by Ed Kurtz
“Your pa ain’t a very nice man.”
Boon’s eyes flashed on me.
Sam said, “Your pa? Christ.”
Lem shouted, “Sam? What’s going on, Sam?”
“What’s going on is you ought to shoot these fucking people, God damn it.”
“I won’t let them kill you.”
“You shoot,” Boon said, “and Sam will die.”
“I believe this is called an impasse,” I offered.
“Shut up, Edward,” Boon said.
I shrugged. I’d heard her say it once or twice and it felt good to use it myself.
“Toss out that iron, Lem,” she said. “And come on out of there with your hands where I can see them.”
“I can’t hardly even lift the right one,” he said. “You shot me.”
“I surely did. Do what I told you or I will shoot your brother in the mouth and then I will come for you.”
“God Almighty,” Lem whined. “You are sure a mean woman.”
“What about Watts,” Sam said.
“That your other man?” Boon said.
Sam nodded.
I said, “Watts ain’t no help to you anymore.”
“Dead?” Sam asked.
“Dead.”
“You are both damned bastards and cocksuckers,” he spat. “Hey, Lem—they killed Watts.”
“God damn it,” Lem said from his hidey-spot.
“I wish that son of a bitch told me what bastards you are,” Sam lamented.
“Damned inconvenient when folks shoot back,” Boon said.
“Want I should start shooting, Sam?” Lem said. “I reckon I can get ’em.”
“Not before this bitch does me,” Sam said.
“Impasse,” I said.
Lem said, “Oh, God damn it.”
Boon gingerly lifted her right foot and brought the heel of her boot down on the gunshot wound in Sam’s side. He grunted. She stepped down hard.
He screamed.
“Sam?” Lem called.
“You cunt,” Sam spat, his eyes streaming and arms flailing. “You fucking bitch.”
“Where is he now?” she said.
“Fucking bitch.”
Boon lifted the boot again. This time, she stamped down fast and powerfully. Sam howled like a coyote caught in a steel trap.
“He still at the customs house?”
“She’s like to kill me, Lem,” Sam hollered. “Might as well start shooting.”
I thought I heard Lem sob then, and the next moment he was up from behind the rock again, squeezing off a shot with his left hand. The ball struck the cabin. The child inside yelped, but I didn’t think she was hit. Just scared. I hoped.
Boon said, “Edward.”
I heaved a sigh and sighted Lem down. His left arm was shaking, trying like hell to get a bead on Boon. I shot him in the chest. He looked startled when the bullet slammed into his ribs, then a little bit like he might start laughing.
Lem didn’t laugh. He just fell down and died.
Boon watched the whole thing, then quietly returned her attention to Sam.
“Just you now,” she said.
“You have murdered my brother and my friend,” Sam seethed through clenched teeth. “You will burn in hell, God damn you.”
“Whatever makes you feel better about it,” she said. “Now, back to business. Where is Arthur Stanley?”
“Up your ass.”
“Edward,” Boon said, keeping her eyes on Sam. “Let’s have that toothpick.”
I might have given it a moment’s thought, but I did as she asked. Pulled the knife, handed it over, hilt first. Boon took it, squatted down over Sam with her boot still pressing half her weight against the wound. He groaned wetly.
“Go on and check on our ward,” she said then.
I scrunched up my brows, uncertain at the time what she meant.
“The kid, Edward.”
“Right,” I said.
Sam turned his shimmering, frightened eyes to me, like I was like to do anything to stop her. I smiled at him. He closed his eyes.
Inside the cabin, the girl still cowered behind the stony fireplace, her dirty knees to her chin and arms wrapped around her shins. She wasn’t in anything anybody would call good shape, but she wasn’t shot, either. She raised her face up so that the light from the hole in the roof caught the water welling up in her wide, brown eyes. The kid didn’t seem much assured by my presence. Then again, I couldn’t see why she should. We might have taken her away from whatever hellish depravity went on in that cathouse back in the city, but she had no good reason to feel safe quite yet. Not with a couple of desperadoes like me and Boon.
