by C. E. Morgan
But Hell just rolled along on her lovely little pleasure cruise. The air was fine with the lushest of breezes, the waters glassy and dotted with befruited islands—
“Goddammit!” Mack hollered from the rail. “Fucking graze for all I care! I fucking bought this pasture for you, asshole!”
It was a fast half mile when the pack passed the pole at just over 0:45. Angelshare, a rangy Runnymede colt, led by two lengths on the inside as Hellsmouth eased her way into ninth along the rump of Play Some Music. Boomie Racz, the curly, blonde up-and-comer, stooped over Music and whipped him when she suddenly sensed Hell at her heels. She flipped her goggles and doubled down, straining for a path through the traffic.
Now the school of horses swung around the turn as if caught in a sweep net, Angelshare faltering off his pace for a moment as he changed leads and Scintilla charging to overtake him with Chief Contender hot as breath on his neck. Only now, as if realizing suddenly that she was hungry and food awaited, Hellsmouth began to stretch out under Reuben and reach for sunlight as she curved around the field. Wary and shrewd, Racz stayed so close that Play Some Music bumped Hellsmouth, shoulder against shoulder, not once but twice. Reuben snarled and shoved and battened down the hatches just as the group emptied into the stretch for the final quarter mile, the four leads now charging neck and neck.
Reuben was done waiting. With an electric strike, he flung back his crop, and with a single stinging lash made contact with the filly’s rump. Her muscles leaping beneath her skin, Hellsmouth exploded out of her gait with such vicious power, her first free stride made the previous three-quarters of a mile seem nothing but a lark. As she shot forward she bore in toward the rail and delivered one fast, teeth-rattling bump to Play Some Music. While Racz cropped and corrected her faltering bay, Hellsmouth drove to the wire with a stride so long and self-assured, so dazzlingly late, that the grandstand rose as a single entity, driven up by a surge of energy that seemed to come from the very center of the earth. Farmers three miles distant heard the cry when, fully extended with her limbs threatening the limits of form, Hell shot under the wire. Play Some Music followed in two solid lengths, but as the crowd threatened to deafen man and animal alike, Mack was already clutching his skull at the sidelines.
“Don’t fuck me, history!” he cried. “I’m too old for this!”
The inquiry sign began to flash.
“No! No! No! No!” His fists were uncorked grenades, the crazy in his eyes unleashed. “NoNoNoNONONONONONONONOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Reuben and Racz were off their mounts in a second, hustling, then running, and now sliding through the office door of the stewards, side by side, panting and pointing.
“He bumped me hard on the straight!”
“She bumped me twice in the turn!”
“We’ll watch again,” said the steward from the Jockey Club.
“We barely touched him on the turn!”
“I can’t prevent a lead switch!”
“Hold on,” said the steward from the Racing Association.
“It’s a miracle Hellsmouth even stayed up!”
“I couldn’t take down your filly with a bulldozer!”
“Ruling stands,” said the steward from the Gaming Commission.
Aboveground, the lights stopped flashing and the crowd lost its mind.
Which is how Reuben came to be photographed victorious atop Hellsmouth in the winner’s circle at Belmont, Allmon at her halter. In the photograph, Allmon looks taller than he is, chin high and proud, but eyes like dark wounds, peering through the camera, past the trainers, the jocks, the drunks, the bettors, the stoopers, the stewards, to a woman he can’t see, but whose details can’t be erased. He shakes his head, so the image is blurred.
“Just like 1972,” Mack mutters. “I thought history had us by the short hairs.”
Reuben puffs out his bird chest and stares down his nose. “I don’t repeat history,” he says, “I make history, and I’m never riding the bitch that easy again.”
* * *
There’s the front of the house, and there’s the backstretch, and never the twain shall meet. Allmon was no more than a migrant worker, no different from the Guatemalans and the Peruvians he groomed with, moving from track to track, following the racing season, following Mack. Like all the rest, he slept in unventilated cinder-block dorms with dingy, mold-streaked walls and sputtering lights, quarters where you couldn’t run an air conditioner, because the barns weren’t set up for the voltage, so you sweated in the swampy ninety-degree nights and watched the other grooms swoon and puke from the heat. You drew flies like any other animal. A couple of the skinnier guys ended up with dysentery. There were track doctors, but they basically dispensed Vicodin and sent you on your way, and unless you were dying, you didn’t get a day off. So you slept in your sweat, bought your food at the 7-Eleven or some Mexican dive, and you worked.
