ABRAHAM’S AMERICA
ON ABRAHAM’S VERY FIRST NIGHT IN SANTA FE, MEYER Shein’s final words before retiring were: Whatever you do, do not step foot in Doña Cuca’s saloon. Abraham knew better than to question his brother the first night in his home, but Meyer continued as if Abe had done just that, and he lowered his voice with a warning: She has sent more than a few men down that primrose path that leads only to the hanging tree. There were rumors. That Doña Cuca had extended credit to the man who was her lover and, when he failed to pay on time and after only two warnings, he was found not only dead from a hole in his head, but also naked in the center of the plaza. That Doña Cuca kept locks of hair from those who lost badly at her table; that she had her man Antonio hack off hairs closest to the neck, and it was said that Antonio was careless. You’ll stay here with us tonight, Abraham. Understood? said Meyer. And then, as if he knew the likelihood of this instruction being followed: At least for now.
Abe then stole out of his brother’s house and walked the dirty streets, searching for a sense of where it was that he had finally and miraculously arrived. How could he be expected to sleep alongside two half-Spanish nephews who (although they bore the face of their German grandfather) spoke a rapid-fire español? His brother had married a native and his children were little Spaniards; it was almost too much to sort out. But after nearly dying on a wagon train from Independence, Missouri, Abraham had sworn that if his fever broke he wouldn’t waste a moment of his goddamn life, and so he promised (as he tried to imagine the inside of Doña Cuca’s establishment) to give the matter no further reflection. The boys were well behaved, his brother was prospering; more incredibly: He, Abraham, was alive.
His teamsters had been about to leave him to die on the prairie; they believed he had cholera and weren’t about to take the chance with such a deadly contagion. But as they propped him up on a bed of grass, a single wagon appeared and—with the uplifting affect of a chimera—it produced a tall, slender man. That tall man leaned forward like a bending birch and offered Abraham a place in his wagon. He spoke French-accented English in low, hoarse tones and promised Abe that he would not be left to die. That man had been the town’s bishop, and as Abraham walked these unfamiliar streets, he looked into the distance at the crenellated towers of the town’s adobe church, and thought of the bishop with a by-now-familiar shudder of gratitude. It was because of this bishop that he was not a pile of nineteen-year-old bones on the prairie, but twenty, healthy, a young man in Santa Fe. He stood straight and lifted his lucky hat, smoothed his esteemed thick head of hair, and when he saw the saloon glowing yellow in the distance, he walked on toward the light.
Inside, he was surprised at the sight of the dreaded dealer. She was younger than he’d expected, dressed in red-gold taffeta and an expression more blank than tough. She stood behind a gaming table, flanked by a man with a striking cleft chin, whom he supposed was Antonio. Men approached the gaming table time and again; some won and some lost, but no knives were drawn and he became convinced that his brother had been typically alarmist in his warnings. Meyer had been an old man by the age of ten, with skinny shoulders sloping with responsibility, with his repertoire of warnings already well-honed; in the spring, when they were boys in the Tiergarten, he’d instructed Abe as to how, under no circumstances, was he to dirty his trousers, talk to unknown shopkeepers, play rough.
Abraham ordered a whiskey and sat at a table closest to the door, making a half-baked promise to himself that in the case of a shootout (he’d thus far only imagined a shootout), at least he could get up and run. He drank and watched the action, took in the greasy fingers of men speaking too quickly for him to understand, accepted a cigarette when a little brown girl offered. He couldn’t help but think that the whole scene was extremely diverting, a hell of a way to spend time. And back he came for the next six nights, drinking his fill of what a few sunburnt New England traders called Oh-Be-Joyful and stepped on the toes of more than a few languid señoritas, who did not act in the least bit angry. He noticed how Doña Cuca spoke only to a few men, how every so often she would whisper to Antonio (or the man he presumed to be Antonio—they had certainly not been introduced), and Antonio would approach a fellow and either proffer a drink, a few stern words or, in belligerent cases, escort him outside. Once he’d heard a terrible scream before Antonio came back through the door, but Abraham assumed the poor bastard had likely deserved whatever had come his way. One had to be a damn fool, he’d reasoned, to get that drunk and spiteful at the only decent saloon in town.
