A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

by Glenn Taylor

And it was then that Henry Trent’s posture straightened. He looked at Abe with something akin to wonder.

  “Max’s manager Tony is a friend of mine,” Abe said. “He’s got them in Melbourne, Australia right now, but I could wire him and see when they might be freed up for a short run. He owes me.”

  Trent smiled big. His silver crowns were tarnished yellow and black.

  There was a sharpness in his stride back to the liquor cabinet, where he poured another for Abe and told him they’d talk more soon. He was feeling nervous on Rutherford. “Take that one for the road,” he told Abe. He patted his back and sent him across the main room.

  He watched him go and wondered at Abe’s angle and his skill in the art of lying. He could not figure what the young man had to gain from such a play. Sallie Baach’s father would finally sell, or he wouldn’t. Beatrice would come to town with Max Mercurio, or she wouldn’t. Either way, he was two thousand richer than he’d been at breakfast.

  He wondered how he’d tell Rutherford about the return of the Keystone Kid, and he wondered, above all, how he’d keep the little man from killing him.

  No sooner had he wondered than he ceased. He’d tell Rutherford that patience was a virtue. You only have to wait until the property is signed over, until Beatrice comes to town, he’d say. Or until the property isn’t signed over, until Beatrice doesn’t come to town. For a time, he’d say, patience. After that, tiny Rutherford, you can do what you will.

  Abe fetched Snippy the mediocre mare before ten, and he rode her all the way to Mingo County. He used a snake whip and boot spurs both to make her go, and—following Elkhorn to Spice Creek, cutting through a thick-brush pass—he came into Matewan along the Tug River at midnight, a thirteen-hour ride. He cooled down the horse and hobbled and staked her at wood’s edge. He watered and fed her. Then he proceeded directly to the small clapboard home of Frank Dallara, where snakeskins hung like wind chimes from the front-porch roof. He stepped careful at the quiet spot on each porch riser, and turned the doorknob slow as any man ever turned one, and went inside and awakened Frank Dallara by tickling him at the nose with a crow feather.

  When Dallara opened his eyes, there was the smooth nickel hole of the five-shot .38.

  “I wonder if you’d join me for a walk outside,” Abe whispered.

  Dallara carried a brass hinge lamp and they spoke cordially as they walked to their destination, a squat building backed up to Railroad Alley.

  Abe told the man he meant him no harm. He told him he was only trying to find who’d killed his brother. Dallara understood. Abe asked him about the snakeskins.

  “My boy Fred likes to catch snakes,” he said. “Him and another boy too.”

  Abe learned from Dallara that his cousin Giuseppe was a strange and quiet man, a bricklayer and carpenter who pulled his flat cap low and kept his eyes on the ground. He’d not been born in the states like Frank Dallara had. Guiseppe had come from Torino to New York, but there was trouble, so he came to Mingo County, like his cousins before him, to mine coal. He’d quit midwinter. He had no tunneling in his bones, only building. When he walked to Keystone in February for work, he’d met Jake. “And here was a man could build near as good as him from what I know,” Frank Dallara said, “and that ain’t common. Giuseppe builds better than me, and I learned from my daddy, who framed and bricked that whole row right there.” He pointed to a two-story building across the tracks, lit sufficient by the near-full moon.

  “I built that house you just woke me up in,” Dallara said.

  When Abe asked him why he reckoned Giuseppe was locked up in Matewan instead of Keystone, Frank Dallara said, “Well, you ain’t got no judge down there do you?”

  In the alley, it was pitch-black and winter cold. Abe leaned a hollow concrete block on its end against the wall. He got on top to see inside the single barred window of the Matewan Jail. On a table in the main hall, a wide kerosene lamp stayed lit overnight, casting thread-iron shadow on bare floor. Inside cell two, Giuseppe Dallara lay on a dirty stack of grain sacks. Abe fast-whistled four short bursts like a nuthatch bird and the man sat upright.

  Giuseppe was hungry. He cocked his head to regard the man at the window square. A stranger, but his face marked him kin to Jake Baach.

  Abe nodded to him and stepped down, and in his place was Frank.

  Abe spoke to Frank Dallara, who listened and then said through the bars, “Questo il fratello di Jake Baach. Vuole sapere se lo sparato.”

