by Glenn Taylor
Now she came into the clearing out of breath. Her feet were tired and even the sound of Ben and Agnes couldn’t lift the lilt at her middle. They exploded from the screen door in a burst of high-spirited calls and hinge-croak and wood-slap, and Goldie paused to watch them.
The cut grass seemed somehow wrong.
Sallie Baach was at the big table, stacking dishes. She leaned across it to fetch a butter knife and her back seized up, a charge coursing the muscles to the right of her spine.
Goldie did not move from her anonymous spot at woods’ edge. She watched Sallie stiffen and go still. She recognized the posture of pain from all those years her daddy had struck the same pose, but still, Goldie did not budge. She’d not offer assistance with the dishes or the infirmities of a body gone bad. She’d not engage Sallie in any sort of talk about the shame of leaving Keystone, of giving up Hood House land. They’d started such a conversation in the near-emptied barn two weeks prior, and Goldie had ignored Sallie then, listening instead to the soft bursts of wind from the long nostrils of Snippy the mediocre mare. Goldie could still lose herself in the darkwater eye of a horse, could still see things there. The last thing she’d heard Sallie say was that the world’s compass was set straight to hell, and no one, once there, could walk back out.
Now Goldie stood across the cut grass bald from the older woman, who’d straightened and turned to face her. It was quiet, not a crow to be found on any pine branch. They regarded each other before Sallie carried her load of smeared dishware back to the house she’d soon have to vacate.
How old she seemed then to Goldie.
BET YOUR LAST COPPER ON JACK
July 4, 1910
Before the sun rose, Cheshire Whitt had already taken care of the coupe. He’d already laid the McDowell Times Independence Day edition at the three doors in town that mattered most. Trent and the Beavers would awaken to the following headline: Boilermaker Jeffries or Galveston Giant Johnson—Who Will Wear the Crown? The article that followed was dry and bereft of humorous insight or mention of racial superiority. Chesh’s father had insisted on such a tone. “No need to salt what’s already boiling,” he’d said. It was more than money riding on this fight.
There was a quarter-page advertisement below the fold inviting all to come to the Union Social and Political Club, where a special telegraph line had been installed for round-by-round returns direct from ringside in Reno. Adjacent to this was a smaller advertisement proclaiming the arrival of the Sublime One, Max Mercurio, with his Beautiful Beatrice. Seats were already sold out for the opening-night show on July 6th.
On his way from the Alhambra to the bridge, Chesh saw, from a distance, the Baach family boarding the early morning train. The platform on either side of them was dark, but the porters had laid out two lanterns by which to load, and they lit the Baaches like footlights. Al carried little Ben. Sallie had an arm around Agnes. Sam stood motionless, nothing in his hands. Chesh regarded his friend. He knew Sam was loathe to leave.
Abe had forced his younger brother to go with the rest of them. “It’s your duty,” he’d told him.
The porters worked fast at the baggage car, lifting suitcases and shoving at iron-bottom trunks.
Before they boarded, the Baaches looked up at the hills they couldn’t see.
Agnes cried, a quiet whimper. No puppeteer had ever come to frighten and delight.
Chesh Whitt watched them step from platform to stair. He listened to the final boarding call. His pocketwatch told him it was a minute past five.
In less than twelve hours, his role would commence, and he wondered if Abe and Goldie’s plan might actually play out. Regardless, his job was easy. “Start a ruckus, whether Johnson loses or wins,” they’d told him. The beckoning of authority by way of drunken foolishness was a vocation with which Chesh was familiar. This time would no doubt prove different.
But Chesh Whitt knew one thing. The white fighter would never best Johnson, and his own celebratory whoops would come genuine.
At quarter past five, the sun still not up, Little Donnie stood in the back of Baach’s storeroom. He unlatched the steel arm and lifted it. The heavy door swung slow and quiet. Abe had oiled the hinges.
In the alley was Rutherford. He stepped inside carrying a lantern. Neither spoke as they moved to the barrel. Little Donnie lifted it and Rutherford crouched, swinging his lantern for a better look. Just as the boy had said, the floor safe bolts were no more. He’d undone them an hour before, as he’d told Trent and Rutherford he would.
