by Ed Kurtz
I said, “I never heard of any court that serves spirits.”
But then I’d never heard of any court that included livestock and pickled human remains, either. It was an all-around banner day for new experiences.
“All of you stand up on your feet,” the judge said. “This here court is in session.”
“Are we to stand through the whole thing?” I wanted to know.
“Keep them lips flapping and you will,” he said.
In lieu of response, I sipped my whiskey. The judge got to fumbling with some tobacco and paper, but his fingers were still too oily to manage it. One of the jurymen who’d subdued Boon and me tottered over to assist in the construction of the cigarette. The rest of us were still standing.
“All right, all right,” the judge said once he had his smoke together and got a match to it. “Sit yourselves down so we can get through this rigmarole, by God.”
Everyone except the barman sat back down. He was still serving a few thirsty customers who didn’t seem too interested in the trial. Probably they’d seen it a dozen times already.
Behind us, the batwings slammed open and the judge looked up with mild interest.
“Good of you to join us, Bob,” said the judge. “Them’s your clients.”
He gestured at us with a chubby pinky finger. Bob Laramie sauntered in, looking like he was nursing one hell of a skullbender, but most certainly not looking like any lawyer. He sidled up to the table in his shirtsleeves where Boon and me sat and gave us the once-over, one a time. Then he grunted.
“And don’t forget, Bob,” the judge continued, “you’re the prosecution here, too.”
“I ain’t forgot, Judge Dejasu,” said Bob Laramie.
I was still trying to work out the logic in having the same lawyer both defend and prosecute us when Boon jumped up to her feet.
“Did you just say Dejasu?”
“It’s a damn sight better than whatever hellish Prussian or Oriental monikers you two killers got saddled with,” the judge said.
“It’s French,” Bob said.
“I am a Texan and American, by God,” the judge countered. “In that order.”
“You got a given name, Judge Dejasu?” she said.
Her right hand trembled at her hip, hungering for a grip that wasn’t there. As a matter of fact, it lay on the judge’s table, not six feet away.
“Selwyn is my Christian name,” the judge said. “But if you call me by it I’ll have you in irons for contempt of my court.”
“Not Bartholomew,” Boon muttered, unsure.
“Barry’s my brother and he ain’t presiding,” said the judge. “And neither is my Aunt Eustace, so sit your ass down and let’s get to business.”
He punctuated this by slamming a closed fist on the table. Bob sat on one side of me, Boon on the other. The trial had begun.
“State your names so nobody else has to butcher his tongue on ’em,” said Judge Dejasu.
Once again, we spoke our names. The judge shook his head in disbelief.
“Christ in heaven,” he said. “You are herewith charged with double-murder of two boys, identities unknown, and also the rustling theft of one cow, Hereford, identity also unknown.”
“I named her Shitbrains,” I offered.
“In the usual circumstances I would expect blue words in this establishment,” the judge said. “But this here is my court and if you get to cussin’ again I will hang you without bothering myself to convict you.”
“I’m sure sorry, Judge,” I said.
“I don’t give a devil’s damn if you’re sorry or not,” he said. “Lawyer Laramie, did you review the evidence against these two jackanapes?”
Bob Laramie groaned, rubbed his temples, and took a long, deep breath.
“I saw the bodies outside,” he said at some length. “And I can see that cow what crapped on the floor over there.”
The barman said, “Oh, hell.”
I finished my whiskey while the barman fetched a dustpan. I didn’t like my chances as far as the outcome of the trial, but I got to thinking every term of court ought to serve liquor to lessen the severity of the ordeal.
“I reckon there’s a cow trail on either side of us,” said Laramie. “the Goodnight-Loving to the west of us, up to Cheyenne, and then there’s the Western trail over east from Bandera to Ogallala. Seems to me yonder cow came from one or the other.”
Judge Dejasu pondered this.
“All right,” he said. “Which direction did the damn beast come from?”
“West,” I said.
