A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

by Glenn Taylor

  “He said he’d not seen play like yours at the table since old George Devol.”

  Abe had read Devol’s Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi nine times through. He’d kept it under his mattress since he was twelve years old, the same year he’d quit school for good. He said, “I aim to best Devol’s total table earnings fore I die.”

  Trent laughed. “You aim to live to a hundred do you?”

  “Forty ought to do.”

  They looked each other in the face.

  Trent pushed the paper across the desk. The pen rode on top and rolled as it went.

  Abe looked at the figure Trent had written in the blank. $100.00.

  “On top of what you take from the table after the rake, I’m prepared to offer you that number as a weekly salary.” He took out his pipe and lit it. “As long as you play like you did in there just now, and as long as you lose to the company men when I signal, I’ll cut you in on two percent of the house earnings, and I mean the tables and the take from stage shows too.” He puffed habitual to stoke the bowl, and his silver teeth flashed. “This hotel will be the shining diamond of the coalfields,” he said. “They will come from New York and New Orleans to sit at my tables and sleep in my beds, and I have a notion they will come to try and beat the Keystone Kid.”

  The weekly salary was high—it guaranteed him more than five thousand dollars in one year’s time. But the house cut was low, and he didn’t like the word exclusive on the paper. He started to say as much, but the words hung up in his throat. He cleared it. He said, “Thank you Mr. Trent.”

  They discussed his daily table hours and decided he’d think on it until the next morning. Trent produced a fold from his inside pocket and peeled off two and handed them to Abe as he stood from his chair. They were brown-seal big notes.

  “For your trouble today,” Trent said.

  They shook hands and nodded. Abe excused himself and headed to the lavatory just outside the office, where he stood and breathed deep before putting the money in his boots. For three years, Al Baach had fitted the insoles of his growing middle boy with a thick strip of leather, and he’d told him once, “If you win another man’s money, you put it under there. Then you keep your eyes open.”

  He walked through the main card room, past the poor suckers who’d never get ahead, and then through the big lobby, past those busy figuring how they could afford the nightly rate, and despite himself, he could not keep from smiling.

  Rufus Beavers stood on the staircase landing. He watched the boy smile and knew he’d lived up to his name at the table. He recognized something in the gait of Abe Baach, something his brother possessed. A sureness. A propulsion that had taken his brother all the way to Florida’s tip, from where he sent home money and word of adventure.

  Rufus made his way to Trent’s office, where he found his associate shaking the hands of well-dressed replacement players on their way through the second door. When they were alone, Rufus told him, “Ease up on the Kid’s daddy. No more collecting.”

  Trent furrowed his brow.

  “Got to keep Jew Baach happy,” Rufus said. “Otherwise, the Kid will have cause to cross you.”

  Trent said, “Having the cause don’t mean having the clock weights.”

  Rufus eyed a cigar box on the desk. Its seal was unfamiliar to him. “I wouldn’t bet against the boy’s nerve,” he said. “We’ll need a Jew on council who’s friendly to liquor anyhow, and that boy’s daddy slings many a whiskey.”

  “You plannin to court the Jew vote and the colored too?”

  Rufus tried to read the words on the box. Regalias Imperiales. “You know another way?” he asked. “Go outside and look around. Stand there and lick your finger and hold it up. See if you don’t know what way the wind blows.” He opened the lid and took out a long dark cigar. He smelled it and put it back.

  Abe had stepped outside the Alhambra’s main doors and was rubbing at the folded contract in his pocket when he noticed Floyd Staples across the way.

  Snow fell. Slow, bloated flakes. Staples leaned against the slats of the general store, eyeballing. “I’ll git my money back Baach,” he hollered.

  Rebecca Staples stepped from the big door at Floyd’s left. She was one of his two women, a lady of the evening who had worked for a time at Fat Ruth’s. She held their little boy by the hand and he cried and dragged his feet. “I want hard candy,” he wailed. Floyd Staples grabbed him away from the woman and smacked his cheek so hard it echoed.

  Abe knew the boy. Donald was his name. Goldie sometimes babysat him on Saturday nights.

  He grit his teeth and had a notion to walk over and stab Floyd Staples right then with the dagger he kept in his vest pocket. But he knew better. He’d leave that job to someone else, for surely someone else would have the same notion and the wherewithal to act on it too.

