Sallie hadn’t looked away from Abe. She swung the baby to opposite hipbone. “Samuel!” Sallie called.
“Yes ma’am?” He’d sat down on Abe’s bed and was fixing to recline.
“Go unload the carriage and roll it to the street.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Jake opened the dresser drawer and looked at the newspaper lining. He slid his fingers underneath.
Abe turned, stepped to the dresser, and slammed it shut, Jake pulling clear just in time. “Don’t forget whose room it is now,” Abe told his brother.
The door closed, and they turned, and their mother was gone.
“You got the gold pieces?” Abe asked.
Jake produced a small burlap sack tied with twine.
Abe took it and tossed it on the bed. He retrieved his jacket from the wardrobe, stuck in one arm, and pulled the sleeve inside out. In the silk lining there was a long, buttoned sheath at the seam. He loaded into it, one by one, the little cedar pieces painted gold. They were hand-cut by Jake, just like the saloon’s poker chips. Abe rebuttoned, righted the sleeve and put the jacket back on.
Jake laughed. “Goldie sew that?”
“She is possessed of many talents.”
He opened a vest button and put a hand inside. There, in a seam in the lining, were four slick pockets where he customarily kept two of each bill, one to ten. He took out a five and handed it to Jake. “Just watch you don’t catch Cupid’s plague,” he told him.
Jake smiled. “Whatever you say highpockets.” He shook his head. He admired the insistent spirit with which his younger brother lived. He only hoped that Abe would stay alive long enough to tamp it down, and that tamping it down might buy him a few more years, and that those few years might carry him to the time in a man’s life when he quits carousing, when he’s content to read books again, like he’d done as a boy, and Jake and Abe and Sam might get old together, telling stories about how it is to go bald or to watch your shot-pouch sag to your knees.
“You got any of that Mingo shine?” Jake asked.
Abe shook his head no. “I’ve got to get downstairs.” He took a fresh deck from a stack on the dresser.
“You planning to play at Trent’s hotel?”
“Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No.” Abe pulled on his shirt cuffs. “But Jake,” he said, “I might soon play there every day, and if I do, the money will come back here and up to Hood House both. You can have all the tools and timber you want.” He knew his brother was happiest when he built. “Frame another house on the hill, and down here a proper stage, new card room.”
Jake shook his head. His cigar was burnt out again. “Trent won’t ever give you that,” he said.
“Like hell he won’t.”
After they’d stepped from the bedroom, Abe locked the door again. There was hollering from the storeroom downstairs. They descended.
Sam had dropped a two-gallon jar of pickled eggs. Thick sharp wedges of curled glass sat dead against the cold soak. Brinewater marked the floor in a hundred-point burst. Sam pushed a broom at the eggs, and they rolled, soft and lopsided on the dirty floor, brine-red, some of them split yellow. Sallie had the baby in the emptied maple carriage. She used it like a battering ram to open the swinging door and depart. She didn’t look at any of her boys.
Abe told Sam not to worry. As long as there were chickens, there’d be eggs, and as long as there were eggs, people would pickle them with beets, and the world would be a proper place.
He swung through the door, arrived at the stage in three long strides, and leapt upon it to take his rightful place beside his queen. The men at the foot of the stage nodded to him and he bent to shake the hands of twenty or more, patting their shoulders with his free hand. The week prior, a track liner had told another man that his poker luck had swung high since he’d shaken the hand of the Keystone Kid. Word got around.
Goldie said, “Get them hats up swine!” She was fixing to scale and shoot another round of cards. She fanned them in her left hand and took a wide stance. The men before her held their hats high, low, and sideways too. Abe got out of the way. He watched her right arm coil slow above the deck. The men went silent and still. Goldie pinched the first and sprung hard her wrist and elbow. Her fingers, on the follow-through, spread open like honeysuckle. Then came the sound from inside the hat’s crown, sharp and dull and full and empty all at once.
Abe closed his eyes and listened to the next and the next and the next after that. It was a sound he could listen to all night.
When she’d finished, she bowed and Abe stepped forward again and said, “And men, when you fish in those pockets for tips, see if you don’t come upon another thing too.”
And they did come upon another thing. “I’ll be durn,” one said to the other as they brought forth quarter-sized cuts of wood painted gold. “How in the hell?” one man wondered aloud, and indeed it was a mystery how Abe had gotten the little gold tokens into all of those various workingmen’s pockets.
“Each of those gold tokens was hand-cut by my brother Jake, who is practicing to become the finest carpenter these parts have known,” Abe told them, “and each of them is good for one beer at the bar.” They mumbled approval. “Men, be sure to tip generously, and keep coming back to A. L. Baach & Sons for all your social needs!”
They spewed what earnings they could spare at the coal bucket and moved as a mass to the bar, where Al and Jake and Big Bill worked to pull, pour, and serve every man who saddled and showed his wooden gold. While he worked, Al glared across the barroom at his middle boy.
Goldie poured the coal bucket’s contents into a big empty cigar box she’d brought over from Fat Ruth’s, where, when business was good, gentlemen callers went through a large box a night.
“What’s the take?” Abe asked her.
“Above average.” She fastened the box shut and tucked it in her armpit. “I want to hear about your card game,” she said. He wore a look she couldn’t read. She winked at him. “I want to get out of this getup too.”
Abe told her he could help with that and that his take was likewise above average. “Let’s get to the storeroom,” he said. He looked to the bar, where the more ambitious men were finishing their free beers. “Just watch a minute,” Abe told Goldie. “See if my plan works.”
And it did. He’d calculated that the men, upon swilling their gold-token good fortune, would be of a mind to have another. He knew that those coming off their shift would’ve stayed only long enough to see Goldie before they went home, cleaned themselves, and set out to behold the Alhambra. But plans could be changed. Now the men set their dented pewter mugs on the bar top, wiped their mouths, and pulled out their watches. “I reckon I’ve got time for one more,” they said, and they fished once again for coins that would lead them where they wanted to go.
“See that?” Abe said. Then he checked his own watch. “Now let’s get to gettin.” He pushed Goldie ahead of him and kissed at her neck when they got to the swinging doors. “We got time for me to show you a thing or two.”
But in the black damp of the storeroom, it was her who showed him. They’d long since found a corner place, between the wall and the floor safe.
She pushed him against the cold back wall. She set the box of coins on the waist-high safe and put her hand to his trousers and worked the buttons on his fly. He picked her up and set her on the safe. The cigar box dropped and sounded a tambourine call. “Leave it,” she said. She tugged at his belt and pulled down his waistband, and when her fingernail cut the pale skin at his hip, he paid no mind. He took off her crown and let it drop. She raised her arms and he skinned the cat and tossed aside the gold feed-sack. Underneath, long-legged underwear was ill-fitted and easily kicked free. He lifted her, one hand under her arm and the other at her thigh. They slowed then and stopped breathing until she had taken ahold and guided him in and pressed herself as close as she could. And it was like that for a moment before they remembered to breathe, and his forearms burned from holding her while she rolled her hips, quickening all the time, toes gripped against the cold panel wall.