A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (25 page)

At five, a yellow-haired Norwegian woman took the stage wearing only three bleached sand dollars held by kite string
over her unmentionables. She sat on a barstool with the handle of a thirty-inch handsaw gripped in her knees and pulled a cello’s bow across the back of the blade. It sang high weary lullabies until more than one silent man imagined he’d found his bride.

In the storeroom, behind a wall newly framed and bricked by Frank Dallara, a pretend game of seven-card stud proceeded slow and quiet. Three of the five men half-played their hands, but they didn’t give a damn about the outcome.

One of them steadily dozed. His shoulder twitched. He breathed through his mouth.

Little Donnie Staples was wayworn, and so it was easy to sleep upright in a hard-seat chair. In ordinary times, he worked his twenty-hour shift at the Oak Slab, slept for four, and was back at the table for another twenty, all the while winning, if he had a mind to. But these weren’t ordinary times. There were no four hours on a feather mattress. There was only a chair.

By then he was accustomed to hard-seat-chair-beds and big-city-actor talk and the lessons of a first-rate confidence man and his card-throwing woman. He’d even grown accustomed to the elaborate and constant predicting of another man’s whims.

For two weeks he’d been told two things about sleep: you can do it when you’re dead, and until then, you can do it in a chair for a half hour, twice nightly, between the hours of
five and seven
AM
. It had proved true, and Little Donnie had begun catching his double-thirty winks in a chair-bed, and he’d maintained control of his faculties sufficient to keep winning at the Oak Slab too.

He awoke from his straight nap to the sound of a comet-gas believer screaming, “I see it! I see it in the air dust!” He one-eyed his timepiece. He stretched and stood. Trent would be anxious for another report. Each morning, he told Trent and Rutherford how he still slow-roped the big mark, how he would keep alive his trickled losing streak until the mark pulled from his jacket the property deed Abe was sure he’d bring. They knew the Chicago mark as Phil, and they were after the man’s eight-story office building on West Superior Street. They knew him to be hooked on Keystone’s charms, and presently they would lure Chicago Phil to the Oak Slab, where they’d take more off his hands. They did not suspect the man was only a tale.

The yellow-haired Norwegian finished her set and lifted, ever so briefly, the twin sand dollars covering her nipples. She shot behind the curtain as the men whistled and hooted. Goldie emerged in her place and hollered to the crowd that Saw Girl would be here all week. She declared comet shots to be half price until seven. “You can sleep after you’re dead!” she called.

Behind the curtain, she took Saw Girl by the shoulders and said to her, “You only lift those sand dollars once, and you only do it at the end of the show. Then you get off quick.”

The girl had a condition that caused her to look through people and to not hear what they said to her. She nodded.

Goldie knew the girl spoke English. “You hear me?” she said.

“Do I not do it just the way you say already?” Even to her own ear, the voice was childish, but she went on anyway. “Do I not?”

The skin beneath her makeup was waxen. It was opium skin.

Goldie made a note to send Saw Girl packing. Back to Baltimore with money in her pocket.

On her way to the storeroom, she spotted Cheshire Whitt tending bar with Sam. She slipped him the write-up for the Sunday and Monday editions. She told him to take his post out front. Her step had spring. She noted the positions of Alva Smith and Rose Cantu, her two most educated ladies. Each was on the lap of a rich man at the main room’s poker table. Each batted her eyes slow for effect. On the promise of Goldie’s good money, Alva and Rose would play it this way for three hours, and then they’d slip out the back, replaced by Goldie’s next two smartest ladies, who’d do the same, and so on. There was no coitus whatsoever involved, and thusly it was a much-sought-after shift for the working girls of Fat Ruth Malindy’s. And the rich men from Bramwell and beyond could not wipe from their minds the pretty gals with the eyelashes who’d up and disappeared. It was enough to make a man come back to A. L. Baach & Sons Saloon. It was enough to make him tell his friends.

Goldie had found something lost to her a decade before. It was a spirited way of being, and it was better than before. Abe had learned in his years gone to tamp down those reckless habits that had previously sabotaged their livelihood. Now there was more thinking than drinking, more talking than fornicating, though all things in moderation were appreciated. It was the sureness of it all that she most favored. The ridiculous certainty that they would come out on top, alive. Only once had she made mention of their endeavor as something fraught with peril. “We might be between the hammer and the anvil on this one,” she’d said, and Abe had only kept doing what he was doing. He was practicing his card manipulations before a mirror, watching his own hands. He’d answered: “Well, lion’s got to roar.”

She met Little Donnie and Abe at the whiskey barrel in back of the storeroom. It was empty. It had a head but no bottom, and under it was the three-foot fireproof safe bolted to the storeroom floor, the same safe she and Abe had long ago retreated to in times of mutual need.

Abe handed Little Donnie an envelope with five thousand dollars inside. He’d retrieved it from under the wardrobe’s hidden slat that very morning, leaving little behind for cushion. He said to the boy, “Give it to him straightaway in his office, alone. Use those good ears of yours and that lazy eye too. Use the mirror if need be.”

Little Donnie had never held such thickness inside an envelope. “This is five thousand?” he asked.

“Tell him that’s fifty percent of our touch. Tell him he needs to cut your three from that.”

The boy nodded and put the envelope in his jacket’s inside pocket.

Goldie watched him close. She still could not understand why Abe wouldn’t accompany the boy on such an errand.

