Glenn Taylor - A Hanging at Cinder Bottom

Through his binoculars, he’d been watching Baach’s place from the ridge since the previous week’s all-night party. He’d told Trent he wanted badly to make arrests. No, the king had said, just as he had said to the idea of walking in on the secret game of seven-card stud. “Patience is a virtue,” Trent had reminded him, “even for the shortest of men.”

A woman lost a dollar at the monte table and stepped away to look skyward like everybody else.

A blackness had come upon the full edge of the big clear moon. Like sludge it moved across, wiping away the light so slow it was hard to notice. Men and women stepped onto balconies and leaned forward on the rail, their necks craned.

The guitar player picked an unrecognizable tune and howled like a dog.

When the moon seemed an oval, it began to turn red. Some went inside, afraid that such color hung death on those who watched. Others joined the guitar man and howled. There was much drinking and dancing on dirt and rooftop both.

The hysterical woman from the comet party screamed once again that she could see poison on the dust.

A man burst forth from Fat Ruth’s without his trousers fully on. He had looked out the window whilst thrusting away and seen the red-slit eye watching him. Now he ran up Wyoming Street with his waistband gripped in one hand, his shoes in another. He shouted in Greek and fell and cut his knuckles.

Tony Thumbs kept up his patter. “Chase that lady!” he called. “Ten will get you twenty!” Most ignored him in favor of the night sky’s show, but not Rutherford. From the dark trench alongside Fat Ruth’s where men were known to piss, he stepped to the monte table and laid down a twenty-dollar bill. “Twenty will get me forty?” he asked Tony Thumbs.

“If that’s your pleasure sir.” And he showed all three cards, slowing up on the queen, before he stacked and squeezed and showed them again.

“I want a new deck,” Rutherford told him. He stomped his boots to drop off the mud. He said, “I want Mexican style, flat on the board.”

“If that’s your pleasure sir,” Tony Thumbs said, and he made a sound with his lips like an angry squirrel, and Baz pulled a deck of cards from his checkered woolen vest. He bobbed his head and showed his teeth and handed the pack to his master, who told the little lawman, “Inspect them if you wish.”

“I do wish,” Rutherford said, and he stared for a time at the missing thumb. He fanned the cards and rubbed their backs and checked for marks or nicks. He pulled the queen of diamonds and the two black jacks. He handed them over and said, “Where you from Methuselah?”

Tony Thumbs showed the card fronts and then worked his hands as if they rode an unseen track. He kept them flat, no squeeze. “I’m not from Mexico,” he said, “but I know Mexican style.”

Rutherford paid him no mind. He was locked on that queen, his short-statured gaze at perfect level with the crate table’s top. When the old man quit his motion, Rutherford grinned at him and pointed to the middle card.

Tony Thumbs turned it. Jack of clubs. “Methuselah lives to turn another card,” he said. He took up the twenty-dollar bill and relayed it to Baz, who rolled it tight as a cigarette and stuck it in his lips and puffed. A few in the crowd laughed. Rutherford was not among them.

He turned and ignored the moon some more. He strode to the door of A. L. Baach & Sons and threw it open and spat on the floor. Black women danced with white men. White women danced with black men. Rutherford was of a mind to pull his pistol.

Tony Thumbs extinguished his lamps. He put out his hand and asked his monkey for their winnings. He told him to stay on the door.

Baz perched on a big empty telegraph spool outside the saloon. The long fingers of his feet gripped wood where someone had carved the outline of a naked woman.

Tony Thumbs stepped inside and located Rutherford. He tapped the little shoulder, and when Rutherford turned to face him, the rolled twenty was held in offering. “I didn’t intend to take it,” Tony Thumbs said. “I was just testing tendency. Some local lawmen will shut down an honest game of monte.”

Rutherford furrowed his brow. He said, “What in the Devil Anse are you talking about?”

“My name is Tony Sharpley,” Tony Thumbs said. “I manage stage talent, the big variety, and before I send my best acts to an untested town, as I will soon be doing here with Max and Beatrice, I always visit first and gauge the authorities.” He pulled a thick card from his breast pocket and handed it over. It read:

TONY SHARPLEY

PRODUCER, VARIETY THEATRE OWNER

57 GREAT JONES STREET, NEW YORK

Rutherford noted again the missing thumb. Stump skin had healed in a white bubble. He looked up at the old man and read his eyes.

A passing miner teetered and knocked into Rutherford with his hip. The lawman drew back and threw a straight right to the testicles, doubling the drunk, before he came round with the left and spilled him to the floor.

“Sweet Mary Magdalene,” Tony Thumbs said. “You, sir, are a pugilist of the noblest variety.”

Rutherford neither smiled nor came out of his stance.

“Allow me to buy you a drink,” Tony Thumbs said.

He did so, after they’d evicted two men from their barstools.

Tony Thumbs told Rutherford how delighted he was that Keystone had a chief of police like him, a man not looking to bust up an honest game of monte, a man who liked to play a little himself. “I cherish a town like Keystone,” Tony Thumbs said. “Dearly do I love a town where working men can spend their hard-earned money as they see fit.”

Sam was behind the counter. He poured the men their second and gave the nod to Chesh Whitt at the end of the bar.

Chesh walked the long way to the storeroom door and swung through. He gave the earlobe-pull signal to a young actor who’d been put on the door. Folks had started to refer to the secret game of poker therein as the Ashwood Wobbler. Abe had coined the term when he tired of shimming a loose corner leg on the cheap ashwood table.

The young man knocked his knuckles against the door in rhthym with the code he’d been shown. Inside, Goldie ceased her target practice and left twelve cards in the corkboard. The men sat up straight and watched her unbolt the lock. When she cracked it open, they all heard his words.

“Tiny is at the bar.”

Goldie took up a velvet satchel from the table. She opened it and brought out a pendant necklace. The cut glass was polished high to look like a big emerald diamond. She pushed it down between her breasts.

Back at the bar, Sam positioned himself so that he was in Rutherford’s line of sight.

Goldie approached him with a tray of empty tumblers in her hand. She tucked herself at counter’s end, set the tray on the bar, and called, “Samuel, six more.” He came over and poured. She leaned across so that she was close to him. She whispered gibberish. Her breasts pressed hard on the bartop.

Rutherford looked to the breasts immediately. They transfixed him. He nodded mechanical-like at the story Tony Thumbs spun.

“The more I think about it,” Tony Thumbs said, “the more July fourth seems a splendid day for Max and Beatrice to arrive.” He wrote the date on a fresh business card, fourth day of July , and next to it he wrote Mercurio’s arrival . Rutherford half-listened and smiled and took the card, staring all the while at the perfect full skin of Goldie Toothman’s cleavage.

She yanked forth the necklace and let it glint ever so quick in the lamplight. Sam took it and put it in his pocket, just as she’d shown him, and she whispered, with her lips forming carefully the words, “Abe said to look at it through your jeweler’s lens before you put it in the safe.”