Boon

by Ed Kurtz

  “You’re bluffing,” said the judge. “I been a judge long enough to know a liar when I see one.”

  I said, “You don’t know Boon,” and went back out to break into an undertaker’s storefront. The place wasn’t far, as Red Foot wasn’t but a pile of wood and adobe in the middle of nowhere, and I had to kick the front door in to gain access. It was dark, naturally, and although I did find a lamp, there were no matches in sight, so I fumbled half-blind for a quarter of an hour before finally finding what I wanted: a steel saw with a smooth wooden handle and teeth as sharp as the day it was sold.

  The whore was asleep in her chair when I returned, despite the judge’s ranting and raving, which I could hear long before I passed through the batwing doors for the fifth time that day.

  “If I could hang you twice, I’d hang you three times,” he said. “You ought to be burned for a witch and buried face down in cow shit.”

  “Just for that,” Boon said evenly as I set the saw down on the table formerly used as the judge’s bench, “I ain’t going to shoot you first.”

  “You’re mad,” he said.

  “Judge Dejasu,” she said, “I’m madder than hell.”

  She kept her Colt trained on the little man when she picked up the saw.

  Chapter Eleven

  I once met a man in a watering hole in some little border town who claimed to have been a sharpshooter during the war. He still wore the tattered gray coat and kepi cap of his fighting days and told me he’d killed more than a hundred Yankees from no closer than a hundred and fifty yards with the same .451 Whitworth rifle. I asked him if that was the reason he was gathering dust a foot and a half from old Mexico with a belly full of mescal, that the guilt of so many untimely deaths had taken its toll on his conscience and was he trying to drink the memories away. The old boy laughed himself hoarse at the suggestion.

  “I never even saw their faces,” he told me. “It was easier than shooting woodcock back in Tennessee.”

  I never met a Butternut who couldn’t shoot, but I’d never met one who’d killed a hundred men, either. This one wasn’t fussed about it, though.

  “There’s a world of difference ’tween shootin’ a man and stickin’ a knife in his heart,” he said. “Sometimes killin’ is easy, and sometimes it ain’t.”

  I didn’t know it then, but I learned. On occasion it didn’t much bother me and I slept like a babe, whereas other times my heart felt shaky for a day or two. Still, every man I ever killed was killed with a bullet. Every man apart from one or two when I couldn’t get a hold of a gun, anyway.

  Most men Boon ever killed—at least in my presence, as she rarely spoke to me about exploits prior to my time with her—were with a bullet, too. A drunk whose clumsy advances in Nacogdoches turned besotted crapulence into spurned vengeance died badly with a steak knife in his ribs when he mistook me for a rival suitor and pulled me off of my mount with murder in his eyes, the second time Boon saved my life as I recollected. She’d been having her supper when she heard me holler and decided the knife she was already holding would be sufficient to her purposes. But apart from that, she was thoroughly a gunwoman. Her .44 was as much a part of her body as the hand that gripped it or the cold brown eyes that sighted down its barrel. Hell, once or twice I’d watched with keen fascination when she’d fallen asleep disassembling the thing to clean it and her fingers kept working at the parts even while she softly snored. That steak knife and her national provenance notwithstanding, Boon never displayed much interest or proficiency in blades.

  The saw, however, was new and different. I hadn’t hesitated when she sent me after it, and I was uncharacteristically silent as she weighed it in her hands like she’d never touched one in all her life, which mayhap she hadn’t. Or more likely, she was thinking about something akin to the Tennessean sniper of my memory, taking measure of the vast difference between cutting a man down with a bullet and cutting off his head with steel sawteeth and no small amount of elbow grease.

  She holstered the Colt and knelt on the judge’s chest. Her knee pressed hard against his chest and the round little man expelled a grunt.

  “You cracked my rib,” he wheezed.

  “Where’s your brother?” she said.

  “You’ll roast in hell,” said the judge. “The devil’ll dance on your bones.”

  Boon touched the sawteeth to the fat, red flesh of the judge’s neck.

  She said, “Bartholomew. Where is he?”

