Boon

by Ed Kurtz

  Above our heads, the windows of the Red Foot Saloon began shattering. The fire had reached the second story. I seemed to be the only one to notice.

  Boon said, “You’re coming back down to Darling with me.”

  Dejasu dropped to his knees, baring his teeth like a wolf would. He carefully set his brother’s head down on the ground and got a better grip on his weapon.

  “Don’t do it,” Boon warned him.

  She had him covered, but old babyface Barry was quicker than either of us anticipated. He had that iron up and against his temple faster than lightning, and he squeezed the trigger, blowing his brains out the other side of his skull. He was still holding the gun when he hit the ground, face to face with the judge. I could not in that moment remember ever having seen anything sadder.

  Boon, on the other hand, wasn’t in a mourning mood. She held her Colt on Barry for a minute longer, as if she expected him to get back up again and want to throw down after all, but once she was satisfied that he was dead, she leathered the gun and walked slowly over to the remains of the Dejasu brothers. She bent at the waist, picked the judge’s head back up by the ears, and walked back to the saloon where she chucked the head into the inferno. She might as well have been playing horseshoes, for all the effect it had on her.

  For the first time in a long while, I silently questioned my only friend’s sanity. But not the first time. Not by a damn sight.

  “Go fetch that horse,” she instructed me. “I’ll stow him.”

  I didn’t argue.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It took most of an hour before we’d gotten far enough away from town that the smoke wasn’t blotting out the sun. The fire had spread to neighboring buildings, just as I reckoned it would, and by the time we were mounted and moving, half the town was in flames. A body could probably see that smoke clear to Goliad, though there wasn’t anybody left in Red Foot to wonder about that. Those that didn’t perish in the saloon or out in the street lit out the night before or as soon as the fire really got going in the morning.

  Red Foot, Texas was no more.

  I’d gotten stuck with a scrawny nag that didn’t appear to have eaten once in all its miserable life. The skinny thing was just wandering outside of town, wide-eyed from the fire and smoke and gunshots, and since my own mount was in all likelihood stolen by one of the fleeing locals, it was that or walk back to Darling. No saddle; just a blanket, Indian-style. I could feel every knobby bone in the nag’s spine every step of the way.

  Boon rode ahead of me, Bartholomew Dejasu slung over the palomino’s hindquarters with a black mist of flies to keep him company. I kept trying not to look at him, the way I’d looked away in the street after he caught the judge’s head, but my eyes were drawn to the corpse time and again. I’d seen plenty of corpses in my years, and some of them had died about as badly as possible. I had even seen a man shoot himself before, though that time it was through the heart and I was in no way responsible for the man’s grief—just some pitiable dipsomaniac in a Little Rock dance hall. It wasn’t any one detail of how Dejasu ended up flopping dead behind Boon’s saddle on the trail back to Darling, but each and every detail mixed all together, from the minute Willocks brought out the bounty paper to the stupid cow and her even stupider cowboys, from the red foot in the Red Foot in Red Foot to that awful saw I stole for Boon to cut off a man’s head. It was all of it so ghastly and all I could think was how terribly I needed a drink, but every drop in Red Foot turned to fuel and the damned nag hadn’t come equipped with any liquor when I stole her.

  I sure felt sore and sorry, and it didn’t help much that Boon hadn’t uttered a single word since we rode out. Was the gravity of what she had done weighing on her? Mayhap, I thought. Then again, for all I knew, she was remembering every bit of it and savoring the memories with a warm smile on her face and joy in her heart. There wasn’t any telling. She was just as quiet as Bartholomew Dejasu and her back was to me.

  Besides, there was that gnawing old question pertaining to her mind and whether or not all of it was where it ought to have to been. That all her rows had been hard to hoe was without doubt or question, and it seemed to me that anybody who went through enough hell kept a measure of hell inside them. You couldn’t hardly turn around in some parts of the country without smacking plum into one crazy war veteran or another, some twisted up husk that used to be a man before the things he did and saw during those bloody, terrible years. And that wasn’t but the four years; I wasn’t precisely sure how old Boon was, but I guessed her to be about my same age, which meant her bloody, terrible years were some ten times longer than that war and counting. More than enough to wear one’s brain down to a nub, I reckoned.

