A Hanging at Cinder Bottom Read online

  “Man’s name a secret?” Abe asked.

  “No,” Moon said. He regarded the cracks in the cold skillet grease. His new partner didn’t want their names linked. Ben Moon didn’t care for such a policy. “His name is Walter Melvin. You heard of him?”

  Abe shook his head no.

  “You ought to have. Man’s photographed the North Pole. Sydney, Australia, from a hot-air balloon too, with a camera he built himself. Made his money in newspapers, now he’s moved on to moving pictures.”

  “That’s somethin,” Abe said. “Moving pictures.” He nodded, looking all the while at the floor.

  “Got to follow the money.”

  It was small talk by then.

  Moon knew the young man had real matters to attend to. “You don’t want to be here for a while anyway,” he told him. “Swollen Man’s got his collectors back in town. They scalped a fella and tossed him in the water.”

  Swollen Man was better known as Dropsy Phil O’Banyon, a big-time, ill-tempered Chicago bookmaker-turned-gangster who frequented Baltimore and always had bad luck at the tables there. In February, he’d lost nine hundred to Abe at a high-stakes game in Butchers Hill. He didn’t shake hands before he left.

  “Phil’s sore at me,” Moon said. “I wouldn’t come down on price to sell him my outfit.” He laughed. “Crazy son of a bitch wants to get into card manufacture.”

  Abe unfolded the telegram and put it on the desk. “I need you to help me understand this,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry about that.” Moon wiped his hands again and yanked the hanky from his collar. He produced from a drawer the original telegram. It gave no indication as to how or why. Again, it was only Jake dying. Moon poked his finger at it. “Family,” he said. “There is nothing without family.” He’d lost his mother to cancer the year before. She was the only family he had. When he was a boy, she’d kiss him goodnight and tell him, “You are my radiant moon.”

  Abe said, “I didn’t know you and Daddy had any contact.” For six years, Abe had wired money to his father, once in winter and once in summer, but there had never been any telegrams.

  Moon said, “Well, once in a while over the years he’s checked on you.”

  “I wish I’d known. There are people there I could have . . .” And he blinked and saw again the face of Goldie. He put his fingers to the pump knot on the back of his head and winced.

  Moon watched him close. “They are all just fine until this telegram, far as I know.” He had always wanted to tell the young man what little he knew of life in Keystone by way of Al Baach’s letters, which came every five or six months. “Your father was grazed in the knee by a ricocheting bullet two years back,” Moon said, “but he gets around. Your mother is well, as is your younger brother. Goldie too is well as far as I know, though her father died last year.” In all of his letters, Al Baach had written to Ben Moon, in one form or another, the following: Abraham must not know of what goes on here with us. If he knows, he will come here, and that is still not safe.

  Then came the telegram. Jake dying.

  Moon said, “I know that your father has managed to keep the saloon open, but business has been slow.” He cleared his throat. “I believe he’s taken up shoe repair again.”

  Abe stared at the words on the telegram and tried to imagine his family, less one. “How can business be slow with Keystone the way it is?” he said. “I’ve met more than a few men who travel there twice a year. I heard a fella in Boston once talking about Cinder Bottom girls.”

  Moon didn’t know enough to answer. He knew some of it lay in the blackballing of the Baaches after Abe cut the wires and left town. He didn’t want to rile him. “Listen to me Abe,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something about your father and then you’re going to get on a train.”

  Abe listened.

  Moon told of a time when he was eleven years old, a time when the first of many letters arrived from Keystone. This first letter, like all that were to follow, was addressed to both Ben Moon and his mother. In it, Al Baach wrote of what had happened that day in September 1877, and how sorry he was about Vic Moon’s demise. He inquired as to whether they’d received Vic’s body and the substantial monies he’d had on him. Al had suspicions already on the veracity of Trent’s promise to send the money, and he apologized for having not taken care of such business himself. A correspondence commenced then between young Ben Moon and Al Baach, and in each letter the boy received, there was a renewed promise to find Vic Moon’s body. There was also enclosed money. When the boy was thirteen, all one hundred and twenty-three dollars had been repaid.

  “I bet he never spoke to you or anyone else about this.” Moon said.

