A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (10 page)

Rutherford sucked on a plug of tobacco to cover the wine’s smell, and then he waited on the authorities. They didn’t like his story.

But a man at Keystone did. Henry Trent had heard of Rutherford, the little station agent with a big gun who moonlighted as a yard bull so he could beat tramps senseless for riding cars. If the tramp gave him a quarter or a necktie or a jackknife, he’d let him go with a singular whack from the butt of his legendary Colt revolver. It was custom-built with a twelve-inch barrel and sperm-whale-ivory grips. Rutherford claimed to have won the thing in a game of three-card monte run by a deaf pirate. The pirate had bought the gun in Hartford Connecticut from Samuel Colt himself, and later, when the deaf pirate happened upon a beached sperm whale in Beaufort, North Carolina, he’d pulled two of its teeth and fitted his ridiculous pistol with ivory.

Trent liked a young man who was short and ugly and capable of violence, who believed himself to be important. He further liked Rutherford’s obsession with rich people, and his need to be one, come hell or high water. He offered him a job as his security detail, errand boy, and collector of monies. He had a tanner fashion the longest holster ever seen, open-ended so that the barrel stuck out. He said Rutherford should get trained in the ways of the embalmer, because together they would be making considerable progress in the coalfields, and with progress, Trent told him, come bodies.

Now Rutherford sat on his floor and read, for the 9,495th time, the words and numbers marking his arrival in the world.
Deformity
, he read.
Circumstance of Interest
. Words had always confused him, no matter how many times he sounded them out.

But numbers he understood.

He was forty-one. He’d counted more money than men fool enough to live twice his time. He wasn’t through counting, not by a damned sight.

SPRING
1903

IT’S A TOAD-STRANGLER

May 15, 1903

He had not aimed to bed another woman. He had not, in fact, known that he’d done so until the following morning, when he awoke next to her in the altogether.

She had her back to him. They were on his bed at the Alhambra, a third-floor corner room where he slept on two-hour breaks from the big table. The game at the big table had a reputation by then from Cincinnati to Savannah, Georgia. Cardplayers called it the Oak Slab Game. Play had not ceased in six years, for just as Trent had predicted, they came from all over to sit against the Keystone Kid.

But things had lately soured. Abe was twenty-three and had not yet saved enough money to enact his grand plan. He had complained of his staid wages and he had too often behaved sloppily on exorbitant whiskey, and so, on the
advice of Rufus Beavers, Henry Trent had turned on the Kid, quietly taking away the very pieces of Abe’s livelihood he and the Beavers brothers had supplied in the first place. His card show on the Alhambra’s stage. His seat at the Oak Slab. The rented room would be next.

The unfamiliar back was nearly pressed against him. The dyed black hair stirred no recognition. He thought of raising himself to look at her face, but he closed his eyes instead, hoping that when he opened them again, she’d be gone.

It did not work. Her small hand sleep-twitched atop the curve of her hip. She wore cheap engraved rings on all four fingers.

It was the sharp quill of a goose feather that had caused him to open his eyes. It poked through the pillow at his throat. He had pinched it tight and pulled it free when there came the sound of the doorknob turning. He sat up, and there Goldie stood. She was stock-still.

There was a quivering hum in her knees. She wore the spool-heeled shoes he’d bought her, and her ankles nearly turned.

Abe could neither speak nor move. There was a push of vomit at his jugular and heat behind his eyes.

Goldie looked only at him, not the woman. She said, “You are a liar,” and left.

He did not pursue her.

In the hallway, she couldn’t get her breath. She put her forehead against the wall and was faintly aware of the
cherubs in the wallpaper art. They rode plum-colored lily pads and drew back their bows. Up ahead, a red-haired boy of nineteen stepped from a room where someone played a harmonica. He wore only a towel, knotted at the waist. He was laughing, but when he saw her, he shut his mouth and stood up straight and secured the loose knot at his navel. “You alright Miss?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Goldie answered. She straightened and breathed deep through her mouth and walked to the stairwell. There, she leaned again on the wall and thought of the time she’d declared to Abe her suspicions about his behavior with other women, and how he’d eased her mind. “I will look at a woman now and again,” he’d said, “but I won’t look at her twice.” And he’d kissed her then, and she’d ceased to wonder much about the nights he stayed at the Alhambra without her, as theirs was a bond built on truth. He’d always been able to look her in the eyes. So it was, that at six o’clock that morning, when the note slid under the door of her room above Fat Ruth’s, Goldie had very nearly stayed put. She did not believe what was written, for she and Abe were to marry in July, and after that, they’d cross the country in a Delmonico sleeper, getting off when and where they pleased.

The note was folded precise and penned by the hand of a woman. It read:
Abe is not alone in his Alhambra bed
.

Now she ran from the sight of that bed. Her shoes were off and she took four stairs at a stride.

Abe sat and stared. He’d not felt this kind of sickness in his middle before. He thought he might cease to breathe, and then, from the hallway, came a noise. She hadn’t closed the door behind her, and in a slap-second, there came upon him the fleeting hope that he could jump up and hit the hallway, and she’d be there, willing to forgive him somehow if only he could look her in the eyes again. In that slap-second he believed he could nail his colors to the mast and hold life together before it fell apart.

He pulled on his trousers and stuck his head into the hall. Goldie was gone. And so too was his hope, which had never been hope so much as a fast cruel trick played by a drunk man’s awaking soul. His was accustomed by then to the ways of his blood, which by night palpitated unearthly glory before spoiling at the cock’s crow.

