A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (29 page)

“Good Lord in Heaven,” Trent said. He’d tripped on his chair and hit the ground.

The slick-haired man cut the engine and stepped from his seat. He was sixty years old but had the frame of a man much younger. He wore no hat. He smiled and breathed in deep through his nose. “Ah,” he said. “That is real air.”

Tony Thumbs emerged slow, his old joints sticking. He made a beeline for the evergreens to relieve his troubled bladder. Baz rode on his shoulder bone.

When he’d finished his dramatic inhalations, the driver stepped toward the stunned lot of standing men. He thrust out his big hand. “Phil,” he said. “Pleasure.” He shook the hand of Rufus first, then Harold, then Al.

Last was Henry Trent, who rubbed at his newly injured hip. He narrowed his eyes. He said, “You’re the man we’ve heard so much on but never yet seen.”

“Well, here I am,” the man said, “and Master John Goodfellow has already found lodging in the parlor of sweet Rose Cantu.” He situated his groin. “And she is still bright as sunshine and as pure as dew.”

Harold Beavers only frowned.

It was quiet for only a moment before Phil made a declaration. “I’ve got a case of rye whiskey in the rumble trunk.” He turned and walked brisk to procure it. He was having the time of his life already. Playing Chicago Phil on a West Virginia mountain was a welcome departure for him, a man who’d spent most of his acting life soliloquizing Shakespeare in the decrepit Old Drury. “Who’s thirsty?” he shouted.

Abe smiled. Tony Thumbs had been right again. The man introducing himself as Chicago Phil was a veritable ham. Jim Fort was his true name. Telling big-money lies was his momentary game.

Harold Beavers liked rye. He watched the man procure it from the rack. He regarded the vehicle. “That is some automobile,” he said.

“Chambers-Detroit,” Phil said. “Touring.”

“What’s your top speed?”

“Thirty-eight miles per hour.” His smile widened. He set the case on the table. He pried it open with a bowie knife he wore on his hip.

“You have a last name?” Rufus asked.

Phil gave no reply, but instead uncorked the rye. He drank from the bottle and handed it to Harold. “Yes,” he
said, “there is ample legroom in the touring. I won that pretty thing at a basement game in Cincinnati. She’s worth thirty-five hundred new.”

Now Tony Thumbs stepped from the trees and went to each man, his hand extended in greeting. “Not to worry,” he said. “Didn’t spill a drop on it.” Baz bobbed his head and offered his own little hand for the shaking.

Harold did not accept. “Hell zounds,” he said. “Carnival come to town.” He took a second snort from the bottle and passed it to Abe.

Tony Thumbs looked square at Trent as he shook his hand and said, “Pleasure. I’ve met your chief of police and admired his gumption.”

Trent nodded.

“Wonderful town you’ve got here. Wide open.” Tony was careful not to lay it on too thick. “Couldn’t stay away. Those Cinder Bottom girls can stiffen up even the shriveled old-stagers like me.” He winked at Harold Beavers, who gave no expression in return. Tony went on. “Max and Beatrice are all lined up. I’ve just finalized their arrangements on Tuesday. They’ll arrive on the fourth, five
PM
train.”

“Good,” Trent said.

The rye made its way around with all but Al imbibing. He’d limped off to fetch two more chairs.

“You say you won that vehicle?” Harold was fond of the particular burn of this strange rye whiskey. He poured it in his coffee mug generously.

Phil smiled. “I had kings full of fours,” he said. He noted the children as they peeked from behind a window curtain. He cleared his throat. “I gather from Abe that all of you gentlemen are aces at the table.” He looked to Rufus. Then Trent. “I gather too that the Oak Slab is the finest and most-established game in a hundred miles or more.”

Trent said, “Thirteen years that game has run without stoppage.”

Phil whistled his admiration and clasped his hands on the table. “I’d sure like to sit and play when I finish at the Baaches.”

“You ever play any cards in south Florida?” Harold asked.

