Boon

by Ed Kurtz

  Chapter Eight

  The horizon was an eerie bruise-purple as the night-time lights of Red Foot became visible in the middle distance. I led a black horse with an overweight corpse draped over the saddle. Boon held the reins of the tall drover’s paint with him slung over its back. I didn’t much like riding into a strange town with as many dead people as live ones in my party. But that’s how it was.

  The oil lamps on the main street stunk, but not as much as the people. If there was one bathtub in all of Red Foot, nobody knew about it. It wasn’t exactly a cow town, but it wasn’t within a fair piece from any railhead, either. Just a filthy hole in the ground with a name and more saloons than anything else. The biggest of these was dead in the middle of town, two stories with rooms to rent and vaguely feminine company to rent along with them. The largest saloon in Red Foot was called the Red Foot. We hitched up in front of it and Boon dismounted, her face a mask of weariness. She looked up and down the street.

  “You seen anything resembling law around here?” she said.

  I’d seen three other saloons, a general store with a sign that read only WERES (which I took to mean “wares”), an undertaker, a shuttered printer with the roof half stove in, a tannery and brine pit filled with bones and offal but otherwise long beyond use, and the livery stable where we came in. But no law in evidence. In fact, beyond the main drag and a few scattered shacks on the outskirts, there was nothing at all left of Red Foot. I said as much.

  “Some jasper in this place might know about it,” I suggested.

  “Mayhap you just want to take a look at the merchandise they got.”

  “If the women ain’t any cleaner than the men, I’d rather not get their lice on me,” I said. “But I would be more than happy to see what’s stocked behind the bar.”

  “I’d imagine so,” Boon said. “It’s been a while now. I can’t say as I’m not surprised you aren’t shaking all over like a cricket on a skillet.”

  That she was back to sniping at me seemed a good sign. She hadn’t been much for palavering since we loaded up the corpses. I guessed she was still thinking about the cowboys’ mothers. I still couldn’t get a hold on that in my mind, but I was just smart enough to keep my chuck-hole shut about it. There wasn’t any sense in arguing with a brick wall, and this brick wall in particular had a sharp tongue and quick draw.

  Our horses dunked their muzzles into a community trough full of murky rainwater, and I hoped they had one inside that was full of whiskey. They didn’t. Just the regular assortment of bottles one would expect, a great many of them with the labels torn off so as to not disappoint the paying customer when they discovered they weren’t drinking whatever used to be glued there. Mine was a powerful thirst and I was not feeling particular. I’d have hung my hat on the stand by the batwing doors on the way in if I still had one, but all the same I went straight for the bar, where I said, “Whiskey and a beer.”

  The public house, such as it was, was ill-lit in the setting sun, none of the lamps inside having been touched by a match. Still, I could make out the few patrons—grubby Texans in mud-caked boots and poorly repaired homespun breeches—and a pair of crib girls lounging lazily by a silent piano missing all of its black keys, waiting for their marks to come to them. Much more importantly, I could see the bar.

  The barman—fat, with a drooping red mustache that cast a sad pallor to his otherwise rosy face—reached for a bottle on the shelf behind him, and that was when I first took notice of the foot.

  Here I’d thought some dimwitted son of a bitch couldn’t think up a name for his saloon, so he named it after the town. This was not so. The town was named for the saloon, and the saloon was named for the actual red foot mounted on a square of polished oak behind the bar. The severed appendage was withered, shrunken and wrinkled by age and its general state of decease, but otherwise in startlingly good condition given the eulogy engraved by hand underneath its fallen arch.

  THE FINAL EARTHLY REMAINS OF

  MAYNARD FRANCISCO BOULLIETTE

  RED FOOT’S FIRST SENTENCE SERVED

  BUT NOT ITS LAST

  July 5, 1866

  “Maynard Francisco Boulliette,” I read aloud. “That’s three different kinds of names for just one man.”

  “More’n he deserved,” said the barman. He sneered at the foot as he said it. “Turkey buzzards got their fill of the mean old bastard, though. That there foot was all they left when they couldn’t eat another bite.”

