The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  “Then I’ll get a taxi!”

  “No.”

  “We got to do it, Momma. Listen—”

  “No, you listen to me,” she said sharply. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not on the hospital’s charity anymore. I missed their deadline. I was sick, I was running some fevers for a week or two and couldn’t get to the paperwork.”

  “Somebody’ll take you.”

  “Who? We’ll end up with crazy bills! You can’t ever escape those bills!”

  “Momma—”

  “No!” she said, and then: “Listen, it comes and goes. Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s not so bad. It’ll pass like it always does. It hurts, but I’m used to it. I’ll take a shower and it’ll help.” And she tried to struggle up and appear more alert, clamping the fabric of her gown between her breasts. “I’m just tired and need to rest.”

  “This is crazy,” he said.

  “Allmon”—and she looked up at the ceiling as if seeking for the words there—“go … do what you do. I’m not even going to judge you. You’re young, you’re free, that’s the greatest gift. Go be in the world. I’m not young anymore. I don’t even want all that anymore. I just need rest. I just … Don’t you owe me that?”

  “Owe you what?” He couldn’t make sense of her.

  Her eyes burned into him. “You owe me your good life. I mean, give your whole life to good things. Help others.”

  “Shit … I…,” he stammered, looking stricken. “I don’t even know what good is most of the time, Momma.”

  She smiled. “Whatever helps people. The ones you love. That’s the good. That’s why I’m saying go on.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Now she was rolling over on the couch again, face to the back. “I can’t rest with you looking over my shoulder and worrying me to death. Go on, Allmon. I just need to rest my eyes a while.”

  He backed away from the couch, knowing he was being ordered out. He reached the door and opened it half-unwilling, terrified yet somehow, strangely, sadly, in the deepest part of him, eager to go. As he stood there hesitating, Marie said, “But don’t walk out of this house without saying I love you.”

  He looked back somberly over his shoulder and said, “I love you, Momma.”

  * * *

  The pain—once as small as a mustard seed—had grown so large, it had become her. She’d been young once and full of light, pure! She had been so full of love as a girl. She had adored her mother, her father, and Mike Shaughnessy. With compunction, pity, longing, desperate fear, and a rivertide of longing, she remembered the girl she had been, the body she had once lived within, so hopeful, so light and slim; long before her period and the swelling of her breasts, she had been free. Then the ironclad change of womanhood had been forced upon her, and it had taken so much from her. It had made her breasts hurt, her guts wrench, it had made her bleed. Then the boys had pinched her swelling breasts, the black boys on her block grabbing her with their eyes before they grabbed her with their hands, even though she wasn’t really pretty, maybe they touched her more because she wasn’t pretty, like a vase of no value a man can handle carelessly (you look better in the dark); men are only awed into good manners by women who are like art, and she wasn’t art. How she had longed for a clean-speaking, sensitive boy who didn’t act or talk black, who didn’t grow up in the neighborhood, but when she found that white boy, he used her only to feel good, and a baby—a whole new life—was what he called an “accident.” He used to say he loved her body. He never said that about her face, and while she was pressing all her hope against him, he’d already been looking for the next girl.

  Her momma was the only human being who ever truly loved her. Her father cared more about the suffering of strangers than he ever cared about her. But she’d taken her mother’s love for granted all the days of her life. Claudia Jeane Rankin Marshall had raised her and watched her grow into her late girlhood with pride—but only now did she recognize the wholeness of that love. She’d said, Momma, I’m scared to grow up. Because the boys were hanging around like vultures, and her momma had pet her head and said, I understand, baby, I understand. And she had understood! But the cancer moved into her body when she was forty-two years old, and then she was gone in a moment, so Marie was all alone, and no one knew how pretty she was on the inside or how she longed, prayed, oh, how she had prayed to God, please bring me a man—in her mind he was white and clean-speaking and good and didn’t look or sound like he was from the neighborhood—who will love me. Please.