“East,” Boon said.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene in memory. The cow had strayed in from the right, so I figured I’d been wrong and Boon was right.
“Your honor, I would like to revise my answer,” I said.
“Lying already,” the judge said. “Criminal type is what you are, Prussian Edward. Any phrenologist worth his salt could tell you that just by looking at your lumpy God damned head.”
Boon made a noise in her throat.
“The heifer came from the east, so if it was part of a drive it’d have to be the Western trail,” she explained. “We were traveling right up the middle between trails and never saw any other cattle or any drive, just the one cow. It got to following us on account of being dumber than Lawyer Laramie here and the cowboys what went after it made one too many presumptions about the setup and decided to speak with their iron instead of their tongues.”
Lawyer Laramie said, “Hey, now. I’m your only defense.”
“You’re also the prosecutor,” Boon reminded him.
“It does get muddled a little,” he admitted.
“I have two questions to be answered in the order I’m fixing to ask them,” the judge said then, ignoring Boon’s tête-à-tête with Laramie. “What cause have two foreigners to be moving up through the Great Land of Texas between two cattle trails other than to rustle beeves, and how come you to be acquainted with my kin?”
“I am no foreigner, Your Honor,” I protested.
“Arkansas is a foreign land to Texas,” said the judge.
“I got a paper tells you both answers,” Boon said, and to my horror she stuck a hand into her vest pocket for the bounty bill. The little cannonball was likely to hang us both and leave our corpses for the descendants of the turkey buzzards that ate Maynard Francisco Boulliette, and here she was about to tell the loco bastard we aimed to hunt down his own brother. They were going to have to rechristen the place Red Feet, provided Dejasu used the same solution when it came time to pickling our parts. This did not come across as a sound legal strategy in my manner of thinking.
“Paper? What paper?” Judge Dejasu was piqued, but attentive to the turn of events. “Lawyer Laramie, confiscate that foolscap and bring it here.”
The old sot did as he was commanded, and the judge unfolded the bill to spread it out on the table before him. The top left corner stuck between the first and second toes of Boulliette’s foot.
The judge studied the bill for several long minutes, his eyes moving slowly from top to bottom, then back to the top and down again, several times over. His round, whiskered face reddened the more he looked at it, and his breath came in short, noisy bursts through his nose.
“I don’t reckon I ever saw such hogwash and foolishness in all my days as an adjudicator for this great state,” he said. “I suspect this Marshal Willocks is a fiction contrived between the two of you and this horseshit truebill printed by some coward at gunpoint for your scheme to bring shame to my good name. Lawyer Laramie, enter this forgery into evidence against the accused.”
“A fiction?” Boon said, incredulous.
“I do not see him here,” the judge said, “nor have I ever seen him. Produce him if you can, but until then he belongs to stories and mad ravings and nothing more.”
“You ever met Ulysses S. Grant?” she cried. “How about Cole Younger? He ain’t here, either.”
The judge sat up straigh
t, making himself as tall in his chair as he could, which was not saying much.
“You are just that hell-fired to murder my own flesh and blood, that it? I never saw such a cold woman in my life, God damn you.”
“And the devil take you, sir,” Boon said. “Straight to hell. And all your kin, too.”
She said it easy as you please, like her dander wasn’t even up. Like she was ordering a bowl of soup in that rooming house back in Darling. Like it wasn’t hardly anything at all.
The judge thought it was something, though. I don’t reckon I ever saw a white man turn that shade of crimson before or since. His round, oily head poured sweat as he worked himself up into a righteous lather, pounding his fists on the table and making Maynard’s foot bounce like a Mexican jumping bean.
“Guilty!” he hollered. “Guilty, by God! Guilty!”
“Judge Dejasu?” Lawyer Laramie stood, leaning on the table for support as he was so nervous he’d started to shake. “We ain’t finished this here trial yet.”
“Prussian Edward and his Oriental squaw are hereby sentenced to hang until they are dead and left out to rot or get et, whichever comes first. Guilty, I says! Damn, you Laramie.”