I said, “Hey there, little calf. Don’t know if you understand any American or if you don’t, but some bad men came ’round, and now they’re gone, and you’re safe here with us.”
The tears spilled over and she didn’t blink at all. Just stared. Quiet like.
Outside, Sam got to wailing again. He sounded like a woman, the way he was screaming. Not that there was a thing wrong with the way women sounded, just that it struck me funny how men’s voices can get so high-pitched when they’re scared bad enough. I reckoned Sam was plenty scared, and plenty hurting, too.
I just hoped she cleaned my knife when she was done.
My meager hopes were dashed when Boon returned to the shanty, short of breath and specked with blood on her face and neck, shirt, and hands. She gave me back my knife, hilt first, and the blade was a gruesome mess.
“Could of wiped it on your pants,” I said.
“Could have,” she said.
“Might could wipe it on your pants my own self.”
“Wouldn’t.”
Good advice, there. I nodded at the open door behind her.
“Dead?”
“No. Just missing a few teeth.”
“Christ,” I said, making a face and looking at the knife. “With this?”
Boon nodded.
“Christ,” I said again. “Tell you anything?”
Boon nodded again.
“Stanley’s left the city. Figures on us coming back there for him, wasn’t willing to put all his trust in them dumb shits he sent after us to finish the job.”
“Good thinking,” I said. “Where’d he go?”
“Funny thing, that. All I could get out of Sam before he blacked out was ‘handsome Frank.’”
“Handsome Frank,” I said.
“Said it three times. Handsome Frank, Handsome Frank, Handsome Frank. Like that, but more blubbering and sort of wet like, on account of the blood.”
“Mighty strange.”
“Mighty,” she agreed.
“Handsome Frank,” I said again, just to hear it. “Reckon that’s what they used to call old Franklin Pierce.”
She chewed on that a minute.
“The president?”
“Yeah, but before that. Back in the Mexican-American War days, way I recollect. Maybe even earlier, one of them Indian Wars back east. Sort of a nickname. Generals always get all kinds of nicknames.”
“Well,” Boon said, “Stanley sure as shit ain’t going to spend his time with President Pierce. Man’s been dead some years now.”
“I recollect that, too.”
“Handsome Frank,” she said.
I shrugged. Looked to the kid, like she might know. If she did, she kept it to herself.
We packed up, left the cabin in the same condition it was when we found it, apart from a couple few new holes in the walls. At Boon’s insistence, we dragged Lem and Watts a ways from the back of the place, into the woods. Sam we left where he lay, his face swollen and some five or six bloody teeth in the dirt beside his head. He hadn’t woken up, but he was still breathing, if a little shallowly. The girl gaped at him.
All those teeth on the ground made me feel a little less troubled about the one I lost back in Revelation.
“Mayhap it was just nonsense,” I said, eyeing Sam’s saddle and provisions. “Crazy with
the pain. Tooth pain is just about the worst pain. Mayhap you ought to have worked on him someplace else.”
“Why don’t you ask him,” she said, stepping up into her saddle.
I gave Sam a light kick in the ribs. He did not stir.
We rode out before noontime. I took Sam’s saddle, gun, and making for biscuits and cigarettes. So, it wasn’t a complete loss, even if we had no idea what was next.
That is, until the kid shocked us both to hell and back but muttering something under her breath, too quiet to hear.
“By God,” I said, pulling on my mounts reins to let Boon and the girl to catch up a bit closer. “She talks.”
“Shut up, Edward,” Boon scolded me. Then, turning her head as far as she could without knocking the kid off the horse they shared, she said, “It’s all right, honey. You can talk to me.”
“And me,” I said.
Boon shot me a look. I shut up.
The girl pursed her mouth and swallowed hard, keeping her eyes down and hands on Boon’s waist. Both horses slowed to a meandering pace. The cabin by then was far enough behind us that we couldn’t see it anymore, nor any other signs of man or beast.
Finally, with what looked to be no small amount of effort, the kid cleared her throat and tried again.
“It’s a town,” she said, her voice small and hoarse.
