A Hanging at Cinder Bottom by Glenn Taylor Page A

she’d seen at the Alhambra. Skinny. She still thought of Sam as a boy. She noted his shovel. “Diggin to China?”
    “Shovelin shit,” he said.
    “Used to make you give me a nickel anytime you cussed.”
    “That’s why I’m flat broke.”
    She laughed a little.
    “Where’s Abe?” He set down the shovel and pushed up his sleeves.
    She shook her head. “Don’t know. Don’t care to.”
    Sam spit out his tobacco. He looked up at the coming clouds. “Goin to get the big rain this evening,” he said.
    “Don’t go into town then.”
    “It’s Friday. My night to pull ale.”
    She picked at a mud nubbin stuck in Dot’s forelock.
    Sam regarded her. Even inside a shadow, Goldie was bright.
    “I believe I’ll ride her before the storm hits,” she said.
    “You know that mare’s pregnant.”
    She didn’t know. It had been awhile since she was up on the hill.
    “You can still ride her,” Sam said. “She’s not too far along.”
    Goldie patted Dot’s big shoulder. It seemed that every matronly thing but her could bear fruit. She’d never wanted to offer a child where so many went unclaimed, but there had once been in her mind the possibility. Then the years passed without so much as a bellyache, and she knew that no lemon wedge or calendar could ever account for that, and so she’d accepted her lot.
    She spotted a dirty sugarcube at the foot of the stall door. She fetched it up and offered it to Dot. She said, “I don’t have the clothes to ride her anyway.”
    “Never stopped you before.” He’d watched her when he was just a little boy, hitching her skirt and kicking off her shoes. No saddle.
    “You feedin her plenty?”
    He nodded.
    Goldie looked past him at Hood House. “You hungry?”
    He was.

    Inside the third-floor room of the red-haired boy, Floyd Staples sat on the bed. He played his harmonica for the entertainment of a prostitute he’d yet to pay. Its sound was lonesome and full.
    “Where did you learn to play like that?” she asked him.
    He did not answer but scratched his neck and looked to the door, which presently opened. The red-haired boy had traded in his towel for a fine suit. “They’re cleaning out his room,” he said.
    “Pay this woman two dollars and a half,” Floyd Staples told him, and the boy produced a billfold and gave her three. She left without a word.
    The red-haired boy was from Mingo County. He’d left the mines after only a year to make his living playing cards. He owed Floyd Staples seventy-two dollars.
    “When you say they’re cleaning,” Floyd said, “you mean cleaning up or cleaning out?”
    “Looks to me like he’s run his course.” He stuck out his chest and regarded himself in the dressing mirror. “That skinny nigger was out in the hall and I heard him say to the leprechaun what a shame it was, the Kid shed off like that.”
    Staples snorted and swallowed. “Ain’t nothin you can do with bad blood except to let it,” he said. “Oak Slab don’t need him anymore. Bigger than he is.” He walked to the dressing table where he poured himself a drink. “Not too big for you though, is it boy?” He swallowed his whiskey and poured another and reclined on the bed with the tumbler atop his chest. He considered his banishment from the Oak Slab. He could still see that ace-high flush. “You got your invitation card tucked someplace safe?”
    From inside his suit jacket, the red-haired boy produced a well-crafted forgery. The embossing was professional. Every grain of the table had been mimicked from the original. Talbert would be on the door, checking invitations, and his eyes weren’t what they used to be.
    The red-haired boy had begun to wish he’d never met the man now lying on his bed, let alone lost to him at the card table. And his stomach had begun to seize anytime he thought of their plan for that night. He’d not spent much time around the likes of Floyd Staples, who, by any human standard, was plain bad. His clothes were in tatters.