The Sport of Kings (45 page)

“What? Who? Okay, Allmon, wait—if she's a relation, we can talk about that, but right now you're under Ohio jurisdiction, and if you move to Kentucky, there are legal issues that take—”

“No!” he cried, and all heads in the room turned. “Now! Get me out of this fucking neighborhood! Get me out of here, or I'm gonna die here too!”

“Allmon—”

“NOW!”

*   *   *

The bus crossed the river as it flowed under the Roebling Bridge, and then they were on Kentucky ground. Cincinnati was a sheer wall of light behind them, disappearing behind the cut in the hill as 75 curved south into foreign ground, the land of forgetting, the place where nothing had existed for Allmon before. He shuts his eyes and only sees Marie. Open, and the land is green and rolling like the rolling of the sea you've only seen on TV. Close, you can hear someone's private music pounding across the aisle; beneath the bus your one duffel bag, that's all. Open, and this is Crittenden. Close, open, this is Georgetown—you've never even heard of it. You wonder if they have an accent here, like the Reverend had a fierce accent. What was the name of his father and grandfather? All you can remember is the word Scipio, but you forget who that was if you ever knew. Drift off for a second, wake with a guilty start to the sound of your mother saying, Allmon, what have you done? It's like she knows you left the old telescope in the house on purpose. Only an idiot would do that, or someone intentionally trying to get lost.

*   *   *

In the closing scene, the lady's house is arrayed in lavender from the kitchen curtains to the soft toilet seat that puffs air when you sit on it. Tiny hand-crocheted doilies underlay white plastic lamps, and clear plastic covers the two sofas from Rent-A-Center. The carpets smell of lilac carpet cleaner, and they're so thick, he can't hear the sound of his own feet as he steps across them, almost as if he doesn't exist anymore, as if he's lighter than air. On the lady's hearth lies a taxidermied cat, before which he stops and stares. He's so numb, he can't even be terrified of it.

The lady called Sophia—second cousin by marriage once removed and adopted on top of that—was bustling around him, taking his duffel stuffed with his few belongings, taking his jacket. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you losing your mind?

“Your cat…,” he said, lacking even the energy to point.

“Oh.” She smiled. “You don't get rid of your baby just 'cause he passes on!” And then she had him by the elbow and was guiding him into a tiny bedroom, where two twin beds were dressed in sweet violet coverlets with pink heart pillows that said
Home Is Where the Heart Is
, and she was showing him the tiny closet and the empty dresser drawers, saying, “This is your room.”

No. No, this doesn't look like my room. Where did my city go? Where is my mother? My mother is my city.

And then the lady—a tiny thing next to him, a child really, except he was the child—was helping him sit stiffly on the bed and patting his shoulder and saying, Let a old lady help you, babydoll. You had a big shock, the worst kind of shock, but you're a good boy, you were a good son to your mama, Sophia can tell, she can recognize a kind heart when she sees one; I don't know how we survive these awful things, but we do, I promise we do, and a better day is coming, but first you got to cry for your mama and for yourself now too, you're in a safe, warm place, yes, babydoll, you're safe here. If he'd known they were the last kind words he would hear for years, that this was perhaps the last woman who would touch his shoulders and hands like he was a precious gift of God—a treasure to be had—he would have tried harder to memorize every detail of the moment and of her and of her simple home, including the yellow fall of light, the dust motes advancing through that light, the timbre of her ancient voice, even the smell of her old-lady breath. But his grieved mind was frozen like a fly in amber.

He was lying down now, his feet free; the woman had removed his sneakers and brought him a glass of grape juice and buttered white bread. Eat this, babydoll, you need to eat something. He couldn't. If he moved one muscle, memory would swamp him and flood his body.

She was in, she was out. She was touching his forehead, saying, Eat.

