by Ed Kurtz
“You don’t say,” I said. “Thanks for the tip, then. I’ll be grateful to you once I’ve had my poke of one or two.”
Thomas Song laughed hard at that, in spite of himself. Red Chester Stamp did not.
“Then I see that you are lost already,” he fumed. “Lost to all the devils of hell, God damn your rotten black soul.”
I could find no reason to further bait the old lunatic, so I kept my back to him and resumed drinking and talking with Thomas. Boon, to the best of my knowledge, remained in her rented room at the hotel across town, studying maps or resting for the journey ahead. From what Thomas Song had to tell us of the movements of cow men and ex-Confederates both, it seemed likely we were to leave Texas post haste and roam northwest, to Wyoming. Men who sounded very much like Arthur Stanley were going there in droves.
Of course, different intelligence quashed those plans in little time, and my night of revelry with the Caddo scout soon went from sour to hellish. Sour because that damnable preacher would not leave the saloon, moving from table to table trying out his act on every cowhand, drummer, timberman, drunk, and whore he could corner. Hellish because the moment he spied me climbing the stairs with my chosen company for the night, a fat blonde with enormous teeth and sparkling green eyes who called herself Billie Lynn, Red Chester Stamp got filled up with his God’s righteous wrath and came barreling toward us.
In his left hand he brandished a worn, water-damaged, leather-bound Bible. In his right, a wood chisel maybe six or eight inches long.
“Whoremonger,” he screeched. “Jezebel! I’ll send the both of you to hell, God damn you.”
Despite what many have heard about the average Texas tavern, it was not always the case that every man in such a place came heeled and expecting trouble. The truth was far less interesting and would never have made the papers and novels back east, for in fact that Bastrop saloon was more typical than not and when that preacher came sprinting at us with the chisel in his fist, everybody within spitting distance was so shocked that nobody said or did anything but watch. Even had any man present wished to draw on the madman, they could not have; the saloon had a strict ordinance pertaining to firearms, which was none were allowed except for the 12-gauge in the lookout’s hands.
This meant, of course, that I was unarmed. I had a rifle in those days—not the Winchester .44-40, but a nice enough Springfield—which was under lock and key alongside everybody else’s iron. Rule of the house was you got it back once you were settled up and outside the doors. To hear the bartender tell it, the proprietor ended up keeping half of them on account of men drinking up more than they could afford on such a regular basis. I hadn’t, not as yet, but that Springfield still wasn’t doing me a lick of damn good where it was. To make things still worse, my Arkansas toothpick was back at the hotel in its sheath. And for a cadaverous old bastard with his sunken face and oily black hair, that Red Chester could move but fast.
Billie Lynn fainted outright. Her great bulk hit the bottom landing of the stairs so hard the railing shook. I had to grab the bannister to keep from falling over, myself. In hindsight, falling might have been the best thing for it. Instead, I seized that bannister with one hand and threw the other one up to protect my face. As strategies went, it was a piss-poor one, but time was not on my side.
While I waited for the chisel to stick me, a dark blur sped between me and Stamp and when I heard him wail in anger and pain, I realized that it was Thomas Song. The poor fool had sprung into action to save my hide, and in the process got most of the preacher’s makeshift weapon stuck between his ribs.
Thomas, in his buckskin coat and store-bought trousers, shiny rattlesnake-skin boots and hair like a magpie’s wing, crumpled to the floor as though all his bones had turned to ash. The whole front of him was awash with blood, and his smooth, boyish face puckered into a twisted mask of agony. I had not known him quite long enough to consider him a great friend, but I liked Nayawsa’ a good deal more than most men I’d ever met. And it was not as though white men carrying Bibles hadn’t caused his people enough grief already.
I guess I saw red. Looking back, it seems as though I really, literally did—that the whole of the saloon and everything in it turned the same glassy, dark red as the blood pulsing out of Thomas Song’s chest. It was a saying I’d heard plenty before but it never occurred to me that there was any truth in it. Red, red, red.
And slow. In those days you’d always hear tell of gunfighters, faster than lightning to the man looking on and yet to them it all happened slow as molasses. I was no gunfighter and I had no gun, but it was for sure like that. I could see the other men rising from their chairs and stools, the lookout spinning ’round up front by the doors, 12-gauge in his hands, a scatter of hats and coats and boots, all of it slowed down to a crawl around me. But me? I was fast.
So fast I hardly knew what I was doing until it was done. And what I did was yank that sticker out of Thomas’s ribs and jam it as hard as I could right into that crazy son of a bitch’s mouth. When I let go of the hilt, my hand was tacky with blood and Red Chester Stamp was trying to scream with that chisel stuck clean through the back of his neck. The preacher dropped down, smashing the small of his back against a chair and breaking it on his way to the floor. He twitched and squirmed like he was all filled through with the Holy Spirit and dancing to beat the Dutch. The blood kept coming out of him, too—more blood than I’d ever reckoned a single man could keep in his body until that night. So much damned blood I doubt they ever got it all off of that floor.
