by Ed Kurtz
“Did you kill him?” I said breathlessly. “Is he dead?”
“He lives, damn you,” Boon hissed, and she burst through the vestibule and out the front door.
The street outside was curiously empty. Ominously so. Boon went out by inches, leading with the .44. A carriage stood still across and up the street, a lantern burning over the coachman’s perch where no coachman perched. Two black horses waited impatiently in front, geldings blowing steam out of their nostrils and occasionally stamping their hooves. I looked left, then right, and then up at the structures crowding one another with windows in their upper stories lit and faces peering back down at me.
Boon slumped her left shoulder, letting the arm dangle like meat on a hook. The wound beneath the shoulder shone wet in the light of the lantern and the windows and the moon.
I said, “We ought to find you a sawbones.”
She hushed me and swung around to her right, where a policeman sprang from the alley beside the Palace and drew down on her. Boon shot him in the head.
Another blue tunic leapt from the front door, and Boon swung the Colt at him, too. She thumbed the hammer, squeezed the trigger, and the damned thing just clicked against an empty chamber. The policeman grinned a drew a bead on her. I threw my great bulk between him and her, and I squeezed my eyes shut so that I would not have to look upon the man who killed me.
God damn San Francisco, I thought, and God damn Arthur Stanley, too. I could only hope my sacrifice would be sufficient to permit Boon to escape. If so, then my whole wretched life would not have been lived entirely in vain, from a youth wasted on hog farming to my years running from conscription, to the very many annoyances and headaches I always caused my poor, long-suffering, dear friend Boon. I never was any good and I never felt that more acutely than in that terrible, frightening moment. Let my death mean something!
And perhaps it will, but at that moment I was not to be Boon’s savior. Another fellow assumed that role, and by opening my eyes again I beheld that it was the Chinese man from the Palace. He held a crude dagger with one hand and the policeman’s hair by the other, and he opened the officer’s throat with one fluid motion that spilled a dark curtain of blood down the front of his tunic. The copper dropped and died, his killer took up the policeman’s pistol, and the Chinese man padded lightly and quickly for the carriage, his queue slapping against his back as he called back, “Come, come, come.”
We went. The man clambered up to the reins and whipped the horses into moving before my feet were off the road. Two more policemen scampered out of the alley and three from the door, and behind them all came Arthur Stanley with his head held high but his face twisted in a grimace.
“He is not dead,” I said.
The police opened fire, their bullets striking the wheels and frame of the carriage when they didn’t go wild, slamming into the street or the clustered buildings. Our curious driver shouted something that might have been Chinese and the horses fell into a trot, shaking the carriage side to side as Boon and I struggled not to topple out of the still-open door. It was all we could do not to tumble to our deaths. The best we could hope for was escape, however temporary, and that was in the hands of the complete stranger driving the coach.
“I realize he is not dead, Edward,” Boon snapped back at me.
“What did you do?”
“I struck a policeman with my gun so I could get a hold of his and shoot Stanley.”
“He didn’t look shot.”
“It was me got shot,” she said.
I did not tell her this was evident, and she did not offer any further information. Instead, I pulled the coach door shut and latched it, and the Chinese fellow drove the horses away from our pursuers until they were no longer visible to us. He did not shout again. Boon leaned back and closed her eyes, which spilled tears—from pain or sorrow, I did not know.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I guess I expected the coachman would carry us right out of town, away from the shanties and the stenches and the masts like treetops in the middle distance, cluttering the bay. Instead, we did not travel far at all, only the far side of the Barbary Coast, maybe half a mile away. Mayhap the fellow was afraid to leave the confines of that tiny area he knew well enough, but it was not for me to say. I barely understood white men and I did not know any one thing about Chinese. I never understood Boon much at all. Most times I reckoned I could not even understand myself.
He lived in a tiny, fusty room, or at least that was where we ended up, and he left us there to drive the carriage someplace else. While he was gone, it was Boon and me, and an old Chinese woman who lay so still and silent on a pallet that at first I reckoned she was dead. Besides the three of us, there was a younger woman who crouched on the floor beside a guttering candle and a young boy, maybe five or six years old. They all of them regarded us with great suspicion, which I did not mind, as I would most like have felt the same way in their shoes. We were strangers to them, disheveled and one of us leaking blood. If any of them spoke a word of English, I never knew it.
The fellow who rescued us returned late into the night, and he brought with him an older Chinaman with a long, yellow beard and his hair shaggy and only neck-length in the back, beneath his silk cap. He caught me studying it and read the question in my mind.
“White boys cut it off,” he said dryly. “Great game for them. Know it shames men. Sometimes they wear the queues like belts. Same as scalping.”
He shrugged sadly. I looked from him to the fellow from the Palace, who pursed his mouth and leaned in to take a closer look at Boon’s wound.
“Bad,” he said.
“Bad enough,” she said.
“Doctor, him,” he said, gesturing at the old man, who nodded.
“All right,” said Boon. “Get on with it, then.”
