A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

by Glenn Taylor

  Rufus shut his eyes and shook his head.

  Talbert kept on. “Said to take the cut barrel from under the bar, make an example of any coloreds get too proud.”

  Rufus sighed. He handed the leather bank pouch to Talbert and looked him in the eyes. He kept his voice low. “You stay right here in this room.” He pointed to the pouch. “There’s a six-shot under the money,” he said.

  Talbert nodded.

  Rufus stood and stepped to the table. Little Donnie had just folded, and the one they’d named Woodrow pulled his chips. Rufus forced a smile and said, “Men, I’m going to see what’s holding up the drinks. I won’t be long.” He gave Little Donnie a look.

  Little Donnie nodded that he understood. These city boys needed close watch.

  When he’d gone through the office and closed the door behind him, Rufus grabbed the halved paper from Munchy’s fat grip and threw it across the floor. “You keep your eyes here,” he said, motioning at the room behind him. He inquired on the barkeep’s absentia.

  “Diarrhea,” Munchy said. “Back in five minutes.”

  Rufus shook his head yet again and marveled at the ineptitude of his associates. “Tell him I took the shotgun,” he said.

  When Rufus stepped lively through the lobby, Abe recognized the sound of his gait.

  The front doors shut, and they crawled from the kneehole.

  The seven o’clock train arrived eight minutes behind schedule. Trent held his drooped bouquet with both hands and licked his teeth to be sure no food remained. He watched a mother step on the platform stool with a squalling baby bucking in her arms. A young man jumped off behind her with his cardboard grip half-open, a faulty latch swinging loose. “This is Keystone?” he said.

  Trent had an uneasy feeling, and it wasn’t indigestion.

  Tony had scooted into the overhang’s shadow once again. On account of his nerves, he’d earlier taken too much of a new powder, and now he was foggy. He’d forgotten the details of his role upon train’s arrival. He could remember neither his exit cue nor the whereabouts of his luggage.

  An older gentleman stepped off the train with an umbrella hooked on his arm. He straightened his suspenders. He squinted and adjusted his spectacles. He had superior night vision when he wore them, and so it was that he spotted Baz, and in turn, Tony. “Tony Thumbs?” he called.

  Trent’s ear perked on the nickname he’d not heard from any other. He turned to see the suspendered man approaching the darkened depot wall.

  “What in the name of scratch are you doing here?” the man said. He stepped within a yard of Tony, who backed away. “Thought you never left Baltimore.”

  Tony could only swallow. It didn’t seem possible that an Old Drury patron would step off a train in southern West Virginia.

  A seering heat rose from Trent’s middle. It climbed up his chest and into his neck, and though he was unsure of precisely how, he knew then that he had been conned.

  The suspendered man kept on. “That monkey still alive?”

  Tony backed into the armrest of a long pine bench. His knee gave and he pitched forward, catching himself with a hand. Baz had no recourse but to jump from his shoulder to the platform boards.

  “You okay?” the suspendered man asked.

  And then Trent was upon them. “Beatrice ain’t on this fucking train or any other!” he shouted, startling those close by. “Who are you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Tony had barely straightened back up when Trent let go an overhand right. It landed flush on the old man’s mouth and put him down hard.

  The war call that came from Baz then was enough to split the eardrum, a scream too high for the human to know. He sprung onto the thigh of Henry Trent and sunk deep his canines there.

  The people on the platform were unable to comprehend what they saw.

  The suspendered man had taken a knee at Tony’s side, and now he looked up. He saw the animal tear away a strip of Trent’s pant leg and a hank of flesh both. Blood flung from the points of the long yellow teeth.

  Trent bared down and grabbed the monkey around the neck before he could bite again. He spun on his heels and flung Baz, and the little body shot forth in a line with considerable speed, and the sound of his head against the train’s sheet-steel side was loud as an anvil strike.

  Henry Trent drew his Colt and made for Railroad Avenue. His stride was broken and slowed from the bite. He hollered, again and again, “It’s a setup! Put every man on the office!”

  She’d walked with loose neck and turned ankles across the Alhambra’s main card room, winking at Munchy all the way. Two cardplayers took note but returned to their hands.

  She lured him off the door in twelve seconds flat.

  Goldie could play drunk with the best, and she’d come out of the floozy gate hard, putting her hand to his crotch and whispering in his ear, “I want a man inside me what’s got some beef on his bones.” She led him by the hand to the corner wall.

