The Sport of Kings (32 page)

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That afternoon, when the mood was settling like ashes on a burned-out fire, their neighbor Beanie came visiting, blunt tongue and motherwit at the ready. She wore her sweats pushed up under her chubby knees and a Bulls jersey with armholes so deep, her white bra showed. Her hair terraced down from her crown in a series of tight rolls that graduated in thickness until the final curl at her nape was thick as a toilet paper roll. She wore one or two gold-toned rings on every finger, and they glinted as she smoked; she always smoked. She found Marie at the kitchen table, staring into the window fan with a scraped plate of food before her.

“Where's my favorite baby boy at?” Beanie said.

“I don't know,” Marie said softly.

Beanie chuckled. “You know that child got a fierce face. Gonna scare the hell out of some white folk when he gets grown. Bone structure, you know what I'm saying. Bone motherfucking structure.”

The corners of Marie's mouth lifted, but she couldn't smile. “I was awful this morning, and he ran off. He's probably out back. I can't blame him.”

Beanie eased down heavily into the other chair with her legs stiffed out before her. “Okay, look at me. Look at me, girl.” Marie glanced up warily, as if expecting a blow. “I'm sick to death of you crying over this motherfucker. You know I am. This shit getting to be like clockwork.”

Marie wiped her nose on her hand. “He promised to take Allmon to the carnival, and then he just sat right there on that couch and drank himself silly.”

Beanie made a sorry sound in her throat and shook her head.

“He couldn't even sit up straight, he was so drunk, and then he tells me he got some girl pregnant in Chicago, and he's moving to Chicago now. And I was like, ‘Do you love me?'”

“First, don't be asking no man if they love you. 'Cause that's just pathetic.”

“And all he said, you know what he said? He was like, ‘I love you, but I got a sweet tooth.'”

“Mike, the white boy?”

Marie nodded.

Beanie sighed. “Who even knew white boys was worthless as these niggers up in here.”

“He left me his car. But I don't even care. Beanie, Allmon shouldn't have seen me like that.”

Beanie sighed. “Yeah, well, somebody's got to put you in check. You act too soft all the time. You let a man run all over—”

Marie laid her hands down flat on the table, her face all affront. “Now you sound like the Reverend saying I act like a white girl.”

“Ew, nasty!” Beanie held up a shielding hand. “I ain't meant it like that, 'cause I ain't that mean. I ain't never met no white girl over age thirteen I'd save out a burning building.”

Marie sighed and looked hopelessly around her. “It's like I got to be some tough-ass bitch to actually be black around here—”

Beanie's head cocked hard. “Who you calling a tough-ass black bitch?”

She got what she was looking for. Marie bowed her head and laughed through her nose, then swept up Beanie's free hand in her own. “I'm just saying … it's like somebody's always ready to tear me down for just being me. The Reverend thinks I act like some whiny white girl, men think they can walk all over me if I just act myself instead of playing some hard-to-get game, and all these girls here act like I'm a race traitor 'cause I was with Mike—”

Beanie waved her hand. “Oh, it don't make them no nevermind, they're just talking shit, 'cause that's what assholes do—”

“No, it's a fact, and you know it. It's like you've always got to playact and pretend to be someone else to get love in this world. Well, I don't playact with men. I don't try to seduce people. I'm just me. And so everybody's out there tricking people into falling in love with them, and I'm all alone.”

“How come that is, you think?”

Marie stared straight into her eyes. “Because they're cowards. Men are cowards.”

Beanie waved smoke away from Marie. “Okay, well, you ain't got to playact. Ain't nobody saying that. Just … just don't nobody want to see you crying over these spineless, tired, worthless motherfuckers. Ain't nobody ever told you ain't no man alive worth crying over?”

Marie closed her eyes, said, “Children need a father.”

“Okay, see now that offends me a little bit,” said Beanie, pulling back her hand. “Both my girls is doing good, and where's their fathers at? Where's Derron at? Who the fuck even knows. At least we all know where Omar's at, you know what I'm saying. But both my girls doing good, star students at SCPA, playing in band and doing ballet, all that. Marie,” she said, but more gently, with a sigh, “you don't need no man. Open your eyes and look around you. Who you see in this building with a man? Who?”

