by Ed Kurtz
Stealth work never really was her style.
“Hold there,” came a voice then. “Hold up there, miss.”
From the planks on the boardwalk came a wide-shouldered man with salt-and-pepper hair and a sort of slow, swaying walk like he’d been at sea for a long time. He also wore a star on his blue-striped shirt, right where his heart was. There was a pair of revolvers strapped cross draw to his hips to complement the star, probably also courtesy of the Town of Darling that appointed him.
“Law,” I hissed at Boon.
“Why don’t you let Lenny go,” the lawman said, “and we’ll have us a little chat about what’s the matter.”
He sounded so calm that it almost calmed me down, except the presence of lawmen never put me at ease. For her part, Boon did in fact release Lenny, but not before taking a fistful of his hair to remember him by. Lenny mewled like a dying cat, scrambling away in the dust and clutching at the top of his head where there now was a brand-new, bright pink bald spot.
Boon opened her hand and let the hair blow away in the breeze. The lawman stopped a few feet away from her and gave her a look-over.
“Sheriff,” she said.
“Marshal, as a matter of fact,” he said, pointing a thumb at the star. The thumbnail was peculiarly clean and cut. “Marshal Tom Willocks. And yourself, ma’am?”
The marshal rested his hands on his sides, just above the curled pearl grips of his guns. Boon still wore hers, too. My rifle remained in its scabbard, which remained with my paint horse. I was not in the habit of walking around armed and ready. All I did was stand in the middle of the street like a fool and gawk like everybody else.
“My name is Boonsri Angchuan,” she said. “This man insulted me and I have had my satisfaction. What else might I do for you, Marshal Willocks?”
“I figure I can believe that,” said the marshal. “Lenny Reed is a character, all right. ’Spect that bald spot might remind him to keep his mouth shut, but then again, probably not. You just come into town today, Miss An—ank…”
“Angchuan. And yes. Myself and my friend here, Herr Edward Splettstoesser, lately of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.”
“Well,” drawled the lawman, “if the two of you will forgive me not trying either of those names with this fat tongue of mine, I would appreciate it if y’all would accept my hospitality over a cup of coffee in my office, if only for a moment. My deputy makes the worst coffee this side of the Indian Territory. You’ve got to taste it to believe it.”
“Are we being put under arrest?” I asked. I was looking at Boon but asking anyone who could answer. The whole scene was a bit puzzling to me.
“There something you got to confess?” Willocks said. He was grinning, but I didn’t think it was very funny.
I shook my head.
“Edward,” Boon said, “shut up. Yes, Marshal Willocks. We will take you up on that bad coffee.”
The coffee was worse than I imagined. After one taste, I set the cup on the marshal’s desk and regarded it cagily. He laughed about that. I did not.
“Now here’s a couple of things about Darling,” he said at some length. “One is, this town is growing by leaps and bounds, which usually means we’re happy as a pig in slop to greet newcomers, even if they are just passing through.”
“Can’t say as any town I ever passed through sent out a marshal to greet me,” Boon said. She was still drinking that godawful coffee for some unknowable reason. I looked around for the deputy who made it, but he was nowhere to be seen. I think I just wanted to know what a man who would make something so unpalatable looked like.
“Can’t say as that’s business as usual here, either,” Willocks said. “But most folks don’t take to dragging a man out into the street the way you done, and as soon as you got here, to boot.”
I said, “He had it coming, sir.”
Boon said, “Shut up, Edward.”
Marshal Willocks chuckled affably.
“Like I told you, Lenny is the sort of man going to end up gutshot in an alley some fine day. There won’t be any charges. Nobody died, and nobody worth worrying about got hurt any. That being said, I would like to know what it is exactly brings the two of you into Darling. If there’s something I can help you with, I’d be more than glad to be of service. But if it’s some kind of trouble you’re after, I would prefer you keep moving.”
