by Ed Kurtz
There came nickering from the remuda as the horses shifted about uneasily. Some horses got used to guns and others didn’t. I didn’t know which kind these were.
While Willocks watched and waited, I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes to watch along with him. The remaining three deputies squatted in the trees, uncertain. Lefty just kept bleeding out of his neck into the dust and dead, brown leaves. No one much seemed to mourn his passing.
The morning was cool and still. I looked for movement, signs of life, and I reckoned the marshal did, too. Who had the better eyes, I couldn’t say, though I never judged mine too poorly. But I did not see anything at all.
The morning chugged along slow, like a train trudging uphill towards a water station, getting hotter all the time and not a sound made by anyone or anyone’s gun. Willocks moved from one knee to the other, stood for some while, then went down again. Now and again he tested his ability to hold the rifle backwards from the way he was accustomed to, his untried left forefinger brushing tentatively against the trigger. The men in the trees shuffled in the brush, some smoking here and there, checking their guns, sighing with frustration. Black ants had found Lefty before long; they came in two military columns and poked around the hole in his neck, filed into his mouth and nose. It was gruesome to look at, so I quit looking at it.
The sun got high, white as paper, and every man jack of us was getting to sweating in the gathering heat. Paddy pissed back in the trees and Blackmouth barked at him to stop splashing with his equipment all over the place. That seemed to be the last straw for the kid, who then leapt to his feet and hollered, “All right! All right, God damn it!”
“Quit your bellering,” said Paddy.
“All right,” Blackmouth said again with a high giggle. He burst from the cover of the copse and bounded for the remuda, a single-action Army revolver gripped tight in his right hand.
Willocks said, “What in hell do you think you’re doing?”
Paddy said, “Scared crazy, that’s what he is.”
“All by God right,” Blackmouth said, swinging up into the saddle of the barrel-chested gray he’d ridden out of Revelation.
“Get your ass down and back to cover,” the marshal scolded him.
The kid paid no mind. Rather, revolver still in hand, he took up the reins and put heels to haunches, and he spurred the gray out from the cottonwoods at a trot. He hallooed like a wild Indian and his hat blew back from his head, straining the cord against his neck as he gigged the horse’s withers again and again.
“All right, do you hear me,” he cried at the flatland, riding straight out to where the shots had originated. “I am coming, all right, I am coming.”
Willocks’ shoulders sank and his body withered from the heat and the sweat and the disappointment. He groaned and wiped his brow with the back of his hand.
“God damned crazy fool,” he said low.
“I am coming,” Blackmouth shouted. He and the gray got smaller and smaller on the shimmering vista until, finally, another shot cracked the sky and the kid dropped like a hailstone from the saddle to the red earth. The gray reared back, tramped a circle, and fell into a hard gallop east until I could no longer see it.
I could still make out the kid, though. Still and small, flat on the ground where he had died.
Tom Willocks hung his head.
“God damned fool,” he said.
“All right,” I said, grinning.
Willocks swung the Springfield up and around to aim at my center, his face beet-red and eyes burning with hate.
“Say another word,” he said. “One more fucking word, Dutchman. Just one.”
I declined. The marshal of Darling kept that rifle at me for a minute longer, his jaw set tight and finger tickling the trigger. I figured he was going to do what he felt like doing, no matter what I did or said, so I leaned back against a cottonwood and closed my eyes. I listened to a soft breeze pick up and I smelled the foliage and the horses and their shit. I thought about Boon and realized that I still wasn’t altogether sure and certain that it was her out there sniping at us. And when I opened my eyes again, Willocks was back to watch, leaning on the Springfield like a crutch with its butt to the ground, having decided not to further incur the wrath of the executioner in the flatland.
