The Sport of Kings (56 page)

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It sounded like a bad joke, how Mack came from a place called Holler—too backwards to even have a proper goddamned name. Way out in Letcher County past Whitesburg under a ridge as tall as any New York skyscraper. Holler. I mean, goddamn. Holler for help was more like it. Too far in to get penicillin when you were sick or to get out when your daddy was drunk and tumbling down Jericho. He came from a family where almost nobody gave a damn if you didn't go to school, where you were eight the first time you got sick on spruce moonshine. Excepting his dear mother, who loved all her children gay or straight or green, his clan was full of shrew-faced mamaws that ruled the roost and men so cowed they could have been cattle. A stereotype of a stereotype, that was Holler. Even the word was arsenic on his tongue. Of course, it wasn't politically correct now to talk about the mountains that way—a bunch of self-righteous cockroaches would crawl through the Internet and infest your inbox, call you a traitor to the ones you left behind. But that was all a song and dance to look better for the Yankees, and Mack liked Yankees about as much as he did mountains. Sure, people liked to wax romantic about down home, about places like Holler or Crine or Sundown—Mama's cooking and eighty-seven-verse ballads and awshucks I ain't knowed we was poor, that whole whitewash—but they only indulged it once they'd got out. Then they'd forget about the beatings, everybody dying too young from drugs and car crashes on mountain roads, the hellfire, the damnation, the everloving ignorance. Sentimental memories were just a way of apologizing for being the kind of asshole who escapes. And escape Mack had.

He was pretty sure they'd flung him up on a nag straight out of the womb. Just a spraddle-legged little fucker on the back of a bow-back mare, taking jam and pork cuts to his cousins over in the next holler, fetching mail in Holler proper for Mother and Daddy, making himself a general nuisance by egging on anyone with a horse or a mule to race down the length of Big Hammer Holler, from Mine no. 11 down to the cluster of Union graves at the far end (his clan ran Jefferson, opposition to most of the county, which just figured). He was always sneaking up on somebody's horse, riding hogs for fun, telling folks he tamed a deer and rode it too, which was bullshit of course, but the story got so big, so reckless, he couldn't remember if he'd rode the thing or just told the tale. Didn't matter. It made him a minor legend, so somebody had actually heard of him on the Alabama Circuit when he went down there begging to ride—a fourteen-year-old with cannonballs in his Wranglers. But he conquered that rinky-dink show pretty fast and then headed west with a boyfriend who only made it as far as Peoria before Mack left him on the side of the road, and then he rode quarter horses in Wyoming until he got thrown hard and was busted up for three solid months. That's when he switched over to training, which was a natural progression, seeing as he was constitutionally incapable of getting along with people, much less taking orders from them. Soon enough he tore the Old West a new asshole and got bored again, ended up back in Kentucky. Of all places. Eating where he used to shit, he supposed, but he never went back to the mountains. He stayed in Lexington with his scratchy, undiluted Letcher County accent, and when people called him a hillbilly, he flexed his wrist under his Rolex and curled his toes in his custom Lucchese boots and thought, You have no fucking idea.

Mack slowed down for nothing but whiskey and his dear mother, whom he'd brought up to a Lexington retirement home pretty much the instant his daddy died, and just now he was charging at his customary speed through Henry's stallion barn, looking for the manager's office. Henry had said he would be there first thing in the morning. They were planning to roll through footage together, debate the new prospects for Seconds Flat, talk about siblings going to stud. He didn't do it like this for everyone; he was in the enviable position of choosing whom to work with so closely, but few were as driven as Forge. Henry was a man who never called it “the game,” and Mack appreciated that. If you were born in Letcher County, you knew that nothing involving more than fifty bucks was a game.

