Boon

by Ed Kurtz

  Of course, when we rode in on the main drag, the business that seemed to occupy most folks was staring at me and Boon. Suffice to say, there wasn’t anybody in a place like Darling who had ever seen someone from Siam before. If there was anybody in Darling that had ever heard of Siam, I’d have gladly eaten my paint horse, bones and all.

  She chose the rooming house, but I went inside to rent the rooms. We often did things this way in fancy-pants places like that, as it saved on any potential trouble up front. A lot of the time, rooming houses and hotels and the like wouldn’t rent a room to Boon, much less let her walk into the building in the first place, on account of her not being fully white. Of course, they never could guess where she actually came from; as far as most of the dim-witted idiots were concerned, she had to be either Indian, Mexican, or Chinese. In the end, it hardly mattered, as none of them would be permitted if any one of them wasn’t.

  In the case of the Darling, Texas rooming house, the main floor was sparsely occupied by clean, well-dressed folks having late breakfasts or early lunches, and each and every one of them was as lily-white as fresh-fallen snow. The way more than a couple of them gave me the stink eye, I reckoned Boon was right to send me in alone. She’d come up later, quietly, and we’d hope for the best.

  It was due to this sort of malarkey and utter lack of horse sense that I tended to prefer it when we made camp on the trail rather than sleep in clean, warm beds in town. I would never have guessed I could come to such a conclusion—I was not a hard nor rough-and-tumble man—but there was simply less to worry about that way. Just the quiet of the open night, Boon, me, and a couple of horses. Once in a rare while we’d have to make a cold camp if we were trying to keep our heads down or maybe lose an unwanted follower, and this was considerably less comfortable, but those nights that she built a little fire and we just sat together, silent with our own private thoughts, were just about my favorite parts of the time I spent traveling with Boon.

  The rooms I rented were two dollars apiece, which I found exorbitant, but I paid without complaint from my fast-dwindling financial reserves and carried my saddlebag up the stairs with me to get settled into one of the rooms. Though we often slept side by side on the trail, the same could never be said of proper bed-sleeping. Likely this was more on account of my discomfort than hers; it just didn’t strike me as proper. It was not as though she was at all unaware of my habits, that I farted in my sleep or almost always woke in the dead of night to make water, but everybody has his own peculiarities and that was one of mine.

  The other room I rented was just across the hallway, and it was no surprise to me to find Boon already waiting outside of it when I came into the hall. How she had gotten in was a mystery to me. She was just ghostly that way when she wanted to be.

  “I’ll get cleaned up, and you should too,” she said when I gave her the key. “I want you to talk to some of those folks downstairs, and I doubt they’ll have much to say to anybody looks as trail-weary as you do right now.”

  “It’s sort of a buttoned-up place,” I said. Probably I said it with a sneer, though this was more from being scolded to bathe at my age than it was in reaction to Darling its own self.

  “You can have a drink or two to loosen up tongues,” she continued, “but watch yourself, Edward. Last thing we need is a repeat of the Blind Dog thing.”

  The Blind Dog thing, as she called it, was an occurrence, all right. And I sure did hate it when Boon brought it up.

  This was down in West Texas, not six weeks after I first began riding with Boon, which meant fewer than six weeks since she saved my spine from a necktie party outside Comanche. The Blind Dog was a mining camp tavern of repute so poor it would have been a step up to call it ill, which is to say it was no place for a lady. Of course, Boon never presented herself as much of a lady, and besides, she’d heard tell of a muleskinner and occasional stagecoach robber name of Ambrose Umberton who was wanted for a robbery that turned into a double murder in Bexar County. Now, Boon was no bounty hunter and neither was I, no matter how much the county seemed willing to put up for Umberton’s scalp, but that was beside the point entirely. Alongside Umberton’s name on the bounty truebill was his shotgun, an Englishman known fittingly around the region as Shotgun Arthur Billings.