“That’s fair,” Boon said. I was not of the view that we should be spilling our guts to the local constabulary so readily, but I’d already been hushed twice. “I am looking for two people. One English, the other from Siam. They are my parents.”
“You from this Siam, yourself?”
“I was born there.”
“Then I reckon you are the first person from that land ever to have graced the Town of Darling, Texas. As to the Englishman, I couldn’t say without more information.”
She gave the lawman some specifics: name, approximate age (sixty or so), taller than average height, probably gone full gray by then. The gold teeth, of course. Willocks rolled it around in his skull for a little while, even looked through a book of truebills he had stashed in a desk drawer, but the name Arthur Stanley held no meaning for him. By that point in the journey, it was hard to feel disappointment anymore. For me, at least. Nobody ever seemed to know much of anything. I’d never said as much, but as far as I could see, we were chasing ghosts. There was no end to the trail we were on, but in the main I liked it just fine that way.
What the hell else was I going to do?
“You certain this fellow is in this part of Texas?” the marshal asked.
“I am not certain he is in Texas at all,” Boon said. “I have been chasing rumors and hunches for some years now, which landed me hereabouts. I do know Stanley likes to deal in slaving, or that he used to did, and that brought me to Galveston after the war.”
“There was some trouble getting everybody on board with the Proclamation,” Willocks admitted.
“Well,” she said, “he wasn’t there, neither.”
He made a thin line of his mouth and sighed through his nose.
“I’m truly sorry I couldn’t have been more help,” the marshal apologized, extending his hands. “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll wire some boys I know in Goliad about it if you’ll write down those names for me. Mayhap they’ll turn something up, and if they do, you’ll be the second to know, right after me.”
“Much obliged, Mr. Willocks,” Boon said. She stood and shook his hand.
He didn’t offer me his hand, and I didn’t want it anyway. I was no great friend of the law, and I guess he could tell that just by looking at me.
“And don’t worry none about that rooming house,” he added as we headed for the door. “Missus Reynold is a terrible old crone, but there’s no ordinance in Darling that backs her up when she tries to keep people she don’t like from taking up a room. You have any trouble, let me know. I’ll straighten her out.”
I went back out into the daylight shaking my head and trying not to fall down laughing. The way that lawman fell all over himself to help out Boon! If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have said the old boy was smitten. Not that any man could blame him if he was. Everyone figured they wanted a submissive and demure woman, the kind the Good Book tells us to search out to be Godly in her service to her Lord and Master, being the husband, naturally. That’s what every fellow thinks he wants, anyway. Before he meets a gal like Boon.
Only there weren’t any other gals like Boon.
I did not much care for Marshal Tom Willocks.
Chapter Four
We took our supper right there in the main room with everybody else that evening, and we didn’t have a spot of trouble from Missus Reynold or anybody else. People stared and whispered, sure. But no trouble.
I guessed the Great Hero of the Plains Tom Willocks had already put his mighty influence to effect in that regard.
What a damn fraud, I thought.
Boon had some kind of soup. It looked watery to me and she
barely touched it. She was a thousand miles away, maybe farther. I tried not to stare, and every time I was on the verge of asking her what was going on in that noggin of hers, I all but bit my own tongue off. If it wasn’t Willocks on her mind, then I supposed it was the fact that she wasn’t any closer to her goal now than she was when we first started out. And that was not to mention the years she spent on the hunt before she ever met me with a rope around my neck.
I was on a roan horse with my hands tied behind my back. The rope went up and over a juniper branch as thick as my thigh, where it was secured to the trunk in a double knot that looked like it was going to hold just fine when that roan was shooed away. In front of me, backlit by the afternoon sun so that I could hardly make out their faces, were three riders. The one in the middle was wearing my hat. He was the one who started the whole mess.