  “If you call him by his whole name when you meet him, he will kill you slower. He’s partial to Barry, but he’ll kill you one way or the other.”

  “He’ll kill me the same as you was going to hang me,” Boon said. “You make a lot of promises you can’t keep, Judge.”

  “I’m the God damned law here,” he said. “You savage bitch. You motherless damned beast.”

  All she had to do was move her hand half an inch and the saw caught skin and pulled. Tiny crimson beads welled up, a dozen or more of them, and smeared around his throat as the judge jerked and cried out.

  “Keep moving like that and you’ll do the job for me,” said Boon.

  I watched this scene unfold with some interest and more than a little revulsion, and though I grew up butchering hogs and had no horror of blood, something about the slow build of the thing got to wracking my nerves and restoring that powerful thirst that plagued me when first we came to Red Foot. I stepped over the dead barman, whose devastated head was by then attracting flies both black and green, and squeezed behind the bar to see what he’d been hiding down there. My eyes lit on a dusty bottle of Old Overholt rye and I quit worrying about having to settle for corn whiskey. Just like every other bartender I ever met, the corpse at my feet had been holding out on the good stuff.

  Served him right, the dead bastard.

  The judge moaned some more while the whore in the chair got to snoring, and all the while Boon kept her big eyes open, staring into what passed for the judge’s soul as I sat on a barstool and pulled the cork with my teeth. It only occurred to me then that the heifer was gone; she probably wandered off when I went for the saw. That left only me for an audience to Boon, her saw, and Judge Selwyn Dejasu.

  “Last time I’m gonna ask,” she said. “Where’s your brother?”

  The judge suggested his brother was presently engaged in unseemly activities with Boon’s mother, which was when I decided it would be best to turn my back to them both and keep my focus on the rye whiskey. I’d never been so grateful for the absence of a mirror behind the bar, which was so often the fashion in saloons all over Texas. The Old Overholt was some of the finest liquor I’d ever poured down my throat, and it took every drop in the bottle to drown out the screaming that erupted behind me.

  I woke up at dawn on top of a lumpy mattress with my boots on the floor beside me. My skull was full of sand and my mouth tasted like a grave. It wasn’t the first time Boon ever put me to bed, but I was surprised she’d had the strength and energy to haul me up the stairs after everything else that had transpired the day before. Boon was always full of surprises.

  After my third failed attempt to lift my own head from the greasy pillow, she appeared in the doorway. The sun was only just rising and the room was still dark, but I could make out her unreadable face. I could also see that she’d changed her clothes into an ill-fitting blue shirt that disguised her feminine form and store-bought dungarees she’d cut roughly at the cuffs and cinched with a leather belt. I never asked to whom the clothes belonged but assumed she hadn’t killed anyone to acquire them. All I knew for sure and for certain was that her old getup must have been awash in blood and worse.

  “What next,” I croaked. My voice startled me, sounding like my throat was full of broken glass. I wasn’t sure yet if I was going to puke or not.

  “There was a letter,” she said, “among the judge’s papers kept at Laramie’s office up the street.”

  “You been busy,” I said. I didn’t know if it was a question or not. It was too early t
o tell.

  “Seems there’s a mess of Dejasu kin not a day’s ride from here,” she explained. “Someplace called Arrowpoint.”

  “Arrowpoint,” I repeated, just to see how it felt in my mouth. It felt like I wished this was all over already. “Judge ever talk?”

  “He had some last words. Two or three of them. None of them kind.”

  “I reckon not.”

  “Get a bottle of beer in you at the bar to stave off that skullbender and let’s ride,” she said. “Might could make it to Arrowpoint before dark if we don’t run across any more stray heifers.”

  I sat up against the wall and raised a forefinger to indicate I needed a minute. The room spun a little but I swallowed about a hundred times to keep my gorge down.

  “Used to be we was looking for your mother and father,” I said. “Now it’s some jasper neither of us ever met. We’re just getting further and further away from where we was, ain’t we?”

  “It’s the same trail,” Boon said. “Just a little longer than we reckoned before.”

