A Hanging at Cinder Bottom Read online

  Abe spat from on high and walked fast across the platform to the small loft window, where he climbed through and ran down the backstage stairs. He elbowed hard the face of the winch man and made the side door in under a minute. He laughed as he went, for he’d shown them all. Magic was not real.

  The door to the alleyway nearly clipped Floyd Staples when it swung. He drew his pistol on instinct and aimed it at the man who’d emerged. He could scarcely believe who it was. “I’ll be durn,” Floyd Staples said. “My luck gets better by the hour.”

  Abe went still with his hands to his side. The awning above them roared and spit a fast leak. He tried to slow his breathing, and he frowned at the man before him with a gun, his mind unable to place him. His beard was uneven and the hair at the brim of his brown slouch hat was pasted to him by day-old sweat. “Floyd?” Abe said.

  “I told you I’d git my money back boy.” He shook his head and smiled, his teeth the color of tree bark. “Are you runnin from the poker table? I thought you was out of that game.”

  Abe could hear a ruckus growing inside. “Could you let me be on my way?”

  Even over the rain, Floyd heard the shouts coming from the Alhambra crowd, and he didn’t like them. He wondered if the red-haired boy had bungled up the plan somehow and made a scene. “Why don’t we both be on our way together?” he said, and he shoved Abe back inside with his pistol.

  He kept it pressed to Abe’s spine as they made their way past the winch man, who sat on the floor rubbing his head. They emerged from a stage door and maneuvered around the edge of the crowd, now in an uproar over the trickery to which they’d been subjected. They hollered at the downed magician and his lovely assistant, exposed in the heat of the footlights. “You God-damned quacksalver!” shouted a woman in a velvet hat. One man threw a green glass bottle, narrowly missing the bald crown of Gus George, who knelt over Nina Gyro where she lay, clutching her broken coccyx and screaming for a doctor.

  Floyd steered Abe to the main card room unnoticed. They moved along the wall and stopped at the door to Trent’s office, where Talbert was on watch. He’d just lowered his newspaper, having caught wind of the ruckus, and he said, “Abe, what in hell is going on?” He paid no mind to either the man at Abe’s back nor Abe’s banishment from the Oak Slab, as was evidenced by what he said and did next. “Guard the door, will you Kid? I’ve got to go see about this noise.” He dropped his paper on his stool, mumbled about floodwater, and was gone.

  Staples told Abe to open the office door and he did.

  There was no one inside.

  Staples shoved him forward and closed the door behind. “I can smell my money,” Staples whispered. “I can smell my new life.” His bloodshot eyes welled up. “Got me a new baby boy,” he said, “and I aim to feed him beefsteak and oysters, buy him popguns and swinghorses and whatever else.” His woman in Matewan had been committed to the home for incurables, and he’d heard the boy was with a widow woman up Warm Hollow. He aimed to go and get him.

  A plate with a half-eaten mutton chop sat on the desk. Abe looked across the office at the glass-paned door through which he’d stepped every day for the last six years. He wondered who sat in his chair.

  Staples kept his eye and pistol trained on Abe as he tiptoed to the card-room door and put his ear to it.

  Inside, the men guarded their hands, elbows on the slab. The single kerosene lamp lit their furrowed brows, and the roof over their heads bellowed the rain’s steady fall. Henry Trent had made a trip to his office safe and returned with the leather bank pouch containing two thousand dollars. The betting had gone high, and he knew somebody would soon cash out. He stood against the wall and gripped tight the leather.

  Rutherford was at his side. He cupped his hand to his ear. “You hear a commotion?” he whispered.

  “It’s the rain,” Trent answered.

  Taffy Reed had just dealt fifth street when the red-haired boy’s accomplice, a bespectacled coal-company accountant named Boner, said, “It’s a toad-strangler ain’t it?”

  This was the cue.

  The red-haired boy stood and drew the pistol he’d smuggled in. He aimed it at Henry Trent’s face. “Hand me the pouch,” he said.

  Rutherford put his hand to the ivory grips of his hogleg.

  “Draw it and I’ll put one clean through him.” The boy moved toward them now.

  “Keep your hands where he can see em,” Trent advised, and Rutherford did as he was told.