  “Bones, too?” I asked.

  The barman nodded sagely and soberly. “’Less’n there’s some other saloon has most of a skeleton hung up in it.”

  “All but the foot,” I thought aloud.

  The genial fellow cast another dark glance at the foot, and I wondered how often he and it reenacted this standoff. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, because my thirst was only getting worse by the minute.

  Once I had my two glasses in front of me, one large and one small, I said, “What makes it red, anyhow? Was old Maynard Indian on top of Spanish and French and whatever else?”

  “Just turned that color when the judge cured it,” he explained. “Used to be a queer old timer name of Estherhaus, worked as both the undertaker and sawbones in the settlement formerly southwest of us. It was him made up the fluid the judge used to keep it in. Big ol’ jar with the damn foot floating in it, and you can be sure he took it to every term of court.

  “Whatever it was old Estherhaus put in that jar, it stained the foot red, and here we are.”

  “Here we are,” I agreed, and I raised a glass to the late Maynard Francisco Boulliette’s severed red foot in the Red Foot in Red Foot.

  The barman looked to Boon, who hadn’t said a word all this time. He raised his brows, a quiet sort of question any woman or man accustomed to being in her or his cups understood to mean What can I get you?

  But Boon didn’t look too thirsty.

  She said, “What’s this about a judge?”

  Some jasper at the end of the bar with the tip of his nose cut off snorted. The barman didn’t seem to notice, but both me and Boon turned our eyes on him.

  “Bounty hunters,” he said without looking up from his drink. It was clear as water, but I couldn’t bear to think that’s what it was. “Came in with a cadaver apiece. Probably looking for a reward.”

  He said reward like it was the filthiest word in the language.

  The barman shook his head sadly.

  “Nothing for y’all here, then,” he said. “We ain’t got any sheriff or marshal in Red Foot. Only the judge. And the judge gives sentences, not rewards.”

  “That a fact,” Boon said.

  The barman shrugged.

  I drank my whiskey in one gulp and sent half the beer in close pursuit. The barman wiggled his eyebrows at Boon again, but she just shooed him away like he was a bothersome old blackfly. I wished she hadn’t, seeing as I was pert near done with my beer and about ready for another round. He went to set to lighting the lamps, which served mostly to fill the air with greasy black smoke, which blessedly smelled better than the denizens of Red Foot.

  “We can do one of two things,” she said. “Either leave the boys with the judge and hope he gets word to their kin, or ride on with them to the next town with some proper law.”

  “I ain’t riding another mile with them cowboys ripening up to a hellacious stink,” I said. “You act like any little speck of this was our fault when they came shooting.”

  Boon narrowed her eyes at me like the sun was in them.

  “Do you know what nuance means?” she said.

  I do now, having read some since those days, but I did not then. I said so. She pushed a sigh out through her nose.

  “Let’s see this judge,” she said. “It’s not too late, and we can put dust between us and that spooky foot before camping out somewheres else.”

  “You find him,” I said. “I’m having another drink.”

  “Hell,” the barman squawked, eavesdropping. “The judge’ll
come to you. This is his place.”

  The jasper with the clear liquid laughed.

  “This whole puddle is his,” he said. “Guess you didn’t notice there ain’t no courthouse, though. No church or meeting house, either. The judge holds court right here in the Red Foot.”

  “Fine,” Boon said. “When’s he get in?”

  “I been here all the time, young woman,” came a booming voice, loud but wet with phlegm. “I don’t never set foot outside this sacred place unless when I got to, and I don’t never got to.”

  Up to then, the few dark-eyed intemperates in the saloon had maintained a low buzz of talk, but once that voice piped up, every mouth slammed shut like the gates of Hell on John Wilkes Booth. We turned our backs to the bar, Boon first and then me, to peer through the smoky darkness in search of the man who owned that voice. She located him first and I had to follow the path of her eyes to find him, which wasn’t such an embarrassment since the man was so small. If I had been any farther away, I would have mistaken him for a child.