The filly was winning stakes races, but that didn’t change Allmon’s four o’clock mornings at the barn, going round on a carousel of tack and groom: bandage work, leg checks, scrubbing off poultice wrappings, taking temps and mucking, filling waterers and haynets, laying down fresh hay. He passed mounts to exercise riders, tidied the shed row, washed and groomed again, iced and rewrapped million-dollar legs. If it was race day, that meant rounds after lunch. Otherwise, the vets came in and doped the horses from their grab bag of steroids, then there was more schooling and walking and feeding, and when evening rolled around, Allmon draped them with blankets nicer than any he’d ever owned. For doing this, he made $350 a week, maybe a hundred extra when Hell placed. He spent his first paycheck on a sleeping bag and a .45 1911 automatic he bought off a guy at the track who used to be a marine, just something cheap he could keep close. You couldn’t trust anybody anywhere anytime; he knew that. Though sometimes he also knew in the subterranean passages of his heart that he was the least trustworthy of all.
“Hey, kid. Decent job today.” Mack was standing there in the stall door, arms folded across his chest, his white Stetson cocked back. Allmon looked up, startled, from where he’d been staring down at his own hands in mystification, lost in thought. He said the first words that came to mind: “My hands feel broke.” As soon as he said it, he wished he could reel the words back in.
“Your hands, huh?” Mack’s eyes narrowed and he cocked his head. “Okay, listen. I’ve seen you doing your work around here for a couple months, and that’s real good. I mean it. So I’m gonna give you some advice, but don’t ask for it again.”
Allmon with side eye: “I ain’t even asked for it this time.”
“Which is why it’s amazing I’m giving it to you for free.” Mack cleared his throat. “Kid, you know what possum and pepper pot is?”
Allmon didn’t bother to shake his head.
“Of course not. See, I grew up in the mountains. Crapalachia. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and the only roses I ever saw were coffin roses. Never even heard of the Derby till I was thirteen. Somebody once said to me that if you weren’t born into money, you couldn’t ever be truly wealthy. Do you think I gave a fuck?”
“I’m guessing you didn’t give a fuck.”
“I didn’t give a fuck.” Mack recrossed his thick arms. “You ever wonder why horses like me?”
Allmon shook his head.
“They don’t, so don’t worry about it. There’s a lot of things in this world not worth worrying about.” Mack peered carefully at Allmon. “So, I noticed you don’t drink.”
“Nah.” Allmon shrugged. “Not really.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” Mack went on. “Every black old-timer I ever knew, and I knew a whole mess of them when I was coming up on the track, they could drink you under the fucking table. Well, go ahead and drink if you want. No law against.” He gestured out toward the broader barn. “You think I don’t know these banditos put tequila in their coffee every morning? You think I don’t know that? Only one rule.” Mack held up a single finger. “Don’t ever let a horse
get hurt under your watch. Or I’ll make it my personal mission to put a bullet in your hide.”
Grown impatient, it was Allmon’s turn to interject. “See, you don’t know me,” he said. “Or you’d know I don’t intend to fuck up. Ain’t no horse gonna get hurt under my watch. I lost everything; I don’t intend to lose this.”
Mack was quiet a moment, took stock of him; he set his legs apart and appraised this young man who—goddammit—he had to admit, reminded him of his own younger, hungrier self. “What have you lost, kid? I know you were in Blackburn.”
Allmon lowered his chin; his eyes burned holes through Mack’s face. “I. Lost. Every. Thing.” And it was God’s own truth. There were tears at the back of his voice, the place where Henrietta’s name lived.