  Keep your temper, Goldie had told him, and he aimed to.

  The boy, who was only four, went quiet and followed his mother and daddy, a whore and a drunk, onto a side street where a new apothecary was being built.

  Abe walked fast to the bridge, where he stopped long enough to spit at the middle and then kept on, smiling at folks who waved or said hello, nearly jogging when he reached the back of the Bottom. He slowed at the corner of Dunbar and a lane as yet unnamed, a spot folks had begun to call Dunbar and Ruth on account of the wide reputation of Fat Ruth Malindy’s fine-looking ladies.

  The snow had quit. There was a wide dull glow of orange behind low scanty clouds. The glow sat slow on the ridge, and the square tops of storefronts lay in shroud.

  A black boy walked toward Abe with a canvas bag strung bandolier-style across his skinny middle. “Evenin edition!” he called. “McDowell Times evenin edition!”

  Abe fished three pennies from his pocket and held them out.

  “Nickel,” the boy said.

  Abe regarded his wiry frame. He looked to be about ten years old. “Since when?”

  “Since my daddy proclaimed it so.” He wore a serious look.

  Abe put back his pennies and handed over a nickel. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Cheshire,” the boy said.

  “Like the cat.”

  He only stared.

  “From the children’s book,” Abe said. “But you haven’t smiled once.”

  Chesh Whitt didn’t read books for children, but he knew who he was talking to. He’d known from twenty yards off. And he’d rehearsed in a mirror how he’d be when he met the Keystone Kid. He’d be poker-faced with a knack for making money.

  “Boy your age ought not be in the Bottom after sundown,” Abe told him before he walked on.

  The men gathered out front of his daddy’s saloon were white and black and Italian and Hungarian and Polish. Some were coming up from the mines and some were on their way down. All were laughing loud at a joke about the limp-dick Welsh foreman with a habit of calling them cow ponies.

  A fellow who could not focus his eyes nodded loose at Abe. “I got a good one for you,” he said.

  “I heard that one already,” Abe answered. He went inside.

  It was an average crowd for Wednesday shift change. A single card game ran at the back, a Russian grocery owner named Zaltzman the only man of six in a suit. A sheet-steel stove burned hot at the room’s middle. It had once been airtight.

  Goldie was on the corner stage, and the men stood before her with their hats off, whistling and calling out, “Go again sister!”

  She had a crown on her head fashioned from tin and grouse feathers dipped in gold paint. In the center, she’d glued a thick oval scrap of bottle-bottom glass. “Bring em back up to me then,” she answered the men, and they reached inside their hats and brought forth the playing cards she’d thrown.

  On the stool at her side there was a long glass of beer. She finished it with great economy and picked up a new deck of cards. “Inspect those comebackers you tobacco drippers,” she called. “I don’t want a card coming back to me bent nor split.” She wo
re an old set of her daddy’s wool long underwear, a gold-painted grain bag over that. The bag was big and stiff, her head through a hole in the seam, so that altogether, in headdress and bag, she shone in the rigged pan spotlight as if she’d ridden in on a moonbeam. Queen Bee they were calling her by then, because in Cinder Bottom, at Dunbar and Ruth, that is who she was. Fat Ruth Malindy made the rules, but Fat Ruth Malindy was ugly as ash. Goldie, on the other hand, was a miracle to behold.

  On this night her hair was up, spun beneath the crown. She rubbed at her neck where a flyaway hair had tickled, and the men watched, the slope of her shoulder bewitching them. She saw Abe at the door and winked in his direction before getting back to business. “These here cards don’t come free boys,” she shouted to the men. She stuck out her toe and pushed the coal bucket to the edge of the little platform. “Drop in what you can spare now.” A miner just off his shift shoved through and dropped in his change. A house carpenter put in a dollar note and stuck his face out over the stage. He sniffed at her with his eyes shut.

  She let him.

  Goldie had long since learned to separate a man from his money. There had always been men and money just as there had always been coal trains and mules, and at Fat Ruth Malindy’s, a girl could either go prone and give up her notions of fight or she could learn how to talk to a man and take what he had. Before the age of thirteen, Goldie had twice pulled a skinny whittler blade and touched its point to the groin of a man trying to force himself upon her. By the time she was fourteen, most men knew better than to try. The ladies of Fat Ruth’s admired the girl’s spirit. Some took it up. And there was laughter in that cathouse, and there was always her daddy, a good man by any measure. And then there was Abe, loyal as they came, quiet when quiet was called for, and, if need be, tameless as the stalking lion.

