horse topped by a bleeding bird of prey, stars whirling in his eyes, a trainer scowling under a white Stetson, and Allmon at Hell's foamed mouth. His face conveyed not victory but a bleak abeyance, as if he didn't know where he was, or how he came to be here. “Look here, look right here!” said the photographer with some impatience, because Allmon kept turning aside. He was looking for Henry Forge, who was nowhere to be seen.

Barely leaning, lest he faint and tumble into a heap of anorectic limbs, Reuben whispered from the catbird seat, “What do you say we have us a drink, soldier. Swap prison tales!”

Allmon shook his head faintly, his face whitewashed. “I don't drink…,” he said, but the hesitation in his voice was plain.

“Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. Smile for the camera, all and sundry!”

The eye of fame blinked and captured them.

*   *   *

“Sir, what can I get for you?”

Henry was staring past the stewardess, his gaze fixed on the fat, white cotton boll moon. It filled the whole of the opposite window, its planar seas and gradations clear in the rarefied heights of their flight. A jagged line was scribbled on its surface, a question that repeated itself again and again, scrawled in his daughter's hand: Is there a difference between happiness and joy, and why can I feel neither?

“May I get you something to eat or drink?”

He should have been celebrating with Mack, holding court with the local news station, fielding questions from the
Times
and the
Racing Form
. He should have been telling Allmon the truth and setting the world back on its axis. Instead, he was returning to his grandchild as quickly as technology allowed. There was no time to waste. His life was caught in a war of attrition and Death was scattering his strongest troops: his singular focus and his old convictions.

“Sir, is there anything you need?”

Need? Yes, he needed to know that his grandson had eaten well, that he was sleeping in peace, that he would be kept safe from all the dangers of the world. To his own astonishment, his chest was full of the most blissful emptiness, wherein he discovered only one thing: Samuel. He realized this was love. It had nothing to do with his happiness, which was nonexistent. He wasn't sure yet about joy.

*   *   *

In a Thunderbird the color of money, Reuben rolled them round to a shack way out in the deeps of Howard County, west of Clarksville, what might have been a speakeasy or a juke joint back in the day, but aslant now and barely standing, filled to busting with grooms, hotwalkers, and a few slumming jocks. Thick light streamed through frosty porthole windows and a general din pulsed the walls. When Reuben burst through the tavern door with Allmon at his heels, reluctant and wary as a deer, they were nearly thrown back by an odorous wall of rank armpits, sodden bar mats, urinal cakes, and unmopped floors. At the sight of Reuben's wizened mask of abuse—grotesque purple nose and great slices of bruise beneath his eyes—all heads swiveled round. Then the room loosed a drunken roar, raising fists and pint glasses, and Reuben raised triumphant matador arms.

“Doo-dah!” he cried, sashaying into the crush of handshakes and shoulder slaps. He tossed back a sly whisper to Allmon, “Tap, tap, Endman. Give them what they think they want, but keep your eyeballs open.”

As expected, theirs were the only black faces in the room.

“How's that nose, Reuben?”

“Nought but a scratch!” he said, squeezing his way toward a tiny four-top.

“Had it coming, Reuben! No broke bones in two years—”

“Them's the wages!” He pointed an impossibly misshapen finger at the nearest barkeep. “Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses!” Allmon had barely found a chair when sloppy shots were slung before them. He eyed the glass, eyed Reuben's dangerous grin, and, with the new reality snapping at his heels, drained it. What else was there to do? He felt smoke curl out of his nose. When the smoke cleared, there was only Henrietta's face before him. Allmon bowed his head, breathless.

Reuben leaned across the table, the dim overhead lights casting mean shadows across his mangled face. “How are you liking our dirty business, prison kid?”

Allmon remained motionless, his eyes down. “On my way up.” The words were outside of him as if belonging to someone else. He suddenly wanted his own mind, and all of its life-roughened texture, to be shredded away. He wanted desperately to be drunk.

“On the house—congrats, Reuben!” The barkeep sloshed down a second round.

Shot glass to his puckered lip, Reuben said, “Well, tell me then—why dost thou bow thy head and wring thy hands thusly?”

Allmon looked up; he'd been unaware of the clustered knot of his fingers, how he kneaded them from the thick knuckle to the nail tip. There was a tiny fissure of anguish between his brows.

Reuben narrowed his sly eyes. “Do I detect a note of worry over the death of … hmmm … a little white gal, perhaps? I swear you went pale as a paddy earlier today! Was she your precious little fig? Did she catch your cock one day when she was out angling for exotic fish? You know how white girls love to gnaw on Negro dick now and agai—”

“To Reuben!” someone cried before Allmon could rise and separate Reuben's head from his neck. Reuben smiled into the crowd with wide eyes and a feint of delighted surprise. But the smile was cut from cruel cloth.