  The boy, suddenly bold in speech and movement, held out his free hand.

  Before he gave over the pouch, Trent told him, “Son, you will be dead before week’s end.”

  He’d made the mistake of looking Trent in the face when he spoke, and he’d lost his boldness, but he took the pouch nonetheless and backed to the door with the gun still leveled.

  Floyd Staples had kept his ear to the door, but now he stepped back and took one of the cast-iron boxing glove bookends from the empty shelf. He raised it up as the doorknob spun, and when the red-haired boy back-stepped into the office and shut the door, he brought it down hard, crushing the skull. The sound turned over Abe’s gut.

  Staples swiped the pouch and ran. He was out the door and halfway across the main card room by the time Abe could make his feet move.

  Talbert returned just as Abe was exiting, and they collided, overturning the stool and spilling to the floor the newspaper and Talbert both. The little man looked up at him. “Kid?” he said.

  “I’m sorry Talbert.”

  It was then that Rutherford managed to shove open the second door. It took all he had to push aside the dead weight of the red-haired boy. The door’s bottom rail made a smear of his blood, and Rutherford slipped on it, his long Colt drawn. As he righted himself, he spotted Abe and lined him in the sights.

  Abe ran across the card room and into the lobby. He knocked the shoulder of a bellboy at the main door and hit the avenue. He turned south and slid in the mud. The rain had not slacked.

  He’d nearly made it to the bridge when he realized he couldn’t go home.

  The first shot came then. Abe thought he could hear it as it passed over his head.

  He ran for the creek. It was almost over its banks. Black as tanner’s ooze and moving quick. A buggy wheel spun on the current.

  The second shot came. He dove in the water.

  It pulled at him hard and carried him fast. He found it difficult to swim toward the opposite bank. His arms burned, and as he bobbed and fought, he could see the railyard up ahead. A slow-moving empty was switching tracks.

  He couldn’t get across. He would not make the bank in time to reach the railyard. He was going to die in that water.

  This he’d accepted, until he saw the outline of a man running at creek’s edge. Light from the railyard lit him just sufficient to see. He was shouting. He carried something long in his hand.

  On the order of his wife, Al Baach had gone looking for his middle boy at nine o’clock. She’d made him take her umbrella, and as he’d neared the bridge, he’d heard the gunshot and seen Abe dive in. He followed, and as he ran, he closed the ribs of his umbrella, secured the snap, and prepared to put it to use. Now he’d gotten ahead of Abe, who was fighting hard and almost at the bank.

  The ground was nearly black, and Al tripped over the big knee root of a hard-leaning tree. The fall took his wind, but as he lay there in the mud, he grabbed ahold of the very root that had toppled him, and he stretched away from it, extending the umbrella to the water with his opposite hand.

  Abe could see it there ahead of him, the metal tip his beacon. He closed both hands around it as he passed, and he kicked his feet and bent his elbows. Al held fast and pulled until he’d gotten his boy at the armpit and hauled him up onto the shore.

  Together, they stood and slid and steadied themselves. Then they ran for the railyard. They ducked behind a high stack of brattice wood and watched an empty westbound train switch onto the mainline. It gathered a little speed, and as it passed, Abe saw
Floyd Staples sitting in the open door of a boxcar with his legs hanging crossed at the ankle. He waved with one hand and held up his money pouch with the other.

  Floyd Staples laughed while he watched the Baaches cower in the dark, soaked to the bone. And when the train had pushed out, he had a look at the big notes in the pouch. Red seals on every one. He smelled them. Then he unlaced his calf-high boot, stuck the pouch tight against his shin, and relaced. He reclined on the rocking floor of the car and pulled a cheap cigar and matches from one pocket and a picture of his woman from another. She wore a fur hat. Her dress was fringed in lace. Floyd had plans. After he got his baby boy, he’d go to Huntington and break her out of the home for incurables. He’d walk right in and pay off the guards. “I am king of all these hills,” Floyd Staples said to himself. And for a moment he believed it. Then he thought of the red-haired boy and what he’d done to him, and something happened to Floyd Staples that had never happened before. A fit overtook the man. It came quick and he sobbed, the heaving kind. His head hung. Snot and spit both came heavy, and he nearly vomited when he pictured that boxing glove bookend, the sound it made on thick bone plate. He’d never planned on killing the boy. Something overtook him in that office, and he knew he’d not ever outrun what he’d done.

