Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Taffy Reed knew Goldie well enough to recognize the look she was giving. He watched.

Goldie leaned down, put her lips at Rutherford’s malformed ear, and whispered, “If I see that dog tied again without water or shade, I’ll knot his lead around your tackle-sack and throw a pork chop in the road.” She reached out, still smiling, and took him by the hand. Around his wrist, she looped the little circle of rope and gave it a forceful tug. It hissed as it cinched, snapping snug to his wrist and appreciably illustrating her point.

Reed brought out a cast-iron pan half full of old water and set it on the floor. The dog quit whining and lapped away. Above him, Rutherford watched with glazed eyes.

Goldie walked to the girl on the drunk man’s lap. “Come with me sugar,” she said, taking the girl by the elbow.

Rutherford snorted again and came out of his stupor. He kicked the frying pan across the floor. It smacked the bar’s brass kickrail, loud as a dinner bell. The men playing cards turned their heads. “She don’t work for you!” Rutherford said.

Goldie ignored him and led the girl to the door.

He called after them, “You can’t just claim any whore you want.” He was tired of Goldie Toothman’s ways. He said, “I ain’t above shooting a woman in the back,” and drew a bicycle gun from his waist. “Most especially when she steals what belongs to me.”

Goldie turned to face him. “You a slave trader are you?” She let go the girl and walked right at him. “I haven’t seen her around here before. You bring her across state lines?” She sniffed twice at the air between them. “Smells to me like you been to Virginia.” She looked down at the little gun between them, took a step closer to it. “How about shooting a pregnant woman in the belly? You above that?” She took the wrist she’d cinched with rope, the same one clutching the revolver, and pulled it to her stomach. The short barrel pressed deep, just above her navel. The dog shivered at their feet, his whine reconvening.

“Hold on now,” Reed said. He was bent over the frying pan with a rag, oily water under his shoes. He held his hands up as if to plead for calm.

A man stood from the card table. His mustache curled into his mouth. “Rutherford,” he said, “Are you holding a gun to a pregnant woman?”

Rutherford recognized his position and said that no, he wasn’t doing any such thing. He pulled free of Goldie’s hold and dragged the dog to his original spot at the bar, retucking his gun as he went.

Goldie turned without a word and hooked the girl again by the elbow on the way out the door.

Just past the Machine Works they moved quick along the creek. Neither had spoken. A man used a barber’s pole to steady himself as he attempted to put one foot in front of the other. “My place is right over on Wyoming a ways,” Goldie told the girl.

They crossed the bridge and came into the Bottom. Goldie checked over her shoulder every twenty paces. They passed the Chinese laundry and arrived at Fat Ruth’s, its white recoat of paint grayed inside a day, its sign proclaiming Fat Ruth Malindys. Cheap Rooms .

There were those who’d advised Goldie to change the name, to make use of her own moniker, but she knew better.

They tucked inside the doorway. Goldie took the girl by the shoulders. “Rutherford bring you here from Virginia?” she asked her.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Yesterday evenin.”

“This is not the place for you,” Goldie told her.

Rutherford had brought in too-young girls before, twice a fourteen-year-old, usually on the occasion of Harold Beavers’ visits from Florida. Harold liked them young.

Goldie said, “I want you to go and set in that chaise lounge inside and think about how nice it’s going to be to go home and see your family.” She opened the screen door. “I’m going to keep watch for a spell, make sure he doesn’t track you.”

Before she went inside, the girl said, “You don’t look pregnant.”

“That’s because I’m not.”

Two women came out of the laundry carrying bundles. They were laughing over a joke they’d heard inside.

There was no indication that Rutherford had given chase.

Goldie looked upon the sign of the beat-up saloon across the street. Al Baach & Sons . She looked to the empty second-story window where he’d sat and watched her as a boy. The sun was low and hot. She put her hand to her brow and turned and looked up at her own window. She imagined herself there, pretending not to see the boy across the way.

She’d nearly forgotten what he looked like full-grown, but she knew that she’d soon find out. In her bones, she knew he wasn’t dead.

She went inside and nodded to a fine-suited lawyer from Welch who was exiting a first-floor room. He came every Wednesday at noon. Taylor was his name. He always wanted the same woman, a middle-aged gal called Wink from up at Kimball. Wink was far and away the stoutest of any at Fat Ruth’s, and she’d charmed the lawyer on his very first visit, recognizing the brand of want in his eye and proclaiming herself the one for him, the only one around who was, as she put it, “meat-boned and black as a tinker’s pot.”

The lawyer tipped his hat to Goldie, and, as was his custom, held out a strange old two-dollar note as he passed. “Your gratuity, Ms. Toothman,” he said, and she took it and told him much obliged. He sniffed a vase of purple laurels on his way to the door and proclaimed what he always proclaimed upon departure: “Sweetest cathouse I’ve ever seen.”

The Virginia girl looked at the floor.

Goldie stuck the money in her cleavage and stepped behind the front desk for a pencil and a slip of paper. “We’ll need to send your people a telegram,” she told the girl. “Tell em you’re on the way.” She licked the lead tip. “You got money enough for train fare?”

The girl shook her head no and looked like she might cry.

“There isn’t anything to cry over now,” Goldie told her. “I’ve got your fare and enough for something to eat too.”

The girl wiped at her eyes and tried to smile.

Goldie said, “Fried eggs taste better on a train.”

In Baltimore, Abe nearly ran from the station. He checked his watch and thought on all he had to do before he lit out again. He dropped his suitcase at his safe house on Camel Alley, locked it back up, and hit the street to collect from those who owed big. He pulled the brim of his hat low and walked up Poppleton Street to Harmony, where he knocked on the door of a crooked police officer who owed him two bills. The man was home. He paid up. He wore a woman’s red silk robe and slippers made of moosehide, and for the length of their short conversation in the doorway, he scratched at his stones. He told Abe, “Your man Buck got fished out of the Patapsco Sunday morning. He was scalped, had six slugs in his belly.”

Abe didn’t give a damn about a short-con goldbricker like Buck. He said, “I’m on the eight o’clock to Cincinnati.” It was a smart lie.

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.” If the man had ideas on double-crossing him, his chums could go sniff the wrong platform at the wrong hour.

He eyeballed Abe, then stuck his head out and surveyed the street. From the bedroom behind him, a woman shouted that she wanted her godforsaken peanut brittle. He paid her no mind. “Where are you headed now?”

“My woman’s place on Calhoun.” Another lie.

He didn’t go west, but east, stopping at Barnum’s Hotel to pick up three hundred from a laid-off B&O bookkeeper who scared easy. The bellman gave Abe a look on his way out.

He stuck to side streets and made his way to the wharf.