Abe knew the boy. Donald was his name. Goldie sometimes babysat him on Saturday nights.
He grit his teeth and had a notion to walk over and stab Floyd Staples right then with the dagger he kept in his vest pocket. But he knew better. He’d leave that job to someone else, for surely someone else would have the same notion and the wherewithal to act on it too.
Keep your temper, Goldie had told him, and he aimed to.
The boy, who was only four, went quiet and followed his mother and daddy, a whore and a drunk, onto a side street where a new apothecary was being built.
Abe walked fast to the bridge, where he stopped long enough to spit at the middle and then kept on, smiling at folks who waved or said hello, nearly jogging when he reached the back of the Bottom. He slowed at the corner of Dunbar and a lane as yet unnamed, a spot folks had begun to call Dunbar and Ruth on account of the wide reputation of Fat Ruth Malindy’s fine-looking ladies.
The snow had quit. There was a wide dull glow of orange behind low scanty clouds. The glow sat slow on the ridge, and the square tops of storefronts lay in shroud.
A black boy walked toward Abe with a canvas bag strung bandolier-style across his skinny middle. “Evenin edition!” he called. “McDowell Times evenin edition!”
Abe fished three pennies from his pocket and held them out.
“Nickel,” the boy said.
Abe regarded his wiry frame. He looked to be about ten years old. “Since when?”
“Since my daddy proclaimed it so.” He wore a serious look.
Abe put back his pennies and handed over a nickel. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Cheshire,” the boy said.
“Like the cat.”
He only stared.
“From the children’s book,” Abe said. “But you haven’t smiled once.”
Chesh Whitt didn’t read books for children, but he knew who he was talking to. He’d known from twenty yards off. And he’d rehearsed in a mirror how he’d be when he met the Keystone Kid. He’d be poker-faced with a knack for making money.
“Boy your age ought not be in the Bottom after sundown,” Abe told him before he walked on.
The men gathered out front of his daddy’s saloon were white and black and Italian and Hungarian and Polish. Some were coming up from the mines and some were on their way down. All were laughing loud at a joke about the limp-dick Welsh foreman with a habit of calling them cow ponies.
A fellow who could not focus his eyes nodded loose at Abe. “I got a good one for you,” he said.
“I heard that one already,” Abe answered. He went inside.
It was an average crowd for Wednesday shift change. A single card game ran at the back, a Russian grocery owner named Zaltzman the only man of six in a suit. A sheet-steel stove burned hot at the room’s middle. It had once been airtight.
Goldie was on the corner stage, and the men stood before her with their hats off, whistling and calling out, “Go again sister!”
She had a crown on her head fashioned from tin and grouse feathers dipped in gold paint. In the center, she’d glued a thick oval scrap of bottle-bottom glass. “Bring em back up to me then,” she answered the men, and they reached inside their hats and brought forth the playing cards she’d thrown.
On the stool at her side there was a long glass of beer. She finished it with great economy and picked up a new deck of cards. “Inspect those comebackers you tobacco drippers,” she called. “I don’t want a card coming back to me bent nor split.” She wore an old set of her daddy’s wool long underwear, a gold-painted grain bag over that. The bag was big and stiff, her head through a hole in the seam, so that altogether, in headdress and bag, she shone in the rigged pan spotlight as if she’d ridden in on a moonbeam. Queen Bee they were calling her by then, because in Cinder Bottom, at Dunbar and Ruth, that is who she was. Fat Ruth Malindy made the rules, but Fat Ruth Malindy was ugly as ash. Goldie, on the other hand, was a miracle to behold.
On this night her hair was up, spun beneath the crown. She rubbed at her neck where a flyaway hair had tickled, and the men watched, the slope of her shoulder bewitching them. She saw Abe at the door and winked in his direction before getting back to business. “These here cards don’t come free boys,” she shouted to the men. She stuck out her toe and pushed the coal bucket to the edge of the little platform. “Drop in what you can spare now.” A miner just off his shift shoved through and dropped in his change. A house carpenter put in a dollar note and stuck his face out over the stage. He sniffed at her with his eyes shut.
She let him.
Goldie had long since learned to separate a man from his money. There had always been men and money just as there had always been coal trains and mules, and at Fat Ruth Malindy’s, a girl could either go prone and give up her notions of fight or she could learn how to talk to a man and take what he had. Before the age of thirteen, Goldie had twice pulled a skinny whittler blade and touched its point to the groin of a man trying to force himself upon her. By the time she was fourteen, most men knew better than to try. The ladies of Fat Ruth’s admired the girl’s spirit. Some took it up. And there was laughter in that cathouse, and there was always her daddy, a good man by any measure. And then there was Abe, loyal as they came, quiet when quiet was called for, and, if need be, tameless as the stalking lion.
He leaned against the wall and watched her scale cards. He smiled.
Al Baach stood behind the bar with a rag over his shoulder. He eyed his middle boy, whose path worried him. Al and Sallie had talked on it for years — how the boy was lucky to have Goldie, how Abe and Goldie together were much like Al and Sallie had been twenty years before. But lately there’d been worry, for Al and Sallie had never been quite so old at quite so young an age.
He gave the rag a tug and put it to his nose and blew. He sniffed hard and kept on watching his middle boy. A lad just in front of him let his head fall to the bar top. He was what they called coke-yard labor. He couldn’t have been over fifteen and had come into the saloon already drunk. Al wouldn’t serve him but the lad had stayed put in order to see Queen Bee.
Al smacked him in the ear and said, “Get in your bed to sleep.” The lad was thoroughly awakened, and he stood and walked to the door. On his way, he knocked against Abe, who righted him and headed for the back stairs.
Al called loud to his middle boy.
Abe ignored him. He hit the swinging storeroom door and jumped to the third riser at a run. He took out his key as he went and unlocked the bedroom door upstairs.
He locked it behind him. It smelled like it always had in there. His.
When Abe and his brothers were little, the Bottom hadn’t yet become what it was. Sallie had allowed the boys to be around the saloon, to slumber nights away in its upstairs rooms as their father sometimes did after the boardinghouse on the hill was booked up perpetual. Respectable boarders would pay a handsome sum to stay up at Hood House, removed as it was from the magnificent filth they so often sought down below. With railroad surveyors and mineral men occupying every open bed, the two oldest Baach boys had moved their playthings to town, where Wyoming Street soon grew awnings to shade its new general store and laundry and tailor shop and tenement-turned-house of ill fame. When Jake Baach was fourteen, he and Big Bill Toothman finished construction of a smaller, second home on the hill, and Sallie aimed to make use of the extra beds, to keep the boys out of the saloon. She aimed to take them from the Bottom altogether, but by that time Abe was a twelve-year-old with the hands of a full-time riverboat gambler. Pretty Boy Baach was good for business. He’d grown accustomed to chewing tobacco when he pleased and playing cards too. School was simple and books had begun to bring on sleep. His head was for numbers. His place was the saloon. He could squeeze tight his mouth and hit a spittoon’s dark heart from nine feet off. He could smell a man’s bluff sweat at the table without so much as a snort.