The Sport of Kings (72 page)

She trained one wicked eye on Allmon when he entered the stall, but she didn't bite. Still, Allmon managed her head, through which coursed a high, almost electric energy. She was a hurricane in a black barrel.

“Goddamn,” said Mack as he eased down slowly to a squat beside her, careful not to make a sudden movement. “Goddamn if I'm not a little bit scared of this filly. That's a first.”

But the long, knobby leg was cool, and Allmon limped alongside Hell to a paddock constructed on the back of Mack's broodmare barn, where a sun the color of old lemons was shrinking the snow. The instant she felt the bite of the February air, Hell's nose rode high like a schooner on waves, and she began to skitter and dance to an old, unheard tune. Her tail snapped and her eyes shined with the bliss of the cold.

“Turn her loose,” said Mack.

“Really?” said Allmon, pausing at the paddock gate.

“Can't never could,” said Mack, flanked by two assistants. Then he reached forward and unclipped the shank to turn Hell loose.

For a long moment, she stood perfectly still in the paddock, her black mane waving and twisting in the squirrely wind, her nostrils wide as the world, her ears pricked forward toward something far beyond the confines of the paddock.

“My God,” one of the assistants whispered. “Her legs are magnificent.” The filly's ears swiveled back, then without so much as a tinge of hesitation denoting pain, she sank into those magnificent legs, her rump a boss of rippling muscle, and leaped forward like a deer from her quarters. Two strides and Mack was beginning to yell; three more and, without altering her speed or veering, Hell crashed chest-first into the metal rim of the pen, sending ripples of shock along its length until it bent under her force. She stumbled heavily against the resistance as if startled, then jerked away and spun around toward her handlers, her eyes lined with high white. Lips furled back nearly to her tattoo, she cried out a wild, shrill, enraged sound that pinned them all, except for Mack, who had flung his hat from his head and raced into the paddock, hollering, “She's gonna charge! She's gonna break her legs!” Allmon didn't know whether it was an honest escape or merely to exercise her natural strength, but he was there inside of two seconds, ready when she leaped forward again, strings of saliva swooping from her bared teeth, her breath a wind shear against his face. She feinted left, then dodged right, but they had her circled. Allmon snatched hold of her halter and drew her head savagely around where he could gain a proper hold. Only then did he see the jagged wound that had opened across her breast, the thin marbled fat exposed beneath. With a start, he realized that Hell—competitor, champion, beauty, his future—was raw meat.

They managed two lunging steps forward with Allmon at the halter, whispering and cajoling and petting her with his voice. But Hell didn't want sweet nothings; in a flash she traced a swift circle with her head and butted him with the long, blunt ridge of her nose. She sent him sprawling elbows akimbo into the dirt.

Allmon cried out, more from surprise than pain as Mack scrambled to restore a hold on the halter. She'd never snapped at Allmon before, never once tried to best him. Now he rose to his feet, his face twisted up with swift, furious offense.

It took the strength of seven to wrestle Hell back to her stall.

While Mack went sprinting for his cell phone, she stood there with her head high, blood running tracks down her front legs, squaring eyeball to eyeball with Allmon, who stood safely on the other side of the stall door. They both shook with grievance.

“Is that how it's gonna be?” he hissed. “I'm the enemy now?”

She raised her lip.

“Well, then this is what you get!” He gestured with a lashing motion at the hay, the dim light, the stall, knowing full well that until the day she quit racing, when they retired her from the track and began forcing select stallions on her, that long-awaited moment when he, Allmon, would make a real life for himself with one of her foals, she would never experience a moment of freedom again.

*   *   *

Copied into the fourth notebook, from K. Aubere's
Limitless Variation and the Advent of Life
:

For a billion years, there was little, only the brownish green scum of the seas. Nothing but basalt rock existed on a land deprived of oxygen and blasted by ozone. In the waters, life was a thin, primitive, fragile sheet. Single-celled, prokaryotic organisms clung to one another like magnetic bits of thread, accreting and forming these microbial mats. Photosynthetic organisms crowded to the top, striving for light, while their buried peers split the weaker sulfide bonds to survive.

But the wheel of the world was spinning, the mats mutating and diversifying, spreading throughout the seas. In a blink of the earth's basalt eye, eukaryotic organisms emerged, algae-like with their organelles, tiny harbingers of complexity. Tissues and organs soon followed.

540 million years ago, Nature reached down, took up all her organisms, and cast them like dice. Invertebrate life tumbled throughout the seas, and in wild radiations, the ocean phyla appeared in startling profusion. Soon, the algae blossomed into plants, which marched out of the waters onto temperate land and blanketed the terrain from sea to sea with vegetation. Tiny animals then emerged to burrow and tunnel through earth's undiscovered soils. The world was redolent with new bodies.

