by Ed Kurtz
“No,” I said. “It was all right. This is murder.”
“Okay,” said Boon. “All right, then.”
She sniffled and breathed in deep through a wide-open mouth, her wide brown eyes leaking tears in runnels before the skull in the fire pit. Gunfire continued the pop beyond the grove, complimented by shouts and cries. The heat from the fire dried the tears on Boon’s face and the lizard in her crept back to the fore as I studied her. She unleathered her Colt as she rose to her feet and said, “I am sorry I walked out on you, Edward.”
It was not what I might have expected in that particular moment, but I offered a sharp nod in response.
That said and done, she pivoted and went quickly toward the gunfire. I seized a carbine from the dead Brute on the ground, checked the chamber, found it empty, levered in a cartridge and followed Boon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
In the short few minutes I’d been away from the fracas, two additional Kiowa raiders were shot dead—one of them with his foot caught in the stirrup and dragged some ways from the grove by the frightened roan he’d taken—and Willocks lay against a gnarled clump of roots with a trunk between him and the remaining Little Rabbits, his left shoulder bleeding badly and ruined right hand soaked through the bandages. Boon reached him first, whereupon he broke into a broad grin and said, “Three down and only some metal in my shoulder to show for it.”
“You dumb son of a bitch,” Boon seethed. “Edward had it all sorted.”
“Sorted? That buck was about to run your fat man through with that lance of his. I saved that Dutch bastard’s life.”
“That’s a God damned lie,” I said.
“Then you don’t know Indians,” Willocks said.
Another shot caromed off a branch barely a foot above his head, sending a shower of bark and leaves down upon him. Willocks shrank away from it. Boon and I fell into crouches.
“What do we do?” I asked her.
She glared hard at the marshal. “A show of good faith, I reckon.”
Her hand thrust out and wrapped around the barrel of the marshal’s rifle, first pushing it up and then snagging it out of his hands. He started to sputter, but she put an end to that by turning the repeater ’round and smashing the butt against his mouth. I could hear his teeth cracking from the impact, and blood ran out of both sides of his mouth as he groaned and fell back against the tree. Willocks put both hands to his face, the bandaged one mixing its blood with the blood from his ruined mouth. And while he did this, Boon pulled my knife from her boot—she’d had it all along, the minx!—and jammed it right into the center of Willock’s bullet wound in his shoulder. He screamed bloody horror. Boon stayed the lizard, unreadable, and twisted the blade.
“That,” she said evenly, “is for Franklin.”
Willocks screeched like a hawk.
Boon released the handle, then slammed the heel of her palm against the hilt, forcing the blade the rest of the way in. The marshal turned away, shaking his wrapped hand in the air and unable to do squat with the other. His face was a mask of terror and pain. Boon then dug her hands into his armpits, hauled him up to his feet, and commenced dragging the moaning Marshal out of the cottonwood copse to where the two living Kiowa still sat their mounts and fired into the trees.
“Don’t,” Willocks whined. “For Christ’s sake, don’t.”
“I know, Tom,” she told him. “Ain’t very white of me, is it?”
I stayed low but maneuvered to where I could see between the trees. She had a hold of him so that he served as a shield, pushing him as he uselessly dug his heels into the dirt. One the two Indians wheeled his horse around, keeping his rifle trained on them but not yet firing. He was, I figured, curious. Curious about why she was marching him out to them, and probably curious about her in general.
I would have been, too.
Once she reached the edge of the grove, where the remuda had been, Boon reached around Willock’s torso and yanked the knife from his shoulder. It took three or four tries, and he screamed the whole time. The Kiowa with the rifle on them watched with interest.
From her shirt pocket, Boon withdrew what looked like a pair of brown cheroots, poorly rolled, and she quickly stuffed them into the marshal’s coat pocket.
“Here,” she said, “take your fingers with you.”
Willocks said, “I hope when they hang you, you dangle there and choke a while.”
“If I see you in hell,” she said, “I’ll let you know how it all turned out.”