  The way I saw things at the time, there must have been a thousand Englishmen called Arthur wandering around Texas alone, never mind the rest of the Union. It was a common enough handle. Boon, on the other hand, wasn’t willing to chance it. So, we rode west while she played bounty hunter until we got wind of the Blind Dog from a pair of Texas Rangers, neither older than twenty, both of whom were well into their cups at the time and blathering on about their next move to intercept their quarry.

  Boon meant to get there first. Accordingly, we lit out at twilight and left the drunk Rangers to their braggadocio and whiskey-infused bravado.

  As soon as we saw lantern light on the flatland, dead ahead of us in the otherwise pitch of night, Boon said, “We’ll leave the mounts in yonder trees.”

  She was riding that palomino even then, but in those days, I had a Paso Fino that I called Brownie. I named horses then, thinking I’d have them around a spell, before I got used to my luck with horseflesh. Both of them got hobbled in a thicket of bur oaks a thousand yards from the Blind Dog, and from there we approached on foot. Boon reckoned if nobody knew we were there until we came through the door, there would be no time for anybody to move against us or escape out the back. It was a good start to a plan in my mind, so naturally I expected more good thinking to follow.

  Instead, Boon pulled that old Colt from its leather and fired one round at the lantern hanging beside the tavern’s front door. The glass shattered and burning oil spread across the front of the building, crawling like white-red hands over the door and tarpaper roof.

  I cussed then and dropped into a squat. But Boon never stopped moving, even when she took the shot. The gun was still out and in her hand, too, as she picked up the pace and hollered into the blaze.

  “Arthur Billings,” she roared. “I have come for you.”

  The greased paper windows burned up quickly, leaving two gaping holes on either side of the door, through which I could see a dozen or so figures scampering around in the smoke and flames. The back door burst open and a couple of men went scuttling out into the night, coughing and cussing. From inside the tavern, a shot cracked out. I presumed it was somebody shooting at us, so I jacked a round into the chamber of my Winchester and took aim.

  The front door flew open then, and a fat man with sparks eating up his great black beard barreled out. The fat man did not have a gun, but he did have a sizable knife, the kind we used to call an Arkansas toothpick back home. I carried one myself. He paid me no mind, but the fat man was astonished at the sight of Boonsri Angchuan approaching from the darkness.

  “Boys,” he called back into the inferno, “there is a Mex bitch out here aiming to kill us.”

  Boon shot him in the chest. The fat man let loose a screech like a bird and fell back into the fire. I figured he could not have been Arthur Billings or Stanley or whoever, as surely she would have had some words for the man before she killed him. But what did I know? My own father was dead going on twenty years by then, but I had not killed him. As far as I knew, I had never known anybody who had killed their own father or even wanted to. This was new territory for me.

  “All I want is the Englishman,” Boon said.

  I wondered if maybe there was more than one man from England in there, and if so, what they would do about it.

  The Blind Dog wasn’t much of a building and in all likelihood not built to last. As such, it did not take long for the roof to fall in, which sent up a great plume of coal-black smoke and burning ashes. Men shouted and cursed inside, and not a few more went scampering out. I jammed the stock of my rifle against my shoulder, following one and then another with the barrel, looking back to Boon and somewhat panicked as to what I should do. She paid me no mind. Her attentio
n was on the men scattering from the blaze she started, her eyes narrowed in the bright, hot hell of it, looking for the man she had come to call out and, presumably, kill.

  Some of them were armed, and they fired wild shots at us. I fired wildly back, levering one cartridge after another, missing most of the time, though I managed to catch one in the thigh, a towering red-headed fellow who went down screaming. Again, I tried to get some sort of instruction from Boon, who went slowly toward the man, looking him over. The man grasped at his wound, spurting blood black as pitch, but when he saw Boon drawing near he found his shooter on the ground and swung it up at her. I shot him, right in the teeth.

  Boon pivoted where she stood and showed me a face meaner than the Devil.

  “Damn you, Edward Splettstoesser,” she said.

  “I should have let him shoot you?” I said.

