by Glenn Taylor
Abe had nearly decided on the coin when he made out the man’s box calf shoes. They were well-made and seldom worn. They disqualified him from charitable donation.
The streetlamp marked him average. He wore a brown wool suit and no hat. He was middle-aged. His head was bald. “May I have a word?” he said.
Abe stopped, hand still at his pocket. There was insufficient light to study the eyes, only flickering wide circles on the clay-brown brick. Abe said, “What is the word you wish to have?”
“God’s word,” the man said.
“I heard that one already.”
“Have you?” His voice was low and ragged.
“I have.” Abe stepped closer to him. The man’s face was slack and kind. There was something familiar about him. His left eye was hazel and his right was brown.
“Did you listen?”
“I did.”
“What did you hear?”
“Plop,” Abe said.
The man was puzzled. He cocked his head and asked, “Holy water?”
“Holy shit.”
The man laughed. His hands, which he’d kept crossed at the front, came apart and hung at his sides. “It’s the truth,” he said. “God is.”
Abe took out the half dollar and handed it to the man. “Is what?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Now Abe laughed. He told the man he’d not had such fine conversation since he didn’t know when.
The man nodded and smiled. “There is nothing without one, two, three,” he said. He pointed at the sky. “God is the comet.”
“What’s that you say about one, two, three?” His ears had pricked at the numerical point.
But the man, who had begun to feel something powerful, only rocked a little at the waist and kept time with his mind. “He has commenced his poison rain and cosmoplast.” He smiled. His teeth were yellow. He was preaching now. “They call this comet Halley,” he said, “but its name is Elohim.”
Abe looked up where he pointed. “Well,” he said. “I suppose it is.” He nodded to the man. “I’ve got to be on my way.”
The man said he had to be on his way too, and he nodded in return and walked south.
Abe looked where he’d stood. There was a picked mound of birdseed. The old heavy door of the flophouse was painted brown, a slop job, coat cracked by heat and the knuckles of undesirable men. The cracks revealed, here and there, a resolute blue. Above the door, someone had painted the street address on a brick. 123. “I’ll be damn,” Abe said, and he looked up at the black iron staircase clutching four stories of brick and dark windows. Then he looked past the roofline at the low dark murk of clouds pushing toward the river, and he imagined the commencement of poison rain and cosmoplast. He could make out side-by-side drops as they neared, the first landing on the bridge of his nose and the next tapping his shoulder at the stitch. He imagined rain thick as syrup and the color of creek mud, and if it had been real, he knew somehow it would smell of grapefruit and rotten eggs.
He walked on to the apartment of his temporary woman.
She was awake. She ate sweet potato pie from the pan and told him she’d been waiting, that a man had come by with a telegram. Her toes were bloody from practicing her dance.
Abe said to her, “What man?”
She handed over the telegram.
RECEIVED at 195 Broadway 213 AM.
Baltimore Md Apr 20 - 10
A. L. Baach wires from Keystone “If son Abe alive tell him come home. Jake dying.”
Stay quiet here Come to docks Talk to Bushels.
Moon.
He went to the closet and unhung all his clothes in one swipe.
She’d never seen him move in such a manner. “Wait,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go home.”
She watched him pack his suitcase and pull rolls of money from spots she’d never known—a loose square of molding at the mantelpiece, a gouge at the dressing table’s kneehole.
“Who is Jake?”
He didn’t answer.
“You going to Baltimore right now?”
“Yes,” he answered, and in fact he was. He’d have to stop in Baltimore on the way home to put things in order. But she believed his home to be Baltimore.
“Joe,” she said. “Wait.”
She believed his name to be Joe.
She walked to the window. It faced west, and on the inside sill she kept a mint plant. She watered it twice a day and watched it from noon to half past, the only time afternoon sun fit between tenement roofs. “Wait,” she said again. She thumbed the little plant and picked a bright leaf, and chewed it to sweeten her breath, as she always did before they lay together on the Murphy bed.
