Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

“Never stopped you before.” He’d watched her when he was just a little boy, hitching her skirt and kicking off her shoes. No saddle.

“You feedin her plenty?”

He nodded.

Goldie looked past him at Hood House. “You hungry?”

He was.

Inside the third-floor room of the red-haired boy, Floyd Staples sat on the bed. He played his harmonica for the entertainment of a prostitute he’d yet to pay. Its sound was lonesome and full.

“Where did you learn to play like that?” she asked him.

He did not answer but scratched his neck and looked to the door, which presently opened. The red-haired boy had traded in his towel for a fine suit. “They’re cleaning out his room,” he said.

“Pay this woman two dollars and a half,” Floyd Staples told him, and the boy produced a billfold and gave her three. She left without a word.

The red-haired boy was from Mingo County. He’d left the mines after only a year to make his living playing cards. He owed Floyd Staples seventy-two dollars.

“When you say they’re cleaning,” Floyd said, “you mean cleaning up or cleaning out?”

“Looks to me like he’s run his course.” He stuck out his chest and regarded himself in the dressing mirror. “That skinny nigger was out in the hall and I heard him say to the leprechaun what a shame it was, the Kid shed off like that.”

Staples snorted and swallowed. “Ain’t nothin you can do with bad blood except to let it,” he said. “Oak Slab don’t need him anymore. Bigger than he is.” He walked to the dressing table where he poured himself a drink. “Not too big for you though, is it boy?” He swallowed his whiskey and poured another and reclined on the bed with the tumbler atop his chest. He considered his banishment from the Oak Slab. He could still see that ace-high flush. “You got your invitation card tucked someplace safe?”

From inside his suit jacket, the red-haired boy produced a well-crafted forgery. The embossing was professional. Every grain of the table had been mimicked from the original. Talbert would be on the door, checking invitations, and his eyes weren’t what they used to be.

The red-haired boy had begun to wish he’d never met the man now lying on his bed, let alone lost to him at the card table. And his stomach had begun to seize anytime he thought of their plan for that night. He’d not spent much time around the likes of Floyd Staples, who, by any human standard, was plain bad. His clothes were in tatters. His beard had last been shaved two weeks on the right side, a month on the left. But he’d promised the kind of money the red-haired boy was after, and it was shortly in sight.

“What time is it?” Staples asked.

The boy checked his timepiece. “Half past four.”

“Your daddy’s accountant friend is tardy.”

“He’ll be here.”

“Let’s go over it again,” Staples said. “I want you to show me your every move after the cue.”

Abe was high up in the fly lines by nine o’clock. He was drunk, seated on the narrow board of the loading platform, legs dangling. In each hand he gripped a pair of dike pliers. He’d taken them from Jake’s big tool chest that evening, thumbing the edges of their jaws for sharpness. He’d not thought twice about stealing them, for his plan to find Goldie had failed, and as he drank, another plan took its place. Now he opened each cutter wide and readied them alongside the blackened wires the audience could not see. He waited for the offstage man to crank the winch. When he did, the crowd could be heard to applaud. Abe watched the wires climb, and when they’d stopped, he gripped each plier tight but did not yet squeeze.

Above him, rain beat the roof with a mighty sound. The storm had begun at sundown and showed no sign of letting up.

The house band was tucked on the floor stage left — the man on upright piano banged slow, joined by an old-timer on guitar and a girl sawing the fiddle. They played the snake-charmer tune in perfect time. Like a trance it filled the place and fought the rain’s drone.

Gus George called to the audience, “You see ladies and gentlemen, if I concentrate and position my hands just so, I can hold Princess Gyro on the very air. Indeed, I have made her float.”

Abe looked down. The top of George’s head was bald. Nina Gyro’s gown was white silk. Abe hummed the tune and tried to remember the words. He sang in a whisper, I will sing you a song, and it won’t be very long .

George went on, “Her trance is deep, ladies and gentlemen. Watch as I prove there is no mere mechanical trickery involved in such a—”

Abe squeezed both grips at once. The pop was loud and metallic, and the crowd gasped as the floating woman came down crooked and hard, blackened wires falling upon her white gown coiled, like rat snakes. Gus George shot a look to the loft, but all was darkness up there. All was shadow in the fly lines.

Abe spat from on high and walked fast across the platform to the small loft window, where he climbed through and ran down the backstage stairs. He elbowed hard the face of the winch man and made the side door in under a minute. He laughed as he went, for he’d shown them all. Magic was not real.

The door to the alleyway nearly clipped Floyd Staples when it swung. He drew his pistol on instinct and aimed it at the man who’d emerged. He could scarcely believe who it was. “I’ll be durn,” Floyd Staples said. “My luck gets better by the hour.”

Abe went still with his hands to his side. The awning above them roared and spit a fast leak. He tried to slow his breathing, and he frowned at the man before him with a gun, his mind unable to place him. His beard was uneven and the hair at the brim of his brown slouch hat was pasted to him by day-old sweat. “Floyd?” Abe said.

“I told you I’d git my money back boy.” He shook his head and smiled, his teeth the color of tree bark. “Are you runnin from the poker table? I thought you was out of that game.”

Abe could hear a ruckus growing inside. “Could you let me be on my way?”

Even over the rain, Floyd heard the shouts coming from the Alhambra crowd, and he didn’t like them. He wondered if the red-haired boy had bungled up the plan somehow and made a scene. “Why don’t we both be on our way together?” he said, and he shoved Abe back inside with his pistol.

He kept it pressed to Abe’s spine as they made their way past the winch man, who sat on the floor rubbing his head. They emerged from a stage door and maneuvered around the edge of the crowd, now in an uproar over the trickery to which they’d been subjected. They hollered at the downed magician and his lovely assistant, exposed in the heat of the footlights. “You God-damned quacksalver!” shouted a woman in a velvet hat. One man threw a green glass bottle, narrowly missing the bald crown of Gus George, who knelt over Nina Gyro where she lay, clutching her broken coccyx and screaming for a doctor.

Floyd steered Abe to the main card room unnoticed. They moved along the wall and stopped at the door to Trent’s office, where Talbert was on watch. He’d just lowered his newspaper, having caught wind of the ruckus, and he said, “Abe, what in hell is going on?” He paid no mind to either the man at Abe’s back nor Abe’s banishment from the Oak Slab, as was evidenced by what he said and did next. “Guard the door, will you Kid? I’ve got to go see about this noise.” He dropped his paper on his stool, mumbled about floodwater, and was gone.

Staples told Abe to open the office door and he did.

There was no one inside.