  As if anticipating my puzzlement, the judge stood up from the small, round table where he sat, at the back of the room beneath a greasy painting of a naked Indian woman wrestling a bear. He was almost as round as he was short, a little cannonball of a man with untamed side-whiskers curling out from his face like black fire. His chin was dimpled and his raven-wing hair was greased back, tight against his skull, where it flowed down the back of his neck before forming curlicues that vanished into his boiled collar. He wore both braces and a belt. Attached to his belt was a brown leather holster, comically huge on his hip, with the pearl grip of a single-action Starr revolver jutting out in such a way that I concluded he must have been left-handed.

  The judge wiped his oily fingers on a red-checked napkin—he had been dining on some fowl without the benefit of cutlery—and took a bow.

  “At your service,” he said.

  Boon went directly to the judge’s table. I waited a minute more for the barman to set me up, then followed her trail with a glass in each hand.

  “Join me, join me,” the judge said. “Forgive my savagery. I most always eat with my hands and rarely use a knife except in self-defense. No way for a white man to eat, but it saves time some.”

  Almost instantly, he dug his fingers back into the glistening breast of whichever bird he was eating, a crimson ring on his right hand splitting the skin almost as well as a dull knife. It was a repulsive spectacle, though the odor of the meat turned my stomach against me. Even had it been crow, I’d have liked to share in the judge’s repast.

  “Tell me,” he said, his mouth full and lips shiny with bird fat, “about your cadavers.”

  Boon pulled out a chair and sat. I set down my drinks and joined her and the judge. Men murmured behind us. I didn’t like that.

  “Pair of men from a cattle drive, I believe,” she began. “Reckoned a heifer they lost got rustled, though I can’t say as I ever heard of rustling one cow from a drive. Anyway, these poor fellows came guns first and between myself and my partner, we were the superior shooters.”

  Boon didn’t talk a lot, but she sure got to the point when she did.

  The judge mulled this over, chewing on one side of his mouth and working at something tough. He then poked a couple of fingers into his maw and dug out a bit of gristle, which he deposited right on the table, beside his plate.

  “Then you mean to say y’all ain’t looking after no bounty,” he said.

  “No,” Boon said. “Not for them, we ain’t. This whole thing was just bad business I wish never happened. All I want is to settle it up proper, so any kin these boys got don’t got to wonder and worry.”

  “Boys, you say?”

  The judge did not seem to care for that appellation much. He finished chewing, swallowed, and worked his tongue around his mouth in search of stray bits before leaning back in his chair and looking us both over closely.

  “What’re you,” he asked Boon, “Injun or Mex?”

  “Neither,” she said, an edge to her voice. “I am from Siam.”

  “Never heard of it,” said the judge. “That out Californy way?”

  “Farther,” she said.

  “Oriental is what you are.”

  “If you like.”

  “Young woman, I do not like one God damn thing about this. Let’s take a look at your corpses, then.”

  A small crowd of spectators had gathered by the time we got back outside, drawn no doubt by the curiosity-inducing sight of two dead men slung over horses, one of whom bore a blackening hole through his head starting where his nose ought to have been. I felt some measure of pride relating to the acumen of that shot.

  One enterprising moron in a sweat-stained bowler had rolled up his shirtsleeves to have a closer inspection, turning the tall cowboy’s head this way and that. The judge put a stop to that immediately.

  “What you got, Henry Rooney, is an unnatural curiosity in things that ought to be let alone,” he barked.

  Rooney backed away, stammering and sputtering in offense.

  “I was only having a look-see for the public good, Judge,” he said.

  “I should of put you in irons the last time you had a look-see at a body,” the judge roared. “Though I can’t figure as a living woman would ever let you.”

  Most of the spectators had a hearty belly laugh about that. Boon and I exchanged a concerned look. Rooney scampered away in shame.

  The judge approached the four mounts and two dead men. Voices chattered and gossiped. Then, a cow lowed miserably. Heads swiveled, mine included, and there in the middle of street stood that by-God heifer.

  “Shitbrains,” I said.