  Against the timber stack, Abe had told his daddy what had happened, shouting over the rain. He said that they were out to kill him, that he’d cut the wires, that they probably reckoned he was in cahoots with Staples.

  Al was unruffled. “Rutherford will shoot before there is talk,” he said. He thought on what to do. “I will go and tell them the truth.” Down the line, they could see the brakeman’s lantern. It swung as it neared, lighting shapes on the black ground. Al knew the Friday nightshift brakeman—he was Robert, a patron at the saloon. When Abe was safely off, he could slip the man a dollar to keep his mouth shut.

  He gauged the lantern’s distance, then looked his middle boy in the eyes. “I will tell them it was Staples alone,” Al said. “I will put them on his trail going west.” He wiped at his brow and took note of the long eastbound train now switching onto the mainline. Its high hoppers were loaded with coal. He put his hand to Abe’s neck. “Listen to me Abraham,” he said. “You go east.” He pointed to the slow-moving train. “You hop that one,” he said. “Do not ride on top—the turns will toss you off.” For a moment, he was flustered. Then he turned to the stack of brattice wood and pulled from it, as best he could make out, the straightest and flattest cut. He pushed it to Abe’s chest. “Lay this on the knuckles,” he said. “It will steady your feet. With your hands, you grip the ladder.”

  Abe looked at the space between the cars.

  The brakeman was now at a jog, fifty yards off. “Hey!” he yelled.

  “You go to Baltimore—the wharf, at Frederick Street. You ask there for Mr. Ben Moon. You tell him you are my son.”

  Abe thought of all he’d left undone. He wanted to make a dash for the twelve hundred dollars stashed in his wardrobe. He wanted to tell his father that he couldn’t go, that he needed to get to Goldie, that there was something she had to know. It was not his time to leave, he wanted to say, but the ball-knot had returned and risen now to his throat, and he couldn’t utter a word.

  Al pulled his son up then by the shirtfront. “Ben Moon,” he said, and he shoved him toward the mainline.

  Abe ran, tucking the board in his armpit. He timed his jump and reached for the hopper’s ladder. The train was gaining considerable speed. He pulled himself up.

  Al could see him as he got smaller in the distance, slipping between the cars and kneeling to set the board across the knuckles. He hoped his middle boy would get a solid foothold.

  “Hey!” the brakeman yelled again. He was twenty paces off with his gun drawn.

  “Robert,” Al Baach called to him. “It’s me. It’s Al.” He reached for his billfold. The black mud from the creek bank had gotten inside his pockets.

  Robert the brakeman slowed up. “Al Baach?” he said, raising his lantern. “What in the hell are you doin out here?”

  But Al did not answer. He stood in the downpour and thought of what would come for him now, of what would befall his family. He thought of the Bottom and how Trent had begun to let it be, how he’d allowed the Baach boys to run Wyoming Street and Dunbar too. He thought of the previous spring’s Alhambra banquet, where Trent had pointed his steak knife at Al across a crowded table of T-bones and said to the important men, “Gentlemen, right there is your next councilman.”

  All of that was over now.

  He watched the eastbound train push out of the yard and into the bend at town’s edge. Its whistle cut the rain and bounced off the ridge. It was the most familiar sound Al knew, but on that night, it hollowed out his very soul.

  High above him, on the bald steps of the mountain, Goldie Toothman walked an old skid trail, the loggers’ dead slash still tangled in the ruts, piled high as her waist. She carried a big box of kitchen matches in the pocket of her coat. Taffy Reed had sold the matches to her for a nickel, claimed to have soaked them in a solution that rendered their phosphorous heads immune to water’s dousing. Goldie had a notion, as she watched the eastbound train curl around a slick-faced highwall, to set the whole tangle afire. She’d left Hood House with no real thought of a plan, only a feeling in her gut that Abe was sure to die.

  Now she stopped and stood still and watched the tiny men in the railyard below. They were lit by the glow of the brakemen’s lantern between them. They exchanged money for silence.