On the seventh night, when Abraham walked through the door, he noticed how Doña Cuca whispered to Antonio, how Antonio placed a whiskey on the bar and beckoned with his cleft chin that Abraham should sit. And Abraham realized that of course he’d been waiting for this very invitation. At the same time he reasoned that he could sit at the bar, a person could sit at anyone’s bar without going in for a gamble.
More whiskey. A nod from Doña Cuca. Finally, a smile. It was as if he were being cajoled into standing—as if the feeling of liquor in his blood and on his breath, his coming to his feet and approaching the Monte table was all some kind of joke—a private joke—between Doña Cuca and him. He laid his piece out on the green and when she finally spoke, her voice was unexpectedly quiet. Abraham did not understand Doña Cuca’s Spanish, and she said deliberately in English (but no louder), “Caballeros do not get drunk.”
“Ah,” he said, releasing an expansive breath. “But I am not a caballero.”
A husky laugh—a laugh that felt hard-won. “Your wife, she permit you to go so far from home?”
“No permission.” He smiled. “No wife.”
She nodded, looking suddenly bored. “So you play now?”
He knew nothing of gambling besides what he’d learned during his sea voyage in steerage and at grimy saloons near the docks of New York and the streets of Saint Louis, Missouri: The house always won. He looked around at the distinctly not-Jewish crowd, at the pearl-handled pistols on tables and in holsters. Monte was a game of cups and swords and suns; it was a game one mastered by losing. But he heard himself say, “Si.” He repeated, “si,” louder this time, and he couldn’t help but smile. He was in New Mexico. “I play.”
That night twelve years ago he was a young man in debt to his careful brother for his passage from Germany, a man with no money besides the coin on the table and the coin in his pocket, and he was also a man who found himself gesturing toward a pile of silver. “How much?”
She looked at him more closely and leaned across the table, gaudy brilliants gleaming in her flame-colored hair. Her taffeta dress rustled with movement and it was some kind of goddamn exciting sound. “Perhaps five thousand.” She didn’t blink her copper lashes or lower her gaze, and he could tell what she saw when he looked at his European shirt, at his groomed moustache, in his eyes.
“I will do more than play. I will bet ten thousand on the king of swords against the bank.”
“Señor,” she scoffed.
He felt the Oh-Be-Joyful warm throughout his legs. In Berlin he was the son of parents who’d met in a cultural salon and were engaged in a concert hall. He was a Jew who was secretly tone deaf, who cared little for symphonies or study or his father’s antiques business with its detailed aesthetic concerns. In Berlin he was a Jew who either fought with gentiles or became too friendly with gentiles and was too often forced into being reminded of his fixed social position. Here, in this room of Spanish officials, a few Yankees, a bombastic Portuguese, and a cluster of plump, brown beauties, he was a German merchant, a rico, even though he had yet to work a single day in this country.
“Please,” he said, “let us begin.” And he began to realize that the drink in his gut was brandy, only brandy, dressed up sweet and tart. He had tossed back a great deal of it with the Portuguese, who was now sitting in a red velvet chair with a girl in his lap, a girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.
“You are very certain of yourself, Señor.”
Doña Cuca was not pretty, he noticed, and he felt a mean kind of power in noticing. There was nothing pretty about her except her strange red hair. “Evidently, Señora, so are you.”
“Señorita,” she corrected, and lifted a brightly striped rebozo to reveal a pistol nestled between her silk sash and ample hip.
“I have placed my bet,” maintained Abraham, and looks were exchanged between Doña Cuca and the silent Antonio, a man with hair so black it glinted purple in the lamplight. He stared her down and the cards began to turn. Doña Cuca dealt swiftly, her strong hands in motion, turning up a deuce and a seven on the table as Abraham became aware of the gathering crowd with its murmurs of Jesucristo. When the third card was turned, Abraham let go of a breath he had not been aware he was holding, and as Cuca revealed the fourth card, he let loose a whoop, a great, hearty cry he had never once heard from his own pale throat.