That was the last she spoke to Marshal Tom Willocks before shoving him with both hands, causing him to stumble forward and, in his struggle to keep from tripping over his own feet, all but sprinting at the awaiting Little Rabbits. The Kiowa on the mount brought his rifle down hard on the crown of Willock’s skull, knocking him down. The second Indian shouted a high cry that echoed against the escarpment and jumped down from his horse, knife in hand.
The marshal shouted, “God damn you, no.”
Boon said, “Come on, let’s go.”
That she did not wish to observe the scalping surprised me, but I did as she bade and followed her back to the campfire. Only once did I glance back, and only briefly. The Little Rabbit set on his mount, a broad-chested youth of maybe fifteen or sixteen, was watching us go. We were done there.
Tom Willocks, however, was not. His screams pierced the dead of night, shredding his throat from the sound of it. We reached the center of camp, gathered as many of the repeaters and pistols as we could carry, and looted the corpses as quickly and efficiently as we could. Boon motioned with her head to the west, on the opposite side of the grove. Willocks screamed his last at about the same time we reached the bay gelding Boon had staked there, alongside a sturdy-looking mule she’d used for a pack animal. Now, I knew, it would be my mount. At least for the time being.
I stepped up into the worn saddle on the mule’s back and said, “Reckon he’s dead yet?”
“I hope not,” she said, and she turned the gelding to point his nose back to where I’d come, at the New Mexico Territory and beyond. I wondered if indeed we were still California bound, but I did not ask. As long as I was back with Boonsri, it did not much matter to me where we went.
After all, I loved her more than I could ever possibly put into words, so I never bothered to try.
At dawn, we encountered a sparse column of U.S. Calvary soldiers, a dozen ragged men riding a dozen ragged, half-starved horses with their ribs showing through their thin flesh. At the head of the procession was a bedraggled lieutenant, by the looks of the chevron stitched onto his blue dress blouse. The officer’s cheeks were sunken and unshaved, his eyes heavily lidded and swollen. The men he commanded looked much worse than he. These soldiers had seen some action and were probably headed back to Fort Union in the Territory. We were all of us moving in the same direction, though Boon and I moved considerably faster than the exhausted regiment.
Boon said, “Don’t go spilling your frijoles to anybody.”
I parted my lips to protest my innocence, but only shrugged. I could not make any convincing argument that I didn’t talk too much.
A few of the men tensed up at sight of us, but most couldn’t have cared less. The lieutenant eyed us cagily until we were within hailing range, when he said simply, “Ho.”
Boon gigged her horse and caught up to the officer, riding past the enlisted men who mostly stared at her and ignored me as I struggled to keep pace.
The lieutenant looked her over with narrowed eyes and said, “You talk English?”
“Better than most,” said Boon.
“Scout?”
“I am not.”
“What tribe?”
“I am not Indian.”
“Hmm,” grunted the lieutenant. “Whether you are or ain’t, this here territory is mighty dangerous for travelers these days. Expect we’ll have most of the rogues killed or penned back in by spring, but there’s still a mess of savages crawling about these parts looking for mischief.
”
“Hmm,” grunted Boon. “Almost seems like they’re mad about something.”
“They’re breaking treaty.”
Boon canted her head to the side. “If you mean Medicine Lodge, the buffalo hunters broke it first.”
The lieutenant frowned.
“Seen any sign, Squaw?”
Boon’s mouth formed a tight, thin line and she glared so hard at the man I thought her eyes might bore holes through his skull. White men are not great listeners, she’d told me from time to time. And she was right about that.
She drew in a deep breath and, as if it hurt to do so, took her gaze away from the lieutenant and looked out over the great, flat, bone-dry expanse of New Mexico laid out before us.
“We seen some bodies,” she said at some length. “Four or five white men. Not soldiers. A cluster of cottonwoods maybe five, six hours east of here, along the Caprock.”
“Christ,” the officer hissed. “Them Comanche fuckers, I’ll bet both balls on it.”
“Could be,” Boon said. “Could be they killed each other. White men are strange.”
