A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (26 page)

His stack of wine crates was set up next to the bow-tied guitar player in the wicker-seated chair, at the same spot on Wyoming Street where the comet pills had sold out six nights prior. A crowd gathered.

Tony Thumbs was stooped in his tall gray hat and matching broadcloth coat. His white mustache was twisted sharp at the tips. Twin kerosene lamps burned high at the edges of his crate. He was all glow and shadow as he called, “Follow the queen! Follow the queen!”

And officer Munchy the doorman did just that, touching his wide middle finger to the blue patterned card-back he knew to be the queen. Tony Thumbs turned it and doubled the fat man’s five. The crowd grew.

Munchy smiled at his earnings and stepped to the door of A. L. Baach & Sons Saloon. He aimed to buy a drink for
Goldie Toothman. All his life, he’d wanted little more than the touch of Keystone’s Queen Bee.

Rutherford stepped into the Bottom without Taffy Reed in tow. In his fist was a balled-up handbill for the lunar eclipse gathering. He was drunk. He tucked himself between Fat Ruth’s and the restaurant, leaning against the siding, looking for Abe Baach.

Through his binoculars, he’d been watching Baach’s place from the ridge since the previous week’s all-night party. He’d told Trent he wanted badly to make arrests. No, the king had said, just as he had said to the idea of walking in on the secret game of seven-card stud. “Patience is a virtue,” Trent had reminded him, “even for the shortest of men.”

A woman lost a dollar at the monte table and stepped away to look skyward like everybody else.

A blackness had come upon the full edge of the big clear moon. Like sludge it moved across, wiping away the light so slow it was hard to notice. Men and women stepped onto balconies and leaned forward on the rail, their necks craned.

The guitar player picked an unrecognizable tune and howled like a dog.

When the moon seemed an oval, it began to turn red. Some went inside, afraid that such color hung death on those who watched. Others joined the guitar man and howled. There was much drinking and dancing on dirt and rooftop both.

The hysterical woman from the comet party screamed once again that she could see poison on the dust.

A man burst forth from Fat Ruth’s without his trousers fully on. He had looked out the window whilst thrusting away and seen the red-slit eye watching him. Now he ran up Wyoming Street with his waistband gripped in one hand, his shoes in another. He shouted in Greek and fell and cut his knuckles.

Tony Thumbs kept up his patter. “Chase that lady!” he called. “Ten will get you twenty!” Most ignored him in favor of the night sky’s show, but not Rutherford. From the dark trench alongside Fat Ruth’s where men were known to piss, he stepped to the monte table and laid down a twenty-dollar bill. “Twenty will get me forty?” he asked Tony Thumbs.

“If that’s your pleasure sir.” And he showed all three cards, slowing up on the queen, before he stacked and squeezed and showed them again.

“I want a new deck,” Rutherford told him. He stomped his boots to drop off the mud. He said, “I want Mexican style, flat on the board.”

“If that’s your pleasure sir,” Tony Thumbs said, and he made a sound with his lips like an angry squirrel, and Baz pulled a deck of cards from his checkered woolen vest. He bobbed his head and showed his teeth and handed the pack to his master, who told the little lawman, “Inspect them if you wish.”

“I do wish,” Rutherford said, and he stared for a time at the missing thumb. He fanned the cards and rubbed their backs and checked for marks or nicks. He pulled the queen of diamonds and the two black jacks. He handed them over and said, “Where you from Methuselah?”

Tony Thumbs showed the card fronts and then worked his hands as if they rode an unseen track. He kept them flat, no squeeze. “I’m not from Mexico,” he said, “but I know Mexican style.”

Rutherford paid him no mind. He was locked on that queen, his short-statured gaze at perfect level with the crate table’s top. When the old man quit his motion, Rutherford grinned at him and pointed to the middle card.

Tony Thumbs turned it. Jack of clubs. “Methuselah lives to turn another card,” he said. He took up the twenty-dollar bill and relayed it to Baz, who rolled it tight as a cigarette and stuck it in his lips and puffed. A few in the crowd laughed. Rutherford was not among them.

