A Hanging at Cinder Bottom Read online

  “Yes,” Al said.

  “Was there something there for you?”

  “No.”

  Goldie turned the knob, stepped outside, and shut the door behind her.

  A mouse ran the length of the kitchen floor. “Where’s the cat?” Sallie asked. Al didn’t answer.

  She stood and went to the door, watched through the squat square panes. The young woman walked down the dirt path to where the cinder clouds billowed and the train whistles blew. Through the thick water glass, she seemed to fall apart and reassemble with each step, her red and yellow dress twisting like a column of fire.

  Sallie just stared.

  “Her food?” Al asked.

  “Eat it.”

  “And the boarder’s?” The other covered plate was for the only present boarder at Hood House, a scholar of some kind up from Virginia who said he was writing a travel book. It was customary in those times to have vacancies. Henry Trent had long since convinced the railroad and coal company men to spend their boarding money elsewhere.

  “Eat his too,” Sallie answered. She’d not have doubled her dumpling recipe if she’d known folks were going to be rude. She could hear her husband getting fatter behind her.

  She watched through the glass until Goldie was gone.

  Sallie had worried on her since Fat Ruth disappeared and Goldie quietly took over the business, a madam who was younger than half her girls and better looking than all of them. Sallie had worried on her more since the passing of Big Bill. Goldie had neither shed a tear nor missed a money delivery to either saloon or boardinghouse, and it was her deliveries alone that had kept the Baaches afloat.

  Trent had been collecting from the Baaches when and how he saw fit, ever since Abe left town. He had more recently wired Sallie’s daddy in Welch, offering a fine price for the land on which Hood House sat. She’d gone to Welch and told her daddy that to sell would be a sin, but he’d looked at the floor while she talked, and then he’d asked her, “Is it a sin worse than intermarriage to a Jew? Is it a sin worse than rearing the mixed-blood bastards of whores?”

  Sallie walked to the iron rocker and looked at the baby boy. He was a year and a half. He was the first half-black baby to come to Hood House, and there were those who found in such offspring nothing more than blather for the front porch.

  A train whistle split the quiet. Sallie turned and watched the old man eat.

  In town, Goldie walked with purpose down Railroad Avenue. The sun had moved free of the mountain and set up overhead.

  Two men who looked to be railroad brass stepped into an alleyway, their stiff hat brims pulled low, heads tucked. She knew what they were looking for.

  In a patch of dirt next to the Union Political and Social Club, a black dog was rope-tied to a chunk of brick chimney. It was a sizable ruin, big as a rich man’s grave marker. The chimney had toppled in a fire the year before and was left, in pieces, where it fell.

  The dog’s tongue moved forward and back as if on a timer. It whined with each pant. There was not a water bowl or a puddle of rainwater to be found. Nor was there an inch of shade, as every tree in downtown Keystone had long since met its end—some by fire, some by flood, and some by tooth of saw.

  Goldie freed the rough length of rope from the bricks’ sharp red edge and pulled the skinny dog across the dirt. When she stepped inside the heavy door of the barroom, nobody paid much mind. There was a card game in the corner where men mumbled low and angry. A girl no more than fourteen sat on the lap of a bearded man whose eyes were nearly shut and whose hands hung dead at his sides.

  “Which one of you does this animal belong to?” Goldie shouted. All gave attention, save the half-conscious drunk with the too-young whore on his knee.

  Chief Rutherford sat on a stool at the end of the long bar. He’d taken off his gun belt and hung it on the stool next to him. He ate his customary noon plate of pickled eggs prepared by Taffy Reed. “That’s my Sambo,” he said.

  He stumbled when he stepped off his stool. He wiped his hands on his shirt and walked slow toward where she stood by the door.

  When he was close enough, Goldie said, “He had neither water nor shade out there in the yard.”

  Rutherford snorted away the drip on his lip and smiled. “Well, I reckon he don’t mind, long as a peach like you wanders by to save him.” He looked her up and down and shook his head in slow disbelief that a woman so beautiful could still be stuck in the bowel of McDowell. “Matter fact,” he went on, “I believe when I put him out there on that rock I was settin bait for the likes a you.” Like every man in Keystone, Rutherford wanted more than anything the privilege of bedding Queen Bee, no matter the cost.