Of course, it was his opinion that the fault was mine. We were at cross-purposes, he and I. He had walked into a saloon south of Comanche to find the love of his life seated on my lap, and he saw red. Thing was, the place was a crib house and his beloved was in its employ. And I might have been a paying customer had the fellow not dragged the poor girl off of me and hauled me outside by the front of my shirt. I had only been in Texas for five days.
The heartsick idiot demanded I fill my hand, which was a request I declined. I had only my rifle, which did not at all suit the situation he was trying to put into place. He then commanded one of his two pals to give me his revolver. This turned into an argument between them, during which I started for the alley between the crib house and the gambling den next door. The third fellow cracked off a shot at me, slamming lead into the corner of the building not three inches above the crown of my skull.
“If he won’t fight like a man,” said the heartsick idiot, “then I ’spect we’ll just hang the son of a bitch.”
I weighed the two options, but I was wasting my time. The first idea was off the table already. The girl who’d been on my lap was on the porch now, clasping her hands to her breast and gazing lovingly at the man who had just decided to lynch me. I thought bitterly about how something like this wouldn’t have happened back in Arkansas, but it probably would have. Honestly, it was only a matter of time.
That was the sort of luck I had.
I got tossed onto a mount with the grubby fellow who’d taken that potshot at me and the four of us went loping out of whatever lousy little cow town we’d been in, in a westerly direction, where they sought privacy and the right tree for the job. Once I was strung up, I asked as politely as I could that the fellows look after my horse. The heartsick idiot said he was going to kill my horse and let it rot in the desert next to me. It didn’t look like we were going to be friends. I said as much, in a manner sufficiently colorful to excite their rage. Though I was about to die, I couldn’t help but laugh a little. It must have been what I said about the heartsick idiot’s mother. Tough jaspers like him were always mama’s boys in the end.
I couldn’t quite make out what he was doing, but it was quiet enough out there in the still, hot air that I could hear the click of the hammer as he eared it back. The usual chain of events in tights like this, at least according to the dime novels, was that he’d fire a round into the air to startle the roan. The roan would then move off, leaving me to hang. That would be that, until the next poor bastard met his beloved whore at the crib house, anyway.
And a shot did indeed come. It echoed out over the cacti and scrub brush and I squeezed my eyes shut to wait for death. The horse fell away from beneath me, and I dropped toward the earth, but my neck stayed in the noose that was now choking the life out of me while my toes scraped the dust. Well, old man, I told myself, I expect this is the end, then. I felt unusually calm, given the circumstances, and tried to hold my breath for some reason but my lungs weren’t having it. Three more shots followed, one right after the other, pop, pop, pop. I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to a whole lot of commotion in the ensuing seconds. Shouts and hooves beating the dirt, what sounded like sacks of grain falling to the ground from a reasonable height. My eyes opened again but by then I was half-dead already and couldn’t see much, or what I could see was as that esteemed disciple said, as through a glass but darkly.
The rope broke. I hit the ground, hard. Had the heartsick idiot had a change of heart? If so, that certainly did nothing to explain the three shots that followed the one that spooked my horse. My face was full of dust and there were hooves beating perilously close to my head. Nothing was going the way I expected it to that day.
When I did finally open my eyes, I found myself staring at the heartsick idiot, who appeared to be staring back at me. Our faces were lined up perfectly there on the ground, only his sported a fresh hole right in the middle of the forehead which leaked blood onto the dirt. A horse nickered nearby and boots hit the earth. I tried to roll over but my back barked at me and my hands were still tied.
The first thing Boon ever said to me, the knife she used to cut the rope still gripped in one hand, was, “You ought to stay away from whorehouses.”
To my credit, I did.
Most of the time.
She gave up on her soup and lay the spoon down on the table. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her look quite as tired as she did that first evening in Darling, Texas, and for reasons I couldn’t seem to pin down it made me feel sad to see it. To tell the God’s honest truth, she was the only friend I had in all the world, and though I knew she had a rough go of life, when it piled up on her mind there was rarely anything I could say or do. At the end of the day, I wasn’t ever much help to her. I was just there.