When she turned, he was closing the door behind him.
It was his custom to leave while they slept, departing a woman’s abode in the night, his feet trained for silence. He’d left women in Atlantic City this way, and more in Savannah, Georgia. He’d left two behind in Richmond, and two more in Newport News. They’d known him not as Abe Baach, but instead as Joe Visross or Honey Bob Hill. Boony Runyon or Woodrow Peek. Sometimes they knew him for a month before he was gone, other times two or three. It all depended on the mark he was working, on how long it took him to take his touch. By the time they woke up, Abe was back in Baltimore, counting out twenties with Mr. Moon.
He’d never felt much in leaving them, never had given a second look to the beds in which they slept. They had enjoyed their time with him, he thought, and they’d get over him soon enough. It had been this way for most of his working years. He’d started out telling himself he’d go back to Keystone when he’d saved twenty thousand. Then he told himself forty. After a while, he didn’t tell himself a thing, and now, here he was.
It was nearly sunup by the time Abe boarded the westbound train out of Jersey City. He’d run from the ferry and climbed into the first car he could, its seats half full of swing shifters, most of them already asleep. He sat and watched a dusty tunnel worker doze, the man’s unshaven neck slack against his seatback.
Abe took out one of two full flasks he’d gathered at the apartment of his temporary woman. He drank from it and watched the sun’s orange glow split the horizon and squint the eyes of those still awake on the train. He took out a deck of cards and shuffled. Angel Backs, a discontinued line of cheap stock with little varnish, cherubs and wings and halos for adornment.
He thought of his old room above the saloon, the cards he’d laid on the windowsill.
He took out the telegram and looked at it again. Jake dying.
He tried to sleep.
Nine miles past Philadelphia, the train bucked at a slow turn and Abe caught a whiff of death rising off Delaware Bay. Morning sun lit up a window smudge left by a sleeping man with too much hair dressing.
He drank the last of his coffee. Across the aisle, a woman had the Philadelphia Inquirer spread before her. One headline read, Miracle cure for syphilis discovered. Abe knocked on the wood of his armrest. It was his own small miracle that his spigot had never leaked so much as a single hot drip. He read another headline. Islanders at Curacao spot Comet streaking overhead.
He checked his pocketwatch. He hadn’t slept more than a twenty-minute stretch in fifty-four hours. The minute hand appeared to bend and the white face went black for a moment. Abe blinked and shook his head. He turned the watch over. A man without the time is lost. He stuck it back in the pocket.
The woman with the newspaper possessed the ankles of an angel. An inch of skin shown between skirt hem and the top of her patent oxfords. Abe beheld that inch. He watched it bobble. He delighted in its map of pores and stubble, and he cleared his throat and said, “Miss?”
She lowered her reading material. Her expression was neither welcoming nor cross.
“I couldn’t help but read your headlines,” Abe said. He pointed to her lap. “I have it on good authority that the comet reported there will rain poison on the lot of us.”
“Yes,” the woman ans
wered. “My sister has been stockpiling comet pills from the apothecary.”
“Smart gal.”
“No such thing as too cautionary.”
He nodded.
A man seated ahead of him stifled a cough. A child ran the aisle with an apple-head doll in her fist.
“Where are you travelin to?” Abe asked.
“Lynchburg.”
He leaned forward. “I couldn’t help but notice the other news, from Germany. The syphilis cure?”
“Yes?” She’d never liked the sound of the word syphilis.
“That’s my old cousin,” Abe said. The train car swayed. The knuckles moaned.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The German fella. One that brewed up the magic serum. He’s my old cousin. He give me an advance dose half a year ago, cured me up right. My pipes are clean as polished brass.” He winked at her.
She looked around to see if anyone had overheard. It was the strangest conversation she could remember, and he was the handsomest man she’d ever encountered. “Well,” she said. “How delightful.”