  She smiled back at him.

  Taffy Reed was tending bar, a habitual vocation in service of his daddy’s customers, the most frequent of whom was Taffy’s other boss, Rutherford.

  Reed had not seen Goldie in weeks, but they’d nodded when she came in the door. The sight of her always made his throat clench. Nobody but the two of them knew that he was the only Keystone man to sleep with her since Abe had run off. It went on for a month in 1905, ending as abrupt as it began. She’d bedded other men, but only a handful, only tall-money types in from New York, and only if they laid down the big-face red-seal notes.

  Taffy Reed knew Goldie well enough to recognize the look she was giving. He watched.

  Goldie leaned down, put her lips at Rutherford’s malformed ear, and whispered, “If I see that dog tied again without water or shade, I’ll knot his lead around your tackle-sack and throw a pork chop in the road.” She reached out, still smiling, and took him by the hand. Around his wrist, she looped the little circle of rope and gave it a forceful tug. It hissed as it cinched, snapping snug to his wrist and appreciably illustrating her point.

  Reed brought out a cast-iron pan half full of old water and set it on the floor. The dog quit whining and lapped away. Above him, Rutherford watched with glazed eyes.

  Goldie walked to the girl on the drunk man’s lap. “Come with me sugar,” she said, taking the girl by the elbow.

  Rutherford snorted again and came out of his stupor. He kicked the frying pan across the floor. It smacked the bar’s brass kickrail, loud as a dinner bell. The men playing cards turned their heads. “She don’t work for you!” Rutherford said.

  Goldie ignored him and led the girl to the door.

  He called after them, “You can’t just claim any whore you want.” He was tired of Goldie Toothman’s ways. He said, “I ain’t above shooting a woman in the back,” and drew a bicycle gun from his waist. “Most especially when she steals what belongs to me.”

  Goldie turned to face him. “You a slave trader are you?” She let go the girl and walked right at him. “I haven’t seen her around here before. You bring her across state lines?” She sniffed twice at the air between them. “Smells to me like you been to Virginia.” She looked down at the little gun between them, took a step closer to it. “How about shooting a pregnant woman in the belly? You above that?” She took the wrist she’d cinched with rope, the same one clutching the revolver, and pulled it to her stomach. The short barrel pressed deep, just above her navel. The dog shivered at their feet, his whine reconvening.

  “Hold on now,” Reed said. He was bent over the frying pan with a rag, oily water under his shoes. He held his hands up as if to plead for calm.

  A man stood from the card table. His mustache curled into his mouth. “Rutherford,” he said, “Are you holding a gun to a pregnant woman?”

  Rutherford recognized his position and said that no, he wasn’t doing any such thing. He pulled free of Goldie’s hold and dragged the dog to his original spot at the bar, retucking his gun as he went.

  Goldie turned without a word and hooked the girl again by the elbow on the way out the door.

  Just past the Machine Works they moved quick along the creek. Neither had spoken. A man used a barber’s pole to steady himself as he attempted to put one foot in front of the other. “My place is
right over on Wyoming a ways,” Goldie told the girl.

  They crossed the bridge and came into the Bottom. Goldie checked over her shoulder every twenty paces. They passed the Chinese laundry and arrived at Fat Ruth’s, its white recoat of paint grayed inside a day, its sign proclaiming Fat Ruth Malindys. Cheap Rooms.

  There were those who’d advised Goldie to change the name, to make use of her own moniker, but she knew better.

  They tucked inside the doorway. Goldie took the girl by the shoulders. “Rutherford bring you here from Virginia?” she asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday evenin.”

  “This is not the place for you,” Goldie told her.

  Rutherford had brought in too-young girls before, twice a fourteen-year-old, usually on the occasion of Harold Beavers’ visits from Florida. Harold liked them young.

