Boon

by Ed Kurtz

  I shot him point blank in the heart, and he fell back into the tent without a sound.

  The cluster of laborers to the other side of me watched a moment longer, then started to wander back to their own sleeping arrangement, which consisted of rude pallets on the open ground, away from the white men’s tents. For a second, I thought they were all just returning to sleep, but instead the men got dressed, pulled their shoes back on, and commenced packing their meager belongings. No foremen, no job.

  Not that any of them shed a tear at the men’s passing.

  Back at the campfire, Boon tended to the one gal’s leg wound. She cried quietly while Boon doctored it, ran cold water from a canteen into it, wrapped it up with a length of flannel she’d torn from one of the dead men’s shirts. The other girl squatted on the ground close by, her knees tight together and eyes wide open, shimmering in the glow from the flames.

  One of the laborers approached apprehensively, keeping his eyes on Boon and me, and went over to her. She raised her eyes to his, and when he offered his hand, she took it. He helped her up, and together they walked back to where the other men prepared to leave. From darkness apart from them, I watched the Siamese cook come into the light. He stopped just close enough to be visible and watched Boon finish up with the girl she was tending to. The girl stood on one leg, tried the other, and winced. In another minute or two, she figured out a limping rhythm she could live with, and made her way to join the others.

  Boon stood and faced the cook.

  The cook said, “They’ll all go back together. West.”

  “You speak English,” Boon said.

  “Not to most.”

  She nodded that she understood. The cook—Chang, he’d been called—invited her over to the fire where they sat and talked in low, hushed voices. I found another bottle of firewater in one of the tents and sat off by myself, just enjoying the company of the liquor. And when, some time later, Boon returned to me, I saw Chang moving back into the darkness away from us and the laborers.

  “Not going with them?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Not one of them.”

  “Tell you anything?”

  “A lot of things,” she said. “But he doesn’t know anything about my mother.”

  “That’s a damn shame,” I said. “I’m sorry, Boon.”

  “Thanks for being the bait there.”

  She gave a sideways smile, and it was the first time it occurred to me that I’d been used in that manner. And now, two years down the road and clear across to California, I was being turned into a worm on a hook all over again. I had little doubt that Boon was smarter than her old pappy gave her credit for being, but that certainty did next to nothing to assuage my fear. People had a tendency to die around us, and this wasn’t any different. But there was something about being at the end of the line, at long last, that wasn’t sitting swell in me.

  I reckoned a substantial part of me never truly thought we’d ever get this far. And now that we had, I was far from convinced it was going to end up being worth the trouble—never mind all the bodies.

  Chapter Forty

  The first I saw of Handsome Frank was a scattering of adobe huts and some shreds of canvas that used to be tents where, I suspected, miners once lived in squalor when they weren’t breaking their backs in the mines. The huts weren’t habitable anymore; time and weather had stove them all in, reducing them to crumbled wreckages without roofs. Within the piles of adobe and dust, remnants of pallets and chests and other personal effects remained, abandoned by the miners when the mines dried out and no color was left to be blasted out of the earth. I wondered idly what could have inspired them to leave in such a hurry. Chances were, that was all Arthur Stanley’s work. He wanted them gone and didn’t give them either time or a choice in the matter. Nothing in it for him, so far as I could imagine. Just plain meanness.

  The man driving the mules cussed and spat, whipping his beasts as the wagon trundled on past the huts. I’d been in and out over the night, sleeping for probably a few hours at a time and then slowly coming awake here in the dark, there in the gathering dawn. Now it was mid-morning, and the sun baked the foothills despite the season and northerly location. It could have been back in the New Mexico Territory for all the sweat oozing out of my skin. I tried to turn over to at least shield my face from it, but my wound barked at me and I could only yelp from the pain. The mule driver ignored me, but somebody else laughed.

  That God damned Irishman, Bill. He sat upon a white and chestnut roan that meandered with its head down in time with the wagon. Bill looked straight at me, reins in hand, and offered a wink.

  “Rise and shine, you Arkie trash,” he trilled. “We’re nearly there.”

