by Glenn Taylor
I built that home on Hood Hill Plateau in 1851. I meant it to be a meeting ground for the preachers of God’s good word. It burned to the ground on July the seventh.
The dirt still smoldered when Oswald Ladd and his daddy arrived from Virginia. They left inside a day, afraid for their lives. They’d found that Keystone was in an uproar over the death of their mayor. The circuit judge wore hatred in his eyes and the tiny police chief had told them he cared little for their property deed, and they’d do best to clear off before dark. Sallie cried at the words her daddy had written. She thought often to go and find her Samuel back home, to go too in the ground with the others she’d borne. To go on finally and rest.
Abe and Goldie had stayed five nights at the Maine Avenue home. He’d proposed marriage to her at a boardwalk cafe. She’d smiled then, even lost some of the ache she’d felt since the foul business with Munchy back in Keystone. Still, when Abe left Atlantic City for Baltimore on the eleventh, Goldie had refused to stay at the shore as planned. He went back primarily to line up work for Chesh and Talbert and Rose Cantu, who’d taken to Baltimore right off. When Abe told her it was safer in Atlantic City, Goldie had said, “I’ll die at your side just the same as I’ll live.”
Now they sat where dead fish and chicken-wire bobbed, and the foghorns blew back at the B&O whistles.
He watched her watch the water. He rubbed at her back.
Presently, he felt a rumble in the pier boards beneath him. He turned to see Bushel-Heap Lou McKill walking in their direction, lamp in his grip, another man at his side.
Abe stood to meet them. The man was familiar. A black fellow, tall and thin. He wore a glass eye where once none had been.
“Fella here come up from Keystone,” Bushels said. “Won’t say much other than he needs to speak with you.”
A fluttering commenced at Goldie’s middle.
“You check to see if he came alone?” Abe asked.
“Already backtracked and lit up the crannies.”
Together, they walked to the warehouse. The Radiant Moon sign had been painted over. Coming Soon! the bricks read, Chambers Automobiles!
Inside, the place was emptied, stripped of presses and cutters and long table lines of wrapper assemblage. The four of them stood beneath a single electric bulb tacked to the ceiling in Moon’s empty office.
The tall officer from Keystone took an envelope from his pocket and handed it over.
The photograph nearly fell to the floor when Abe opened the letter. He had not yet read its greeting when he saw his brother’s face in black and white, the eyes both swollen shut, the lips split and sunken where teeth no longer rooted.
A sound came up from deep inside him and he bent a little at the waist.
Goldie turned away. “Oh Samuel,” she said.
The letter was penned in an unfamiliar script. Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman, you have two days from receipt of this letter to return to Keystone to face the crimes of murdering officer Munchy Briles and Mayor Henry Trent. You shall bring with you what you have stolen. The man on delivery of this letter shall not be harmed and shall travel alone before you to advise. If you fail to surrender within two day’s time, Sam Baach will be hung by the neck until dead. If you surrender within two day’s time, he will be set free.
Abe looked at the glass-eyed man, who shook where he stood, pointy-shouldered in a white shirt he’d sweated through.
“Rutherford is whittled down all the way to you?” Abe said. He’d gotten word from Chicago and New York of what had happened to the others who’d tracked him. On July 16th, Harold Beavers had ventured alone and drunk to the office building at 1 Superior Street. It sat across the lane from the Cathedral of the Holy Name, and before he’d stepped inside 1 Superior, Harold had looked up at the spire, two hundred feet above. He’d hesitated, then entered the squat building through the front door, expecting to see secretaries and spectacled types with pencils behind their ears. Instead, he found himself in a smoke-filled lounge of pitiless men playing pocket billiards. He’d said, “I’m looking for Phil,” and the ones who were bent across the felt had straightened and stared him down, and the ones leaning at the wall had put their hands inside their coat. When Harold Beavers moved his own hand to the small of his back, they drew down and fired all at once. They were not the timid kind. They spent their days at 1 Superior Street, headquarters of Dropsy Phil O’Banyon’s North Side Gang. The bullet hole in Harold’s manhood had barely scabbed black when they filled him with fifty more.