  Now he had her pressed there, hidden behind the coat-hook partition, his breath a pinched wheeze. She shut her eyes against its foul stench.

  Abe pulled his hat low. He walked across the card room unnoticed by all but one at the tables. The man was losing interest in losing hands and had begun to wonder at the stillness around him and at the woman who’d led off the fat man. He watched Abe go past. He did not know Abe, but found it strange that one so thin could be so swollen at the front. He watched Abe turn the knob and step inside the office of Mayor Trent without knocking.

  Inside, Little Donnie had already opened the big safe doors. He stood open-mouthed before the high clean towers of money, and behind him, the other men did the same.

  Without a word, Abe untucked his shirtfront and pulled out the six-stack of four-bushel grain bags. They commenced to filling.

  Out in the main room, the curious, losing man stood from the poker table. The one who was shuffling said, “You cashing out?” He received no answer.

  The man walked toward Trent’s office. He heard labored breathing from beyond the partition wall. “Hello?” he called.

  Munchy quit his groping. He was motionless, his red face buried in the cleavage of the most beautiful woman in the world.

  What Goldie had most feared was happening. She lifted her arm from the sweat-soaked back of his jacket and quietly reached for the pocket of the hanging dogskin coat.

  The man stood by the bar and listened. He said, “If anybody wants to know, I believe I just seen a man walk unchecked into Mayor Trent’s fortress.”

  Munchy knew without a doubt then that he’d been had. He straightened and put his hand to his belt holster. He’d pulled his gun and nearly drawn back the hammer when Goldie got her own pistol free of the fur-lined pocket. She fired twice.

  The quiet afterward made everything slow. She hated that he looked her in the eyes when he dropped. To see such a thing up close was too much for Goldie.

  Abe recognized the double report of his spur-trigger pistol. “Go!” he hollered, and threw open the door. They cinched their filled grain sacks and went, shoulder-toting the loads swift of foot. They left behind nothing but the locked metal case of a man known only as Phil.

  Gun drawn, Abe stepped to the partition. Goldie was flat against the wall. She’d moved only to drop her weapon and put her hands to her mouth, and her face was drained of color. On the floor, Munchy tried to gather air, his wide mouth a useless bellows, his jaw hinging hard like a fresh-caught fish. Abe knew by the sound that both his lungs were collapsed. He told Goldie they had to run and they did.

  He knocked down the curious losing man on the way.

  Not one other stood from his poker table seat as the safe-robbers ran past in a line. As he went, Jim Fort hollered, “Tell em they shouldn’t a crossed Chicago Phil!”

  Rose Cantu had piloted the Chambers to its place at the head of the line. Behind it were the twin Oldsmobile Runabouts, ready for the open road.

  When the safe-robbers emerged from the side stage door, they spread into
all three cars. They held the fat grain sacks like children on their laps. “Where’s Chesh?” Abe said to Rose, and she only shrugged and mashed the gas.

  They hit Railroad Avenue and made left to travel west. Rose took the lead carrying four. Talbert followed in the second, and Abe drove the third. Goldie rode silent and white at his side. He stopped at street’s middle and looked back to Fred Reed’s.

  Chesh Whitt burst from the yard, the short officer trailing him close. He was twenty yards from the car when Henry Trent hobbled into range.

  Trent could see now what was happening. He somehow knew what they’d done. He stopped in the road and leveled his Colt.

  The officer giving chase dropped to the ground at the crack of Trent’s first shot. The man was not hit, but he played dead just the same, and he wondered why he’d quit his coke-yard job.

  Trent fired slow and even, and the fourth caught Chesh in the side. He fell and got up to keep coming, the Oldsmobile five yards off.

  Abe left his foot on the brake but stood at the tall curved dash. He took a wide stance and turned his hips. He steadied his center as Moon had taught him inside the long shooting stall.

  Trent put his sights on the man who’d stood, the man he now saw was Abe Baach.

  Abe fired first and Henry Trent dropped to the hard-packed dirt where he’d stood.

