by Ed Kurtz
“They just leaving us out here unarmed?” I protested.
“No,” Boon said. “They’re taking us with them.”
I could feel all the blood drain out of my face.
“Why?” I said.
She shrugged.
Terrific.
The two fellows who took our guns also took our reins, and we rode without power over our destinies with the little band of Mescalero Apaches for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Along the way it became clear to me that the square-faced man was, in fact, the leader of the band, though the woman held some measure of authority, as well. I wondered if she was his wife or his sister, but for the most part I just quietly panicked over what they had in store for us wherever we were going.
Where we went was a camp that might or might not have been across the border into Mexico, where our mounts were confiscated and we were both roughly directed to be seated in front of a smoldering fire. The remaining women of the camp had kept things running, it seemed, while the men and the one woman were out carousing, setting fire to stagecoaches and abducting nice folks like me and Boon.
All told, there were fewer than thirty of them in the camp. I knew the Army was giving the Indians of every tribe an honest-to-God drubbing, but I hadn’t heard of any legitimate bands reduced to such small numbers. These, I concluded, were some manner of outlaws, off-agency and off-treaty.
Not that the treaties were worth the paper they were written on. But still.
We were fed some sort of roasted meat. I could not place the flavor and I did not want to. I was hungry enough that I ate everything I was given without waiting until it was cool enough to not burn my lips and gullet. I had a sense it was wolf meat, and had it not been such lean times, I might have had an issue with it. Wolf meat tastes vile. The way things were, I wished for more.
“What happens now?” I asked Boon, as if she’d know.
She chewed her meat without complaint.
“Hard to say,” she said, her mouth full. “Never heard of any Apache filling your belly before killing you, though.”
“You heard a lot about Apache?”
“No.”
I was not reassured. Boon was clutching at straws. Neither of us had the first clue what was to happen next. I wondered if the Mescaleros would let me have some paper and the pencil I kept in my saddlebag to write a last letter, but I dismissed the idea when the only person I could think of sending it to was Boon. I could just tell her my final thoughts before I was killed.
They were: “Should’a left that stagecoach alone.”
“It was a trap, all right,” she agreed.
The woman watched us intently while we spoke and finished eating. Soon thereafter, old square-face re-emerged from the buffalo-skin entrance to his wickiup and strode stiffly to the fire. I guessed it was time and thought about praying. It wasn’t much of a thought. If God thought it was okay for us to be in this position, I wasn’t going to beg him to get us out of it. There just wasn’t any talking to people like that.
Square-face spoke to the woman, and the woman took Boon by the forearm to guide her up to her feet. I stood up, too, but square-face barked something harsh and one of his men pushed me back down on the ground. Someone laughed. I really amused them with my antics, it appeared. I ought to have been in the circus.
Once Boon was up, the woman stepped aside to let square-face look her up and down. He said something in a low voice I couldn’t hear, so I wouldn’t have understood it even if he was talking American. But Boon nodded—just the once—and together they went back through the buffalo hide. She looked back before she disappeared into the wickiup.
I said, “It’s been a real pleasure riding with you.”
Boon said, “Don’t be a moron. I’ll see you in the morning.”
It must have been going on midnight by then, though I could not say for sure or for certain, and I was awake another two to three hours by that fire, well past the time it died down to nothing but cinders and ash. And all that while, the woman from the raiding party sat across from me and stared like she could see into my future, to the moment of my demise. For a while I thought perhaps she would take me to another of the slapdash wickiups scattered around the periphery of the camp, but she only gazed at me without expression until I got used to it and fell asleep under the starlight.
At first light, Boon woke me with a nudge in the ribs from her boot. I opened my eyes to find her with the reins to her palomino in hand, her gunbelt reaffixed to her waist. The camp was cold and otherwise vacant, apart from my horse staked some twenty feet distant.
“We lost a day’s riding,” she said. “Come on.”
“What happened?” I asked her.
“Saddle up.”
It was half an hour before I caught up with her on a thin, barely recognizable trail snaking up the Texan side of the Big Bend toward El Paso. The band leader’s Springfield was tied behind her cantle. I didn’t ask her about it. I didn’t ask her about anything. We rode silently until making our own camp that night, and she sold the rifle in El Paso the following day. Boon always preferred working with short guns.
Maybe she just didn’t want to look at it and remember anything. I never knew. I just assumed she’d saved my life again, somehow.
Now that we were roaming through the middle of Comanche country, I couldn’t help but ponder on whether she’d have to do that again. Whatever it was that she’d done.
We put that camp smoke behind us and I kept alert, scanning the horizon on all sides for signs of new friends, but I didn’t see another living soul the rest of the day, unless beeves and prairie birds have souls. I knew for a fact mosquitoes did not, and I saw plenty of them, too.
After an early supper of salted venison and cowboy coffee that just about knocked the boots off my feet, Boon retrieved the paper on Dejasu and opened it up on the ground to the back side. There, Willocks had scrawled a rough map of the Panhandle with dotted lines for trails he could conjure from memory. Said trails led to a point in the state’s upper northwest corner where it met with both Indian Territory and the New Mexico Territory. The marshal made an X there, underneath which he’d written the words RED FOOT.
