by Glenn Taylor
Magic man still had not paid.
And here was his wife, naked on the bed.
“You need to get yourself dressed and clear out,” Abe told Nina Gyro. He put his hand against the window jamb and leaned hard. He looked up and down Railroad Avenue for Goldie, but a sweat had come on him, and his vision was not sharp.
Nina Gyro licked her lips and patted the mattress and said, “You need to shake off those breeches and bring back one-eyed Jack.”
Abe Baach would never put a hand on a woman in anger. No Baach boy ever would because their mother and daddy made it certain. But inside his foul-sweated skin, Abe knew that he might have to release his hand from the window jamb and let himself fall forward, clear through the glass and down to the road below. This he might have to do in order not to put a hand on the woman in his bed, for he was angry. She had ruined him.
He had never been with any but Goldie.
On the nightstand was a clear pint bottle and one teacup—broke-off handle, no saucer.
Abe walked closer to read what was scrawled in lip rouge oil on the bottle glass. It was difficult to make out at first. Balm of Gilead. He remembered then that he’d imbibed from it quite generously the night before. He’d stuck it in his pocket and walked straight to the Alhambra where he’d pounded the locked door to Trent’s office. He remembered being thrown out the side stage door by Rutherford and Taffy Reed, and in the alley was Nina Gyro. He’d called her husband a flea-circus man and told her, “that monkey tamer owes me.” She’d laughed, hooking her arm in his. They walked together to Faro Fred Reed’s club where Abe had his own back room. They passed the bottle and she’d whispered in his ear that she could suck the silver off a dime. After that, he remembered nothing, and this was not customary when drinking Dorsett’s moonshine.
He stepped to the bed and she reached for his fly. He slapped her hand and grabbed her by the arm. He did not squeeze.
She giggled.
“You put somethin in my drink?”
She giggled some more.
“Somebody tell you to put somethin in my drink?”
She looked him straight in the eyes and smiled the way she did onstage. When she could hold his stare no longer, she looked around the bed for a cigar. “Well handsome,” she said. “You put it in me again like you did awhile ago, and I’ll tell you.”
He let go of her and walked back to the window. He leaned there again and tried to narrow the number of men who’d pay a woman like that to do what she had done. A few came to mind.
Nina Gyro looked at the long hollow of his spine and the way he hung his head. He was the best-looking boy she’d ever tried to bed, and he’d shown himself to be, in relative terms, a gentleman. She believed that decency still had its tiny place in life. She shook her head at what she was about to do. “Listen to me bonny boy,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something, and after I tell you, I’m going to ask you something.” She opened the side-table drawer and took out a box of matches. “Then I’ll be on my way, and if you want to, you can give me a little something.”
There was a ball-knot at his sternum. He thought for the second time of putting himself through the window. “Just please clear out,” he said.
She stood from the bed and pulled on her undergarments. “Pumpkin, you didn’t put a thing in me,” she said. “I droppered the knockout juice at midnight and you was asleep in this bed by two.”
He didn’t move.
“I stripped you down, then myself, and then I got some winks.” A short cigar fell from her balled dress when she picked it off the ground. “Now we’re cookin,” she said. She lit it and drew deep.
He straightened then and faced her. He needed things made clear. “Are you telling me we did not engage in the act?”
She fixed the twisted bodice of her dress. “Smell your totem,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Smell it. Rub your fingers on it and snuff at your fingers.” She demonstrated with exaggerated hand gestures and boisterous nasal inhalations.
He did what she’d commanded. The stink was his own.
She could tell by the way of his eyes that he was not yet fully persuaded. “Pumpkin,” she told him. “I haven’t bathed in a week and a half. I’m what you’d call storm-cellar musty—you’d know if you’d been in there.”
And with that, there bloomed again within Abe’s blood a notion to fight on. He felt as good just then as he could remember ever feeling, and he was going straight to Goldie. He thought to clean up and then thought better—he’d not clean up and he’d get her to smell his totem as proof of his innocence.
