by C. E. Morgan
“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?”
“You take the risk,” Allmon said, “because a legacy is forever. They can take everything else away from you.”
Henrietta’s smile was small, barely a crack under her flushed cheeks. “That’s where you’re wrong. They can take your legacy too. There’s nothing permanent in this world.”
He stiffened up, wanted to say, You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you don’t know how much those words weigh, but before he’d even decided to keep his mouth shut, she had risen with some impatience and stood close to him under the light. “Do you know what I want?”
A sidelong glance at the door, and she looked too, checking to see whether anyone was there. Only a vacancy, so she stepped over some of the tack toward him.
She said, “People spend their lifetimes pursuing things that don’t even really give them pleasure in the end—just the admiration of strangers. I think that’s a fucking waste.”
He glanced up, startled, but she was sinking down onto her haunches before him and staring into the shadows where his eyes were recessed, inaccessible. The shadows excited her terribly. She said, “There are three things I like the most about fucking. I like the first moment, when you push your cock in and I can feel everything—everything—intensely. Men like to say that women don’t have much sensation, but that’s not true. That’s just a lie they tell themselves.”
Allmon’s hands had come to a standstill on the leather as if soldered there. She could tell he was hardly breathing, and ther
e was the faintest trembling along his neck.
“Give me that,” she said, taking up the bridle. Then she rose and in a moment had turned and settled herself backward on his lap, nestling his legs between hers and settling in against his groin. She laid the leather aside and said, “The second thing I like is to fuck like this.” And she rocked back into him just barely, listening for the sure-inevitable-easy-math-look-ma-no-hands sharp intake of his breath. He was inert under her as if all his nerves were severed. “I like this because I can feel the big ridge on the head of your cock against the front. When I do it like this”—now she was rocking against him with aching slowness—“I can build up until you’re begging me, you’re fucking begging me to fuck you harder, and you’re trying to get deeper, but I keep fucking you shallowly just like this, even though you’re begging me, begging me to fuck you deeper, and this”—she grasped up his hands, forcing them up her shirt to where her elastic bra could be simply pushed aside—“you have to fucking grab my nipples; no, grab them, that’s what I like—grab me harder”—and she placed her fingers over his and forced them down hard around her nipples, rocking harder when she said—“and then when I come on your cock, I’ll finally let you fuck me really deep, but only when I say so.”
She leaned back into him fully then, wound her neck against his, so she could smell him, so that natural-order home scent of him filled her nostrils, and her breathing was rough when she said, “That’s what I like.”
And then she was off him in an instant, adjusting her bra and pulling down her T-shirt, turning abruptly and handing him the bridle, which he took up numbly, confusedly in one hand.
“But I’m discovering there’s a third thing I like,” she said, “and that’s waiting for it. But trust me when I say I don’t like to wait too long. What is it you want, Allmon?”
He was hard, so it wasn’t entirely a lie when he looked straight into her eyes and said, “You.”
* * *
Because there is hunger. Like any desire, it’s only temporarily satisfied, which calls into question the reliability of satisfaction and whether such a state can be said to exist at all. Anything we eat knows us more intimately than a lover. Not merely the inside of our mouth but the esophagus, stomach, alimentary canal, upper and lower colon, sphincter. Everything we desire, we shit out and leave behind.
So there is thought, which is ought and should and will. It’s a great mill wheel spinning in the mind, all the minutiae of the world swept along in the millrace, plundered and broken by the wheel, detritus to drift away. The wheel spins and spins and spins, going nowhere, despite ceaseless activity.
The amygdala is the seat of elemental emotion. Shaped like an almond, it lies behind the smooth skin of the forehead, the cranium, the rapid eyes. When sensing threat, the amygdala stimulates a cascade of hormones for flight or fight. In a thousandth of a second, this is done.
But before the action, before the clamor and heat of the fight, there is a pause. The body freezes, the slower neocortex not yet aware of danger. In the pause, the body gathers its energies, prepares itself. As of yet, there is no action. But this quiet state is only temporary.
There is also love, which looks like hunger but is not. The fewer words said about it, the better. Language is the charnel house of man.
* * *
Allmon crept into the dark stall. He waited until the nightman had fired up the 250, gassed the thing once for good measure, and the lights had fallen away into the black pit of the bowl before rising on its other side near the old manager’s house.
Why are you here? Henry had asked.
Allmon touched the animal on its soft, bony head, found the tufted tip of its ears, its subtle sway back and rough tail. Then, careful not to hug on the delicate neck, he bent over and simply wrapped his arms around the chest and rump like he had that first bridling day. He took care not to burden her with any of his weight. This hurt his back, but the animal was warm and passed its heat along without grudge. Then it grew curious and wended its neck back toward him. He felt the warm shallows of breath against his side. In and out, in and out, and for a few moments he didn’t realize the press and lull was in him too, that it too was rising, rising steadily until the wave overcame itself and, with crushing force, swamped him. Suddenly he was drowning in the old grief again: he would give anything—anything—to have his momma back for two minutes, one minute, even thirty seconds! Anything! They could cut off his fucking legs if it meant he could hold her hand just one more time! Nothing was anything without her. He was a drowned man.
