by Glenn Taylor
At a quarter past eight, he stood out front of the Alhambra Hotel. Its face had stood the test of weather. A man was paid good money to once a day scrub down its bricks and wash its windows. It showed.
Railroad Avenue was peopled thick farther on at the station, but it was quiet at his present juncture. He’d half expected armed doormen on the hotel stairs. He stepped around the side of the building to see about the entrance there. Not a soul was guarding it. The awning under which he’d bumped Floyd Staples seven years prior still hung, bleached by sun and striped by dirty rain. A scabied cat scavenged a wad of newspaper spilling fish bones. Abe proceeded, aiming to see about the building’s rear. He spoke to the cat as he passed, holding his hand low for a sniff, but the cat showed its teeth. It sounded a hiss and then a low rumble.
No man stood at the building’s backside. It was only the double-bricked husk of the longest game of poker in the land.
He returned to the front of the building and opened the big door.
The lobby shined in straight dark lacquer. Abe nodded to the men at the tall front desk. The seated man was hatless and bald. Two others leaned on wide fluted columns, and asleep between their polished shoes was a long-haired dog.
“Afternoon,” Abe said, though he knew it to be morning. He walked over and held out his hand. “Abe Baach,” he said.
The seated bald man swallowed and sat back and squinted. “You’ll have to pardon me.” He patted his shirt pocket. “I don’t have my spectacles.”
Abe looked at him closer. “Mr. Talbert?” he asked.
The man took up his glasses and knocked over a blue-glass toothpick holder in the shape of an egg. “Yes?” he said.
“What happened to your hair?”
The man got his glasses on. “I can’t hardly believe what’s in front of me,” he said. “Norman, pinch my arm.” He held it out but neither man moved. Then he felt at the top of his head and said, “Would you believe me that I lost all that hair at once a few months back?” which was neither the entire nor the truthful story.
“Is that right?” Abe said.
“God’s word.” He raised his right hand. Then he shook his head. “Abe Baach,” he said. “I had hoped someone was foolin me, comin in here proclaiming themselves as such.”
Abe said, “April Fools’ has come and gone Mr. Talbert.”
The dog on the floor sneezed and moaned and reshut its eyes. The other men continued to lean—neither had bothered to so much as stand straight when Abe had offered handshake. They made their eyes as lifeless as they could and took up a spilled toothpick each and chewed.
Abe looked at one and then the other and smiled. It put them off enough—one checked his timepiece and the other walked to the front window and pushed aside a shear.
“These two is new,” Talbert said.
That much was clear to Abe when he introduced himself. He’d watched their faces for tells, but his name rung neither of their bells. “They are young yet,” he said. He regarded Talbert, who had always worn a kind face.
The dog farted.
Abe and Talbert commenced straightaway at laughing. The other two did not.
Abe frowned at the stench. He asked, “You boys feedin this animal frog legs?”
He clasped his hands in front so they’d know two things. First, that he would stand and wait for what he sought, and second, that he wasn’t looking to do anything quick and deceitful. He said, “I’m here to see Mr. Trent.”
The man at the window laughed then, for though he was new, he had gathered that Henry Trent was not one to take unannounced visitors at early morning hours.
Abe recognized the laugh as dismissive rather than jovial. It was a suitable sound when made by an older, smarter man. But when emitted by a young fool such as this one, it was lamentable at best. He thought to himself, Keep your temper, and he did. He kept his stance too, but turned his neck and shoulders to regard the man at the window, who tried his best to wear a hard look. Abe smiled at him still.
Talbert stood and leaned forward over the desk. He said, “I always thought you was a nice fella, Kid. But last I seen you, you knocked me to the ground and ran out of here in a hail of gunfire.”
“And I am sorry for knocking you down Talbert,” Abe said.
“I don’t know what they’re liable to do to you.” Talbert thought. He whispered, “Rutherford’s in there with him at the Oak Slab.”