I did not think she sounded particularly grateful for all that was being done for us, and I might have said so had she not pulled the ruined chemise up and off her torso with a low groan. It might could come as a surprise, but there was never a time in our years together that ever I saw my friend in such a compromising position, which is to say in the buff, and I could happily have continued that trend if she wasn’t dead set on breaking the streak then and there. I must have turned red as a strawberry because I could feel the hot blood in my cheeks, spinning away like I’d been slapped and gasping at the thick, wet air.
“Chrissakes, Splettstoesser,” she rasped. “I know for a fact you been with a passel of whores all your grown days. Ain’t hardly like you never saw a pair of titties before.”
I sputtered something that was no known language and stared at my boots. I tried like to hell to think about anything else, which became successful when I heard her yelp like a cat with its tail caught underneath a rocking chair and knew the Chinese sawbones had gotten to work. The old woman on the pallet turned her watery eyes on me and chuckled.
Without turning back around, I said, “How bad is it?”
“Lung okay,” said the doc. “Rib broke. Two, I think. Bad, but she live.”
“Thank God for that,” I said.
“Been nice God saw to it I wasn’t shot to begin with,” Boon groused. I could not disagree with her assessment.
The surgery took up most of the rest of the night, and I dozed some on the floor during, my back still to Boon and the doctor and the man who saved our hides. The boy and the younger woman played some game that looked like dominoes if dominoes was a hundred times more complicated. The room had no windows, and eventually the candle died out and the younger woman lighted another one. I lost all sense of time, wondering if the sun was up or if it was even the next night already.
Next I laid eyes on Boonsri was some hours after the last time, and she was bandaged up with rags that were already bleeding through. The sight of it reminded me of Willock’s ruined hand, which got me to thinking about all that business the preachers blabbered about eye for an eye. She was hunched over on one of the pallets, her whole chest wrapped u
p, studying the pocket watch she took off that cowboy back in Texas. I could not think of where she’d hidden it away in that Oriental getup she’d been wearing, but more than that I couldn’t understand why she bothered to bring it. Our old duds were back at the St. Francis hotel, along with my rifle and a load of other things, and it occurred to me that all of it was lost to us now. I reckoned Boon prepared for that contingency and took the watch along just in case. It was something she was not willing to lose.
The doctor was gone and soon after the woman took the boy up in her arms and left, too. The old woman slept and the man who drove us away from the gunfight at the Palace sat in a corner reading a Chinese newspaper. Would it ever have a story about the Siamese woman who came to town with a .44 caliber Colt and her blood hot for killing the Englishman that whelped her? I’d never know, but I kind of hoped I might get a mention in there if it did.
Later, our savior disappeared again, and when he came back he brought with him a clay pot full of some sort of chop suey with fried chicken feet in it. We all ate like we hadn’t eaten in weeks, all of us but the old woman, who kept on sleeping. And once our meal was done, the fellow said, “Now you go. Not safe for me. Not safe for her.”
He pointed with his chin at the old woman and gave Boon an apologetic look.
Boon nodded. She moved to get up, faltered, moaned, sat back down. The fellow and me flew to her and helped her to her feet. He set us up with some fresh clothes that weren’t much more than rags, but they were clean and wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. We left with our bellies filled but our hearts low. San Francisco wasn’t going well at all.
The building was a hive of little rooms like the one we’d been in. We slinked out into the narrow hall where faces peered out from cracked doors at us. The air was thick with a dozen competing odors that confused my senses, though they stirred my belly, too. I wasn’t all too sure about those chicken feet when they were offered, but I was damned if the whole stew wasn’t one of the tastier things I’d ever had the pleasure of devouring.
Boon led the way, found the stairs.
I said, “I never even thanked him.”
“I did,” she said.
“Don’t even know his name.”
“Fong,” she said. “Jing Fong. Came west looking for a friend he says went to Australia. Got hitched up and stayed. Never found the friend.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Says he was a killer.”
“So are we.”
“So are we,” she said.
We wormed our way down the stairs and through another narrow hallway where the floorboards creaked and crackled. Ahead of us was mostly darkness until a door squealed open and a shape filled the brightness of the sun outside. I paid this no mind, but Boon reached past me to the closest doorknob, opened the door, and pushed me into the room without a word. She shut the door gently once were both inside and clamped a hand over my mouth.
“Policeman,” she said.
“Fong,” I said.
“Will be fine. Be quiet.”
I stayed quiet. Boon pressed close to the door and listened. The floorboard creaked some more on the other side of it. My blood pounded in my ears.
The room was almost pitch black, the only light in it leaking in from the doorframe. So, when I heard a small whimper somewhere behind us, I came close to crying out myself. Boon touched my arm, as if to settle my nerves, and she plunged into the darkness where I heard a voice whisper but could not make out what it said. A moment after, a match struck, filling my nostrils with a devilish, sulfurous smell, and Boon lighted a lantern atop a three-legged stool. Beneath the stool was a pallet much like those in Fong’s room, except upon this one was a filthy, slumbering white man beside a young Chinese girl. The girl’s eyes were wide and shimmering in the lantern light. Boon pressed her finger to her lips and pointed at me. The girl hesitated, but she rose from the pallet, careful not to upset the ugly man beside her, and she padded softly across the room to me.