“Huh,” said Mack, nodding, and crossed his arms. “Well, let me tell you something. I’m nothing. I’m nobody. From nowhere. I’m not even going to tell you the name of the town I grew up in, because you’d think I was shitting you. Who the hell am I to be a millionaire five times over? In the hunter jumper world and all that fancy boondoggle bullshit, you can’t rise. But here—in this world, in the blood horse world? Sky’s the limit. We don’t care who you are. We don’t care if your daddy hit you, who raped you, who you sleep with, what prison you came from, understand? All you got to do is work. I want you to remember that.”
Allmon held wide his arms, affronted. “I been working since I was twelve. I know how to fucking work.”
“Well, then, here’s my advice.”
“I thought you just gave me your advi—”
“Number one!” Mack snapped. “Don’t smoke pot; it makes you stupid. Number two, cut your hair; they’re looking for reasons to hate you.”
Allmon sighed, swagging his head.
“And number three,” Mack bulled over his objection, “don’t ever loan out your sleeping bag.”
Allmon looked up, eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Crabs. Now get back to work. I’m not paying you to work your mouth.”
“Henry Forge, a lifelong devotee of racing and one of its steadiest breeders, is finally putting his name in lights with his big black filly, Hellsmouth, who trounced the field this October at the Juvenile Fillies Stakes. Close readers of Blood Horse will recognize the marks of her predecessors Hellcat and Hellbent, but even the most casual racing fan should detect the imprint of Secretariat. This horse is a living, breathing manifestation of the old adage: the best horses come out of the best horses.”
—Burrow, Blood Horse
Father has spent his life under a bright light in a narrow hallway, repeating names he memorized long ago. But I looked out the window, looking for the ideas that underwrote nature. The problem: what I really saw was my own imagination written onto the landscape of physical matter over time. Self on everything.
“In a long career as a track writer and as witness to some of the greatest horses this sport has ever seen, I can say with absolute certainty that this is the first horse that’s eclipsed the great Secretariat in my mind. And it’s a filly—if that don’t beat all.”
—Greeney, Racing Form
Then I met someone I wanted more than the idea of him, and I began to think: another also thinks. An equivalency began to assert itself. I sensed the enduring mutual affinities. But until that moment happens, it’s impossible for the mind to accept that the self is not the center of the universe, that the center is everywhere, that the universe is always expanding, that there is, in fact, no limit to the universe at all.
“The King is dead. Long live the Queen!”
—The New York Times
The movement of evolution is from simple to complex.
The queen knew what she was—something royal, a bold ruler—and she liked nothing better than to show out. On her early morning walks with Allmon, she would showboat among the riffraff, spinning her black tail and crow hopping on her perfectly turned hooves. She mugged for the cameras like her grandsire had done thirty years before, tossing her bull head and rippling her withers like a colt shot up on elephant juice. But Allmon knew she was clean; no one was sneaking in Regu-Mate or Equipoise, Lasix or milkshakes or anything beyond the standard regimen of anti-inflammatories. All the coltish conformation she displayed, the thick, bundled muscles of her quarters and the long, aggressive neck, was her treasure by birthright. Some fillies were just like that—better than the colts at their own game.
Henry. The sight of the man was a shock. Allmon reared back, not recognizing him at first, the way he leaned against Mack’s barn as if it were the only thing keeping him from toppling into his own grave. Allmon blinked, as if to clear his vision of a mirage. Where had all Henry’s physical beauty gone? His face was the color of old ashes, his once red-gold hair visibly thinner, and he had lost twenty pounds he couldn’t spare. He looked to all the world like a handicapper down all his profit, all his luck.
When Henry felt the weight of Allmon’s gaze, he straightened up, looking right at him. Then he pushed himself away from the barn wall, turned, and walked with visible effort through its rolling door.
Dread moves swift as blood through the body, from the heart to the distal extremities. For some months, the baby had existed only as a strange muscular tension that wrapped itself now and again around Allmon’s brain, but suddenly it was as present as the blood in his veins. Yes, it had surely been born by now. Sweat prickled at Allmon’s neck. He walked slowly toward the barn, a knocking in his chest. It was like the blow of a pick against an ice block.