But why the sudden and dizzying acceleration of life in the Cambrian? Why then and not before? For 4 billion years, the rate of expansion had been placid, steady. The fossil record is slim, the cupboard nearly bare.

Freedom. Oxygen levels rose in the Cambrian, there was a cooling of the earth's simmer, followed by a sudden, sigmoidal rise. In land's abundant light, single-celled life strengthened and augmented, occupying new adaptive roles. The first land plants became coal forests that grew taller with each generation. The denizens of the seas grew to an inch, then a foot, then a meter in the form of terrifying fishes that established suzerainties in the depths. Extinctions shook the dynasties of the earth, cutting down classes and orders—though the phyla never vanished. They simply regathered their troops and when the Age of Reptiles began, dinosaurs thundered over carpets of insects and beetles, flowers and ferns. Mammals broke the trees and cut blazes, and then the apes appeared, and the ape men eventually stood up. They spread out from the bowl of Africa to Europe and Asia with crude tools in their hands and eyes evolved to gaze ahead at the horizon. But then Homo emerged out of the family Hominidae, and brought with him that very late and crude invention, the human brain. The rest, as they say, is history.

*   *   *

She wasn't green anymore, she was seasoned, and she was enormous. The turf writers flocked around her at Gulfstream—Todd Greeney from the
Racing Form
, Jeff Burrow of
Blood Horse
, and all the rest. Mack hated the press; as far as he was concerned, fielding a single question was an unforgivable waste of his daylight, but the track management had requested it—hell, they'd all but demanded the press conference, so here he was, every pugnacious, impatient, hypertensive, contemptuous ounce of him. While Hellsmouth stood at attention with Allmon at her chin, Mack barked out her numbers in a blunt staccato:

“Height: 16 hands, ¾ inches.

“Point of shoulder to point of shoulder: 16 inches.

“Girth: 74 inches.

“Withers to point of shoulder: 28 inches.

“Elbow to ground: 37½ inches.

“Point of shoulder to point of hip: 46 inches.

“Point of hip to point of hock: 40 inches.

“Point of hip to buttock: 24 inches.

“Poll to withers: 40 inches.

“Buttock to ground: 53½ inches.

“Point of shoulder to buttock: 68 inches.

“Circumference of cannon under knee: 8¼ inches.

“Point of hip to point of hip: 25 inches—she's got a big ass.

“All right, now you know the numbers. Clearly, she's huge.”

Greeney squinted, tilted his head, and said, “Mack, you've waited for the Florida Derby to race her. It's pretty clear you're going straight for races that offer you a hundred points and not messing around with smaller stakes. Why are you getting such a late start? Is there something we don't know? You're not exactly known for being conservative.”

Mack reached up and touched the pale brim of his hat, forming a brief shield over his features, then he squared up and stared down his interlocutor as though an epithet had been hurled in the general direction of his mother. “First off, I'm a registered Republican, and I'm conservative as fuck. Second, there's nothing wrong with my filly. She's a hundred percent. Actually, this filly's two hundred percent.”

“Then why'd you—”

“Because,” Mack said, his lips thin, “I've got nothing to prove. I know where she's headed.”

“Is she breaking from the gate any better?”

Mack grimaced. “No, that's still a shit show.”

A writer from the
Herald
said, “She's still running from behind?”

“Listen, yeah,” Mack said, then sighed, hands to his hips. “What you guys don't understand about women is a lot. Smart women, they get bored easy. This one here, she's so much better than the rest, she has to manufacture her own challenge. If she didn't come from behind, she'd fall asleep on her own goddamn feet.”

Greeney again: “But do you feel she's gotten enough conditioning to come back with the kind of performance she was capable of last year? We've all watched a lot of juveniles burn out in their third year. You think she'll be ready without warm-ups?”

Mack's patience was about sapped. He jutted out a blunt finger into the air in front of his chest with all the cocked force of a small revolver. “This filly just burned up five furlongs in fifty-eight and a half,” he spat. “You could cut off one of her goddamn legs and she'd still run faster than that bowlegged hack Angelshare.”

Greeney was shaking his head, a grin twitching about his lips. “Can I quote you on that?”

“Go ahead and quote me. I think we all know I'm not gonna die of natural causes.”

They broke up laughing.

