by Glenn Taylor
She got up and came around and kissed him on the mouth, and it was to her liking.
He said, “The people here in southern West Virginia are the finest I have seen.”
“Just wait till I cook you supper.”
When Sallie made up her mind on something, it could not be unmade.
The twice-a-year preacher came through at Thanksgiving. He wed them at the Marrying Rock at two in the morning. A candlelight service, no witness in earshot but the crickets.
There were those who chattered about the couple, and Sallie’s family was among them, but from the start she was unenthralled with such talk. Those who would fault her love for a German Jew could go on and fault themselves silly. She had a boardinghouse to run.
Inside a year, she had a baby boy to rear, and inside another two she had a second. Her third boy came in ’83. There were easy years and hard, and when Hood House had no vacancy, the boys lived over the saloon. Each boy was free and lively and sweet, and each was trouble. The first was Jake and the last was Sam. The middle one they named Abraham.
WINTER
1897
QUEENS FULL OF FOURS
February 17, 1897
It was Wednesday. Snow had stuck to the mountaintop but not the road. It was the day on which a game of stud poker commenced in Keystone that would last thirteen years. It wasn’t intended to last that long. It was intended instead to carry in the kind of money most couldn’t tote, and it would do so in a quiet fashion, for the game itself was the only of that day’s events not publicized by handbill in the growing town. You must see the lobby to believe it, the papers said. Grand Opening. Alhambra Hotel. It was Henry Trent’s most ambitious project to date, a three-story brick building with four columns in front. He’d built it on the southwest bank of Elkhorn Creek, where the monied folk had moved.
Five men had been invited by courier to sit at the big stakes table. One of the five was Abe Baach, then seventeen years of age. Having already cleaned the pockets of the men at his daddy’s saloon, he had a reputation. Most had quit calling him Pretty Boy Baach in favor of the Keystone Kid.
The Kid whistled that stale February morning as he walked west on Bridge Street with his arm around his girl. Goldie Toothman whistled too, pressed against him tight for heat. She’d bought him a six-dollar gray overcoat for his birthday to match the stiff hat he wore. The coat was long, well-suited for Abe, who’d stretched to six foot two.
They stopped halfway across the bridge, and though his pocketwatch told him he was nearing late, Abe said he needed to spit in the creek. It was superstitious ritual, but neither of them was taking chances. They regarded the water below, rolling black over broken stones. Along the banks, it was frozen. Brittle-edged and thin and the color of rust.
“I’ll play quick and clean,” Abe said.
“I know you will.” She put her hands inside his coat button spaces for warmth. She kissed him at the collarbone and told him, “Don’t cross Mr. Trent.” She whispered, “Keep your temper.”
He locked his hands around her and squeezed. “Liable to freeze out here,” he said. Beneath her jacket she wore only an old gown. There had been little time for sleep the night before and no time for proper dressing that morning. Sleep came short and ended abrupt when cards and bottles turned till sunup.
Where the crowd grew thick, Abe and Goldie parted. Her daddy had taken ill again, and she’d have to see about his duties. Big Bill Toothman swept up and kept order at Fat Ruth Malindy’s, a boardinghouse-turned-whorehouse above which he and Goldie lived. Goldie’s mother had died giving birth to her, and Big Bill had raised her alone ever since, with no help from Fat Ruth Malindy, who was his sister-in-law. She was madam of the house and the meanest woman there ever was. So Big Bill got help from the Baaches, whose saloon sat directly across Wyoming Street, where Abe, from his second-story bedroom, had spent his boyhood kneeling at the sill over stolen card decks, knifing seals and opening wrappers like little gifts, shuffling and dealing and laying each suit out to study them. All the while, he waited for Goldie to look back at him from across the lane. From the time he was ten, he’d waited for her, and while he did, he memorized the squeezers from the New York Card Factory, emblazoned in cannons and cherubs and birds of prey and giant fish and satyrs and angelic, half-nude women who fanned themselves with miniature decks of cards. He stole a fine dip pen from his father and began marking them, even recreating their designs on newsprint, down to the tiniest line.