They locked eyes and nodded, and he set back the barrel.
He pointed to a low shelf behind him. Rutherford held out his lantern.
Little Donnie shoved aside a sack of coffee to reveal a six-foot length of steel chain. The links were a half inch thick. Hitch hook on both ends.
He pointed to the corner, and Rutherford aimed his light at a four-foot warehouse hand-truck with a long steel nose.
When the time came, rolling away the safe would take no time at all.
They peeked from behind the shelves and stepped together to the pantry where the card-players-only piss bucket sat. Inside the tiny room, it smelled of ammonia and mold. Against the wall was an old Western washer with a broken crankshaft. Little Donnie lifted off the top and Rutherford swung his lamp. Tucked in the bottom corner were two .41 caliber double Derringers. Little Donnie opened the breech of each to show they were loaded and Rutherford noted the S&W on the rim. Guns tucked back in place, they stepped quiet from the piss pantry.
Back behind the shelves, they locked eyes and nodded once more, and Rutherford walked out the open door.
Little Donnie relatched the heavy arm and turned the key.
He let out the deepest breath he could ever remember taking.
The fight wire was spooled and ready on a temporary short pole by noon. Already it was eighty degrees or more, and men stood in the side yard of the Union Social and Political Club, some of them hatless and crowding under a wide tarp. It hung at an angle between the building and the chunk of brick chimney at yard’s middle. Beneath it, the telegraph operator sat at her relay board and tested the key spring. She fanned herself with a ledger book.
Taffy Reed surveyed from the open side-doorway. He estimated seventy men, most of them toting big money. Two-thirds were black. Proper coloreds, his father called them. The white men present were mostly politicians, there to glad-hand and get votes in the upcoming interim. They’d leave long before round one’s bell.
Two more police officers stood with their hands crossed at opposite corners of the yard. They were new on the force, former coke-yarders who’d come up from North Carolina two years before. Black men whom Taffy did not trust. The tall one was missing an eye. The short one had the chest of a woman. Fred Reed was paying them overtime to watch for trouble. “Any black man hollers too loud when Johnson wins, you shut him up,” Fred had said. “Remind him he claim to’ve bet on white.”
A man in overalls approached, pushing an iron-wheeled railroad dolly strapped with two crates of champagne. They were last-minute extras shipped in special from Norfolk.
Fred waved the man up the ramp fashioned from two-by-fours. When he’d told him where to put the crates and paid him his tip, Fred stepped to the open doorway and stood beside his son. Together, they watched as councilman J. T. Whitt stepped into the yard. He wore a tall Knox hat and tan bluchers. He smiled and nodded hello and asked each man he greeted, “Newspaper still to your liking?”
Fred leaned on his boy. “He knows he can’t win again, but here he is.”
Taffy nodded.
“Man don’t even take a drink,” Fred said.
They watched J. T. Whitt shake the hand of Harold Beavers.
“Now that man,” Fred said, pointing to Harold, “will win in a landslide.” He laughed a little. Shook his head. “He knows how to win. Knows you got to be crooked as a bucket of fish hooks.”
Taffy didn’t laugh. He’d heard that one before.
Fred pu
t his arm around his boy. “And we right there in that bucket boy,” he said. “We on the side that wins.”
Taffy half-listened. He wanted to go play a few hands of seven-card stud before he sat at the Wobbler that afternoon. He knew he was the second-best poker player in Keystone, but he’d never played the likes of Abe Baach, never been allowed at the Oak Slab. The Alhambra main room may have changed its no-negro policy, but the Oak Slab never would. It had long since loosened formalities, ceasing employment of a dealer in ’01, but no black man would ever be seated. The Ashwood Wobbler would be Taffy’s turn at the table.
Harold Beavers too had his mind on poker, but still, he kept right on glad-handing, working his way across the dry yard. He handed out slugs of his Chokoloskee whiskey. He put his arm around half the men present. “Call me Harry,” he said. He told several men how sharp he found their suits. To Mose Zaltzman, fat in a black tailcoat, he said, “Russia, that jacket is sharp as a rat’s turd in a glass of buttermilk.”