  Goldie said, “I want you to go and set in that chaise lounge inside and think about how nice it’s going to be to go home and see your family.” She opened the screen door. “I’m going to keep watch for a spell, make sure he doesn’t track you.”

  Before she went inside, the girl said, “You don’t look pregnant.”

  “That’s because I’m not.”

  Two women came out of the laundry carrying bundles. They were laughing over a joke they’d heard inside.

  There was no indication that Rutherford had given chase.

  Goldie looked upon the sign of the beat-up saloon across the street. Al Baach & Sons. She looked to the empty second-story window where he’d sat and watched her as a boy. The sun was low and hot. She put her hand to her brow and turned and looked up at her own window. She imagined herself there, pretending not to see the boy across the way.

  She’d nearly forgotten what he looked like full-grown, but she knew that she’d soon find out. In her bones, she knew he wasn’t dead.

  She went inside and nodded to a fine-suited lawyer from Welch who was exiting a first-floor room. He came every Wednesday at noon. Taylor was his name. He always wanted the same woman, a middle-aged gal called Wink from up at Kimball. Wink was far and away the stoutest of any at Fat Ruth’s, and she’d charmed the lawyer on his very first visit, recognizing the brand of want in his eye and proclaiming herself the one for him, the only one around who was, as she put it, “meat-boned and black as a tinker’s pot.”

  The lawyer tipped his hat to Goldie, and, as was his custom, held out a strange old two-dollar note as he passed. “Your gratuity, Ms. Toothman,” he said, and she took it and told him much obliged. He sniffed a vase of purple laurels on his way to the door and proclaimed what he always proclaimed upon departure: “Sweetest cathouse I’ve ever seen.”

  The Virginia girl looked at the floor.

  Goldie stuck the money in her cleavage and stepped behind the front desk for a pencil and a slip of paper. “We’ll need to send your people a telegram,” she told the girl. “Tell em you’re on the way.” She licked the lead tip. “You got money enough for train fare?”

  The girl shook her head no and looked like she might cry.

  “There isn’t anything to cry over now,” Goldie told her. “I’ve got your fare and enough for something to eat too.”

  The girl wiped at her eyes and tried to smile.

  Goldie said, “Fried eggs taste better on a train.”

  In Baltimore, Abe nearly ran from the station. He checked his watch and thought on all he had to do before he lit out again. He dropped his suitcase at his safe house on Camel Alley, locked it back up, and hit the street to collect from those who owed big. He pulled the brim of his hat low and walked up Poppleton Street to Harmony, where he knocked on the door of a crooked police officer who owed him two bills. The man was home. He paid up. He wore a woman’s red silk robe and slippers made of moosehide, and for the length of their short conversation in the doorway, he scratched at his stones. He told Abe, “Your man Buck got fished out of the Patapsco Sunday morning. He was scalped, had six slugs in his belly.”

  Abe didn’t give a damn about a short-con goldbricker like Buck. He said, “I’m on the eight o’clock to Cincinnati.” It was a smart lie.

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight.” If the man had ideas on double-crossing him, his chums could go sniff the wrong platform at the wrong hour.

  He eyeballed Abe, then stuck his head out and surveyed the street. From the bedroom behind him, a woman shouted that she wanted her godforsaken peanut brittle. He paid her no mind. “Where are you headed now?”

  “My woman’s place on Calhoun.” Another lie.

  He didn’t go west, but east, stopping at Barnum’s Hotel to pick up three hundred from a laid-off B&O bookkeeper who scared easy. The bellman gave Abe a look on his way out.

  He stuck to side streets and made his way to the wharf.

  The warehouse brick wore heavy paint meant to withstand seawater carried by the wind. Radiant Moon Playing Card Company it read. At the long dock on Frederick Street he looked for the man they called Bushels. He tapped his fingers against the brass piling cap. A wad of chicken wire and driftwood bobbed against the slick pilings beneath him. He looked past the smog and out across the harbor to Locust Point, the place where his father had arrived from Germany thirty-three years before. Birds dived for fish and a high-stacked vessel waited for position to dock.

  Bushels stepped from the warehouse and surveyed. When he spotted Abe, he waved him over.