  Chesh jumped on the gearbox in back and Abe sat down and took the tiller. “Hold on,” he said, and Goldie turned to clutch Chesh’s wrist, and they drove, a crowd in the street behind them circling their mayor, who lay on his back with a soft-point bullet in his heart. Rufus and Fred Reed took a knee on either side, and Trent looked up at the sky between them where the coke ash gusted gray. His head grew light and tingly. He said something about skyrockets before dark and a monkey and a train. He swallowed. Again and again he swallowed.

  Fred Reed took off his pressed white shirt and wadded it over the bubbling hole. “Go get my vehicle!” he hollered to the one-eyed officer standing at his back open-mouthed. Rufus stood and took the man by the sleeve, and together they ran for Fred’s coupe. It was parked beyond the yard, the only automobile left to be had.

  When Rufus turned the crank, there was nothing.

  Chesh Whitt had dismantled the carburetor.

  Dusk came on the drive to Kimball, the sun muted deep beneath the ridge. A mile out, they’d emptied their grain sacks into hat trunks and leather cases. They ditched the vehicles by a tipple at Kimball’s edge and boarded the train bound for Huntington.

  At Matewan, Abe stepped off the coach in full dark. Frank Dallara stood by the bulletin light. Giuseppe was not with him as planned.

  Abe had wired two hundred dollars that morning on word that the jailer could be bribed.

  Now Frank Dallara was stooped and red-eyed. “They found him hung from the window bars at supper,” he told Abe. “Said he knotted up strips of that burlap he slept on.”

  They’d planned to bring him to Baltimore, find him work bricking mansions along Druid Hill Park.

  “I’m sorry Frank,” Abe said.

  The conductor called stragglers to board. “We’re six minutes off!” he hollered. “I’m letting her go!”

  At the big Huntington station, Goldie spoke to a ticket agent she knew. The man was a monthly regular at Fat Ruth’s, and as per her instructions, he’d requested extra hours on Independence Day. She slid a silk-knotted roll of twenties between the bars of his window. “When they come askin,” she said, “You tell em Chicago. We were all of us bound for Chicago with transfer at Cincinnati.”

  She procured their tickets to Baltimore and Atlantic City, and they boarded the Pullman sleeper in a line. When the porter tried to take their luggage, Abe told him to kindly step back. The old man eyed Chesh Whitt, who was bent at the waist and leaking blood through his dressing. “Colored ain’t permitted in the sleeper,” the man said.

  Abe put a finger to his lips and said, “Shhh.” He held out a ten.

  Chesh grunted as he made for the step stool. He looked back at the porter, who reminded him of his grandaddy. He said to him, “Don’t fret George. One of us runs these rails tonight.”

  At the passenger station in Charleston, they were joined by Sallie, Al, Agnes, and baby Ben, all of whom had spent the evening there, waiting. When Abe inquired on Sam’s whereabouts, his daddy said only, “He is gone. He run.”

  They’d last seen him at two that afternoon, while they ate cold chicken behind the station. They’d just spread a quilt on the bank of the Kanawha when Agnes saw him above and pointed. “Is that Uncle Samuel?” she’d asked, and there he was, high up on the river trestle, running just as fast as he could.

  Everywhere were riots on Independence Day streets. Jack Johnson had won easy, and as night became morning, men were stabbed in the dark for being black. The quarrelling on Keystone’s dirt lanes was relatively tame. White men mostly mumbled and glared. There were celebratory calls not unlike those of Chesh Whitt, even as Mayor Trent was tended and kept still. He somehow kept breathing, his heart languid but alive.

  He was toted by Fred Reed toward the hospital at Welch, his chariot a horse-drawn rig meant for coffins. By the time they hit Bottom Creek at nine, he was dead.

  It was Rufus who discovered the others. He’d walked to the Bottom and into Baach’s saloon with the cut-barrel shotgun level at his hip. He’d followed the sound of their calls and nearly turned away when he saw Rutherford and Reed hog-tied on the floor by his brother. Here, Rufus thought, here is delegate-elect Beavers, his member gunshot and bled nearly dry.

  He cut them all loose.

  Rutherford and Reed chained the de-bolted Baach safe to the hand-truck and rolled it to the alley, where they blew off its door with dynamite. Inside was nothing but a Devil Back Joker. Stuck to its front was the business card of Mr. Tony Sharpley, 57 Great Jones Street, New York.