He listened to her watching television in her lavender living room; it was all happening in another country in a language he couldn't comprehend. Then she was vacuuming. Glasses were washed, the toilet flushed and then ran uselessly for a while, there was the sound of the woman humming, then proper night fell, and darkness engulfed the house.

He lay there in nothingness. The blackness was total, and the only thing he could see was his mother rigid in her casket, and nothing else. He started, his heart pulsing weakly. His hand faltered over his breast, then met the other hand, folding in the attitude of the dead. His eyes were open, her eyes were closed. Either way, darkness. What should he do now?

A candle he thought guttered was burning low, and his mind caught the light. Yes. He was rising suddenly. He was rising in the dark to go back to Ohio, or anywhere north, because that's where they were all waiting for him—all of them.

I am going to find my father. His name is Michael Patrick Shaughnessy. His father's name is Patrick something Shaughnessy and his mother's name is I don't actually know and their parents' names are
          
and
          
and
          
and
          
and their parents' names are
          
and
          
and
          
and
          
and
          
and
          
and

He was slipping his feet into his shoes and lacing them, his eyes unblinking. He was no longer confused. He felt around for his duffel and found the nylon strap. When he hefted it, he was hefting his whole life, and it weighed practically nothing. He couldn't find where the lady had put his starter jacket, so he simply left the room, bumping twice into a wall in the pitch black, and then he was in the living room, where a tiny eye of light remained on the television screen. It illuminated the keys on a side table. He snatched them up and let himself out of the lavender house, where the old woman would have held him and helped him cry if only he'd known how to do those things without remembering.

For the life of him, he could not figure out why he had been born.

The Cadillac started in an instant, and he did everything the way Aesop had shown him. Lights on the left, release parking brake, reverse, and away you go. He crept down the street, his hands clutching the wheel, looking neither right nor left, but applying the gas and departing forever from this way station.

He had no idea where he was going. He passed AA cemetery no. 1 without even knowing it was there, then the old train tracks, and when he saw a man on the street, he screeched to a halt.

“How you get out of Lexington?”

“Where you headed, son?”

“North.”

“Got to head up the hillbilly highway. But watch out for New Circle, it's like a big old wheel.”

He was speeding and heading home. The car swerved madly as the gas jetted through the carburetor, and a honking horn wowled past him, but he didn't hear it, because it took all his effort to not remember, because the world had gone retrograde and now ran counter to sense. The stars were slung under the horizon and hell was high. Life led to nothing, and he was arcing now toward that future faster than he ever had before, because every impediment was gone. His speed was tremendous. A horn blared, then more, the bright lights of this city entirely foreign, and then the policeman who had lodged his cruiser between two juniper bushes on the barn end of a Thoroughbred operation actually laughed out loud as he switched on his lights and sirens. What kind of idiot did eighty-seven down Winchester Road—and in a purple fucking Cadillac at that? His partner said, mildly, “Good God.” Then their lights were swooping red and blue across the blacktop before them, and damned if the purple car didn't actually speed up for a few seconds before it pulled over, and they saw a man fumbling at the wheel—possibly black, yeah, definitely black—so the cop behind the wheel was pulling his gun even before he was under twenty miles per hour. It was the fumbling he really didn't like; it didn't bode well.

The loudspeaker boomed out, causing Allmon to jump, but then he heard a voice with its sawn timbre saying, “Get out of the vehicle, and put your hands on the roof.”

For a moment he reached for his wallet, but he didn't even have it with him. And what good would it have done? All he had was a high school ID. Whatever. Nothing mattered. There was no meaning in his frightened eyes, or in the thumping of his heart, and there was no meaning in the words that said louder this time: “Exit your vehicle with your hands up! Now!”

