Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Abe had nearly decided on the coin when he made out the man’s box calf shoes. They were well-made and seldom worn. They disqualified him from charitable donation.

The streetlamp marked him average. He wore a brown wool suit and no hat. He was middle-aged. His head was bald. “May I have a word?” he said.

Abe stopped, hand still at his pocket. There was insufficient light to study the eyes, only flickering wide circles on the clay-brown brick. Abe said, “What is the word you wish to have?”

“God’s word,” the man said.

“I heard that one already.”

“Have you?” His voice was low and ragged.

“I have.” Abe stepped closer to him. The man’s face was slack and kind. There was something familiar about him. His left eye was hazel and his right was brown.

“Did you listen?”

“I did.”

“What did you hear?”

“Plop,” Abe said.

The man was puzzled. He cocked his head and asked, “Holy water?”

“Holy shit.”

The man laughed. His hands, which he’d kept crossed at the front, came apart and hung at his sides. “It’s the truth,” he said. “God is.”

Abe took out the half dollar and handed it to the man. “Is what?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Now Abe laughed. He told the man he’d not had such fine conversation since he didn’t know when.

The man nodded and smiled. “There is nothing without one, two, three,” he said. He pointed at the sky. “God is the comet.”

“What’s that you say about one, two, three?” His ears had pricked at the numerical point.

But the man, who had begun to feel something powerful, only rocked a little at the waist and kept time with his mind. “He has commenced his poison rain and cosmoplast.” He smiled. His teeth were yellow. He was preaching now. “They call this comet Halley,” he said, “but its name is Elohim.”

Abe looked up where he pointed. “Well,” he said. “I suppose it is.” He nodded to the man. “I’ve got to be on my way.”

The man said he had to be on his way too, and he nodded in return and walked south.

Abe looked where he’d stood. There was a picked mound of birdseed. The old heavy door of the flophouse was painted brown, a slop job, coat cracked by heat and the knuckles of undesirable men. The cracks revealed, here and there, a resolute blue. Above the door, someone had painted the street address on a brick. 123 . “I’ll be damn,” Abe said, and he looked up at the black iron staircase clutching four stories of brick and dark windows. Then he looked past the roofline at the low dark murk of clouds pushing toward the river, and he imagined the commencement of poison rain and cosmoplast. He could make out side-by-side drops as they neared, the first landing on the bridge of his nose and the next tapping his shoulder at the stitch. He imagined rain thick as syrup and the color of creek mud, and if it had been real, he knew somehow it would smell of grapefruit and rotten eggs.

He walked on to the apartment of his temporary woman.

She was awake. She ate sweet potato pie from the pan and told him she’d been waiting, that a man had come by with a telegram. Her toes were bloody from practicing her dance.

Abe said to her, “What man?”

She handed over the telegram.

RECEIVED at 195 Broadway 213 AM.

Baltimore Md Apr 20 — 10

A. L. Baach wires from Keystone “If son Abe alive tell him come home. Jake dying.”

Stay quiet here Come to docks Talk to Bushels.

Moon.

He went to the closet and unhung all his clothes in one swipe.

She’d never seen him move in such a manner. “Wait,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go home.”

She watched him pack his suitcase and pull rolls of money from spots she’d never known — a loose square of molding at the mantelpiece, a gouge at the dressing table’s kneehole.

“Who is Jake?”

He didn’t answer.

“You going to Baltimore right now?”

“Yes,” he answered, and in fact he was. He’d have to stop in Baltimore on the way home to put things in order. But she believed his home to be Baltimore.

“Joe,” she said. “Wait.”

She believed his name to be Joe.

She walked to the window. It faced west, and on the inside sill she kept a mint plant. She watered it twice a day and watched it from noon to half past, the only time afternoon sun fit between tenement roofs. “Wait,” she said again. She thumbed the little plant and picked a bright leaf, and chewed it to sweeten her breath, as she always did before they lay together on the Murphy bed.

When she turned, he was closing the door behind him.

It was his custom to leave while they slept, departing a woman’s abode in the night, his feet trained for silence. He’d left women in Atlantic City this way, and more in Savannah, Georgia. He’d left two behind in Richmond, and two more in Newport News. They’d known him not as Abe Baach, but instead as Joe Visross or Honey Bob Hill. Boony Runyon or Woodrow Peek. Sometimes they knew him for a month before he was gone, other times two or three. It all depended on the mark he was working, on how long it took him to take his touch. By the time they woke up, Abe was back in Baltimore, counting out twenties with Mr. Moon.

He’d never felt much in leaving them, never had given a second look to the beds in which they slept. They had enjoyed their time with him, he thought, and they’d get over him soon enough. It had been this way for most of his working years. He’d started out telling himself he’d go back to Keystone when he’d saved twenty thousand. Then he told himself forty. After a while, he didn’t tell himself a thing, and now, here he was.

It was nearly sunup by the time Abe boarded the westbound train out of Jersey City. He’d run from the ferry and climbed into the first car he could, its seats half full of swing shifters, most of them already asleep. He sat and watched a dusty tunnel worker doze, the man’s unshaven neck slack against his seatback.

Abe took out one of two full flasks he’d gathered at the apartment of his temporary woman. He drank from it and watched the sun’s orange glow split the horizon and squint the eyes of those still awake on the train. He took out a deck of cards and shuffled. Angel Backs, a discontinued line of cheap stock with little varnish, cherubs and wings and halos for adornment.

He thought of his old room above the saloon, the cards he’d laid on the windowsill.

He took out the telegram and looked at it again. Jake dying .

He tried to sleep.

Nine miles past Philadelphia, the train bucked at a slow turn and Abe caught a whiff of death rising off Delaware Bay. Morning sun lit up a window smudge left by a sleeping man with too much hair dressing.

He drank the last of his coffee. Across the aisle, a woman had the Philadelphia Inquirer spread before her. One headline read, Miracle cure for syphilis discovered . Abe knocked on the wood of his armrest. It was his own small miracle that his spigot had never leaked so much as a single hot drip. He read another headline. Islanders at Curacao spot Comet streaking overhead .

He checked his pocketwatch. He hadn’t slept more than a twenty-minute stretch in fifty-four hours. The minute hand appeared to bend and the white face went black for a moment. Abe blinked and shook his head. He turned the watch over. A man without the time is lost . He stuck it back in the pocket.

The woman with the newspaper possessed the ankles of an angel. An inch of skin shown between skirt hem and the top of her patent oxfords. Abe beheld that inch. He watched it bobble. He delighted in its map of pores and stubble, and he cleared his throat and said, “Miss?”