A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (22 page)

The office was quiet and Abe kept his eyes on the second door. He sat down in the same chair he’d sat in so many times before.

A fan hung from the ceiling and spun slow on a turbine belt drive. There was a half inch of dust on each wide blade. The black spade minute hand on the floor clock clicked to six. The desk lamp surged and hummed and the glass-fronted bookcase trembled at a slow passing train.

Henry Trent stepped into his office.

Abe stood.

Trent watched him and kept his hand on the knob as he back-shut the door. He wore no jacket. His white shirt was stained yellow at the armpits. Neck skin hung over his standing collar, and he’d dyed his hair black all the way down to the roothole, so that when he sweat from the forehead, it came out charcoal gray and puddled at the wrinkles running up-and-down and sideways both. He breathed deep through his nose and walked over. When he got within a foot, he stopped, stood with his big hands on his waist, and said nothing.

Abe held out his hand. “Mayor Trent,” he said. “I imagine you—”

“Did Talbert’s men pat you?”

“Yessir.”

Trent started to inquire about the thoroughness, but instead he took a handful of popcorn kernels from his pocket and threw them at the outer door.

Munchy came in and stood at attention.

“Pat him again,” Trent said, “and get on up in his armpits. Ankles too.”

Abe stood with his arms out and his stance wide again, looking Trent in the face while the fat man located the deck of cards Abe had wanted him to locate. He tossed it on the desk.

“Get in the crack of his ass,” Trent said.

When it was done, Munchy nodded that Abe was clean. He went back to his paper.

They sat across the wide desk from each other just as they had thirteen years before.

Trent took up the Devil Back package of cards and turned it over in his hand. He said, “I thought Talbert had lost his mind just now when he came in there and said what he said.” His posture in the highback chair was not what it once had been. “He had the tact to whisper it in my ear, but if Rutherford happens to leave his post in there and come through that door, he’s liable to tug his shooting iron and put six right through you.”

Abe dipped his hand in a hidden pocket and produced an envelope of money. He held it across the desk. “I hope you’ll find it satisfactory,” he said.

Trent took the envelope and fished out the notes and counted two thousand dollars.

Behind him, the bookcase still sat empty of books, its glass fronts obscured by flat neglect. Atop the case was the
cast-iron boxing glove bookend with which Floyd Staples had crushed the skull of the red-headed boy.

Trent was thrown off by the money. He was suddenly dry-throated. He stacked it on top of the envelope. “Why did you come back here?” he asked.

“My brother Jake has died.”

“Shameful situation that one. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Abe shut his eyes for the briefest of moments, and in doing so, he imagined himself hurtling across the desk with his little nails between the fingers of his fists, punching at the eyes of Henry Trent, proclaiming all the while,
This is what I do when I smell something wrong on a fella!
Instead, he looked at Trent and said, “Doc Warble said blood infection from the slug.” He’d wondered if he’d be able to tell, when he finally sat with the man, whether or not Trent was carrying Jake’s demise. Now here he was, and Abe couldn’t smell a damn thing on him.

Trent said, “Sepsis. Bad luck.”

“The worst kind.”

“I hope you do not think me somehow complicit in Jake’s end.”

“If I thought that, would we be conversing like we are?”

Trent sniffed hard and stared back with eyes as dead as the worthless lobby men. He said, “I’d heard Jake had long since got the syphilis too.”

“These days,” Abe said, “there’s a miracle cure for that.”

Trent had not heard the news. He readied his hand next
to the pistol tucked at the desk’s knee hole. “Don’t know if you caught wind,” he said, “but there’s some saying Jake and the Italian was engaged in homosexual relations.”

“Is that right?”

“Lovers’ quarrel.”

Abe swallowed. In his mind he heard her voice.
Keep your temper
. He looked at his hands. He kept his temper. “Mayor Trent,” he said. “I’ve done considerable growing up while I was away, and I’ve become a successful man of business.” He sat forward on his chair and looked Trent in the eye. “I’d like to apologize to you for my drunken and juvenile ways of old and for the pain I may have caused on the evening of my departure.” He cleared his throat. “I believe you know I was not involved with Floyd Staples, but I should have stopped him somehow.” He willed a look of remorse to his face.