In the rearview he saw a black guy—and for a moment entertained a faint and foolish hope—but then it didn't matter, because the man's hands were on him, and he was face-first against the hood of the car, his own hands splayed there, as unfamiliar as the contents of someone else's pockets. “Where's your license?” He shook his head, his thoughts as distant as Ohio, and the other cop, a white guy, was going through the car now, rifling through his duffel bag and, “Now what's this?” Two vials. And, “Mark, there's a weapon here,” and the black man behind him tightens his hold but needlessly, and if this is his last embrace, he'll accept it; he's not resisting. The black man says, “Stupid. Incredibly stupid. Where did you think you were headed?” Tries to say Cincinnati, but it comes out “Shhhhh,” and the man says, “Well, wherever you were going, you're not getting there tonight, son.” Son? No, not that. “Hey, kid, what's your name?” Allmon can't answer the question, because he's not sure what that even means. Hey, I'm just a kid! Just kidding! I'm nobody's kid. And the white guy says, “You don't want to answer questions, fine. Bullpen for you,” but he's still refusing to answer any questions when they ink his fingers and photograph his expressionless face downtown. When he walks into the holding cell bullpen tank meatcan, three concrete walls with bars at the Fayette County detention center, he doesn't say a word, can't think over the piss smell, cigarettes, barnyard stench, thrumming music, eyes staring at him, through him; same bewildered silence later when he's arraigned for a fitness hearing and transferred by the juvenile judge to adult court as a youthful offender, and only with his harried defense attorney he meets five minutes before his five-minute hearing does he finally say, confusedly, “When can I go home?” Then with further prompting at his hearing, he begins to haltingly describe the unwound spool which is his life, but when, skeptical and unmoved, the circuit court judge asks him, “Do you understand the nature of a Class C felony?” he can only nod his head yes, because it's true, he does know—Aesop told him. He's seventeen but sentenced as an adult by an angry, exhausted judge: ten years for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, with an extra two years for motor vehicle theft and possession of a weapon and resisting arrest, eligible for parole in six years, and spending his first four months in a detention center before he's transferred to that hellhole Bracken for three years, followed by three in minimum-security Blackburn, where he will learn to groom horses, but in both facilities, he is a strange and terrified boy in a strange and terrifying no-man's-land, where on the first of 2,190 nights, when they cut the fluorescent lights, he begins to cry and longs hellishly for home with the fever-pitch concentration of the damned, aching for the city of his mother, for the ghost of his father, his young and original self; for that place where the skyscrapers are steeples under which the Reverend preaches, divulging all the arcana of manhood and warning him away from Kentucky, which is just a cell Allmon yearns to reach out and unlock, swinging open to a free vista of the seven hills and the river now a fable, a river flooding its banks and telling tales, which Allmon cries to on his knees:
Tell me a story. Tell me about my past. Tell me about a place where the lights don't go out

A voice says, Shhhhh

tell me a story where no one goes away

Shhhh …

tell me a story about me

Scipio says, Listen now:

 

INTERLUDE III

That man there is a blood man. He stands at the edge of the Kentucky hills where they slope to the prattling river, imagining his children and their children not with his mind, but with the will of his body inclined toward freedom. He has come from the heart of Kentucky, a place that boasts one slave for every white man, and he is one of those slaves, or so they tell him, though he won't be for long.

He is an independent man and enterprising, though never formally educated, a man solitary and suspicious by nature, with no friends but his mother, who died in the spring of this very year, so the yoke of love has been lifted from him, his spirit now free to make his body free. Hate and desire bear him aloft from the outskirts of Paris like a seedling on fresh wind seeking fertile ground. He leaves his master's farm on a Saturday with a pass to attend a dance at a farm in Winchester in the company of ten other bondsmen, but when they reach the fork in the road that turns south toward Clark County, he takes his leave without a word, slipping from their jovial pack and disappearing into the woods. He cinches sacks of crushed Indian turnip around his calfhide brogans to throw off the scent and then crashes deep into the undergrowth of shrubs and thorny bushes. He knows of the famed railroad—all but the most ignorant backwoods slaves know of it—but he long ago decided to seek no help, none at all, refusing to follow another, black or white of any political persuasion, because he will be a man who makes his own way.