He’d had cards printed on quarter-inch stock, the following proclamation on the front:
VOTE FOR
HAROLD BEAVERS FOR
HOUSE OF DELEGATES
YOU WILL FIND MY NAME ON
THE REPUBLICAN TICKET AND YOUR VOTE
WILL BRING NOTHING BUT GOOD
Rufus and Trent sat on ladder chairs by the chimney chunk, the tarp low against their hats. They compared their leather-bound pipe cases. Trent’s was velvet-lined. Rufus preferred satin. “Doesn’t get stuck with crumbs,” he said.
Trent couldn’t get his mind off that morning’s transaction, a sale at which he’d not been present. “So everything came off without a hitch you say?” His voice was pinched. His stomach was ailing him again.
“There was old man Hood’s signature,” Rufus said, pointing to his lap, “and there was mine.” He’d met Goldie and the lawyer that morning at an office in Kimball, halfway to Welch. “The drive was more than pleasant,” Rufus said. “Very few bad spots along the way.” The road had finally been finished as far as Kimball, and it was the first time he’d tested his Oldsmobile at such distance.
He had not suspected for a moment that the lawyer was Mr. Taylor, the Wednesday regular at Fat Ruth Malindy’s, happy to draw up false papers for the madam of the sweetest cathouse he’d ever seen. Old man Hood’s signature on the power of attorney was forged by Abe. Taylor had handled the true sale of the property just two weeks before.
“And you put the deed in the safe?”
“How many times are you going to ask me that question?”
Trent took out his watch. “I best head next door to welcome Phil and them others,” he said. All men currently at the Oak Slab had been given notice of their impending eviction. They did not possess the city money of their coming replacements.
Rufus watched Taffy Reed carry a schoolroom blackboard from inside. It was the size of a front door. He set it against the bricks and laid out three lengths of chalk. The betting would be heavy.
Rufus cocked his head and studied the younger Reed’s movements. He said, “You think this is all going to come off this evening?”
“How do you mean?” Trent had already stood and taken a step.
“You think Rutherford and my brother can do what they say they can?”
“I do.”
“And you think Taffy Reed will sit pretty for it?” He still watched the young man where he stood at the blackboard, drawing columns with exceptional straightness.
“Taffy will never question Rutherford on a goddamn thing.”
Rufus wondered if it was true. “And you think your Little Donnie has been both thorough and wholly forthright?”
“I know he has. I raised that pup.”
Rufus coughed and snorted. Swallowed. He took off his hat and rubbed his head.
Trent didn’t like the last-minute inquisition. “I’ll say it again.” He lowered his voice. “Rutherford saw it with his own eyes just this morning.” He stared down at his old friend, who did not change his attitude. “The boy had unbolted the safe just like he told us.”
“You don’t think Abe might sniff something tonight?”
“So what if he does? He won’t have any protection on hand. Nobody’s packing a piece at his table—they frisk same as we do.”
Across the way, Harold laughed too loud at his own joke.
Trent kept on. “You’ll have eyes on the Oak Slab the whole time, and you’ll have Munchy and barkeep and Talbert too.”
“Fine lot.”
“They know how to fire a gun don’t they?”
Rufus said he supposed they did. “And you’re still planning to meet this magic man and his gal at the station, despite all that’s got to happen?”
“I am.”
Rufus put away his pipe and crossed his legs. He looked up at the man with whom he’d built Keystone. “And Goldie?”
“What about her?”
Rufus kept on looking.
“Brought it on herself, didn’t she?”
When Rufus didn’t answer, Trent walked away.
For the first time in two months, the barroom of A. L. Baach & Sons Saloon was empty. Only Abe and Goldie sat at the bar. The stage was empty, its gaslights cold.
“Doesn’t seem right,” Abe said, “Sam not behind the bar.” He recalled the day in April when he’d walked in on his brother like a ghost. “Saloon sharks won’t know the difference—he never did stomp one dead.” He thumbed a mug-bottom divot in the bar top.
Goldie held his other hand. “You did the right thing sending him off,” she said.