A man stumbled into his side with a bear's embrace. “Nobody can bring down this son of a bitch, not even a flying horseshoe and Boomie Racz! Toast! Toast!” And the cry was raised again, and now two grooms—Barney and Truss—slid into the other two empty seats with yet another round, but even as their glasses sparked empty beneath the tavern's grimy lights, Reuben leaped to the seat of his chair and, with hands to his Pan hips, cried, “Toast? Why, sure! I'd like to take this opportunity to praise an old friend who holds me tight and never lets me go! Raise a glass to Jeff Davis—may he be set afloat on a boat without compass or rudder, then that any contents be swallowed by a shark, the shark by a whale, whale in the devil's belly and the devil in hell, the gates locked and the keys lost, and further, may he be put in the north west corner with a south west wind blowing ashes in his eyes for all ETERNITY. Say aye if ye mean aye!”

“Aye!” Sloshing glasses punctured the smoky air above their heads. Reuben perused the scene with a sharp, slaten eye.

“Are you happy, Reuben? Your purse is getting fat!”

He grabbed at his cock. “It is!”

“Speech!”

He leaned down and pounded his fists once, twice on his table and rocketed upright. “Speech?” he cried. “Why, no soul wants to hear a speech tonight! Let's play a game instead!” He swooped up his drink, threw it back, and the bar followed suit. With flint whimsy, Reuben hollered over the din: “Fellers and fellerettes, free shots for the winner of the interlocutor's quiz!” He stomped about in a small circle on his chair as if it were a dirty shingle. “Tell this here jock, why are there no Thoroughbreds of ebon hue?” He gazed around, then tossed up his hands. “Black, you idiots, black!”

“There are!” called someone near the tap.

“Nyet! Not jet! Not one of you critters has seen a true black on the track!” And it was true; they hadn't.

“I'll drink it myself, then,” he snarled, and upended his shot. “All the pretty horses descend from the black, but interbreeding dilutes the majestic purity! Now the blackest black is merely muddy brown!” His chin crumpled under a swooping fishtail frown, but he winked at Allmon.

“Another!” someone yelled. “I ain't drunk yet!”

“Yes, yes, let me amuse you, please,” Reuben hissed. Then, trumpeting through the tight embouchure of his lips: “Yokels! Riddle me this: How came I to be a tin soldier? Where are my esteemed brethren? Black predecessors once ruled this unruliest of sports!”

Proudly, as if coughing up a pearl, their neighbor slapped the table and blurted, “Jim Crow.”

A flap of a disdainful hand. “I see you know your minstrel show, but no, no, Paddy, no. Once upon a glorious time, we won every Derby, snatched every purse. But the vain rascals of the North conspired against the Sons of Ham. They staged a coup! And the Negro, once so dominant, was ousted! Why, Willie Sims himself had to grovel for a ride! Sorry, no shots for my dear friends … not tonight anyway!”

“Ahahahahahaw!” The room roared and they drank and Reuben glowered through snaky eyes, slipping down from his dais perch and plopping into his seat.

The room was full pickled, and Allmon too. Five shots in, there ensued a fabulous unraveling. As he sat marveling at the curiously dead weight of his tongue, thinking it a relief to be freed from memory, he was dragged up from the table by one elbow and yanked gracelessly again through the roiling, rowdy crowd. Reuben was a tiny man, but all muscle and trouble.

Back at the half-empty table, Truss shook his head and leaned blearily toward his companion. “Man, I get sick of that shit.”

“What?” said Barney.

“It's always black this and black that,” said Truss. “Like bad shit didn't happen to anybody else.”

Barney nodded. “I know. Things have changed.”

“I mean, there were white slaves too. People forget that.”

“Yeah, people totally forget that.” They clinked their glasses and sloshed whiskey.

The season ripped the door from Reuben's hand, the wind as cold as Christmas. He and Allmon stumbled into a night of river-bottom black; yes—overhead the faint stars wobbled like the light of steamboats spied from below. Allmon looked at their vague and nameless number, his head beginning to spin on what remained of his sober sense. Ungoverned, his tongue blurted, “Eight years ago, I lost every … but I got a deal … I'm the devil.”

Half-distracted with machinations and manipulations, all manner of chaos on the tip of the rapscalliest tongue, Reuben swung round in the dark and peered hard at Allmon. “Come again, little nut? What business is this? Are we speaking of the pale lily and her get? Were you by any chance the sire?”

Allmon weaved and stumbled back against the aluminum siding of the building, huddling under the meager eave, burrowing into his jacket against the weather, against reality. He shook his head.

“But…” Reuben sidled. “You expected you were?”