The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  Then, like a bird, he was gone in an instant. But it was only when he reached his bedroom and slammed the door that his composure, so tenuous, shattered. He abandoned himself to the tears that really belonged to the Reverend, tears that had been dammed up for months. He cried and cried until there were no tears left and when he finally looked up with swollen eyes, the sun had slipped low and flung the room into shadow. The sounds of Marie’s bedtime rituals were long past, so he rose. Then wall by wall, item by item, he worked to memorize every detail of the apartment, because he knew he would never be here again, and then he got down on his knees on the hardwood floor and prayed to his father, something he had never tried before. Please come. Please come this Friday and save us. And, balanced on the slenderest plank of hope, he waited on Friday for Mike to come—for Mike, for God, for anyone to save them, but nobody did come, because nobody does.

  * * *

  The only place to go was down—down past the useless, spinning wheel of Knowlton’s Corner, down near the Mill Creek, which stank of feces and oil, down where the neighborhood disintegrated at its shiftless edges into Cumminsville, a noplace crumbling under the black shadow bands of the viaduct and I-74, where the houses were shambling, filthy, and few, overshadowed by the behemoth brownfields looted of their industry, windows shattered by rocks and bullets, down into forgottenness where few families lived and the ones who did lived in decay, in the bowels of the city. What’s worse than Helltown? This.

  Marie and Allmon took up residence in a tiny shotgun on Blair, a narrow side street three blocks southwest of Knowlton’s Corner. The tenant had just died of pancreatic cancer and the rent was $400, lowered a hundred dollars by the landlord—a distant cousin of the dentist Marie worked for. The house stood fifteen feet wide and three rooms deep: a dank front parlor and kitchen relieved only by a nicotine-browned window facing north, furnished with an orange, mildewed couch where Marie would sleep; a middle room, where Allmon would inflate a twin air mattress; and a bathroom in the back with a tiny square window that looked onto a tiny plot of shattered glass and nameless weeds. They had brought only what they could transport in the car, then the car was sold for two thousand dollars, and the money was gone in an hour, five months of rent prepaid. There was simply no way to move their old mattress or their dressers, which were left on the street and carried off by strangers. Allmon had brought his telescope, but he didn’t need a telescope to know that they had reached the edge of the world.

  Allmon stretched a polyester sheet across his mattress, taped a Bulls poster to the wall, then set the Reverend’s telescope in the bathroom to train its eye up and out of the tiny window to see what could be seen. That first night the sun fell like something wounded, and a triumphant night came up in all directions.

  Without his hearing, Marie stepped up behind him in the darkness of the room and with her gentlest voice said, “Allmon, I believe we’re going to make this place a home.”

  Without surprise, without turning, without otherwise acknowledging her presence, Allmon said, “You believe what you want, Momma. I don’t believe in nothing.”

  * * *

  Hope and reality were at cross purposes. The new plan wasn’t good or bad, just a plan. After school was dismissed, Allmon got off the bus at Chase and counted the doorways as memory dictated until he found what he hoped was the one, then he slipped around back and knocked on the rear door. There was no answer. He knocked once more, rapping hard, and when still no reply came, he stepped off the back porch, squinting up at the redbrick edifice, his hope flickering and dimming. “Come on,” he whispered softly, but he realized it was probably a stupid idea anyway—kick the pavement, curse the sky, crawl back into the barrel of the shotgun—

  “The fuck you want?”

  He whipped around and detected dark bands of face through the pale slatted blinds on the eastern side of the building. He could barely mutter the words through his nerves. “Aesop around?”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “Hey.” A deep, calm voice from a second-story window; Allmon recognized the slow sound immediately. He craned his neck and saw a shadow delineated by interior light. “It’s cool. Come on up.”

  In a moment he was through that back door and ascending the stairs, gathering his courage around him like a shawl, the clay mineral smell of a basement almost overwhelming him, a damp cool suckered from last night’s air. The creaking stairs led to a single wooden door, and he didn’t have to knock; it opened away from his fist, and the man was standing there in a wifebeater and black Bengals sweats, a suspicious look on his face.

  “Duckie sent you over here?”