  “Trails change,” I said. “They get dead when things change, and folks leave them to grow over and take new ones. I ’spect you wouldn’t hardly notice the difference day after day in a saddle, neither.”

  “Go drink that beer,” she said. “I don’t want to be in Red Foot when the sun’s up.”

  She started to leave but stopped with her back to me and head turned up. Before she could say anything about it, I smelled the smoke.

  After I smelled the smoke, I saw it, too. Black and thick, snaking up into the hallway from the floor below.

  And then, having both smelled and seen the smoke, Boon and I heard from the arsonist.

  “My name is Barry Dejasu,” he hollered from outside. “Burn up in there or come and get shot.”

  We weren’t fixing to leave Red Foot just yet.

  Chapter Twelve

  “You reckon somebody got word to him?” I asked.

  “That or he wasn’t much more than a fart away all this time,” Boon said.

  She looked angry to me. Not scared. Never scared, not really.

  I jumped back into my boots and looked out the window. The glass was filthy and cracked, and it took me a moment to get my bearings. I was looking out the back of the building and there wasn’t a whole lot behind it other than mud and scrub and a few whores’ cribs. Red Foot didn’t comprise much apart from the main street and the ramshackle buildings that lined up tightly on either side of it with their false fronts and no boardwalk. I thought I could see some movement in the distance, but it was probably just a deer. Barry Dejasu wasn’t back there. He was downstairs or out in the street, waiting for us.

  “This fuckin’ place gonna burn up like kindling,” he shouted. “Best make up your minds.”

  “I guess he’s right,” I said.

  “I’ll go see him, then,” said Boon, calm as you please.

  “You do what you said you was going to do?” I asked her. “With that saw, I mean.”

  She nodded soberly.

  “I done it.”

  “Barry ain’t going to like that.”

  “He ain’t.”

  “All right then,” I said with a grunt as I stretched my back. I wasn’t getting any younger and that lousy bed was worse than sleeping on the ground. “I’ll go with you.”

  From the landing I couldn’t see him. The bar was completely engulfed in flames. It looked like he’d doused it with the rotgut the barman usually served in lieu of the Old Overholt he’d secreted away. That stuff was mighty flammable and probably not fit for human consumption, but the Lord knew I’d drunk plenty of it and its like over the years. The fire was slowly but surely crawling away from the bar, creeping over the floor and up the walls. My eyes stung and my throat burned badly. I turned away from the smoke and found the chair the judge had been sitting in, underneath that awful picture of the girl and the bear, when first we’d seen him the night before. He was there again now.

  Or at least most of him was. Above the hollow of his throat there wasn’t any of Selwyn Dejasu to speak of. I didn’t know who had propped him up there, Boon or Barry, but I didn’t think it mattered. Fact was, Barry Dejasu had seen what Boon did, and whatever his purpose had been when he arrived at the Red Foot in Red Foot that morning, it was now to kill the strangers responsible for the death of his brother. In his shoes, I’d have been about the same business, so I couldn’t really blame him.

  Boon knelt at the top of the steps and picked up what I figured for a sack, but turned out to be the blood-soaked shirt she’d had on throughout our hogwash trial. As a matter of fact, she’d had it on for some weeks by then, so I reckoned it was about time she changed into something else, anyway. Things worked out all right in that small way.

  The shirt-sack had some heft to it due to its contents, which I could guess at. The smoke was gathering up thick at the ceiling by then, threatening to put an end to us before either the fire or Dejasu his own self could get around to it. I wondered how long it would be before the whole damn saloon was burning, and how long after that before the fire spread to the next building and the one after that. Like I said, there wasn’t much to that town other than what got thrown together there on that muddy street, and it was all pushed up on top of each other like they were hurting for room when they did it.

  Boon went down the steps first, cargo in hand, with me just behind her. She drew the Colt .44 about halfway down. The smoke was so bad I couldn’t see anything anymore, and I cursed myself for not having looked around for my rifle. Had the judge or his men taken it inside when he decided on that idiotic trial? I couldn’t remember. Mayhap it was still lashed to the cantle of my saddle on the horse out of doors. Mayhap the horses had run away already, or been let loose by Dejasu, or killed by him. Mayhap he ate the damn beasts. I didn’t know.

