Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

“Of course,” Abe said.

But Trent would not run things by the Beavers brothers. He’d manage it all alone while they sunned themselves in Florida, and by the time they returned in June, he’d have locked up a hundred acres more. Prime acres of plateau land where homes could be built and folks with means could live high up from the filth below.

They shook hands.

Trent unlatched the arch doors on his liquor cabinet. He poured two whiskeys from a wide-bottom decanter. He raised his glass and said, “To half-Jew Abe, businessman and crippler of the knife-wielding.” He opened the door to the main card room and told Munchy to go on break. He stepped through and surveyed. “Too quiet,” he said.

Abe followed and they stood in the open and watched the singular table of men, and without taking his eyes off them, Trent said to Abe, “I’ve always liked your daddy. I never intended the bad blood and all that’s happened.” His eyes welled and his voice shook. He was not in full control of his sensibilities.

He cleared his throat and returned to his office, where he poured another and eyed the green-sealed card pack dancing in red devils. He took it up and walked back to Abe. He perched his foot on a rung of the fat man’s stool. “Look to be some fine cards,” he said.

Abe said that they were indeed. He listed of the towns and cities they supplied, all the way to San Francisco. He said, “And we supply a good many top magicians and sleight-of-hand artists too. Verner and Marlon, Mercurio and Andrews, and we—”

“Max Mercurio uses these cards?” He’d nearly choked mid-swallow.

“Uses them exclusively,” Abe said.

Trent thumbed the deck. “Do you know him?”

“We’ve shared a drink or two.” Abe had never met the man.

“Fine stage magician,” Trent said. “Doesn’t need all the bangs and flashes.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.”

The barkeep side-eyed them from his station and unclasped his hands. He was ever-ready to grab, if need be, the cut-barrel shotgun. It hung from a pair of broken-down hay hooks affixed to the underside of the bar.

Trent asked, “Do you know Mercurio’s gal?”

“Beatrice?”

“That’s the one.”

“Beatrice is a jewel. Doesn’t put on airs.”

There was a rising carbonation in Trent’s throatway. He didn’t know whether it was excitement over Beatrice the Beautiful or indigestion from that morning’s fatback and eggs. He said, “I saw the very same in her.”

The conversation was playing just as Abe had imagined it, and he did not miss a beat. “I wondered if they’d been down here. I haven’t spoken to Max in a while.”

“Well, they haven’t yet,” Trent said. “I met Beatrice only in passing once in New Orleans.” He’d met nothing more than her picture on a rectangle of newsprint. Four times since, he’d made written request of rates, but Mercurio had never returned his letters.

Abe suspected Max Mercurio would sooner be run through with a pig spit than come to Keystone. He said, “Well, the Alhambra’s first-class. I’m sure I could arrange it.”

And it was then that Henry Trent’s posture straightened. He looked at Abe with something akin to wonder.

“Max’s manager Tony is a friend of mine,” Abe said. “He’s got them in Melbourne, Australia right now, but I could wire him and see when they might be freed up for a short run. He owes me.”

Trent smiled big. His silver crowns were tarnished yellow and black.

There was a sharpness in his stride back to the liquor cabinet, where he poured another for Abe and told him they’d talk more soon. He was feeling nervous on Rutherford. “Take that one for the road,” he told Abe. He patted his back and sent him across the main room.

He watched him go and wondered at Abe’s angle and his skill in the art of lying. He could not figure what the young man had to gain from such a play. Sallie Baach’s father would finally sell, or he wouldn’t. Beatrice would come to town with Max Mercurio, or she wouldn’t. Either way, he was two thousand richer than he’d been at breakfast.

He wondered how he’d tell Rutherford about the return of the Keystone Kid, and he wondered, above all, how he’d keep the little man from killing him.

No sooner had he wondered than he ceased. He’d tell Rutherford that patience was a virtue. You only have to wait until the property is signed over, until Beatrice comes to town, he’d say. Or until the property isn’t signed over, until Beatrice doesn’t come to town. For a time, he’d say, patience. After that, tiny Rutherford, you can do what you will.

Abe fetched Snippy the mediocre mare before ten, and he rode her all the way to Mingo County. He used a snake whip and boot spurs both to make her go, and — following Elkhorn to Spice Creek, cutting through a thick-brush pass — he came into Matewan along the Tug River at midnight, a thirteen-hour ride. He cooled down the horse and hobbled and staked her at wood’s edge. He watered and fed her. Then he proceeded directly to the small clapboard home of Frank Dallara, where snakeskins hung like wind chimes from the front-porch roof. He stepped careful at the quiet spot on each porch riser, and turned the doorknob slow as any man ever turned one, and went inside and awakened Frank Dallara by tickling him at the nose with a crow feather.

When Dallara opened his eyes, there was the smooth nickel hole of the five-shot.38.

“I wonder if you’d join me for a walk outside,” Abe whispered.

Dallara carried a brass hinge lamp and they spoke cordially as they walked to their destination, a squat building backed up to Railroad Alley.

Abe told the man he meant him no harm. He told him he was only trying to find who’d killed his brother. Dallara understood. Abe asked him about the snakeskins.

“My boy Fred likes to catch snakes,” he said. “Him and another boy too.”

Abe learned from Dallara that his cousin Giuseppe was a strange and quiet man, a bricklayer and carpenter who pulled his flat cap low and kept his eyes on the ground. He’d not been born in the states like Frank Dallara had. Guiseppe had come from Torino to New York, but there was trouble, so he came to Mingo County, like his cousins before him, to mine coal. He’d quit midwinter. He had no tunneling in his bones, only building. When he walked to Keystone in February for work, he’d met Jake. “And here was a man could build near as good as him from what I know,” Frank Dallara said, “and that ain’t common. Giuseppe builds better than me, and I learned from my daddy, who framed and bricked that whole row right there.” He pointed to a two-story building across the tracks, lit sufficient by the near-full moon.

“I built that house you just woke me up in,” Dallara said.

When Abe asked him why he reckoned Giuseppe was locked up in Matewan instead of Keystone, Frank Dallara said, “Well, you ain’t got no judge down there do you?”

In the alley, it was pitch-black and winter cold. Abe leaned a hollow concrete block on its end against the wall. He got on top to see inside the single barred window of the Matewan Jail. On a table in the main hall, a wide kerosene lamp stayed lit overnight, casting thread-iron shadow on bare floor. Inside cell two, Giuseppe Dallara lay on a dirty stack of grain sacks. Abe fast-whistled four short bursts like a nuthatch bird and the man sat upright.

Giuseppe was hungry. He cocked his head to regard the man at the window square. A stranger, but his face marked him kin to Jake Baach.

Abe nodded to him and stepped down, and in his place was Frank.

Abe spoke to Frank Dallara, who listened and then said through the bars, “ Questo il fratello di Jake Baach. Vuole sapere se lo sparato .”