A Hanging at Cinder Bottom. Glenn Taylor
“Rufus did too. Rutherford had his on Staples, but I had a notion.” He signed his name to a line at the bottom of the sheet. “And do you know what Fred Reed just whispered in my ear?”
Abe nodded that he didn’t.
“He said he’d not seen play like yours at the table since old George Devol.”
Abe had read Devol’s Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi nine times through. He’d kept it under his mattress since he was twelve years old, the same year he’d quit school for good. He said, “I aim to best Devol’s total table earnings fore I die.”
Trent laughed. “You aim to live to a hundred do you?”
“Forty ought to do.”
They looked each other in the face.
Trent pushed the paper across the desk. The pen rode on top and rolled as it went.
Abe looked at the figure Trent had written in the blank. $100.00.
“On top of what you take from the table after the rake, I’m prepared to offer you that number as a weekly salary.” He took out his pipe and lit it. “As long as you play like you did in there just now, and as long as you lose to the company men when I signal, I’ll cut you in on two percent of the house earnings, and I mean the tables and the take from stage shows too.” He puffed habitual to stoke the bowl, and his silver teeth flashed. “This hotel will be the shining diamond of the coalfields,” he said. “They will come from New York and New Orleans to sit at my tables and sleep in my beds, and I have a notion they will come to try and beat the Keystone Kid.”
The weekly salary was high—it guaranteed him more than five thousand dollars in one year’s time. But the house cut was low, and he didn’t like the word exclusive on the paper. He started to say as much, but the words hung up in his throat. He cleared it. He said, “Thank you Mr. Trent.”
They discussed his daily table hours and decided he’d think on it until the next morning. Trent produced a fold from his inside pocket and peeled off two and handed them to Abe as he stood from his chair. They were brown-seal big notes.
“For your trouble today,” Trent said.
They shook hands and nodded. Abe excused himself and headed to the lavatory just outside the office, where he stood and breathed deep before putting the money in his boots. For three years, Al Baach had fitted the insoles of his growing middle boy with a thick strip of leather, and he’d told him once, “If you win another man’s money, you put it under there. Then you keep your eyes open.”
He walked through the main card room, past the poor suckers who’d never get ahead, and then through the big lobby, past those busy figuring how they could afford the nightly rate, and despite himself, he could not keep from smiling.
Rufus Beavers stood on the staircase landing. He watched the boy smile and knew he’d lived up to his name at the table. He recognized something in the gait of Abe Baach, something his brother possessed. A sureness. A propulsion that had taken his brother all the way to Florida’s tip, from where he sent home money and word of adventure.
Rufus made his way to Trent’s office, where he found his associate shaking the hands of well-dressed replacement players on their way through the second door. When they were alone, Rufus told him, “Ease up on the Kid’s Daddy. No more collecting.”
Trent furrowed his brow.
“Got to keep Jew Baach happy,” Rufus said. “Otherwise, the Kid will have cause to cross you.”
Trent said, “Having the cause don’t mean having the clock weights.”
Rufus eyed a cigar box on the desk. Its seal was unfamiliar to him. “I wouldn’t bet against the boy’s nerve,” he said. “We’ll need a Jew on council who’s friendly to liquor anyhow, and that boy’s Daddy slings many a whiskey.”
“You plannin to court the Jew vote and the colored too?”
Rufus tried to read the words on the box. Regalias Imperiales. “You know another way?” he asked. “Go outside and look around. Stand there and lick your finger and hold it up. See if you don’t know what way the wind blows.” He opened the lid and took out a long dark cigar. He smelled it and put it back.
Abe had stepped outside the Alhambra’s main doors and was rubbing at the folded contract in his pocket when he noticed Floyd Staples across the way.
Snow fell. Slow, bloated flakes. Staples leaned against the slats of the general store, eyeballing. “I’ll git my money back Baach,” he hollered.
Rebecca Staples stepped from the big door at Floyd’s left. She was one of his two women, a lady of the evening who had worked for a time at Fat Ruth’s. She held their little boy by the hand and he cried and dragged his feet. “I want hard candy,” he wailed. Floyd Staples grabbed him away from the woman and smacked his cheek so hard it echoed.
Abe knew the boy. Donald was his name. Goldie sometimes babysat him on Saturday nights.
He grit his teeth and had a notion to walk over and stab Floyd Staples right then with the dagger he kept in his vest pocket. But he knew better. He’d leave that job to someone else, for surely someone else would have the same notion and the wherewithal to act on it too.
Keep your temper, Goldie had told him, and he aimed to.
The boy, who was only four, went quiet and followed his mother and Daddy, a whore and a drunk, onto a sidestreet where a new apothecary was being built.
Abe walked fast to the bridge, where he stopped long enough to spit at the middle and then kept on, smiling at folks who waved or said hello, nearly jogging when he reached the back of the Bottom. He slowed at the corner of Dunbar and a lane as yet unnamed, a spot folks had begun to call Dunbar and Ruth on account of the wide reputation of Fat Ruth Malindy’s fine-looking ladies.
The snow had quit. There was a wide dull glow of orange behind low scanty clouds. The glow sat slow on the ridge, and the square tops of storefronts lay in shroud.
A black boy walked toward Abe with a canvas bag strung bandolier-style across his skinny middle. “Evenin edition!” he called. “McDowell Times evenin edition!”
Abe fished three pennies from his pocket and held them out.
“Nickel,” the boy said.
Abe regarded his wiry frame. He looked to be about ten years old. “Since when?”
“Since my Daddy proclaimed it so.” He wore a serious look.
Abe put back his pennies and handed over a nickel. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Cheshire,” the boy said.
“Like the cat.”
He only stared.
“From the children’s book,” Abe said. “But you haven’t smiled once.”
Chesh Whitt didn’t read books for children, but he knew who he was talking to. He’d known from twenty yards off. And he’d rehearsed in a mirror how he’d be when he met the Keystone Kid. He’d be poker-faced with a knack for making money.
“Boy your age ought not be in the Bottom after sundown,” Abe told him before he walked on.
The men gathered out front of his Daddy’s saloon were white and black and Italian and Hungarian and Polish. Some were coming up from the mines and some were on their way down. All were laughing loud at a joke about the limp-dick Welsh foreman with a habit of calling them cow ponies.
A fellow who could not focus his eyes nodded loose at Abe. “I got a good one for you,” he said.
“I heard that one already,” Abe answered. He went inside.
It was an average crowd for Wednesday shift change. A single card game ran at the back, a Russian grocery owner named Zaltzman the only man of six in a suit.