Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

He said that L. D.’s help in the money endeavors would be much appreciated.

Rebecca Staples then seceded herself from the conversation. Its terminus was known, and its risk was death. She climbed onto the bed next to her boy Bob, who was the kind to roll out and hit the floor and holler out and keep on sleeping.

It was quiet.

To be certain he was understood, Abe said to Little Donnie, “The mark is Trent.”

“And Rutherford and Beavers too,” Goldie said. She watched the boy for tells.

He looked at one and then the other. “It’s a spirited undertaking,” he said.

“The touch on this is somethin else,” Abe said. “Take you two days to count it out. Big-faced red-seal notes, high-stacked.”

Goldie nodded her head. “High as your belt buckle,” she said.

“A quarter cut to each of us three,” Abe said. “The fourth is split by my associates traveling down from Baltimore.”

When the boy breathed in, he shook.

Abe looked at Goldie. He took his own slow inhale before he spoke again. “L. D.,” he said. “I know by the eyes, straightaway. I know who’s iron-hearted, and I know on top of that who’s on the wrong side.” The boy had eyes opposite his father’s. Abe hoped him ripe enough to ally himself accordingly. He held out his hand. “We can show you some things,” he said.

Little Donnie nodded. He put out his own and they shook.

Robert Staples kicked his short little legs straight and talked in his sleep. “They do,” he mumbled. “Tippy-top.”

Sam stepped out of the room for sustenance.

Abe stood and stretched his legs. He put a hand to the wardrobe where his money rested.

Goldie leaned forward in the bowback chair, elbows on her knees. She asked if Taffy Reed would be amenable to an endeavor such as theirs. Little Donnie said he couldn’t be sure, but that he doubted it. Taffy was like his daddy. He didn’t bite the hand. It was what she’d assumed, and it relieved her in fact, for she worried that trouble could stir should Abe and Taffy mix.

Goldie told Little Donnie that such a plan involved, at its conclusion, relocating. She said, “I will never love another place the way I love McDowell County, but there are times when what’s required is a journey.” She said the Baaches were planning for the possibility of a long one that didn’t ever circle back to Keystone.

Little Donnie indicated he wouldn’t mind relocating elsewhere.

“Good,” Goldie said. And she sat back again, and the spindles moaned at the touch of her ribs and shoulder blades. She called Rebecca over and told mother and son that the following would be required: supreme confidence, discipline, and endurance. She looked Rebecca in the eye and made her profess to stay off the opium and to mislead Rutherford as need be in order that they might all do their best work. “And if we tell you to tell Rutherford you’re going away for a while and you’re taking little Bob with you, then that’s what you do.” She looked Little Donnie in the eye and told him he too would have to mislead.

Abe spoke to Rebecca from where he stood. “I’ve got a man coming to town who makes a powder,” he said. “Eases you off the poppy.” Tony Thumbs had miracle cures for most any ailment, cures that had righted Abe’s own ship more times than he cared to count.

Sam brought up the big blue coffeepot, four straight cups, and a bowl of olives he’d soaked for a month in white whiskey. Taffy Reed had given him the idea. On a winter consideration collection, Taffy had indicated that his toothpicks were booze-pickled. Penny candy too. Licorice, caramels. Tobacco. Garden vegetables. Taffy would brine most anything in whiskey.

Abe sat down again. He sighed and smiled and took up a handful of olives. He tossed them in his open mouth and chewed. He told the story of the coming summer.

“I call it the double-sideways big con,” he said, tapping at the side of his head again. “It goes both ways and there will be a good bit of improvising on the side, but our mark will be certain of one thing all the way through.” Abe looked at Little Donnie straight and spoke in an even tone. “He’ll believe himself the superior confidence man to me, and you’ll keep him right on believing.”

The boy swallowed and kept his mouth shut.

“You’re our roper,” Abe told him. “An important job, but an easy one too if you listen when you need to listen and speak when you need to speak.”

The boy nodded.

Abe said he wouldn’t hold it against L. D. if he decided to double-cross him. “But you need to know, I played Trent already in his office, threw some short stack at him and watched him go soft. Gave him a whiff of the right woman.”

“Beatrice?”

Abe nodded.

Sam was too ambitious with a honk off his whiskey-coffee and regurgitated into his mouth with the croak and puff of a toad. He kept his lips shut tight and swallowed it back straightaway. “Pardon me,” he said.

Goldie laughed.

Abe went on.“Our inside men arrive shortly from Baltimore.” He spat four olive pits rapidly into an open hand. “You’re sitting above the big store right now.” He pointed to the floor beneath their feet. “We will revive this place. People will know of it for a hundred miles or more, and they will seek out its delights.” He pointed at Little Donnie. “But you’re not the entertainment, L. D. You are a player of cards.” He smiled. “You’ll nightly engage in a false game of high-stakes poker with men pretending to be someone they’re not.”

Sam poured coffee while Abe spoke slow and deliberate on such delicate matters as to convince Trent that Little Donnie was his roper, working his mark. It was enough to addle the mind.

There was talk of disguises and mirrors and paid actors and forged documents and false jewels.

They all listened to him.

The boy asked smart questions. Abe answered all but one, the boy’s last. “How did you manage to put your card in my bug?”

“That isn’t how it happened,” Abe said. He held out his hand. They shook.

Little Donnie Staples left that early morning a changed young man, and, as he was told to, he reported back to Henry Trent while Abe waited in the Alhambra’s fine lobby, small-talking with Talbert.

Trent was by then laid up with bad digestive troubles. A flop sweat was upon his temple. He was still and pale and centered on his wide cane-box mattress. He clutched his bedsheet. He could not figure what the boy was telling him. He said, “Abe is downstairs right now?”

“He is.”

“And he told you to ask me about all this?”

“He did.”

“Why doesn’t he ask me himself?”

“I gather he’s a little bit afraid of you. Doesn’t want to overstep his bounds too quick.”

It settled him a little to hear such a thing. He almost smiled. “And if I let you play there? How’s he cutting it?”

“I get three. You get forty-seven. He gets fifty.”

“Did he say what number he was looking to clear?”

“One hundred grand. Biggest mark will be a fella from Chicago owns some office buildings.”

“What kind of game is it?”

“Seven-card stud. The men will all be from Cincinnati and St. Louis and the like. Big money men. No buckwheaters, no chickens.”

Trent was having trouble following. The boy was using words that neither pleased his ear nor aided his thinking. He thought of sitting upright but didn’t. The clock on his bedside table metered the silence in cold clicks. He asked one of the many questions he had. “Why would they come to a ratshit West Virginia saloon to risk their holdings?”

Had little Donnie been running on ample sleep, he’d have answered quicker. As it was, he felt his throat closing, but he managed to push out the words. “I gather he’s been selling cards to these men for six years, and they are all of them hooked bad on the poker table.” He told Trent that Abe had recently wired the men and revealed what they’d always suspected — that he’d once been somebody. That he’d once been the Keystone Kid. Back then, like Rutherford and Harold Beavers and so many others, they’d wanted to play him but never had the chance. He’d disappeared. Now he was back. Now they could take him on right smack in the bowel of his own red-light boomtown.