A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (35 page)

The man stood there nodding, his tremble subsiding.

Abe left the office and whistled at the head of the stairs.

When he stepped back inside, another man was with him, the kind who took jobs no one else would touch. “One-Eye,” Abe said, “this is Anchors. He’s going to follow
you to the station, ten paces behind the whole way.” Anchors wore a scowl. He’d been too long in the sun. Abe went on. “He totes a police revolver, and if he sees any other with you, he’ll slap it out and lay you down.”

“I come alone,” the tall man said, “all the way.” It was the truth. Keystone could not spare the men.

Abe believed him.

The lightbulb surged. From out on the water, there arose a grinding sound.

Abe called over the man known as Anchors. He slipped him two twenties and whispered in his ear. “Get on that train but don’t let him know it. Follow and watch. You can get you a toothbrush on arrival.”

Anchors put his hands in his pockets and stepped to the tall man’s side.

Abe regarded once more the glass eye, its crude brown paint-job. “Go on,” he said. “You can make the ten o’clock if you trot.”

The tall man started for the door. He’d nearly made it through when he stopped and spoke without turning. “When do I tell em you’ll arrive?” he asked.

Abe worked his jaw. “Tell them we’ll be there at sundown on Sunday. Last train in.”

Goldie listened to their footfalls on the stairs. There was something in the sound of it that recalled her daddy.

Bushels was feeling particularly protective by then. He said, “I was ready to go with you the first time Abe, when
you came through in April.” He’d always liked the young man from West Virginia. “I’ll ride in ahead of you, on an earlier train. Lay down some work. We can figure this.”

Goldie moved to the long office wall, where she sat down beneath a square hole. It had once housed Ben Moon’s safe, and a dusty outline of the big portrait remained.

Abe said, “You still keep up with that counterfeiter?”

Bushels said he did.

“You’ll need to call on him.”

Goldie made an airy sound and lay her head back on the wall. How tired she had grown of such games.

Bushels looked at her there, and then at Abe, who regarded the folded letter in his hands. “Abe,” he said. “We need to wire Mr. Moon. We need to work out a plan.”

Abe nodded. He was already thinking on it. The pain in his head was back, but it could not block what he conjured. “I’ll stop at the telegraph office on my way to Tony Thumbs’s.” he said. He hoped the old man would be there. He hoped he wasn’t dead.

Before he left Moon’s office, Abe sat down next to Goldie on the wall. He told her not to fret. He told her they’d make it out of Keystone yet again, alive and free.

She only shook her head. He kissed her on the temple.

He walked up South Street figuring, talking to himself aloud.

Outside Tony Thumbs’s building, he smelled rain. He looked up for night clouds, but there were none. It was only
the moon, big as it had been at the Keystone eclipse. The Old Drury’s sign was in need of repair. They’d not run a show in months.

Inside, Abe pounded on Tony’s locked door.

The old man had taken up opium full time since putting his monkey in the ground. There were days when he stayed eight hours inside the stale, cushioned joint on Camel Alley, when the only words he spoke were his order, “Ten fun of the number one.” He grew tired of the walk to and fro, and so he’d bought from the joint’s proprietor his own full layout—skewer, lamp, and pipe. He’d not left his bedroom since.

Tony Thumbs would turn eighty-three on August 21st. He felt no need to leave his little spot above the Drury.

He felt no need to answer when a knock came at his door.

But Abe pounded still, and the ringing in his ears built until it broke, and inside the clamor of his shrill mind, a quiet place came forth, like the one he and Jake had once known. And inside the quiet place, he could not hear the pounding of his very own fist, even as he watched it knock. He heard instead the pulse of his blood. He shut his eyes and saw Sam, his empty lips and crushed nose.

His knees nearly gave, but he neither fell nor hit his head. He sat down on his heels and breathed deep. He thought of the last time he’d seen Jake, his purpled neck and motionless eyes beneath the lids. He thought of Sam’s face in the photograph.

There is nothing without family. There is nothing without one, two, three.

Abe needed the old man and his miracle cures.