Nina Gyro slipped on her shoes.
“Would you come with me to tell Goldie?” His notions, good ones and bad, were coming fast by then.
She laughed. “That’s not the deal. I’ve done a third of what I said I’d do—I told you something.” She squeezed a paper tube and put color on her lips and cheeks. Her cigar was nearly spent, but she did not mind its burn between her fingers. “Now I will ask you something, and then you will give me something, and that will be the last of you and me, you hear?”
“I hear.”
“What I want to ask is if there is any opium in this shit town, and if there is, would you point me to it.”
“There is and I will.” And on the back of a handbill for his canceled show, he drew her a map to Cinder Alley and told her to knock at the fourth door on the left—it would be blue—and to say the following when Mr. Wan answered: There is no doctor like old Doctor Go.
“Good.” She was as happy as she could be without the opium, which she’d not smoked in almost a week. “And if you want to give me a little something for my trouble,” she told him, “I would be obliged.”
He said he’d take a pass on that last one, and she curtsied to him and was gone.
From the window, he watched her on the avenue. She bent her course to the bridge and the Bottom. To Cinder Alley. He wondered if she’d make it back in time for her stage show that evening.
He got on the floor and used his spike nail to extract four fifty-dollar notes from a baseboard gap. Emergency money. The only other possessions he kept in that place were a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a razor, and a beaten copy of Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi. He slid the book in his jacket pocket. He rolled the clothes and toiletries, stuck the roll under his arm, and left. He did not take with him the balm of Gilead, for she’d confessed about the knockout juice.
Goldie was not in her room or any other at Fat Ruth’s. In the lobby, he spoke with Rebecca Staples. She leaned her hip on the parlor sofa and told him, “I haven’t seen Goldie, honestly, in I don’t know when.”
Rebecca did not look good. Floyd Staples showed up once a month to force himself on her and tell her she was worthless and take her money before he went back to his other woman in Matewan, a woman of unsound mind who’d borne his child in December.
Abe suspected Rebecca Staples of lying to him, but he would not press her. He asked, “How’s that little boy of yours?”
“Not so little anymore.” She sprayed perfume on a vase of white ostrich feathers.
“How old is he now? Nine?”
She had missed his last two birthdays. “Yes,” she said. “Might be ten.”
He started toward the door.
“He plays cards all day,” she said. She sat down on the sofa, atomizer still aimed at the vase. She squeezed the puffer until the plume sagged.
“I think you’ve scented that arrangement sufficient,” Abe said.
She did not acknowledge, but sprayed once more and quit. She suspected herself newly pregnant, and her mind was awash in quiet panic.
He was almost out the door when a clear thought came to her. “He’s in the kitchen right now,” she said. Then she raised the volume of her high voice and called, “Little Donnie!” She coughed and cleared her throat. She told Abe, “It would sure please him to see your card play up close. Maybe just a riffle?”
He sai
d he needed to find Goldie. “Another time,” he told her. He took George Devol’s book from his pocket and set it down on the upright parlor piano. “Tell the boy to read this,” he said. “I’ll come collect it after a while, show him a trick or two.” And then he was out the door.
Little Donnie Staples stepped from the kitchen. “What?” he said.
Rebecca thumped a fist at her ribs to break up the indigestion. She told him never mind.
Across the street, Jake was tending bar. Big Bill Toothman sat on a stool and rubbed his lower back. Neither had seen Goldie.
Jake told him to try Hood House. “She’s likely up there with mother, taking turns at bad-mouthing you.” There was plenty of that to go around. Al Baach in particular was angry with Abe. Al had traveled the day before to Welch in order that he might calm his preacher father-in-law, who had heard of the middle boy’s penchant for drinking and bucking those that mattered. Before he’d ridden off on his new bay colt, Al had spat on the ground and told Abe, “I would tell you take care of the women and children, but I know better.” Al was worried. He’d not paid a cent in consideration money for six years, and he wasn’t about to start up again on account of his son. Al had finally been able to put a little away, and Henry Trent had even tapped him to run for council the following year. There was real money to be had in that game.