Abe studied the tall man’s real eye. “I know you,” he said. “You’re the first fella I met when I came home in April. Believe I gave you a silver dollar.”
The man’s breathing turned quick. He looked to his right at the giant.
“How’s your short friend?” Abe asked him. “One with the titties?”
“Dead,” the man answered, but Abe already knew.
When Harold Beavers had sent no word from Chicago for three days, Rufus tasked the short tittied man to New York, for he was wholly unintimidated by a producer’s lair. But 57 Great Jones Street was no variety theater. In truth, it was home to Little Naples Saloon, and when the short Keystone officer turned up there, having drunk considerable courage to run his mouth, Paul Vaccarelli himself pulled his piece, and he shot the tittied man through the cartilage of his nose.
The glass-eyed man’s tremble had increased and he feared he’d wet his pants. “I’m just a messenger,” he managed. He’d been drunk when he agreed to do it. Rutherford had paid him two fifty-dollar notes.
The lightbulb was hot above them.
Abe said, “You ought to consider how you align yourself in this life. You tell that to Taffy Reed and the other police too.” He folded the letter around the photograph of Sam. He took out his watch. “You tell Rutherford and Rufus Beavers that I will do what’s been asked. But I will come alone.”
“No,” Goldie said. “That’s not right.” Her voice was quiet but sure.
Abe did not look in her direction. He stared hard at the glass eye and said again, “I’ll be traveling alone.”
The man started to speak. He’d been given a script which demanded that both of the accused answer for their crimes. A witness had said with certainty that it was Goldie who’d shot Munchy Briles. Now the man could not remember what he’d rehearsed on the train.
Goldie said, “You tell them all that two of us are coming home.”
Abe looked where she stood. She wore no expression. He remembered what she’d said on the docks. I’ll die at your side just the same as I’ll live. He winked at her and went on. “Tell them we will come with one man watching to be sure they hold up their end. We’ll step off the train when we see Sam step on it, alone.”
The man stood there nodding, his tremble subsiding.
Abe left the office and whistled at the head of the stairs.
When he stepped back inside, another man was with him, the kind who took jobs no one else would touch. “One-Eye,” Abe said, “this is Anchors. He’s going to follow you to the station, ten paces behind the whole way.” Anchors wore a scowl. He’d been too long in the sun. Abe went on. “He totes a police revolver, and if he sees any other with you, he’ll slap it out and lay you down.”
“I come alone,” the tall man said, “all the way.” It was the truth. Keystone could not spare the men.
Abe believed him.
The lightbulb surged. From out on the water, there arose a grinding sound.
Abe called over the man known as Anchors. He slipped him two twenties and whispered in his ear. “Get on that train but don’t let him know it. Follow and watch. You can get you a toothbrush on arrival.”
Anchors put his hands in his pockets and stepped to the tall man’s side.
Abe regarded once more the glass eye, its crude brown paint-job. “Go on,” he said. “You can make the ten o’clock if you trot.”
The tall man started for the door. He’d nearly made it through when he stopped and spoke without turni
ng. “When do I tell em you’ll arrive?” he asked.
Abe worked his jaw. “Tell them we’ll be there at sundown on Sunday. Last train in.”
Goldie listened to their footfalls on the stairs. There was something in the sound of it that recalled her daddy.
Bushels was feeling particularly protective by then. He said, “I was ready to go with you the first time Abe, when you came through in April.” He’d always liked the young man from West Virginia. “I’ll ride in ahead of you, on an earlier train. Lay down some work. We can figure this.”
Goldie moved to the long office wall, where she sat down beneath a square hole. It had once housed Ben Moon’s safe, and a dusty outline of the big portrait remained.
Abe said, “You still keep up with that counterfeiter?”
