The Sport of Kings (80 page)

When Hell was tied and secure in the trailer, she lowered her head to gaze out the slide window at the cameras. She raised her lips at the press and stamped dreadfully. At pasture, on the track, or tied in an aluminum box, she knew she was the gift. And she knew they knew it too.

Henry turned to Lou and lifted Samuel out of her arms. “Thank you,” he said simply, then hauled himself into the Chevy's bucket seat and looked at Mack and said, “We're done here, Mack. You're too hard on horses.”

Mack, who had charged after them, raised one red hand, as rough and cracked as an old, worn baseball glove, and pointed directly at Henry. “You listen to me good, Forge,” he said, then made a circling gesture at the press. “Listen, all you assholes. You think I'm hard on horses? You think I'm tough? Well, I'm the only one in this fucking place who knows what respect looks like! All you critics writing your shitbit reviews, you Monday morning quarterbacks that can't even throw a spiral, you actually think it's a
virtue
”—his lips trembled—“to coddle a great talent? To rein in the best of the very best? Listen to me, if you got the fire, then you burn! You don't throw fucking ashes on it! You don't tamp it out!” He pointed into the trailer at Hell, and she looked right at him with one black, half-wild eye. “It's better to be great and break down than to never be great at all. She knows it, I know it, and anybody with any goddamn courage knows it. That filly's got bigger balls than the rest of you put together!”

Henry settled Samuel on the seat beside him and inserted the key. Allmon pressed against the crowd—that is my son, that is my child—but try as he might he couldn't get through the crush of press that surrounded the trailer like a security detail. Panic flooded him.

Mack stepped up to the driver-side door. Even as his head seemed to balloon visibly with a fury that threatened to burst his eyeballs, his voice was steady and hard. “Don't do this, Henry,” he said. “Don't you turn on that goddamn truck. Listen to what I'm saying. Listen to what that horse's body is saying.”

The truck engine roared to life.

Mack punched at the air and took a single step forward. His voice was so loud, they damn near heard him on the other side of Churchill Downs. “You bring her back to me, Henry!” he yelled as the truck pulled out with the trailer. “Either she's on my farm in one week for the Preakness, or I'm gonna come get that filly myself, and she's going all the fucking way! Do you hear me, HENRY? ALL THE MOTHERFUCKING WAY!”

*   *   *

Henry sped eighty miles an hour down I-64. The Kentucky acres sweeping past, he was buffeted by wave after wave of realization. This horse—this life—was his patient, always had been, always would be. The soul was not an essence but a doctor. The salve was not medication or temporary rest or painkillers, but his action in the world under the aegis of his will. Yes. I, Henry Forge, swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea, and I take witness to all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following oath and agreement: I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts. If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all humanity and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my life.

Henry looked toward the bloodred sky of diminishing day and wondered whether there was forgiveness in it. Who was his doctor? Did he even deserve one? His eyes filled with tears and they turned the sky to a crimson wash, so it seemed he was peering through tears of blood. He would be home in an hour.

*   *   *

They were gone—the cameras, the press, the crowds. It was so quiet now you could almost hear the monarchs winging over the milkweed and wallflower and the pollen tumbling through the breeze. Allmon was squatting with his palms flat against the outside wall of the barn, the exit to nowhere within his sights, when he detected the distinct patter of a featherweight approach, fleet feet ferrying a man on the run. On those feet followed an unmistakable voice, a squeal on gravel with its faux jaunty no-care air: “I jumped in the seat and gave a little yell; the horses ran away, broke the wagon all to hell; sugar in the gourd and honey in the horn, never been so screwed since the day I was b— Allmon, as I live and breathe! Why so forlorn, my man?”

Allmon didn't look up, he didn't have to. His head remained bowed, as if the crumbled mulch between his feet required the whole of his concentration, but all he saw before him was his son's face. “Go away,” he hissed. It was barely a whisper, but the force of hate in his words surprised even him. He couldn't take any more today. He couldn't take any more ever.

Reuben reared back. “What? Who? Me? What has dear Reuben done?”