It was Christmas Eve 1892 that Goldie had looked him back.
Now he watched her return to the swinging bridge. He blew hot air into his cupped hands and moved at a fast clip up Railroad Avenue, sidestepping the crowd and walking, without hesitation, between the wide columns and into the kind of establishment only a boomtown could evidence.
The Alhambra’s lobby was indeed rich with curvature and girth. Through the right bank of mahogany double doors was a small auditorium, equipped with a fine stage. A purple felt grand drape hung behind it, a narrow row of gas footlights in front. They were lit for an ongoing opening-day tour of the facilities, and the children of the rich danced before their glow with spotlighted teeth, and one girl fell onto her fragile knees and cried.
At the back lobby wall, a man named Talbert recognized Abe and showed him around a card room with fourteen tables. Each one was covered in fine green billiard cloth. Iron pipes striped the high walls, and twenty or more jet burners lit the place with steady little flames that left no wall streaks. Abe was accustomed to the flat wick lamps at A. L. Baach and Sons, where kerosene smut marked every inch. Al Baach wasn’t concerned with decor. He was content to merely keep open the saloon he’d bought outright in 1891, for the great panic of ’93 had frightened him, and he’d not cleared sufficient money since to renovate.
Abe surveyed the men at their tables, the timid manner in which they moved their wrists and fingers, the slight shiver of their cigar tips.
The smell of good varnish was still on the air.
Talbert asked what his pleasure was.
Abe took the invitation from his pocket and showed it.
Talbert scratched at the mass of greasy hair on his head and squinted at the invitation card. On it was the embossed seal of a round table. “Why didn’t you show me this right off?” he asked. “You’re late.” He told Abe to follow.
They walked across the wide main card room and Talbert tapped five times at Trent’s office door before entering. Inside, it was empty. Wall-mounted gas lamps ran hot. He shut the door behind Abe and pointed to a second glass-paned door at the back. He said, “They’ve already gone through.” When Abe didn’t move, Talbert said, “Go on in.”
When he did, Abe found himself in a room lit by a single lamp. It hung on a hook above the middle of a great big round table fashioned from a white oak tree with a breast circumference of twenty and one-half feet. Four men stood around it talking and smoking. They wore suits. Trent and Rutherford stood in the corner next to a seated black man who was paring his fingernails with a penknife.
When the door was shut, Henry Trent said, “That makes five.”
Rutherford walked to Abe and held out his hand and said, “Buy-in.”
Abe took the fold of notes from his inside jacket pocket. Rutherford licked his thumb and counted five twenties and said to the black man, “Dealer take your seat and split a fresh deck.”
Abe took off his coat and hat and hung them on one of seven cast-iron coat trees lining the wall.
He and the other four card players took their seats around the table.
The dealer wore a black satin bow tie. His suspenders were embroidered in redbirds. His shirtsleeves were rolled and his fingernails were smooth as a shell. Abe had heard how good he was and had played once or twice with his son.
The man shuffled. He had fast mechanics and a soft touch. “I’m Faro Fred,” he said. “I’ll turn cards till I’m dead.”
Abe sized up the other men. Each of them he knew, whether by face or by name.
They had all heard of him.
Rutherford poured whiskey into a line of cut-glass tumblers with a bullseye design. He set one before each man. Then he sat down in a chair beside the cookstove and took out his chewing tobacco.
Trent said, “If you’re here, I don’t have to explain a whole lot.”
One of the men had a short-lived coughing fit. When he finished, Trent went on. “The game is pot-limit short stud.” He looked each man in the eye. “Go on and buy your chips.” He pointed to the orange glow inside the stove and told Rutherford to tend it, and then he sat down in the opposite corner to watch.
Abe admired the table’s girth and finish. He did not know that it was the very same table where his daddy had signed his name twenty years before. Do not sit down with Mr. Trent, Al Baach had told him. He does not speak in truths. Abe watched the dealer make his little column of chips and push it forward.
Faro Fred looked him in the eyes, as he did each man to whom he pushed chips soon to be thinned.
Abe straightened his stack and kissed the bottom chip and cracked his knuckles.
