A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

“Not tonight.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No.” Abe pulled on his shirt cuffs. “But Jake,” he said, “I might soon play there every day, and if I do, the money will come back here and up to Hood House both. You can have all the tools and timber you want.” He knew his brother was happiest when he built. “Frame another house on the hill, and down here a proper stage, new card room.”

Jake shook his head. His cigar was burnt out again. “Trent won’t ever give you that,” he said.

“Like hell he won’t.”

After they’d stepped from the bedroom, Abe locked the door again. There was hollering from the storeroom downstairs. They descended.

Sam had dropped a two-gallon jar of pickled eggs. Thick sharp wedges of curled glass sat dead against the cold soak. Brinewater marked the floor in a hundred-point burst. Sam pushed a broom at the eggs, and they rolled, soft and lopsided on the dirty floor, brine-red, some of them split yellow. Sallie had the baby in the emptied maple carriage. She used it like a battering ram to open the swinging door and depart. She didn’t look at any of her boys.

Abe told Sam not to worry. As long as there were chickens, there’d be eggs, and as long as there were eggs, people would pickle them with beets, and the world would be a proper place.

He swung through the door, arrived at the stage in three long strides, and leapt upon it to take his rightful place beside his queen. The men at the foot of the stage nodded to him and he bent to shake the hands of twenty or more, patting their shoulders with his free hand. The week prior, a track liner had told another man that his poker luck had swung high since he’d shaken the hand of the Keystone Kid. Word got around.

Goldie said, “Get them hats up swine!” She was fixing to scale and shoot another round of cards. She fanned them in her left hand and took a wide stance. The men before her held their hats high, low, and sideways too. Abe got out of the way. He watched her right arm coil slow above the deck. The men went silent and still. Goldie pinched the first and sprung hard her wrist and elbow. Her fingers, on the follow-through, spread open like honeysuckle. Then came the sound from inside the hat’s crown, sharp and dull and full and empty all at once.

Abe closed his eyes and listened to the next and the next and the next after that. It was a sound he could listen to all night.

When she’d finished, she bowed and Abe stepped forward again and said, “And men, when you fish in those pockets for tips, see if you don’t come upon another thing too.”

And they did come upon another thing. “I’ll be durn,” one said to the other as they brought forth quarter-sized cuts of wood painted gold. “How in the hell?” one man wondered aloud, and indeed it was a mystery how Abe had gotten the little gold tokens into all of those various workingmen’s pockets.

“Each of those gold tokens was hand-cut by my brother Jake, who is practicing to become the finest carpenter these parts have known,” Abe told them, “and each of them is good for one beer at the bar.” They mumbled approval. “Men, be sure to tip generously, and keep coming back to A. L. Baach & Sons for all your social needs!”

They spewed what earnings they could spare at the coal bucket and moved as a mass to the bar, where Al and Jake and Big Bill worked to pull, pour, and serve every man who saddled and showed his wooden gold. While he worked, Al glared across the barroom at his middle boy.

Goldie poured the coal bucket’s contents into a big empty cigar box she’d brought over from Fat Ruth’s, where, when business was good, gentlemen callers went through a large box a night.

“What’s the take?” Abe asked her.

“Above average.” She fastened the box shut and tucked it in her armpit. “I want to hear about your card game,” she said. He wore a look she couldn’t read. She winked at him. “I want to get out of this get up too.”

Abe told her he could help with that and that his take was likewise above average. “Let’s get to the storeroom,” he said. He looked to the bar, where the more ambitious men were finishing their free beers. “Just watch a minute,” Abe told Goldie. “See if my plan works.”

And it did. He’d calculated that the men, upon swilling their gold-token good fortune, would be of a mind to have another. He knew that those coming off their shift would’ve stayed only long enough to see Goldie before they went home, cleaned themselves, and set out to behold the Alhambra. But plans could be changed. Now the men set their dented pewter mugs on the bar top, wiped their mouths, and pulled out their watches. “I reckon I’ve got time for one more,” they said, and they fished once again for coins that would lead them where they wanted to go.

“See that?” Abe said. Then he checked his own watch. “Now let’s get to gettin.” He pushed Goldie ahead of him and kissed at her neck when they got to the swinging doors. “We got time for me to show you a thing or two.”

But in the black damp of the storeroom, it was her who showed him. They’d long since found a corner place, between the wall and the floor safe.