Which, of course, made for an eerie and dispossessing experience that raised the same question, I am sure, in the mind of every man in that cottonwood grove: where could she possibly hide? Were there anything approaching a rise or some rocks or even a log to provide cover, more sense could have been made of the situation. As things were, however, there was little to nothing stretching out before us but dust and yellow short grass. It was as though our shooter was perfectly invisible, a wraith with a rifle that could not be seen nor stopped. None of us voiced this apprehension, but I knew each one of us was thinking it. Whether or not it was Boon out there picking men off, the increased restlessness of the two remaining men in the trees was all the evidence I needed to judge them scared out of their minds.
And if it was not Boon, then there was a good portion of my own self that was a fair bit frightened, too.
The two deputies—or, more properly, gunmen—left to Willocks were the big Brute and the lanky, dark-faced Irishman with a nose like an eagle’s beak. It was this second one who broke the long silence in the late afternoon, throwing down his knife so that it buried itself in the dirt at his feet and shouting, “One woman! One damn woman! What kind of yellow sons of bitches are we, anyhow?”
“Go on ahead and get kilt, then,” said the Brute.
“I won’t be cowed by a God damned woman,” Paddy spat. “And not any Oriental breed, neither, or whatever she be.”
“She’s more,” Willocks said softly.
He didn’t take his eyes from the vista to say it, and it sounded as though he might have been talking to himself.
“Eh?” Paddy said. “What’s that, Willocks?”
“Mayhap you won’t be cowed by a woman,” said the marshal, “but this isn’t just any woman. You’d do well to hear me on that.”
“What is she, then? God’s snot, Willocks! I killed thirteen men in fair fights, mostly, some of them terrible, mean fuckers you never thought could be, and here we are stove in and hiding out from one woman with a rifle? I can’t stand for that, Willocks. God damn you, I can’t stand for that!”
Tom Willocks smiled and laughed soundlessly. Gradually, his head turned to face me, still leaned up against the tree for so long my legs were tingly and half-asleep.
“Whyn’t you tell him,” he said. “Tell him what she is.”
“Boonsri Angchuan?” I said, laughing. “Christ, I don’t reckon God himself knows for sure what she is. And I don’t know for sure whether He made her, or if it was the other fellow down below, ’cause she’s got plenty of devil in her when her blood is up, and it just about always is.”
Paddy scoffed.
“Ain’t no devil out there,” he groused. “Just one fucking woman.”
“Go find out,” Willocks said.
“A woman,” Paddy said.
Willocks twisted around, rising at the same time, and roared, “Go find out, you jabbering son of a bitch!”
The Irishman said nothing in reply to that.
And so, we waited a good deal longer, until the afternoon melted darkly into night. The night, it turned out, was to be considerably more interesting still.
Chapter Twenty-Three
On a flat, red rock, which had been baking in the sun all day at the edge of the cottonwood grove where it met the dust, a scaly prairie lizard squatted with its black, half-lidded eyes trained on me. I had seen probably a thousand of its like in my time, and a hundred other kinds of lizards besides, but I had never seen one change the expression on its cold, cruel face. Way I always guessed it was, the little critters just didn’t have the mind for it, which is to say they weren’t made for anything else than killing their prey, eating up the flesh and bones, and resting in the
warmth of the sun until they got hungry again. No thought put to it. No faces to pull, the way human beings do, on account of there wasn’t any emotion there to inspire such a thing. Just dumb killers, that was all.
Yet being cold and being a killer did not a moron make. A man didn’t need to know Boon too intimately to reach that conclusion, and I reckoned I knew her better than anybody. She was smart as a quirt and thrice as mean, and though her face rarely betrayed what was going on inside that skull of hers, there was no question that a lot was going on all the same. Just because I could not read a prairie lizard did not mean I knew it. But did the lizard feel a thing when it caught its prey and crushed it between its jaws? Did Boon?
If she ever shed a tear for the judge, I never knew it, but there was a time when the scales dropped off and something warm and alive showed underneath—and I’m not thinking of the drover she shot back in the panhandle. Before that dumb cowboy made up his bed and laid down into it there was a boy.