“But the jurymen,” Laramie said. He pointed at them, scattered around the Red Foot in various states of inebriation. Only two of them looked back at him. The rest paid no attention at all. In fact, one of them was asleep on the floor.
“No thanks to them and no thanks to you, Lawyer Laramie,” the judge ranted. “I done this conviction all by myself and I’ll thank you to recognize me for my talents in that regard. Other than that, shut your mouth or I’ll have a third length of rope cut.”
Lawyer Laramie knew which side of his bread was buttered. He shut his mouth.
Boon did not.
“I never saw such a twisted joke of a courtroom and I reckon your appointment to judge is a fiction and fancy you made up from thin air,” she said. “You go on and try to hang me and my friend, Dejasu. I’ll bring your head to your brother for you.”
My dear and only friend Boonsri was not given to hyperbole. It happened once in a rare while, as that is just the way folks express themselves sometimes. But when most people might say it’s hotter than a hundred suns, Boon most often would not, simply because she knew it was not, in fact, that hot. Boon would only say it’s awful hot today. All of this is to illustrate that she was the sort of person who, in most cases, said precisely what she meant without need for embellishment or metaphor.
Which is to say I felt my stomach rotate a full circuit in my trunk as I thought about her intent to separate the judge’s head from his neck, and I had more faith in her intent to do so than all the saints in heaven.
Things only got troublesome from there.
Chapter Ten
In the years I’d spent in the company of Boon, I’d seen her end more than a handful of arguments at the barrel of a gun or the edge of a knife. I did not take it upon myself to record incidents of this nature in a timely or faithful manner, but offhand I could conservatively estimate that my friend brought about the demise of some fifteen souls between the three she blew out of their saddles in the moments before we first met and our arrival in Red Foot, Texas. But that’s on the low end. It might have been closer to twenty-one.
Arithmetic is not my strength.
More than once, I’d thought about whether she was crazy. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the violence, because I don’t believe she ever did. It just came so easy to her, and with such skill. She was a tightly wound coil of Siamese snake-woman daring any and every passerby to draw near for her strike. Sometimes I waited with bated breath for the moment to come and it never did. Other times I hadn’t any notion what was coming and ended up every bit as shocked as the man dying on the floor.
Had she inherited a meanness from her gold-mouthed father, whom she claimed was evil through and through? Or was it instead the result of a life lived harder than most? Nothing was ever easy for a half-Siamese orphan left to her own devices at a tender age, with nobody to speak to and too many hours spent gathering bitterness and rage like wool. Nothing but the rage itself, I reckoned.
And rage was what spilled out of her next, that evening before Judge Selwyn Dejasu in the Red Foot Saloon. She was up and over the table before the chair she’d been sitting in hit the floor, agile as a bobcat, and she vaulted so that the table tottered violently and Lawyer Laramie scrambled for safety. I just sat still as I had been, watching everything happen like it was a dream. I wished that it was.
The judge had his pistol out faster than I would have thought possible and against my better instincts, I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation of the shot. The gun fired and I smelled the acrid smoke before something clattered and broke.
“Boon!” I cried.
Sure she’d been hit, I opened my eyes and leapt to my feet to find the barman screaming to my right, the side of his head awash with blood where an ear had been moments before. Boon had gotten to the judge’s wrist before he squeezed the trigger, forcing the gun away from her. Now the barman hollered almost as loudly as the judge himself, who kept repeating, “She broke my wrist, she broke my wrist.”
Still grasping the fractured joint with one hand, she curled the other hand into a fist and introduced it to the judge’s nose, which squashed flat in a spray of bright red blood. His gun finally dropped from his fingers to the floor. I watched it fall, the barrel cutting a groove into the wood floor, and spin away toward the bar. So, too, did one of the underutilized jurymen, a stout old boy who’d helped to convey me inside for the trial. The two of us squared off, more or less the same distance from the pistol, as if we were already armed and fixing to throw down in the street.