  He leaned against the wall and watched her scale cards. He smiled.

  Al Baach stood behind the bar with a rag over his shoulder. He eyed his middle boy, whose path worried him. Al and Sallie had talked on it for years—how the boy was lucky to have Goldie, how Abe and Goldie together were much like Al and Sallie had been twenty years before. But lately there’d been worry, for Al and Sallie had never been quite so old at quite so young an age.

  He gave the rag a tug and put it to his nose and blew. He sniffed hard and kept on watching his middle boy. A lad just in front of him let his head fall to the bar top. He was what they called coke-yard labor. He couldn’t have been over fifteen and had come into the saloon already drunk. Al wouldn’t serve him but the lad had stayed put in order to see Queen Bee.

  Al smacked him in the ear and said, “Get in your bed to sleep.” The lad was thoroughly awakened, and he stood and walked to the door. On his way, he knocked against Abe, who righted him and headed for the back stairs.

  Al called loud to his middle boy.

  Abe ignored him. He hit the swinging storeroom door and jumped to the third riser at a run. He took out his key as he went and unlocked the bedroom door upstairs.

  He locked it behind him. It smelled like it always had in there. His.

  When Abe and his brothers were little, the Bottom hadn’t yet become what it was. Sallie had allowed the boys to be around the saloon, to slumber nights away in its upstairs rooms as their father sometimes did after the boardinghouse on the hill was booked up perpetual. Respectable boarders would pay a handsome sum to stay up at Hood House, removed as it was from the magnificent filth they so often sought down below. With railroad surveyors and mineral men occupying every open bed, the two oldest Baach boys had moved their playthings to town, where Wyoming Street soon grew awnings to shade its new general store and laundry and tailor shop and tenement-turned-house of ill fame. When Jake Baach was fourteen, he and Big Bill Toothman finished construction of a smaller, second home on the hill, and Sallie aimed to make use of the extra beds, to keep the boys out of the saloon. She aimed to take them from the Bottom altogether, but by that time Abe was a twelve-year-old with the hands of a full-time riverboat gambler. Pretty Boy Baach was good for business. He’d grown accustomed to chewing tobacco when he pleased and playing cards too. School was simple and books had begun to bring on sleep. His head was for numbers. His place was the saloon. He could squeeze tight his mouth and hit a spittoon’s dark heart from nine feet off. He could smell a man’s bluff sweat at the table without so much as a snort.

  Too, Goldie lived across the way. None could keep the young man from Goldie.

  Abe opened the big wardrobe in the corner and hung his jacket there. He kept his vest on, and from its change pocket he withdrew a small, homemade dagger fashioned from a four-inch cut-spike nail. It was light as a toothbrush, its handle a lashed leather shoelace. He set it on a shelf inside the wardrobe. From his fob pocket, he withdrew the nickel-silver railroad watch his daddy had given him two years prior. It was Al Baach’s custom to give his boys a sturdy Waltham pocketwatch on their fifteenth birthday. Engraved on the case back of each was the following: A man without the time is lost.

  Abe thumbed a smudge on the bezel and tucked it back in the pocket. It was half past six.

  He sat down on the bed and untied his shoes. From underneath the inner sole, he produced the two twenty-dollar notes, plus the other bills he’d won, folded lengthwise. He kissed them and then knelt at the open wardrobe, where he reached to the back and undid a hidden latch. Then he shifted the false bottom and lifted it out, his old hidden spot under the slat. He set all the money but one twenty inside with the rest, replaced the slat, rehooked the latch, and sat for a moment on the floor with his back against the wall. He took full breaths and let them out slow.

  The game at the Alhambra would bring him what he’d always been after. It was something to ponder.