  Of course, she wasn’t raving or anything. She didn’t think she was the Queen of Sheba or piss in the street or kill people at random. Sure, she’d sent quite a passel of men off to their judgments, but like I said, there wasn’t a one of them didn’t have it coming. Judge Dejasu had it coming for damn sure, and had she merely shot him I wouldn’t have even been thinking about it the next day. But that wasn’t how it happened at all. I couldn’t say that Boon particularly enjoyed what she’d done, but the fact alone that she’d thought it up at all, never mind carried it out cut by horrible cut, wasn’t something I was apt to forget any time soon. And by soon, I mean to say ever in my life.

  It was far and away the worst thing I’d ever seen my friend do, though not the worst she’d done, to hear her tell it. That came some years before she ever made my acquaintance, long before they tried to string me up outside Comanche. Well before I left Arkansas for good, and before she came east, by her reckoning, to look for her mother and kill her father. I never was completely sure, but the way she told it made it sound like this happened during the war, back in the sixties. I spent those years hiding out from conscription. Boon spent them getting warmed up for the road ahead.

  And it took her some warming up to me to tell it—that and an equal share of the corn whiskey I’d had that night. I’d pulled the stopper by the campfire and settled in for another night of silent, solitary drinking until I passed out in my roll, but she sidled right up to me and said, “Pass that bottle here.”

  She’d been kind of spooky all that day, not just quiet like she most always was, but sort of worried and always looking around from side to side like she expected a good old fashioned bushwhack. I didn’t ask, but after two or three healthy swallows from that bottle’s neck, she volunteered.

  “March the fifth,” she said, even though it wasn’t but the third then. I elected not to correct her. “Puts me in mind of some black things, since you’re wondering.”

  “Who says I’m wondering?” I said.

  “Don’t never play any poker, Edward. You ain’t got the right face for it.”

  I never did, but I took her point. Most Germans had a good market on the stone-face routine, or so I always heard it said, but somehow, I missed that particular trait when the rest of them got passed on down to me. Boon could read me like a book and it didn’t take that much practice.

  “Some heavy fighting in Georgia, Tennessee around then, I reckon,” she went on. “Of course, I didn’t know about it then. I hardly even knew there was a war on at all. I was still in California, pressing big shirts for fat white men who more often n’ not figured I came with the price of the laundering. They’d call you a dirty yellow chink in the light of day and try to get a hand up your skirt soon as the sun was down. Men are a bad sort anyway you cut it—white men, ’specially—but they get badder in the dark.”

  She confiscated the bottle again to drink some more and let me stew on what she’d said. Boon always had an endless variety of choice words about men, but I never took it personal. Way I figured, she wasn’t wrong. Still, any time she got onto things like that and gave me a little knowing look, a sort of you-know-what-I’m-jawing-about look, I did exactly what she wanted me to do, which was remember all the times I wasn’t altogether jake myself when it came to certain sor
ts of people. She did that then, by the campfire that night, and I shifted uncomfortably on my roll.

  Men aren’t nothing but trash, Boon liked to say. She said it again then, and I nodded.

  “There was this one fellow I’m not like to forget,” she said. “Not in a century of Sundays, I won’t. Name of Percy Watkins. Son of a forty-niner, but one of the rare ones that actually found his color, so Percy sat high on the hog. Shit, he was a hog. Never wore the same collar two days in a row, which I knew damn well since I was the one who boiled and starched them. Most days it was a Negro girl brought in his laundry, some poor creature talked less than me and looked for all God’s green earth like she was defeated the day she was born and she knew it. For Mister Watkins, she’d say. Just them three words, every time, and she’d take the ticket and leave. For Mister Watkins. Christ. I swear she winced when she said it, too.

