Shoggoths in Bloom Read Online Free Page B

laurel crown and what it means to be King for a Day.
    The thing about race horses, is that the trick with the good ones isn’t getting them to run. It’s getting them to stop.
    They’ll kill themselves running, the good ones. They’ll run on broken hearts, broken legs, broken wind. Legend says Black Gold finished his last race with nothing but a shipping bandage holding his flopping hoof to his leg. They shot him on the track, Black Gold, the way they did in those days. And it was mercy when they did it.
    He was King, and he was claimed. He went to pay the tithe that only greatness pays.
    Ruffian, perhaps the best filly that ever ran, shattered herself in a match race that was meant to prove she could have won the Kentucky Derby if she’d raced in it. The great colt Swale ran with a hole in his heart, and no one ever knew until it killed him in the paddock one fine summer day in the third year of his life.
    And then there’s Charismatic.
    Charismatic was a Triple Crown contender until he finished his Belmont third, running on a collapsed leg, with his jockey Chris Antley all but kneeling on the reins, doing anything to drag him down.
    Antley left the saddle as soon as his mount saw the wire and could be slowed. He dove over Charismatic’s shoulder and got underneath him before the horse had stopped moving; he held the broken Charismatic up with his shoulders and his own two hands until the veterinarians arrived. Between Antley and the surgeons, they saved the colt. Because Antley took that fall.
    Nobody could save Antley, who was dead himself within two years from a drug overdose. He died so hard that investigators first called it a homicide.
    When you run with all God gave you, you run out of track goddamned fast.

    3.
    Sonny was just like that. Just like a race horse. Just like every other goddamned fighter. A little bit crazy, a little bit fierce, a little bit desperate, and ignorant of the concept of defeat under any circumstances.
    Until he met Cassius Clay in the ring.
    They fought twice. First time was in 1964, and I watched that fight live in a movie theatre. We didn’t have pay-per-view then, and the fight happened in Florida, not here at home in Vegas.
    I remember it real well, though.
    Liston was a monster, you have to understand. He wasn’t real big for a fighter, only six foot one, but he hulked. He loomed. His opponents would flinch away before he ever pulled back a punch.
    I’ve met Mike Tyson too, who gets compared to Liston. And I don’t think it’s just because they’re both hard men, or that Liston also was accused of sexual assault. It’s because Tyson has that same thing, the power of personal gravity that bends the available light and every eye down to him, even when he’s walking quietly through a crowded room, wearing a warm-up jacket and a smile.
    So that was Liston. He was a stone golem, a thing out of legend, the fucking bogeyman. He was going to walk through Clay like the Kool-Aid pitcher walking through a paper wall.
    And we were all in our seats, waiting to see this insolent prince beat down by the barbarian king.
    And there was a moment when Clay stepped up to Liston, and they touched gloves, and the whole theatre went still.
    Because Clay was just as big as Liston. And Clay wasn’t looking down.
    Liston retired in the seventh round. Maybe he had a dislocated shoulder, and maybe he didn’t, and maybe the Mob told him to throw the fight so they could bet on the underdog Clay and Liston just couldn’t quite make himself fall over and play dead.
    And Cassius Clay, you see, he grew up to be Muhammad Ali.
    4.
    Sonny didn’t tell me about that fight. He told me about the other one.
    Phil Ochs wrote a song about it, and so did Mark Knopfler: that legendary fight in 1965, the one where, in the very first minute of the very first round, Sonny Liston took a fall.
    Popular poets, Ochs and Knopfler, and what do you think the bards were? That kind of magic, the old dark magic that soaks