by Ed Kurtz
“I drank some last night.”
“You never get your fill.”
“I ain’t yet, no.”
She shook her head. The girl looked from her to me and back again. I had no experience with kids, really. To be honest, I was mostly spooked by her.
“We are not done,” Boon said then, and as though that settled anything, she took the child by the hand and they walked together along the docks to the north.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“She’s dead, you know,” she said.
“Who is dead? Your mother?”
She kept walking, the child’s tiny hand in hers.
“Boon?”
No answer came. There was nothing else to do but catch up.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The next couple of days were spent on the periphery of the city, wandering through small mining camps where mostly we were met with suspicious men who were much better armed than we. There could not have been one speck of color left in all California by then by my reckoning, but I figured men would keep trying for it until all the world burned up and maybe some after. For the first day and a half I could not figure out Boon’s objective and for the large part I just hoped she hadn’t cracked and decided to look for gold instead of vengeance. It wasn’t until we reached a derelict shack sandwiched between two tremendous rocks north of San Francisco, near a creek and alongside a narrow canyon, that I understood otherwise. She crept up to a cold firepit beside the place and hovered her palm over top of it just long enough to determine that it was warm enough to have been recently used.
“We keep going,” she said.
Boon hadn’t said much of anything to me in the time since we’d absconded from the city, so it was only then I gathered that she was looking for an abandoned camp to settle into while she healed up and we sorted out what was next. There was plenty of her squatting down next to the girl, whispering to her so that I could not hear, but I was little more than a camp follower and I confess that I came to resent it.
It was hard going afoot, though on the third day we reached the Grizzly Flat Road off the old Carson Trail and caught a ride with a small caravan of Mormons, disappointed with the prospects of California and turning back toward Utah. They all eyed us cagily and I could not blame them, for not one of us did not look like we’d been through hell and the Mormons were not to know whether it was a hell of our own making. Boon and the child rode in the back of a wagon with most of the other women, while I sat up on the lazy board with a scowling teamster and stared at the oxen’s asses for the rest of the day. The teamster never spoke a word to me. He never even met my eyes.
We disembarked at Placerville and shared a short and silent meal with the Mormons, consisting of salt pork and hardtack and creek water. I soaked my portion of the hardtack in the water to soften it. Otherwise it was unpalatable.
The Mormons made camp and Boon fell into some conspiratorial meeting with one of the men leading the caravan, apart from the fire at a stand of sycamores. When she returned with the child to the campfire, she said, “There is an old shack down the middle fork of the river, up on the flat. These people stayed in it before and say it is livable. We’ll hole up there tonight.”
“And what of the night after that?” I said.
“One night at a time.”
“And what of Arthur Stanley, Boon?”
She did not answer me. She just squatted quietly over the fire, the child beside her working with no small effort on a chunk of hardtack. Every man and woman present stared at her like she was the strangest thing they had ever seen, which I very much doubted. The religious see all sorts of wild things to hear them tell it. Surely a little girl was no great mystery, but then again, I could not profess to see into another man’s mind. All people were strange to me.
It was full dark by the time we reached the little cabin, and we were all shivering cold and soaked to our waists from crossing the Cosumnes River to get there. Fortune smiled upon us in the form of a crude but usable stone fireplace and chimney inside the tumbledown shack, which Boon instructed me to get going immediately. I did as I was told, eyeing the stars through the half-stove-in roof and hoping it wouldn’t rain.
The fire I built was mostly bits and scraps of the shack itself, with pine needles and dry leaves for kindling. It was smoky to the point of choking, but warm. More smoke wafted up through the hole in the roof than the chimney. I found an old book with yellow pages left behind by the Mormons, made to toss it on the flames, but Boon stayed my hand and said, “Leave it.”
I knew her better than to imagine it was some kind of superstition on her part. It was respect.
Boon sat on the floor with the child beside the fire, eating from the meager provisions donated to us by our brief hosts on the trail, while I paced the opposite side of the cabin, beneath the yawning chasm above, smoking a pathetic cigarette I made from dry crumbs left behind by some other squatter in weeks or months past. I did not take part in the meal. I wasn’t hungry.
After unwrapping her dressing long enough to check and prod her wound, Boon wound the rags back ’round herself and, leaning against the wall beside the fire, fell asleep. For a spell thereafter, the girl regarded me from across the room, keeping her bright eyes on me but betraying nothing in her face as to what might have been going on in her head. I pretended I didn’t notice until I couldn’t anymore. Then I met her gaze full on and smiled. She sort of half-smiled back; a crooked, unpracticed thing, the result of mimicking what she was seeing more than anything natural to her face. She held this awkward pose for a minute or two, then relaxed her face, let it sink back to the blank frown to which she was accustomed. I offered a nod, only because I could think of nothing better, and as if this was an invitation she rose from the floor and crossed over to me, where she sat again at my feet.