  Bushels was what they called Bushel-Heap Lou McKill, Scotsman and former champion wrestler. Now he protected Ben Moon, or whoever Ben Moon told him to protect, and for on-the-side money, he bent nails and ripped card decks in half. He was six and a half feet tall and weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. He was quiet and known to possess an uncommon sense of decency. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. He wore a compass rose on one forearm and a swallow on the other.

  They shook hands. “He’s in his office,” Bushels told him. “Before you go up, he wants me to make sure nobody knows you’re back.”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “There’s been some trouble.”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “You check for a tail after the train station?”

  “I checked.”

  “Then he wants you to come straight up.”

  Abe slipped Bushels a fin. “I need twenty-five decks,” he told him. “Devil Backs, the ones with the false name and New York address. Ten wrapped, fifteen free. I need the wrappers flat-packed, stamps separate.”

  Bushels nodded. “I’ll bring em to the office.”

  Abe followed him through the open warehouse doors.

  Inside, Bushels made for the packing department and Abe climbed the stairs three at a time.

  When he knocked at the big office door, Moon said to enter.

  The office was wide and dark. It smelled of hot grease and newsprint. Moon was having his lunch. He stood from behind his desk and waved Abe inside.

  He was an average-sized man with a well-groomed beard. The embroidered handkerchief tucked at his shirt collar was streaked in grease. On the desk was a massive book weighted open by a skillet of fried rockfish. He walked to Abe and shook his hand. He took him by the shoulder and there he squeezed and patted heavy. “Sit down for just a minute,” he said. “You want some fish?”

  “I might have a bite.”

  They sat and ate with their hands. “I know you need to get on a train as fast as you can,” Moon said.

  “I’ll make the early morning.” Abe wiped his fingers on a stack of newspapers and pulled from his inside pockets the bankrolls he’d stashed at his temporary woman’s place. “Here’s the take from New York,” he said. “Fifty-five hundred and change.”

  It was a good take from a cut-short trip. Moon held his hands up to indicate he didn’t want the money. With what he expected to soon rake in, the fifty-five hundred could walk.

  Ben Moon was a wildly rich and adventuresome man whose business practices had grown increasingly bold. He w
as not bound by law or convention. No woman could settle him. Recently, he’d decided to fundamentally alter the path of his life’s work.

  He spoke with his mouth full of fish. “You keep that and take it home with you. Matter fact,” he said, and he stood and walked to the room’s corner. There, behind a three-foot portrait, was his wall safe. The portrait was black and white and depicted a man in a flat cap with his hands in his pockets. King of Aspromonte it read across the top. He swung it open and worked the combination and returned to his desk with two thousand dollars. “Here,” he said. “God knows how long you’ll be gone.”

  Abe thanked him.

  From a stack of targets with eight-inch bullseyes, Moon took up a sheet. “You want to shoot a little?” Moon believed a man must keep keen his shooting ways. He’d installed a single-stall range running the length of the building. Its only entrance was at the end of his office.

  “Not today,” Abe said.

  A tow’s foghorn sounded from out on the water.

  Moon was unsure of how to tell the young man his news, so he simply told him. “I’m getting out of the card business,” he said. “I’m selling this place.” He looked at the walls, the ceiling over his head. “It’s going to be an assembly plant for automobiles. Can you imagine it? The Chambers Motor Car Company.” He shook his head. He said, “I have some investment opportunities in New Jersey and southern California.”

  “Investment opportunities?”

  “Cards are on the downslope.” Moon sat back down and continued to eat. “Anti-saloon leagues will be the death of us all,” he said. He stared blank at a stack of books about birds.

  Abe couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “I’ve partnered with a fella of means who’s built one of the finest rigid airships in the world. You should see it Abe,” Moon said. He thought for a moment on pulling out the blueprints, showing the young man the oversize rudder and the long sleek gondola basket. He knew Abe would appreciate such work, and the same could not be said for the other men he employed. But time was short. He said, “Took him five years, but it’s near done, and it’s sitting in Atlantic City now.”