  Rufus Beavers returned to the Alhambra, where he could only stare at the emptied insides of his own thrown-open safe. It was taller than he, and it had not been so bare since the day of its purchase in 1894. All that remained was a foreign metal case. Rufus pried it open to find twenty card decks and one business card. The decks read:

  BIG SUN PLAYING CARD COMPANY

  NEW YORK CITY, USA.

  The business card read:

  PHIL O’BANYON

  1 EAST SUPERIOR STREET

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.

  Tony Thumbs had survived. Knocked unconscious, five front teeth gone, he’d been helped to the train by the suspendered man, who’d thought to seek out and load the luggage too. On the eight o’clock eastbound, the old man rocked with his head against the window glass.

  He rode in this fashion through Princeton and on past Lynchburg too, the fear in his bones subsiding as the mountains gave way to flat. He held a frozen Delmonico steak to his mouth and rocked in his red velvet seat. He looked at the empty cushion beside him. Baz had not been so lucky as him.

  The monkey was wrapped in the suspendered man’s jacket and stuffed in Tony’s medicine trunk. His little body was cold and stiffening quick, clacking against brown and red bottles of curare and opium and valerian and maypop.

  At Silver Spring, Tony peeked inside the trunk to see his oldest and dearest friend in this world. He pulled back the lapel of the fine worsted jacket and looked at the white face and cold open eyes. He cried, and he did not care who saw.

  He drank from a red medicine bottle before he closed up the trunk.

  He hoped the others had made it out alive. He hoped they would meet him in Baltimore, and that they’d let him rest awhile. He was eighty-two years old after all.

  At Ellicott City, he finally slept. He dreamed of Abe and Goldie, flying on the air above the Old Drury stage before the glow of new electric lights. They had no need for wires. They tossed money upon the air, and it floated there, as if unbound by gravity’s rule. And Tony stood at stage’s edge and asked if he could have his cut of the touch, and they told him yes. Of course, Goldie said. Of course. An
d she looked at Abe and commanded, “Climb!” And the Kid and the Queen levitated, high above the money to the flylines. And Tony held out his hands, and his missing thumb was there, twiddling quick as could be, and above him, the money never fell. It only grew thick. He watched it multiply, and he was happy, for he knew that it was sum enough to procure five golden teeth and a six-month supply of Camel Alley opium, high grade. He knew the money was sufficient to buy a black granite headstone and a silver shoe-box coffin, lined in mulberry Egyptian silk.

  TEN FUN OF THE NUMBER ONE

  July 22, 1910

  The moon over the Baltimore wharf was full and low. Abe and Goldie sat on the Frederick Street docks and watched the towboat lamps dance on the water’s black chop. He’d already pointed to the tall pilings and told her how he’d earned his scar. Now he aimed a hand in the direction of Locust Point and said, “See those lights way out there? That’s where Daddy landed in ’77.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine that? Alone and twenty years old. Stepped on a boat in Germany and stepped off it right here.”

  The big water suited Goldie. She had even grown fond of its smell. And though Baltimore’s flatness did not likewise fit her fancy, she enjoyed walking the streets, knit close on all sides with tall buildings.

  “I believe I’d be seasick most of the way,” she said.

  He nodded his head. “Stick with trains.”

  Los Angeles, California, was where they’d soon travel, though Goldie wondered if the East Coast might better suit her than the West. Ben Moon was living temporarily then in Atlantic City, where he’d purchased a saloon and a home on the inlet too. He’d given both to the Baaches upon their arrival and told Al he could tend the business in whatever measure he pleased. Little Donnie played cards at the new saloon under the name Caleb Shook. At night he slept in a ground-floor white iron bed, inside the Maine Avenue home of Al and Sallie Baach. Under the floorboards was a door and under the door was four hundred thousand dollars. Sallie had looked at the money only once. She sat mornings and evenings in a wicker throne on the home’s front lawn. She could see the water and the lighthouse both. She could watch Agnes and Ben duck in the high cordgrass and run on the sand. And all the while, as she watched them hide and seek and build castles and knock them down, as she heard them squeal and whistle and mimic the song of the laughing gulls, she bit the tip of her tongue to keep from crying. The children were all she had to beat back the sorrow. The place itself was nothing to her. She’d stay on their account, but such a place was not meant for Sallie. She belonged in the hills, where she suspected her Samuel had returned. Her daddy’s letters told nothing of her youngest—none in Welch had heard a word. Old Man Hood’s last letter had read: