The Sport of Kings (39 page)

*   *   *

She was standing over him, exhausted beyond endurance, her eyes dry ever since the disease had wrecked her tear ducts, and held a telescope and a bag of children's books in her hand. It was all she'd taken today from the Sycamore house, which the Reverend had left to the church. She had no idea why her father had even owned a telescope—he was a man who talked about heaven but trained his eyes on the earth, because heaven didn't matter, only the kingdom. While she stood the tripod by the bed, her son couldn't move, caught in the vise of his migraine, but the sound of her movements echoed down the hallway of his mind. Marie wanted to say, “I tried to protect you, but I can't do it anymore. All I have left is pain,” and he wanted to say, “Please don't be sick,” and she wanted to say, “His eye may be on the sparrow, but he must love me less than a little brown bird,” and he wanted to say, “Don't ever leave me alone again,” but all she said aloud was, “Allmon, now you've got to learn to love yourself more than me—by any means necessary.”

In a moment she's asleep, and he's dragging the leggy Celestron to the front window that overlooks Knowlton's Corner and, using his own bodyweight as leverage, he tilts the stiff black arm high, so when he peers through its narrow aperture he can see the sky. But he only catches the white streetlight across the street, and in the transforming miracle of refraction, the light shatters into a rainbow of spectral color with no recognizable form. He rears back, spooked, but realizes it's only the streetlight—a boring white light boring into the boring dark. As if not sure what to trust, he peers and watches it explode out of itself again. His heart begins to beat loudly at the door of something: this light in the telescope is wilder, bigger than what he can see with his own eye. Had his art teacher not said white was the presence of all colors, that it contained all the visible world? Only now in this moment does the Reverend truly dim and die like a match going out, and in his stead the white grows deeper and more real. He's grieved and confused in this world where the stars are up and down, where everyone has fallen asleep, where his father doesn't come, where he stands in what he has no words to call the intermundane black between heavenly bodies. Up high, the moon sheds its small light for the world's unintended children. He remembers the word Scipio, and he thinks maybe it's the name of a star.

*   *   *

Seventeen months and three days after the death of the Reverend Marshall, a small white envelope arrived. The presence of Marie Marshall was requested at a pre-appeal disqualification hearing in the investigation of her involvement in attempt(s) to defraud the welfare system. Marie's mind balked—she didn't sell stamps, she worked her regular hours, never more, and she'd always been prompt, polite, showing up with her paperwork at her reevaluations and—

Oh shit, the car. The car that Mike had given her that she hardly ever used except to buy groceries in College Hill, because the IGA in Northside was so awful, the car that had sat there with Chicago plates in an unused alley two blocks away, unnoticed by anyone until a towing sign appeared, and she finally had to hustle up the money to reinstate her expired license and buy plates and insurance. She'd been unable to make the payments after a few months but kept the car for emergencies. You weren't allowed a resource worth more than $1,500. But what was she supposed to do? Throw away her only real resource? No, maybe it wasn't about the car after all, maybe it was some kind of technicality. There was no need for panic yet. She just needed to show up looking proper—her hair straight, clip-on pearls—and keep her damn mouth shut.

But showing up to anything was getting harder and harder. Work had become a farce of trying to look busy and efficient when she could barely function. It hurt her hands so much to type that sometimes she just cried at her desk. A consuming fatigue had filled her from the inside out, and no amount of sleep repaired it. Because her tear ducts had stopped producing tears, it felt as if acid were being poured on her eyes every moment of the day and night, all the thousands of nerve endings exposed to the air, her eyelids turned to sandpaper. She made just barely too much to qualify for Medicaid but couldn't afford private insurance—not that they'd insure her now anyway, given her current symptoms. Most of the time, she felt she'd been invaded by an alien. She didn't know how to get it out of her body since she hadn't allowed it in in the first place. It just arrived one day, like she was accidentally pregnant with her own dying. It was pain's version of the virgin birth—you never did it with death, but somehow he screwed you anyway.