  “Once in a while, the fat man came in his own self. Usually on Fridays, though I can’t say why. Mayhap he gave the girl Fridays off. Twice, maybe three times a month, his breath coming in a full minute in front of him, smelling like a still exploded right next to a cigar factory. Now, this is twenty-five, thirty times he’s done this already, you understand? And still he comes in with a slobbery grin and pulling the skin away from his eyes, says China girl, velly pretty, velly pretty. I tell him I come from Siam and I talk American just as good as he does, just like I did every God damn time he played that fool act on me. God Almighty, Edward, I had some kind of hate in me for that man.

  “You yellow bitch, he says to me next. Do you know who I am? I told him his own name to show him I did, and I asked him had he forgot it. Old Percy was getting awful red by then, sweating up a storm, so the other girl up front there, she hurried off to the back with the rest of the family what ran the laundry. Six of them, as I recall, and they all lived back there, too. The Huang family. Weren’t but sheets dividing it into rooms, but I’ll burn a thousand lifetimes in hell if they weren’t the cleanest, smoothest sheets you ever saw, boy.

  “The Huangs didn’t fool around with big men like Percy Watkins. There wasn’t any percentage in it. You kept your head down and did what was expected of you, and you got through the day most of the time. The big men never let you forget you weren’t like them, and most of the little ones didn’t, neither. You had your place and you stayed in it, by God, if you knew what was good for you. And that went even when they called you a yellow bitch. That went even when they put their big, tobacco-stained hands on you and insisted that you apologize. That’s what Percy did then, and I did not much care for it.

  “Tell me you’re solly, he said. Say solly, solly, China girl. Tell me you’re solly or I’ll sweep you off them bound feet and make you solly.

  “Well, Edward, I have to tell you that I did not take kindly to these words.”

  I didn’t expect she would have. At the time, we had known one another for less than one year, but there had been some words here and there. They were, I was sad to recognize, to be expected. But never had I witnessed any man take the time and trouble to speak quite so horribly to Boonsri. And yet I knew her well enough, when she was telling me her story, to understand that things would not have gotten better from there.

  “What did you do?” I said, knowing too well the answer would haunt me once she told me.

  “I put a pair of shears in his neck, opened him from belly to throat, and unmanned him,” she said. “The first two were easy, but a man’s private and personal organ is harder to cut through than you’d think. That last bit took more work than I expected.”

  She worked this around in her mind for a moment, remembering the effort, I suppose. It was a thing of instinct that I crushed my thighs together and turned slightly away from her.

  “Did you run?” I said.

  “I didn’t go back to the Huangs,” she said. “But I didn’t leave San Francisco, either. I knew I could hide well enough. We Orientals all look alike, you know.”

  She said this with a sorrowful, sardonic smile, and I would swear before the Throne of God that there were tears in her eyes. It was the first time I ever saw such emotion on her, and though not the last, it was rarer than hen’s teeth.

  “He was the first man I ever killed,” Boon said. “I could have killed a hundred before him, some of them worse than Percy Watkins by a mile, but it never happened ’til him. I always wondered why.” She was really crying then. Not loud, not blubbering or anything. But the tears were streaming like brooks. “I always wondered about that.”

  Hand on a Bible, I was crying, too. Before that night, I never thought for a minute that killing meant any more to Boonsri Angchuan than stepping on a cockroach meant to anybody else. I figured her for a stone-cold murderess, if I’m to be honest about it. Mad? I was sure of that, too. So how came you to keep riding with her, Splettstoesser?

  I’ll get to that.

  Watching her back, bouncing on that palomino with Bartholomew Dejasu bouncing in the same rhythm behind her, I thought about Percy Watkins and his split belly, his severed cock, his cruelty and his death and Boon’s tears about it so many years later. Did she recollect Percy’s organ when she removed the judge’s head? Would she cry someday about Selwyn Dejasu, also? I wasn’t with her every hour of the day and night. Perhaps she skulked off to weep away the dead, the killed, whenever she had a private moment to do so. I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.