From beyond the door, somebody at the big table told a good one and the men were made to laugh, loud and in unison.

Trent took his hand away from the concealed piece. He packed the bowl of his pipe and got it going. He regarded the younger man and remembered the way he once manipulated cards. “What line of work are you in?” he asked him.

“I am a salesman for the Big Sun Playing Card Company.”

“I’ve got my card supplier.”

“Course. I’m not looking to make a sale.”

“What is it that you want?”

Abe told him he wanted a new beginning. He said he aimed to stay awhile and help out his family, and that if it sat right with Trent, he would restore his daddy’s saloon to its former self. “I hope that two thousand will mean something to you,” he said. “I hope it might buy Daddy a few months respite from collection.” He said that such a respite would allow him to put the place in working order, and putting the place in working order would allow a decent living for his brother and more equitable footing for his father, who was injured at the knee and of the age to put his feet up once in a while. He said, “And I aim to bring my mother around on selling Hood House to you.”

“It’s the acreage I’m after.”

“Acreage too.”

The fan above spun and a piece of dust fell on the heavy desk between them, slow as the snowflakes Abe had seen that morning.

Henry Trent again turned the card deck over in his hands. He took long pulls on his pipe and said, “Goddamn Baaches. You took a five-year king’s run at the big table and shat on it, left your daddy to shovel up and pay the fiddler.” He licked his finger and stuck it in the bowl of his pipe. There was a small wet sound. “Your brother finally found the wise way to real money, and what did he do? He shat on it. Went prohibitionist, religified.” He shook his head. Baaches were hard to figure. “What happened to your face?” he asked.

“Ran across a man who could wield a blade.”

He nodded. He knew the type. “Did you give as good as you got?”

“Only thing he wields now is an invalid’s chair.”

Trent smiled.

Abe smiled back.

They stood and met at desk’s end, and Abe remembered what Goldie had said about the man’s volatile state. For a moment he wondered if a gun was to be pulled, but Trent instead raised up his fist and knocked pipe ash on it. He looked hard at Abe’s eyes before bending toward the wastebasket and blowing. He said he’d have to run things by the Beavers brothers.

“Of course,” Abe said.

But Trent would not run things by the Beavers brothers. He’d manage it all alone while they sunned themselves in Florida, and by the time they returned in June, he’d have locked up a hundred acres more. Prime acres of plateau land where homes could be built and folks with means could live high up from the filth below.

They shook hands.

Trent unlatched the arch doors on his liquor cabinet. He poured two whiskeys from a wide-bottom decanter. He raised his glass and said, “To half-Jew Abe, businessman and crippler of the knife-wielding.” He opened the door to the main card room and told Munchy to go on break. He stepped through and surveyed. “Too quiet,” he said.

Abe followed and they stood in the open and watched the singular table of men, and without taking his eyes off
them, Trent said to Abe, “I’ve always liked your daddy. I never intended the bad blood and all that’s happened.” His eyes welled and his voice shook. He was not in full control of his sensibilities.

He cleared his throat and returned to his office, where he poured another and eyed the green-sealed card pack dancing in red devils. He took it up and walked back to Abe. He perched his foot on a rung of the fat man’s stool. “Look to be some fine cards,” he said.

Abe said that they were indeed. He listed of the towns and cities they supplied, all the way to San Francisco. He said, “And we supply a good many top magicians and sleight-of-hand artists too. Verner and Marlon, Mercurio and Andrews, and we—”

“Max Mercurio uses these cards?” He’d nearly choked mid-swallow.

“Uses them exclusively,” Abe said.

Trent thumbed the deck. “Do you know him?”

“We’ve shared a drink or two.” Abe had never met the man.

“Fine stage magician,” Trent said. “Doesn’t need all the bangs and flashes.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.”

The barkeep side-eyed them from his station and unclasped his hands. He was ever-ready to grab, if need be, the cut-barrel shotgun. It hung from a pair of broken-down hay hooks affixed to the underside of the bar.