  Abe shook his head no. He wondered why Ben Moon hadn’t told him before. He wondered at the figure: one hundred and twenty-three dollars. It was chasing him.

  There was a low roar inside his head.

  “Your father is a good man,” Moon said. He opened a box of long cigars and took one. “He is one of the few left.” He trimmed his cigar with a letter opener and lit it and told Abe it was time to go home and make things right with his family.

  Abe nodded.

  “I do know a little bit about Mr. Henry Trent and Mr. R. Rutherford,” Moon said. “And the Beavers brothers.” He scoffed, but beneath the scoff was the truth. Ben Moon feared no man, excepting those absurd West Virginia men about whom he’d only read in letters, those men living in a place he’d never been, the place his daddy had died. “You need to ready yourself, maybe bring a man or two along.” He cleared his throat. “Trent is mayor now, and Rutherford is chief of police.”

  A dizziness came upon Abe then. He thought he might fall from his chair.

  “You feeling poorly?” Moon asked.

  “I’m just fine.”

  “You certain?”

  “I’m certain.”

  He wished he had time to help the younger man, but too many needed help in this world, and he had always been a man without the time. “You all set for pistols?” he said.

  “I’m all set.”

  “I got a new five-shot .38. Little three-inch barrel.” Moon opened the big bottom drawer and took out a revolver. “Easy to conceal,” he said. “You still pack a second don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Might be time to pack a third.” He held it out. He said, “It’s good for close quarters.”

  Abe took it. The gun wore not a smudge. Nickel finish, blued hammer. He tucked it at the base of his spine and cinched his belt a hole tighter. “Thank you,” he said.

  “How about rifles?”

  “Not on this trip.”

  “You want to take along Bushels?”

  “No.”

  “He is a man of many talents.”

  “No. It’s easiest on my own.” He tried to imagine himself back in Keystone. He considered a moment on how he might play it, on what he might find. “Second thought,” he said, “tell Tony Thumbs to watch for a telegram.”

  Moon smiled at the sound of the old man’s name and wrote it down. “You haven’t used Tony in a long while,” he said.

  Tony Thumbs was an eighty-two-year-old theater operator whose company Abe enjoyed. He had once been a large-scale buyer of Radiant Moon cards. Before that, he’d been a top card manipulator himself until a blacksmith, angry over losing at Tony’s monte table, chopped off his left thumb with a hammered-steel cleaver. Now he made small-batch powder remedies for insomnia and brewed syrup cures for indigestion. He ran a theater called Old Drury and kept a stable of actors and short-con specialists and oddball sideshow types.

  “You hire on Tony Thumbs,” Moon said, “you get two bodies for the price of one.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean Baz.”

  Baz was a capuchin monkey who rarely left Tony’s shoulder.

  “That monkey is still alive?”

  “I figure each of em is waiting on the other to die first.”

  They laughed at the thought of it
.

  They discussed their methods of communication. Ben Moon would wire Abe at the Keystone office on Wednesday mornings. He’d address the telegrams to Joe Visross, and he’d use a false name himself. They’d stick with the codes they’d developed. More than likely, the telegrams would shortly originate from New Jersey, where Moon had business to attend.

  “Abe,” he said, “I will give you what you need to straighten affairs down there. My father’s life ended in Keystone, and many years ago, before all this other got in the way, I resolved—”

  Bushels knocked on the office door and came on in. He had the forgery cards Abe requested—two boxes wrapped tight in oilcloth and strung with twine. Abe thanked him.

  He shook Ben Moon’s hand, and again the older man grabbed him at the shoulder and patted him.

