Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

The air in the hallway was stale. He listened for sounds from the stairway.

The red-haired boy was knocking at another door across the hall, calling, in a low tone, “I know you’re in there Lucille. I need me a bite of those ham biscuits.”

Abe cleared his throat in the doorway.

The boy looked at him over his shoulder. “Hello sir,” he said.

Abe wore a hard look at him until the boy’s face went red and he looked back to the door. He tapped it light with his knuckles.

Abe slammed shut his own door and his bedmate sat up. Only then did he recognize her face.

Her tittles hung pale-nippled. She was slight, and when folks remarked on the quality, she was known to say, “Fit me inside a peanut shell.” She’d cut her eyebrows in such a manner as to seem exotic, but it had not worked. Abe had made her acquaintance just four nights earlier at the Oak Slab Game. She was Princess Nina Gyro, the floating gal from Cyprus, though in truth, she was Nina Gill, born and bred in Des Plaines, Illinois. She was the latest lovely assistant and wife to the Great Gus George, stage magician. Gus George was getting old, but he’d played the Keiths once upon a time, and so Trent had hired him both to fill seats and to spite Abe, whose card manipulations, no matter their precision, dissatisfied the Alhambra theatergoers. Henry Trent had also hired Gus George because he’d seen a handbill with Princess Gyro’s likeness, and he’d said to himself that he must have that woman. He’d ripped up Abe’s stage contract right in front of him, and four nights prior, on the very day of Gus George’s arrival, Trent had signaled Abe to let the magician win at the table. But Abe would not fold to a man who took his job. He cleaned Gus out, and afterward Trent spoke to him as if he were a boy, saying, “You do like I tell you to do! Now magic man’s liable to powder out of here.”

Abe had lost his head then. With other men present, he’d stood and hollered in Trent’s face, “Your magic man owes me three hundred!”

Magic man still had not paid.

And here was his wife, naked on the bed.

“You need to get yourself dressed and clear out,” Abe told Nina Gyro. He put his hand against the window jamb and leaned hard. He looked up and down Railroad Avenue for Goldie, but a sweat had come on him, and his vision was not sharp.

Nina Gyro licked her lips and patted the mattress and said, “You need to shake off those breeches and bring back one-eyed Jack.”

Abe Baach would never put a hand on a woman in anger. No Baach boy ever would because their mother and daddy made it certain. But inside his foul-sweated skin, Abe knew that he might have to release his hand from the window jamb and let himself fall forward, clear through the glass and down to the road below. This he might have to do in order not to put a hand on the woman in his bed, for he was angry. She had ruined him.

He had never been with any but Goldie.

On the nightstand was a clear pint bottle and one teacup — broke-off handle, no saucer.

Abe walked closer to read what was scrawled in lip rouge oil on the bottle glass. It was difficult to make out at first. Balm of Gilead . He remembered then that he’d imbibed from it quite generously the night before. He’d stuck it in his pocket and walked straight to the Alhambra where he’d pounded the locked door to Trent’s office. He remembered being thrown out the side stage door by Rutherford and Taffy Reed, and in the alley was Nina Gyro. He’d called her husband a flea-circus man and told her, “that monkey tamer owes me.” She’d laughed, hooking her arm in his. They walked together to Faro Fred Reed’s club where Abe had his own back room. They passed the bottle and she’d whispered in his ear that she could suck the silver off a dime. After that, he remembered nothing, and this was not customary when drinking Dorsett’s moonshine.

He stepped to the bed and she reached for his fly. He slapped her hand and grabbed her by the arm. He did not squeeze.

She giggled.

“You put somethin in my drink?”

She giggled some more.

“Somebody tell you to put somethin in my drink?”

She looked him straight in the eyes and smiled the way she did onstage. When she could hold his stare no longer, she looked around the bed for a cigar. “Well handsome,” she said. “You put it in me again like you did awhile ago, and I’ll tell you.”

He let go of her and walked back to the window. He leaned there again and tried to narrow the number of men who’d pay a woman like that to do what she had done. A few came to mind.

Nina Gyro looked at the long hollow of his spine and the way he hung his head. He was the best-looking boy she’d ever tried to bed, and he’d shown himself to be, in relative terms, a gentleman. She believed that decency still had its tiny place in life. She shook her head at what she was about to do. “Listen to me bonny boy,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something, and after I tell you, I’m going to ask you something.” She opened the side-table drawer and took out a box of matches. “Then I’ll be on my way, and if you want to, you can give me a little something.”

There was a ball-knot at his sternum. He thought for the second time of putting himself through the window. “Just please clear out,” he said.

She stood from the bed and pulled on her undergarments. “Pumpkin, you didn’t put a thing in me,” she said. “I droppered the knockout juice at midnight and you was asleep in this bed by two.”

He didn’t move.

“I stripped you down, then myself, and then I got some winks.” A short cigar fell from her balled dress when she picked it off the ground. “Now we’re cookin,” she said. She lit it and drew deep.

He straightened then and faced her. He needed things made clear. “Are you telling me we did not engage in the act?”

She fixed the twisted bodice of her dress. “Smell your totem,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Smell it. Rub your fingers on it and snuff at your fingers.” She demonstrated with exaggerated hand gestures and boisterous nasal inhalations.

He did what she’d commanded. The stink was his own.

She could tell by the way of his eyes that he was not yet fully persuaded. “Pumpkin,” she told him. “I haven’t bathed in a week and a half. I’m what you’d call storm-cellar musty — you’d know if you’d been in there.”

And with that, there bloomed again within Abe’s blood a notion to fight on. He felt as good just then as he could remember ever feeling, and he was going straight to Goldie. He thought to clean up and then thought better — he’d not clean up and he’d get her to smell his totem as proof of his innocence.

Nina Gyro slipped on her shoes.

“Would you come with me to tell Goldie?” His notions, good ones and bad, were coming fast by then.

She laughed. “That’s not the deal. I’ve done a third of what I said I’d do — I told you something.” She squeezed a paper tube and put color on her lips and cheeks. Her cigar was nearly spent, but she did not mind its burn between her fingers. “Now I will ask you something, and then you will give me something, and that will be the last of you and me, you hear?”

“I hear.”

“What I want to ask is if there is any opium in this shit town, and if there is, would you point me to it.”

“There is and I will.” And on the back of a handbill for his canceled show, he drew her a map to Cinder Alley and told her to knock at the fourth door on the left — it would be blue — and to say the following when Mr. Wan answered: There is no doctor like old Doctor Go .

“Good.” She was as happy as she could be without the opium, which she’d not smoked in almost a week. “And if you want to give me a little something for my trouble,” she told him, “I would be obliged.”