“What’s a town, darlin’?” Boon said.
“Handsome Frank is,” said the kid. “Used to be, I mean. I heard miners talk about it sometimes. When they…”
She trailed off, leaving that bit of horror to the imagination. I chose not to imagine it.
“A mining town,” I said.
“Ghost town, sounds like,” Boon added.
The girl nodded at that.
“Handsome Frank, California,” I said, staring at the trail ahead of us like we were already on our way. Which I guess we were, now that we knew.
Boon reached back with one hand and gently patted at the kid’s shoulder.
“Thanks, darlin’,” she said. “I figured you for clever, and there you are.”
The girl sort of half-smiled at that and pressed her forehead against Boon’s back.
I smiled a little bit, myself.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The ghost town was a fair piece north of Grizzly Flats, more or less eighty miles as the crow flies. We got our bearings from a ferryman at Sweeney’s Crossing, which wasn’t anything better than a swing ferry, two posts on either bank, and a rope to guide it across. The ferryman was a disabused old codger who spent his father’s inheritance on coming west to get rich and ended up charging two dollars a head and an extra three per horse to get across the Cosumnes River. I reckoned if the geezer survived another decade, at those prices he might get rich still.
“Hell of a boom town for a minute or three,” he grumbled at us as he took his sweet time guiding us over the water. “Twenty, twenty-five years back. Thousands of folks ran full chisel to get jobs up there in those days. Even declared its independence from the Union before those gray-coated traitors down south ever done.”
He gave me the stink-eye with that bit of information, having heard my Arkansas accent, no doubt. No use telling him I was a coward who hid out in those years. That wouldn’t have been any better.
“Independence didn’t last but a few months, though,” he went on. “Fourth of July came around and there wasn’t nothing to celebrate. Folks didn’t like that, so they gave up on the Great Republic of Handsome Frank.”
The ferryman laughed at that until his laughter turned to consumptive coughing and he was hacking up half his lung meat into the river. So much for getting rich on gouging travelers, I thought.
Boon said, “But it’s a ghost town now?”
“Has been a mess of years,” the old man said, still hacking up phlegm. “Prospectors from Minnesota or some such place set it all up in the Forties and it was as good a placer outfit as any. Trouble was, the whole caboodle kept burning right down to the fucking ground. Sorry, Miss.”
Boon waved it off.
“They’d build it all back up, on account of there was still plenty of color in the place, but then it’d just burn down again. Last big one was fifty-eight, fifty-nine, something like that. Most everybody moved on after that. Reckon some stuck around, tried to get the last of the yellow out of the earth, but if there’s anybody left now, I’d figure them for crazier than shit-house rats. Sorry again, Miss.”
“Sounds like there was always a bit of crazy in that place,” I said.
The ferryman chuckled.
“That’s gold for you, son. Y’all go looking, you’ll end up with fevered brains, too. I seen it a hundred thousand times. Mark my words, some scientist back east’ll have it figured in another twenty years that gold poisons the blood and makes men lunatics. Poison’s so vile just thinking about it too much does the trick. Fucking gold!”
“We’re not interested in gold,” Boon said before he could apologize for his mouth again.
“Then you’re crazier than the ones who is,” he said with a grin.
Eventually, we got to the other side of the river. I was running my hand over my cheeks when we got there, wondering if most of the stubble there had sprouted during the journey. The old man kept chattering at us while we disembarked and stepped up into our saddles, warning us that it was a fool’s errand to bother heading for Handsome Frank and that there wasn’t any gold left in California, no matter what Boon said about our intentions. That ferryman was still talking even as we gigged our beasts into a canter away from him and his flapping jaw. What he had was a lonely way of life, I figured.
The rest of the day’s ride was done mostly in silence. Unsurprisingly, I talked the most, Boon only a bit here and there, and the girl—whose name we still did not know—not at all. We gave Placerville a wide berth and camped cold just north of her after dusk. Boon washed her back wound with some water she’d canteened from the Cosumnes and she rinsed out her bandage as best she could before squeezing it out and wrapping herself up again. There was still a good deal of wincing and grunting while she accomplished these tasks, and I knew it was far from a good idea to keep from seeing a sawbones rather than continue onto some dead mining town. But I never had called the shots and I wasn’t about to start doing so then or ever. That was just the way things were.