  At the window, cold air issued in at the sill. The shade was half drawn, and below him, folks walked the dirt streets laughing. The restaurant beside Fat Ruth’s radiated the stench of hog fat burned black. The cook stood out front in an undershirt despite the cold. He picked his teeth with a thumbnail and watched the ladies coming to work. There were more than usual on account of the grand opening across the creek. There were white ladies and black ladies and foreign ladies too. Fat Ruth’s was the first in the Bottom to do such a thing, and that was fine by the cook. He said to each as she passed, “You looking every inch a peacock tonight.”

  Another man stepped from the restaurant and concurred. “Like a springtime payday out here,” he said.

  Al rapped his middle boy’s door, three quick.

  Abe had heard someone coming on the stairs. He picked up the spike nail and put it back in his pocket.

  When he opened, there stood his daddy, sweat drops squeezing forth from the pores in his nose. Behind him was Jake, who smiled and pushed his way in and tried to make himself as tall as his younger brother by standing straight. He stuck his face in Abe’s. “Don’t forget whose room it was first,” he said. “Don’t forget who can whup you in a fair fight.”

  Abe wouldn’t forget. After Goldie, it was Jake who knew him best.

  Al closed the door behind him. “Do you play at Trent’s table?” he asked.

  “Who’s tending bar?”

  “You answer my question Abraham.” Al spoke loud and set his jaw. None of the boys would ever forget who could whup all three.

  Abe said, “I played at his table and I won.”

  Al shook his head and looked at his hands. He wanted to use them to choke his middle boy, but it would serve no end. Al had known it the first time he’d ever switched Abe, who was ten at the time and had been seen hopping a slow coal train. While Al swung the switch, the boy had whistled with his eyes shut, and he’d spat on the ground when it was done.

  Choking the boy wouldn’t steer him clean. Al crossed his arms.

  Abe thought his daddy looked old then, and he thought Jake did too.

  Jake had a pint bottle in his back pocket. He had a pencil behind one ear and a skinny cigar behind the other. He was supposed to be fixing the storeroom s
helves.

  “Who’s tending bar?” Abe asked again.

  “Big Bill. He come over with me,” Jake said. He was dark-handsome like Abe, but his nose was bigger and his chin weaker.

  Abe knew by the way his brother said “come over with me” that Jake had been at Fat Ruth’s again. He’d been lifting from the saloon’s money box for two years, just enough to dip his wick once a week. Abe said, “Bill’s not well.”

  “He’s better now.” Jake put his thumb to a corner edge of peeling wallpaper. “Worry about your own health Abe,” he said. “Be dead soon enough you get in with Trent.” He walked to the closed wardrobe and knocked on it. “Never was well made, was it?”

  “Goldie won’t like seeing her daddy at the barback,” Abe said. “He’s ill.”

  “Bill will be okay.” Al uncrossed his arms and breathed hard through his nose. He said, “Abraham, Henry Trent has nothing for you. You think he gives you everything, but he gives you nothing in the end.” He opened and closed his hands. “As he gives, he takes.”

  There was a noise outside the door and the three of them turned their heads.

  It was Sallie. She’d swung it open without knocking and looked at the men. She toted an unfamiliar baby girl on her hipbone. Behind her was Sam, the only Baach boy forever in need of sunlight. He was skinny as ever and fourteen years old.

  “Stand up straight Samuel,” Al told him.

  The boy did so and followed his mother inside.

  “Shut the door,” Al told him.

  Sallie said to leave it open. She looked at Abe when she spoke. “We’re not staying.”

  The years had not been easy on Sallie, but they’d fortified her resolve. After Samuel’s birth in ’83, there was a still-born. A year after that, there was another, and for a time, Sallie only lay on her back in bed. She’d taken one basting spoon of chicken broth per night for two months. One day she came out of it and never looked back. The Baach boys did what she told them, and Goldie and Big Bill helped at Hood House when it was needed, but mostly Sallie ran the place, and she did so with considerable attention to cleanliness and well-kept books. In ’95, she took in the unwanted baby of a Tennessee girl working at Fat Ruth Malindy’s and named her Leila. With Goldie spelling her from time to time, Sallie attended that child’s every need, sleeping next to her crib up at the second house on the hill. At Christmastime in ’96, a wealthy friend of her father’s and his thin barren wife adopted Leila, and Sallie had nearly taken to her bed again. Instead she cried for a night and half a day. Then she stopped. “Sometimes, the eyes can’t keep from crying,” she’d told her boys. “They’re pushing out the poison.”