Antonio betrayed no emotion as he collected the coins and handed them over to Abraham.
“Bravo,” said Doña Cuca, before wrapping tobacco in a corn husk and lighting its pointed tip. “Tell me your name.”
“My name is Abraham Shein.” And upon hearing his father’s surname in what was, after all, an undisputable den of iniquity, he suddenly felt like a boy. He leaned in closely so that Antonio would not hear him. “I must admit something to you, Señorita”—he dramatically bowed his head—“I do not have much more than a fist full of dollars in my pocket. I’m afraid that if I’d lost, I would have owed you terribly. I would have had no choice but to become your slave.” He collected his silver and dared to smile.
“Abraham Shein,” she replied, and he met her hard, green gaze. “I know this deck of cards like I know you. You are young and stupid but you will help me one day. I dealt you those swords purposefully—make no mistake. I did not wish to take the chance of having to shoot you dead.”
DOÑA CUCA WAS STILL WORKING NIGHTS THESE MANY YEARS LATER, overseeing the gambling, the bar, and the girls. She was still blank-faced and quiet, still a señorita who would not marry unless marriage moved her up in the world, and up a great deal further than she had already come with her very considerable skills. She was still notoriously dangerous only to other people—only to suckers and saps—when Abraham stormed through the doors on a Friday night after dining at his brother’s house. He had seen Eva home after dinner, but had not even stepped inside. She never asked him where he was going, and it bothered him that she did not ask, for silence was worse than inquisition. Her dark eyes were galling in their accusation; what right had she to those eyes? They fixed on him even when he could not see them, even when she was sleeping soundly in the middle of the pitch-dark night.
As Abraham sat at the bar, Antonio handed him a brandy sour followed by a bowl of pretzels because Antonio was an excellent bartender and knew how he liked pretzels by the handful, especially when agitated. “Cuca,” he called out to her, confident of her affection even as he was acutely aware of having recently lost more than a few times at this table without paying up. He was confident even as he knew (he was no green-horned dupe) that he had quietly slipped into the circle of Cuca’s debtors, with whom he could hardly expect to be associated, because, after all, Doña Cuca and Abraham Shein—they had a special rapport that transcended the dealer-gambler relationship with a certain understanding—an unspoken sensibility made perfectly clear in jokes and wordless exchanges. He was certain that Cuca knew it would only be a matter of days—maybe weeks—before he paid her back with interest, and she certainly didn’t seem to be in any hurry as she made her way toward him, through the reliably thirsty crowd. When she approached, smirking, with her strange red hair and green eyes, he offered his customary welcome: “Some poor Irish bastard must have had quite a time with one of your many ancestors.”
She too provided a ritual response: “God help the good Meyer Shein—going into business with a devil like you.”
Sometimes, without warning, this joke galled him deeply, and this was one of those times. It was true Meyer established the business and conserved the money and that Abraham was not the most fiscally conservative man in town, but sometimes Abraham was sure his brother’s fiscal responsibility was solely derived from the pleasure he received knowing jokes like this were tossed around, and that when Abraham took failed risks now and again, Meyer could freely impugn him.
He was a little bit broke. Though he was able to swig brandy and eat pretzels and receive credit without hindrance (in fact, Cuca usually put on a big show of being insulted, should he offer to pay drink-by-drink, night-by-night, like a stranger), and though he was able to delight officers’ wives by sneaking silk shawls to Fort Marcy along with Mexican cigars and sugared plums and fine French wines for parties, he not only still remained in debt to his brother for his passage from Germany, but Meyer was losing patience with how these items disappeared in the name of generosity toward others. The slow damage Abe was doing, or so Meyer claimed, was not worth Abe’s way with a customer, his admittedly curious powers of persuasion. The storeroom goods sold well enough with or without Abe’s show. Unlike Abraham, Meyer had not come to America with any elaborate fantasies, but only as a way to avoid German military conscription; unlike Abraham, he had not enlisted in the American Civil War and he cared little about status and reputation, only work and family, family and work. Excitement for Meyer was riding horseback with his Spanish mouse toward the pueblo on a Sunday, where, as far as Abraham could tell, they did little besides eat supper on a blanket, staring off in the distance like sheep. Meyer did not gamble, not even at Wolf Spiegelman’s weekly poker game, which would be starting soon.