  “Huh? Naw.” Allmon shifted awkwardly, staring at the doorframe, wishing suddenly he hadn’t come, but then blurting out, “This one time, I was walking around here and you was like, ‘You wanna make some money?’ and I was thinking maybe—”

  “Oh shit—Smartie!” And the man placed both his hands on the doorjamb and leaned back so the muscles of his biceps leaped under the skin, and he hollered laughter. “I remember! That was so motherfucking funny, I was like goddamn—you was running so fast! Yeah, I remember you. Like Carl Lewis and shit. Oh my God…”

  At first Allmon couldn’t tell whether he was the target of this laughter and his spirit quailed, but the man reached out, touched his shoulder once with a quick, guiding prod that was not unfriendly, and said, “Get on in here,” so Allmon entered the apartment, and the door closed on his old life.

  The man was still half laughing, but the laugh was no longer in his appraising eyes: “So now you back and you wanna make bank. How old you now?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Damn, time fly! Why ain’t you come back sooner?”

  Allmon shrugged.

  “What, you can’t talk?”

  He just shrugged again. “When I got something to say.”

  The man grinned slowly and glanced at his compatriot. “Respect, respect. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

  “You think you maybe got something for me to do?”

  The man lowered his chin fractionally, peered at him. “Maybe,” he said, then his hands reached forward and clamped down on Allmon’s shoulders. “You can run, you know what I’m saying. But not like run!” And he threw back his head and laughed, a laugh that bounded out from his belly with so much eruptive force that tears sprang to his eyes, and for the first time Allmon saw in that broad, cold face a real warming. He felt the gears of his own heart scraping into motion.

  Aesop wiped a hand over his eyes to stanch his laughter and eased onto a plastic seat at the kitchen table, his legs splayed and his elbow coming to rest on the table. “Motherfucking funny,” he said, and looked at Allmon sideways. He sighed and said, “When I’m like I need you to run Northside, I mean you need to run my shit. We cook over by the cemetery. You run from the factory to my boys, keep your eye on my lookouts, they let you know when the five-oh roll. But you got to work without drawing no attention to yourself. You understand what I’m saying? I don’t want you to run, motherfucker. I need you all calm and walking around and shit. Don’t be sneaking, don’t be nothing. You got to look like a niggah with no purpose.”

  As he took in these words, Allmon’s face was calm and only a slight twitching at the brow betrayed any fear. But there was no real surprise; his head might be trying to play naïve, but his heart had made its decision weeks ago, and his body had brought him here on that underground resolve, which registered only as a vague plan to make some money.

  From the table before him, Aesop picked up one small vial and rolled it between his fingers. “You run good for me, you make like a hundred a day.”

  “For real?”

  Aesop swagged his head, laughing with his friend and making mild fun. “For real.”

  Allmon just ducked his head, abashed.

  “Listen, Smartie,” Aesop said, and waited for him to look up. “You run hard, be sharp, you deal in a couple years. Then you make mad bank and chill on the corner,
you feel me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Then the man’s face grew very still, his eyes hooded. He pointed at the table where his gun lay. He said, staring into Allmon’s eyes, “This my piece, Southern Comfort. ’Cause it comfort the Southern brother.” Then he grabbed at his crotch. “And this here my big dick. ’Cause it fuck all the white bitches. And that shit comfort the Southern brother too!” His eyes brightened and he laughed a raucous laugh and pointed at his friend in the doorway, who just smiled and shook his head ruefully with his arms crossed over his chest. Then Aesop turned to Allmon, suddenly serious again. “You think we all thugs? You think you a thug?” he asked.

  Allmon didn’t know what to say. So he said, “You gonna give me a gun too?”

  The man scowled. “I don’t need no schoolkid wannabe thug round here. I don’t do stupid and messy, you feel me? I need smart niggahs. I know Marie ain’t had no stupid kid. If you do math, know how to long-range think, understand psychology, all that shit, that’s valuable to me, because I’m a entrepreneur. I run a successful business here. For real, I run this motherfucking hood, I govern. Fuck the police, you know what I’m saying, I’m the mayor.”

  Allmon nodded, but he was staring at that gun, at its cold black grace.

  “So couple years, yeah, then you get your own gravedigger. But you too young for that shit right now. Ain’t no need, just a accident waiting to happen. Now run hard. Be sharp. Who knows, maybe you be my accountant someday. Get all the bitches you want.”