  “Mornin’, Bill,” I said.

  I could hear another rider to the other side of me and at least one or two trailing behind the wagon, but I decided against further aggravating the new hole in my body by trying to get a gander. I just took it for granted they were there and watched as Handsome Frank came fully into view.

  There wasn’t much to it, or rather, left of it.

  If Revelation was a boom town with its precipitous growth and constant construction, what I was dragged into was the hard bust on the other end of that rope. What passed for the road into and through the abandoned mining town was riddled with dandelions, crabgrass, and chickweed. No one had trodden the road for some time. The town itself comprised one- and two-story buildings of both adobe and lumber, all of them sagging like they were being slowly pulled into the ground. The wooden structures, among them a small hotel, a farrier’s shop, a tiny livery stable, and what appeared to have once been a blacksmith’s shack, suffered badly from dry rot. The adobe ones, mostly former domiciles as far as I could tell, crumbled like their smaller counterparts on the far side of the settlement. Only the hotel and the farrier had ever had windows of glass, and all of them were broken, leaving nothing but tiny, ragged shards sticking out from the frames. For reasons I could not fathom, the three outhouses spaced evenly apart behind the main buildings had fared better than anything else.

  Handsome Frank was a ghost town. Maybe ghosts shit like everyone else.

  The mule driver pulled tight at the reins and brought his mules to a slow canter up to the hotel, where we stopped. Bill rode a bit ahead to dismount by the hitching post beside the building, where he tied off and stretched his back from the ride. He wore shooters on each hip, visible to me when his coat lifted from the stretching. With a curt nod of his head, the other riders rode up, too. Three of them altogether, rough-looking men I presumed answered to the Irishman. They, too, hitched up. They, too, were all well-heeled.

  The only ones who weren’t packing iron were me and the mule driver, who climbed down from his perch and pissed on a cluster of swinecress in the middle of the street. He whistled as he did so. The Irishman rolled his shoulders, flashed a toothy grin at me, and waltzed right into the hotel. His men milled about like cows.

  I lay back down and shut my eyes against the glare of the sun. My throat felt like sandpaper and my stomach twisted with pain. All the same, I dozed until I was waked again by a resounding English voice.

  “Like most California boom towns,” Stanley loudly announced over me, “this one led a very short life. It exploded from a few prospector’s tents to everything you see here inside nine months, and less than a year after that there wasn’t a man jack in sight. Mines played out, left most with nothing but the clothes on their backs. My uncle got very fucking rich, however.”

  A horse nickered over by the hitching post. I licked my lips, which did absolutely nothing, and opened my eyes. Stanley leaned over the side of the wagon, smoking a cigarette and watching me intently through narrowed eyes.

  “I wasn’t here yet,” he said. “But I own it now. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll be looking for something else entirely we never knew we wanted, and I’ll find it right here.”

  “Guess you do all right with little girls,” I ra
sped at him.

  I hadn’t known one of Bill’s roughnecks was looming just behind me until he hit me in the head. It wasn’t enough to scramble my brains or put me out, but it hurt like six different kinds of hell.

  “God damn it,” I said.

  “You know I’ve been on four continents and more than a dozen countries? For all the caterwauling I hear about the way this Chinaman or that Negro gets treated here, you ought to see how some of these people treat their very own back home. I never kidnapped anybody, fat man. I purchased commodities, fair and square. More than half the time from their own parents.”

  “Must save you a passel to just sire them your own damn self,” I said.

  “I have appetites like every other man,” Stanley said. “And because it’s the way of nature, that sometimes results in bastards and half-breeds.”

  He spread out his hands before me like he’d just performed a magic trick. His gold teeth gleamed in the bright afternoon sun. It looked like he’d swallowed a lantern.

  “Why’d you doctor me up?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re that stupid,” he said. “Even a hick like you knows about bait.”

  “Never fished much.”

  “You shall today.”

  “And here I thought this was going to be a bad day.”