  Her temperature was rising, is rising, the wick burning brighter as it burns low, fighting for life in an invisible draft. God, I brought a boy into this world for the love of Michael Shaughnessy and gave him his name. But he left anyhow. Daddy always told me wind is the breath of God, and woman is a flame bent in the wind towards man: Why did you curse me with this female body? I’m begging that you free me of it, make me anything but a woman in heaven. Make me an avenging angel, so I can look down on the world with inhuman strength and no feelings at all. Make me an animal, so I won’t know anything. Make me a man, so I won’t give a damn about anyone.

  Lord, I never asked for this body, and I only had it a moment before the baby came, and he tore it up—I traded my breasts and my waist and my smooth skin. I traded my body for his life. I lost the love of his father, who only loved his own pleasure, because you didn’t give me any other beauty to keep him! You named me Ugly. Why am I even praying to you? Shame on you for letting me suffer! And shame on you for stealing my mother from me when I needed her most! God, I hate you more than I hate the devil! You demand that I love you? Is love and hate the same thing in heaven? Folks always say the Lord is wonderful! Who wrote that? They all must live in some quiet, safe world where no black folk live, no poor folk. The Lord isn’t wonderful—he’s cruel! He looks at the suffering of his own children like he’s watching television, and if he isn’t cruel, then he’s retarded and doesn’t understand the world he made, doesn’t know that little girls get their legs forced apart, boys got pockets full of dope, mothers sell their children, parents die! The Lord is wonderful? If the Lord is alive, the Lord is a pimp, letting life violate you, because your desperation buys him your belief. No? Then prove I’m wrong!

  Oh God, forgive me. Forgive me and ease my suffering, help me and help Allmon. He’s just a boy and doesn’t know a thing. Forgive him for everything he’s doing! I wish I never had him to suffer. Momma, I pray to you, I pray to Daddy. Please forgive me for whatever I did to make you go away from me, that made you desert me! I don’t know why I’m alone. I tried to love Mike, I tried to love my child, but they took all of me and didn’t give me anything back. A baby doesn’t even love you, just uses you to get on with its life—and I loved so hard that I broke—

  God, please hear your Marie.

  God, my lungs hurt.

  God, these are my breasts, empty now.

  These are my eyes you ruined.

  I want my momma.

  God, I tried to love me, but I don’t know how.

  God, please watch over Allmon.

  God, please speak to me.

  Please.

  If I ever heard one word from you in my life, I didn’t know it.

  Please, I am a thread, please sew with me, I am a candle, please light me, please love me, please tell Momma I miss her every day and I forgive her for dying, God, I am a house for a little boy, let my boy live in me forever, oh I’m afraid of the dark light me I’m scared to disappear God oh God I am a thread sew me to me I am Marie I am your little girl I am a body God you made

  * * *

  He was gone from the house for exactly two hours and three minutes. He walked out with the gun stuffed down his drawers like he was in the movies, but then he was afraid he was going to blow his own dick off, so he switched it into his cargo pocket, the weight tugging on him, bumping his thigh, an off-tempo drum beating against his rhythmless life. He had a plan, he was going to go borrow money off Aesop and take her straight
to the hospital, but the man, ever shrewd, saw the way fear sketched in the lines of Allmon’s face, so he just tilted his head and said, “Work tonight, then I break you off what you need.” He couldn’t wheedle, there was no point, and there wasn’t any other option, so he just went through the frazzled motions—holding the curb down near Fergus, the old faces grown gaunt and routed from two years of using now filing past with his lookout all jumpy half a block up. Then he was winding his way through the streets and interstitial alleys of the hood, vial after vial after vial, pocket twenty bucks, pocket thirty under the moon obscured by faint clouds, the moon stricken like its own panic was growing. Momma. Holy shit, he was standing on someone’s porch—these white dykes that held down good jobs but who used like fucking fiends—when he realized he could hardly breathe. The aperture of his pupil was swiveling shut. Her sores were festering on his own flesh, her flesh was his flesh, and now as he handed a vial in exchange for a tiny roll, tears came unbidden to his eyes. Was this a panic attack? By the time he was back on the sidewalk, panic bloomed full-bore, and he was racing down Hamilton Avenue as if someone were chasing him, cops and traffic be goddamned, until he was standing, heaving air before Aesop, where he dropped the returns and said, “Listen, I got a bad feeling. I need cash now, like right now. My momma’s sick. I got to take her to the hospital,” and Aesop was rearing back: “Why the fuck you ain’t said something? I’d a flushed you when you come in,” pressing rolls into his hands, much more than he needed. Then he was running way down Hamilton Avenue, across the wasteland of Knowlton’s Corner, down where the smell of the Mill Creek announced its foul presence under the viaduct, and back into the house.