I’d never heard of it. I hadn’t heard of Stiff Neck, either, until we were in it. Mayhap Red Foot was a cholera town, too. Or mayhap it only existed in Willocks’s imagination. There was no telling with a character like that.
“Last known whereabouts,” I said, gnawing on the cold venison and remembering the wolf meat fondly. “Not much to start with.”
“We’ll go about it the way we always do. Ask questions.”
“We been doing that near three years now,” I complained. “This is a hell of a lot of country to hide in.”
“And this one with more reason to hide,” she agreed.
“Can’t shake the feeling we’re getting farther away from where we want to be,” I said, “instead of closer.”
“There’s no place you need to be,” Boon said, folding the paper back up. “It’s my ride and you don’t have to come along if you don’t like it.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I’ve got to have a moment,” she said.
That was Boon’s code for needing to make water, and she rose to wander off into the darkness to do so, the conversation effectually closed.
Three years come September. Three years since she saved my hide and recruited me to help her hunt down a father meaner than Satan and a mother who was probably dead. Three years of the sole friendship of my whole life, though I didn’t suppose I would ever really understand Boonsri Angchuan. And it wasn’t on account of her being a woman or coming from faraway Siam. It was just because she was Boon.
When she returned from her moment, she doused the fire and slid into her bedroll, her Colt within reach as always.
Way I figured it, if God was willing and the creek didn’t rise, we’d reach Red Foot before noon assuming we lit out before dawn.
Chapter Seven
> Red Foot was a God damned disaster.
First of all, we did not arrive before noon. We didn’t even arrive before nightfall. The delay was on account of the stupidest cow in the entire history of Texas. If there was ever a dumber one, I couldn’t account for it and didn’t want to know about it. This one was bad enough.
Things went from bad to worse after we finally rode into that stinking little hole in the ground called Red Foot, but first—and you will pardon my language—that fucking cow.
It was a brown and white Hereford heifer, and it wandered right up to us on the remains of a riding trail that looked untrodden for a hundred years. Where it had come from was anyone’s guess, but since it was only Boon and me, our guesses were the same: the dumb beast must have gotten separated from a drive and gone unnoticed. How it meandered so far from any and all known cattle trails was known to the cow alone.
Cussing and kicking at the cow didn’t do anything to dissuade it. Boon called shoo, shoo but it didn’t appear to know that part of the vernacular. Occasionally we’d pick it up and leave the critter behind, but it always managed to keep our scent and it caught up eventually, like a coon hound. This went on for hours. The fool thing decided we were its drovers now.
My vote was for shooting it and being done with it. Boon, who was not permitted by the Federal Government of the United States of America to vote on two counts, vetoed that measure. The cow lived.
Then, coming on late morning, the Hereford idiot’s real drovers showed. There were two of them, one tall and thin, the other short and round. They looked like they ought to be telling stale jokes on a stage someplace back east. Instead, they rode full chisel toward us and the infernal cow, who I’d taken to calling Shitbrains. To my surprise and disappointment, Shitbrains did not trot off to her true caretakers with elation in her huge, stupid eyes. In fact, she ignored them altogether and kept bouncing along the trail beside us. That was sufficient evidence for the drovers to presume cattle rustling was afoot, whereupon they got to shouting some of the bluest curses I’d ever heard and opened fire with their rusty revolvers.
“We hang rustlers here in Texas, you bastards,” called the tall one.
“Just shoot ’em,” shouted the fat one. “Let the Lord figure it out.”
“Take your God damned cow,” I screamed back at the drovers. My voice sounded shrill and womanish in my ears, but I was in a frantic push to kick the hell out of my mount’s ribs to get clear of the cowboys’ wild shots. “We don’t want it!”
“Now they don’t want it,” the fat one cried. This was punctuated by another shot, though from which revolver I couldn’t say. I looked over my shoulder to see how close they were and found good old Shitbrains close to heel, galloping for all it was worth to keep its pace with us. I swore to myself if those fool cowboys didn’t kill us, I’d eat every square inch of that cow, right down to the hooves.
“You get the old man,” the tall one said. “The Indian is mine.”
“Cut off that Injun’s nuts for me,” the fat one said. “I’ll make it into a ’baccy pouch.”
Christ, they thought she was a man. No wonder they weren’t letting up with those shooters. I reckoned they’d be in for a huge surprise once they pulled the breeches off her corpse.
But Boon wasn’t interested in dying that day. She gave as good as she got, pulling her Colt and firing three shots in quick succession. None of them hit the drovers, but they slowed down and pulled away from one another, one after her and one after me. It was either a good-sized drive that could afford the temporary loss of two of its bone-headed men, or a small one that was doomed to fail anyway. It didn’t much matter to me. I was just trying to stay in the saddle and above ground. In the meantime, my opinion of cowboys was not improving.