Bushels said he did.
“You’ll need to call on him.”
Goldie made an airy sound and lay her head back on the wall. How tired she had grown of such games.
Bushels looked at her there, and then at Abe, who regarded the folded letter in his hands. “Abe,” he said. “We need to wire Mr. Moon. We need to work out a plan.”
Abe nodded. He was already thinking on it. The pain in his head was back, but it could not block what he conjured. “I’ll stop at the telegraph office on my way to Tony Thumbs’s.” he said. He hoped the old man would be there. He hoped he wasn’t dead.
Before he left Moon’s office, Abe sat down next to Goldie on the wall. He told her not to fret. He told her they’d make it out of Keystone yet again, alive and free.
She only shook her head. He kissed her on the temple.
He walked up South Street figuring, talking to himself aloud.
Outside Tony Thumbs’s building, he smelled rain. He looked up for night clouds, but there were none. It was only the moon, big as it had been at the Keystone eclipse. The Old Drury’s sign was in need of repair. They’d not run a show in months.
Inside, Abe pounded on Tony’s locked door.
The old man had taken up opium full time since putting his monkey in the ground. There were days when he stayed eight hours inside the stale, cushioned joint on Camel Alley, when the only words he spoke were his order, “Ten fun of the number one.” He grew tired of the walk to and fro, and so he’d bought from the joint’s proprietor his own full layout—skewer, lamp, and pipe. He’d not left his bedroom since.
Tony Thumbs would turn eighty-three on August 21st. He felt no need to leave his little spot above the Drury.
He felt no need to answer when a knock came at his door.
But Abe pounded still, and the ringing in his ears built until it broke, and inside the clamor of his shrill mind, a quiet place came forth, like the one he and Jake had once known. And inside the quiet place, he could not hear the pounding of his very own fist, even as he watched it knock. He heard instead the pulse of his blood. He shut his eyes and saw Sam, his empty lips and crushed nose.
His knees nearly gave, but he neither fell nor hit his head. He sat down on his heels and breathed deep. He thought of the last time he’d seen Jake, his purpled neck and motionless eyes beneath the lids. He thought of Sam’s face in the photograph.
There is nothing without family. There is nothing without one, two, three.
Abe needed the old man and his miracle cures.
He stood up and kicked down the door.
THEIR DAY HAD COME
August 21, 1910
At a minute past midnight, Ah Tong tossed the pebble. It was wrapped in a sheet of paper. He’d listened from the alley for Abe’s whistle, then come closer to hear what Goldie hummed. When the perimeter guards moved to the jailhouse’s opposite side and she still hummed All clear, Tong ran up and tossed the pebble through the high window bars.
Abe took it up from the floor just as the officer on hall guard stirred awake. He sat in a spindle-back chair just outside cell one.
“You dozin One-Eye?” Abe said. He held the pebble note in his fist.
The tall man took out his watch. His shift was done. “I’m going home to bed is what I’m doin,” he said. He sometimes felt he was living under a curse, one put upon him by Abe back in April, one transmitted by way of that Morgan dollar. He put his fingers in his ears and shut his eyes and waited.
Two minutes later, Taffy Reed followed Rutherford through the main hall door. They nodded to One-Eye as he left, and Rutherford called after him, “Be back here at seven, no later.”
Rutherford sat down in the chair that faced Abe’s cell. He stared hard at the condemned, who was naked and had dropped flat on his belly.
“Bet you didn’t know this here is called a push-up,” Abe said. His voice strained as he up-and-downed on his knuckles. “I know the fella who first coined the term.”
Taffy stood behind Rutherford with a sack of dried peppers in one hand and a lantern in the other. He watched the fluid motion of the push-up. “I’m going to pickle,” he said. On his way past Goldie’s cell, he swung his lantern to see. She stood over the drainhole, naked as a jaybird.