And still that cruel, wild bastard did not die. Not right then, anyway. A couple of men carried Thomas out of the place to a sawbones up the street, but he was dead by the time they reached the doc’s front door. Red Chester Stamp, on the other hand, hung on for another two and a half days, which I spent sitting in the Bastrop city jail awaiting the arrival of a judge from Austin, who aimed to hold a preliminary hearing to figure it all out. I’d have run once that red mist cleared away in the saloon, but the lookout had that scattergun on me before I knew up from down.
It was the judge who informed me of Stamp’s passing, to which I said, “I am sore sorry I could not have watched him die.”
“I expect I understand how you feel,” the judge said. “And given the circumstances, which was witnessed by a fair half of the men in this town, I can’t say as you committed any crime necessitating further inquiry, never you mind punishment or recompense.”
I thought that amounted to a lot of fancy words and asked the judge was I free to go, and he agreed that I was. Boon had been visiting me on the regular the entire time they had me sitting in that little cell—which was a damn sight nicer than the ones they had in Revelation, New Mexico—and she was there when the judge from Austin made his last appearance in my life. She’d heard the whole story as I explained it to the city marshal first and the judge second, and she’d heard a passel of witnesses come through the office upstairs to corroborate every word I’d said. So, when at last we were riding away from that place on what we reckoned, incorrectly, was our way to Wyoming, she asked me if I’d ever killed a man with a tool like that before.
“No,” I told her. “I have not.”
It was only those two years and some days later, on the train through the Southern Rockies to the Golden Gate of San Francisco, that she learned Red Chester Stamp was in fact the first man I’d ever killed at all.
“Hell’s bells,” she said to that. “Way it sounded, I had you made for a seasoned killer even then.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I just couldn’t stand what had been done to my friend.”
“Good to have a friend like that,” Boon said. I could have sworn she smiled a little, or almost.
“Glad you think so, Boon. I’m sure glad.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In the three years I’d spent with Boon, from my near-death outside Goliad to our journey by train to the westernmost points of the continent, she never once came within shouting distance of
her mother, her father, or anyone who could be reliably said to have known them. Hers was a herky-jerky quest, given to mount up and gallop after the faintest rumor or lie. And me, of course, along for the ride. I did not mind it one whit. But I could tell she was growing tired. More tired than I had ever seen her or would have believed possible for a wildcat like Boonsri Angchuan.
“Texas took too long,” she said, slumped against the window with her hat perched over her eyes. The red feather bounced against the glass, outside of which the Red Butte rose crimson from the Coconino Plateau, dark and imperious against the violet haze of the rising sun. We’d been in the Arizona Territory two days by then, sleeping in fits and starts on the hard, rough benches as passengers boarded and disembarked, played cards and sang hymns and occasionally argued about things happening in places they’d never see. “Years wasted. Years, by Christ.”
“You got me out of it,” I said.
She smiled wanly beneath the brim of her hat.
“I got you,” she said, and the smile melted away. “A lot of death, too. It took a lot of death just to get us this far.”
“Not for no reason,” I said.
“Mayhap I’m starting to forget the reason.”
“Your ma and pa,” I offered stupidly.
“Sure, Edward,” Boon said. “I know.”
“We’ll find her,” I said. “You will. Both of them.”
“Could be. And then what? Who will she be when I see her? Who have I become? Do you know I haven’t ever thought that far ahead, Edward? To one damned second after I find them—either of them?”
“Well, with him, it’s easier to reckon.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Dead. But that ain’t the end of it. That ain’t ever the end of it.”
“No, I guess it ain’t.”
“You believe in Heaven and Hell?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I don’t. Doesn’t really add up much to me.”
“Just this, then.”
I shrugged.
“I expect so.”
“What the hell for?”
She sat up a little, let the hat slide back to reveal her big brown eyes to me. They were as bright as ever, but the skin around them was dark and tight.
I said, “Does everything got to have a reason?”
“Be easier.”
“Would.”
“But it don’t.”
“Not always.”
“I’m tired, Edward.”
“I know, Boon.”
She slid back down, and so did her hat, and in a matter of minutes, she was asleep. I stayed awake a good long while after that, watching the world grow dark and listening to some of the other passengers snore. Mostly I thought about how tired Boon was, and how close we seemed to be getting to the end—and more than any of that, what good any of this was. Or had ever been.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The rest of the journey was long, but uneventful. Almost as soon as we crossed into California, we moved north, up the length of the state, to Sacramento City, where we disembarked, changed trains, and made the relatively short jaunt down to San Francisco and its notorious Barbary Coast.
I didn’t hear so much about it anymore, not like everyone did from New York to New Orleans back in the old days, the gold days. I’d sure met and known more than a few hopefuls making their way out there, folks who took as an article of faith the stories about just bending down to pick the wealth right off the ground. Most never did find any color out there, and a hell of a big heap of them wasted away, destitute and ruined, never to come home again. Even those few that did get their hands on a little of that Californy glory tended not to know what to do with it; they’d ride their mules back into the city and spend it all up in a matter of weeks or even days. Fine food, silk clothes, fallen women, and when it was all over they had nothing left but the tales to tell at the next rendezvous of other happily ruined mountain men.