He played tight for the first two hours. If his hole card was jack or lower, he threw his two on the pile and spectated. He watched them lick their teeth and grimace and rub at their foreheads and take in their whiskey too quick. He noted the liars and the brass balls. He separated the inclinations of one man from another, and he catalogued who would try to outdraw him when he got what he was after. In the fourth hour, he won a little, twice, on a couple high pairs. Then he lay in wait another two.
His time came when the drunkest man with the deepest stack raised to the limit three straight rounds. Abe followed him where he was going, and when it came time to flip his hole card, with two pair showing, he turned over that droopy-eyed, flower-clutching queen.
“I’ll be damn,” Rutherford said. “Queens full of fours.”
It had taken Abe only six hours at the table to clean out the best stud poker man in all of McDowell County.
The man’s name was Floyd Staples, and he didn’t muck his cards straightaway. In fact, he flipped his own hole card, as if he believed his ace-high flush might somehow still prevail if only everyone could see all those spades. He watched Abe restack the chips. Staples’ eyes narrowed to nothing. He bit at his mustache and breathed heavy through his nose.
Floyd Staples was unbathed and living in the bottle, and his cardsmanship was slipping. That much was plain to all in the room.
He pointed across the table and said, “This boy is a cheat.”
Abe double-checked his stacks. He’d told Goldie he’d cash out if he got to four hundred. He stretched his back and said to the dealer, “I reckon I’ll cash out now.” He pushed his chips forward, and Faro Fred pulled them with a brass-handled cane.
“Three hundred and seventeen after the rake,” Fred said.
Trent opened a leather bank pouch and counted out the money.
Floyd Staples stood up and smacked the table with the flat of his hand. He looked from Abe to Henry Trent. “You going to let Jew cheaters run your tables?”
Abe stood up. He looked at the expanse of table between himself and Staples.
He straightened his shirt cuffs. He smiled and kept his temper.
It was quiet. Two men took out their watches and looked at their laps.
Rutherford stepped from the wall and handed Abe his winnings.
Abe nodded to him and peeled off two ones. He folded them one-handed, and on his way to the door, he slid them to Faro Fred, who had pitched the fastest cards Abe had ever seen.
It was then that Floyd Staples said, “Baach, I will fetch my rifle and shoot you in your goddamned face.”
Henry Trent quick-whistled a high signal.
Rutherford drew the hogleg from his holster and held it at his side. He told Abe to step back, and then he opened the office door and directed Floyd Staples into the light.
When the door shut behind them, Trent said, “Let’s us all just stretch our legs and visit a minute.”
And they did. They stood up and smoked. Abe spoke briefly with a man in octagonal spectacles who was more refined than his present company. He was not accustomed to threats of death and foot-long revolvers.
Rutherford stepped inside the room again. “He’ll be alright,” he said. “Talbert’ll get him a whore.” He swallowed tobacco juice and coughed into his hand.
Trent said, “Well he damn sure won’t play at this table ever again.” He gave Rutherford a look and turned to the other men. “I apologize for the unpleasantness. You gentlemen play as long as you like. I’ve got solid replacement players ready to rotate. Rutherford will pour your drinks and light your cigars, and if you are in need of company, he can arrange that too.” He put his big-knuckled hand on Abe’s shoulder, opened the door and said, “After you.”
Abe stepped into the office.
Before he followed him through, Trent bent to Faro Fred and whispered a question in his ear. Fred whispered back an answer.
The glass rattled when Trent shut the door behind him.
A two-blade palmetto fan hung from the ceiling on a tilt and did not spin. It was yet untethered to a turbine belt drive. Trent had plans to tether it by summer, when he’d salary a man just to turn the crank. The big bookcase was empty, its glass fronts showcasing nothing. Atop the case sat two cast-iron boxing glove bookends.
Abe sat where Trent pointed, a handsome chair with a green pillow cushion on the seat. It faced Trent’s double-top desk. He stood behind it and shook his head and laughed at the magnificent young man before him. Trent looked ten years younger than the sixty he was, but he knew his face had not ever carried Abe’s brand of chisel.