Abe watched Talbert’s eyes. Through the dusty lens of his spectacles, they were genuine. He said, “My brother has died and I have peaceable intentions.” He stepped back and announced that he would go ahead and save them the trouble, and with slow and delicate touch of finger and thumb, he withdrew his spur-trigger pistol and handed it grip-first to Talbert, whom he proclaimed trustworthy and wise.
Talbert admired the little gun and put it in a locked drawer. He rubbed at the back of his neck. Inside he was blank, confused as to his allegiances in life. “Well,” he said. “I suppose we ought to go tell him you’re here.” And he stood and told the two young ones to stay where they were.
He led Abe past the grand stage door and into the main card room. Once there, he pointed back to the lobby and said, “Those two are worthless as chicken shit on a pump handle.”
The card room was quiet. Four men sat at a middle table hunched and tired. On the left wall, a bartender stood rigid behind the counter, hands crossed behind him.
An electric bulb hung over the bar, and more hung high above the tables, their cords tacked to the black tin ceiling. These were the only electric lamps in Keystone. Trent had said in 1902 that he’d have electric inside a decade, and seven years later, the lines lit up. They pulled straight from the generators of the Northfork Mining Company, where circuit judge Rufus Beavers sat on the board of trustees. Beavers was newly widowed and had lately become a more-than-regular patron of the Alhambra Hotel. He was at the Oak Slab most nights. He kept a third-floor room on permanent. His brother Harold was known to take over the room on his twice-a-year visits home, throwing big money around and nightly taking two or three women upstairs.
The hot orange filaments hummed. Abe watched them dance inside the glass, alive. He’d once told Jake that he’d have electric lamps at A. L. Baach & Sons by 1910. He’d wrongly thought he’d be running the Bottom by then.
On the way to Trent’s office door, Talbert tipped his head at the barkeep and whispered, “Nothing between that one’s ears but cotton.”
A fat man sat on a stool in front of the door to Trent’s office. He lowered his halved McDowell Times and bit a long stretch of dried beef. “Who’s this?” he said to Talbert.
“This is Abe Baach, the Keystone Kid.” And with that, Talbert made his customary tap on the door, told Abe to stay put, and went through.
The fat man said he didn’t believe that to be the truth, and in the same sentence asked if he’d been frisked, but Talbert had already shut the door.
“I have been thoroughly frisked,” Abe said. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Munchy,” the man said. “I’m police.” He pulled back his jacket and showed his badge. He aimed his beef at Abe’s scar. “What happened to your face?”
Abe told him, “Well Munchy, I was performing cunnilingus on a gal who turned out to have a greased bobtail trap in her pussy.”
“You were doing what?” Munchy said, but Abe never got to extrapolate because Talbert came back through the door and held it open and told Abe to go and sit by the desk, that Mr. Trent would be with him presently. They crossed in the same spot where Abe had knocked him off his stool all those years back, and Talbert nodded to him and said, “I wish you luck,” and closed the door again.
The office was quiet and Abe kept his eyes on the second door. He sat down in the same chair he’d sat in so many times before.
A fan hung from the ceiling and spun slow on a turbine belt drive. There was a half inch of dust on each wide blade. The black spade minute hand on the floor clock clicked to six. The desk lamp su
rged and hummed and the glass-fronted bookcase trembled at a slow passing train.
Henry Trent stepped into his office.
Abe stood.
Trent watched him and kept his hand on the knob as he back-shut the door. He wore no jacket. His white shirt was stained yellow at the armpits. Neck skin hung over his standing collar, and he’d dyed his hair black all the way down to the roothole, so that when he sweat from the forehead, it came out charcoal gray and puddled at the wrinkles running up-and-down and sideways both. He breathed deep through his nose and walked over. When he got within a foot, he stopped, stood with his big hands on his waist, and said nothing.
Abe held out his hand. “Mayor Trent,” he said. “I imagine you—”
“Did Talbert’s men pat you?”
“Yessir.”
Trent started to inquire about the thoroughness, but instead he took a handful of popcorn kernels from his pocket and threw them at the outer door.