“Turning in,” was all she said before rising from the table and going purposefully to the stairs.
I signaled the bartender for another drink, but he only pursed his lips at me and shrugged. With a sigh, I got up and went over to him to get my damn whiskey.
When I returned to the table, I was surprised to find Boon’s chair now occupied by none other than Marshal Tom Willocks. He struck a sulphur match against the underside of the table and touched the flame to a cigarette perched in his mouth. Blue smoke spilled from his nostrils once he got the thing going, and he waved the lucifer out before letting it drop to the floor.
“Bad habit,” he said without looking at me. He bent over to retrieve the dead match. “This ain’t that type of place.”
Willocks dropped the match into the ashtray on the table, heretofore clean and empty, and puffed away while I sat down and stared at him over my glass.
“Soup’s cold,” I told him, “but I don’t reckon Boon would mind if you finish it.”
“Thanks, no,” he said. “I took my supper at my desk like always. There’s a little diner at the far north end of Willoughby Street run by the Widow Perkins. She brings me a bowl of beef stew or chili most every evening, bless her heart. I heartily recommend it.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
He drew in a lungful and held it for a moment before expelling the smoke in a great plume that filled the space between us.
“Siam,” he said at some length. “You know, the only reason I ever heard of it is those twins. The Siamese Twins, you know what I mean.”
I didn’t.
“Come again?” I said.
“Couple of brothers, born stuck to each other or some such thing. Used to tour all over the county, charge a quarter to look at ’em. I never did, but I read all about it in the papers from back east. Anyway, they’re from Siam, too. Just like your pretty friend.”
Pretty friend. I wanted to stuff that cigarette up his nose, hot end first.
I said, “I don’t reckon Boon is stuck to anybody.”
“No,” he agreed, “I don’t reckon she would be. How do you suppose she speaks English so well? That on account of her daddy?”
“She grew up in America,” I said. “Back east mostly, way to hear her tell it, though she’s muttered something or other about California, too. I don’t know if she talks any Siamese or not.”
If she did, it was no better than my German, but I’d never heard her say anything that wasn’t in English apart from the odd Mex word, which was the same for just about anyone.
“Abandoned,” the marshal said low.
That was about the size of it. Near as I could tell, the old Englishman had brought them both—Boon and Pimchan—first to Cuba, then to America, with the glowing promise of making them a right and proper family. Boon in a fancy Yankee school and Pimchan made a right and proper wife. Instead, Pimchan ended up in something like indentured servitude but more akin to slavery, never mind the law. By the time Boon ran off to California in search of her mama, she wasn’t but twelve years old and landed in an orphanage for Chinese children because nobody would believe she wasn’t Chinese. Came up the rest of the way with kids she couldn’t understand and grown-ups who wouldn’t listen to her. Seems she was no older than fourteen when she broke out of that awful place, though it was another couple-few years before she learned the full truth of her provenance and parentage.
That was when the hate started.
But I didn’t tell all of this to Willocks. My big mouth had already spouted more than enough. I blamed the whiskey. It was a damned sight better in Darling than I was accustomed to.
“It ain’t been all that easy for her,” I said.
“Between two worlds,” the marshal waxed, “belonging to neither. No, I don’t ’spose that is very easy.”
“Everybody has a cross to bear,” I said, and I slammed the rest of the liquor down my gullet. I’d have loved to follow it up with another, but Willocks was beginning to get on my nerves. “It’s been a right smart pleasure, Your Honor, but I’m sure looking forward to that clean bed upstairs.”
I stood up a little too fast and stumbled a little, grasping the edge of the table to keep from toppling over. Damn fine whiskey. I tried to remember the name on the bottle, but I wasn’t too sure of my own name by that point in the proceedings.
“Hang on just a minute there,” said Willocks. He reached over and grabbed me by the wrist. I did not care for that one whit and I snapped my hand away from him.