“Well, sure. And on top of it, I won my first clean grand in Bay Biscayne.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes sir. That was back when I still kept my monies in a bank, fool as I was.” He laughed. He noted the Beavers’ nod of approval. “Anyway, back then I’d been depositing my table winnings at this fancy bank on Flagler Street, a hundred or more dollars a day, every day, for a number of months, and one particular Friday, as I was leaving, the bank president asked for a word. He was a small, sickly man, but his office was beautiful. Had a chandelier in there I’d still like to get my hands on.”

The men listened.

“So we sit down and he asks me how it is I’m able to deposit like I do—wants to know what line of work I’m in. So
I tell him. I’m a professional gambler. He says to me, ‘Don’t gamblers lose now and then?’ I said they didn’t if they knew their business. He said, ‘No man knows his business that well.’ I said I’d prove to him that I never lost a bet. I said I’d bet him right then and there two hundred dollars that at noon the next day, I’d come back to his beautiful banker’s office, and his balls would be spiked all over, like sweetgum seeds.”

Each man laughed then. Abe especially enjoyed the tale, as he’d been the one who told a version of it originally on a late saloon night. Jim Fort had been tickled by the story, asked if he might use it in his role as Chicago Phil. “By all means,” Abe had told him.

Phil went on. “So the banker, a real square paper, he can’t pass up what he knows is impossible, so he says, ‘You’re on,’ and shakes my hand.” Now he had them hooked. He was talking fast enough to keep them on the line and slow enough not to lose them. “Next day, I go back. Accompanying me is the richest son of a bitch in Miami at that time, a man who’d just as soon gamble on cockroach races and back-alley nickel pitches as he would a title fight. We step in the office and close the door and I tell the bank president to drop his trousers. He does so, red-faced, but content in the knowledge that his balls are round as they’d ever been. Still, he’s got to prove it, so I step over to where he’s standing half-naked under that big gleaming chandelier, and I reach over there between his puny thighs and cup those nuts in my hand, and the banker turns redder still, and across the
room, the richest son of a bitch in Miami drops his head to his chest and takes out his billfold.”

The Beavers brothers just sat there a moment. Henry Trent too.

“I’d bet that rich son of a bitch twelve hundred dollars that on Saturday at noon, I’d have a bank president’s balls in my hand.”

They slapped the table and roared, Harold especially. It was one of the finest tales he’d heard.

They emptied the bottle and uncorked another.

At two o’clock, Tony laid on the table a bottle of beer, a cigarette, and a match. He said he’d bet any takers his monkey could open the beer, drink it down, light the match, and smoke the cigarette in less than two minutes. The Beavers brothers inspected the bottle, and indeed it was tight-sealed with the new variety of crown cap. They each laid down ten.

At the sound of Tony’s whistle, Baz leapt from his shoulder and bared his yellow teeth at the bottle. The men were startled by the length of his canines. His movements were newly quick. He used his middle incisors like a vice, tore off the cap and spat it in the grass, and, sealing his lips around the bottle’s neck, he pointed its bottom at the sky. His swallows were fast and consistent. It was empty in forty-nine seconds. He lit the match on his big toenail whilst already drawing on the butt. They’d not ever seen a body puff so swift, and when he’d finished he dropped it in the bottleneck hole.

Hiss.

The Beavers said it was the best ten dollars they’d spent.

Tony held Baz like a baby then, and the monkey went right to sleep. Tony took him to the car and held him there still, humming a made-up tune. He didn’t like to see his little friend do the trick they’d dubbed the bottle-and-smoke, but Baz had long since known it by the time he came to Tony, and it had always proven stellar in the making of friends.

The men spoke on the rarity of the ladies of Fat Ruth Malindy’s. They spoke on the Reno title fight and the current price of coal per short ton.

At half past four, the two men and a monkey departed, trailing dust. Phil shouted a verse as they rolled on: “Let’s drink to our next meeting lads, nor think on what’s atwixt!”

The other men leaned and slumped and watched them go. Rufus said, “Those fellas is somethin else.”