  Allmon grinned.

  The man leaned in. “But don’t fuck with me, little man.”

  “Huh?” Allmon looked at him in alarm.

  And then in the quiet voice that in one sentence would delimit his future and fence it tight: “Don’t fuck with me, or I’ll fuck everything you love. Every. Thing. Every. One. I’m the mayor and the mafia and the motherfucking love. Understand?”

  Yes, Allmon understood, but he was already reaching out to shake the man’s offered hand. He’d already decided that life was a gamble and his best odds were in this house.

  * * *

  Marie never left the shotgun anymore, except to go to work, and when she returned, she slumped on the couch with her face to its back and didn’t move again unless she was forced to. She was beginning to miss more days than she worked, and she didn’t cook anymore. It took all of her energy—every ounce of self she possessed—simply to survive the pain that had engulfed her life. The change was breathtaking. This wasn’t the journey into adulthood she’d imagined as a young girl, the one that involved a husband and children. This was a journey with only one companion—illness—and it had taken from her everything that she understood as herself and replaced it with shattering pain.

  Allmon carried on as best he could without her. He became the cook of the house, sticking to a plain white diet bought cheap at the IGA: potatoes, rice, white bread, corn, eggs, and milk. And while he cooked, while he playacted the normalcy of a steady home, he turned an increasingly worried, surveying eye on Marie. He began to discover thick clumps of her wavy hair in the shower. At first he thought, Probably straightening made it fall out, but he was kidding himself. Marie had straightened her hair once about a year ago and hadn’t done it again. He noticed how she no longer painted her nails or wore lipstick or did any of the things he knew a woman did if her spirit was tilted toward the world of men. And now her hair was falling off her head, and he could see the ground of her scalp through what was left. What he saw was ugly, and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t.

  When he had saved three thousand exactly, he wrapped it in a rubber band and brought the roll to her, placed it on the coffee table. He said, “Momma.”

  Slow, slow, with enormous effort that made his stomach wrench with misgiving, Marie rolled over on the couch. Her eyes were red, raw, her face distorted by unmanaged pain, her hands like claws clutching at her collarbone. For a moment she squinted at the roll on the table, uncomprehending, then she looked right at him.

  Her voice was scratchy but clear: “No.”

  Allmon reached forward and pushed the bundle toward her and nodded his head once, a stubborn assertion.

  She shook her head. She shook it hard again and again. “Take that money back where you got it, Allmon, and don’t ever let me see it again.”

  “Momma, you know I can’t take it back.”

  Marie’s breath hitched. He couldn’t tell whether it was a gasp of astonishment or an aborted sob of a woman who’d long expected what was coming. Either way, she stared at Allmon through burning eyes and, despite the terrified pounding of his heart, enduring the stab of her complicated disappointment, he spoke up one more time. “It’s enough for the doctor and six months of rent.”

  Marie began to cry and pushed the money off the couch onto the floor and rolled over on her side on the couch again. Although she wouldn’t look at him or talk to him for two days, she didn’t say no again.

  * * *

  Doctor: Marie, how bad is the pain?

  Marie: It’s so bad, I can’t think anymore.

  Allmon: She can’t really open her eyes.

  Doctor: Well, you came up negative for Sjögren’s for now, but you really need to see a corneal specialist. These things tend to appear in clusters. Have you been using drops?

  Marie: They only help for like thirty seconds. I feel like I’ve got acid on my eyes.

  Doctor: How are you still able to work?

  Marie: I don’t have a choice. My bills …

  Doctor: Well, I wish I could tell you more from your tests, but there are so many rheumatological diseases and it’s not completely clear which one this is. We’ll probably know more at a later date. It’s normal for it to take a decade to show up more clearly in the blood.

  Allmon: What’s that mean?

  Doctor: It means your mother has a lot of the soft criteria for lupus, but not the hard criteria. But we really don’t need to worry about that. We’ll treat the symptoms. The diagnosis isn’t really important.

  Marie: No! The diagnosis is important! I can’t get disability without a diagnosis! I can’t keep going—I need that diagnosis!