He opened a drawer and produced a clear glass bottle with no label. “Evening like this one calls for the best.” He set two glasses on a stack of ledgers and unstuck the cork. “You heard of Dorsett’s shine?”
Abe nodded that he had.
Trent smiled. There were two silver teeth in front. His brow had gone bulbous and so had his nose and chin. “You drank it?”
Abe nodded that he hadn’t. He’d only been to Matewan once. Dorsett’s shine didn’t much travel outside Mingo County.
Trent handed over a glass with little more than a splash inside. “Here’s to you,” he said. Then he drank his down and sat himself in a highback chair of leather punctuated by brass buttons. He coughed twice and took a deep breath and smiled.
Abe sniffed at the rim and smelled not a thing. He swallowed it and set the glass on desk’s edge. There was no burn, only a tingle below his bellybutton.
Trent lit his pipe. “Your daddy is a fine man,” he said.
Abe nodded that he was. He’d long since learned at the card table not to engage in the playing of conversational games, and he’d long since learned not to trust the man who’d promised his daddy a kind of wealth that was yet to arrive. Al Baach had developed a theory over the years that he’d been bamboozled from the start. Mr. Trent never wires red cent to Baltimore, Al Baach had told his boys. He never sends back Moon’s body. He knew this, he said, because Moon’s own son had told him in a letter. The son was grown now, a good successful boy, Al called him. He warned his boys to stay away from Keystone’s king, and mostly they listened. But Abe was tired of hearing folks complain. Every shop owner and whorehouse madam in Cinder Bottom coughed up Trent’s required monthly consideration with a smile. In exchange, the law left them mostly alone. Some whispered that there might come a time when Henry Trent was no more. Maybe, they whispered, somebody would shoot him, or maybe he’d get choked on a rabbit bone and cease to breathe. But no matter what they whispered, in public they all sang praises to his hotel and theater and all that he and the Beavers brothers had done for Keystone. When the bank had failed the people in ’93, Trent and the Beavers had not. They were the kind of men who kept their money in a safe. And for a while, they gave it out. After ’93, they took to collecting it with interest, and nobody ever had the gall not to pay when Rutherford came co
llecting. Trent did not himself venture to the other side of Elkhorn Creek any longer. He’d been heard to say that Cinder Bottom wasn’t fit for hogs to root.
The way Abe saw it, Trent could say what he wanted on the Bottom. He’d built it after all. And, the way Abe saw it, Trent knew the path to real money, and the rest of them didn’t. Abe was relatively young, but he saw a truth most could not. There wasn’t but one God, and he was the big-faced man on the big note. His likeness and his name changed with the years, but he maintained his high-collared posture, dead-eyed and yoked inside a circle, a red seal by his side.
He looked across the desk at the older man, who regarded him with humor.
“Your daddy was here in the early days,” Trent said. “He’ll get what’s due him.” He pointed his finger at Abe. “You tell ole Jew Baach I haven’t forgot.”
It was a name seldom used by that time, a relic of the days when Al was unique in his presumed religiosity. Now there was B’nai Israel on Pressman Hill, a tall stone synagogue equipped with a wide women’s balcony. Attendance was ample, though no Baach had ever stepped inside it. Abe wondered whether Trent even knew of such a place. He wondered whether Trent knew that if he hollered “Hey Jew” on Railroad Avenue, more than two or three would turn their head.
There were those who said Henry Trent’s mind was not what it once had been.
He poured another in his glass and raised it up. “To half-Jew Abe,” he said, “the Keystone Kid.” He stood and went to the corner. He told Abe to turn and face away, and when he’d done so, Trent spun the combination knob of a six-foot, three-thousand-pound safe. He opened the inside doors long enough to put five hundred back in his leather pouch, then he swung shut the safe, sat back down, and took out a sheet of paper and a silver dip pen. “You know I had my money on you,” he said. “Rufus did too. Rutherford had his on Staples, but I had a notion.” He signed his name to a line at the bottom of the sheet. “And do you know what Fred Reed just whispered in my ear?”
Abe nodded that he didn’t.