  Abe walked down the back stairs and out to the loading docks. He took a last look at the water as he left, and he recalled the peace he’d found at the harbor all those years before, walking where his father had walked as a young man. Then he looked at the tall pilings where he’d nearly lost his life at twenty-three. It was on his second Friday night in Baltimore, just past the Frederick Street docks, that he’d run across a squat man named Dash who was known to parry and slash like his joints were oiled, a trained cutter in a fight. Abe hadn’t known Dash’s reputation at the time. He’d only known that he was a dip, a no-good pickpocket whose buddy tried to stall Abe by the loading docks. The stall was clumsy when he bumped Abe, who recognized the strategy and kept walking. There was nothing in his pocket to pick. His money was in his shoes. But Dash was frustrated to come up empty-handed, and he hollered at Abe, “Watch where you step you fuckin tomato can.” Abe was drunk, and he’d turned and taken a swing. Dash pulled the blade and got him across the jaw on the second slash. Blood came in a sheet, quick, and Dash reared back to go again. That’s when Ben Moon shot Dash in the spine with a .45 revolver from where he stood against the back wall of his warehouse. He was more than forty feet off when he fired.

  At that time, Moon had been president of the Radiant Moon Consolidated Card Company for two years. Everyone in the harbor knew not to cross him.

  He stopped Abe’s blood with the fine starched shirt off his back. He used his necktie to cinch it tight, and when the police came, they nodded respectfully at him and said, “Mr. Moon, good evening.” He nodded back and stood there shirtless, lighting a cigar with his big bloodied hands.

  The policemen knew he walked the harbor at night, watched the docks where his crates full of cards were loaded and shipped off to Norfolk and Savannah. They knew he wasn’t the kind to shoot a man in the back for no good reason.

  That same night, Ben Moon took young Abe to the home of his personal tailor, who awoke and fed Abe amber whiskey before stitching the cut closed with his finest six-cord thread, and two weeks later, when his face had healed sufficient, Abe was sent back to the tailor, this time with a note from Moon to make the young man four fine suits. Moon had come to understand the rarity of Abe’s intelligence and hand mechanics by then, and it wasn’t long before he sent him out on the mainlines to every East Coast town worth a damn, and in those towns Abe played the role of card salesman for the Radiant Moon Playing Card Company, a square paper by all appearances. He wore his fine suits and carried a leather grip full of sealed and unsealed card decks, but Abe Baach was no square paper. He was a confidence man with five fake names. In April of 1910, where he was headed, he’d not be able to use any of them.

  THE PULPIT WOULD HAVE WHEELS

  April 21, 1910

  The journey from Baltimore to Keystone had been a long and fractured locomotion. When the long train crossed the state line into West Virginia, Abe tapped his foot seven times upon the rumbling carriage floor, one for each year he’d been gone. Despite the lengthy absence, he knew every high trestle, every roaring downgrade. He recognized in the echoed sound of the steam whistle a loneliness only heard where hills grow close as camel humps, the narrows between them waiting on floodwater.

  The engineer blew his whistle again at the last crossing before town. The engine slowed at the switch, its brakes rattling hard. Inside the passenger car, Abe watched the people sway together in perfect time, a traveler’s muted dance. Their fingers and toes were gripped and steadied by habit, and they looked through windows bleared by coal dust. The hillsides rolled by slow on either side, steep-banked and the purest green. It was early afternoon. The sun held its angle and warmed the earth.

  Abe sat alone in a wide-backed coach chair. His big leather grip was flat on the seat beside him, a duffel on top. He studied what passed outside his window. A tipple clutching the hill. A line of beehive coke ovens with two men to a hole, one for the wheelbarrow and the other for the shovel. The train lurched. He could see up ahead now the bridge at Elkhorn Creek, the square brick buildings on Railroad Avenue, more of them than when he’d left. Between the buildings were packed-dirt alleys staked and strung across with clothesline—white sheets agitating in the wind, silent, like flags.

  The train slowed at the new N&W passenger station. It was of the board-and-batten variety, its tin roof sharp-angled and striped by the shadow of two chimneys. KEYSTONE was painted in red across the building’s side. Out front, two buckboard wagons were stacked double with whiskey kegs. A boy stood and waited for someone, his trousers hitched high above his waist, a man’s black bowler hat in his hand. Beside him, a policeman leaned against a post and checked his watch. The train came to a full stop. It hissed. Abe tucked his chin, picked up his suitcase and duffel, and jumped from the coach to the platform before the brakeman could set out the stool. It was half past noon.

  He walked past the policeman with his head low and his hat pulled down. He nodded hello to a good-looking woman in a plaid skirt, and he snorted at the wind to catch sin’s direction. It blew from where it always had, the windows of the saloons and houses of ill fame across Elkhorn Creek. It blew steady from Cinder Bottom.