Since we had no campfire, the only victuals were river water and a handful of berries Boon said were okay for eating. The flour I stole from Sam was useless in a cold camp and probably weevily anyhow. I was sorry for the absence of coffee, too. Each of us ate a little and the berries were so tart my eyes watered. When they were all gone, Boon sat away, whittling a stob with my knife. I had half a mind to just gift the God damned thing to her, considering how often she’d taken to using it.
If nothing else, I did have the tobacco and papers I had also liberated from Sam’s saddlebag, so I set to rolling up a few smokes and hoping to heaven Boon didn’t rain hell down upon me for the tiny firelight it made. She didn’t. I smoked in silence and wondered, idly, whether Sam made it out of Grizzly Flats alive.
I never did find out.
The kid was perched on a mossy log not more than five feet from where I lay on my side on the hard ground, sucking the smoke deep into my lungs. I could only sort of make out her outline in the moonlight, but her eyes shined like there was a light behind them, which I kind of reckoned there was. She stared at me a good long while, from the time I started rolling the smoke to when I smoked it down to a stub that burned my fingers and crushed it out in the dirt. That was when I said, “You got a name, kid?”
The kid nodded. I had to laugh at that.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Guess I didn’t ask what it was. Mine’s Edward, though I ’spect you already foxed that out for your own self.”
She nodded again, her eyes never trailing away from me. I was starting to feel like I looked funny to her.
“Chinese?” I asked her.
She shrugged.
Her mouth screwed up to one side and she thought that one over. Then, another nod.
“’Splains how come your English is so fine, anyhow.”
And another shrug.
“Boon there, she’s Siamese. Or half, anyway. Born over there and everything. I guess that’s close to China, but I don’t rightly know.”
I took to scratching my beard while I tried to figure on where, exactly, Siam might be hiding on a map of the world when the kid by God giggled. Turned out I did look a little funny. And boy howdy, wasn’t that delightful.
I smiled at her smile, and I said, “Now, me? I come from Arkansas. Not much to tell about it, ’less you’re a right smart interested in hogs, because that was what we did until I skedaddled. Raised ’em, bred ’em, sold ’em, slaughtered ’em. I knew a hundred times more hogs than people by the time I was fourteen. But I also ate pork seven times a week when most everyone else around us was scrabbling for poke salad, even before the Yankees came. Hard times. Still is, most like. Don’t much plan on ever heading back, though you never know. Mostly I don’t ever think too far ahead. Drifter is what I am. I go where the wind blows, though these last few years that wind’s been the name of Boonsri Angchuan, if you get me.”
She smiled a little wider and nodded her head. I wasn’t doing anything but rambling, running my mouth to keep from getting too stove in by the silence, but she hung on to every word.
“Truth be told, I never done much but drink and make the acquaintance of fallen women. A little stealing here and there but only on account of I was hungry or thirsty or something like that. I never robbed trains or banks or took anything somebody really needed. My whole life wasn’t worth spit on a dull knife until I met her.” I motioned with my chin at Boon, whose back was still to us, where she still sliced away at that old stob. “I mean, I done plenty of that since, too, but now there’s more. I’m more. Because of her. Best friend I ever had. Only one, I reckon. Only real one.”
The child’s brightness dimmed a little then, her little brow furrowed into a nest of wrinkles at the bridge of her nose. Something I’d said confused her, or maybe concerned her. I shut my mouth for a minute to let her voice any complaint, but none came. Faced with her continued silence, I wondered whether it was the concept of friendship, or the particular friendship of which I had spoken. Kid like that, the way she’d come up so far, I couldn’t imagine she understood much if anything about the way real people were with one another. All she’d ever known was horror and filth. My gorge rose in me at the notion of it. Made me sick. Sick and angry. It was an awful old world, sometimes.