But one voice pierced the laughter. “Yeah, I'm not buying it.” It was Jeff Burrow, tipping his ball cap up from the springy mass of his graying brown hair. He'd worked the track for thirty years, and there were numerous things he was afraid of, including his semper fi father-in-law and butterflies, but Mack Snyder was not on that list. “Let's stop beating around the bush. You're hard on horses, everybody knows it. Your filly's big as a boat, that's great, it's impressive. But she skipped all the spring prep races, and now you bring her to Florida with a busted-up chest. How do you know you're not setting her up to be another Ruffian?”

Mack started at the reference. Everyone could see the war on Mack's face as he struggled to manage dueling armies of blustercuss and knickertwist. His normal raw porcine pink bloomed to a beefy red. He stepped toward Burrow with that finger still extended and the safety off, but, as if on cue, in a massive show of bravado, Hellsmouth sank into her heavily muscled quarters and reared high, rolling her hooves above the heads of the gathered men. Without a beat, Allmon scrambled to manage her.

Mack laughed a gravelly laugh and turned his pointing finger toward his horse. “How do I know? I know because I'm in love with her. And I never loved anybody that didn't know how to fight.”

*   *   *

She was frothing in the post parade and fractious in the gate, whinnying for free rein and snarling at the bars of the five slip. Reuben eased his bones off the rails and situated himself on her back, snugging up his knees and fixing tight his goggles. He pressed the red crop under his arm, licked his lips, and surveyed the dirt track before him. He'd been waiting all winter like Hell's war wife and here they were, reunited at the edge of a triumphant future. Hell had been crushing furlongs—absolutely demolishing them—in her morning workouts all week. She'd drawn the faithful railbirds with their cameras at dawn; she'd made the chief clocker stutter with excitement. Now she was tossing her black braids, banging her rump once against the rear door. She was more than ready, she was bursting out of her skin.

“Come out,” Reuben whispered, staring through the crack in the gate. “Come out for blood.” Now the jocks balanced their mounts. The sun was streaming light so loud they could hear it like a banging drum. When the burn of expectation mounted to out-and-out pain, the bell shrilled, and the gate clattered wide. An earthquake cracked through the stands, and the Florida Derby was on.

In a move that made the announcers shout, Hell broke clean as new glass beneath Reuben. She sheared out so suddenly without her usual sink and bob that he had to snatch manically at the roots of her braids and tuck hard to remain aboard. Was it only yesterday morning that she'd shambled out of the gate with her old loose-limbed stride? This was altogether new, how she plunged past the charging field inside of three paces, long before the first turn. Gone was her adolescent chop and her early wastrel furloughs. In their place a deep and powerful lunging had asserted itself. With every stride, she reached further forward, her nose piercing the air with a fresh and dreadful aggression. It was as if a new horse were unfurling under Reuben; he recovered his wits, doubled down upon her, one ear thrilling to the warrior report of her hooves.

The crowd didn't wait for the turn, they rose in a jolt at the ⅞ pole, every eye locked on the charging filly as she took possession of the field. She was too strong to be pretty, but she had something in her new maturity far better than beauty: dignity. The colts all felt her occult energy; they sensed it like a shadow tilting over them and dropped away as if they'd slowed up, though in reality they only charged the harder. As the stunned field wound out of the turn and into the straightaway, never once did Reuben think to raise his crop to tap her on a shoulder or quarter. Hell was riding a wave of her own power and needed no spur to draw the first four lengths between her and Angelshare, which was when Reuben first became aware of the unearthly roll of sound ripping across the grandstand. “The devil's on his long black train,” he muttered as four lengths turned to seven. Seven to ten, and her wave began to crest and unfurl with unmitigated strength. She was pulling further away and the words of the announcer were unclear, but Reuben knew the man was yelling. Poured across her back, he spared a thought to reserve her—go easy on that delicate bone—but he didn't or he couldn't as she rolled out her most destructive, punishing stride, now extending sixteen lengths from Angelshare and closing in on Secretariat's coppery ghost, so she was practically on his tail when she rolled thunderously under the wire twenty lengths ahead. She had slain the colts and flung dirt in their eyes, but her victory and Reuben's wild yell and the shattering cries of the crowd didn't alter her course; she continued to accelerate past the wire, her sweat unbroken, her huge heart untested. Reuben cawed and whooped and finally had to stand in the irons, hauling savagely on the reins. Hell whinnied and jerked her neck, arguing strenuously against her restraints, but finally, with an angry cry and a churlish toss of the head, she eased to a hard gallop. Now Stop the Music, poor fool, pulled up alongside her in his cooldown loop. Hell turned to him, her lips curled, her eyes like globes of a newly charted world. As the cameras rolled, she snaked out and bit the gelding savagely on the tender flesh of his ear. Both jocks cried out, wrestling for space, until Hell finally galloped away, a spring in her step and blood in her mouth. The season was on.