She shrugged her shoulders at him and took her horse from a lope to a trot, riding out ahead of the column. The lieutenant sat in the saddle and watched her with something like wonder and maybe irritation. He hadn’t anything else to say.
I rode up beside her, the mule getting more stubborn by the hour, and glanced back over my shoulder to find the regiment wheeling around to go back east. If they managed to keep the same pace they had been riding, I reckoned they’d come across Willocks and his men by noontime or thereabouts.
Them, and the scorched skull in the firepit.
“Why not let the buzzards and bugs have ’em?” I asked her.
“Don’t know much of shit about most of those men,” she said. “Could be not a decent soul among them, but I don’t know for sure. Might could be there’s kin back home, be wanting to know what became of them. Decent burial ain’t too much to ask.”
“Decent burial,” I said, shifting my rear on the mule’s back. I was thinking of the Dejasu brothers, but also the cowboys we’d brought into Red Foot. Some dead got a little respect, others didn’t. I couldn’t suss it out. I said, “I don’t tend to understand you, Boon.”
She said, “I know, Edward.”
Part Three
Barbary Coast
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I was worrying the pit in my gums where Les had knocked my front tooth out, poking and prodding with my tongue. Across from me on the facing bench seat, Boon stared out the window with the cowboy’s watch clutched in one hand, watching the territories flit by as the locomotive trundled west. She’d had to waste the tickets she’d bought the first time and spend a considerable chunk of her poke to get her hands on the bay gelding and pack mule that carried her out to the Staked Plains, and once we made it to another stop along the tracks—not Revelation, of course, which would not have rolled out a welcoming party complete with brass band—she sold those animals and reinvested in new tickets. Each transaction left her a little broker than she was before, but we’d made the train this time around. The chief difference now was in the cash and coin we’d pilfered from the pockets of dead men, back east beneath the shadows of the Caprock Escarpment. Probably we didn’t get everything they’d had on them, being in the hurry we were in. But if nothing else, we’d be able to sleep in clean beds when next we disembarked, wherever that would be.
And to think we’d been so flush there for a moment, back in Darling with two hundred dollars in double eagles. Easy come, easy go.
I dozed a bit, nodding in and out as the monotonous clank and grind of the piston rods and valves beneath us lulled me, and the whistle screeched to snap me back awake again. All the while, Boon clamped her long, slender fingers down on that watch and gazed at the gathering dark over the rise and fall of the Southern Rockies in the distance. Whether or not she actually saw them, rather than whatever was playing out inside her head, was another matter altogether.
I was in one of the dozing spells when she woke me to say, “Remember Percy Watkins?”
At first I did not. I was groggy, and a hell of a lot had gone down since last I thought of the fellow in San Francisco she’d butchered at the dawn of her life’s mission. Only when she made a cutting motion at her crotch did all the pieces come together in my mind. A shudder rocked up my spine and I said, “Oh, sure. That jasper.”
“My first,” she said.
“I remember you saying.”
“What about yours,” she said.
It was not Boon’s habit to ask me a lot of questions about my life, and most of what I’d told her was because it was my habit to run my mouth when the quiet made me too nervous to stand it. On account of this, I was more than a little surprised by the question, and still more so that she didn’t already know the answer, given my reaction to it at the time.
Because she was right there when it happened. Well, she did not witness the event, but she was close enough to hand. I’d missed the war, and the only lives I’d ever taken in all my days before Boon arrived were chickens, hogs, and the odd cottonmouth or copperhead here and there. But Christmas Day of 1871 was the first Christmas I’d spent with anybody I much cared for in a damned long time, and it was also the first time I ever found cause to kill another human being. That she had never known this to be the case alarmed me some, for I now wondered whether I gave the impression that it hadn’t hit me like God’s own fist right in the breadbasket. It surely did.
Never mind how badly Red Chester Stamp deserved it.