“Tell me,” he said, watching her worn face through a veil of scent and smoke. “Have I been helpful to you, as you predicted so long ago?”
“You know you have been a help—you have lost so often at my table!” She laughed her husky laugh, which usually made him feel comforted, but tonight it did no such thing. “Have you brought me what you owe?”
He coughed, the whiskey burning his throat, and he was ashamed at his surprise; he had not ever imagined being asked this question. “I haven’t brought you anything,” he answered, perhaps too quickly. “My apologies,” he added, making sure to look straight into those mean, green eyes that never seemed to blink. “You needn’t worry about all that,” he said boldly, “not with me.”
“Oh I do not worry,” she said unaffectedly. “Worry is for fools.”
Abraham laughed then, and he heard how his laugh was already different. It was the laugh of a man growing used to losing; he fought not to let disgust seep through his expression, which was no doubt an alarmingly broad smile.
“How is your princess?” she asked, as if inquiring about a termite problem, perhaps a case of gout.
“My princess?” He sighed. “Well, I suppose she is just fine,” he said. He tried not to think of his wife’s jewels, her precious heirlooms that comprised a significant portion of her dowry, which were never meant to be sold. The fact that he hadn’t ever come close to pawning his wife’s jewels was how he liked to measure his character. Still—he couldn’t deny it—he liked knowing they were there. Sometimes he checked under their bed as many as ten times a day, where the jewels lived in a locked box, to which only he and Eva had the key. “My princess—she needs to rest.”
“Don’t we all,” she said neutrally, having obviously not changed her opinion of the mercurial Mrs. Shein. Abraham had seen Eva smile warmly at Doña Cuca one day while strolling in the plaza, and then, not one week later, give her a look so frigid that Abraham was ashamed—not so much for his wife’s snobbishness but because he knew its deeper source. He knew her watchful face in the middle of the night, when he came late to their bed smelling worlds apart from the man she’d seen early in the morning. He knew Eva assumed Doña Cuca was running a brothel, which of course she was, and that he was a regular patron, which in fact he was not. There was a girl with wavy black hair and an alluring gap between her teeth who sat on his lap now and then, but no matter how much liquor he swallowed, he’d always managed to walk away, declining all invitations. Cuca sucked smoke deep into her lungs and the sight did not repulse him. “I hear about the governor’s ball,” she finally said.
“Yes,” he said, “good for Shein Brothers’ business.”
“Oh I think so. Supplying a Fort Marcy fiesta—muy bien.” She stubbed out her cigarette in his near-empty drink, and he couldn’t help but lament its last good sip, even as he realized what hostility lay in that stubbed out butt. “Shipments of oysters on ice—I hear about this—crates of French champagne? And what will Mrs. Shein wear?”
Her mouth was pursed impatiently, awaiting his reply, but he could only say, “You will have it.” He said it so softly; he had no choice but to repeat himself.
She stuck out her bottom lip for a moment, before sighing. “Well this is good, Señor. This is very good.” Then, decisively, she took the ruined drink away. “Antonio,” she called with a furious smile. “Another for El Guapo. He looks thirsty, no?”