He nodded his head. It was full up again with ache, strongest at the base of his neck, and his left ear rang on and off. The night before, as he’d practiced his card manipulations in front of a mirror, he’d shut his eyes against the ringing, and when he’d opened them again, he saw in the mirror his hands, precise and mechanical as they front- and back-palmed and passed and fanned and riffled. He looked down to see his true hands motionless against the dresser top, while in the mirror they kept at their furious routine. He shut his eyes and shook his head and looked again. In the mirror, they moved. In the flesh, at the end of his wrists, they were motionless as death.
Goldie squeezed his fingers. “Samuel belongs with your mother and daddy,” she said.
He nodded again. From his jacket pocket he took out a paper sleeve. He unfolded its little triangles and tipped back his head and poured the powder on the back of his tongue. He swallowed and made a face.
“Go down easier with a little milk,” Goldie said.
He only smiled. The bitterness on his tongue nearly gagged him, but he’d found that Tony’s headache powders worked fastest when administered in such a dry fashion. The old man had added a new ingredient, a thing called curare he’d procured in Guyana. He said it might numb the pain Abe suffered.
The mantel clock under the Lincoln lithograph read quarter past one.
“We’d better get ready,” Abe said.
When they kissed, their eyes were open.
A knock came at the locked saloon door.
Abe cracked it open to find a tall Chinese man in a tan fedora and three-piece suit. “Abe Baach?” the man said, and he was taken aback. He recognized the face inside the saloon.
Abe didn’t answer. He moved his hand to the small of his back.
“My name is Ah Tong,” the man said. “My cousin is Gene Wan. I’ve come for the short-run puppet show.”
“You’re about three weeks too late.” Abe looked beyond him, where men bunched in front of the restaurant and whistled at the ladies going by.
“I apologize for my tardiness,” Ah Tong said. “I got in a little trouble the night I wired you my acceptance.” His chin was squared and his eyes genuine. “Had to pass a little time in the pokey,” he said. He’d cut and run during a prisoner transfer on Friday.
The cook across the lane threw his cigar in the dirt and tore off the undershirt he wore. He took a boxer’s stance and called out, “Ja
ck Johnson going to whip ole Jeff tonight boys!” and they cheered him hearty and loud.
Abe ignored them and took note of the Chinese man’s silver watch chain. “It’s too late,” he said. “You don’t want to be around here anyhow.” He nodded and pushed on the door.
Ah Tong stuck his foot in the channel. “Wait,” he said. He took out his billfold. He held forth two ten-dollar notes. “The booking fee you paid,” he said.
Abe cocked his head. “Keep it. Cost of travel.”
Tong put the money back and nodded. He said he was obliged. He thought a moment before he pulled back his shoe. He was on the lam and predisposed to keep things private, and he’d even thought on hiding out a few months in his cousin’s laundry storeroom. But as he stood there, it struck him how he knew the man behind the cracked saloon door, and it seemed too odd to let go. He swallowed before he spoke. “I saw you play cards once in the Bowery, back in April.” He’d taken note of the play that night, for even then he’d recognized the player. “You bottom-decked a fat rich man and cleaned him out, and I remember thinking I’d never seen mechanics like yours before. Smooth,” he said. “Like Canada Bill Jones.”
“Wasn’t me,” Abe said. “Got the wrong fella.” He wondered at the man’s angle.
“Professor Goodblood?” Tong said.
But when he pulled back his shoe, Abe shut the door in his face.
Tong turned and watched a woman dance in her underclothes behind the big front window of Fat Ruth Malindy’s. He struck a match and lit a cigarette and stepped past the empty spool table. He regarded the black men bunched across the street. The sign above their heads read Food Good and Cheap.
The cook put his undershirt back on. “What you lookin for Chinaman?” he said.
Tong didn’t answer, but walked on to his cousin’s laundry.
Cinder Bottom recalled the streets of his boyhood in Los Angeles. It recalled to him Calle de los Negros and the railyards where he once played hide-and-seek.
Jim Fort had not ever perspired before stage lights the way he perspired now at the Oak Slab. You are Chicago Phil, he repeated in his mind, eyes shut, cards on the table before him. He wished he’d played more poker on his free time, wished he’d drunk a little more courage that afternoon.