  Doctor: Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t give it to you. And, frankly, you probably don’t want to mess with disability anyway. Even with a solid diagnosis, they almost always reject my patients the first couple of times, and it can take years to get through the appeals process if you get through at all. And that’s with a lawyer who knows what he’s doing. For now, we’ll just get you on a cocktail of drugs and—

  Marie: I don’t have insurance.

  Doctor: Oh. I see. And with these medical records, you’re ineligible. Well … the only other thing I can suggest is that we get you started on prednisone. It’s cheap and it works. Of course, sometimes the side effects of the drug can be worse than the disease.

  Marie: There’s nothing else?

  Doctor: Not really. Lupus doesn’t get much research. Mostly, colored women get it. There’s really nothing else to do but take steroids. We’re all still following a script that was written fifty years ago.

  * * *

  On the bus ride home, Marie leaned against Allmon with her eyes shut. Jostling next to him, she realized for the first time that the hard press of his shoulder blade was a smidge higher than hers. He was almost tall now, he might even grow to be six feet, but he was still too much the little boy, too much the child. Soft. That was her fault.

  “Momma, I don’t even know who I come from,” he said suddenly, his voice cutting into her thoughts.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, without opening her eyes.

  “I mean, I don’t even know who Grandpa’s grandparents was.”

  She sighed. “Allmon, honey, I can’t remember their names right now. The Reverend was good at remembering that stuff, not me. You grow up and you forget things.”

  “See, that’s what I mean!” he said angrily under his breath, and the edge in his voice surprised her. She steeled herself against the
pain, then opened her eyes to look at him.

  Allmon crossed his arms and continued, “You don’t know who you are if you don’t know where you come from.”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit!” Marie snapped with genuine irritation. “That’s just some black-pride Roots bullshit, and it’s always some black man saying it. You show me a black man who knows a single thing about real pride and I’ll give you a million dollars! Always thinking everyone hates them, always acting like thugs. Most white folks don’t hate you, Allmon; they just don’t care about you.” She made a dismissive sound and waved her stiff, swollen hand. Then her own words slotted home, and she thought, Maybe that’s worse.

  “You ain’t even listening to me,” Allmon said sullenly, and turned away from her, looking so much like the little boy he used to be—hooded eye, puffed-out lip—that it caught her breath. She felt the whooshing of time like a physical thing speeding past her and wanted mightily to turn and hold her baby boy, her little lamb, say everything’s going to be all right. But she couldn’t. She closed her eyes again and sat up straight on the pole of her spine. She breathed deeply and said, “Allmon, you think you need to know about the past? Why? ’Cause you don’t know enough about hurting yet? You think you need to know how your great-great-great-grandfather Scipio got himself out of Kentucky only to hang himself? Really? ’Cause I think staring down the past won’t get you anywhere. You need to grow up fast. Focus on the here and now. I want you to take that test and get into a good magnet school. And listen to me now: Whatever happens, I don’t want you hovering over me, you understand? I don’t want to see you crying or carrying on or dropping out of school. Become a doctor or lawyer or something. I let you get away with being soft for a long time, but that’s over. Now you’ve got to be a man.”

  He refused to look at her lest he cry. “Yeah, Momma.”

  “Yeah, okay, then.” And she leaned away from him into the cold of the bus window, where the condensation dampened the flushing fever on her cheek.

  * * *

  He did as he was told; he rounded up what remained of his boyhood and forced it into a shadowy pocket of his heart. It kicked and pounded for a while, but he closed his ears to it and his spirit soon evanesced into wounded silence. Instead, he studied on Aesop (caps, glocks, swagger, wit, threat, diamond signet ring on his pinkie), who his mother didn’t know a thing about, but then she didn’t know anything about being a man, what it was to be in your body, how you were born into obligation. A man’s whole life was a haymaker. So he continued to run in the afternoons after school. Sure, you weren’t supposed to lie, to cheat, to bribe, to hit, to sneak. But increasingly, the world of rules was being shown up for what it really was, a rigged system, a fixed game. You should be good, definitely—but only until you couldn’t, until everything you loved was on the line. It just made him want to kill someone if he studied on that too hard. So the key was to not study on the truth—the madness in the center of everything that was called common sense in a white-ruled world.