A Hanging at Cinder Bottom. Glenn Taylor
had taken Abe only six hours at the table to clean out the best stud poker man in all of McDowell County.
The man’s name was Floyd Staples, and he didn’t muck his cards straightaway. In fact, he flipped his own hole card, as if he believed his ace-high flush might somehow still prevail if only everyone could see all those spades. He watched Abe restack the chips. Staples’ eyes narrowed to nothing. He bit at his mustache and breathed heavy through his nose.
Floyd Staples was unbathed and living in the bottle, and his cardsmanship was slipping. That much was plain to all in the room.
He pointed across the table and said, “This boy is a cheat.”
Abe double-checked his stacks. He’d told Goldie he’d cash out if he got to four hundred. He stretched his back and said to the dealer, “I reckon I’ll cash out now.” He pushed his chips forward, and Faro Fred pulled them with a brass-handled cane.
“Three hundred and seventeen after the rake,” Fred said.
Trent opened a leather bank pouch and counted out the money.
Floyd Staples stood up and smacked the table with the flat of his hand. He looked from Abe to Henry Trent. “You going to let Jew cheaters run your tables?”
Abe stood up. He looked at the expanse of table between himself and Staples.
He straightened his shirt cuffs. He smiled and kept his temper.
It was quiet. Two men took out their watches and looked at their laps.
Rutherford stepped from the wall and handed Abe his winnings.
Abe nodded to him and peeled off two ones. He folded them one-handed, and on his way to the door, he slid them to Faro Fred, who had pitched the fastest cards Abe had ever seen.
It was then that Floyd Staples said, “Baach, I will fetch my rifle and shoot you in your goddamned face.”
Henry Trent quick-whistled a high signal.
Rutherford drew the hogleg from his holster and held it at his side. He told Abe to step back, and then he opened the office door and directed Floyd Staples into the light.
When the door shut behind them, Trent said, “Let’s us all just stretch our legs and visit a minute.”
And they did. They stood up and smoked. Abe spoke briefly with a man in octagonal spectacles who was more refined than his present company. He was not accustomed to threats of death and foot-long revolvers.
Rutherford stepped inside the room again. “He’ll be alright,” he said. “Talbert’ll get him a whore.” He swallowed tobacco juice and coughed into his hand.
Trent said, “Well he damn sure won’t play at this table ever again.” He gave Rutherford a look and turned to the other men. “I apologize for the unpleasantness. You gentlemen play as long as you like. I’ve got solid replacement players ready to rotate. Rutherford will pour your drinks and light your cigars, and if you are in need of company, he can arrange that too.” He put his big-knuckled hand on Abe’s shoulder, opened the door and said, “After you.”
Abe stepped into the office.
Before he followed him through, Trent bent to Faro Fred and whispered a question in his ear. Fred whispered back an answer.
The glass rattled when Trent shut the door behind him.
A two-blade palmetto fan hung from the ceiling on a tilt and did not spin. It was yet untethered to a turbine belt drive. Trent had plans to tether it by summer, when he’d salary a man just to turn the crank. The big bookcase was empty, its glass fronts showcasing nothing. Atop the case sat two cast-iron boxing glove bookends.
Abe sat where Trent pointed, a handsome chair with a green pillow cushion on the seat. It faced Trent’s double- top desk. He stood behind it and shook his head and laughed at the magnificent young man before him. Trent looked ten years younger than the sixty he was, but he knew his face had not ever carried Abe’s brand of chisel.
He opened a drawer and produced a clear glass bottle with no label. “Evening like this one calls for the best.” He set two glasses on a stack of ledgers and unstuck the cork. “You heard of Dorsett’s shine?”
Abe nodded that he had.
Trent smiled. There were two silver teeth in front. His brow had gone bulbous and so had his nose and chin. “You drank it?”
Abe nodded that he hadn’t. He’d only been to Matewan once. Dorsett’s shine didn’t much travel outside Mingo County.
Trent handed over a glass with little more than a splash inside. “Here’s to you,” he said. Then he drank his down and sat himself in a highback chair of leather punctuated by brass buttons. He coughed twice and took a deep breath and smiled.
Abe sniffed at the rim and smelled not a thing. He swallowed it and set the glass on desk’s edge. There was no burn, only a tingle below his bellybutton.
Trent lit his pipe. “Your Daddy is a fine man,” he said.
Abe nodded that he was. He’d long since learned at the card table not to engage in the playing of conversational games, and he’d long since learned not to trust the man who’d promised his Daddy a kind of wealth that was yet to arrive. Al Baach had developed a theory over the years that he’d been bamboozled from the start. Mr. Trent never wires red cent to Baltimore, Al Baach had told his boys. He never sends back Moon’s body. He knew this, he said, because Moon’s own son had told him in a letter. The son was grown now, a good successful boy, Al called him. He warned his boys to stay away from Keystone’s king, and mostly they listened. But Abe was tired of hearing folks complain. Every shop owner and whorehouse madam in Cinder Bottom coughed up Trent’s required monthly consideration with a smile. In exchange, the law left them mostly alone. Some whispered that there might come a time when Henry Trent was no more. Maybe, they whispered, somebody would shoot him, or maybe he’d get choked on a rabbit bone and cease to breathe. But no matter what they whispered, in public they all sang praises to his hotel and theater and all that he and the Beavers brothers had done for Keystone. When the bank had failed the people in ’93, Trent and the Beavers had not. They were the kind of men who kept their money in a safe. And for a while, they gave it out. After ’93, they took to collecting it with interest, and nobody ever had the gall not to pay when Rutherford came collecting. Trent did not himself venture to the other side of Elkhorn Creek any longer. He’d been heard to say that Cinder Bottom wasn’t fit for hogs to root.
The way Abe saw it, Trent could say what he wanted on the Bottom. He’d built it after all. And, the way Abe saw it, Trent knew the path to real money, and the rest of them didn’t. Abe was relatively young, but he saw a truth most could not. There wasn’t but one God, and he was the big-faced man on the big note. His likeness and his name changed with the years, but he maintained his high-collared posture, dead-eyed and yoked inside a circle, a red seal by his side.
He looked across the desk at the older man, who regarded him with humor.
“Your Daddy was here in the early days,” Trent said. “He’ll get what’s due him.” He pointed his finger at Abe. “You tell ole Jew Baach I haven’t forgot.”
It was a name seldom used by that time, a relic of the days when Al was unique in his presumed religiosity. Now there was B’nai Israel on Pressman Hill, a tall stone synagogue equipped with a wide women’s balcony. Attendance was ample, though no Baach had ever stepped inside it. Abe wondered whether Trent even knew of such a place. He wondered whether Trent knew that if he hollered “Hey Jew” on Railroad Avenue, more than two or three would turn their head.
There were those who said Henry Trent’s mind was not what it once had been.
He poured another in his glass and raised it up. “To half-Jew Abe,” he said, “the Keystone Kid.” He stood and went to the corner. He told Abe to turn and face away, and when he’d done so, Trent spun the combination knob of a six-foot, three-thousand-pound