Allmon came up unsteadily from his crouch, so he rose with the height and clumsy movement of a bear to turn heavily on Reuben. “Forge left. He took Hell and left.” There was more, but he couldn't form the words.

Reuben's mouth smiled slowly with a pained draw, and a single veiny hand drifted to his chest with cold, calculated surprise. “Withdrew her out from under this here jock?”

“Withdrew.” The word was disgusting, vile. It was violent. It smashed the whole of hope.

Reuben shook his head and whistled softly. “Jockey claims foul…”

Allmon practically spat words through rising grief. “Nobody's running that horse again, not even you—the great Reuben Bedford Walker III!”

“Are you sure about that?” Reuben's slaten eyes never wavered from Allmon's face.

“I'm done!” And then Allmon forced the worst words. “He took my son!”

Reuben cocked his head. “Your what?”

“That motherfucker lied to me! He's raising up my son!”

Now Reuben reared back cartoonishly with a surprise that even he couldn't hide. “By Jove and Elegua…,” he whispered.

Allmon stretched his arms wide. “My fucking child! My child's in his house! I'm standing here and all I got in my hand is the keys to his fucking car. I'm sick, I need money. I need my own child! And all I got after all this,
all
of it—is some keys.” He stared down at the keys, heavy as a heart in his hand. Yes, men like Forge had the keys to everything.

Reuben shook his head and regained his bearings; he leaned forward with narrowed, coy eyes. “Out of the saddle and into the dirt—thereby hangs but not ends a tale. Snatched swaddlings aside, what about the horse? Riddle me this—do you or do you not have a deal with Mr. Forge? Surely the deal still stands and the filly must race to the end of the season. Of course”—Reuben cleared his throat—“Mack would take the reins if Forge were to become … indisposed. All's well that ends well, isn't that what they say when there's something rotten in Kentucky?”

Now the impossible highs and lows of the day had worn Allmon's self-control to a bloody nub. His child's face swam before his aching eyes. It was all he could do not to shake the jock right out of his simpleness; he wanted to pick up his scrawny 118-pound carcass and separate it from his chicken neck. “I made a deal with the devil!” He said it too loud and too slow, as if the jock were not only hard of hearing but stupid too. “No clause for withdrawing the horse! All I was supposed to do was keep her healthy, but nobody never said he couldn't pull her. I got nothing. You hear me?” Then a sneaking thought: Forge lied, but I sold my child. My soul is as rotten as old fruit. He wanted to weep, but this was grief beyond weeping.

Reuben's whole body grew utterly still, except for his fingertips, which twitched, and his eyes, which grew full of unfathomable things. With the speed of a striking snake, his arm swept through the crook of Allmon's arm. The taller man was jerked from the barn wall with a hissing command and inhuman strength, which was the hard secret of the jock's body: “Come along, my little wingnut. Come with me.” A mismatched pair; Reuben tugged him toward the border of a parking lot, away from prying eyes, but no one was watching them now, they were of no interest to anyone; no one cared now that the superhorse was gone.

When Reuben spoke again, his voice was winsome and savage in equal measure. “Now hear this,” he said. “The story's not even over and you're already telling it wrong! That's the problem with you—you never learned to tell a story slant, never learned to tell your own. Why, not once have you wooed me with swashbuckling tales of your days on the streets, your adventures in prison! You're too obedient by far, dragging your chains in resignation! Even when they've snatched your darling mtoto!” The jock shrugged and sighed. “But what can old Reuben do? Some are born to be kings, and some are content to be jewels on the king's sleeve. Maybe it's in the blood.”

Allmon didn't listen with his old defended silence, his brooding brow shielding his eyes and overhanging his heart. He whirled to face the jock. “Why you always schooling me? I don't need your fucking lectures! Do this, do that, talking nonsense. You don't know shit about me!” But behind his words, he thought: Blood? My blood is poisoned. Momma gave me bad blood. A dying man wouldn't drink my blood to save his own life.