  “That the cow?” the judge asked.

  Boon agreed that it was.

  The judge said, “Hmm.”

  First, he examined the fat one—the bastard I’d shot. There wasn’t much to look at. Apart from taking most of his face through that hole I’d made, the rest was burned black and turning to leather from the hot ride to Red Foot.

  The judge said, “Hmm.” Again.

  Next, he turned his attention to the tall one. The lad Boon had mourned in the tall grass. The judge saw something in the countenance of that corpse that Boon had seen, too. But not me. I was starting to think everybody but me was loco when it came to this particular matter.

  “Why, this is just a boy,” the judge said. I thought he sounded mournful.

  “Bullets kill just as good when boys shoot them,” I said. “I heard tell about a woman in Little Rock got killed when her girl got to playing with her daddy’s Army revolver, and the girl wasn’t but three years old.”

  “But you ain’t no three-year-old girl,” the judge said gravely. “Nor any barefoot Arkansas hayseed’s woman. You’re a growed man, son.”

  I reckoned it was rich that the judge of Red Foot, Texas, acted so high and mighty about us Arkansans, like this was any grand place to see, but I kept quiet on that subject. Way I saw things, we were all complicit in the self-same Confederacy, which meant each and every man jack of us was going to answer a few tough questions about that to old Saint Peter when the time came if the preachers were right about any one thing. But the little whiskered cannonball in front of me wasn’t interested in the Final Judgment just now. He had his own judgments to make.

  He said, “What’s your name, son?”

  “Edward Splettstoesser,” I told him.

  “Woo-hee,” the judge said. “I wouldn’t want to be the undertaker responsible for your tombstone. How about this one? The Oriental?”

  He jerked a thumb at Boon.

  “Boonsri Angchuan,” she said darkly.

  “Christ Jesus,” the judge bemoaned. “At least Edward is easy enough. All right, court is in session soon as I finish my supper and get a beer down my gullet. Ten of you men get your asses inside to serve, and somebody scare up Bob Laramie.” He turned an oily forefinger on Boon, and then me. “Bob’s the only lawyering man in Red Foot, so y’all got to share him.”


  Boon reached for her Colt, but there were two men upon her before she could so much as curl a finger around the grip. I didn’t even bother trying for my rifle.

  “We done told you the facts,” she said.

  “Criminals ain’t partial to facts,” said the judge. Then, to the town men holding us: “Search ’em over for what coin and paper they got on their persons. Court ain’t free.”

  “This is what we get for your warm feelings about them God damned cowboys,” I said.

  Boon said, “Shut up, Edward.”

  Chapter Nine

  Though I had not spent much time inside courtrooms, I knew well enough that there were a few aspects of this one that were notably unusual. Chief among these was the town’s—and the judge’s—nominal red foot, which was taken from behind the bar and propped up on the table from which the tiny jurist presided. It was a wonder the judge did not wear it on a chain around his neck, he was so proud of the grisly thing.

  The inclusion of the Hereford heifer in the proceedings was equally peculiar. She’d been tied with rope to the foot rail underneath the bar and stood still and patient, if bug-eyed and bewildered by the sharp turns her formerly uneventful life had taken in the last several hours. I was half-convinced the judge aimed to use the cow for a material witness, but when I brought it up to Boon she just hushed me.

  “You can’t sass your way out of this one,” she said. “Everything ain’t a joke.”

  “If this court ain’t a joke, I don’t know what is,” I said.

  The judge sat behind the table, which had been moved to the center of the room to suit the occasion, and continued to pick over his supper. The barman brought him a glass of beer that was mostly foam and the six men the judge had harangued into jury duty slumped in various spots around the saloon. He could not manage the full ten on such short notice and got to hollering when somebody suggested substituting some of the whores that it wasn’t lawful-like and would be an insult to the hoary old institution of the American court of law. Not due to their profession, mind you, but because they were women.

  My friend with the drooping mustache brought me a fresh whiskey and a beer, something like a sympathetic smile hiding underneath all that red fur.