Munchy came in and stood at attention.
“Pat him again,” Trent said, “and get on up in his armpits. Ankles too.”
Abe stood with his arms out and his stance wide again, looking Trent in the face while the fat man located the deck of cards Abe had wanted him to locate. He tossed it on the desk.
“Get in the crack of his ass,” Trent said.
When it was done, Munchy nodded that Abe was clean. He went back to his paper.
They sat across the wide desk from each other just as they had thirteen years before.
Trent took up the Devil Back package of cards and turned it over in his hand. He said, “I thought Talbert had lost his mind just now when he came in there and said what he said.” His posture in the highback chair was not what it once had been. “He had the tact to whisper it in my ear, but if Rutherford happens to leave his post in there and come through that door, he’s liable to tug his shooting iron and put six right through you.”
Abe dipped his hand in a hidden pocket and produced an envelope of money. He held it across the desk. “I hope you’ll find it satisfactory,” he said.
Trent took the envelope and fished out the notes and counted two thousand dollars.
Behind him, the bookcase still sat empty of books, its glass fronts obscured by flat neglect. Atop the case was the cast-iron boxing glove bookend with which Floyd Staples had crushed the skull of the red-headed boy.
Trent was thrown off by the money. He was suddenly dry-throated. He stacked it on top of the envelope. “Why did you come back here?” he asked.
“My brother Jake has died.”
“Shameful situation that one. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Abe shut his eyes for the briefest of moments, and in doing so, he imagined himself hurtling across the desk with his little nails between the fingers of his fists, punching at the eyes of Henry Trent, proclaiming all the while, This is what I do when I smell something wrong on a fella! Instead, he looked at Trent and said, “Doc Warble said blood infection from the slug.” He’d wondered if he’d be able to tell, when he finally sat with the man, whether or not Trent was carrying Jake’s demise. Now here he was, and Abe couldn’t smell a damn thing on him.
Trent said, “Sepsis. Bad luck.”
“The worst kind.”
“I hope you do not think me somehow complicit in Jake’s end.”
“If I thought that, would we be conversing like we are?”
Trent sniffed hard and stared back with eyes as dead as the worthless lobby men. He said, “I’d heard Jake had long since got the syphilis too.”
“These days,” Abe said, “there’s a miracle cure for that.”
Trent had not heard the news. He readied his hand next to the pistol tucked at the desk’s knee hole. “Don’t know if you caught wind,” he said, “but there’s some saying Jake and the Italian was engaged in homosexual relations.”
“Is that right?”
“Lovers’ quarrel.”
Abe swallowed. In his mind he heard her voice. Keep your temper. He looked at his hands. He kept his temper. “Mayor Trent,” he said. “I’ve done considerable growing up while I was away, and I’ve become a successful man of business.” He sat forward on his chair and looked Trent in the eye. “I’d like to apologize to you for my drunken and juvenile ways of old and for the pain I may have caused on the evening of my departure.” He cleared his throat. “I believe you know I was not involved with Floyd Staples, but I should have stopped him somehow.” He willed a look of remorse to his face.
From beyond the door, somebody at the big table told a good one and the men were made to laugh, loud and in unison.
Trent took his hand away from the concealed piece. He packed the bowl of his pipe and got it going. He regarded the younger man and remembered the way he once manipulated cards. “What line of work are you in?” he asked him.
“I am a salesman for the Big Sun Playing Card Company.”
“I’ve got my card supplier.”
“Course. I’m not looking to make a sale.”
“What is it that you want?”
Abe told him he wanted a new beginning. He said he aimed to stay awhile and help out his family, and that if it sat right with Trent, he would restore his daddy’s saloon to its former self. “I hope that two thousand will mean something to you,” he said. “I hope it might buy Daddy a few months respite from collection.” He said that such a respite would allow him to put the place in working order, and putting the place in working order would allow a decent living for his brother and more equitable footing for his father, who was injured at the knee and of the age to put his feet up once in a while. He said, “And I aim to bring my mother around on selling Hood House to you.”