He turned and ignored the moon some more. He strode to the door of A. L. Baach & Sons and threw it open and spat on the floor. Black women danced with white men. White women danced with black men. Rutherford was of a mind to pull his pistol.

Tony Thumbs extinguished his lamps. He put out his hand and asked his monkey for their winnings. He told him to stay on the door.

Baz perched on a big empty telegraph spool outside the saloon. The long fingers of his feet gripped wood where someone had carved the outline of a naked woman.

Tony Thumbs stepped inside and located Rutherford. He tapped the little shoulder, and when Rutherford turned to face him, the rolled twenty was held in offering. “I didn’t
intend to take it,” Tony Thumbs said. “I was just testing tendency. Some local lawmen will shut down an honest game of monte.”

Rutherford furrowed his brow. He said, “What in the Devil Anse are you talking about?”

“My name is Tony Sharpley,” Tony Thumbs said. “I manage stage talent, the big variety, and before I send my best acts to an untested town, as I will soon be doing here with Max and Beatrice, I always visit first and gauge the authorities.” He pulled a thick card from his breast pocket and handed it over. It read:

T
ONY
S
HARPLEY

P
RODUCER
, V
ARIETY
T
HEATRE
O
WNER

57 G
REAT
J
ONES
S
TREET
, N
EW
Y
ORK

Rutherford noted again the missing thumb. Stump skin had healed in a white bubble. He looked up at the old man and read his eyes.

A passing miner teetered and knocked into Rutherford with his hip. The lawman drew back and threw a straight right to the testicles, doubling the drunk, before he came round with the left and spilled him to the floor.

“Sweet Mary Magdalene,” Tony Thumbs said. “You, sir, are a pugilist of the noblest variety.”

Rutherford neither smiled nor came out of his stance.

“Allow me to buy you a drink,” Tony Thumbs said.

He did so, after they’d evicted two men from their barstools.

Tony Thumbs told Rutherford how delighted he was that Keystone had a chief of police like him, a man not looking to bust up an honest game of monte, a man who liked to play a little himself. “I cherish a town like Keystone,” Tony Thumbs said. “Dearly do I love a town where working men can spend their hard-earned money as they see fit.”

Sam was behind the counter. He poured the men their second and gave the nod to Chesh Whitt at the end of the bar.

Chesh walked the long way to the storeroom door and swung through. He gave the earlobe-pull signal to a young actor who’d been put on the door. Folks had started to refer to the secret game of poker therein as the Ashwood Wobbler. Abe had coined the term when he tired of shimming a loose corner leg on the cheap ashwood table.

The young man knocked his knuckles against the door in rhthym with the code he’d been shown. Inside, Goldie ceased her target practice and left twelve cards in the corkboard. The men sat up straight and watched her unbolt the lock. When she cracked it open, they all heard his words.

“Tiny is at the bar.”

Goldie took up a velvet satchel from the table. She opened it and brought out a pendant necklace. The cut glass was polished high to look like a big emerald diamond. She pushed it down between her breasts.

Back at the bar, Sam positioned himself so that he was in Rutherford’s line of sight.

Goldie approached him with a tray of empty tumblers in her hand. She tucked herself at counter’s end, set the tray on the bar, and called, “Samuel, six more.” He came over and poured. She leaned across so that she was close to him. She whispered gibberish. Her breasts pressed hard on the bartop.

Rutherford looked to the breasts immediately. They transfixed him. He nodded mechanical-like at the story Tony Thumbs spun.

“The more I think about it,” Tony Thumbs said, “the more July fourth seems a splendid day for Max and Beatrice to arrive.” He wrote the date on a fresh business card,
fourth day of July
, and next to it he wrote
Mercurio’s arrival
. Rutherford half-listened and smiled and took the card, staring all the while at the perfect full skin of Goldie Toothman’s cleavage.