  Giuseppe spoke fast and for quite some time.

  When he ceased, Frank looked down at Abe from his perch. He said, “He was huntin squirrels with your brother on Buzzard Branch. He’d set his rifle down against a tree trunk so he could piss off the edge of a jutted ridge rock up there—folks call it Big Brogan—you know it?”

  Abe said he did.

  Dallara went on. “And when he come back, his rifle’s gone. Him and your brother was trying to figure it when three shots come from way far off. Jake was knocked to the ground, but he stood up and screamed and ran down the mountain. Giuseppe followed, but when he got to the bottom, a colored police drew down on him, and he ran out of there. He came to my house, and I took him to a hideout up Sulfur Creek Hollow. Your chief of police tracked him two days later, said he’d found the rifle dropped up on Buzzard Branch too.” He coughed before he clarified. “That rifle is Giuseppe’s—a good Marlin I sold to him for six dollars and a half—but it wasn’t him that fired it.”

  Giuseppe spoke again from inside the jail.

  Frank Dallara listened and waited a moment before he relayed it to Abe. “He says your brother was a good man. He says your brother was like his own blood kin.”

  Abe nodded his head. He took out his watch. Just after one. The mediocre mare would be plenty rested by the time he walked back.

  He pulled a twenty-dollar note from his vest pocket and handed it to Frank Dallara. “For your trouble,” he said. He apologized for the rude and abrupt nature of his arrival. Then he told him there might come a time when he was needed in Keystone. “I might clear your cousin’s name,” he said.

  He nodded to Frank Dallara and walked away.

  NO BUCKWHEATERS, NO CHICKENS

  May 6, 1910

  In those days, Little Donnie Staples was employing the bug to win. The bug was a device that hid a card under his chair at the Oak Slab until such time as he needed it to secure his fortune. He’d built it himself from a penny, a steel spike, and a watch spring. It tucked neatly into the gouge he’d made in the seat’s underside and could be dislodged with considerable speed if suspicion arose. He’d used it to win ninety-seven dollars with an ace of spades on May 4th. Then, after his four-hour slumber, he’d returned to play, and he’d found in his little bug not the ace of spades customarily reloaded by Talbert, but instead a Devil Back joker from the Big Sun Playing Card Company. It wore heavy varnish and along the bottom it read:

  A DROP OF BLOOD IN EVERY RED INK BATCH!

  Such an odd development perplexed Little Donnie. The card got his steam up. Still, he won considerable monies without aid from the bug, and later, in his room at the Alhambra—the very same third-floor corner room where Abe had once roosted—Little Donnie studied the card. No black ink was used in its manufacture. It was a three-color print, primarily red. Its yellow company sign was bright as summer squash and was held by a dancing green monkey on a pedestal, while the pedestal was striped in a color that was neither red nor green nor yellow. Little Donnie brought the card close, the lines an inch from his left eye, the one folks referred to as “lazy.” It was anything but. It rolled sometimes, but it could see things no one else could. On that night, in the striped pedestal of the devil-monkey, the eye saw:

  123123123123123

  MAGNIFY

  Little Donnie Staples,

  Tell Trent I gave you

  invite to Baach game.

  Come to saloon back door

  on Friday 4 am sleep break

  The word MAGNIFY was all he could make out. H
e fetched his pearl-handled magnifying glass and read:

  123123123123123

  MAGNIFY

  Little Donnie Staples,

  Tell Trent I gave you

  invite to Baach game.

  Come to saloon back door

  on Friday 4 am sleep break

  He could not sleep then for the clamor of possibility in his mind.

  Abe Baach was who Little Donnie had always wanted to be.

  In the morning, he stood opposite Mr. Trent with his elbow on the long bar. He asked if they could be alone and Trent shooed away the barkeep. Behind them, an old woman pushed floor oil across the boards between tables. She hummed low.

  Little Donnie told Trent he’d gotten an invite to a 4 AM poker game at Baach’s saloon. Trent sipped at a short glass of soda water and cringed. He was hungover bad and knew another trip to the commode was close at hand.

  Their exchange was to the point and feverishly paced. It proceeded as follows:

  “You say it’s a secret game?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Played on your sleep time?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did the invite come?”