Abe said, “Tell him Chicago Phil left but said he’d be back in about a month. Tell him the man is hooked and he wants to sit once more against me here before he tries his hand at the Oak Slab. Tell him he’s bringing back bigger money and a building deed both.” He patted the head of the big hollow barrel. “Tell him there’s a safe in back under a barrel,” he said, “and that what’s in it grows nightly.”

Little Donnie committed it all to memory.

Abe had a headache. He touched at the healed spot over his ear where the pump knot had once resided. There came, at his touch, a roaring sound still.

Little Donnie watched him put his fingers to his head and work his jaw open and shut.

“You okay Abe?” he asked.

“Chesh Whitt is out front, armed,” Abe said. “He’ll tail you and make sure nobody tries to rob you on the way.” The young Whitt had proven eager to work whatever job they gave him. He liked the money and he didn’t ask questions.

Little Donnie said he needed to drain his bladder before he left. The sight of that much money made him nervous,
and when was nervous, he had to go. He stepped into the old pantry where the piss bucket resided.

They waited for him at the back.

Abe patted the boy on the shoulder, unlatched the door bar and lifted it, then turned the big lever key.

Outside, the sun was rising.

When the boy was gone, Goldie crouched at the false-bottom barrel. She pressed herself to its middle and wrapped her arms around and lifted it off the safe. She set it on the floor.

“Strong,” Abe said. “Well put together.”

She slid her drawers off over her stockings and shoes. She hopped on top of the safe and hiked her dress and spread apart her thighs.

“You been into the comet shots?” Abe asked her.

“I been into remembrance,” she said.

Rutherford paced the length of Trent’s office, eating the fifth of six pickled eggs. He did not care for the sound of Little Donnie’s voice. Rutherford’s strides were long as he could make them, soft so as not to agitate his bunions. He scratched at his chest as he paced. Bedbugs had roosted in the hair.

Trent leaned back in his big chair and counted the notes in the envelope. He shook his head. “Five thousand,” he
said. “The easy way. And this fella is coming back for more in a month?” He laughed. “Timing might work out. Rufus and Harold aren’t due back until June the twentieth.”

Rutherford quit pacing but kept scratching. His mouth was full of egg. “Why in the hell does it matter when the Beavers come home?” he said.

Trent answered. “I told you already. We’ve got to cushion them with the possibility of a second big touch and the Hood property both. They’ll not be happy with the Abe Baach development otherwise.”

The Beavers brothers were raising money in the Florida Everglades. They were celebrating Harold’s retirement from the slaughter of plume birds, and they’d be home in time to throw summer money at the September primary elections. The midterm meant council seats and new state delegates too.

Rutherford looked at Little Donnie, who looked at his shoes. “You best make this worth it,” he said.

Little Donnie looked at Rutherford, then Trent. He said, “There’s a safe in back of the storeroom, hidden under a barrel. It’s where they put the table winnings, which are growing considerable nightly.”

Trent and Rutherford shared a look. “That’s good work boy,” Trent said. He laid the five thousand on his desk, opened the top drawer, and took out a hand mirror. He raised his lip and regarded his teeth. There was a snag on the tip of his silver incisor. He’d cut his tongue on it twice
already. From the same open drawer he took out a long wood rasp that had belonged to Jake Baach. He placed it against the silver snag and filed it smooth. “Rutherford,” he said. “Excuse me and the boy for a moment.”

The tiny man slammed the door behind him.

Munchy was on his stool with the paper quartered in one hand and a pimiento cheese sandwich in the other. “What’s got you so hot?” he said.

Rutherford slapped the sandwich to the floor and wiped his fingers on Munchy’s coat sleeve. Four orange stripes dotted in red. “Shut your fuckin mouth fat man,” he said.

In the office, Trent stood and said, “For that kind of good work, I’ll give you a little more than three percent. Give you an even two hundred.” He counted it off the stack.

Then, as was customary, he asked Little Donnie to turn and face away while he opened the safe to deposit the forty-eight hundred. He blocked a direct view with his body.

The boy did as he was told, but he rolled that loose left eye as far to the socket corner as he could. He trained it on the wall-embedded junebug mirror he’d angled precise the night prior, and in that tiny mirror, he studied the spinning knob.

His other eye he shut to better hear the clicks.

A RADIANT AND BLOOD-RED ROOM

May 24, 1910

The night he met chief Rutherford, Tony Thumbs had been in Keystone for only two days, and he would leave inside a week. He’d stepped onto the depot platform Sunday afternoon, his rolling dresser trunk behind him, his white-faced capuchin monkey riding on top. The monkey’s name was Baz. He was forty-one years old, exactly half his master’s age. Tony Thumbs had bought him for nine dollars in Guyana from a British organ grinder with one tooth. On the platform at Keystone, Baz transacted with a small boy selling the last of his folded
McDowell Times
for three cents. The boy had smiled when the monkey handed him the pennies. Baz had smiled back and held open the paper in front of Tony Thumbs. The headline read:
Now You See It, Now You Don’t. The Moon Will Disappear on Tuesday Night
. “Good,” Tony Thumbs had told his monkey. “Very good.”

Tacked to the first telegraph pole they saw was a handbill proclaiming
You Can Still Sleep After You Are Dead. Come to A. L. Baach & Sons Saloon Tuesday Night and Watch the Moon Vanish
.

Now it was nearing midnight of that very Tuesday, and Baz the monkey stood on his pedestal in the street next to his master, who, despite his advanced age and having only one thumb, turned the fastest monte since Canada Bill Jones. He’d grown long the nails of his pinky fingers and used them for getting under the card’s surface. He used them too for scooping and snorting the homemade snuff he kept inside a silver necklace box.