by Glenn Taylor
Trent was by then laid up with bad digestive troubles. A flop sweat was upon his temple. He was still and pale and centered on his wide cane-box mattress. He clutched his bedsheet. He could not figure what the boy was telling him. He said, “Abe is downstairs right now?”
“He is.”
“And he told you to ask me about all this?”
“He did.”
“Why doesn’t he ask me himself?”
“I gather he’s a little bit afraid of you. Doesn’t want to overstep his bounds too quick.”
It settled him a little to hear such a thing. He almost smiled. “And if I let you play there? How’s he cutting it?”
“I get three. You get forty-seven. He gets fifty.”
“Did he say what number he was looking to clear?”
“One hundred grand. Biggest mark will be a fella from Chicago owns some office buildings.”
“What kind of game is it?”
“Seven-card stud. The men will all be from Cincinnati and St. Louis and the like. Big money men. No buckwheaters, no chickens.”
Trent was having trouble following. The boy was using words that neither pleased his ear nor aided his thinking. He thought of sitting upright but didn’t. The clock on his bedside table metered the silence in cold clicks. He asked one of the many questions he had. “Why would they come to a ratshit West Virginia saloon to risk their holdings?”
Had little Donnie been running on ample sleep, he’d have answered quicker. As it was, he felt his throat closing, but he managed to push out the words. “I gather he’s been selling cards to these men for six years, and they are all of them hooked bad on the poker table.” He told Trent that Abe had recently wired the men and revealed what they’d always suspected—that he’d once been somebody. That he’d once been the Keystone Kid. Back then, like Rutherford and Harold Beavers and so many others, they’d wanted to play him but never had the chance. He’d disappeared. Now he was back. Now they could take him on right smack in the bowel of his own red-light boomtown.
Trent stifled a belch. “Presumably they know of me?”
“I gather they don’t.”
He grunted. “Why does he need you?”
“I gather he’s heard about my play.”
“Why does he think I’ll let you?” Forty-seven percent on a hundred grand was good money, but Trent had good money enough to wipe at his asscrack if he saw fit.
“The way Abe sees it, we can fleece the Chicago fella twice, once at Baaches, where I’ll appear to lose while Abe wins, then again when we steer him to the Oak Slab, confident against my play.” He had gotten his stride back.
A crane fly bumped at the lamp’s cast circle on the ceiling.
“And he wants a cut of the Oak Slab take?”
“No. Just wants to get his daddy’s saloon up and running again.”
Trent thought on it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why does he believe we’ll do it?”
“He believes we’ll do it for the kind of certain money that comes in working the table with him as a partner. These men will think they’re lucky enough to play Keystone’s best, from way back and nowadays both, and they’ll think us enemies rather than cohorts.”
“Why doesn’t he just beat them without you?”
“I gather he can’t play like he used to. He’s lost what he had.”
Trent knew of at least three men who’d be interested to know such a thing. Rutherford and Harold Beavers and Taffy Reed had wanted a shot at the Keystone Kid for as long as he could remember. He watched the crane fly dance above him. He said, “He gave no indication of another angle?”
“He thinks he’s smarter than he is.” Now Little Donnie improvised. “I’d say the Jew blood in his veins taints his view on who aligns with who in this world. I could feel it. He wrongly assumes me his friend.”
It was quiet.
Trent considered the advantage of having the boy inside Abe’s domain. “Go on and do it then,” he said. “We’ll make something out of it.”
“He said he’d be glad to come upstairs and talk to you about it further.”
“Tell him in a day or two.”
And so it was that Little Donnie Staples would daily come to spend three dark morning hours with Abe and Goldie. They would teach him things such as how to covertly place tiny mirrors at strategic angles inside a man’s office. Between lessons, he would nap upright at a fake game of poker populated by salaried stage actors from Tony Thumbs’s Baltimore stall. The best of them, a fifty-five-year-old actor named Jim Fort, would play the role of Chicago Phil, millionaire. The diamond stickpins in their silk ties would be made of glass. They would speak one way in character and another alone. This facade they would all maintain in the event that Trent might finally show his face at Baach’s place, in the event that he might try and confirm the strange and intriguing tales told to him by the lazy-eyed son of a whore.