The number 17 bus got her downtown by ten, and she only had to wait an hour in the loud, overcrowded lobby before being called into the windowless hearing room, but that was about an hour longer than her nerves could take. When they finally called her name, sweat rings had soaked through the lining of her suit jacket.

Two people sat behind a table—a black woman and a white man with a beard like Santa Claus. The white man was opening a three-ring binder, reading from something that looked like a script.

White man: Sit down.

(Defendant sits, smiles; tries to look innocent and calm)

Black woman: You've been called for this pre-appeal hearing—

Defendant: I thought this was my hearing.

Black woman: Let me finish, please. You've been called to hear the charges against you and respond if you choose to and begin preparation for the hearing, which will be held in five weeks' time.

(Defendant nods, compliant but clearly worried)

White man: We have reason to believe you've defrauded the welfare system by owning, but not declaring, a late-model vehicle. We know that you recently reapplied for a license and were fully insured on that date. Would you care to respond at this time?

Defendant: No! (turns to woman) I mean, no—listen, someone gave me that car! I didn't pay for it myself—I wouldn't have money to pay for something like that on my own! My ex gave me that car.

Black woman: So you own the car.

(Defendant closes her mouth, realizing her mistake)

White man: (clears throat) Ma'am, your hearing will be held in five weeks' time. Until then, your benefits will be suspended.

Defendant: My what? No, wait! (scoots forward on metal chair, turning from the man and staring earnestly into the woman's face) I've got a boy. I've got a very, very good little boy. I need to get those stamps or he doesn't get enough to eat. Listen, please, you need to believe me.

Black woman: This paper says you still work for Dr. Herman Bischoff in Northside.

Defendant: I do, but it's not enough hours. It covers the rent, and I can't hardly even do that! Listen to me, please—I am sick. There's something wrong with me. I know you don't understand, but you have got to believe me. I'm sick, and I can't do anything about it, because I'm broke, and I can't go to a specialist. I promise you, it's a fact. I've got nothing in this world right now! No parents, no brothers and sisters! I'm so sick I can't hardly work, but I can't stop working or what—or what? What are we going to do? Does the world just want us to roll over and die?

(Long silence, then the black woman looks down at the paperwork. The defendant, instead of crying, turns stonily to audience, proceeds monologue, barely audible:

Lady, I was looking at your face and I was trusting in the familiar, your plum eyes and wide nose. Your color. I thought it was a homing beacon, that brown—like it was saying, talk to me, I'm dark and lovely too, talk to me, my ears are open like God's ears are open, and I speak your language, because we're family.
)

Black woman: Well, I don't know much, but I do know that if people like you would spend half as much time seeking better employment and education as you do crafting your stories, your children would be a whole lot better off. And that, Miss Marshall, is a fact.

(Defendant, still facing audience, concludes monologue:

I pray there's a God—and he disowns you, you black bitch.
)

*   *   *

A long time ago, she had called out, I've got a surprise for you! Your daddy's coming home! But that was long, long ago—why was life so long? Now she called out with a voice that had lost even the memory of buoyancy, and her son came to her dragging his feet like he could intuit some imminent loss. He stood there before her, twisting on his legs the way he used to when he was younger, but he wouldn't look up. He directed his dread at her feet.

God, the twisting! It set Marie's teeth on edge, and she wanted to grab him, make him stop, force him to understand without having to say the words. Her eyes were burning with an acid that was driving her insane and, God, here was this child she had given life to and he had no sympathy for her at all, didn't know her at all; children thought only of themselves and their own needs. Love and resentment infected her maternal heart in equal measure. She wanted her own mother so powerfully then, more than she ever had. It was such a goddamned lie that time healed all things!

She just said, “We've got no more food stamps.”

Allmon looked up at her in surprise. “How come?”

“That's not your concern,” she said. “You're the child; I'm the mother.”

He said nothing, but she saw him recede into the worried space behind his eyes. Where he had been twisting, now he just looked straight ahead. When her hand made a move toward him, he jerked away.

