A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (33 page)

Trent’s ear perked on the nickname he’d not heard from any other. He turned to see the suspendered man approaching the darkened depot wall.

“What in the name of scratch are you doing
her
e
?” the man said. He stepped within a yard of Tony, who backed away. “Thought you never left Baltimore.”

Tony could only swallow. It didn’t seem possible that an Old Drury patron would step off a train in southern West Virginia.

A seering heat rose from Trent’s middle. It climbed up his chest and into his neck, and though he was unsure of precisely how, he knew then that he had been conned.

The suspendered man kept on. “That monkey still alive?”

Tony backed into the armrest of a long pine bench. His knee gave and he pitched forward, catching himself with a hand. Baz had no recourse but to jump from his shoulder to the platform boards.

“You okay?” the suspendered man asked.

And then Trent was upon them. “Beatrice ain’t on this fucking train or any other!” he shouted, startling those close by. “Who are you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Tony had barely straightened back up when Trent let go an overhand right. It landed flush on the old man’s mouth and put him down hard.

The war call that came from Baz then was enough to split the eardrum, a scream too high for the human to know. He sprung onto the thigh of Henry Trent and sunk deep his canines there.

The people on the platform were unable to comprehend what they saw.

The suspendered man had taken a knee at Tony’s side, and now he looked up. He saw the animal tear away a strip of Trent’s pant leg and a hank of flesh both. Blood flung from the points of the long yellow teeth.

Trent bared down and grabbed the monkey around the neck before he could bite again. He spun on his heels and flung Baz, and the little body shot forth in a line with considerable speed, and the sound of his head against the train’s sheet-steel side was loud as an anvil strike.

Henry Trent drew his Colt and made for Railroad Avenue. His stride was broken and slowed from the bite. He hollered, again and again, “It’s a setup! Put every man on the office!”

She’d walked with loose neck and turned ankles across the Alhambra’s main card room, winking at Munchy all the way. Two cardplayers took note but returned to their hands.

She lured him off the door in twelve seconds flat.

Goldie could play drunk with the best, and she’d come out of the floozy gate hard, putting her hand to his crotch and whispering in his ear, “I want a man inside me what’s got some beef on his bones.” She led him by the hand to the corner wall.

Now he had her pressed there, hidden behind the coat-hook partition, his breath a pinched wheeze. She shut her eyes against its foul stench.

Abe pulled his hat low. He walked across the card room unnoticed by all but one at the tables. The man was losing interest in losing hands and had begun to wonder at the stillness around him and at the woman who’d led off the fat man. He watched Abe go past. He did not know Abe, but found it strange that one so thin could be so swollen at the front. He watched Abe turn the knob and step inside the office of Mayor Trent without knocking.

Inside, Little Donnie had already opened the big safe doors. He stood open-mouthed before the high clean towers of money, and behind him, the other men did the same.

Without a word, Abe untucked his shirtfront and pulled out the six-stack of four-bushel grain bags. They commenced to filling.

Out in the main room, the curious, losing man stood from the poker table. The one who was shuffling said, “You cashing out?” He received no answer.

The man walked toward Trent’s office. He heard labored breathing from beyond the partition wall. “Hello?” he called.

Munchy quit his groping. He was motionless, his red face buried in the cleavage of the most beautiful woman in the world.

What Goldie had most feared was happening. She lifted her arm from the sweat-soaked back of his jacket and quietly reached for the pocket of the hanging dogskin coat.

The man stood by the bar and listened. He said, “If anybody wants to know, I believe I just seen a man walk unchecked into Mayor Trent’s fortress.”

Munchy knew without a doubt then that he’d been had. He straightened and put his hand to his belt holster. He’d pulled his gun and nearly drawn back the hammer when Goldie got her own pistol free of the fur-lined pocket. She fired twice.

The quiet afterward made everything slow. She hated that he looked her in the eyes when he dropped. To see such a thing up close was too much for Goldie.

Abe recognized the double report of his spur-trigger pistol. “Go!” he hollered, and threw open the door. They cinched their filled grain sacks and went, shoulder-toting the loads swift of foot. They left behind nothing but the locked metal case of a man known only as Phil.

Gun drawn, Abe stepped to the partition. Goldie was flat against the wall. She’d moved only to drop her weapon and put her hands to her mouth, and her face was drained of color. On the floor, Munchy tried to gather air, his wide mouth a useless bellows, his jaw hinging hard like a fresh-caught fish. Abe knew by the sound that both his lungs were collapsed. He told Goldie they had to run and they did.

He knocked down the curious losing man on the way.

Not one other stood from his poker table seat as the safe-robbers ran past in a line. As he went, Jim Fort hollered, “Tell em they shouldn’t a crossed Chicago Phil!”

Rose Cantu had piloted the Chambers to its place at the head of the line. Behind it were the twin Oldsmobile Runabouts, ready for the open road.

When the safe-robbers emerged from the side stage door, they spread into all three cars. They held the fat grain sacks like children on their laps. “Where’s Chesh?” Abe said to Rose, and she only shrugged and mashed the gas.

