The Sport of Kings (82 page)

The flora and the simple fauna, they had no fathers, only genetic predecessors, and because they had no fathers, they had no stories, and because they had no stories, they didn't suffer any notion of themselves. In the landscape behind his eye, Henry fashioned a prairie of purple coneflowers, lovely and indistinguishable. He imagined the absurdity of one flower asserting its singularity, its glory, yearning to stand a hard-won inch above its nearest neighbors, straining on its flimsy stalk, flailing its petals, whispering in a hoarse, pollen-choked voice, “Me! Me! Me!”

Ambition is a form of suicide if it kills the simple self.

He looked down into Samuel's face. What do you know, Henry? His mind no longer howled with a grief that obscured fact; he had no more strength left to resist naked realization. There were galaxies in the body of every man and woman; Henrietta's had gone unexplored. He had flung her life away before her death. And he had mistaken the black body for a beggar's suit. Until today, until he had brought Samuel into the rain-washed open air of Churchill Downs, he had never rebelled against his father, not really.

What he knew could barely fill a teaspoon, and it looked mostly like hope: Samuel's diaper would be dirty again shortly, he would wake once during the night, there would be a few more ear infections, then he would begin to crawl and come rounding along the el porch on a shiny red bicycle his grandfather had bought him, he would read many books full of useless information, then make love with a woman and have a child, succeed at something, fail at many more things, argue perhaps to the point of breaking with his own child, then stoop and shrivel and go slack on some hospice bed somewhere, his eyes wide with Lavinia's disappointed wonder.

Still, Henry did not reach for the door. Though his body was exhausted—never more so—his mind was not fatigued. In his arms, Samuel was making the kittenish sounds of waking. In a minute or two, they would pitch headlong into a darkly blue night. But Henry's race was not yet run. There was still something to be known, something that arrested his movement. His mind pressed forward, grappling for it; he could feel the ache of its muscular exertions.

He might be a fool, a climber, a dreamer, supremely guilty, maybe he was even evil, yet hadn't he preserved the perfection of this land? Who else but the Forges and their ilk had done this, could do this? The poor of the earth were the tramplers of the earth, and that was the truth. Give them a beautiful thing and they would foul and wreck it. One last time, the old fire reasserted itself: Why should he, Henry, restrain himself? He was not the child of immigrants, not a fisherman, not a simple, unremarkable flower in a field. Look at what he had built; look at what he alone had made from the mud of his will and the mortar of his desire! If he was indeed a member of the animal kingdom—and he would grant that he shared something with the crude and base animal—why should he restrain himself when restraint was required of no other beast? The dogs rutted in the yard and the lions slaughtered the antelopes. The owl was as ruthless as the rattlesnake and so on and so on. Even the earth obeyed the demands of its nature: it snatched everything, absolutely everything, whether mountain or beast or daughter, back to its breast. Human beings alone were capable of greatness. Only they could even conceive of greatness. So he had stomped on necks, so he had used his daughter. He had grown rich in the wild capitalism of life! Those incapable of greatness despise greatness the most; theirs were the loudest voices denying its very possibility.

Father, we are uniquely capable of morality. We must be moral, because we can be moral.

He stood very still as the words settled like silt to the floor of his veins.

We can snatch from the air the abstractness of numbers, adding and subtracting and making logic from magic, and because we can, we do, and we must. We can build pyramids and sky-piercing towers, so we must. We can wrestle language from our grunting, so we must. We can map our physical mysteries with machines of our own making. We can classify the species of the earth, name every stone and streamlet. We can run a hundred miles, and we can walk on the face of the moon, so we must—and then we must go farther.

We can, from the chaos of existence, extract meanings, which do not exist. We can make ourselves philosophers and scientists and priests. We can construct our unnatural civilizations—we can, and therefore we must. To starve our genes is to honor our genes. With fear and loathing we can stand on the necks of our parents and refuse them. We can evolve from simple to complex. We can choose survival of the species over survival of the self. We can say no to nature and form a conspiracy of doves.

We are uniquely capable of morality, therefore we must be moral. That
is
our nature.