AT THE ELDEST SPIEGELMAN’S HOUSE, THE GAME WAS UNDERWAY, and when Abraham came through the door the men barely nodded, so high was the concentration. The dirt floors here were covered with piñon planks and as they creaked under his boot soles, he realized he could no longer step on a wood floor without feeling guilty. He recalled last month’s very first official Yom Kippur in this town (which was said to have finally occurred because the arrival of one additional Jewish bride—Mrs. Eva Shein!—had successfully galvanized the population to hurry up and finish acting like wayward children set free from their traditions), and how when his family and colleagues had gathered to observe in this very room, what he’d felt most strongly was not religious nor community spirit, but panic and resentment at how Eva’s face had struggled with unholy envy. Her eyes had gone immediately to Spiegelman’s silk-covered walls crowded with portraits in oil, which, for his wife—more than any convenience—seemed to embody a certain European sensibility that—much to her evident satisfaction—she was apparently not alone in still desiring. Later that night, she’d reminded him of how Wolf Spiegelman—his esteemed colleague and fierce competitor—seemed to share her interest in wood floors, an interest he’d dismissed if not disdained. She’d reminded him of how Theo, the younger Spiegelman, would likely return soon from his trip to Germany with a new bride and immediate plans for a proper house; the two usually went in tandem. She whispered sharply while turning from him under their bedcovers, her tight little body curled in on itself, reminding him of nothing so much as a caterpillar. As he wrapped his legs around her, as he lifted her nightgown (voluminous to the point of ridiculous), she insisted she was not ashamed of such comfortable desires even if she did live far from their homeland. Even if she lived here in what she had come to call, quite bitterly, Abraham’s America.
Accepting a bourbon from Don Romero, the former governor, he sat in his usual spot between Spiegelman and Isinfeld, but Isinfeld sat across the table and in his place was none other than the bishop, who, after years of scrupulously declining social invitations if gambling was to take place, had recently caved in after his most recent trip abroad. He was starved, or so they all liked to rib him, for Europeans, any Europeans, even Jews. So there he sat, sipping wine and looking glum, as he so often did when he witnessed their games, as if he were a sickly child in a school yard, not so dissimilar from Meyer, when all he really wanted to do (or so Abraham imagined) was to place a bet, yet he never once played a hand. It was the second game he had attended since his dramatic and long-awaited homecoming. Having survived not only Indian raids (not to mention peril at sea, bouts of dreaded cholera) but death itself, death in print, Bishop Lagrande was a hero of no-less-than-mythical stature.
And yet here he sat, cutting a morose devout figure, eyes clouded over with gloom. Abe did not remove his jacket and did his best to ignore the bishop’s demeanor, which he could only translate as bad luck. The circle finished the current hand, and he marveled at how Cuca had come right out and asked him for the money. He found himself dwelling not on how he was going to get that money to her straightaway, but on the galling fact of how her question—given the feeling of friendship between them, to say nothing of his standing in the community—was insulting, indecent, and an outrage. He raised his finger to the dealer, and as the cards landed softly before him, he couldn’t help but note how he loved the near-inaudible sound of them, and how his lucky watch burned a hole in his pocket the way it did before a big win.
“Bishop, play a round, just this once,” said Abraham, finally, feeling the satisfyingly crisp touch of cards in his hand. He studied his cards and, after arranging them, slugged a generous sip of bourbon. It was a shoddy hand, but, Abraham reminded himself, although it took more than good cards to win a hand, winning a crucial hand did not require good cards. He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs as if he couldn’t be more comfortable.
Isinfeld peered nervously through wire-rimmed spectacles, Spiegelman tapped his too-long fingernails and bit his lower lip as Sheinker lit a fresh cigar. These were men with lifelong, nervous habits, men who were all obviously wondering whether Abraham planned on living up to his reputation and raising the stakes. It was never a surprise—whenever he walked through Spiegelman’s door—to recognize how his arrival was dreaded as much as it was welcome; his presence was inseparable from his potential to take a game that much further than any of them were in the habit of expecting. At times he found this reticence endearing, but tonight he saw them through a lens of disgust: They too had made it across ocean and prairie; they too had made it through packs of savages, through patches of rough weather and brutal terrain, only to sit here and worry. They were all so timid, so afraid of loss.