Hell was rank for the lead, shouldering past Allmon into the barn, passing through golden streams of morning light, so chaff particles swam and eddied around her in a liquid rush. Henry watched his filly pass into her stall—his winning girl, his thousand-pound trophy. He could detect no flaw in her at all. She was perfection. A furious, wasting anger blew through him. How could that illusion be so enduring?
Henry looked at Allmon and cleared his throat. “My daughter died.”
Allmon came to a complete standstill, body and mind. Then he drew back with a stupid expression on his face.
Again: “A month ago, my daughter died. In childbirth. The child survived.”
The color drained visibly from Allmon’s face.
“The child is small but healthy.” Then he said hesitantly, as if he’d been asked a troubling question, “Some produce better than they run.”
Allmon searched Henry’s eyes, desperate to comprehend, yet desperate not to comprehend, now or ever. There was madness in the words. The edges of the world were crumbling off the map.
“This horse is all I have left,” Henry whispered suddenly, but even as he said this, he felt the falseness of it immediately. He also had his name, he had that.
The words helped Allmon recover himself, if only slightly. He leaned forward, his face jutting into Henry’s space. “You don’t even know what nothing is.”
A flash of a despondent grin.
Allmon didn’t even know how he found the strength to speak, it was like the devil swept up through his body to wag his tongue. “The deal still stands, old man. Don’t try to play me now.” But through the anger flashed an old, wilding, reckless sorrow: God’s finger touched her and she slept. It threatened to upend him; he was breathing in panic, not air.
Brief confusion slashed Henry’s grief-lean face. “Yes, the deal still stands. We will take this horse all the way. Give her the best possible care. Baby her, feed her by hand, sleep outside her stall, do whatever it takes. I don’t want another pair of hands on her. Protect her by any means necessary.” Allmon had some sense that his head was nodding, playing its part, nodding because there were all sorts of sabotage afoot in barns like sponging or slipping blistering agents into a horse’s mouth, agreeing because this was a conversation any two horsemen would have, but then the horror of the thing began to break forcibly through his thoughts, and he said, “The baby … it’s mine?”
Henry paused. He felt his father pulling on his right hand, his gran
dfather pulling on his left, dead weights both. He straightened up. “No,” he said suddenly, surprised as the words spun like silk from his mouth. “It’s not.”
Allmon drew back jerkily, a look of pure astonishment on his face. There was a rending of the temple cloth. In an instant, furious tears filled his eyes, and those tears turned to hate even before they touched his face. He could find no words as cutting as the betrayal that swamped him.
Henry stepped back, half turning to exit the stall, but confusion stayed him, as well as a complicated weight of regret that he immediately sensed would only grow, but he couldn’t correct. The child—the wrong color but the right blood—was his. His family.
“The child’s name is Samuel,” he said, surprising himself.
Then he left Allmon alone in the stall, Allmon who now had nothing in the world but a horse that didn’t belong to him. He took one step forward as if he intended to follow Henry and demand some different truth, an altered past. But he just sank to his knees in urine-soaked hay, a howl of grief and rage filling his mind. Fool! And he thought he had known loss!
* * *
Laurel Futurity, November 2005. The trees were bare, and like the leaves, the bright crowds were thick on the ground, turned out in their Saturday color jostling for position at the saddling paddock, where the grooms managed the mounts and the trainers sprang jocks. Henry stood among the Laurel Park spectators but they, as if by instinct, offered him a wide berth. He was an emaciated version of his old self, a hack among Arabians. A month along, his grief was still so fresh that no one could look at it. It traveled as a bright sparkling acid all along his capillary rivers; his skin was so thin, it shined right out of him, a gorgeous, harrowing thing. It was like the angels of old: it stunned everyone into silence, and they averted their eyes.
Only Reuben—a Currier & Ives on his pert Hell perch—stared openly.
“What ails the money man?” he whispered down his mount’s neck.
Allmon’s hands were visibly shaking as he struggled to adjust the bridling over the bridge of Hell’s velvet nose. Reuben peered at him with shrewd, hooded eyes. “Why, Allmon, you’re white as that bridle,” he said. “Perchance you’ve seen a ghost?”