Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Abe told him, “Well Munchy, I was performing cunnilingus on a gal who turned out to have a greased bobtail trap in her pussy.”

“You were doing what?” Munchy said, but Abe never got to extrapolate because Talbert came back through the door and held it open and told Abe to go and sit by the desk, that Mr. Trent would be with him presently. They crossed in the same spot where Abe had knocked him off his stool all those years back, and Talbert nodded to him and said, “I wish you luck,” and closed the door again.

The office was quiet and Abe kept his eyes on the second door. He sat down in the same chair he’d sat in so many times before.

A fan hung from the ceiling and spun slow on a turbine belt drive. There was a half inch of dust on each wide blade. The black spade minute hand on the floor clock clicked to six. The desk lamp surged and hummed and the glass-fronted bookcase trembled at a slow passing train.

Henry Trent stepped into his office.

Abe stood.

Trent watched him and kept his hand on the knob as he back-shut the door. He wore no jacket. His white shirt was stained yellow at the armpits. Neck skin hung over his standing collar, and he’d dyed his hair black all the way down to the roothole, so that when he sweat from the forehead, it came out charcoal gray and puddled at the wrinkles running up-and-down and sideways both. He breathed deep through his nose and walked over. When he got within a foot, he stopped, stood with his big hands on his waist, and said nothing.

Abe held out his hand. “Mayor Trent,” he said. “I imagine you—”

“Did Talbert’s men pat you?”

“Yessir.”

Trent started to inquire about the thoroughness, but instead he took a handful of popcorn kernels from his pocket and threw them at the outer door.

Munchy came in and stood at attention.

“Pat him again,” Trent said, “and get on up in his armpits. Ankles too.”

Abe stood with his arms out and his stance wide again, looking Trent in the face while the fat man located the deck of cards Abe had wanted him to locate. He tossed it on the desk.

“Get in the crack of his ass,” Trent said.

When it was done, Munchy nodded that Abe was clean. He went back to his paper.

They sat across the wide desk from each other just as they had thirteen years before.

Trent took up the Devil Back package of cards and turned it over in his hand. He said, “I thought Talbert had lost his mind just now when he came in there and said what he said.” His posture in the highback chair was not what it once had been. “He had the tact to whisper it in my ear, but if Rutherford happens to leave his post in there and come through that door, he’s liable to tug his shooting iron and put six right through you.”

Abe dipped his hand in a hidden pocket and produced an envelope of money. He held it across the desk. “I hope you’ll find it satisfactory,” he said.

Trent took the envelope and fished out the notes and counted two thousand dollars.

Behind him, the bookcase still sat empty of books, its glass fronts obscured by flat neglect. Atop the case was the cast-iron boxing glove bookend with which Floyd Staples had crushed the skull of the red-headed boy.

Trent was thrown off by the money. He was suddenly dry-throated. He stacked it on top of the envelope. “Why did you come back here?” he asked.

“My brother Jake has died.”

“Shameful situation that one. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Abe shut his eyes for the briefest of moments, and in doing so, he imagined himself hurtling across the desk with his little nails between the fingers of his fists, punching at the eyes of Henry Trent, proclaiming all the while, This is what I do when I smell something wrong on a fella! Instead, he looked at Trent and said, “Doc Warble said blood infection from the slug.” He’d wondered if he’d be able to tell, when he finally sat with the man, whether or not Trent was carrying Jake’s demise. Now here he was, and Abe couldn’t smell a damn thing on him.

Trent said, “Sepsis. Bad luck.”

“The worst kind.”

“I hope you do not think me somehow complicit in Jake’s end.”

“If I thought that, would we be conversing like we are?”

Trent sniffed hard and stared back with eyes as dead as the worthless lobby men. He said, “I’d heard Jake had long since got the syphilis too.”

“These days,” Abe said, “there’s a miracle cure for that.”

Trent had not heard the news. He readied his hand next to the pistol tucked at the desk’s knee hole. “Don’t know if you caught wind,” he said, “but there’s some saying Jake and the Italian was engaged in homosexual relations.”

“Is that right?”

“Lovers’ quarrel.”

Abe swallowed. In his mind he heard her voice. Keep your temper . He looked at his hands. He kept his temper. “Mayor Trent,” he said. “I’ve done considerable growing up while I was away, and I’ve become a successful man of business.” He sat forward on his chair and looked Trent in the eye. “I’d like to apologize to you for my drunken and juvenile ways of old and for the pain I may have caused on the evening of my departure.” He cleared his throat. “I believe you know I was not involved with Floyd Staples, but I should have stopped him somehow.” He willed a look of remorse to his face.

From beyond the door, somebody at the big table told a good one and the men were made to laugh, loud and in unison.

Trent took his hand away from the concealed piece. He packed the bowl of his pipe and got it going. He regarded the younger man and remembered the way he once manipulated cards. “What line of work are you in?” he asked him.

“I am a salesman for the Big Sun Playing Card Company.”

“I’ve got my card supplier.”

“Course. I’m not looking to make a sale.”

“What is it that you want?”

Abe told him he wanted a new beginning. He said he aimed to stay awhile and help out his family, and that if it sat right with Trent, he would restore his daddy’s saloon to its former self. “I hope that two thousand will mean something to you,” he said. “I hope it might buy Daddy a few months respite from collection.” He said that such a respite would allow him to put the place in working order, and putting the place in working order would allow a decent living for his brother and more equitable footing for his father, who was injured at the knee and of the age to put his feet up once in a while. He said, “And I aim to bring my mother around on selling Hood House to you.”

“It’s the acreage I’m after.”

“Acreage too.”

The fan above spun and a piece of dust fell on the heavy desk between them, slow as the snowflakes Abe had seen that morning.

Henry Trent again turned the card deck over in his hands. He took long pulls on his pipe and said, “Goddamn Baaches. You took a five-year king’s run at the big table and shat on it, left your daddy to shovel up and pay the fiddler.” He licked his finger and stuck it in the bowl of his pipe. There was a small wet sound. “Your brother finally found the wise way to real money, and what did he do? He shat on it. Went prohibitionist, religified.” He shook his head. Baaches were hard to figure. “What happened to your face?” he asked.

“Ran across a man who could wield a blade.”

He nodded. He knew the type. “Did you give as good as you got?”

“Only thing he wields now is an invalid’s chair.”

Trent smiled.

Abe smiled back.

They stood and met at desk’s end, and Abe remembered what Goldie had said about the man’s volatile state. For a moment he wondered if a gun was to be pulled, but Trent instead raised up his fist and knocked pipe ash on it. He looked hard at Abe’s eyes before bending toward the wastebasket and blowing. He said he’d have to run things by the Beavers brothers.