On the embalming table, Taffy poured brine from a quart jar into a gallon that was already half full of boiled eggs. He’d left the door cracked to take periodic peeks at Goldie’s cell. He’d done so for a week, since the condemned had begun to fight the heat with nudity. They were generally clothed only in the early morning hours.
When Abe finished his forty push-ups, he hopped to his feet and brushed the dirt off his chest. He looked down at himself. “Rutherford,” he said. “What about my hog? If I come over and waggle it between the bars, will you brush off the dust for me?”
Rutherford had not shifted posture an inch since he’d sat. “Come on over here,” he said. “I’ll brush it. Rip it clean off too. Fry it up in back with some purple onion, serve it to your mother.”
Abe laughed. “You could serve five or six more than that with it,” he said.
Rutherford looked away momentarily. He tried to see Goldie down the hall, but it was too dark at that end. “Five or six?” he said. “I believe that’s about how many I’ll get to kill when I do find your mother and daddy, and whoever else has that money.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“You won’t be here to see it, that’s certain.” If he pointed his boot toes, he could almost touch the floor. He sighed and sat back. “Less you go ahead and tell me now where the money is. I believe you know this is your very last chance to stay what’s comin tomorrow.”
Abe went to the straw tick in the corner and lay down and crossed his legs at the ankle.
Rutherford hated the man with such fortitude he could barely keep from shooting him through the bars right then. He wouldn’t do it. He’d watch instead as Abe died before a crowd. Rufus Beavers had declared Thursday morning that the pair would be properly hanged as soon as a scaffold was built. He even had a man for the job, a man who’d built the gallows used by Isaac Parker, Rufus’s most favorite of judges. By that time, Rufus was drunk every hour of every day. He’d nearly gone mad since the heist and his brother’s disappearance, and he’d finally grown weary of Abe and Goldie’s trickery and money-baiting. He should have known better than to keep them alive on the promise of four hundred grand. He should have known better, even on that July Sunday sundown, when the two of them had surrendered to Keystone. They hadn’t stepped down from the train right off. They’d stood on the coach steps and opened the lid of a four-foot steamer trunk. They’d tipped it forward so Rufus could see the money stacked neat to the top. That’s when Rutherford turned Sam Baach loose on the final outbound train. The young man who’d wanted only to come home now wanted only to leave. When it had departed, and they reopened the trunk, beneath the top layer there was nothing but newsprint.
Rutherford spat on the hallway floor. “Rufus may have given up on that money, but I won’t ever,” he said. “I’ll kill everyone you know to get it back.”
Abe put his arm beneath his head. A luna moth walked up the wall toward the ceiling. “That isn’t go
ing to happen,” he said.
“You don’t know what I can do.” Rutherford stood up and put his face near the red-rusted bars. He lowered his voice and said, “I’ve killed enough to where I lost count. Easier and easier and easier.” He smiled a little. “Even the Keystone Kid, even ole big brains never knew what I done. Always thought I took orders from Trent, from Beavers.”
“That’s right,” Abe said. “You always were superior at takin orders.”
Rutherford didn’t care to bite his tongue when death for Abe Baach was this nigh. “Wasn’t takin orders when I dropped on that guinea from a tree branch,” he said. “One ridin into town with your daddy?” He let it sink in a minute. “That was my first.” He smiled at the old bad memories he’d twisted to good. “Vic Moon kept breathing through a broke neck too, had to knock him in the brain box with the butt of my axe.” He ruminated a moment at his humane ways. “Could have been Jew Baach on that horse,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, nobody told me to do that. I just done it.”
Abe sat up on his elbows and looked at the tiny man.
Rutherford kept on. “And that same night, when your daddy stood in the road with Trent like they was friends, and the Beavers threw them snakes on me from the high porch, I didn’t go to no White Sulphur Springs like Trent ordered me to.” He shook his head. “Nossir, went to that old slope mine and tossed Vic Moon in there. First of many. And here you and your daddy always thought it was Trent that didn’t ship that body.”