  Until that moment I didn’t think I could hate Red Foot more than I already did, but I was wrong. I still had some hate for it left to come out.

  “Had a paper on you,” Boon shouted through the smoke and fire. “Guess it’s ashes now.”

  “Wasn’t worth dog shit, anyways,” Dejasu called back. It sounded to me like he was laughing, but he might have been coughing, too. I sure was.

  “Dead or alive, Dejasu,” she told him, alighting at the bottom of the stairs and raising an arm to shield her face. “Your call. Don’t matter to me.”

  Instead of replying to that, he fired another shot into the saloon. It went wild, smashing something glass, maybe a bottle or a lantern. He couldn’t see us through the smoke, but we couldn’t see him, either. Boon moved faster to the front in spite of this, since there wasn’t really any other choice unless we just wanted to give up and die right then and there. I didn’t want that, as it happened, and neither did Boon.

  Dejasu fired again, and then again in quick succession. For the first time it occurred to me that he might not have been alone out there. He seemed the type to run with a gang, and it was conceivable that he had one with him, which made our poor chances a hell of a lot poorer. Could have been there were a dozen guns out there instead of just the one. I was starting to rethink the wisdom of just sitting down and taking in all that smoke.

  But Boon didn’t hesitate. Not for a second. She bolted for the batwings before the second shot ever got off, raising the shirt-sack with one hand and jutting the pistol out with the other. Dejasu shouted something more, but I couldn’t hear it on account of the bottles behind the bar were starting to burst from the heat, and the rotgut liquor inside them only fed the hungry flames. She was gone, out of the saloon, and I was starting to flinch and cower at all the destruction around me, so I thought I might as well run for it, too. On the way to the doors, I almost tripped right over my Winchester, which was laying on the ground like a gift from God. Or more probably, Satan.

  Only one round in the breech, as I recalled. The rest of the cartridges were still among my sundries. I thought about that Butternut sniper and wished I had a scope, not that it
would have done me any good. I was going closer to my target, not farther away.

  I busted through the batwings in a plume of choking smoke, my eyes pouring tears like I just heard news my dog died, and there in the street stood two men, side by side. One was bald-headed, no hat, the hair on his face reaching clear up to his eyes. The other man was tall, his hair a curly mop of black that dangled down over dark eyes. This one wore a menacing expression, but I couldn’t get over just how boyish he looked. He worked hard on that sneer to make up for it.

  “Which one of you killed my brother?” said the boyish one. I could hardly believe this pretty-faced man came from the same womb as Selwyn Dejasu. “Which of you God damned sons of fucking bitches do I kill first?”

  Boon hurled the shirt-sack at him. He hadn’t expected that, and neither had I. The cloth fell away in mid-arc, revealing the gray, bloody head of Judge Dejasu as it rose and fell in Barry’s general direction. Barry let out an awful, low moan and put his hands up to catch it. The head landed right in his hands and he pulled it in close to his chest like he was going to rock it to sleep.

  “Christ,” he bellowed. “Oh, Christ.”

  His friend wasn’t half as shocked by Boon’s trick. He filled his hand with a Remington Navy pistol, his face cool as winter. I shot him with my lone cartridge, square in the chest. The bald man never got his shot off, and he didn’t make a sound. He just dropped to the mud like a sack of grain and lay still. At the same time, Barry Dejasu started to scream.

  Barry’s gun still hung on one finger, swaying back and forth as the rest of his fingers clutched the head of his kinsman and he bawled until his face turned purple. It was an ugly thing to see, so I turned away. I didn’t have another shot, anyway, so it didn’t seem to matter if I was looking at him or not. Up the street, in the direction we’d come into Red Foot, I saw Pim, Boon’s palomino, loping idly around the undertaker’s I’d robbed the night before. My mount was nowhere in evidence.