  Goldie did not watch the train as its tail was swallowed by the woodland hollows ahead. She knew then that Abe rode somewhere inside its rumble, and she wondered if her terrible dream’s fruition might come to be on some other ground, if Abe would dangle for his debts on a foreign limb where she could not see him. It would be easier that way.

  She looked up and let the rain fall into her eyes.

  SPRING & SUMMER

  1910

  THE CROWS WERE IN THE EVERGREENS

  April 20, 1910. New York

  It was not yet four AM when the cardsharp exited the ill-lit Bowery bar. He took long strides to a place he knew inside the wall of a graveyard on Second Street. There he leaned and opened the quartered newspaper in his grip. It was the evening edition. He’d lifted it from the bar’s counter before he slid unseen out the door, and when he’d folded it around his earnings, the headline below the crease had declared: Summer Here Two Months Early.

  The air was June hot.

  Now he set the paper on a wall ledge and leaned and counted his latterly money. No light reached the long lawn of vaults, so he sequenced the notes on touch. One hundred and twenty three dollars. He right-angled dog-ears with his thumb, flatted the stack, and split it in two. He took off his shoes and inside each he made for his money a bed. A man who walked could appreciate the extra cushion.

  He lit a cigar and held the spent match until he’d left the graveyard. He walked to First Avenue, stood beneath a gas lamp, and looked about. There was not a soul, and this struck him as peculiar.

  He took from his jacket pocket a handbill made by a printmaker he knew. It was folded at the middle, a good stout paper, its dimensions about that of a book. Its artwork depicted a spade which swallowed a club which swallowed a heart which swallowed a diamond. At the center of the diamond there was an eye, with a man inside the pupil. Across the bottom, the handbill read Watch the Master Card Manipulator! The Incomparable Playing Card Prophet known around the world as Professor Goodblood will astound and delight! He sat down on his heels and tented the handbill at its crease. He set it as a house upon the street brick. He produced again his matches and struck one and held it underneath until the handbill burnt to a fine black scatter. There was no need for it now.

  He’d only gotten the short-run show because the owner of the Stuyvesant Theatre owed him considerable money. It was a gesture of goodwill. Abe had considered the offer and had gone so far as to print a sample handbill, but in t
he end, the man sold his theater and moved to Australia, and the new owner had told him, “Listen Goodblood, card tricks are flapdoodle. The people want leg-drop action. They want raincoats and whiskers.”

  It was of no real import. Professor Goodblood was not real.

  Abe Baach was the cardsharp’s name, but no one knew it. He was called by many names in those times, names dependent upon location and disguise of mustache or beard or eyeglass. Names dependent upon the mark he roped or the tale he told.

  He wore a scar from his ear to his bottom lip.

  He had more money than he could spend, and it had not come from paltry vaudeville checks or short-run opening card acts. The freshest of it had come easy on this particular night. His mark at the Bowery bar was a fat crooked rich man who had drunk his weight in gin. Abe had nearly let him walk from the table with dime enough for streetcar fare and a cup of coffee. But the man proved unworthy, ruining a competitive hand of stud poker with too much chatter on such unoriginal topics as the cultural inferiority of immigrants. “The micks and the guineas,” he’d said, “are bull-headed ingrates, and the kike panders to the nigger.” Abe had nodded and laughed and said how right the man was before he took his last nickel.

  Now he walked alone up First Avenue to the apartment where he’d slept most nights for a month. The tenant was a good-looking gal from Kingston, Jamaica, a stage actress and dancer who sometimes passed for white and who pronounced her words in a way that tickled him. On the first night he’d slept over, after enjoying a maneuver Abe had privately named the low-high side-to-side, she had said to him the following: “You got good curve in de hose.”

  He crossed Seventh Street and sidestepped a dried-out pyramid of horse manure.

  Up ahead, in the darkened doorway of a flophouse, a man stood. Abe had seen him from the corner and had put a hand to his vest change pocket, where he kept a half dollar and a little two-shot spur-trigger pistol. It was his custom with strangers on dark streets to allow three possible greetings. A passing nod if the gentleman was average. Be he mendicant, the gift of a coin. And should the man be looking to rob a body, he’d meet the empty smile of a muzzle.