Abe smiled. He liked the way she said delightful—quick, as if built from a single syllable. He watched her take in his smile. He watched her own emerge. He told her he was pulling her leg and she chuckled. He told her he was not the type to contract syphilis and then he asked if she fancied playing cards. She did.
Abe reached his hand across the aisle. “My name is Joe,” he said. “Joe Visross.”
He began calling her Dee. When she asked him why, he said that to him, she was Miss Dee Lightful, and that she always would be. She chuckled some more. He moved to the seat facing hers and utilized the table between them to spread the deck. “Oh my,” Dee said. She’d not seen the work of such hands before. They moved as if mechanized, oiled for unbroken ease. He blind shuffled, smooth-talking all the while. She picked cards and he shuffled again, palming without the slightest trace of impropriety. He plucked the cards she’d chosen every time. She was impressed.
Fifty miles from Baltimore, they’d already shared and finished the contents of his second flask. Abe flagged the porter and handed him a fin to allow them passage across the loud rollicking vestibule to a vacant compartment car. Once inside, he set down his luggage and pulled the window shade on the locking door. Dee lay down on the low bunk and hiked her skirt. Her eyes were wanton from whiskey. Abe was quick and careful to take his customary position astride her, groin to loin, weight on his elbows.
When he shut his eyes to kiss her, he saw, plain as daybreak, the face of Goldie Toothman.
He raised up and hit his head on the iron luggage berth. The blow nearly put out his lights, and when he touched his hand to the back of his skull, a knot rose slow. He’d lost his vision but was able to shove off the bed and stand.
Dee regarded him there, shuffling against the train’s rollick. “Are you going to be sick?” she asked.
He put his hand out against the wall. His sight returned dull at the edges and he looked through the window glass at the Susquehanna bridge trusses whipping by. He’d once seen a man hung by the neck from such a truss.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Dee said. She’d begun to realize what she’d almost done with a stranger on a train.
“I’m sorry,” Abe managed. He picked up his bags and was out the door without a sound, a steady throb at the back of his skull. His breath was still hung up in his throat at the sight of Goldie.
Memories can be nullified, and when she’d started to fade some years back, he was glad. It had made everything easier out in the world.
Now he stood inside the roar of the vestibule, taking deep breaths in order to compose himself.
Jake dying. They were words he could not outrun. He watched the accordion walls contract around him like the gills of a fish. He looked at the pressed-steel floor of the gangway beneath his shoes. It was nearly reflective, spit-shined. At the corner, it was factory-stamped Pullman No. 123. “I’ll be damn,” he said.
Four hundred miles away, locked inside a fitful nap, Goldie Toothman heard another kind of roar, the kind that often accompanies daytime slumber, and she sat upright, ears ringing. She was in an upstairs room at Hood House. She had waked out of breath.
She stood from the sweat-addled bed and cursed the unseasonable heat.
Across the room, Jake Baach lay dying on the other twin mattress.
She checked his pulse at the neck, where the skin had gone purple-yellow. The wrapped dressing there was a foul brown, the wound beneath it a scabbed bullet graze. The one in his belly had gone clear through. Another was lodged in his scapula. Goldie lowered her ear to his face and listened. He still breathed.
She went to the dressing table mirror and regarded her reflection there. It displeased her. The crows were in the evergreens again, making their awful racket. She walked to the window. Somebody had closed it while she slept. There were those at Hood House who believed Jake might sweat out whatever was in him, whilst others believed in the cure of spring air.
All of them knew by then that such things did not matter. Doctor Warble had done what he could. He said it was most likely a blood infection, and that hope was a notion to think about quitting.
Goldie looked into the yard.