“It’s the acreage I’m after.”
“Acreage too.”
The fan above spun and a piece of dust fell on the heavy desk between them, slow as the snowflakes Abe had seen that morning.
Henry Trent again turned the card deck over in his hands. He took long pulls on his pipe and said, “Goddamn Baaches. You took a five-year king’s run at the big table and shat on it, left your daddy to shovel up and pay the fiddler.” He licked his finger and stuck it in the bowl of his pipe. There was a small wet sound. “Your brother finally found the wise way to real money, and what did he do? He shat on it. Went prohibitionist, religified.” He shook his head. Baaches were hard to figure. “What happened to your face?” he asked.
“Ran across a man who could wield a blade.”
He nodded. He knew the type. “Did you give as good as you got?”
“Only thing he wields now is an invalid’s chair.”
Trent smiled.
Abe smiled back.
They stood and met at desk’s end, and Abe remembered what Goldie had said about the man’s volatile state. For a moment he wondered if a gun was to be pulled, but Trent instead raised up his fist and knocked pipe ash on it. He looked hard at Abe’s eyes before bending toward the wastebasket and blowing. He said he’d have to run things by the Beavers brothers.
“Of course,” Abe said.
But Trent would not run things by the Beavers brothers. He’d manage it all alone while they sunned themselves in Florida, and by the time they returned in June, he’d have locked up a hundred acres more. Prime acres of plateau land where homes could be built and folks with means could live high up from the filth below.
They shook hands.
Trent unlatched the arch doors on his liquor cabinet. He poured two whiskeys from a wide-bottom decanter. He raised his glass and said, “To half-Jew Abe, businessman and crippler of the knife-wielding.” He opened the door to the main card room and told Munchy to go on break. He stepped through and surveyed. “Too quiet,” he said.
Abe followed and they stood in the open and watched the singular table of men, and without taking his eyes off them, Trent said to Abe, “I’ve always liked your daddy. I never intended the bad blood and all that’s happened.” His eyes welled and his voice shook. He was not in full control of his sens
ibilities.
He cleared his throat and returned to his office, where he poured another and eyed the green-sealed card pack dancing in red devils. He took it up and walked back to Abe. He perched his foot on a rung of the fat man’s stool. “Look to be some fine cards,” he said.
Abe said that they were indeed. He listed of the towns and cities they supplied, all the way to San Francisco. He said, “And we supply a good many top magicians and sleight-of-hand artists too. Verner and Marlon, Mercurio and Andrews, and we—”
“Max Mercurio uses these cards?” He’d nearly choked mid-swallow.
“Uses them exclusively,” Abe said.
Trent thumbed the deck. “Do you know him?”
“We’ve shared a drink or two.” Abe had never met the man.
“Fine stage magician,” Trent said. “Doesn’t need all the bangs and flashes.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more.”
The barkeep side-eyed them from his station and unclasped his hands. He was ever-ready to grab, if need be, the cut-barrel shotgun. It hung from a pair of broken-down hay hooks affixed to the underside of the bar.
Trent asked, “Do you know Mercurio’s gal?”
“Beatrice?”
“That’s the one.”
“Beatrice is a jewel. Doesn’t put on airs.”
There was a rising carbonation in Trent’s throatway. He didn’t know whether it was excitement over Beatrice the Beautiful or indigestion from that morning’s fatback and eggs. He said, “I saw the very same in her.”
The conversation was playing just as Abe had imagined it, and he did not miss a beat. “I wondered if they’d been down here. I haven’t spoken to Max in a while.”
“Well, they haven’t yet,” Trent said. “I met Beatrice only in passing once in New Orleans.” He’d met nothing more than her picture on a rectangle of newsprint. Four times since, he’d made written request of rates, but Mercurio had never returned his letters.
Abe suspected Max Mercurio would sooner be run through with a pig spit than come to Keystone. He said, “Well, the Alhambra’s first-class. I’m sure I could arrange it.”