  Stanley chuckled softly and moved away to where I could no longer see him. I thought I’d probably be able to sit up if I tried, but I wasn’t too interested in another bonk on the melon from the Irishman’s lackey. Instead I let my eyes wander over what little I could see from my position in the wagon, the tops of the buildings higher than a single story, mostly, and that was when I spied the gun atop the Handsome Frank Hotel.

  A big gun. A spring-loaded, rapid-fire, hand-cranked by God Gatling gun.

  I didn’t think for a minute that it had been left behind when the town got left to rot. This was brought along by Stanley and his friends. Which meant this time, he was a hell of a lot better prepared for when—and if—Boonsri came after him again.

  And, of course, after me.

  As much as I hated to admit it, I hoped to heaven she wouldn’t.

  Before long, Bill himself took up position on the roof, behind the massive gun. Only then did I risk sitting up, whereupon I saw two of the Irishman’s crew positioned on the hotel’s drooping front porch. The third man was several paces on the other side of the wagon, patrolling the roadway. The mule driver slumped against the front door of the farrier, a bottle to his mouth. Stanley was nowhere in sight.

  I managed to get my back against the wagon’s latched tailgate where I whiled away the quiet day the same as everyone else—waiting. My wound had long since bled through the bandage, but no one was going to take notice or do anything about it. The doctoring that had been done was only ever intended to be temporary.

  And the more I looked and figured, I was right in the line of fire of that damned Irishman’s Gatling, anyway. Now I knew why the rest of the men tied up close to the hotel while the mule driver left the wagon in the middle of the road. I supposed old Stanley was no great lover of muleflesh. Their driver didn’t seem to much care, either.

  I scratched at my cheeks where the hair I’d shaved off before our big night in San Francisco was growing back. I swatted at blackflies that were growing interested in my sweat as well as my bullet wound. I longed for a smoke and a pull of anything so long as it was liquor. Mostly, I just waited, and as I waited, the afternoon melted slowly into evening like a cake left out in the heat.

  One of the men guarding the front of the hotel set to lighting lanterns both inside and out when the sun vanished behind the foothills and the sky turned yellowish in the haze of dusk. I could then see Stanley in the lobby, pacing before the shattered windows, keeping watch. I wondered if he was nervous. I also wondered if he really gave a tinker’s damn about Monty, who he’d not breathed a word about since right after I shot the poor son of a bitch. Knowing what I knew about the man, I gravely doubted it.

  After full dark, the man who’d lighted the lanterns went over to the muleskinner, slapped the hat off of his head, and took his bottle. He then returned to his post on the hotel porch and drank deeply, his free hand resting on the butt of one pistol. His partner didn’t move at all. I could no longer make out the man patrolling the road, but Stanley remained inside, moving intently from one end of the lobby to the other, then back again. He smoked and seemed to be talking to himself. I was right. He was nervous.

  Then my eyes wandered back up to the tremendous gun on the roof. I had to squint one eye almost shut just to barely make out Bill’s silhouette in the sparse moonlight, but it was enough to see the second shape rise up behind him with a long blade that gleamed as it was drawn across the Irishman’s throat. He never made a sound. Just a broad, dark jet of blood that spurted from his neck before the killer caught him by the armpits and lowered him gently to the roof.

  She came.

  Howdy, Boon, I thought.

  See ya, Bill.

  She did not so much as look my way. But I knew she’d seen me there. At least, I was pert near for sure and certain she had, until she moved up behind the gun and reached for the crank.

  I then revised my assumption to one of two camps: either she saw me and hoped I’d move out of the way in time, or she hadn’t, and I hoped I’d move out of the way in time. Given the nature of my injury and the fact that I’d been laid out so long my legs were tingly and weak, my quick escape was not assured. Even so, I tried to kill a pair of grackles with one hefty rock when I hollered, “I’m burning to take a dump and I’ll be damned if I do it in this wagon.”

  “Mr. Stanley,” one of the hotel guards called into the lobby. “Prisoner needs to shit.”

  “Let him shit his trousers,” the Englishman said.

  “Christ Jesus, Stanley,” I shouted, hauling myself up with no little agony. “These here trousers are store-bought.”

  “You’ll be buried in ’em, anyhow,” said the guard.