  He found his mother seizing on the couch, her right hand twitching and flapping against the floor where it had fallen, palm open and still pink with the fever of life. No thought, Allmon just wheeled away from the house and ran to the Fifth Amendment without hesitating—no time to feel—and he called the ambulance, he didn’t care about the cost. Yes, her name is Marie and this is Allmon Shaughnessy, yes, she’s my mother!—but by then it was too late. His mother’s kidneys had failed, and she died under the care of the shocked ER physician, who took one look at the lupoid lesions that had ravaged her neck and torso, and said with his hand over his surgical mask, “Jesus Christ. Who let this happen to her?”

  * * *

  That night Allmon didn’t dream of his mother. Instead, the Reverend appeared for the first time in many years. In the dream, the old man was standing in a field where nothing was sown, and he was kicking at the fallow soil and poking it with a long stick like a shepherd’s staff. All around his head, glimmering stars swarmed like gnats, and he batted them away with his hands, which were even larger now than they had been in life, nearly the size of dinner plates.

  As Allmon approached him, the sun was setting to his right and warming his skin. The Reverend looked up suddenly, and Allmon saw he had drawn a line in the dirt with his staff.

  “Stop!” the Reverend said, and the stars stilled about his head, hovering. He pointed a gnarled finger at Allmon. “Don’t you step across this line, boy! This line got drawn for you, and only the Lord can take it away!”

  “But—Momma—”

  “Time is short! You better pray you discover yourself!”

  And in the dream he tried to do as he was told, but when he bowed his head, he couldn’t pray, and only cried and cried.

  * * *

  This time he came to the funeral and sat in the very front row, shivering like he wouldn’t ever be warm again. His PO officer loaned him the suit he wore—gray gabardine, too small in the shoulders, too long in the leg. From the periphery of his vision, the glossy gray box of the casket imposed itself. The half dozen people in the room were staring into that space, but he couldn’t look up, he couldn’t look at the last vision of his mother in this world. She was his only holding. His hands trembled like there were fevers breaking across them, and if he would just look up, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, not as bad as he imagined—

  That was his mother. Lying there in a gray box. Her body. He surprised himself by not making a sound, just looking at her stony, painted face, the still thing that looked like her but wasn’t her at all—all that remained of her birthing him, taking him in her arms, schooling him, hushing him, yelling at him, crying over him. He watched closely for her breathing until his eyes blinked of their own accord. Surely, her chest would move just a little bit if he stared long enough. Whereas before he couldn’t bring himself to look, now he couldn’t look away. It had the appearance of her, and yet didn’t. Her face was sunk into itself slightly, hollows around her eyes despite the spackling of makeup. He wanted to stand up suddenly and say to someone, everyone: “That ain’t my momma!” But he remained utterly still, both body and mind. Then, into his emptiness came a flood of images—his mother in the kitchen cooking, the coppery brown of her eyes, the lines her worry made, the laugh she had laughed a long time ago that no one else could laugh now. His only inheritance was memory.