  “Go ’round back and chase some of them others down,” she barked at me. “Only kill them that need killing. Dead men won’t tell me one damn thing.”

  “They’re long gone, Boon,” I protested. Even on foot, I’d never find anybody out there in the dark, but I could hear the distinct sound of hooves beating the earth full chisel well past the miners’ shacks to get away from the mess we’d made.

  Her plan-that-wasn’t-a-plan hadn’t gone according to plan, it seemed.

  “Damn you, Edward,” she said again, only this time without my surname. I couldn’t blame her. It was a mouthful.

  I thought to remind her that she was the one who shot out the lantern, but I decided it was wiser to keep my trap shut. Instead, I got as close to the flames as I could without igniting myself, and I peered into the wreckage of the Blind Dog to see if anyone remained inside. All I found were bodies blackened by fire, roasting to the marrow.

  If her father had been Arthur Billings, and if Arthur Billings had been in the Blind Dog, there was no telling now. He would have either escaped or been burned so badly nobody would ever know.

  Except we did know, eventually. We remained in the area another two weeks, wandering from Wichita Falls to Del Rio, sniffing around like hounds for any news of the men from the truebill. There was nothing at all until we got to a stinking cow town called Marshall’s Bluff that had two things on its easternmost side to greet incoming visitors: a sign proclaiming the place’s name and a pair of gray corpses hanged by their necks from a red oak. They were, we learned, none other than Ambrose Umberton and Shotgun Arthur Billings, whose true Christian name was Alvin Speers.

  Alvin Speers was not Boon’s father. She was assured by the fact that the blackening corpse belonging to him had a mouthful of rotten teeth. Stanley, I learned, had a mouthful of gold.

  It was two weeks wasted, and Boon was no closer to finding either of her parents. The way she saw it, the setback put her farther away than ever. And, of course, whenever it came up, the whole caboodle was entirely my fault. Though I would admit to having had a snort or two from one of the bottles I kept stashed in my saddlebags prior to the Blind Dog fiasco, I for damned sure hadn’t shot that lantern out.

  All the same, when she warned me about not turning Darling into that kind of mess, I only nodded by way of reply. She went into her room and me into mine, where I washed my face and neck at the basin—I wasn’t paying or waiting for any bath—and weighed the wisdom of visiting a barber. I wore a rascally beard, mostly white by then, though more from sheer laziness than choice. Would Boon mayhap treat me the smallest bit kinder if I had myself a trim, cleaned up a touch, and presented myself with a measure of self-respect?

  I shrugged at the thought. Probably not.

  It wasn’t my beard or anything else like it that made Boon the way she was. That went much, much deeper and didn’t have a thing to do with me. Or, at least, I hoped it didn’t.

  After washing, I exchanged my filthy shirt for one that still clung onto something vaguely approaching cleanliness and made my way downstairs. As far as I could tell, Boon had already absconded by then. To where, only the Devil knew.

  Runny eggs, limp bacon, and tepid coffee comprised my breakfast. I devoured it all and wished for more. Once I was done eating, I ordered a whiskey from the bar with a beer back and had a look at who was left in the place while I sipped. It was for the most part a completely different group of folks from the people I’d seen the first time, except for one old man hunched over a small table by the street-facing windows. He just seemed to be watching the world go by, which to me meant he might be likely to know a thing or two.

  I brought both of my drinks over to where he sat and said, “Yearning for a little company and conversation, old-timer?”

  “You don’t ’zactly look like a young’un yourself,” he said.

  “Don’t let the white beard fool you,” I told him. “I ain’t but forty-one or forty-two.”

  The old fellow narrowed his eyes at me like maybe he thought I was lying, but he dismissed it and me outright in favor of returning his gaze to the street outside. The only thing I’d learned from him was that he wasn’t any Englishman, as evidenced by his decidedly Texican accent. He didn’t sport any gold teeth, either. At least he wasn’t Arthur Stanley, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

  “I was old afore I was thirty-two,” he said after a while, still looking out the window. “Way I reckon it, time ain’t the same all the time. Some folks get old a lot faster’n others. I can’t say as I can recall my right age, but I sure don’t recollect ever being young.”