He heard the sounds before they registered, but hell, it was February and every horse he encountered was cock-addled or in estrus, and his poor brain was echoing with the sounds of breeding or grooms talking about breeding or his own thoughts on breeding, so he didn't realize what it was until he saw it, though he certainly should have; his body already knew. He heard that sound of someone moaning low, and the slapping of skin that made his dick move before his brain could get involved. He only stood there at the office door for maybe two seconds—the fools left it cracked! Or maybe they got off on that, who knows—but it seemed just shy of an eternity: the black guy moving over a white woman who had turned her face away, but whose hair was unmistakable as she moaned and gripped the groom's buttocks, so it stood out in his mind later with all the startling, upending stark of a photographic negative. It was only when he had stepped smartly and immediately away, when he was marching off to the house, realizing Henry had meant
that
office, that he understood exactly what he'd seen.

At the far end of the shed row, he laughed once, a harsh, surprised sound. Mack wasn't a cruel man—well, he'd been accused of cruelty by a couple of employees, but mostly he was just impatient—but, more to the point, he appreciated a good joke. Especially at another man's expense. A wealthy man? One who paid him to be the best, all the while thinking he was a step above on the ladder? He felt a twinge of compunction when he thought of those kids just having their suds-in-the-bucket fun … But yeah, this was pretty goddamn irresistible.

Which is why he was grinning over Henry's head when he stepped into the house office, why he could barely tuck away that grin as they watched the seven prospect videos, and why he ended up saying something, even though he really knew he shouldn't, even though he felt a tiny twinge of almost-regret.

It didn't stop him. He was a risk taker, just like Henry Forge. “Tell me again the name of that black kid you got working for you, Henry.”

“Allmon. Why?” said Henry from where he was switching off the DVD player and straightening up to see him out.

Mack tapped his Stetson against his thigh and torqued up his lip. “Well”—the world in the pause—“I know you watch your investments, Henry.” The words were just barely weighted with the drag of meaning, but Henry looked at him sharply.

Henry paused before he spoke. “That's right.”

“And you no doubt got big plans for your daughter.”

This time, Henry didn't answer, just looked, and Mack played it easy, played it cool. He knew how to handle a whipsaw. “I can see how you've been grooming her to take over this operation. She's a talented lady, for sure. But things sure can go wrong in a hustle. All sorts of things. A girl headed for the big time can end up hauling coal. It's a crazy world.”

The meaning settled and the sclera of Henry's eye brightened with blood. He said, lowly, “And you speak from experience? You've seen that sort of thing happen, I assume?”

They were standing at the side door to the el porch now, looking out over the acreage, which men like Henry were handed on silver platters at birth. Mack said, all casual, “Yeah, sure. I've seen it myself. It's just a reality of life how even the best-laid plans can get fucked. Funny how that can happen.” Then he popped his hat back on his head and said, “It sure is funny.”

*   *   *

“Henrietta!”

Henry made a hard knot of his Burberry tie and dragged a comb through his silvery hair, but his pugilist hands trembled in the mirror; there was disturbance beneath the water.

“Henrietta!”

Careful, Henry. The overeager go out in the first round, and the obdurate are softened by something other than hard blows. Night was encroaching and Kentucky was folding in on itself and, with it, untold possibilities for a man who couldn't manage himself.

“I'm right here.” Henrietta was just outside the door of the bedroom, standing before the hall mirror in a red silk dress he'd bought her seven years ago for a Derby run—the year Hellcat finished second. He remembered the race; he remembered the red dress.

“You look beautiful, daughter.”

Henrietta smiled, not turning from the mirror as she clipped her grandmother's pearls to the lobes of her ears. But Henry could see her eyes were too alive and elsewhere—the look of a woman only recently visiting foreign countries, her mind not yet returned home.

“Where have you been?” he said easily.

She stiffened, the old steel in her eyes again. “What am I—a child?” she said.

A cock of the head, a curb of the mind's tongue. It was Henry's turn to say nothing.

As she pinned up her hair, Henry stepped in and kissed the back of her neck. But his gall rose: from her shoulders drifted the heated smell of woman, that wandering sex; it was a noisome stench. “Your grandfather would be very proud of you,” he said, and watched as her glance stalled, seemed to catch the waft of meaning almost after it had drifted past. She shifted in her low heels, adjusted the dangerous bodice.

“Are you ready?” she said.

He was ready.