  “Abe asked me hisself.”

  “You go on and do it and report back to me what you find.”

  And from Trent’s throat came a sucking sound and he put one hand to his stomach and the other to the seat of his pants, beneath which his sphincter pinched sudden against the pressure. And in his mind was a long-forgotten boyhood memory of the time he’d half-filled a pig-bladder balloon with mud-puddle water. He’d blown air in it too and toted the tight balloon in the farm wagon for the long journey to church, and on that journey his tied knot had failed, and the bladder burst brown upon his lap and ruined his Sunday trousers. His granny had held up the mule and thrown him to the ground. She’d stepped from the high wagon seat and jumped a ditch to break off a switch from a sourwood tree. She’d yanked down his trousers and twenty-lashed him across the kneebacks. “You are a bad-hearted little boy,” she’d told him, and he cried and looked at the ground. The sourwood leaves she’d stripped lay in a rudimentary curl on the dirt, their October color coming in, reddest at the middle rib.

  Little Donnie went to the back door of A. L. Baach & Sons Saloon on his Friday four AM sleep break. He was greeted warmly there by Sam Baach, who shared his height and slim build. Sam took him upstairs to Abe’s room, where, assembled in a semicircle of unmatched chairs, were the Keystone Kid and Queen Bee, and mother Rebecca. In a ball on Abe’s bed slept brother Robert, who was six and a half years old. He was known to kick and talk in his sleep. Little Donnie liked to call him Bob.

  There was rainwater pooled on the windowsill. Cigar smoke ribboned above. Rebecca Staples petted the head of her slumbering youngest and smiled at her oldest.

  Abe stood and shook Little Donnie’s hand. He asked him, “Do you mind if I call you L. D.?” and then he called him L. D. and told him he was truly sorry that he had not showed him a card trick on the afternoon of May 15th in the year 1903. “I was a boy back then who thought he was a man,” he said, “and I was six years older than you are today.” He tapped at the side of his head and said to think on that awhile. They sat down.

  “L. D.,” Abe said, “I can appreciate a well-made bug.” And he spoke on how he’d once employed the bug just as L. D. had. He said he’d employed mirrors too, sometimes six at once, each no bigger than a june beetle. He’d worked alone and with a partner. He’d blown smoke-ring signals and used the earlobe pull. He’d cold-decked and dealt seconds. He’d crimped, marked, and nicked on the fly. “And L. D.,” he said, “I believe you’ve already seen my line work on that joker. I can go a hundred times smaller than that.” He told the boy he’d give him two years’ apprenticeship in two months’ time. He aimed to stay the summer. He aimed to find out who shot his brother. “And the next time I leave Keystone,” he said, “I won’t be leaving alone, and there won’t be a pocket on any of us that isn’t full up with double-eagles.”

  He said that L. D.’s help in the money endeavors would be much appreciated.

  Rebecca Staples then seceded herself from the conversation. Its terminus was known, and its risk was death. She climbed onto the bed next to her boy Bob, who was the kind to roll out and hit the floor and holler out and keep on sleeping.

  It was quiet.

  To be certain he was understood, Abe said to Little Donnie, “The mark is Trent.”

  “And Rutherford and Beavers too,” Goldie said. She watched the boy for tells.

  He looked at one and then the other. “It’s a spirited undertaking,” he said.

  “The touch on this is somethin else,” Abe said. “Take you two days to count it out. Big-faced red-seal notes, high-stacked.”

  Goldie nodded her head. “High as your belt buckle,” she said.

  “A quarter cut to each of us three,” Abe said. “The fourth is split by my associates traveling down from Baltimore.”

  When the boy breathed in, he shook.

  Abe looked at Goldie. He took his own slow inhale before he spoke again. “L. D.,” he said. “I know by the eyes, straightaway. I know who’s iron-hearted, and I know on top of that who’s on the wrong side.” The boy had eyes opposite his father’s. Abe hoped him ripe enough to ally himself accordingly. He held out his hand. “We can show you some things,” he said.

  Little Donnie nodded. He put out his own and they shook.

  Robert Staples kicked his short little legs straight and talked in his sleep. “They do,” he mumbled. “Tippy-top.”