  He turned around suddenly and looked at the people in attendance. There was a little old woman from Lexington, who’d introduced herself as the cousin of a cousin or something, and who offered out of the blue to let him come live with her; there was Marie’s old employer, the dentist, who had paid for the casket, as well as a man who introduced himself as a friend from middle school, and a few people he had never seen before. He stared impolitely into the dentist’s white face and the spinning roulette of his emotions settled on fury—who was this white fuck coming here, thinking he could just show up a day late and a dollar short? Same white fuck that wouldn’t let her work enough to get health insurance. Same white fuck that didn’t let everybody get health care. He hated that white face. Fury was a blood blister waiting to burst, and when his mouth opened, he felt the arm of his PO cradling his shoulder, turning him around again.

  Shhhhh.

  God’s finger touched her and she slept.

  His mother was so still. For a moment, grief and uncomplicated love flared in his eyes, and the roulette swung, and he was a boy again with a mother at home and a father due in any minute on eighteen wheels. The tenor of his grief shifted downward. Tears were acid on his eyes.

  The funeral was held in the smallest parlor of the Chase Brothers funeral home, in a small space carved from a larger room by partitioning walls made of a heavy gray nylon. The sitters were seated on folding chairs; someone got up and left before the service even began. The service itself consisted of just a minister standing before that unreality in the casket, which was his mother, Marie Marshall, daughter of Damien Emerson and a grandmother Allmon had never met, all gone now. With horror, he realized he could no longer remember the Reverend’s voice, only his righteous anger. What had he said to him that night? The night he died and went away from Allmon forever, evaporated into nothing, leaving him alone in the world—

  The preacher, paid for the occasion from Marie’s minuscule life insurance policy, said, “What do we do when we lose someone too soon?”

  no idea

  “What words do we cry to heaven in our grief?”

  no words

  “Even in the midst of grief, we must know that Christ is watching.”

  not really no

  “Because what do we believe?”

  nothing

  “We believe that Christ raises all believers from the grave.”

  nothing

  “Until then, the dead are alive in our memory and in heaven, thank Jesus.”

  nothing

  Bow your heads and pray. The Lord is my nothing, I shall want nothing. He maketh me to lie down in nothing, he leadeth me beside nothing, he restoreth nothing yea, though I walk through the valley of nothing, he leadeth me in the paths of nothing for the sake of nothing and I will lift up mine eyes unto nothing—from whence cometh my help? My help cometh from nothing which made nothing and nothing, oh nothing, why have you forsaken me? Why do you take your little ones and bash them against
rocks—where can I go from your nothing? Where can I flee from your nothing if I go up to the heavens you are nothing if I make my bed in the depths youarenothingandJesusneverdidcomebecausenooneeverdoesamenhavemercyuponyournothingamen

  * * *

  He stood alone in the waiting room adjacent to the showing parlor. He wavered before the foggy window that looked out onto Hamilton Avenue and breathed in the gaseous scent of the paperwhites splayed on the sideboard beneath the damp sash. Leaning forward slightly against the cold, wet window, he stared into the street. The snow had turned to mush, cast gray by the weak, borrowed light of winter. Cars slushed by, fanning blackened snow. The people all walked with their heads down. The world looked like old wallpaper.

  In these streets, he looked for his prospects and found none.

  He turned slightly to gaze back into the other room at the paltry mourners and the woman—that old relative who said her name was Sophia—was turned in her seat and looking at him with such a deep and abiding intensity that he had to turn away. Grief was a hand at his throat. Don’t cry. Think. He could barely even do that. He stared into the streets, reading the script and intuiting the ending. These were the killing grounds, he knew that, a cemetery for boys like him. If he stayed here, he had no options but one: to become what Aesop had told him he would become, what he himself had chosen as a twelve-year-old, before he even knew what choosing was. His fate seemed set. How could he escape this life? Every day they spun the wheel of death and someday the ball would fall in his unlucky pocket, probably sooner rather than later. Except … He looked over at the old woman who was watching him, his own gaze as intense as hers suddenly, then he leaned in toward the street, listening. He pressed his ear to the glass. The street spoke.

  His PO came up beside him, wrapped an arm round his shoulder again, saying, “You’re doing great, Allmon; just get through this day. Just make it through this, and then you can—”