CYANOGEN GAS WILL IMPREGNATE THE ATMOSPHERE
May 18, 1910
The people stood in the middle of Wyoming Street and danced on loose legs and sprung knees. They drag-slid their feet, kicking dust into the cool night air. A man in a bow tie sat on a wicker-seated chair and played a guitar. Another stood and played potato bug mandolin. From an open turquoise suitcase, a woman sold single-dose pills for a dollar apiece. The suitcase was rigged with a leather belt around her neck, and she walked up and down the street’s center calling, “It’s not too late! Comet pills! Get your comet pills!”
It was four in the morning.
Inside, Sam Baach poured generous swallows from a squat-cylinder black-glass bottle. Comet drops, half dollar a shot. A miner still in his carbide cap paid and regarded the clear liquid. He knew of another man on his shift who’d stayed underground for the earth’s impending passage through the tail of Halley’s Comet. “What’s in it?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m not entirely sure,” Sam said. “Quinine, rum, purple wine. And there’s secret ingredients too that the doctor doesn’t tell of.” The doctor was the husband of the woman with the turquoise suitcase. He’d made a display of drinking down five shots of his own product and proclaiming, “No poison gas will ruin these pipes!” and was now asleep, face down on the crowded corner table. The miner looked over at him and said, “Well, here’s to living past sunup.” He drank it down and ordered another.
Abe was readying one of the performers Tony Thumbs had sent in from Baltimore, a Frenchman whom he hoped would please the crowd. A. L. Baach & Sons had not seen this many warm bodies since before he’d left town in ’03. Trent and Rutherford had left him well enough alone, all on the reports of Little Donnie and the promise of a New York telegram proclaiming the impending arrival of Max Mercurio and the Beautiful Beatrice. In the meantime, Abe had brought in some of Tony Thumbs’s choicest acts to populate the saloon, and more were on their way.
The stage itself had been finished the day before by Frank Dallara, who was paid handsomely. He made use of an oversize custom workbench in the storeroom, a great big bench made by his cousin and Jake Baach. Its tool well was quadruple deep. It had wide-throated shoulder and tail vises. On that workbench, Frank Dallara had now built, in two weeks, the rails, battens, grids, and drops of a proper performance stage, miniaturized. He’d been paid handsomely, and with a cut of his earnings, he’d paid the jailer at Matewan to feed Giuseppe something other than beans and bacon.
Goldie lit the footlights and stepped behind the curtain. She got on an upturned pail and brushed powder on the opening act’s face while he stared at the newspaper. He’d been asking, “What this word means” for twenty solid minutes, pointing at headlines and leadlines both. Goldie looked where he pointed. Cyanogen gas will impregnate the atmosphere. “Means poison,” she told him. “We’re passing through the comet’s tail right now.”
He frowned.
Abe stood by, watching. He cracked his knuckles and checked his watch.
Goldie made the opening act take another swallow from the brown glass bottle Ton
y Thumbs had sent along.
“I do not need it,” the man said.
“Can’t hurt,” she told him.
He swallowed and winced and looked again at the newspaper.
“Don’t worry,” Abe said. “It’s no truth in that headline.” The cyanogen-gas theory had been largely discounted, but Abe had paid an acquaintance at the McDowell Times to run the article three days straight in order that he might stir folks to buy comet pills and comet shots, in order that they would attend the saloon’s comet party. The acquaintance was Cheshire Whitt, whom Abe paid handsomely to print handbills reading You Can Sleep After You Are Dead. Come to A. L. Baach & Sons. Wednesday night into Thursday morning. Dance and drink and be entertained by world-renowned acts on our new stage.
The acts weren’t world-renowned as much as Baltimore-renowned, and the fame came less from stage time and more from habitual drunken exhibitionism.