While the tall one galloped after Boon, her imaginary testicles on his mind, the fat one rode with surprising speed at my tail. I couldn’t see how his girth didn’t break the spine of the mare he was ruining, but the proud old girl held her own and beat the North Texas earth to dust, closing the gap between us. I heard, but did not see, Boon fire another shot from her Colt. That only left one more round before she would have to reload. She always kept five in the chambers, one empty. The empty one was so she wouldn’t accidentally blow her own toes off when the thing was holstered. The way things were going, she’d be buried with all of her original toes before long.
It had long been my belief that I would go down this way, though cut down by law or outlaw, not some stripling drovers from Nowhere, Texas trying to live out their favorite dime novels written by some Easterner never been farther than Tennessee. I must have blushed from embarrassment at the thought of it, even as I slammed my boot heel into my poor mount’s short ribs to put a few more inches between me and the man aiming for my brains. I stopped thinking about it when a ball took the hat off my head.
It was a good hat, and I never did get it back.
But I did manage to free my .44-40 from its scabbard lashed behind the cantle of my saddle, twisting my back painfully as I did so. My attention was split and my mount went pounding off the trail and into the tall grass, where I levered a cartridge into the breech and slammed the round through the fat drover’s nose.
Before I could rein in and get back the way I’d been, I heard four more shots split the air. I hoped to Christ one of them was Boon’s, because only one could have been. The first thing I saw when I got my horse pointed back north was Shitbrains the Cow. She was standing in the middle of the trail, watching the show like she was in a St. Louis opera house or somesuch. I never had feelings about a particular cow one way or another, but by God Almighty I hated this one.
The second thing my eyes lit upon was Boon’s palomino, Pim, her saddle empty, trotting and snorting with the tall drover’s horse not far behind. The other horse was free of its rider, too. They’d killed each other between those four shots. I was sure of it. There is no pride in confessing that there were tears in my eyes as I abused my poor mount to get across the road faster, but it was how things were.
I just couldn’t stand the thought of losing her.
My pitiable creature caught up with Boon’s beast in time for me to notice movement in the grass, which I had only just passed. I leapt down and chased after it, never thinking, needing to know. There I found Boon kneeling beside the corpse of the tall drover, his sandy blond hair streaked red with blood. She looked like she was praying.
“Boon!” I hollered. “Thank God!”
I ran to her. She held a pocket watch in her hand, a cheap little thing probably made of tin, open to the face.
“Just a boy,” she muttered.
On the inside of the cover, a tiny image was pasted. It was cut from a photograph, and it was some schoolmarm-looking woman. When Boon looked up to me, I saw that she was crying.
“His mother, most like,” she said. “I don’t ’spect he ever saw twenty years.”
I could hardly see how such things mattered when somebody was sending hot lead flying at your head. God created Man but Sam Colt made them equal, as the saying went. What did it matter if the man who killed you was nineteen or ninety-nine?
But it mattered to Boon. She closed the watch and slid it into the pocket of her open vest. She said, “His mama will want to know.”
“That ain’t our concern,” I said. “We didn’t start none of this.”
I thought about the portly corpse some distance away, its skull mostly a gaping hole now, and whether or not that fat bastard had a mother, too. All we’d done was look fair friendly to an addle-brained pile of steak on hooves. Those boys never asked a single question; they just started shooting.
Over one damn cow.
In the years I had known this peculiar woman, I had seen her put lead in a number of men—not to mention a couple of women—and send more than a few of them to their judgment. And yet this was only the second time I ever saw her shed a tear over any one of them. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. What was a woman to do when strangers
came gunning for her for no damned reason?
In Boon’s case, cry.
I said, “Hell’s bells, Boonsri Angchuan, I never did see you act so womanish.”
To this day, I wish I hadn’t ever said that. She knocked me flat with one fist to the chin. First time I ever saw so many pretty stars in the middle of the damn day. When the stars faded, I found her looming over me like an angry goddess, her pink eyes spilling tears on my face and teeth bared like a wolf.
“You rotten motherless son of a bitch,” she seethed, “don’t you dare ever tell me who or how to mourn or by Christ it’ll be you I’m mourning.”
I half-expected her to draw on me. She didn’t, but she didn’t have to. It felt like she did, just from the words. Hell, just from the words, I felt like I’d been shot six ways from Sunday. I was cut down.
“Now,” she said, “’less you got more to say to me, Edward Splettstoesser, you had best get your horse and help me load these boys up to bring to town, you hear?”
I heard. And I hadn’t more to say to her. Even if I had, I would have been too self-preservational to do so, which is to say I was afraid. Wise fellows were afraid of Boon.
“Okay,” is what I said.
She took the tall drover, the blond lad with the picture of his mother in his pocket watch. I took the fat one, which meant all the more work for me, loading his enormous bulk onto the black mare he’d ridden to his death. That most of his face had passed through the back of his skull led to a certain degree of gagging and spitting from me, but I was loath to complain to an already riled Boon. Once she got the tall one tossed up and over his own saddle, she was already taking another long and quiet moment to weep and mourn. I was damned if I understood, but twice-damned to say a word sideways about it, which I didn’t.
I just took up the fat man’s reins to lead his mount and waited on Boon to lead our caravan of two living and two dead north, to Red Foot.
Which was quite precisely the last place we should ever have gone.