They hit Railroad Avenue and made left to travel west. Rose took the lead carrying four. Talbert followed in the second, and Abe drove the third. Goldie rode silent and white at his side. He stopped at street’s middle and looked back to Fred Reed’s.

Chesh Whitt burst from the yard, the short officer trailing him close. He was twenty yards from the car when Henry Trent hobbled into range.

Trent could see now what was happening. He somehow knew what they’d done. He stopped in the road and leveled his Colt.

The officer giving chase dropped to the ground at the crack of Trent’s first shot. The man was not hit, but he played dead just the same, and he wondered why he’d quit his coke-yard job.

Trent fired slow and even, and the fourth caught Chesh in the side. He fell and got up to keep coming, the Oldsmobile five yards off.

Abe left his foot on the brake but stood at the tall curved dash. He took a wide stance and turned his hips. He steadied his center as Moon had taught him inside the long shooting stall.

Trent put his sights on the man who’d stood, the man he now saw was Abe Baach.

Abe fired first and Henry Trent dropped to the hard-packed dirt where he’d stood.

Chesh jumped on the gearbox in back and Abe sat down and took the tiller. “Hold on,” he said, and Goldie turned to clutch Chesh’s wrist, and they drove, a crowd in the street behind them circling their mayor, who lay on his back with a soft-point bullet in his heart. Rufus and Fred Reed took a knee on either side, and Trent looked up at the sky between them where the coke ash gusted gray. His head grew light and tingly. He said something about skyrockets before dark and a monkey and a train. He swallowed. Again and again he swallowed.

Fred Reed took off his pressed white shirt and wadded it over the bubbling hole. “Go get my vehicle!” he hollered to the one-eyed officer standing at his back open-mouthed. Rufus stood and took the man by the sleeve, and together they ran for Fred’s coupe. It was parked beyond the yard, the only automobile left to be had.

When Rufus turned the crank, there was nothing.

Chesh Whitt had dismantled the carburetor.

Dusk came on the drive to Kimball, the sun muted deep beneath the ridge. A mile out, they’d emptied their grain sacks into hat trunks and leather cases. They ditched the vehicles by a tipple at Kimball’s edge and boarded the train bound for Huntington.

At Matewan, Abe stepped off the coach in full dark. Frank Dallara stood by the bulletin light. Giuseppe was not with him as planned.

Abe had wired two hundred dollars that morning on word that the jailer could be bribed.

Now Frank Dallara was stooped and red-eyed. “They found him hung from the window bars at supper,” he told Abe. “Said he knotted up strips of that burlap he slept on.”

They’d planned to bring him to Baltimore, find him work bricking mansions along Druid Hill Park.

“I’m sorry Frank,” Abe said.

The conductor called stragglers to board. “We’re six minutes off!” he hollered. “I’m letting her go!”

At the big Huntington station, Goldie spoke to a ticket agent she knew. The man was a monthly regular at Fat Ruth’s, and as per her instructions, he’d requested extra hours on Independence Day. She slid a silk-knotted roll of twenties between the bars of his window. “When they come askin,” she said, “You tell em Chicago. We were all of us bound for Chicago with transfer at Cincinnati.”

She procured their tickets to Baltimore and Atlantic City, and they boarded the Pullman sleeper in a line. When the porter tried to take their luggage, Abe told him to kindly step back. The old man eyed Chesh Whitt, who was bent at the waist and leaking blood through his dressing. “Colored ain’t permitted in the sleeper,” the man said.

Abe put a finger to his lips and said, “Shhh.” He held out a ten.

Chesh grunted as he made for the step stool. He looked back at the porter, who reminded him of his grandaddy. He said to him, “Don’t fret George. One of
us
runs these rails tonight.”

At the passenger station in Charleston, they were joined by Sallie, Al, Agnes, and baby Ben, all of whom had spent the evening there, waiting. When Abe inquired on Sam’s whereabouts, his daddy said only, “He is gone. He run.”

They’d last seen him at two that afternoon, while they ate cold chicken behind the station. They’d just spread a quilt on the bank of the Kanawha when Agnes saw him above and pointed. “Is that Uncle Samuel?” she’d asked, and there he was, high up on the river trestle, running just as fast as he could.

Everywhere were riots on Independence Day streets. Jack Johnson had won easy, and as night became morning, men were stabbed in the dark for being black. The quarrelling
on Keystone’s dirt lanes was relatively tame. White men mostly mumbled and glared. There were celebratory calls not unlike those of Chesh Whitt, even as Mayor Trent was tended and kept still. He somehow kept breathing, his heart languid but alive.

He was toted by Fred Reed toward the hospital at Welch, his chariot a horse-drawn rig meant for coffins. By the time they hit Bottom Creek at nine, he was dead.

It was Rufus who discovered the others. He’d walked to the Bottom and into Baach’s saloon with the cut-barrel shotgun level at his hip. He’d followed the sound of their calls and nearly turned away when he saw Rutherford and Reed hog-tied on the floor by his brother.
Here
, Rufus thought,
here is delegate-elect Beavers
,
his member gunshot and bled nearly dry
.