Abe put his hand on the barstool and leaned. A long house centipede raced from under the kickplate. Saloon sharks they called them. Abe shot out his boot and stomped it dead.
Jake asked if he’d like a drink.
“Just a beer.”
He had three, plus the onion-stuffed heel of a breadloaf, before he hiked up the hill. He was halfway home when he stopped and put his hand against a tree trunk. He retched and his knees nearly gave at the thought of losing her. But a single word arose inside him. Climb. And so he did.
Goldie was not at Hood House, whose rooms were full-booked. Nor was she at the second house, which they’d taken to calling the orphanage on account of Sallie’s ongoing rearing there of the motherless children of whores.
Abe watched his mother through the open door of an upstairs room. She hummed Twinkle Twinkle and worked a highback rocker with her foot. The child she held was Agnes, who had come to her only a month before. Every other unwanted baby had gone the way of adoption, but Sallie was determined that wouldn’t happen with this one. Agnes would be a Baach. Agnes would be the girl child she’d never had.
Sallie pretended not to see her middle boy in the hallway. She shut her eyes and hummed until he was gone.
Only when he was out the door and down the hill did Goldie come out of the closet behind the rocker. “I’m going out to the barn for awhile,” she whispered.
Sallie only nodded and kept at her humming
In the nave of the crib barn, Goldie stood and rubbed at the muzzle of her favorite horse. Dot was the mare’s name, on account of the white between her eyes. She was a blood bay, one of four horses the Baaches kept. As a girl, any time the notion struck, Goldie would knot a hackamore bridle and throw a leg over and ride. She’d not done so in years, but now she was of a mind to clap spurs to the horse and go.
She looked in the darkwater eye of the horse and saw there a refracted light beam from the open barn mouth. It curled white along the black roll of the eye, narrow to wide, and it looked to Goldie like the front lamp of a far-off night train, and for a moment, she was inside the eye of the horse called Dot, and she forgot what Abe had done, and she was happy. She scratched at the horse’s chin. She said to her, “I bet you still like to get out on a straight stretch.”
Samuel Baach walked past the open aisle with a shovel in his hand. When he saw her, he backtracked and said hello.
“Hello Sam,” Goldie called. The sun lit his forearms pale. He was the age and size of the red-haired boy she’d seen at the Alhambra. Skinny. She still thought of Sam as a boy. She noted his shovel. “Diggin to China?”
“Shovelin shit,” he said.
“Used to make you give me a nickel anytime you cussed.”
“That’s why I’m flat broke.”
She laughed a little.
“Where’s Abe?” He set down the shovel and pushed up his sleeves.
She shook her head. “Don’t know. Don’t care to.”
Sam spit out his tobacco. He looked up at the coming clouds. “Goin to get the big rain this evening,” he said.
“Don’t go into town then.”
“It’s Friday. My night to pull ale.”
She picked at a mud nubbin stuck in Dot’s forelock.
Sam regarded her. Even inside a shadow, Goldie was bright.
“I believe I’ll ride her before the storm hits,” she said.
“You know that mare’s pregnant.”
She didn’t know. It had been awhile since she was up on the hill.
“You can still ride her,” Sam said. “She’s not too far along.”
Goldie patted Dot’s big shoulder. It seemed that every matronly thing but her could bear fruit. She’d never wanted to offer a child where so many went unclaimed, but there had once been in her mind the possibility. Then the years passed without so much as a bellyache, and she knew that no lemon wedge or calendar could ever account for that, and so she’d accepted her lot.
She spotted a dirty sugarcube at the foot of the stall door. She fetched it up and offered it to Dot. She said, “I don’t have the clothes to ride her anyway.”
“Never stopped you before.” He’d watched her when he was just a little boy, hitching her skirt and kicking off her shoes. No saddle.
“You feedin her plenty?”
He nodded.
Goldie looked past him at Hood House. “You hungry?”
He was.