The air in the hallway was stale. He listened for sounds from the stairway.

The red-haired boy was knocking at another door across the hall, calling, in a low tone, “I know you’re in there Lucille. I need me a bite of those ham biscuits.”

Abe cleared his throat in the doorway.

The boy looked at him over his shoulder. “Hello sir,” he said.

Abe wore a hard look at him until the boy’s face went red and he looked back to the door. He tapped it light with his knuckles.

Abe slammed shut his own door and his bedmate sat up. Only then did he recognize her face.

Her tittles hung pale-nippled. She was slight, and when folks remarked on the quality, she was known to say, “Fit me inside a peanut shell.” She’d cut her eyebrows in such a manner as to seem exotic, but it had not worked. Abe had made her acquaintance just four nights earlier at the Oak Slab Game. She was Princess Nina Gyro, the floating gal from Cyprus, though in truth, she was Nina Gill, born and bred in Des Plaines, Illinois. She was the latest lovely assistant and wife to the Great Gus George, stage magician. Gus George was getting old, but he’d played the Keiths once upon a time, and so Trent had hired him both to fill seats and to spite Abe, whose card manipulations, no matter their precision, dissatisfied the Alhambra theatergoers. Henry Trent had also hired Gus George because he’d seen a handbill with Princess Gyro’s likeness, and he’d said to himself that he must have that woman. He’d ripped up Abe’s stage contract right in front of him, and four nights prior, on the very day of Gus George’s arrival, Trent had signaled Abe to let the magician win at the table. But Abe would not fold to a man who took his job. He cleaned Gus out, and afterward Trent spoke to him as if he were a boy, saying, “You do like I tell you to do! Now magic man’s liable to powder out of here.”

Abe had lost his head then. With other men present, he’d stood and hollered in Trent’s face, “Your magic man owes me three hundred!”

Magic man still had not paid.

And here was his wife, naked on the bed.

“You need to get yourself dressed and clear out,” Abe told Nina Gyro. He put his hand against the window jamb and leaned hard. He looked up and down Railroad Avenue for Goldie, but a sweat had come on him, and his vision was not sharp.

Nina Gyro licked her lips and patted the mattress and said, “You need to shake off those breeches and bring back one-eyed Jack.”

Abe Baach would never put a hand on a woman in anger. No Baach boy ever would because their mother and daddy made it certain. But inside his foul-sweated skin, Abe knew that he might have to release his hand from the window jamb and let himself fall forward, clear through the glass and down to the road below. This he might have to do in order not to put a hand on the woman in his bed, for he was angry. She had ruined him.

He had never been with any but Goldie.

On the nightstand was a clear pint bottle and one teacup—broke-off handle, no saucer.

Abe walked closer to read what was scrawled in lip rouge oil on the bottle glass. It was difficult to make out at first.
Balm of Gilead
. He remembered then that he’d imbibed from it quite generously the night before. He’d stuck it in his pocket and walked straight to the Alhambra where he’d pounded the locked door to Trent’s office. He remembered being thrown out the side stage door by Rutherford and
Taffy Reed, and in the alley was Nina Gyro. He’d called her husband a flea-circus man and told her, “that monkey tamer owes me.” She’d laughed, hooking her arm in his. They walked together to Faro Fred Reed’s club where Abe had his own back room. They passed the bottle and she’d whispered in his ear that she could suck the silver off a dime. After that, he remembered nothing, and this was not customary when drinking Dorsett’s moonshine.

He stepped to the bed and she reached for his fly. He slapped her hand and grabbed her by the arm. He did not squeeze.

She giggled.

“You put somethin in my drink?”

She giggled some more.

“Somebody tell you to put somethin in my drink?”

She looked him straight in the eyes and smiled the way she did onstage. When she could hold his stare no longer, she looked around the bed for a cigar. “Well handsome,” she said. “You put it in me again like you did awhile ago, and I’ll tell you.”

He let go of her and walked back to the window. He leaned there again and tried to narrow the number of men who’d pay a woman like that to do what she had done. A few came to mind.

Nina Gyro looked at the long hollow of his spine and the way he hung his head. He was the best-looking boy she’d ever tried to bed, and he’d shown himself to be, in relative
terms, a gentleman. She believed that decency still had its tiny place in life. She shook her head at what she was about to do. “Listen to me bonny boy,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something, and after I tell you, I’m going to ask you something.” She opened the side-table drawer and took out a box of matches. “Then I’ll be on my way, and if you want to, you can give me a little something.”

There was a ball-knot at his sternum. He thought for the second time of putting himself through the window. “Just please clear out,” he said.

She stood from the bed and pulled on her undergarments. “Pumpkin, you didn’t put a thing in me,” she said. “I droppered the knockout juice at midnight and you was asleep in this bed by two.”

He didn’t move.

“I stripped you down, then myself, and then I got some winks.” A short cigar fell from her balled dress when she picked it off the ground. “Now we’re cookin,” she said. She lit it and drew deep.

He straightened then and faced her. He needed things made clear. “Are you telling me we did not engage in the act?”

She fixed the twisted bodice of her dress. “Smell your totem,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Smell it. Rub your fingers on it and snuff at your fingers.” She demonstrated with exaggerated hand gestures and boisterous nasal inhalations.