He made a show of yawning before he reached into his breast pocket and took out the banknotes he had designated for tonight’s crucial win. He laid them purposefully on the table—a silent answer to their silent question—making sure to meet each pair of eyes. Each man met his gaze with an obvious interest in whether Abe in fact had the kind of cards to support this type of wager. Sheinker put his money down, followed by Isinfeld, until the pile was nothing to joke about. “Bishop,” Abraham persisted, “are you in?”
The bishop shook his head sadly and Abraham felt like punching him suddenly, giving him something far stronger to contend with than a glass of wine. He wanted to force him to laugh not the wistful excuse for laughing (which commonly emerged as a thin, Gallic sigh) but something more authentic, a laugh that would temporarily remind the good bishop just how much of a man he still was, even though he was a man of the cloth, and just how little the difference was between him and a room full of peddlers.
“What on earth is the matter?” cried Abraham, in a voice that did little to disguise his vague irritation. How was he to play any kind of successful hand with this disapproving shadow? I do not believe in Jesus Christ, he nearly hissed. Do you really think you can judge me like some Mexican bastard on an isolated rancho, a maid servant begging for blessing? Abraham was suddenly and utterly convinced that the bishop knew everything—not only his shabby hand but his secret debts and burdens, his empty promises—and was looking so bereft as a subtle means of censure.
Spiegelman grumbled, and Abraham pulled his chair out from the table. The wood made a scraping sound on the floor, a sound that was oddly satisfying. “I want to know,” Abraham said. “I simply want to know what is troubling our friend the bishop. Does anyone not recognize a troubled man?” He put his hands on the bishop’s shoulders and felt the surprise of knobby bones beneath the scratchy wool cassock.
The bishop half-smiled and waved him off like a woman denying her husband is drunk, a woman insisting with a wistful smile that she too is having fun. But Abraham was not drunk, not really; his was a hearty constitution that had aged over time like strong, sharp cheese; it took a great deal on any given night to send him into slurry forgetfulness. Why, he wondered, had Cuca talked to him that way? His money lay in the center of the table, underneath the pile. For a moment, he saw no currency but only dirty paper covered in elaborate script and ambitious illustrations. He saw that someone had chosen the motif of women adorned with Grecian garments, which were (ironically—he couldn’t help but think) meant to represent justice and honor. The pile of banknotes looked childlike and flimsy and yet—all that paper: it seemed as vulnerable and regal as feathers of a dead rare bird. “Our good Catholic friend”—he lowered his voice, suddenly feeling nothing besides the urgent need to know the bishop’s mind—“you cannot fool me.”
“Leave him be, Abe…”
Abraham’s hands no longer touched the bishop’s shoulders but hovered just above, the palms outstretched. “What?” he asked, the way his mother might have, when one of her boys made trouble. “He sits here despondent after surviving! He should be reveling in his life. His life!” He picked up his cards and kept them close to his chest, where his heart beat a brutal march because his heart knew what was coming next even if he wasn’t so sure. He felt the same warmth throughout his legs as he had the first time he’d ever placed a bet in this town; he felt the same unstoppable momentum that he had come to respect. “Is this game so important that we cannot talk as friends?”
“It is nothing,” said the bishop succinctly. “I am only…” He stopped himself, obviously aware of how Abraham had somehow succeeded in forcing him to speak up. He made his voice clipped and quick, as if to get through the sentence as soon as possible. “I beg your pardon, but I cannot locate any more funds. My resources…” He shook his head. “I have no further resources.”
Spiegelman shifted in his seat, looking at the pile of money as if it were yet another dodgy character. He glanced from his cards to the money before giving his cards one final study and matching the bet amount. “And the French Society?” Spiegelman asked the bishop, obviously distracted, annoyed by this turn in conversation.
The bishop stuck out his lower lip and slowly shook his head. “If I do not think of something, all of my planning—the very fine stonecutters in France, n’est ce pas?—this will all be for naught. The cathedral will exist only in my mind. This is—you see this—C’est un désastre,” he muttered finally.