She yanked forth the necklace and let it glint ever so quick in the lamplight. Sam took it and put it in his pocket, just as she’d shown him, and she whispered, with her lips forming carefully the words, “Abe said to look at it through your jeweler’s lens before you put it in the safe.”

Rutherford had so long been around liars and cheats and the tellers of other men’s secrets that he was amply skilled in the art of lip-reading. He tried once more to listen to the man he knew as Tony Sharpley. “Yeah,” he said, looking at the business card. “July the fourth is splendid.” It was a word he’d never before used.
Splendid
. It sounded funny coming from his mouth. He looked up from the card to find Goldie Toothman between himself and Tony, her cleavage now at his shoulder.

“Rutherford,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to apologize for my behavior at Fred Reed’s place a month ago.” Now she brushed against him, and she made her eyes heavy too. “I drove you to act the way you did by starting trouble myself. I’m working on my language now.”

“That’s good,” Rutherford managed. “Vulgar tongue don’t belong in no woman’s mouth.”

“You’re not so bad Rutherford,” she said, and she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek and walked away.

Munchy stood by the stage and watched. He followed her. He figured if she’d plant one on the smallest man in town, she might plant one on the biggest too.

Rutherford just sat on his stool and looked at the business card in his hand. He was too stunned to watch Goldie go.

They were playing it just as she and Abe had envisioned and written on paper and spoken in whisper and with volume both—they were playing it like they’d practiced.

And, as was their custom, all were playing it as if Abe was seated at the Ashwood Wobbler. He wasn’t.

He was clear up the hill.

Inside his mother’s empty boardinghouse, he sat in a chair at the head of the long kitchen table, conversing in a pleasant manner with Mr. Ladd the God-fearing chaste Virginian, the only boarder to be had.

The young man was explaining, in over-enunciated pronouncements, why it was that the anti-saloon league would sweep away every sinner in every town like Keystone.

“Isn’t but one Keystone,” Abe said.

“I’ll give you that.” Ladd pushed up his glasses and took a drink of his buttermilk.

Abe took a drink of his own and listened to his stomach squeal. He couldn’t remember when he’d last drunk buttermilk.

Mice scurried in the rooms above them, where Sallie slept with little Ben beside her and Agnes read by candlelight.

Out in the second house, Al Baach put together a peculiar pair of shoes.

Mr. Ladd noted a strange tang to his milk. He coughed. He drank some more.

Through the window, the sun’s impossible remains cast against a moon yet eclipsed, and the two men sat inside a radiant and blood-red room.

Abe took note of the thick white droplets hung up in the man’s pathetic mustache. He wished Ladd would take a swipe with the back of his hand, but it was not to be. As he’d been trained, the young man took up his napkin, made it a tight triangle, and dabbed the remnants carefully away. Abe looked past him then at the big floor clock. The minute hand was stubborn. It stuck and pulsed immobile.

The roar was in his head again.

A heavy-framed map of the United States dropped from the wall, its big glass square cracking in two upon landing. For thirty years, it had hung by a nail next to the pie safe.

Oswald Ladd jumped at the sound. He looked to the split-glass map. “Gracious,” he said. “How does that occur?”

Abe watched him swallow and dab. “You don’t have much of an Adam’s apple, do you Mr. Ladd?” he said.

Ladd released the empty tumbler. He’d been careful not to slice his lip on the rim’s chip. He said, “I beg your pardon?”

“You’ll not be pardoned by me sir.” Abe did the math in his head. Ladd had begun to drink his buttermilk at ten past one. Now it was twenty-three past one. He guessed the little man would be asleep by half past.

In the kitchen, just after midnight, Abe had dropped in a hardy dose of muskroot, valerian, maypop, and opium, ground fine as ash. A Tony Thumbs custom powder, guaranteed reliable.

He looked again to the big clock. A little carved mahogany swallow perched at its peak. Its wings seemed to move, and Abe shut his eyes and said, “Tell me again how people pass the time where you’re from.”

Ladd had begun to sweat at the brow. “They don’t pass it Mr. Baach. They wring from it the blood of Christ.”