The Sport of Kings (27 page)

They should have just barbecued Secretariat, because no one ever really gave a fuck. Cry with joy when he crosses the line, then eat him. There were no more true believers.

She didn't know what to do. How best to forget a day like this? Henrietta reversed and peeled out of the lot, heading downtown toward the stunted high-rises of this provincial town, a city that first repelled Northern aggression and then strengthened itself on a genteel aggression, smiling on its own smallness and petty prettiness. She felt herself to be nearly in a mania. Out of nowhere, clattering hail fell and, jarred, she watched the tiny balls of ice pop and bounce on the ground and percuss on the steel hood and roof of the car. She lifted her foot off the gas, aware she had been speeding; she was no longer in Paris, where she could always say, “I'm Henrietta Forge,” where a policeman might peer into her face, note the resemblance, maybe grin and tease her as though she were nothing but a troublesome child.

On the far side of downtown, she found a parking spot by the Ledger, one of the older horse pubs. She had changed out of her dress in Louisville, resumed her uniform of button-up smudged with the grime of horses, her worn boots caked with fulvous dirt, her clothes and her ponytail slightly damp from the weather. She stood in the front of the bar, surveying.

“Can I get you something to drink, miss?”

Yes, they could get her something to drink. Yes, she was thirsty. On the first Saturday in May, the Commonwealth got drunk early and stayed that way until Monday morning. With a beer, she walked the bar with cold purpose, inspecting the men who remained there. In a side room, she noted the old careworn men weighted on their pool sticks as if they were crutches, a small huddle of men in suits doing business, horse business she knew from their Irish brogues. She spun on her heel, returned to the main room. She spotted a blond man at the bar. Broad shoulders, nearly bald. He smiled at her sleepily and nodded once. He had seen her come in, and she had seen him see her.

She walked directly up to him, stood there a moment. “What are you doing?” she said.

“What—me?” He smiled, but the smile failed at his blue eyes as if he'd encountered a trick question. “I'm drinking?” He tried to sound cocksure, even mocking, so taken aback was he by her approach. She did not respond. In a moment, he had unstartled himself, and his smile gained its ground. He said, more seriously, lower, “What are you doing?”

She registered the wavering in his face, the play at confidence. It tested her patience. Why did men always make this play for boldness? They came off like little children pretending to be grown. Why bother lying to a woman, who could read an expression before it formed, and know its source and its source's source?

She said, “Let's go somewhere.”

His eyes widened in honest surprise. “Really?” Then he held up his left hand, where a little gold band winked.

She just shrugged. It all seemed like bad acting.

And that was all it took, it was that easy. He started off his stool but headed in the opposite direction of the front door.

“I'm parked out back,” he said. “I work in the kitchen.”

She followed him through the single swinging door, through a grimy kitchen where a line cook peered out from under the warmers to watch in surprise as they passed, and then out the back doors, where they stood in a two-hundred-year-old alley where the bricks had worn down to nothing from wagon wheels and horse hooves and the heels of the forgotten who once traversed there. Rain was falling heavily now, painting red on the brick, weaving small rivulets around the crumbling geometry of the bricks.

The man held a hand to his brow and peered at her heatedly. “Where to?” he said.

“Your car,” she said. The rain fell down her cheeks.

He skipped toward his car, but as he was reaching his keys to the driver's-side door, she peered down the dank alley once and back at the door to the bar's kitchen, and then she said, “No! In the back!” The rain killed any echoes.

So he climbed, almost bashfully, into the backseat, fumbling with a condom he pulled from his wallet, and she climbed in, wet, beside him and stripped her jeans off one leg and undid the zipper on his, and then in another moment she climbed on top of him. He was gasping under her. She braced her forearm against his sternum. He told her to take her top off. She didn't, and he couldn't get to her in the tight space crammed with milk crates and old clothes. She said, “Don't come, don't come.” Already the fury was easing. He grabbed at her where he could. “Don't come,” she said. When the lightning flashed, she could see his face with startling clarity. The rain drummed on the roof of the car. It reminded her of something she couldn't name, but it was better that way. If you haven't named it, you haven't killed it yet.

*   *   *

She became a familiar sight at the Ledger, McCarthy's, Second Wind, the Hare & the Hound, Breakers. A skinny woman with her reddish hair pulled back and a too-direct gaze. She came in for one drink and one man and tried to make it a simple transaction. The men obliged, not because she was pretty—she was handsome at best—but because they were willing to be had and, for once, here was a woman willing to take them without fuss. What more is there to say about those years? She could shoot and her aim was sure. She was after pleasure. What is pleasure? It is not the opposite of pain.

At first, she sought out beautiful men, thinking that beauty would naturally make for more pleasure, but she found a thing of beauty was a joy for not very long. These were the kinds of men who loved to take off their clothes, who loved their own arms and abdomens sculpted by exercise. They wanted her to watch them, and they composed their male faces sternly for her admiration, but she didn't want to watch them, she wasn't there to admire. The point of fucking was to crush the pearl, not polish it. But they polished and polished, and then she understood—they thought
they
were the pearl!

She learned to stay away from the men who talked too much, who asked her all the polite and proper questions that men ask women, questions they thought she wanted to answer, which she did not. They pretended interest in her private mind, a thing too many women squandered on unworthy men, seeming to think their inner lives no more valuable than a penny. She wouldn't divulge it. These were the ones who drew her to them softly and gazed at her in the warm, bland imitation of romance, the ones who tried to nestle dutifully against her later, as if they actually preferred this farce of intimacy to drinking alone in their apartments, free to look down at wet city streets as pleasantly empty as themselves, as happily deserted.