Then, restoring some of the sand under his feet, the wave receded as he had long ago learned it would, and he straightened up slowly, ancient tears in his eyes, but not on his face. Why was he here? To grasp the very things that had been stolen from him, the things he wasn’t allowed to touch.
* * *
So you go on working your job, the old life and all of its emotions packed carefully away, trying to keep yourself steady, because the girl’s coming back, the redhead, the thin-lipped girl, some kind of future. There’s something about her, something interesting, but to do this right, you need to be hard in every sense of the word. You’ve got something she wants, she’s got something you want. You prepare yourself with carnal thoughts, which slip from your brain pan in bubbles. You see that from the top of the room where you take your ease, watching your body below rise up from its sleeping bag, which smells of your own distinct months-long musk. She swivels those little hips through the door, the boss girl, the employer, the owner’s baby girl. You don’t know exactly how to do this, but you’re going to do it, definitely yes. That girl is a door.
A harsh whisper: “Where’s your father at?”
The white girl just shrugs, like she’s slipping a weight off her shoulder. “I’m not my father’s keeper.”
Then she forms a noose of her arms and slips it over his head, drawing his body near. From way up there, his breath catches as he leans down, watching very carefully. He wants to see this, how a man and a woman do this. He kissed some girls as a kid, but he was shy and stupid. This is what a real kiss looks like. It makes sounds that discomfit, but it fascinates. Until she slips her hand down the front of his night drawers and he concentrates up there, wills his life to life—really, now is the time, really (!), but no matter how she touches it, it remains soft and cute as a mole. Then the breeder, the enthusiast, the appraiser really goes to work on him, and his mind could explode with the force of his effort; he’s a man; he’s supposed to leave coins in her purse, cream in her cup, diamonds in her ring. She raises his hand to her breast, but her body is so cold to him, he wants to snatch his hand back. Maybe it’s the way his body jolts or maybe because it’s been too many minutes now, but her snowy papery white face, which had been peering so intently into his, proceeds through a string of subtly drawn transformations, from confusion to vague disbelief to consternation and now flaring indignation. When he says, dully, “I don’t know why I…,” she peers at him. “Is this always a problem for you?” “Naw, I just … it’s not my fault, I don’t know.” She draws back her hand, real offense on her face. “Are you saying it’s me? Are you gay or something?”
She doesn’t know the history in his words, what that means to a man like him. His arms, his defenders, his weapons just reached out and pushed her back into the chaffy wood of the tack wall, and the wind went all out of her in an audible woof. From up there, hissing: Don’t hurt the woman, the house, the horse, your chances. Then the little white woman was up in his face, her words whipping him. “You know what the problem is with people like you?” she spat. “Self-pity. It’s always someone else’s fault.”
“People like me?” he said, rearing back, incredulous. “Like what—like black? Well, you know what’s wrong with people like you? You’re all spoiled inbred racist motherfuckers, but you don’t even know it! You’re so blind, you can’t tell when the person standing in front of you is half-white! Which I am!”
She scoffed. “I’m
sorry, but if you don’t look white, you’re not white. At least in the real fucking world.”
You know what rage is like? It’s like a fire that blooms from your feet to the crown of your head in an instant. He knew what rage could do—she had no idea. He lowered his head like a bull and stared her down. When he intoned, “Fuck you,” it wasn’t a roar, it wasn’t chaos, it was a deep, mortal hatred that rolled up from the center of him. Unmistakable. It caused her to shrink back like physical violence never would have, her face suddenly stripped of its anger and recast with fear. Regret was instant on his tongue. “Shit!” He said, “Henrietta,” and reached out for her, because he needed this in a thousand different ways. But it was too late. She’d already turned on her heel, a complicated roil of feeling growing like sickness in her stomach, alongside a determination not to touch him again. And she didn’t, not for many months.
* * *
It was summer on the wheel again, and Henrietta and Allmon were tasked with driving a pair of two-year-olds to the training center the day before the yearling sale. It was a wet Friday morning with continual, sourceless mist obscuring the lineaments of the buildings, so that the horses and grooms and riders seemed to traverse here and there behind a damp and billowing veil. They were quiet as librarians in the haze, shushed by the soft weather. This was a sly rain, never hard, yet insinuating itself until everything was saturated. The sideways, gossamer weather made continual inroads against the indoors—moisture seeping through dykes of hay to dampen the earthen floors, concrete slickened and made dangerous, tiny runnels steering around bits of straw and manure toward cracks in the doors and stall walls. The grooms shivered in their work, though the day was not cold. The horses smelled like wet dogs.
Outside, the world was a headlong green, a green that weighted the trees, the leaves heavy on the boughs like mossy green coins gathered dangling and dripping in suspended nets. It called to mind Irish days Henrietta had seen when she traveled to Coolmore Stud on prospecting trips with her father. Everyone spoke of the incomparable green of Ireland, but it was no more green than Kentucky. It was a color to crack the code of life.