“Climb in your chariot Rufus,” Harold answered. “Let’s us see who can lay off the brake longest into town.”

Goldie was on her way up the hill as the Beavers came careening down. She hid herself behind a poplar tree and cringed at the sound of their vehicles.

When they’d passed, she went on.

She’d put Rebecca Staples and little Bob on the four o’clock to Princeton. She didn’t know why, but she’d nearly cried as the train pulled away.

Now she came into the clearing out of breath. Her feet were tired and even the sound of Ben and Agnes couldn’t lift the lilt at her middle. They exploded from the screen
door in a burst of high-spirited calls and hinge-croak and wood-slap, and Goldie paused to watch them.

The cut grass seemed somehow wrong.

Sallie Baach was at the big table, stacking dishes. She leaned across it to fetch a butter knife and her back seized up, a charge coursing the muscles to the right of her spine.

Goldie did not move from her anonymous spot at woods’ edge. She watched Sallie stiffen and go still. She recognized the posture of pain from all those years her daddy had struck the same pose, but still, Goldie did not budge. She’d not offer assistance with the dishes or the infirmities of a body gone bad. She’d not engage Sallie in any sort of talk about the shame of leaving Keystone, of giving up Hood House land. They’d started such a conversation in the near-emptied barn two weeks prior, and Goldie had ignored Sallie then, listening instead to the soft bursts of wind from the long nostrils of Snippy the mediocre mare. Goldie could still lose herself in the darkwater eye of a horse, could still see things there. The last thing she’d heard Sallie say was that the world’s compass was set straight to hell, and no one, once there, could walk back out.

Now Goldie stood across the cut grass bald from the older woman, who’d straightened and turned to face her. It was quiet, not a crow to be found on any pine branch. They regarded each other before Sallie carried her load of smeared dishware back to the house she’d soon have to vacate.

How old she seemed then to Goldie.

BET YOUR LAST COPPER ON JACK

July 4, 1910

Before the sun rose, Cheshire Whitt had already taken care of the coupe. He’d already laid the
McDowell Times
Independence Day edition at the three doors in town that mattered most. Trent and the Beavers would awaken to the following headline:
Boilermaker Jeffries or Galveston Giant Johnson—Who Will Wear the Crown?
The article that followed was dry and bereft of humorous insight or mention of racial superiority. Chesh’s father had insisted on such a tone. “No need to salt what’s already boiling,” he’d said. It was more than money riding on this fight.

There was a quarter-page advertisement below the fold inviting all to come to the Union Social and Political Club, where a special telegraph line had been installed for round-by-round returns direct from ringside in Reno. Adjacent
to this was a smaller advertisement proclaiming the arrival of the Sublime One, Max Mercurio, with his Beautiful Beatrice. Seats were already sold out for the opening-night show on July 6th.

On his way from the Alhambra to the bridge, Chesh saw, from a distance, the Baach family boarding the early morning train. The platform on either side of them was dark, but the porters had laid out two lanterns by which to load, and they lit the Baaches like footlights. Al carried little Ben. Sallie had an arm around Agnes. Sam stood motionless, nothing in his hands. Chesh regarded his friend. He knew Sam was loathe to leave.

Abe had forced his younger brother to go with the rest of them. “It’s your duty,” he’d told him.

The porters worked fast at the baggage car, lifting suitcases and shoving at iron-bottom trunks.

Before they boarded, the Baaches looked up at the hills they couldn’t see.

Agnes cried, a quiet whimper. No puppeteer had ever come to frighten and delight.

Chesh Whitt watched them step from platform to stair. He listened to the final boarding call. His pocketwatch told him it was a minute past five.

In less than twelve hours, his role would commence, and he wondered if Abe and Goldie’s plan might actually play out. Regardless, his job was easy. “Start a ruckus, whether Johnson loses or wins,” they’d told him. The beckoning of
authority by way of drunken foolishness was a vocation with which Chesh was familiar. This time would no doubt prove different.

But Chesh Whitt knew one thing. The white fighter would never best Johnson, and his own celebratory whoops would come genuine.