*   *   *

Across miles of time, I am coming for you, Henry Forge, and I am coming to settle for my son. I'm taking from you what's not yours, what I had no earthly business giving away. My fingers are shanks, my arms are lead pipes, my head is a cinder block to your skull. My life is death.

It's the bullpen for you, Henry Forge.

Let me tell it to you straight. Let me open your fucking ears until they bleed. I'm going to rip your eyelids away. In your fancy fucking car, I've got a story to tell.

The holding cell is this: dumb, dirty, sick, tired, evil, bored motherfuckers—forty of them shoved into a cell built for fifteen. I'm a kid among men. It's crazy, terrifying loud, sound of a cranked-up soap opera with bad reception over the wailing honky-tonk singer on the guard's radio, and there's so much talk, high-pitched crank chatter, two dudes fighting and someone yelling nonstop at the guards, begging and pleading, then talking shit, then begging again, and somebody's sick, the noise makes your head spin. And the smell! You try to breathe without using your nose so you don't retch—it's cigarettes, urine tang, BO smell, whole place like a barnyard and shit, oh my God, the shit. Only two things nonhuman in this crowded, sweaty hellhole, concrete benches and a stainless steel toilet clogged with shit. You got to go so bad, you don't think you shit since Cincinnati, but you're not about to do that in front of these people. You know what happens. You've heard all the talk, half the brothers in Northside had gone up inside. So you know. And they're all watching. Big-ass black Gs with hooded eyes and tattooed arms like trees, and white, meth-addled motherfuckers, strung out with open sores and scabs all over and mean, you can tell, like raw pitbull mean, a few wore-out men smoking or muttering or coughing up spit, but all of them keeping an eye on you, because nobody here is white with money, so you're the lowest on the totem pole, just a kid, someone says,

“Young.”

But you're too scared to look at who said it. You stare straight ahead, stoic, try to look tough.

“Cigarette?” someone says, and squeezes in beside you.

“Naw.” You firm up your shoulder. You can't accept nothing from no one. You can't owe nobody nothing. But the guy isn't leaning into you, isn't pressing your space, isn't trying to insinuate. You realize it's some old dude, hopefully harmless. Maybe. But you don't look him in the eye, you keep staring straight ahead, because you can't trust yourself not to break down. Grief is blocking up every orifice—can't shit, can't piss, can't cry, you wouldn't be able to eat if there was anything to eat. Your mother is six days in the ground. Everything inside you is paralyzed.

“What they bring you in for?”

Grand theft auto, speeding, driving without a license, resisting arrest, possession of a controlled substance, there's more but the words are all running together and it's confusing, it's like you're trying to read left to right or something.

“You got previous arrests?”

“Yeah.”

The man nods. “They gonna send you up then.”

“I'm seventeen.” The words jet out, almost indignant. High with disbelief.

Dry laugh. Then he just says, “Well, they gonna send you to juvie first. But then, you going in. Me, I been in and out since I was twelve. Trust me, you be all right if you play. But hear me, Young: Niggahs always gonna try. Got to be on the awares. Fresh meat. Know what I'm saying?”

Stricken, you dare to glance at the man.

The man purses out his lower lip. “You gonna figure it all out, but you got to be wise like a serpent. You ain't small but you ain't big neither. You got a hard face, that's good. That'll get you mad respect if your fists as hard as your face. So when you get up in there, you gotta act a man. Get some cat in your stride. Straight up rough. No motherfucking hesitation. Don't nobody care if you a teenager except the niggahs that aim to turn you out.”

Then the man settles into himself, crosses his arms over his chest, looking sleepy. He's done, his wisdom imparted. But that's it? There isn't anything else? You turn and stare through the bars, but you're just one of a dwindling many—they keep getting hauled off for their arraignments or let out on bail. You stare in desperation at the guards like maybe they'll recognize you, see the little kid in you. But the guards are white, glassy-eyed, they've seen it all before, years and years of it. You all look alike. You aren't Allmon anymore, Mike Shaughnessy's son with the Reverend's hands and Marie's soft nature. You're just a black boy neither big nor small with a fat nose and 3b hair, a body with no past and no future. A notevenreallywannabe thug. Nothing. Less than nothing.