Abraham sat down and looked at the bishop. He pictured the faces of his cards lined up like souls. As he took another sip of bourbon, the men’s faces blurred, and he ceased to even see his cards. All he saw were oil flames glancing off Isinfeld’s spectacles and Sheinker’s glowing cigar tip and the queen and swords of the Monte game twelve years ago when he understood what it meant to win by bluffing, that bluffing was the greatest victory of all. He saw all of this and most of all he saw himself. He saw himself the way a hunter sees his prey—wild, vital—and it was from this vantage that he liked himself best. He saw how he placed the rest of the money—every last bill—on top of the pile and how the men’s faces looked pale. He knew they were counting up the unusually high pile in their fastidious minds and wondering if Abraham had finally reached his limit. He pictured the brown silk lining of his left breast pocket, the empty space so recently filled with greenbacks taken little by little from the Shein Brothers’ office, from a spot under a floorboard that Meyer didn’t know he knew about. And as all the players besides Spiegelman took their turns and folded like the conservatives he knew them to be, as every man but Spiegelman refused to match Abe’s bet—cutting their losses and forfeiting what they’d already laid down—Abraham Shein and Wolf Spiegelman were left facing each other, and the room was so fraught with tension that Abe was not surprised to see even the bishop knock back a full glass of wine in one shot. This moment was what he loved best, and he savored the way Wolf scratched his head as he weighed what to do; Abraham enjoyed this drawn-out question but he enjoyed the answer more: Wolf Spiegelman folded; he put his sweaty cards down with a scowl.
Abraham made sure he maintained a smile, a stubborn assertion that this was nothing but gentlemen’s fun, and he reached to gather all the finger-smudged inky delicate beautiful beautiful money. His hands were shaking because he knew the night’s risk-taking was not quite concluded, that this was no time to hold back. “I insist,” he said, breathing oddly heavily, smoothing his hair with one hand. “Bishop, I insist you take this money I have won. You are a great friend to all God’s creatures, even the Jews…” He forced a smile, but not one man was laughing. “My friends,” he pleaded. Once again he tried to look them all in the eye, but Spiegelman refused, tapping his long fingernails rapidly on the table as if it were a military drum. “I cannot sit idle while this great man is in need. Therefore I insist, I absolutely insist that you take this money right now. The last impression we want to give our friend is that we have become part of some—how do they say?—some hard-hearted codfish aristocracy. So please, Bishop—”
“Abraham—” the bishop interrupted.
“I will not hear a word until you accept.”
Bishop Jean-Paul Lagrande looked sheepishly from one man to the next and reached for the money before Abraham changed his mind. He was obviously too relieved to say much more than thank you.
“Gentlemen,” Abraham said, “please continue.” Upon realizing he’d successfully ingratiated himself to a far more respected (if more impoverished) member of the community than Doña Cuca, he took a cigar from the ebony box on the table, and stifled a smile as genuine as it was terrible. He had no business making grand gestures like this one; he was aware of this. He was aware that his wife deserved a house and that Doña Cuca deserved her money back, just as he was aware that it wasn’t right to have essentially stolen from his brother. He was also aware that these were not stupid men; each one found Abe’s benevolent motivation quite suspect, and yet they had to respect the fact that Abe had won that money fairly. He had also put them in an undeniable fix, for whoever suggested continuing to gamble for personal profit tonight would certainly look less than civic-minded, and these three men thrived on reputation almost as much as on profits. On the other hand, none of them would have wanted it to appear as if they were merely following Abraham’s example. He was aware of their fury, but they couldn’t say anything without looking miserly or like a follower, at least not tonight. One only had to look around to understand why Abraham couldn’t help himself: The bishop seemed to have shed ten years from his wizened complexion, and the men? The men looked trumped.