“Cara.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.”

“Diane.”

“All right. Shit.”

Marie stared in sudden consternation at the fan, watching tendrils of smoke slip into its draw. Then she said, “And that girl with the twins I always see out on Knowlton's Corner. I don't know her name. I see her out with that big stroller.”

Beanie reared back. “Oh!”

“What?”

“That bitch? Oh shit! That bitch a one-woman jizz factory, she got dicks clocking in and out every hour of the day. She ain't got no man, Marie—she got a pimp!”

“What? No! She's a prostitute?”

“You ain't know that? Goddamn, Marie, you so ignorant!”

“But—I, I can't help it—I grew up in church!”

Both women howled. And once started, they couldn't stop, so Beanie had to fling her cigarette out the window and stomp her feet, and Marie ended up slipping off her chair onto the floor, leaning her head back onto the chair seat to cry. Then she was too weak from laughter to stand, so Beanie had to stand over her and, hauling her up with both hands, said, “Well, get Allmon on down to church then. Get him a dose of the Reverend.”

*   *   *

The Reverend lived in an old four-story brownstone on Sycamore, one in a row of five on the block, all in a state of disrepair. The façade was pink as adobe punctuated by black architraves that made pointy eyebrows over windows and black shutters, a few of which swung loose and hung precariously by a single hinge, threatening passersby below. The stoop was concrete, the corbel and cornice painted gray to look like stone. The peeling house rained old paint flakes on the stoop, where once upon a time, when Marie was young, there had been rectangular planters filled with geraniums and oxalis. When her mother died of cancer, the planters and their flowers had disappeared. Now there was nothing on the stoop but the deep wear in stone of a hundred thousand footsteps impressed over the course of a century and more. It swooped gently like the seat of a cold gray saddle.

Marie and Allmon drove up Sycamore in the Escort Mike Shaughnessy had left them, but it was hard to find a spot downtown, so they parked down a side street barely wider than an areaway, crowded with black trash bags and tires and forsaken furniture. As Marie cut the motor, three men who had stood huddled together at the end of the alley scattered like jacks.

“I don't miss living down here,” she sighed, but her eyes were on Allmon in the rearview. “Honey, listen to me,” she said, pinning him with a serious gaze, “I need you to get some Jesus here, all right?”

He nodded.

“That's all I'm asking of you.”

“Okay.”

She held up a finger. “And I don't want any talk about your daddy. You hear me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ain't no uh-huh. I'm serious. Yes, Momma.”

“Yes, Momma,” he said.

When they rang the doorbell, a Chinese man answered the door. Marie started back in surprise. She looked at him without saying a word, this pint of a man with long, thin hair like a horse's neglected mane, who wore an old white painter's jumpsuit splattered with bright color. He was ageless, bedraggled, a man who hadn't bathed in a long while and who probably didn't care. He took one look at them and said, “Who are you?”

“I'm Marie,” she said, indignant. “Who are you?”

“Oh, ha!” the man cried. “The Reverend's daughter, Marie. Of course! Come in, come in. I'm new here. I didn't realize.”

He waved them into the building with two quick flaps of his hand, and they entered the soaring foyer, where the balustraded staircase rose steeply to the second floor. Above, the drift of radio chatter and men's voices. The bang of something dropping and raucous laughter.

“I think the Reverend's in his office. Yeah, there he is. Listen, if you're staying the night, I'd like to share with you my witness, how Christ changed my life.”

“Uh-huh,” Marie said, steering Allmon toward the parlor.

“I was a dead man walking before I let him in my heart. I used to live down on Broadway; you can't even call it living what I was doing. But I'll tell you all about it later. It'll be a warning for your kid.”

“Yeah, okay, sure.”