When they close that rumbling thundering deadening door of steel bars, you've officially passed through the gates of hell.

Now, today, here in this car on this May evening, all you got is the memories flooding in … and pain. Can't lie to yourself anymore. It's here. It was always in you, Marie's lost life making a wild wail of your joints and eyes. And you thought you had got control somehow—in this world where they murder mothers! But, Allmon, Marie got used and abused by Mike Shaughnessy just like Henrietta got used and abused by you—no, don't think, can't think. This isn't even about that, it's not even about your child, who got tricked out of your arms; this is about simple survival now! When Henry Forge takes away the future, he doesn't just take away money, no, he takes away your chance to go to the doctor and say, “See I got this little problem, just a setback, but I know you got medicine for me. I know you can save me and you will save me. Because I got money now. That's the key to survival in this country. I got money, so in this great nation that means I deserve to live.”

I'm talking to nobody at all, am I? No one in the living world is listening. They kill your most precious thing, then close their ears to you. But I'll say it anyway:

The trial is in a plain, nondescript room, nothing fancy, some grooved paneling on the wall under fluorescent lights, an oak desk—you're freaked out by how normal everything looks, how empty the room is, not like on TV—with a white guy behind that desk watching all impassive as the prosecutor argues and your attorney, who you never talked to before five minutes ago in the crowded hallway outside, counterargues, and you get on the stand for maybe four minutes and begin to haltingly describe what has happened to you, Northside, juvie, your momma, her dying—no, wait, I was something else before all that, I promise, the Reverend can back me up—but the man says, “If your list of infractions wasn't so extensive, I might be moved by your story. But, frankly, I am not. In fact, I'm tired of it. For the life of me, I can't see what distinguishes you from so many identical young men who parade through these chambers and ask for leniency, day after day, year after year, all with a sob story, all seemingly repentant but right back here in two months' time if I let them go, all a burden on society—or, as in your case, a threat to society. If your experience in juvenile camp did nothing to curb your … enthusiasm for criminality, then I see zero call for leniency. I have no more patience for so-called kids like you. I'm sentencing you as an adult. You made your choice, Mr. Shaughnessy. You made all of your choices a long time ago.

“You are hereby remanded by the Kentucky Department of Corrections for the term of twelve years. Because you are seventeen, you will spend four months in a residential facility, then you will be transferred to Bracken. You will serve six years before being considered eligible for parole. May you be an example to others.”

Take it away. Clasp its ankles in manacles to hobble it. Place a chain around its waist. Now weave cuffs through the chain and secure its wrists in the cuffs. And drive it away just like you're driving now.

Ice is breaking on the surface of the river. Allmon wants to hold all the floes together, reassemble the solidity and stolidity secured by the dead cold, but he can't, it's coming apart under him as he's trying to cross with his son in his arms; he can hear it whining and moaning as it cracks. It's because he's running too hot with this disease his mother gave him, the disease maybe he gave to his son, the disease Marie was cursed to bear because of her black burden of a body, black as river as grave as starless sky

Allmon's mouth is filling with water, but there's still room for words.

The youth offender facility is: nothing really. Not scary, just boring, trifling, you've done this before. It's like being a senior in high school; nobody fucks with you anymore, and it's not as intense as you think it's gonna be.

But the penitentiary is: Anarchy. Your worst fucking nightmare, only all day every day, 24/7, no escape. It's not where they house men, it's where they make animals. After they wash you down, delouse you, spread your cheeks and root around in your anus, they walk you for the first time along the tier of the main line to your cell, and all those eyes, black eyes brown eyes blue eyes, from the dayroom up the four dizzying floors, turn to watch you, and suddenly the rooster crows, the dogs start their barking, there's sheep and screaming birds and yowling cats, the sound rises, shriek piling on shriek until it crescendos to pure madness and you're more than halfway to panic. The sound of wild animals is so horrifying, your body would run away out of pure instinct if you didn't have a guard right at your back. That cacophony is worse than the sound of your cell door closing the very first time, which is a casket closing.