  That night, we made a cold camp that did not involve any storytelling or spilling of the heart’s blood. Just dead quiet in the pitch of night, each of us in his and her bedrolls, Boon having relieved poor Pim of Barry Dejasu’s weight by tossing the corpse to the cold, hard ground while we slept. I doubt his face was farther than five feet from mine while I lay there, pretending like I was gone to dreams of better days behind or ahead. In fact, I stayed awake most of the night, only nodding off when time took its toll. And when I did dream, I dreamed of Percy Watkins, Judge Selwyn Dejasu, and Boon’s tears over my own lonesome grave.

  Chapter Fourteen

  That this time we only rode into town with one corpse between the two of us, as opposed to the two that we brought into Red Foot, seemed a blessing. Boon no longer had the paper on Dejasu to prove her rightful possession of the corpse, but assuming Willocks had managed to retain his office for the handful of days we’d been gone, I did not anticipate any major problems to trip us up on that account.

  My optimism proved fantastical. Or at least plumb stupid.

  Marshal Willocks was, in fact, still a town marshal, and he did, also in point of fact, maintain his desk and hat-stand in a musty little room right down the road from the Darling barber shop where first we made that esteemed gentleman’s acquaintance. He was not, however, in an obliging mood when Boon and I arrived to darken his doorstep and collect our promised reward. Nor was he alone.

  With Willocks, stuffed tightly in the hot little office, were three other men, all of them dour-faced, fat, and decked out in black suits like preachers or mourners. Willocks sat behind his desk, but the three fat men rose from their chairs when we came in. No one said anything for the best part of a minute. Everyone looked to Willocks. It was his show, I guessed.

  “These gentlemen are Darling’s aldermen,” the marshal said. He rattled off their names, which I immediately forgot. It didn’t seem like the kind of information worth storing in my skull for later use. “Built this town from next to nothing.”

  “Not next to nothing,” one of the aldermen corrected him. “Nothing a’tall.”

  “All right, then,” Willocks said. “Nothing at all.”

  The aldermen all nodded.

  Boon said, “Congratulations.”

  I wanted to ask about the people they had raking the street, but it wasn’t the time. I was just going to have go on wondering about that particular anomaly.

  “You find him?” the marshal said.

  “We found him,” Boon said. “He’s right outside.”

  “Alive?”

  “No.”
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br />   “That’s a shame,” Willocks said. “See, that’s a God damn shame.”

  “Marshal,” another alderman snapped, “there is a lady present.”

  Willocks snorted.

  “No,” he said. “There sure ain’t.”

  Then I snorted. Boon shot me a look. I simmered down.

  She said, “What are you driving at, Willocks?”

  “Just this,” said the first alderman, probably the fattest. “We have dropped all charges against Mr. Dejasu. He is no longer a wanted man.”

  “He ain’t no kind of man at all,” she said. “On account of he’s dead.”

  “Then you killed a free citizen.”

  “I did not,” Boon told him. “As a matter of true fact, Dejasu killed his own self.”

  The fat man’s mouth dropped open. It was dead quiet in the marshal’s office again. Everybody seemed to be thinking that one over fair hard.

  “I can’t hardly see how it matters one way or the other,” I put in. “We had us a paper on him and that paper said apprehend. Nothing about alive or not.”

  “Paper’s no good,” said the fattest alderman.

  “Was when we got it,” Boon said. “Marshal his self gave it to us and we had us an agreement.”

  The alderman licked his lips and rocked a bit on his heels. The floorboards groaned beneath his weight.

  “Seems like we’re not speaking the same language, Miss…?”

  “Boonsri Angchuan,” she said.

  The fat man had a good laugh at that.

  “Well,” he said after he got through with his fun, “fact is the charges were dropped before you could ever have made it to Red Foot. I expect you wasn’t but ten miles out of Darling when we dropped them.”

  “Then you ought to’ve sent word them ten miles,” Boon said.

  “We were reticent about that,” said the third alderman. “Not knowing what sort of people you two are. Bounty hunters aren’t exactly law and order.”