Inside the third-floor room of the red-haired boy, Floyd Staples sat on the bed. He played his harmonica for the entertainment of a prostitute he’d yet to pay. Its sound was lonesome and full.
“Where did you learn to play like that?” she asked him.
He did not answer but scratched his neck and looked to the door, which presently opened. The red-haired boy had traded in his towel for a fine suit. “They’re cleaning out his room,” he said.
“Pay this woman two dollars and a half,” Floyd Staples told him, and the boy produced a billfold and gave her three. She left without a word.
The red-haired boy was from Mingo County. He’d left the mines after only a year to make his living playing cards. He owed Floyd Staples seventy-two dollars.
“When you say they’re cleaning,” Floyd said, “you mean cleaning up or cleaning out?”
“Looks to me like he’s run his course.” He stuck out his chest and regarded himself in the dressing mirror. “That skinny nigger was out in the hall and I heard him say to the leprechaun what a shame it was, the Kid shed off like that.”
Staples snorted and swallowed. “Ain’t nothin you can do with bad blood except to let it,” he said. “Oak Slab don’t need him anymore. Bigger than he is.” He walked to the dressing table where he poured himself a drink. “Not too big for you though, is it boy?” He swallowed his whiskey and poured another and reclined on the bed with the tumbler atop his chest. He considered his banishment from the Oak Slab. He could still see that ace-high flush. “You got your invitation card tucked someplace safe?”
From inside his suit jacket, the red-haired boy produced a well-crafted forgery. The embossing was professional. Every grain of the table had been mimicked from the original. Talbert would be on the door, checking invitations, and his eyes weren’t what they used to be.
The red-haired boy had begun to wish he’d never met the man now lying on his bed, let alone lost to him at the card table. And his stomach had begun to seize anytime he thought of their plan for that night. He’d not spent much time around the likes of Floyd Staples, who, by any human standard, was plain bad. His clothes were in tatters. His beard had last been shaved two weeks on the right side, a month on the left. But he’d promised the
kind of money the red-haired boy was after, and it was shortly in sight.
“What time is it?” Staples asked.
The boy checked his timepiece. “Half past four.”
“Your daddy’s accountant friend is tardy.”
“He’ll be here.”
“Let’s go over it again,” Staples said. “I want you to show me your every move after the cue.”
Abe was high up in the fly lines by nine o’clock. He was drunk, seated on the narrow board of the loading platform, legs dangling. In each hand he gripped a pair of dike pliers. He’d taken them from Jake’s big tool chest that evening, thumbing the edges of their jaws for sharpness. He’d not thought twice about stealing them, for his plan to find Goldie had failed, and as he drank, another plan took its place. Now he opened each cutter wide and readied them alongside the blackened wires the audience could not see. He waited for the offstage man to crank the winch. When he did, the crowd could be heard to applaud. Abe watched the wires climb, and when they’d stopped, he gripped each plier tight but did not yet squeeze.
Above him, rain beat the roof with a mighty sound. The storm had begun at sundown and showed no sign of letting up.
The house band was tucked on the floor stage left—the man on upright piano banged slow, joined by an old-timer on guitar and a girl sawing the fiddle. They played the snake-charmer tune in perfect time. Like a trance it filled the place and fought the rain’s drone.
Gus George called to the audience, “You see ladies and gentlemen, if I concentrate and position my hands just so, I can hold Princess Gyro on the very air. Indeed, I have made her float.”
Abe looked down. The top of George’s head was bald. Nina Gyro’s gown was white silk. Abe hummed the tune and tried to remember the words. He sang in a whisper, I will sing you a song, and it won’t be very long.
George went on, “Her trance is deep, ladies and gentlemen. Watch as I prove there is no mere mechanical trickery involved in such a—”
Abe squeezed both grips at once. The pop was loud and metallic, and the crowd gasped as the floating woman came down crooked and hard, blackened wires falling upon her white gown coiled, like rat snakes. Gus George shot a look to the loft, but all was darkness up there. All was shadow in the fly lines.