A Hanging at Cinder Bottom by Glenn Taylor

had worked for a time at Fat Ruth’s. She held their little boy by the hand and he cried and dragged his feet. “I want hard candy,” he wailed. Floyd Staples grabbed him away from the woman and smacked his cheek so hard it echoed.
    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