A Hanging at Cinder Bottom by Glenn Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

since learned at the card table not to engage in the playing of conversational games, and he’d long since learned not to trust the man who’d promised his daddy a kind of wealth that was yet to arrive. Al Baach had developed a theory over the years that he’d been bamboozled from the start. Mr. Trent never wires red cent to Baltimore , Al Baach had told his boys. He never sends back Moon’s body . He knew this, he said, because Moon’s own son had told him in a letter. The son was grown now, a good successful boy , Al called him. He warned his boys to stay away from Keystone’s king, and mostly they listened. But Abe was tired of hearing folks complain. Every shop owner and whorehouse madam in Cinder Bottom coughed up Trent’s required monthly consideration with a smile. In exchange, the law left them mostly alone. Some whispered that there might come a time when Henry Trent was no more. Maybe, they whispered, somebody would shoot him, or maybe he’d get choked on a rabbit bone and cease to breathe. But nomatter what they whispered, in public they all sang praises to his hotel and theater and all that he and the Beavers brothers had done for Keystone. When the bank had failed the people in ’93, Trent and the Beavers had not. They were the kind of men who kept their money in a safe. And for a while, they gave it out. After ’93, they took to collecting it with interest, and nobody ever had the gall not to pay when Rutherford came collecting. Trent did not himself venture to the other side of Elkhorn Creek any longer. He’d been heard to say that Cinder Bottom wasn’t fit for hogs to root.
    The way Abe saw it, Trent could say what he wanted on the Bottom. He’d built it after all. And, the way Abe saw it, Trent knew the path to real money, and the rest of them didn’t. Abe was relatively young, but he saw a truth most could not. There wasn’t but one God, and he was the big-faced man on the big note. His likeness and his name changed with the years, but he maintained his high-collared posture, dead-eyed and yoked inside a circle, a red seal by his side.
    He looked across the desk at the older man, who regarded him with humor.
    “Your daddy was here in the early days,” Trent said. “He’ll get what’s due him.” He pointed his finger at Abe. “You tell ole Jew Baach I haven’t forgot.”
    It was a name seldom used by that time, a relic of the days when Al was unique in his presumed religiosity. Now there was B’nai Israel on Pressman Hill, a tall stone synagogue equipped with a wide women’s balcony. Attendancewas ample, though no Baach had ever stepped inside it. Abe wondered whether Trent even knew of such a place. He wondered whether Trent knew that if he hollered “Hey Jew” on Railroad Avenue, more than two or three would turn their head.
    There were those who said Henry Trent’s mind was not what it once had been.
    He poured another in his glass and raised it up. “To half-Jew Abe,” he said, “the Keystone Kid.” He stood and went to the corner. He told Abe to turn and face away, and when he’d done so, Trent spun the combination knob of a six-foot, three-thousand-pound safe. He opened the inside doors long enough to put five hundred back in his leather pouch, then he swung shut the safe, sat back down, and took out a sheet of paper and a silver dip pen. “You know I had my money on you,” he said. “Rufus did too. Rutherford had his on Staples, but I had a notion.” He signed his name to a line at the bottom of the sheet. “And do you know what Fred Reed just whispered in my ear?”
    Abe nodded that he didn’t.
    “He said he’d not seen play like yours at the table since old George Devol.”
    Abe had read Devol’s Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi nine times through. He’d kept it under his mattress since he was twelve years old, the same year he’d quit school for good. He said, “I aim to best Devol’s total table earnings fore I die.”
    Trent laughed. “You aim