The child looked up at me and I down at her. The cigarette burned my fingers and I flicked it up, through the hole in the roof, before lowering my bulk down to the floor next to her.
Then, in a quiet voice to avoid waking Boon, I told the girl our story.
“A little over three years back,” I said, “I found myself in a spot of trouble outside Comanche. That’s in Texas, a fair piece east of here…”
I told her about that necktie party and Boon’s fortuitous arrival, about Mescalero Apache and crooked law dogs and crazed judges, hunting high and low for an Englishman who might never have been in Texas at all for all we knew at the time. She faced me with open eyes and a tightly closed mouth, listening to me prattle on about Stiff Neck and Red Foot, Darling and Revelation, our tight underneath the shadow of the Caprock Escarpment and the shoot-out back at the Palace in the Barbary Coast. I told the girl-child all of it, or as much as I could remember then and there, and from time to time I considered how I’d be hard pressed to believe half of it if somebody else were telling it to me. And knowing how the brains of a storyteller tended to embellish with each retelling of his stories, I came to wonder if I believed every word of it hearing my own self talk and talk and talk through the night. But damned if she didn’t listen to all of it, rapt as far as I could tell, and when I’d run out of stories to tell and fell into a long pause to search my memories for more, the kid curled up like a kitten and dropped into a deep sleep.
And like the changing of watch, no sooner was she out than Boon was awake, watching from the shadows of her place by the cold fireplace.
“You sleep?” she said.
“No. Just talked.”
“You do that.”
“I surely do.”
“She talk?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Maybe she can’t.”
“She will when she wants to,” Boon said.
“We playing house now? Ma and Pa and like that?”
“Just trying to be who I needed when I was her age.”
“Until what?”
“Until she finds some people a heap better than we are.”
“That’s mos
t people,” I said.
“I hope so,” she said.
Dawn came and while the kid slept, I helped Boon root around the weeds and scrub outside for rabbit tobacco to pack her wound with. She took what little we found, smashed it up with her hands and mixed it with mud from the riverbed to make a poultice. Back in the cabin, she turned her back to me, slid out of her shirt and unwrapped the bandages again so that I could stuff the stinking mess into the hole in her back.
“Menominee reckon rabbit tobacco cures foolishness,” she said when I finished up and set to helping her get the rags back in place. “If they’re right, maybe we’ll both disappear before noon, fools that we are.”
“Boon,” I said, “what did you mean, that last day in town? You said she was dead.”
She heaved a deep sigh and turned back to me, buttoning up the threadbare shirt Jing Fong had given her and rolling the question around in her mind. Her lips parted and she started to speak, but in an instant her eyes popped wide and she clamped her mouth shut, turning her right ear toward the gaping roof. Boon heard it before I did—the jangle of gear and splash of hooves in the river nearby, snorting horses and grumbling men.
Someone was coming. Boon shot a worried glance at the girl, still asleep on the floor, then to me. Her hand was already at the grip of her Colt. I pulled my knife and mourned the loss of the Winchester. Then, together we went to the door to see about our visitors.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Three men, three mounts. The men wore dungarees and dusty hats. There were bedrolls wrapped in slickers cinched to their saddles, like they were expecting rain. Or else expecting to be on our trail long enough it might could rain. In any event, they were there now. My first thought upon spying them through the narrowly cracked door was of the Mormons, whether they’d given us up or if some harm had come to them. I wondered too if they knew we had a child with us and whether they’d care. On that latter account, I reckoned not. These were not lawmen. They were mercenaries if ever I had seen one, which I had. Somebody had a price on us, me and Boon, and these were the fellows out to collect.
“This for Willocks, you reckon?” I whispered to Boon. “Or is this your pa’s bunch?”
“Could be either,” she said, wincing at my calling Stanley her pa, “or both. We need more than just one gun.”
“I don’t guess asking for one would do much.”
“You reckon?” She gave me a sharp look. I shrugged. “Split them up is what we got to do. Get one apart, get what he’s shooting with.”
“Then it’s fair.”
Boon said, “Nothing is ever fair.”
“Reckon not,” I said.
She motioned at the roof and I nodded, went softly to the big hole and sucked in a deep breath before attempting to climb up. The girl was awake then, staring. She looked no more or less afraid than she always did. I smiled, rolled my shoulders.
“I am too old and too fat for this shit,” I said, and I reached up to grip the timber around which the tarpaper had collapsed. Boon watched me, earing back the hammer on her .44. I faltered twice, the second time nearly falling on my ass, but on the third try I managed to find purchase and, slowly and painfully, pulled myself up through the hole and onto the cabin roof. I farted loudly in the process. No one seemed to notice.
I slumped over the timber, all but certain it would crumble beneath my weight, but the beam held and I could hear how close the riders were now. So, too, I could feel how stupid I was for doing this. A distraction, a decoy with no gun. There were dumber ways to die, but I’d always hoped for a little more dignity than that. Maybe I never did have much horse sense. I didn’t reckon the very dumb were tipped off to the fact that they were dumb.
