He smiled.
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.”