He stood up and kicked down the door.

THEIR DAY HAD COME

August 21, 1910

At a minute past midnight, Ah Tong tossed the pebble. It was wrapped in a sheet of paper. He’d listened from the alley for Abe’s whistle, then come closer to hear what Goldie hummed. When the perimeter guards moved to the jailhouse’s opposite side and she still hummed
All clear
, Tong ran up and tossed the pebble through the high window bars.

Abe took it up from the floor just as the officer on hall guard stirred awake. He sat in a spindle-back chair just outside cell one.

“You dozin One-Eye?” Abe said. He held the pebble note in his fist.

The tall man took out his watch. His shift was done. “I’m going home to bed is what I’m doin,” he said. He sometimes
felt he was living under a curse, one put upon him by Abe back in April, one transmitted by way of that Morgan dollar. He put his fingers in his ears and shut his eyes and waited.

Two minutes later, Taffy Reed followed Rutherford through the main hall door. They nodded to One-Eye as he left, and Rutherford called after him, “Be back here at seven, no later.”

Rutherford sat down in the chair that faced Abe’s cell. He stared hard at the condemned, who was naked and had dropped flat on his belly.

“Bet you didn’t know this here is called a push-up,” Abe said. His voice strained as he up-and-downed on his knuckles. “I know the fella who first coined the term.”

Taffy stood behind Rutherford with a sack of dried peppers in one hand and a lantern in the other. He watched the fluid motion of the push-up. “I’m going to pickle,” he said. On his way past Goldie’s cell, he swung his lantern to see. She stood over the drainhole, naked as a jaybird.

On the embalming table, Taffy poured brine from a quart jar into a gallon that was already half full of boiled eggs. He’d left the door cracked to take periodic peeks at Goldie’s cell. He’d done so for a week, since the condemned had begun to fight the heat with nudity. They were generally clothed only in the early morning hours.

When Abe finished his forty push-ups, he hopped to his feet and brushed the dirt off his chest. He looked down at himself. “Rutherford,” he said. “What about my hog? If I
come over and waggle it between the bars, will you brush off the dust for me?”

Rutherford had not shifted posture an inch since he’d sat. “Come on over here,” he said. “I’ll brush it. Rip it clean off too. Fry it up in back with some purple onion, serve it to your mother.”

Abe laughed. “You could serve five or six more than that with it,” he said.

Rutherford looked away momentarily. He tried to see Goldie down the hall, but it was too dark at that end. “Five or six?” he said. “I believe that’s about how many I’ll get to kill when I do find your mother and daddy, and whoever else has that money.”

“That isn’t going to happen.”

“You won’t be here to see it, that’s certain.” If he pointed his boot toes, he could almost touch the floor. He sighed and sat back. “Less you go ahead and tell me now where the money is. I believe you know this is your very last chance to stay what’s comin tomorrow.”

Abe went to the straw tick in the corner and lay down and crossed his legs at the ankle.

Rutherford hated the man with such fortitude he could barely keep from shooting him through the bars right then. He wouldn’t do it. He’d watch instead as Abe died before a crowd. Rufus Beavers had declared Thursday morning that the pair would be properly hanged as soon as a scaffold was built. He even had a man for the job, a man who’d built
the gallows used by Isaac Parker, Rufus’s most favorite of judges. By that time, Rufus was drunk every hour of every day. He’d nearly gone mad since the heist and his brother’s disappearance, and he’d finally grown weary of Abe and Goldie’s trickery and money-baiting. He should have known better than to keep them alive on the promise of four hundred grand. He should have known better, even on that July Sunday sundown, when the two of them had surrendered to Keystone. They hadn’t stepped down from the train right off. They’d stood on the coach steps and opened the lid of a four-foot steamer trunk. They’d tipped it forward so Rufus could see the money stacked neat to the top. That’s when Rutherford turned Sam Baach loose on the final outbound train. The young man who’d wanted only to come home now wanted only to leave. When it had departed, and they reopened the trunk, beneath the top layer there was nothing but newsprint.