Hell, I’d been sore tempted to make the trip myself, once upon a time, but I wasn’t hardly grown yet in forty-nine and yet to see the world outside of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I might still have absquatulated with my grandpappy’s roan in the dead of night had he not scared me off the notion with stories of gangs and desperadoes, men from faraway places like Chile and Australia who would as soon cut your throat as say howdy to you. Your Golden Gate is the mouth of hell, boy. At the tender age of fifteen, mayhap sixteen, I was like to take the old man at his word. I could not help but ponder what he would have thought now, all those years later, as I stepped down onto the filthy platform at Petaluma among the stinking miners, chattering Chilenos, inebriated sailors, pig-tailed Celestials, and pink-bosomed Angelicas all hustling for the ferry at Haystack Landing for San Francisco, by way of the bay.
There were so many places that Boon and I had come to, where the locals stopped and stared at the unlikeliest pair they ever did see in their sheltered little lives. Here, no one paid us the slightest bit of mind. We were wonderfully invisible, or damned near to it—at least until we came to check on that crib house the late Marshal Willocks divulged. Crammed onto the ferry like so many cattle in a pen, I quietly reminded her of what was most likely going to be one hell of a welcoming reception, should we elect to just waltz right up to the front door.
“Pinkertons would be my guess,” she said, failing to keep her voice low as I had. She came across utterly unconcerned, if not exactly confident. I was nervous as all hell.
Our ferry arrived, after a while, at a large seawall constructed over filled-in mudflats on the eastern waterfront of the San Francisco Bay. Here, amongst so many whores and macks, pickpockets and sneak-thieves, zealots, gunmen, knifemen, and men who could murder with their bare hands and very likely did, we disembarked and at last entered that city’s famous Barbary Coast.
San Francisco was a city, indeed, and though I was not so much a rube that I had never seen such a crush of humanity and buildings, this one was dirtier, more debauched, and plain smellier than any I’d ever seen. For a time, I wondered if the terrible mingling of odors was the ocean, but it was not. The waters were not at all so polluted as the people who poured off of them into the streets.
The sky was steel-gray despite the relatively early hour, and the air was both chilly and damp. Small boys scuttled beneath the rickety wharves, banging traps with knobby stobs to torment the rats they’d caught. Boon led the way, not bothering to wait for me as she went boldly forth into a narrow alley with mucky water almost as high as our ankles stagnant on the ground. An old man, his face an impenetrable network of deep lines and blue veins framed top and bottom with tobacco-stained white hair, either slept in the muck or had died in it. I couldn’t tell which. Boon paid him no attention. I struggled to keep up with her.
“Stay close,” she said. “Stay awake. You’re as like to get stuck with a knife as looked at here.”
Judging by some of the cold, hard stares I was getting from beady-eyed locals lurching or lounging around the mouth of the alley, I believed her. So, too, I felt like I was beginning to get a much clearer idea of how Boon got so hardened than I ever had before. This was surely a place that hardened people, if they meant to survive it.
“We need a room,” she said when we emerged onto Davis Street. “Here, in Sydney-Town.”
“Sydney-Town?”
“I don’t know if it’s still called that. Used to be. It’s rough, but we’ll be more noticed coming and going than if we just stay here.”
“Okay,” I said. “A room. And then what?”
“Then we go shopping,” Boon said.
The room, which for once we shared for reasons of security, was in the old St. Francis Hotel on Grand Avenue. As for the shopping, Boon collected me and took us both to an auction house called The Grand Eastern, a curious building with no windows, no doors, just a wide-open space like an urban barn wherein a scrubby man in a ruffled shirt presided over a pulpit like a pastor. Behind him, shelves were stacked and stuffed with most every imaginable good fro
m floor to ceiling. Men shouted over one another to be heard by the auctioneer at the pulpit, scrambling over one another to get their hands on what they wanted for the best possible price. It was pell-mell pandemonium, and the prices were so high I could have fainted from shock.
“Boon,” I said, “we haven’t much money left.”
She smirked and said, “The Barbary Coast is a place where you can both spend and make money in quantities greater than you ever saw. Settle your nerves, Edward.”
I stayed quiet, but my nerves kept on jangling.
Boon shouted and haggled with the best of them, snaking her way through the throng to the front, where she raised and dropped her hands as if in some secret code. I stayed in the back, watching with puzzled interest as she procured one item after another: a ruffled shirt much like the one the auctioneer wore, boiled collars, a maroon silk waistcoat and matching trousers, black pointed shoes, a plug hat, ornately embroidered slippers, a long silken robe with wide sleeves, an ornamental hair pin adorned with blue and pink flowers. I did not know what to think or expect, but if I’d thought she aimed to buy victuals, liquor, and ammunition, I for sure came away the more confused for it.
A coolie climbed after the goods on a rolling ladder, and once they were all purchased, he wrapped them one by one with brown paper and twine. Boon carried the tower of packages back to me and unloaded them all into my arms.
“And now?” I said.
“Back to the hotel,” she said. “I want you to bathe and tame that damned beard of yours. And get a little rest. I reckon there’s a long night ahead of us.”
“I got to get presentable in a lousy place like this?”
I rolled my head around at the countless wretched souls pressing against us from every direction.