Stamp wasn’t an Indian, and he wasn’t called “Red” for being Irish-colored, either. In fact, his hair was coal-black and skin sallow, unfreckled. He dressed in white and black every time I ever saw him (which wasn’t much or often), like a circuit preacher, which was exactly what he claimed to be. The appellation “Red,” according to Chester Stamp, derived from the color of God’s righteous anger at the wicked sinners on all the Earth in general and Texas in particular. Among their number, it so happened, I was counted. Boon was too, but she was beyond salvation and beneath contempt, being a “breed.” In the eyes of Red Chester Stamp, only I was within reach of the glorious and everlasting Kingdom of God, if only I would raise my hand up and take it.
She still wasn’t looking at me after she’d asked about it, the Rockies turning a spooky pinkish purple before the slow setting sun through the window of our car. It almost seemed like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud, or that she wasn’t aware she had. I cleared my throat a little and rooted around in my coat pockets until I found the small bottle of clear Mexican mescal I’d purchased from a pock-faced drummer before boarding that morning. Train-riding wasn’t any kind of thirsty business like horse-riding, but I wasn’t looking for an excuse to take a nip or two. I just wanted it.
“You remember that preacher man,” I said after swallowing my dose of medicine and jamming the cork back into the neck. “Red Stamp.”
“Red Chester,” she said. “By God, he was your first.”
It wasn’t a question. She was just marveling over the revelation. In a way, I was surprised she recalled him at all.
“He was,” I said, savoring the liquor but not the memory.
Red Chester Stamp got started on his circuit after the big flood of ’69, or at least that was the first anyone had heard of him, according to the Caddo scout we’d hitched up with in Bastrop, southeast of Austin. Nayawsa’, who locally went by the name of Thomas Song, was recommended to us by my favorite Bastrop bartender, who told Boon that Thomas had done a fair bit of scouting for the Army under one General Augur and that there wasn’t hardly a square inch of Texas that Thomas didn’t know like the Devil knew Scripture. More than this, Thomas Song was reputed to be a man with information, or ways to get it. Thomas came into that very bar later the same evening, and as it happened, it was he who directed us north to the panhandle, where in time we made our acquaintance with good old Tom Willocks.
That same evening, we also encountered Red Chester Stamp, who Thomas laughingly called the Wet Preacher, on account of his history of traveling by canoe on the floodwaters by torchlight, shouting Bible verses at the top of his lungs in the dead at night. That appellation carried with it a double-meaning, too—Red Chester was as much a drunk as he was a lunatic. I’d been putting them back for the better part of two hours with Thomas Song before Stamp ever set foot in the place, and within the span of another hour the preacher was drunker than the two of us combined.
I had seen him around, and so had Boon. Once or twice he had shouted at us. But only at a distance.
Thomas said to me, “Just make sure you don’t look him in the eye.”
“Why,” I said, “he going to mesmerize me?”
“You look the Wet Preacher in the eye, you won’t never get rid of ’im.”
That struck me as funny, in the way that things a man wouldn’t normally find all that funny get to be outright hilarious when he’s in his cups. I was in my cups, all right, and it got me to chuckling, and I forgot all about what Thomas Song said near as soon as he’d said it. That was when I turned on my stool and looked that mad preacher right in his wide, rheumy blue eyes.
And Stamp bellowed, “Sinner God damned hell-spawn!”
Which was a hell of way to say hello, to my mind. In lieu of reply, I raised my glass to him and turned back to Thomas, who said, “You’ve done it.”
Before I could ask what exactly it was I had done, I felt the preacher’s hand clamp down on my shoulder and smelled his noxious breath close to my face.
He hissed, “You are riding straight for hell, friend. Say the word, and I can help you.”
I set the glass back on the bar and swept his hand from my shoulder. Stamp grunted, stumbled, and righted himself by gripping the edge of the bar. I turned again, and again I met his bleary gaze.
“I am not your friend,” I said. “And I do not want your help.”
“There are fallen women here,” he said conspiratorially, rolling his eyes around the place. Indeed, like so many taverns of its like I had visited in my days, this one doubled as a whorehouse with a small, if less than alluring, assortment of working girls lounging around the downstairs in search of clientele.