She couldn’t have been more than twelve, maybe thirteen years old. Right about the age I reckoned Boon had been when she first reached the Bay from old Connecticut—and it looked to me that this one had been shanghaied into the same, awful circumstances. I watched her closely, as sure that she was going to act as I was unsure of what exactly she was going to do.
Boon cleared up my confusion by pointing to my boot. I nodded, pulled my knife. She took two long, silent strides to retrieve it and returned the same way. I put my hands on the girl’s slight, slender shoulders and turned her away from the pallet, toward me and the door.
“Don’t look,” I whispered.
Boon shushed me. I covered the girl’s ears and she pressed herself against my leg. It was all over in an instant, the blade sinking point first into the hollow of the man’s throat and Boon using the heel of her left hand to push it all the way down to the hilt. He never had a chance to make any sound other than the awful wet gurgling of so much blood filling up his airway. Was she thinking of the dirty men who crowded her memories and nightmares? I have always assumed so. And I knew even then that the girl would not be free of such horrors in her future, either, no matter what Boon did for the child that no one ever did for herself.
She had to stand on the dead man’s chest to wrench the knife free. She wiped the blade clean on his shirt. Her hands and sleeves were still coated with the blood, and when she handed the knife back to me, she smeared it on the back of my hand. I imagined that it was hot, so hot it burned, and fought to stop thinking about it. My stomach roiled.
It was catching up to me. Three years, so much God damned ugliness.
It was catching up to me.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I was against it from the start, but the girl came with us when we went out from that slum and snuck away back to the docks. There was a word somewhere in my brain for it, for the danger of bringing a child along on our flight, but I stammered and spat trying to search it out.
Boon said, “Liability.”
“Mayhap,” I said. It wasn’t the word, and I did not know its meaning, but I wasn’t in the mood to nitpick. “I can for sure understand what you are doing with her, what with her being in the same sort of trouble you was in before.”
“Trouble,” she said flatly.
“Probably there’s a hundred girls like that,” I went on. “A thousand. I don’t know. What’s saving one? ’Specially if we get our own God damn selves killed for trying?”
Boon’s eyes flashed on me. She looked every bit the same as she had that day in Revelation, the day she knocked me down and I ended up in the hoosegow. I clenched my jaw and braced for the hit. It did not come.
“I do not expect nature ever came up with a dumber creature than a man,” she said, those eyes still huge and bright. “But the worst part of it is how willfully stupid you sons of bitches are, Splettstoesser. You choose stupidity because you can and because it is easy.”
She spit off the edge of the embankment, into the oily water sloshing up against the posts dubiously holding up the docks, crawling with algae and barnacles.
I said, “Boon.”
“I have killed a mess of men,” she said. “Only the boys hurt me, because maybe there was still time for them to choose better. Grown men are what they are. Most of them deserve worse than I can ever mete out to them, and that’s a fucking fact.”
For the briefest instant I thought she might cry, but she steeled herself and turned her face down to the small, withdrawn kid standing just apart from us. Neither of us knew her name. She had not spoken a single word. It was my assumption that she understood no English, and since neither Boon nor I could speak Chinese, we were at a deadlock. If nothing else, I worried she had no idea what we were about. For all she might have known, we were only more slavers come to steal her away to the same circumstances or worse.
“All men are stupid, little one,” she told the child. “But do not worry. I am here and I will keep you safe.”
To my
astonishment, the child appeared to listen closely, and she nodded when Boon finished speaking. Boon smiled at her. The child did not, but kept her gaze upon Boon. An understanding was there that had nothing to do with me—something I could never understand or be a party to. I felt vaguely guilty in that moment, and I could almost grasp what Boon had been talking about. Not quite, but on the cusp. She was no fool, my dear friend Boon. But Christ knew I was.
Gulls screamed overhead and men shouted from every skiff and ship’s prow. Animals wandered free underfoot and the air at the water was cool and rank and felt thick in my throat. Boon touched the child’s face, studied her closely. So slight and pale, in need of a bath. She was all Boon could see for all the pell-mell madhouse confusion all around us. I tried to read her face, to see if it was the case that we were simply beaten. Her revenge aborted, her mission replaced with this silent child in whom she seemed to see so much of herself. And if so, what of all of it? The killings, the blood and bone, the fire and iron? Death did not mean much, most times. I never figured mine would. There would never be any children to carry on my worthless line, and I could not think of a single soul apart from Boon who would ever have reason to recount my name and life long after I got put in the cold earth to rot. Nevertheless, I liked to think I never took away a man’s life without cause, and that cause was in service to the private war into which I was conscripted. For all my effort to keep away from the War Between the States, Boonsri Angchuan snatched me up into battle all the same. And now, it appeared all for naught.
All except for the little ward now with us.
God in Heaven, I could have cried myself.
“I don’t know what we’re about no more,” I said. “And I do not care except for I will need a bottle of something strong wherever we are going.”
“You been sober so long I can’t say as I’m not shocked to hell you ain’t shaking all over,” Boon said.