She avoided the artistic types with their self-congratulation, their misapprehension of their own strangeness, their pride in their small arts, and their disdain for the world, which looked plainly like fear. These men, thinking themselves so unusual, were often the most predictable, the first to ask her why she had no husband and no children. They thought her older than she was, the lines of summers past already lining her face. At first bold and brash, they scuttled back into their shells after the last quiver of orgasm, afraid to be netted. Not so strange, not so different after all.

When she tired of the search, she would stay at home for a period of weeks. But by midcycle, she was dying, wasting on the inside, a slave to her body. She could not spend an easy evening reading, and shaken by her desire out of that cashmere life, she would head to the city. She had to find a man, and she decided she wanted a big man—a black man. She didn't care if there was pain; more pain meant less feeling, and that was fine with her; less feeling in the cunt, less feeling in the heart.

But in the end, she settled for any good body, willing but unremarkable men who wouldn't bother her later. Some shy with the erotic poverty of young men, some older and beaten down in spirit like cuffed dogs. Their age didn't matter when she was in search of something a man hid from you until the very last moment when, while straddling them, you could feel your own cruel power rising up in you stronger than any orgasm, the power to sentence a man to shame, the power the judge holds over the cocksure criminal—no, better yet: the power to judge the judge.

*   *   *

She had only one friend during those years, a man she met in a bar. She'd driven to McCarthy's one night when she was twenty-three and ordered a whiskey while standing at the register, taking quick stock of the men in the room. It was a Wednesday night, there were no women in the half-lit place, and voices were murmurous and low. What men were there were mostly playing pool, smoking and eyeing her through the dimming slat of drunkenness. A shot was missed, and a ball went clattering across the barroom floor. There was only one man at the wooden bar, hunched over his Budweiser, taking occasional sips. His black-and-gray hair was gathered back in a ponytail the width of a horse's tail, and it hung down to within inches of his waist, as thick at the bottom as it was at the band. He was dressed like anyone else in jeans and an old T-shirt, but he was taller and thicker, she could see that, despite his poor posture. When she sat down on the stool beside him, he turned and looked her plainly in the face, then turned away again without a word. He could have been thirty-five, he could have been fifty, his face wasn't telling.

The bartender said, “Penn, you need another?” and the man nodded.

When she didn't turn away and he felt her staring, he turned again and she noticed now the very tan skin, the heavy, dark brows, the broad nose. But once again, he turned away with no expression at all. When he peered a third time, with one eyebrow arched, she said, “Hi,” smiling only slightly—as if she needed something from him, and the smile was for politeness' sake, which it was.

A long pause in which nothing transpired on that neutral face, then he said softly, “Hi.”

She stared at him without blinking, her small smile not budging, but just as he turned back to his drink, no puzzlement or awareness or anything showing on his mute and impassive face, she said, “Why don't I come home with you.” It was not a question.

He sighed, and without looking up from the twinkling amber of his beer bottle, he shook his head slowly and said, “Listen…” His voice trailed.

“What?” Her face revealed only careful curiosity, still polite.

“I…” He took a long breath and looked straight into her eyes now. “You want to come home with me…,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, the smile slipping now, replaced by her true face, which was not friendly, just plain.

“Listen,” he said, “the truth is, I don't think I … can handle a forward lady tonight.”

“Oh,” she said abruptly, and sat back on her stool, looking directly ahead of her at the wall, which was a mirror so she was looking at herself. She felt him turn likewise to the front. She was mildly affronted, but not enough to move. She'd never thought of herself as forward, only direct, the type of person who knew what she wanted—but then what exactly was the difference? Inside her mouth, she bit her tongue lightly. The man had a strange voice, like he had learned English as a second language. Low and flat and uninflected, like Native American voices she had heard. After a minute or so had passed, she said, without looking at him, “Are you Indian?”

A long pause. “Um, a Melungeon, I guess.”

“What's that?”

“Poor man's Spaniard.”

“Sounds greasy,” she said, and he laughed. But she didn't turn to him again, and he didn't turn to her. She finished her whiskey, and when the bartender looked at her with his brows raised, she just made a defeated face.

But she was watching her neighbor from the corner of her eye, and each time he reached for the neck of his beer, she detected a foul cut along the inside of his hand, extending across the palm to the vale between his thumb and index finger.

“What did you do to your hand?” she asked into the silence.

“I was seeding bluegrass and got cut,” he said slowly. She realized that he probably always spoke this slowly, as if feeling his way forward in the dark toward each word. It didn't seem an effect of the alcohol. He would have sounded simple, except that his voice was careful and thoughtful.

“You cut yourself on the machine?” she asked, and now she turned to him fully, because she was honestly curious. She couldn't picture how he'd done it.

“No,” he said, and paused, so for a moment she didn't think he was going to answer at all. Then he looked at her, and his eyes were very dark brown, and he said, “I've got a hand seeder.”

“It must be very old,” she said, frowning.

“Yes.”

“Why on earth would you use a hand seeder?” she asked.

“The machine doesn't work so good. You get too much plant in with your seed.” He swiveled slightly on the stool and made an upward sweeping motion with his injured hand like he was scooping something up. “With the seeder, you just get the pure seed.”

“And there's a market for this…?” she said.

“Pity for it anyway.”

Now it was her turn to laugh. Then she said softly, as if to herself, “Seems like we ought to have old tools like that around.”

“Farm girl?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“But rich.”

She blinked in surprise. “I guess so,” she said. “So what?”

“So nothing.” He turned back to the bar and drained his drink, knocking the bottle back down to the wood. He looked at her and with that not unkind, expressionless face, he sighed and said, “You can come to my place if you want.”

“Okay,” she said. She hadn't brought her pride along with her.

“But I live all the way down in Jackson County.”

“I don't care,” she said with a shrug, and there was such an inadvertent tone of despondency in her voice that she didn't hear but he couldn't miss, that he instinctively offered her his hand to help her off the stool.