Her hand hovered in the space between them as she said, “We can't stay here. I can't afford it. We've got to get out by Friday.”

“Where we going?” he said smally.

“I don't know,” was the only honest reply.

Tears filled his eyes and he said, half question, half accusation, a word he had never said in her presence before: “You fucked up.”

The involuntary strike of her open hand across his cheek coincided with her cry: “Don't you speak to me that way! I'm your mother!”

Then, like a bird, he was gone in an instant. But it was only when he reached his bedroom and slammed the door that his composure, so tenuous, shattered. He abandoned himself to the tears that really belonged to the Reverend, tears that had been dammed up for months. He cried and cried until there were no tears left and when he finally looked up with swollen eyes, the sun had slipped low and flung the room into shadow. The sounds of Marie's bedtime rituals were long past, so he rose. Then wall by wall, item by item, he worked to memorize every detail of the apartment, because he knew he would never be here again, and then he got down on his knees on the hardwood floor and prayed to his father, something he had never tried before. Please come. Please come this Friday and save us. And, balanced on the slenderest plank of hope, he waited on Friday for Mike to come—for Mike, for God, for anyone to save them, but nobody did come, because nobody does.

*   *   *

The only place to go was down—down past the useless, spinning wheel of Knowlton's Corner, down near the Mill Creek, which stank of feces and oil, down where the neighborhood disintegrated at its shiftless edges into Cumminsville, a noplace crumbling under the black shadow bands of the viaduct and I-74, where the houses were shambling, filthy, and few, overshadowed by the behemoth brownfields looted of their industry, windows shattered by rocks and bullets, down into forgottenness where few families lived and the ones who did lived in decay, in the bowels of the city. What's worse than Helltown? This.

Marie and Allmon took up residence in a tiny shotgun on Blair, a narrow side street three blocks southwest of Knowlton's Corner. The tenant had just died of pancreatic cancer and the rent was $400, lowered a hundred dollars by the landlord—a distant cousin of the dentist Marie worked for. The house stood fifteen feet wide and three rooms deep: a dank front parlor and kitchen relieved only by a nicotine-browned window facing north, furnished with an orange, mildewed couch where Marie would sleep; a middle room, where Allmon would inflate a twin air mattress; and a bathroom in the back with a tiny square window that looked onto a tiny plot of shattered glass and nameless weeds. They had brought only what they could transport in the car, then the car was sold for two thousand dollars, and the money was gone in an hour, five months of rent prepaid. There was simply no way to move their old mattress or their dressers, which were left on the street and carried off by strangers. Allmon had brought his telescope, but he didn't need a telescope to know that they had reached the edge of the world.

Allmon stretched a polyester sheet across his mattress, taped a Bulls poster to the wall, then set the Reverend's telescope in the bathroom to train its eye up and out of the tiny window to see what could be seen. That first night the sun fell like something wounded, and a triumphant night came up in all directions.

Without his hearing, Marie stepped up behind him in the darkness of the room and with her gentlest voice said, “Allmon, I believe we're going to make this place a home.”

Without surprise, without turning, without otherwise acknowledging her presence, Allmon said, “You believe what you want, Momma. I don't believe in nothing.”

*   *   *

Hope and reality were at cross purposes. The new plan wasn't good or bad, just a plan. After school was dismissed, Allmon got off the bus at Chase and counted the doorways as memory dictated until he found what he hoped was the one, then he slipped around back and knocked on the rear door. There was no answer. He knocked once more, rapping hard, and when still no reply came, he stepped off the back porch, squinting up at the redbrick edifice, his hope flickering and dimming. “Come on,” he whispered softly, but he realized it was probably a stupid idea anyway—kick the pavement, curse the sky, crawl back into the barrel of the shotgun—

“The fuck you want?”

He whipped around and detected dark bands of face through the pale slatted blinds on the eastern side of the building. He could barely mutter the words through his nerves. “Aesop around?”