Now the opening act was powdered and reassured that the world would not end before he took the stage. Goldie peeked her head through the curtain and whistled at Sam, who was having trouble keeping empty mugs filled. Sam in turn nodded to Cheshire Whitt, who opened the door and hollered at the people in the street that the show was starting inside.
It was shoulder to shoulder when Goldie stepped from the curtain. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “direct from Paris France, I give you L’homme Péter.”
The crowd took this to mean that the man’s name was Peter. Had any of them spoken French, there may have been fair warning of what was to come.
He wore a yellow swallowtail dresscoat and a purple flowered cravat. His skin was pale and his tonic-slicked hair a reflective black.
He surveyed the quiet audience before him, turned away from their upturned faces, and bowed toward the curtain. Still bent at the waist, he called out, “Now the automobile, with a backfire,” and he lifted the tails of his coat and sent forth with wondrous might a continuous blast of odorless gas. It issued from his anus with the clear tone of a combustion engine, and it ended with an impossible clap that startled those in front. When they recovered from their startle, they began to laugh heartily in a chorus. The chorus rose as the reality of what they’d seen set in, and they only quieted when L’homme Péter looked over his shoulder and said, “Now for the Yankee Doodle.” They waited in disbelief. He played it in perfect time and pitch. Some bent double with laughter then. One man left in disgust. For any who questioned the sound’s origin, L’homme Péter took a paper sleeve of talcum powder and emptied it over the up-pointed seat of his black breeches. He called, “The Waltz!” and a cloud of fine white particles burst upon the gaslit air, spinning as they fell.
It was as if he’d swallowed an accordion.
They called him out with savage claps and high whistles for an encore, and behind the curtain Goldie fed him another swallow of Tony Thumbs’s patented Fart Juice, though L’homme Péter didn’t need it. He’d been born with a gift—the fart juice only stirred propulsion. He threw open the curtain, bent again before them, and played the snake-charmer song until their bellies clinched and their eyes watered from laughter.
At five, a yellow-haired Norwegian woman took the stage wearing only three bleached sand dollars held by kite string over her unmentionables. She sat on a barstool with the handle of a thirty-inch handsaw gripped in her knees and pulled a cello’s bow across the back of the blade. It sang high weary lullabies until more than one silent man imagined he’d found his bride.
In the storeroom, behind a wall newly framed and bricked by Frank Dallara, a pretend game of seven-card stud proceeded slow and quiet. Three of the five men half-played their hands, but they didn’t give a damn about the outcome.
One of them steadily dozed. His shoulder twitched. He breathed through his mouth.
Little Donnie Staples was wayworn, and so it was easy to sleep upright in a hard-seat chair. In ordinary times, he worked his twenty-hour shift at the Oak Slab, slept for four, and was back at the table for another twenty, all the while winning, if he had a mind to. But these weren’t ordinary times. There were no four hours on a feather mattress. There was only a chair.
By then he was accustomed to hard-seat-chair-beds and big-city-actor talk and the lessons of a first-rate confidence man and his card-throwing woman. He’d even grown accustomed to the elaborate and constant predicting of another man’s whims.
For two weeks he’d been told two things about sleep: you can do it when you’re dead, and until then, you can do it in a chair for a half hour, twice nightly, between the hours of five and seven AM. It had proved true, and Little Donnie had begun catching his double-thirty winks in a chair-bed, and he’d maintained control of his faculties sufficient to keep winning at the Oak Slab too.
He awoke from his straight nap to the sound of a comet-gas believer screaming, “I see it! I see it in the air dust!” He one-eyed his timepiece. He stretched and stood. Trent would be anxious for another report. Each morning, he told Trent and Rutherford how he still slow-roped the big mark, how he would keep alive his trickled losing streak until the mark pulled from his jacket the property deed Abe was sure he’d bring. They knew the Chicago mark as Phil, and they were after the man’s eight-story office building on West Superior Street. They knew him to be hooked on Keystone’s charms, and presently they would lure Chicago Phil to the Oak Slab, where they’d take more off his hands. They did not suspect the man was only a tale.