Across the black expanse of farm, across the farrow winter-world of Bourbon County in January, across town, the old Tavern blazed. The centuries-old building, a gray limestone structure as pale in the night as the adjacent courthouse, built by pioneer hands and maintained by Old Dominion faith, stood festooned with stringed white bulbs and garlands. A round, hyperfecund moon loomed over her slate rooftop, and the stars were all dimmed before the overbright, nettling lights of Paris.

The old tavern door was manned by a wizened groom in age-old livery, bowing at the waist as he ushered them into the dark, cramped space of the low-ceilinged foyer. A single sconce twinkled. With his hand at her back, Henry steered his daughter through a narrow hall toward snapping candlelight and high, sharp chatter, voices like breaking glass. They descended three stone steps into a small banquet room.

Now they all turned as one, forty or fifty heads as a single body, conversation halting, all eyes on the lamplit pair. Henrietta clutched once at her bodice, sensing the almost irresistible draw of the passage behind them, the aloneness it offered, but Henry stepped smartly into the room ahead of her, a childish grin of delight on his face.

A smartly dressed woman of sixty disengaged herself from the crowd, setting aside her glass and reaching for Henry with both hands. Her eyes were rimmed with blue kohl and her feathered blonde hair reached improbable heights in all directions. Her long bejeweled earrings swung to and fro, snatching the light as she turned to the small crowd, crying, “The guests of honor!”

Henrietta barely heard the cheer that followed. She'd been here before, but never at night, never when the scarlet walls were turned to swampy blood by flickering lamps and candles, clashing with the swagging salmon drapes. The woman was speaking into her face with boozy breath when someone pressed a chilled tumbler of bourbon into her hand. She took the thing as a shot.

“To the memory of John Henry, that Old Regular sonofabitch!” came a rallying cry, and she knew there were no strangers here. These white, warm faces, pink with alcohol, all possessed surnames that had struggled over the Wilderness Road to this bloody ground, naming it Paris after other trodden and trammeled wildernesses. Kentucky had folded all their lives together into a tight braid.

Look at them all raising glasses to her munificent grandfather, her ambitious father—panegyrics for the living and the dead. The bourbon Henrietta was drinking was florid and complex, but she tasted only confusion. She had lain under Allmon just this afternoon, cursing with want and wanting his need. She was in love, but maybe she was also hopelessly naïve. She blinked. Did she actually think that love offered some kind of escape? There is kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. You could step out of your heels, walk backward along the hall, recede from their collective gaze, but you could never escape the category of your birth and all the morphological categories which precede it.

The garish mouth of the woman cried, “Come on, y'all! Dinner awaits!” and they were ushered to their tables, where gold flatware, crystal goblets, and old china sparked under the low lights. The woman raised a glass and knocked the tines of a fork against its faceted side. “We are here to celebrate the new Genealogical Museum of Central Kentucky”—applause all around—“funded in large part by a towering donation from the Forge family in the name of John Henry, whom we all remember as a treasured member of the community, deceased now more than thirty years. We wouldn't be—we couldn't be—who we are without men like John Henry and Henry Forge, men who preserve our past and guide us into a future where the past still matters. The Forge family is one of the crown jewels of the Bluegrass and, though they probably would have preferred to give anonymously, we just couldn't let them do that. We want to polish the jewels of our hometown. Now give a big Kentucky thank-you to Henry and Henrietta Forge! Join me in raising a toast!”

One long swig of bourbon and Henrietta's tongue was dry and bleached as a bone. There was raucous cheering and faces were speaking at her, but all she could think was: God, we all look alike, as if they'd crawled from the birth canal of the same remote ancestor. Love was an in-house project. When Judith had left, it was almost as if she'd never existed. Her bloodline offered no lifeline.

They launched into the repast: encrusted scallops with a mango spice reduction, roasted parmesan asparagus, local greens with raspberry vinaigrette and crème brûlée.

“Drink up,” her father said, and she did. Her third.

Through the warbled glass at her nose, she watched Henry assume his stance at the lectern, his drink wobbling in his hand. Or was it her eyes that wobbled in their sockets? Another swig would answer.