  The other guard had a good laugh about that and said, “Fuck me if I’m digging that hole.”

  “Fuck you either way,” I said, and I tumbled over the side of the wagon and collapsed into the dust and crabgrass. My intention had been more graceful, but it was what it was.

  “Hey,” the first guard yelled. He drew a Navy Colt from his right-side holster and bore it down on me as he stepped off the porch. “Get your ass back in that wagon, damn you.”

  My side was on fire but I pushed up to my knees anyway, feeling the wound ooze through the bandage and my shirt both. The guard thumbed back the hammer and straightened his arm out in front of him.

  “I have nervous bowels and it is going to be an awful mess,” I said, getting shakily to my feet. “Shoot me in the back like a devilish coward if you got to, but this man has got to shit.”

  The guard crinkled up his brow, turned his head to look at his partner. The partner shrugged. I grasped the edge of the wagon and worked my around it, moving slowly into the street. The further I got from the lanterns in and around the hotel, the better my eyes adjusted to the darkness blanketing the rest of the Great Republic of Handsome Frank—well enough to see the third man, the patrol guard, emerging from the side of an adobe dwelling with a carbine in both hands.

  “Who’s that?” he said.

  “Abraham Lincoln,” I responded, and I rushed him.

  I had my hands on the barrel and stock before he could gather his wits enough to aim, and we began to struggle over the rifle as he bellowed, “Boys! God damn it, boys!”

  I wished he hadn’t done that. I slammed my forehead against his face as hard as I could. My skin shredded against his teeth, some of which I felt give and fall back into his mouth. He gurgled and I won the carbine. A single shot erupted behind me. I turned the rifle on the patrolman and shot him in the chest. He hit the ground but I didn’t check to see if he was dead. There was someone pounding the dust behind me.

  I spun around in time to find the guard who’d point
ed that Colt at me coming fast up the road from the hotel. His pal wasn’t far behind. I pumped another cartridge into the breech and took aim, but I hadn’t needed to. The Gatling gun atop the Handsome Frank Hotel erupted then, flashing white-hot and spitting rounds that chewed up the wagon, the street, and the lead guard in a matter of seconds. He must have caught close to a dozen of those massive rounds that exploded his skull and tore his trunk to pieces before what was left of him splashed wet to the street. I froze momentarily, stricken by the grisly sight of it, and the other guard dove for the cluster of huts from which the patrolman had come.

  “God fucking damn you, Bill,” he cried all the while. “You shot Bez all to hell, you crazy Mick bastard.”

  “Weren’t Bill,” I said. I triggered a round in his direction, knowing I’d miss. He’d already skittered into one hidey-hole or another. “Didn’t really need to shit, neither.”

  Two down, and not counting the drunken muleskinner, that was half already. My throbbing, bleeding side notwithstanding, I reckoned we weren’t doing too poorly. Emboldened, I gave chase toward the adobe huts to find the son of a bitch.

  I barely made it five paces before six men came out of them.

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  Some had repeaters. Most carried revolvers. They were as surprised as I was. My sole advantage was that I knew exactly what was going on and they, I hoped, did not.

  I ran back for the hotel.

  “More coming!” I shouted.

  Shots rang out behind me and the men yelled over one another, stumbling out into the street. I weaved as best I could. My lungs ached and my legs threatened to buckle. Even if I didn’t get shot again, I was beginning to think I’d never live to see another sunrise.

  When I got within pissing distance of the wagon, I dropped and skidded through the dirt and stones and weeds the rest of the way and clambered underneath it as Boon let loose with the Gatling once again. Each shot sounded like a cannon and there were a hell a lot of them coming fast and hot right over my head as she cut Stanley’s secret contingent of gunmen down all at once. From where I cowered beneath the wagon, I watched as they managed to get off another five or six shots that all went wild, the superior firepower from above ripping them apart so horribly their own mothers would never be able to identify what remained. I’d dodged conscription over a decade earlier for a lot of reasons, but a big one was never wanting to have to witness something like that. Fate had a laugh at my expense that night.