The yellow-haired Norwegian finished her set and lifted, ever so briefly, the twin sand dollars covering her nipples. She shot behind the curtain as the men whistled and hooted. Goldie emerged in her place and hollered to the crowd that Saw Girl would be here all week. She declared comet shots to be half price until seven. “You can sleep after you’re dead!” she called.
Behind the curtain, she took Saw Girl by the shoulders and said to her, “You only lift those sand dollars once, and you only do it at the end of the show. Then you get off quick.”
The girl had a condition that caused her to look through people and to not hear what they said to her. She nodded.
Goldie knew the girl spoke English. “You hear me?” she said.
“Do I not do it just the way you say already?” Even to her own ear, the voice was childish, but she went on anyway. “Do I not?”
The skin beneath her makeup was waxen. It was opium skin.
Goldie made a note to send Saw Girl packing. Back to Baltimore with money in her pocket.
On her way to the storeroom, she spotted Cheshire Whitt tending bar with Sam. She slipped him the write-up for the Sunday and Monday editions. She told him to take his post out front. Her step had spring. She noted the positions of Alva Smith and Rose Cantu, her two most educated ladies. Each was on the lap of a rich man at the main room’s poker table. Each batted her eyes slow for effect. On the promise of Goldie’s good money, Alva and Rose would play it this way for three hours, and then they’d slip out the back, replaced by Goldie’s next two smartest ladies, who’d do the same, and so on. There was no coitus whatsoever involved, and thusly it was a much-sought-after shift for the working girls of Fat Ruth Malindy’s. And the rich men from Bramwell and beyond could not wipe from their minds the pretty gals with the eyelashes who’d up and disappeared. It was enough to make a man come back to A. L. Baach & Sons Saloon. It was enough to make him tell his friends.
Goldie had found something lost to her a decade before. It was a spirited way of being, and it was better than before. Abe had learned in his years gone to tamp down those reckless habits that had previously sabotaged their livelihood. Now there was more thinking than drinking, more talking than fornicating, though all things in moderation were appreciated. It was the sureness of it all that she most favored. The ridiculous certainty that they would come out on top, alive. Only once had she made mention of their endeavor as something fraught with peril. “We might be between the hammer and the anvil on this one,” she’d said, and Abe had only kept doing what he was doing. He was practicing his card manip
ulations before a mirror, watching his own hands. He’d answered: “Well, lion’s got to roar.”
She met Little Donnie and Abe at the whiskey barrel in back of the storeroom. It was empty. It had a head but no bottom, and under it was the three-foot fireproof safe bolted to the storeroom floor, the same safe she and Abe had long ago retreated to in times of mutual need.
Abe handed Little Donnie an envelope with five thousand dollars inside. He’d retrieved it from under the wardrobe’s hidden slat that very morning, leaving little behind for cushion. He said to the boy, “Give it to him straightaway in his office, alone. Use those good ears of yours and that lazy eye too. Use the mirror if need be.”
Little Donnie had never held such thickness inside an envelope. “This is five thousand?” he asked.
“Tell him that’s fifty percent of our touch. Tell him he needs to cut your three from that.”
The boy nodded and put the envelope in his jacket’s inside pocket.
Goldie watched him close. She still could not understand why Abe wouldn’t accompany the boy on such an errand.
Abe said, “Tell him Chicago Phil left but said he’d be back in about a month. Tell him the man is hooked and he wants to sit once more against me here before he tries his hand at the Oak Slab. Tell him he’s bringing back bigger money and a building deed both.” He patted the head of the big hollow barrel. “Tell him there’s a safe in back under a barrel,” he said, “and that what’s in it grows nightly.”
Little Donnie committed it all to memory.
Abe had a headache. He touched at the healed spot over his ear where the pump knot had once resided. There came, at his touch, a roaring sound still.
Little Donnie watched him put his fingers to his head and work his jaw open and shut.
“You okay Abe?” he asked.
“Chesh Whitt is out front, armed,” Abe said. “He’ll tail you and make sure nobody tries to rob you on the way.” The young Whitt had proven eager to work whatever job they gave him. He liked the money and he didn’t ask questions.