A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (12 page)

Abe was high up in the fly lines by nine o’clock. He was drunk, seated on the narrow board of the loading platform, legs dangling. In each hand he gripped a pair of dike pliers. He’d taken them from Jake’s big tool chest that evening, thumbing the edges of their jaws for sharpness. He’d not thought twice about stealing them, for his plan to find Goldie had failed, and as he drank, another plan took its place. Now he opened each cutter wide and readied them alongside the blackened wires the audience could not see. He waited for the offstage man to crank the winch. When he did, the crowd could be heard to applaud. Abe watched the wires climb, and when they’d stopped, he gripped each plier tight but did not yet squeeze.

Above him, rain beat the roof with a mighty sound. The storm had begun at sundown and showed no sign of letting up.

The house band was tucked on the floor stage left—the man on upright piano banged slow, joined by an old-timer on guitar and a girl sawing the fiddle. They played the snake-charmer tune in perfect time. Like a trance it filled the place and fought the rain’s drone.

Gus George called to the audience, “You see ladies and gentlemen, if I concentrate and position my hands just so, I
can hold Princess Gyro on the very air. Indeed, I have made her float.”

Abe looked down. The top of George’s head was bald. Nina Gyro’s gown was white silk. Abe hummed the tune and tried to remember the words. He sang in a whisper,
I will sing you a song, and it won’t be very long
.

George went on, “Her trance is deep, ladies and gentlemen. Watch as I prove there is no mere mechanical trickery involved in such a—”

Abe squeezed both grips at once. The pop was loud and metallic, and the crowd gasped as the floating woman came down crooked and hard, blackened wires falling upon her white gown coiled, like rat snakes. Gus George shot a look to the loft, but all was darkness up there. All was shadow in the fly lines.

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.”