Reuben reared back on his booted heel, the lines of his starved face like knife tracks down brown bread. “Is that right? I don't know you? You think Reuben is a four-foot fool and ignorant as all that? Why, you're transparent as glass! You're nothing but a little nug of amber, and old Reuben can see clear through you to the other side!” He pressed his face up toward Allmon's. “You think I don't know the sobstory streets you grew up on? I smell government cheese on your breath, you got blisters on your thumbs from selling cut-rate crack! Concrete clefts in your eyes, bones broke by the police! Your daddy's fled and your mama's dead! You turned your back for one second and they stole your baby just like they always do! You think Reuben's ignorant? Well, maybe you need to recognize just how much I recognize!”

Allmon was already talking over Reuben's talk, features smeared with disgust and alarm. “That's all you think I am? That's it?”

Reuben waved a dismissive hand. “One man's stereotype, another man's award-winning performance. So you followed the script designed to mold you. They call you a brute born to a single mama, raised on welfare, sent to juvie, then prison, a man who walks out on his child and now shovels shit. Oh, you want their approval, but from now till eternity, they'll feed you just enough scraps off their plate to keep you hanging around their knees with your tongue lolling out. You won't starve to death, Allmon, but you'll always be their bitch.”

Allmon roared, “I got nothing! All I've been doing, I've been trying to survive! The rules help them, not me! I didn't make this world, but I got to survive in it! The game wasn't designed for nobody but them to win!”

“Shhhh, I get it, I get it,” Reuben whispered, glancing over his shoulder to determine the limits of their privacy. Then with something that looked like compassion, he said, “You think I don't understand the dreams you nurse in that big old coxcomb of yours? Think I don't know you pissed your drawers the first time you laid eyes on these big old Kentucky mansions with their pretty horses running rounds? Their frosty girls and money-colored grass? Oh, but you didn't just want the money, did you, my dear? Oh no—Allmon Shaughnessy wanted the dream!” Reuben searched for ammunition in Allmon's distressed face. “The dream of the Deep. Dark. Southland.” He paused with the tip of his pink tongue between his teeth. “Well, has Reuben got the shock of a lifetime for you, Yankee Doodle Doo. Kentucky ain't the Deep South; it's the minstrel of the United States! Just a white nigger dandied up and trying to pass as an aristocrat! Haw!”

Allmon pressed a hand to his forehead as if to ward off the dim aura of a migraine. “I don't even want to know what you're talking about now.”

But Reuben was six feet tall and rising. There was no stopping him. “This land right here under your clumsy-ass feet? Why, this here's the No-Man's-Land, the Borderland, the Dark and Bloody Ground, the In-Between, the Slaughterhouse, the Wild Frontier—the original Nameless Place! But they won't tell you that in school, no sirree!” Reuben spread his skinny arms as if to gather his powers. “See, back in the good ole cotton-picking days, all these plantations here—yes, my little almond, these plantations you so lust after—they grew corn to the eye and horses to the sky. Hickory-boned colts put cash in Kentucky coffers. But this here Commonwealth had a PR problem, didn't they? The piss-yella Yanks were scared to death of our dark idyll, our low-down disordered hell! A hundred and twenty counties of bourbon and murder, thick with backward woodsmen and outlaws fond of affrays and fucking, an uncivilized land of barkers and daredevils and gunslingers, horse raiders and assassins, barn burners and Klansmen. A damnable district of dopers and dastardly deeds—whippings and murders and baleful butchery! Kaintuckee meant scrapings from the devil's boot!” He yelped a sharp rebel yell.

“Why, there wasn't one man in a hundred willing to brave our races for fear of getting shot, so they started building tracks in New Jersey and New York. Pimlico purses got plump, Saratoga got sass, and the races ran like a Longines. Now, the perfidious paddy jocks wanted their share of the take, because we brothers were the best, and they couldn't gain a nose against us. So what do you think they did? Why, they staged a coup, of course, and blocked us from our own best game—they ousted us! Soon money was a river running north. Woe and lamentation! The Borderland went bust!”

Reuben leaned in. “So, what's a sweet little state to do in the face of bad press?”

Allmon didn't want to hear any more. He was growing increasingly ill with every word.