She pushed him against the cold back wall. She set the box of coins on the waist-high safe and put her hand to his trousers and worked the buttons on his fly. He picked her up and set her on the safe. The cigar box dropped and sounded a tambourine call. “Leave it,” she said. She tugged at his belt and pulled down his waistband, and when her fingernail cut the pale skin at his hip, he paid no mind. He took off her crown and let it drop. She raised her arms and he skinned the cat and tossed aside the gold feed-sack. Underneath, long-legged underwear was ill-fitted and easily kicked free. He lifted her, one hand under her arm and the other at her thigh. They slowed then and stopped breathing until she had taken ahold and guided him in and pressed herself as close as she could. And it was like that for a moment before they remembered to breathe, and his forearms burned from holding her while she rolled her hips, quickening all the time, toes gripped against the cold panel wall.

They sat together on the gold feed-sack afterwards, and Abe lit a match and showed her the contract. She kissed him. She was pleased at the sight of the long, looping numbers, but she did not say so. She did not say anything, for as quick as they’d brought pleasure, those same numbers struck in her a strong and sudden premonition that life, for a time, would be splendor, and then Abe would be gone.

He burned his thumb and tossed the match. He lit another and showed her a twenty.

She tapped her knuckle on the safe behind her. “What’s in this thing?” she asked him.

“Dust.”

There was a pickled egg at the floorboard within Goldie’s reach. It caught the match’s light and shone pink and smooth. She leaned and reached for it. She blew off the dirt and ate it.

When they stepped from the storeroom, the men had cleared out. Goldie took up a dustpan and headed for her Daddy, who was sweeping by the door.

Jake dunked mugs in one tub and rinsed them in the next. Beside the tubs was the stack of little gold pieces he’d cut. He had ideas on putting a hole at their middles or branding their faces with a B.

Al stood over his rosewood cash box behind the bar. He sorted dimes from nickels and quarters from halves. He bagged them accordingly. He licked his thumb and rifled the notes and put them in an envelope. The count was high for a Wednesday.

Abe came up behind his Daddy slow and silent. “How’d we do?” he asked.

Al nodded. He closed the cashbox and turned around. “I want to come and choke you when I see the men with the gold, but too busy.” He tapped his finger to his forehead. “Now I see your plan.”

It was the first time the two had smiled at each other in a year.

“How many normally leave after Goldie throws the cards?” Abe asked him.

“You are a smart boy Abraham.”

“How many?”

“Half?”

“At least. They want to get where they’re going.” In conversation on games of confidence, Abe talked near as fast as he thought. “How many walked out that door tonight?”

“I imagine five—”

“None.” Abe reconsidered. “Well, one. But only if we count the over-served boy who snuck back in after you’d tossed him.”

“And then I toss him again.”

“There you go.” Abe watched his Daddy laugh. He joined him. “Can’t count one that doesn’t drink and been tossed,” he said. “And I’ll bet some ordered another after, and another after that, all the while talkin to each other about coming back tomorrow.”

Al felt old next to his middle boy. Small, too, for though Abe was not as thick-ribbed as his Daddy, he was two inches taller. He patted Abe’s shoulder. “Remember, Abraham,” he said, “Even the smart boys can listen once in a while.” He tapped his forehead again. “Even the big boys can get hurt.”

Al had just turned and picked up the cashbox when the door opened. It knocked hard against the head of Bill Toothman’s push broom.

Rutherford stepped inside. Behind him was Taffy Reed, Rutherford’s errand boy and son of Faro Fred. Taffy was a year younger than Abe. He was well above average at the card table and had come by his moniker there. For a nickel, the young man would roll up a shirtsleeve, straighten his arm, take the elbow skin between his fingers, and pull it down, a stretch of flesh some five inches in length, highly reminiscent of the elastic properties of chocolate taffy.

“Evenin Baaches,” Rutherford said. He gave a foul look to Bill Toothman who was next to him, twisting the broom handle back into the head.

“Evening Rutherford,” Al said. He put down the cashbox and took note of Rutherford’s sidearm, which seemed to have grown longer somehow. He watched the little man spit tobacco juice on his floor though there was a spittoon to his left.

At the bar, Rutherford climbed on a stool and Taffy Reed stood.

“I’m going to walk Daddy over,” Goldie told Abe. She kissed his neck, whispered that she’d be back, and took hold of Big Bill’s arm. The sweeping was done. Al had given her an extra two dollars for her Daddy.