Rutherford spat on the hallway floor. “Rufus may have given up on that money, but I won’t ever,” he said. “I’ll kill everyone you know to get it back.”

Abe put his arm beneath his head. A luna moth walked up the wall toward the ceiling. “That isn’t going to happen,” he said.

“You don’t know what I can do.” Rutherford stood up and put his face near the red-rusted bars. He lowered his voice and said, “I’ve killed enough to where I lost count. Easier and easier and easier.” He smiled a little. “Even the
Keystone Kid, even ole big brains never knew what I done. Always thought I took orders from Trent, from Beavers.”

“That’s right,” Abe said. “You always were superior at takin orders.”

Rutherford didn’t care to bite his tongue when death for Abe Baach was this nigh. “Wasn’t takin orders when I dropped on that guinea from a tree branch,” he said. “One ridin into town with your daddy?” He let it sink in a minute. “That was my first.” He smiled at the old bad memories he’d twisted to good. “Vic Moon kept breathing through a broke neck too, had to knock him in the brain box with the butt of my axe.” He ruminated a moment at his humane ways. “Could have been Jew Baach on that horse,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, nobody told me to do that. I just done it.”

Abe sat up on his elbows and looked at the tiny man.

Rutherford kept on. “And that same night, when your daddy stood in the road with Trent like they was friends, and the Beavers threw them snakes on me from the high porch, I didn’t go to no White Sulphur Springs like Trent ordered me to.” He shook his head. “Nossir, went to that old slope mine and tossed Vic Moon in there. First of many. And here you and your daddy always thought it was Trent that didn’t ship that body.”

Down the hall, Goldie could hear every word.

Taffy Reed had noted the tone in Rutherford’s far-off voice. He’d put his ear to the cracked-open door.

“How about we get down to it?” Rutherford said. “How about ole Jake?”

Abe stayed as he was, his arms beneath him tingling.

“People knew him and that Italian wasn’t just carpenter buddies.” All that Rutherford had kept to himself was blooming from his throat unchecked. “Me and Harold Beavers was on a bender, and we followed them nancies up in the woods.” He pointed upward toward nothing in particular and kept on. “I bet Harold he couldn’t hit your brother more than two out of three from a hundred yards off.” He laughed then. “Fuckin rifle jammed or he’d have took the other one too.”

Down the hall, Goldie had quit breathing. She saw, inside the darkness, the white of Taffy’s eye as he blinked and aimed his ear on the hall.

Rutherford gripped the iron of Abe’s cell door. He said, “Trent never spoke a word on ridding this world of Jake Baach. Jake wasn’t no more than a fart on the wind to Henry Trent.” He stuck his mouth between two bars. “And hasn’t nobody of import taken notice of you bein here neither,” he said. “And tomorrow I get to watch you and your woman drop, and there isn’t anybody but me left to run this whole place.” That very evening at dinner, he’d strangled the life from Rufus Beavers. They were arguing over the money they’d discovered as counterfeit when it escalated. He’d pinned the old man to the floor of Trent’s office and watched his eyes pop. He’d rolled Rufus up in a horsehair
rug and toted him to the shuttered bootleg slope mine, and there he’d dumped him down the three-hundred-foot hole.

Without a sound, Taffy Reed stepped into the darkened hall and cupped his ear.

“No more Rufus,” Rutherford said, “and pretty soon no more Fred Reed.”

Abe looked at the man. The lantern by his chair cast him bigger than he was and his shadow stretched long on the floor.

Rutherford stepped back from the bars. “Taffy!” he hollered. “I’m going home to bed! Come out here and watch this cocksucker!” He left a white-labeled pint of Chokoloskee whiskey by the chair.

On the straw mattress, Abe listened to the main door close, and when it did, he unclenched his fist. He unwrapped the pebble and read Tong’s coded note:

Luna in flight

Serpiente tucked tight

Taffy Reed stepped back in the embalming room for his lantern.

He walked past Goldie without swinging it. He set it down by the chair at cell one and took up the whiskey and drank. It nearly choked him. When he’d quit coughing, he said, “I’ve reconsidered.”