The man ushered them over the threshold into the parlor of what had once been a grand Cincinnati row house, now a fraying thread in the tapestry of the city. The Reverend presided, stiff and upright, in his usual place on his busted crimson leather chair, his Bible open on his lap. All over the chair, white stuffing like cotton bolls extruded from seams and tears and from under duct tape patches. When the Reverend looked up and saw them, he closed his Bible, laid it aside, and stood. He was tall and broad with nothing extra on him, shoulders like a box under his neatly ironed secondhand shirt, which was tucked in tight and buttoned to its starched collar. His enormous hands hung at his sides, the fingers fidgeting subtly, forever in motion, his old gold wedding band catching the light dully. It was not so much the man's size that commanded attention but his head and face—the tight, short hair sprinkled with gray above an enormous forehead, dark as a chalkboard with deep lines written across its surface. His nose was wide and sloped steeply beneath the heavy, mannish brows that Allmon had inherited. And set deep, deep beneath those brows, tawny eyes burned bright as lanterns. The Reverend never just looked; his eyes bored into the object of his concern.

“Hi, Daddy,” said Marie with a pittance of a voice, sounding not much older than her boy.

The Reverend nodded. “Always late. You missed supper.” His voice, enormous even when conversational, filled the shape of the room. His aurous eyes dismissed her with an unreadable expression, then settled on Allmon. Allmon smiled up into that familiar face, which did not smile in return. Nothing was said for a long moment, but just as Marie was drawing her breath to speak, the Reverend intoned, “What're you doing to this child's head?” After fifty years in the Queen City, rural Arkansas still rolled off his tongue.

“What?” said Marie, and she reached down to touch Allmon's hair, which had grown all out of order like a hedge unchecked. “It looks good. I like it like this. It's kind of free.”

The Reverend cocked his head and when he spoke, every word was slow, declarative, his vowels as broad as fields. “May I remind you there's a difference between free and sloppy? You think your child looking unattended-to is free? Folks see a child like that, they think he doesn't have a mother. They see a just-so Negro. May as well give him a dashiki and a blunt.”

“Daddy!” said Marie, laughing. “Four-year-olds don't need to look like lawyers. I mean, what decade is this?”

“Apparently, the decade where don't nobody care if their children look homeless. This business … this ain't even in style.” A derisive flap of his enormous hand.

“In style? You really think you should be lecturing me about what's in style?” Marie turned left and right to appraise the Reverend's holdings, which amounted to a wrecked house, dilapidated vinyl furniture, a parlor room with books to the ceiling, and two identical Goodwill suits. She sighed. “Anyway, you know, some people like it.”

“Like who? Like White Mike, that's who!” The Reverend turned his back to them and raised up his hands in exasperation. He took a few halting steps toward his chair and said, “Jesus help me learn there ain't no sense arguing when the milk”—and here he paused between each word—“done. Been. Spilt.” Then he lowered himself into his chair with pronounced fatigue, like a man much older than his sixty-five years, and said, “Y'all just sit down now. Just sit down and visit and no more bickering.”

So they sat, Marie and Allmon on a sticky gray vinyl couch facing the Reverend, who seemed not particularly inclined to say anything more. Allmon reached up and found the swell of his hair; he noted for the first time how it stuck out past his ears. His grandfather turned that keen, unbreaking gaze upon him and said, “How you doing, young mister?”

“Daddy was here!” said Allmon, his hand still to his Afro.

“Aw…,” moaned Marie. “Aw, Allmon … dag.” And she just leaned forward and put her face into her cupped hands.

“Aha!” said the Reverend, looking at Allmon with an appraising eye. “Children always speak the truth! Now, how long it's been since the good Michael Shaughnessy graced this child with his presence?”

Marie said through her hands, “He was here this weekend.”

“I mean before that.”

She paused. “Nine months.”

The Reverend's head was a deep bell, swinging side to side but making no sound. He didn't have to say a word.

Marie raised her own head and took a deep breath. “It was an okay visit, really.” Still the Reverend said nothing, and her eyes filled suddenly with tears and she said, “Actually, it wasn't very good, Daddy.”

The Reverend cleared his throat and said, “Don't be crying in front of your child.” Then he stood again, removed his worn white handkerchief from his breast pocket, and handed it to Marie.

She took it but crumpled it in her fist unused and whispered, as if Allmon wouldn't hear a whisper. “I don't really know if he's gonna come back.”