  Sam stepped out of the room for sustenance.

  Abe stood and stretched his legs. He put a hand to the wardrobe where his money rested.

  Goldie leaned forward in the bowback chair, elbows on her knees. She asked if Taffy Reed would be amenable to an endeavor such as theirs. Little Donnie said he couldn’t be sure, but that he doubted it. Taffy was like his daddy. He didn’t bite the hand. It was what she’d assumed, and it relieved her in fact, for she worried that trouble could stir should Abe and Taffy mix.

  Goldie told Little Donnie that such a plan involved, at its conclusion, relocating. She said, “I will never love another place the way I love McDowell County, but there are times when what’s required is a journey.” She said the Baaches were planning for the possibility of a long one that didn’t ever circle back to Keystone.

  Little Donnie indicated he wouldn’t mind relocating elsewhere.

  “Good,” Goldie said. And she sat back again, and the spindles moaned at the touch of her ribs and shoulder blades. She called Rebecca over and told mother and son that the following would be required: supreme confidence, discipline, and endurance. She looked Rebecca in the eye and made her profess to stay off the opium and to mislead Rutherford as need be in order that they might all do their best work. “And if we tell you to tell Rutherford you’re going away for a while and you’re taking little Bob with you, then that’s what you do.” She looked Little Donnie in the eye and told him he too would have to mislead.

  Abe spoke to Rebecca from where he stood. “I’ve got a man coming to town who makes a powder,” he said. “Eases you off the poppy.” Tony Thumbs had miracle cures for most any ailment, cures that had righted Abe’s own ship more times than he cared to count.

  Sam brought up the big blue coffeepot, four straight cups, and a bowl of olives he’d soaked for a month in white whiskey. Taffy Reed had given him the idea. On a winter consideration collection, Taffy had indicated that his toothpicks were booze-pickled. Penny candy too. Licorice, caramels. Tobacco. Garden vegetables. Taffy would brine most anything in whiskey.

  Abe sat down again. He sighed and smiled and took up a handful of olives. He tossed them in his open mouth and chewed. He told the story of the coming summer.

  “I call it the double-sideways big con,” he said, tapping at the side of his head again. “It goes both ways and there will be a good bit of improvising on the side, but our mark will be certain of one thi
ng all the way through.” Abe looked at Little Donnie straight and spoke in an even tone. “He’ll believe himself the superior confidence man to me, and you’ll keep him right on believing.”

  The boy swallowed and kept his mouth shut.

  “You’re our roper,” Abe told him. “An important job, but an easy one too if you listen when you need to listen and speak when you need to speak.”

  The boy nodded.

  Abe said he wouldn’t hold it against L. D. if he decided to double-cross him. “But you need to know, I played Trent already in his office, threw some short stack at him and watched him go soft. Gave him a whiff of the right woman.”

  “Beatrice?”

  Abe nodded.

  Sam was too ambitious with a honk off his whiskey-coffee and regurgitated into his mouth with the croak and puff of a toad. He kept his lips shut tight and swallowed it back straightaway. “Pardon me,” he said.

  Goldie laughed.

  Abe went on.“Our inside men arrive shortly from Baltimore.” He spat four olive pits rapidly into an open hand. “You’re sitting above the big store right now.” He pointed to the floor beneath their feet. “We will revive this place. People will know of it for a hundred miles or more, and they will seek out its delights.” He pointed at Little Donnie. “But you’re not the entertainment, L. D. You are a player of cards.” He smiled. “You’ll nightly engage in a false game of high-stakes poker with men pretending to be someone they’re not.”

  Sam poured coffee while Abe spoke slow and deliberate on such delicate matters as to convince Trent that Little Donnie was his roper, working his mark. It was enough to addle the mind.

  There was talk of disguises and mirrors and paid actors and forged documents and false jewels.

  They all listened to him.

  The boy asked smart questions. Abe answered all but one, the boy’s last. “How did you manage to put your card in my bug?”

  “That isn’t how it happened,” Abe said. He held out his hand. They shook.

  Little Donnie Staples left that early morning a changed young man, and, as he was told to, he reported back to Henry Trent while Abe waited in the Alhambra’s fine lobby, small-talking with Talbert.