  I took the fact that he decided to continue talking to me as an invitation to join him, so I sat down across from him and pointed my nose at the same street he was watching. I was amused to find a young man on the east side of the street carefully drawing a rake over the dirt to smooth it out. I was far better accustomed to streets so sloppy with mud they had to lay down boards every which way for people to get around. Darling was a funny little town.

  I said, “You ever hear tell of a country called Siam?”

  “Can’t say as I have, since I ain’t,” he said.

  “Way the hell on the other side of the Earth,” I explained. “Over near China, I think. Or closer to China than it is to Dallas, at any rate.”

  “That right,” he said.

  “Reason I ask is I used to know an old gal from there. Siam, not Dallas. Wondered if maybe she ever came through Darling.”

  This was not the whole truth, since I had never laid eyes on Pimchan, but I never saw any harm in a little exaggeration to smoothen out a conversation.

  “Knew a Chinaman once,” the old man said. “Up Dakota way. Thought he couldn’t talk one word of American for three years until one day he says clear as day he just don’t like me. And here I thought we was friends all that time.”

  I wasn’t getting anyplace with the old-timer, who seemed only half aware of where he was or that I’d sat down with him. For half a second I had it in mind to ask about the Englishman, but instead I just downed what remained of the whiskey and got to work on the beer. It burned pleasantly in my throat while the old man stared at nothing in particular and I wondered what my next move ought to be. I got to looking over some of the other folks in the room, thinking on which of them might be better for talking to, when the old man said, “Looks like one of them China folks now, ’less that’s the other kind you was talking about.”

  “Siamese,” I said out of habit, and I turned back to find just what it was that had piqued the old-timer’s interest.

  It was, of course, my friend Boon. She was dragging a man by his hair out of a barbershop cattycorner from the rooming house. The man was screaming to wake up all the devils in hell, grasping at his scalp to keep Boon from tearing it clean off.

  At least the Apaches used knives, I thought. Seemed like Boon didn’t need one.

  “Oh, hell,” I said.

  The old man said, “That the one you looking for?”

  “Pardon me,” I said, and I excused myself from the table to make my way outside.

  Chapter Three

  He had
called her a “half-breed.” The man Boon was dragging by the hair, I mean.

  I could have told him that wasn’t a good idea, but then, I never did cotton much to his type. Name-calling was no way to treat folks. A man like that had to learn one way or another.

  “Seeing as I’m an agreeable woman, I’m going to give that one to you, because I know you ain’t nothing more than an ignorant hayseed,” Boon told him. “But now that I’ve told you, you do know better, which means the next time some trash like that passes what few teeth you got left, I will be full within my rights to cut you down.

  “Now, be a good boy and nod your head to show me you understand.”

  “I—I can’t,” the man groaned.

  I could see then that he was, in fact, missing quite a few teeth. The blood on his gums and lips indicated that this was a very recent loss. He was right, though—there was no way he could nod his head when she had such a good grip on his hair.

  I walked out into the street, laying waste to the good work done by the boy with the rake, and shot a glance over at the red-and-white-striped pole installed beside the barber shop’s front door. The barber—a reedy fellow with little hair of his own—was locking the door and closing the shutters. It didn’t look like I was going to get that trim, after all.

  “I didn’t get much in there,” I called out to Boon, pointing behind me to the rooming house. “How are you getting along?”

  “I don’t think people in this town are very polite,” she said.

  The man she had by the hair moaned and groaned. He kept saying he was sorry, over and over. I sort of doubted he was all that sorry. Mostly, I figured he just wanted Boon to let him go.

  “Seems to happen a lot,” I said.

  She just sneered.

  People were beginning to gather on the boardwalks, on either side of the street, to have a look at the crazed woman dressed like a man and assaulting one of their own fine citizens. Not too closely, of course—nobody wanted to get noticed by her. But she was building quite the audience nevertheless.