She opened the lower sash, pulled from the floor stack a sturdy book, and stuck it in the channel. The window was open wide enough to put her head through. The birds kept at their cawing, and she said to them, in a near-whisper, “Shut your cock-chafin beak holes.” When they did not obey her command, she returned to the white iron bed, knelt, and reached underneath. She took the hammerless shotgun from its mount against the slats, checked that both barrels held shells, and took a crouch position at the open window, barrels resting on the sill. She lined up her shot, shut her open eye, and imagined herself squeezing the trigger, and that the room-rattling noise of it awoke Jake Baach from his wretched death nap to behold black feathers and pine needles bursting from the branches.
She opened her eyes. The crows had gone quiet.
She was about to stand from her crouch when one of them cawed again.
“I’ll murder the murder of you,” she told the crows.
Spending the night at Hood House had put her in a foul mood once again. She’d offered to administer to Jake as he worsened, and she was glad to ease Sallie Baach’s load, but the trees and animals did not suit Goldie any longer. She longed for town. She could see it from the window, pulsing already just down the clear-cut face of the mountain.
How odd, she thought, to have such contrary worlds cheek by jowl.
She looked at the table clock by the bed. Nearly noon. She could be on Railroad Avenue by half past.
The washbowl was half full of clean water. Someone had hung a hand towel on the edge.
She lay the shotgun on the dressing table and took a hairbrush from the jewel drawer. When she had her hair up and her face and neck washed, she regarded herself in the mirror again. Her displeasure was mostly set aside. She watched Jake’s reflection in the mirror’s corner, so still under the sheet. The back of his hand was like a swollen plum, fingers black.
Someone was coming up the stairs.
It was little Agnes. She stopped and stood in the open doorway.
Goldie turned on the stool to face her. “Hello sweetie,” she said. How tall she’d gotten for seven years old. Her short pants long outgrown, lean legs with big kneecaps. A tooth had gone missing up top. Goldie wondered if Sallie had buried it in the yard. She’d missed so many such things staying away all the time.
“Is that my book in the window?” Agnes asked.
“Aren’t all of em in these stacks yours?”
“Have I read you the story of Krustikuss and Growlegrum?”
Goldie stood and picked up the shotgun. “If you’re up for sitting with him till Grandma Sallie comes, I might let you read it to him.”
“I’m up for it,” Agnes said.
They crossed in the doorway and Goldie kissed the top of the
girl’s head. She hesitated, asked if the baby was asleep.
Agnes nodded that he was. She watched Goldie descend the stairs, and then she stepped inside the room. She took note of the used water and towel she’d laid out for Goldie. She did not look over at the man she called Uncle Jake, but instead sat in the chair by the window and opened her book and read, “So one was tall and one stout but both were of the same size in wickedness, and as to Krustikuss he liked to eat babies while Growlegrum was fond of young ladies.”
Downstairs, a thin line of oven smoke adhered to the kitchen ceiling, dancing there, slow and fickle to the whims of wind through open windows. Al and Sallie sat at the long table drinking coffee. Between them were two plates covered by dishtowels.
They regarded her as she descended the landing.
“Supper won’t stay hot much longer,” Sallie said.
“I’ve got to get to town.” Goldie set the shotgun in its hooks over the pie safe and headed for the door.
Al picked up a section of the paper and crossed his legs. He rubbed his knee where the ache was deep.
“I just got Ben settled in the cot.” Sallie pointed at the little one where he slept in an iron rocker by the sideboard. “We can set and visit a minute fore I go back up to Jake.”
Goldie wanted to tell her that they’d visited plenty the night before at that very table. Al had told them then what he’d done. He’d said, “I sent a telegram to Baltimore, to Mr. Ben Moon. And if Abe is alive, Mr. Moon will send him home.”
Goldie had nearly laughed. In seven years, Al Baach had never said a word on Abe. Seven years she’d watched the Baaches shrink while Henry Trent took what he wanted from them, and not once did anybody say they knew Abe’s whereabouts, or that they might send a telegram his way.
Goldie stopped, her hand on the doorknob, her back to them. “Did you go to the telegraph office this morning?”