The boy, name of Beck Hill, wasn’t but sixteen years of age, which she and I knew because some months later she made us both return to the place it happened and visit his gravesite. The age was inscribed on the marker. The thing of it was, she never once spoke of the event after it happened, never gave sign that it had affected her one way or another. In the course of those months, it was my assumption that it had not, that it was like nothing to her. Then, one April morning, she rode west instead of east, which was the direction we were going. I had no idea where she was headed and she was not interested in answering any questions. I thought I’d choke on my own throat when it became apparent that we were returning to Beck Hill’s own hometown, Cutter, Texas, where the winter previous Boon had shot the boy dead in the street.
We never entered the town proper that day. The cemetery was set on a hill on the westerly side of Cutter, apart from the rest and behind one of its two churches. Boon rode directly to the cemetery gate, hitched Pim to a rail, and walked inside. She had not spoken for hours. I waited, still on my horse, for a spell. Eventually I dismounted, tied off, and followed her in. I found her by the grave, on her knees, bawling like a child with her face in her hands. It was, at that time, the only time I had ever seen her cry whilst sober. I never did again until the cowboy. The sight of it was so startling and so affecting to me that I, too, burst into tears. Upon hearing my hitching sobs, Boon jumped to her feet and screamed at me in a rage.
“Get out, you poor, spying bastard,” she cried. “Get out and leave me be.”
I went without argument. Boon remained by Beck Hill’s grave, sitting in the grass beside it, and from where I waited outside the fence I thought I could hear her muttering to the dead boy, her voice soft and incomprehensible in the wind. Perhaps she was apologizing, I thought, for being too fast for a hot-headed and piss-drunk kid to outdraw and knowing it full well when she met his challenge to stand against him in the street. Maybe again she was speaking the words she wished she’d said instead when Beck, his head swollen with whiskey and terror, slapped Boon full across the face and demanded she act like a man so long as she was going to dress as one. Do you want to die tonight, little boy is what she did say. And boy howdy, how the miners and cowboys filling that raw timber palace laughed at that—and at Beck Hill.
There never was a disease so fatal as male pride, and in the case of Beck Hill, it was quick. He demanded she draw down on him, of course, but instead Boon left without a word, tired as she was of the idiot child’s badgering. With that, the laughter changed course, directed now at her instead of him, and rising like a wave to wash Boon right out into the street. She reddened, I can say, for no woman or man can much stand to be mocked, but she walked firm out of that hole in the earth with me chasing after, whereupon she said to me, “Let’s go.”
I must have nodded or grunted my agreement, but I didn’t speak. And had I wished to speak, I would not have anyhow, on account of the loud, squeaking voice that erupted behind us from the open doors of that damnable Cutter saloon.
“I will shoot your fat man if you do not draw down on me, bitch,” said Beck Hill, and Boon turned at the same time I did to find the boy tickling the butt of a revolver strapped against his side.
“You will not shoot anybody,” she told him. “You are a child, and children should be in bed at this hour.”
More laughter, uproarious. Beck Hill turned pink. His draw was deliberate and practiced—none of that fluttering his hand out for him, but straight down and up again—yet slow. The barrel came against me, as promised. A boy of his word. I reached for the belly gun I kept on me in those halcyon days but there appeared a dark, black hole in Beck Hill’s forehead before I could manage it into my hand. Boon had drawn fast, faster than I’d ever seen her, and fired just the once. Once was all she needed. The boy stood upright for several long, agonizing seconds, his pale blue eyes round and wet but not seeing. The ruffians who had so enjoyed the spectacle before were scattered now, leaving Beck backlit by the lanterns and chandelier inside the tavern, wavering side to side until at merciful last, he collapsed to the boardwalk like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Got what he asked for, the addle-brained stupid-ass,” cried one of the blackened miners. He hacked a laugh out of the lungs that would kill him soon enough. No one else laughed with him.
Boon stood stock-still a minute longer, taking her time to holster her Colt and watching Beck Hill so closely I wondered if she was unsure she’d killed him. She then swallowed hard, sniffed, and said once again, “Let’s go.”
