A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (13 page)

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 the 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.

Abe had nearly decided on the coin when he made out the man’s box calf shoes. They were well-made and seldom worn. They disqualified him from charitable donation.

The streetlamp marked him average. He wore a brown wool suit and no hat. He was middle-aged. His head was bald. “May I have a word?” he said.

Abe stopped, hand still at his pocket. There was insufficient light to study the eyes, only flickering wide circles on the clay-brown brick. Abe said, “What is the word you wish to have?”

“God’s word,” the man said.

“I heard that one already.”

“Have you?” His voice was low and ragged.

“I have.” Abe stepped closer to him. The man’s face was slack and kind. There was something familiar about him. His left eye was hazel and his right was brown.

“Did you listen?”

“I did.”

“What did you hear?”

“Plop,” Abe said.

The man was puzzled. He cocked his head and asked, “Holy water?”

“Holy shit.”

The man laughed. His hands, which he’d kept crossed at the front, came apart and hung at his sides. “It’s the truth,” he said. “God is.”

Abe took out the half dollar and handed it to the man. “Is what?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Now Abe laughed. He told the man he’d not had such fine conversation since he didn’t know when.

The man nodded and smiled. “There is nothing without one, two, three,” he said. He pointed at the sky. “God is the comet.”

“What’s that you say about one, two, three?” His ears had pricked at the numerical point.

But the man, who had begun to feel something powerful, only rocked a little at the waist and kept time with his mind. “He has commenced his poison rain and cosmoplast.” He smiled. His teeth were yellow. He was preaching now. “They call this comet Halley,” he said, “but its name is Elohim.”

Abe looked up where he pointed. “Well,” he said. “I suppose it is.” He nodded to the man. “I’ve got to be on my way.”

The man said he had to be on his way too, and he nodded in return and walked south.

Abe looked where he’d stood. There was a picked mound of birdseed. The old heavy door of the flophouse was painted brown, a slop job, coat cracked by heat and the knuckles of undesirable men. The cracks revealed, here and there, a resolute blue. Above the door, someone had painted the street address on a brick.
123
. “I’ll be damn,” Abe said, and he looked up at the black iron staircase clutching four stories of brick and dark windows. Then he looked past the roofline at the low dark murk of clouds pushing toward the river, and he imagined the commencement of poison rain and cosmoplast. He could make out side-by-side drops as they neared, the first landing on the bridge of his nose and the next tapping his shoulder at the stitch. He imagined rain thick as syrup and the color of creek mud, and if it had been real, he knew somehow it would smell of grapefruit and rotten eggs.

He walked on to the apartment of his temporary woman.

She was awake. She ate sweet potato pie from the pan and told him she’d been waiting, that a man had come by with a telegram. Her toes were bloody from practicing her dance.

Abe said to her, “What man?”

She handed over the telegram.

RECEIVED
at 195 Broadway             213 AM.
Baltimore Md Apr 20 - 10

A. L. Baach wires from Keystone “If son Abe alive tell him come home. Jake dying.”

Stay quiet here Come to docks Talk to Bushels.

Moon.

He went to the closet and unhung all his clothes in one swipe.

She’d never seen him move in such a manner. “Wait,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go home.”

She watched him pack his suitcase and pull rolls of money from spots she’d never known—a loose square of molding at the mantelpiece, a gouge at the dressing table’s kneehole.

“Who is Jake?”

He didn’t answer.

“You going to Baltimore right now?”

“Yes,” he answered, and in fact he was. He’d have to stop in Baltimore on the way home to put things in order. But she believed his home to be Baltimore.

“Joe,” she said. “Wait.”

She believed his name to be Joe.

She walked to the window. It faced west, and on the inside sill she kept a mint plant. She watered it twice a day and
watched it from noon to half past, the only time afternoon sun fit between tenement roofs. “Wait,” she said again. She thumbed the little plant and picked a bright leaf, and chewed it to sweeten her breath, as she always did before they lay together on the Murphy bed.

When she turned, he was closing the door behind him.

It was his custom to leave while they slept, departing a woman’s abode in the night, his feet trained for silence. He’d left women in Atlantic City this way, and more in Savannah, Georgia. He’d left two behind in Richmond, and two more in Newport News. They’d known him not as Abe Baach, but instead as Joe Visross or Honey Bob Hill. Boony Runyon or Woodrow Peek. Sometimes they knew him for a month before he was gone, other times two or three. It all depended on the mark he was working, on how long it took him to take his touch. By the time they woke up, Abe was back in Baltimore, counting out twenties with Mr. Moon.

He’d never felt much in leaving them, never had given a second look to the beds in which they slept. They had enjoyed their time with him, he thought, and they’d get over him soon enough. It had been this way for most of his working years. He’d started out telling himself he’d go back to Keystone when he’d saved twenty thousand. Then he told himself forty. After a while, he didn’t tell himself a thing, and now, here he was.

It was nearly sunup by the time Abe boarded the westbound train out of Jersey City. He’d run from the ferry and climbed into the first car he could, its seats half full of swing
shifters, most of them already asleep. He sat and watched a dusty tunnel worker doze, the man’s unshaven neck slack against his seatback.

Abe took out one of two full flasks he’d gathered at the apartment of his temporary woman. He drank from it and watched the sun’s orange glow split the horizon and squint the eyes of those still awake on the train. He took out a deck of cards and shuffled. Angel Backs, a discontinued line of cheap stock with little varnish, cherubs and wings and halos for adornment.

He thought of his old room above the saloon, the cards he’d laid on the windowsill.