Trent asked, “Do you know Mercurio’s gal?”

“Beatrice?”

“That’s the one.”

“Beatrice is a jewel. Doesn’t put on airs.”

There was a rising carbonation in Trent’s throatway. He didn’t know whether it was excitement over Beatrice the Beautiful or indigestion from that morning’s fatback and eggs. He said, “I saw the very same in her.”

The conversation was playing just as Abe had imagined it, and he did not miss a beat. “I wondered if they’d been down here. I haven’t spoken to Max in a while.”

“Well, they haven’t yet,” Trent said. “I met Beatrice only in passing once in New Orleans.” He’d met nothing more than her picture on a rectangle of newsprint. Four times since, he’d made written request of rates, but Mercurio had never returned his letters.

Abe suspected Max Mercurio would sooner be run through with a pig spit than come to Keystone. He said, “Well, the Alhambra’s first-class. I’m sure I could arrange it.”

And it was then that Henry Trent’s posture straightened. He looked at Abe with something akin to wonder.

“Max’s manager Tony is a friend of mine,” Abe said. “He’s got them in Melbourne, Australia right now, but I could wire him and see when they might be freed up for a short run. He owes me.”

Trent smiled big. His silver crowns were tarnished yellow and black.

There was a sharpness in his stride back to the liquor cabinet, where he poured another for Abe and told him they’d talk more soon. He was feeling nervous on Rutherford. “Take that one for the road,” he told Abe. He patted his back and sent him across the main room.

He watched him go and wondered at Abe’s angle and his skill in the art of lying. He could not figure what the young man had to gain from such a play. Sallie Baach’s father would finally sell, or he wouldn’t. Beatrice would come to town with Max Mercurio, or she wouldn’t. Either way, he was two thousand richer than he’d been at breakfast.

He wondered how he’d tell Rutherford about the return of the Keystone Kid, and he wondered, above all, how he’d keep the little man from killing him.

No sooner had he wondered than he ceased. He’d tell Rutherford that patience was a virtue. You only have to wait until the property is signed over, until Beatrice comes to town, he’d say. Or until the property isn’t signed over, until Beatrice doesn’t come to town. For a time, he’d say, patience. After that, tiny Rutherford, you can do what you will.

Abe fetched Snippy the mediocre mare before ten, and he rode her all the way to Mingo County. He used a snake whip and boot spurs both to make her go, and—following Elkhorn to Spice Creek, cutting through a thick-brush
pass—he came into Matewan along the Tug River at midnight, a thirteen-hour ride. He cooled down the horse and hobbled and staked her at wood’s edge. He watered and fed her. Then he proceeded directly to the small clapboard home of Frank Dallara, where snakeskins hung like wind chimes from the front-porch roof. He stepped careful at the quiet spot on each porch riser, and turned the doorknob slow as any man ever turned one, and went inside and awakened Frank Dallara by tickling him at the nose with a crow feather.

When Dallara opened his eyes, there was the smooth nickel hole of the five-shot .38.

“I wonder if you’d join me for a walk outside,” Abe whispered.

Dallara carried a brass hinge lamp and they spoke cordially as they walked to their destination, a squat building backed up to Railroad Alley.

Abe told the man he meant him no harm. He told him he was only trying to find who’d killed his brother. Dallara understood. Abe asked him about the snakeskins.

“My boy Fred likes to catch snakes,” he said. “Him and another boy too.”

Abe learned from Dallara that his cousin Giuseppe was a strange and quiet man, a bricklayer and carpenter who pulled his flat cap low and kept his eyes on the ground. He’d not been born in the states like Frank Dallara had. Guiseppe had come from Torino to New York, but there was trouble,
so he came to Mingo County, like his cousins before him, to mine coal. He’d quit midwinter. He had no tunneling in his bones, only building. When he walked to Keystone in February for work, he’d met Jake. “And here was a man could build near as good as him from what I know,” Frank Dallara said, “and that ain’t common. Giuseppe builds better than me, and I learned from my daddy, who framed and bricked that whole row right there.” He pointed to a two-story building across the tracks, lit sufficient by the near-full moon.