There would not be another word of Beck spoken until spring, when I followed her back to Cutter, to the cemetery, where Boon Angchuan wept over the boy she had shot dead that night. Those tears cost us some three days of travel out of our way, and she never again betrayed the smallest memory of any of it. The reptile again, her scales all carefully put back in place, her black eyes unknowable.
Her twin, the prairie lizard, scrambled away with the coming of dusk. The Brute had relaxed some, shaving his cheeks with a knife and his own spit. Paddy dozed against the bark of a cottonwood. Marshal Tom Willocks, ever vigilant in his all-possessing drive to avenge his fingers and savaged pride, remained at the vanguard, watching the sunset and studying for signs he’d never see. Now and again he regarded his thickly bandaged hand, as though forcibly reminding himself of the source of his rage. And me? I could not help but grin at the fury written on his august face, for I knew Boon would not cry after she killed him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The next shot came some four hours after the previous one. The one after that followed seconds later, and then it turned into a volley. Night had come again to our little grove, and there was no doubt among any of us that there was now more than one attacker.
“She got friends, hoss?” the Brute said, diving away from the fire he had built. The site of the previous campfire was abandoned on account of the roasted skull in the middle of it. No one wanted to touch it, so they just built another fire.
It seemed to me the Brute no longer believed in the theory that it had been Boon out there all along. I was no longer sure I bought it, either. She certainly couldn’t fire three or five repeaters all at once, and as far as I knew her only friend in all the lonesome blue world was me. Then again, I’d known nothing of Franklin Merrick before the moment I met him. There were all sorts of things I didn’t know about Boon.
“Impossible,” said Willocks. He rested the barrel of the rifle on his right forearm and squeezed off a shot with his left hand. Blind fire, it hit nothing. Our attackers responded with another volley, four or five shots in a rapid string. Cottonwood bark burst on either side of me and I hurried deeper into the copse. The marshal did, too, but not before we all heard a high, loud yell from the pitch.
“Comanche,” the Brute hissed.
“That or Kiowa,” said the other gunman. “Probably both.”
“They’ll be wanting the horses,” I suggested.
Willocks said, “Well, they won’t be gettin
g any of them. Not while any one of us still lives and can shoot.”
“After they kill us, then.”
“You shut your God damned mouth if you are going to talk like that,” he said.
The three of them—the Brute, Paddy, and Willocks—clustered together and set to levering rounds into the two repeaters they had between them, a Winchester and a Spencer carbine, along with Lefty’s Springfield, which evidently took five hands to accomplish. So too did they load one revolver after another, of little use at distance but good for if, and when, the raiders closed in on us. The only fortunate thing about the whole frightening affair was the fact that most Plains Indians were lousy shots—ammunition was rare enough for them that they lacked the experience. Willocks’ men did not seem to know that, or at least give two shits. I watched their harried faces, ghostly in the orange firelight, and said to Willocks, “How about you toss me one of them hoglegs?”
“You think I am stupider than you,” he said.
“I think three and a half gun hands is better than two and a half.”
“Stuff your half up your ass,” he said. “I am whole and can shoot as good as any man.”
I shrugged. The deputies peered at me and then at the marshal, weighing my words against his. None of them said anything. I listened to the crackle of the fire and the fussing of the horses. Willocks should have posted one of his men closer to the remuda, but I wasn’t going to tell him anything. In the absence of further gunfire and halloos from the raiders, it was a certainty that they were drawing closer by the minute.
It hadn’t been but a few months since the second battle at Adobe Walls, which wasn’t much more than pissing distance from where we were besieged beneath the Caprock Escarpment. That was about twenty-five or thirty men against some seven hundred Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne, something I reckoned felt good to remember given how well the white men fared by the end of it all, though I sorely wished for Billy Dixon’s famous Big Fifty Sharps. What I wasn’t so aware of at the time, however, was how high and hot the blood ran amongst the Plains Indians in those bloody days, nor that the indecisive battles waged all across the Panhandle that year were heating up into what the papers and dime novels came to call the Red River War.