They stared at him—his co-religionists, co-gamblers, his cohorts—and as Abraham sucked on the tasty cigar, he knew each one was trying to decide how to proceed. Because no matter what had just transpired, he knew they all looked down on him as vaguely dissolute; after more than a decade in the territories—despite the fact that there were ladies in town now, despite how he’d gone to the considerable trouble of finding himself a German bride—not only did he still frequent all manner of drinking establishments no matter how low, but he insisted on speaking—almost exclusively—not regular English, but the English of American outlaws. He knew these men had shared with the bishop a subtle disdain for his booming voice, his often provocative statements, but he also knew that although they had silently scorned his sometimes crude ways, they had also been thankful for him—thankful for his being different and offering them a certain solidarity, a bond with each other and with the soft-spoken bishop that, with Abraham’s sudden and unstinting offer, had just been palpably broken.
“Carry on,” said Abraham amiably. “And count me out.”
ABRAHAM AND THE BISHOP STEPPED OUT FROM UNDER SPIEGELMAN’S vigas. They stood together in the empty street under a spangled sky.
“I fear your generosity has spurred them toward higher stakes tonight,” the bishop said after a silence. “Do you suppose they will finish before morning?”
“Oh I doubt this has anything to do with me. They like to win,” he said almost defensively. Then he shrugged. “So do I.”
“Yes,” said the bishop, smoothing his clean-shaven face with his ringed hand—as if the thin layer of stubble of this late hour was an unfamiliar, perhaps unpleasant, sensation. “I am aware of this,” he said. “And”—he cleared his throat, kept his eyes on the stars—“I will do everything in my power to make sure you do. Your benevolence will not go unrewarded.”
Abraham shook his hand, and spontaneously drew him into an embrace. There was the burnt and waxy smell of candles clinging to the bishop’s cassock, but also a hint of richness—a scent he would later identify (while laying awake hours later as the sun began to rise) as butter. He clapped the Frenchman’s bony back twice before finally letting him go. Wagon wheels turned a few blocks away; burros brayed at the moon.
They walked their separate ways, kicking up dirt in two directions.
“Abraham,” the bishop called out from yards away. “Bonne nuit.” Abe had never heard his voice so loud. It was unsettling, somehow.
When he could no longer see the bishop in the distance, he imagined the outline of his own body against the night sky, the wobbly delineation of a simple child, smudged roughly at the edges. His back and his shoulders ached all at once, and he wondered if he might not duck into Doña Cuca’s for a final restorative bourbon; at this late hour, after a full night’s profits, she was known to be a shade more reasonable. It was a windless night and he could hear everything, every rock underfoot, every coyote in the distance. He imagined that if he listened intently enough, he would hear beyond these thick adobe walls and discover matches being struck, arguments about money, vulgar scenes of love, but as he grew closer to the corner, he actually heard the real, if faint, sound of whimpering, like a dog about to die. He heard this whimpering over the saloon piano in the distance—speedy and out of tune—and the percussive slurs of drunkenness, crescendos of intermittent laughter. He heard this sound of whimpering and felt a punishing sadness but no curiosity. He walked faster toward the familiar noise and light, and was somehow desperate now for Cuca to understand that he was not a man to whom nothing was real besides his own personal fortune. He was moving so quickly by the time he rounded the corner that he almost missed the source of the whimpering. Down the alleyway where the trash was piled and had been piled for months now, where scrawny, hungry dogs had long exhausted their resources, there were two shadowy figures pummeling some poor bastard, and from the diminishing sound of the whimpering protests, they were doing one hell of a job. Abe didn’t look, not even for a moment, because he knew their faces well—they had worked for Cuca for years doing exactly this; this was no cause for surprise. When he opened the door to the saloon, he felt his face cleave in two and he realized he was smiling. He pictured those men in the alley—one pudgy Mexican, one big Anglo from Denver—and at first he thought they must have quit their blows because he couldn’t hear the whimpering anymore—it had been so damn insistent—but then he realized he had only to step through this particular door for the room to draw him in and block everything else right out. The outside world, for a little while, remained somehow wholly in the dark.