  The Alhambra Hotel was due south, just past the bend. He did not so much as turn his head in its direction.

  Nearing the bridge, Abe regarded the water below. It rolled quiet over jutted stones, its color black and its level as low as Abe had ever seen it in spring. Still, evidence of flood times abounded on the banks. A wardrobe with the doors torn off. A bed frame split in two. Like bones in the mud, they held until the next one came. The bridge’s boards were fresh cut, and they’d be fresh cut again before long.

  At the middle, he spat.

  He breathed in the smell of sawdust and dirty water and coke-oven ash. He looked across the bridge to the Bottom, the place that had born and raised him. The streets were yet to be cobbled, a testament to dirt’s resilience. Men and women stood upon them and talked, their features unknown from where Abe stood. There were more of them than he’d ever seen, and payday was still a day off.

  He put down his suitcase and duffel long enough to adjust his new pistol, secure at the small of his back. Then he walked across the bridge and onto the main thoroughfare, where a man had fallen down drunk next to a horse-drawn wagon. He was snoring, and three little boys stopped to watch him, passing a poke of hard candy and laughing. One of them kicked the drunk in the armpit, but the man did not stir. The owner of the horse and buggy emerged from the doors of the wholesale grocers. He shooed the boys, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and whistled for a policeman. Four of them leaned against the slats of a saloon up ahead. They looked, then went back to talking.

  Abe walked down the middle of Bridge Street. It was good to be back in a place cinched by hills. On all sides, they rose up and watched over man’s thin attempt at living.

  He noted the new clocktower, the fancy striped awnings that stuck out everywhere, some of them lined in fringe. Telegraph wires hung between rough-hewn poles full of knotholes. Men stood on second-floor balconies, and here and there spilled perfectly good beer on pedestrians below. One of them whistled to any woman he supposed a whore, and if she looked in his direction, he’d pro
claim his love in a song of questionable discernibility and origin. He hollered the chorus: “And my knob’s as hard as hick-ry and it’s stiff as a churn.”

  When Abe had left Keystone, there were three whorehouses. Now, there were twenty.

  Everywhere was the smell of whiskey and beer, the way it lingers and heats in the sun. He looked no one in the eye. He stepped into an unnamed side street and the crowd thinned some. A girl leaned against the iron post of a fence and called, “Hey sugarcube,” but it was unclear if he was the man in question. He walked on until he came to the corner of Wyoming Street. He could see it now, his daddy’s place. The sign across the front of the building was in disrepair. Saloon it read, and underneath, A. L. Baach & Sons. It was as if he were looking at the place for the first time.

  He only glanced at Fat Ruth’s, where an unfamiliar woman in pink stood by the window, before he approached his old home.

  There was no fancy awning, only a stoop, and next to it, a wheat-flour barrel acting as a table. It was an old cask with half-rotted staves. Three men sat around it talking, each blacked in coal dust save a clean-wiped spot at the eyes and mouth. Abe nodded in their direction and walked inside.

  It may as well have been midnight in there. The window shades were drawn tight—sharp, thin lines of sunlight carried inside a few feet then died. The air was heavy and rank. Vinegar water streaked the floor, and its smell pulled at memories the way smells sometimes will. Two black men sat at the bar. Coke-yarders, both of them, coming off third shift. They turned to look at him, then kept at their conversation on the monetary risks of raising roosters to fight. Next to them, a mop handle leaned against the bar top, its bucket base of dirty vinegar water still settling.

  A heavy tarpaulin covered what had been the little stage. Beneath it was the stopped progress of Jake’s skilled carpentry, a cobwebbed affair of grandiose intent. A plan never realized.

  From the storage room in back, there came the sound of breaking glass and mumbled cursing. A moment passed, the swinging door kicked free, and a young man stepped through it carrying a five-gallon kerosene can in one hand and a jug of whiskey in the other. He was tall and thin and he wore an uneven beard. “You two better sip it slow,” he said to the men at the bar. “I broke one gettin it off the high shelf.” Then he saw Abe standing there.