I went for the gun, but the old boy was a second quicker. My fingers grazed the cylinder while his secured the grip and raised it up to push the barrel against my nose. He grinned. I considered praying, but dismissed the idea outright. I never was too sure about whether the preachers were right about God and, if they were, that the Old Man ever had my best interests at heart. I figured I’d let Him do what He wanted and just worry about the bullet that was about to take up residence in my brain.
Seemed to me I’d been living on borrowed time ever since Boon showed up to ruin my first hanging anyhow, and an extra three years wasn’t anything to spit at. A damn fine three years, too, for the most part. In spite of myself, I got filled up with warm feelings about it, never mind the iron in my face, so I decided to give Boonsri one last look before facing a more serious judgement than Selwyn Dejasu could ever mete out.
She’d sure gotten the better of the old judge, too. He was on his back, still in his chair, and Boon had one boot planted firmly on his flabby neck. She had also reclaimed her Colt, which was at that moment aimed directly at the juryman’s head, which split open at the sound of a shot once she pulled the trigger. I got a mouthful of blood and pushed the dead man off of me. He rolled into a fresh pile of cow slop on the floor and Shitbrains stepped on his eye. I didn’t think he much minded.
The fat padding the judge’s windpipe protected it enough that he was still uttering any number of blue oaths that would have made Squirrel-Tooth Alice blush to beat the Dutch. Most of the remaining jurymen either lit out or hid under tables after Boon’s timely shot, though the barman was still standing and still screaming his fool head off. That set the heifer to moaning, though I couldn’t tell if she was frightened by the ruckus or just thought she was accompanying the barman’s song.
I picked up the dead juryman’s pistol and might have put an end to the cow that started the whole miserable business, but Lawyer Bob Laramie came tramping down the stairs with a scattergun bigger than the judge he sought to rescue. I hadn’t noticed him going upstairs in the first place and wouldn’t have worried much if I had; he didn’t come across the sort to worry about. I was plenty worried about that scattergun, though.
Boon said, “Edward!”
I replied by way of swinging the pistol away fr
om the cow and around half the saloon to Laramie, who by then was charging Boon and weeping from terror.
“Don’t you hurt the judge!” he cried.
He took aim at Boon’s chest, so I shot him in the neck. The shotgun went up and he fired at the same time as he was shot, missing me but taking off most of the rest of the barman’s head. The heifer’s accompaniment turned into a solo. Lawyer Laramie slapped at his ragged, bloody neck and dropped backward, flat on his back.
Conscious of the possibility of other surprise avengers, I took stock of the rest of the room. The air was filled with smoke that burned the eyes and scratched in the throat. Beneath the picture where the judge had earlier dined, one of the appointed jurymen stood with his hands out like he was being robbed. I turned the pistol toward him.
A working girl seated comfortably nearby, looking a little bored, said, “Aw, let Pete alone. He’s gone and pissed his Levi’s.”
I motioned with the pistol for the batwings. Pete bolted for them and staggered out into the night. That left only one member of the original jury, who cowered with his hands over his head beneath a table in the back by the stairs, and two whores, including the uninterested one. The other girl took advantage of the relative calm and, gathering up her threadbare skirts, went running up the stairs, taking two steps at a time. A door slammed shut somewhere up there. I didn’t reckon she’d be going for another scattergun—she’d have left the door open otherwise.
Boon took her boot off the judge’s throat and hauled him up to his feet by his whiskers.
“I’ll hang you yet,” he said. “You and Arkansas Edward, both.”
“You got a chance to keep your head attached to your body,” Boon told him. “Don’t go lousing it up with that talk.”
The judge emitted a hoarse laugh.
“Take you to my brother, that it? I’d sooner cut my own head off than give Barry to you.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, and she pushed him hard to the floor again. To me, she said, “Go back to the undertaker’s we passed by. He’ll have a saw for cutting timber.”