Hooves and forelegs caked with mud, the horses loped up to within five or six yards of the shanty, where the point man raised one gloved hand to halt the procession. He pushed his hat back on his head and squinted, his face a network of deep wrinkles, like a spiderweb. The man had not yet spotted me. I stayed flat against the roof, waiting on Boon to make her move.
That move came when she slid the barrel of her .44 through the crack in the door and squeezed off a shot, sending a bullet clean through one rider’s right arm. The limb flapped wildly and the man screamed, batting at it madly with his other hand. Boon slammed the door shut and the other men, the point man and his sole uninjured rider, drew revolvers and started shooting. I tried to flatten myself still more but it was nothing doing. Beneath me, Boon crouched behind the fireplace. The child cowered behind her, compressed into a tiny ball and trembling with fear.
Boon shot me a look. It was all I needed.
“Hey, peckerwood!” I hollered, waving my arms in the air like an idiot or a lunatic or both.
“On the roof, Sam!” shouted the injured rider.
Sam, the point man, raised his gun and fired two shots at me, missing both times as I scuttled down the roof and down to the ground on the backside of the cabin. I moved to the corner, listened closely to the hoofbeats, and the second I saw a boot I grabbed a hold of it with both hands and yanked the rider off the saddle. The rider crashed down on top of me and together we rolled in the mud, the bastard’s dapple gray stamping the muck frighteningly close to my head.
It wasn’t Sam, nor was it the poor son of a bitch Boon got in the arm. This fellow wore a bushy yellow beard as unruly as mine had been, previous to my San Francisco transformation, and one of his eyes was so milky I reckoned he couldn’t see out of it. He saw well enough to pin me in the mud and pummel my face and neck with his hammy fists, though. I was getting sorely tired of having my ass whupped in the mud by roustabouts.
Two shots sounded on the front side of the shanty. Boon’s and Sam’s, I guessed. The jasper on top of me rained his fists down on me until I couldn’t really feel it anymore, which seemed equal parts blessing and curse. The upshot of it was I was able to gather my senses enough to focus on the task at hand. Namely, getting that son of a bitch off of me and his gun away from him.
It was easier than I reckoned it would be. I took the beating long enough that it gave the old boy a right smart of security that I would not fight back. He had me licked, at least as far as he was concerned, so that when I snatched the six-shooter from the rig he had cinched around his waist he hardly did anything but gawp.
My hand curled around that grip fair nicely, and though my eyes were half-swollen shut and I was half-blind with tears, I managed to stick the barrel right under his chin and I sort of smiled. His hands went up sort of instinctively.
I said, “We done here?”
He went for the gun. I wished he hadn’t done that. I shot him, the bullet exiting the top of his head and his eyeballs rolling back as the whites turned red. He slumped down on me. I rolled him off into the mud and spent a couple of difficult minutes rocking back and forth, trying to right myself. That fellow sure gave me a hellacious drubbing and I was beginning to feel it all over again.
I was dizzy on my feet. The world tilted and spun. I figured that made us just about even: one solid shooter on each side, one impaired. Then I remembered that Boon had a hole in her back. It was what it was. I shrugged it off and crept slowly around the side of the shack to the front.
Sam still sat his mount. The other fellow was crouched on the ground behind a rock, balancing his pistol on the surface with an unsure left hand. Both fired on the cabin until they were empty. Then the injured man vanished behind the rock and Sam wheeled around to the other side of the cabin while they both reloaded.
I checked the hogleg I’d taken off the corpse back of the cabin. Double-action five-shot, two in the cylinder. I cried out, “Boon!”
And ran out front, my boots splashing in the muck. The man behind the rock poked his head up. I fired, but the ball struck the rock instead of him, kicking up a column of dust and pebbles. Sam gigged his horse back to the fray, his iron trained on me. The front door slammed open and Boon spun out of it, shooting before Sam knew she was there. He got hit in the side and dropped
out of the saddle. His mount didn’t move, so Boon hurried over and slapped it on the backside. Off the horse went, snorting its complaint, and Boon loomed over Sam on the ground with the Colt trained on his face.
“Hi, Sam,” she said.
Sam spat. I kept my eyes on the rock.
“Sam?” the man called out. “Hey, Sam?”
“She got me dead to rights, Lem,” Sam said. Though he hadn’t let go of his gun.
“That’s my brother there,” Lem called back. “Can’t let you kill my brother.”
“Seems like your brother was fixing to kill me,” Boon countered.
“Ain’t personal.”
“Is to me.”
“Christ in Heaven, woman,” Lem said. “It’s just a God damned job.”
“For Arthur Stanley?”
Lem did not respond to that. Boon kicked the revolver from Sam’s hand and spun her .44 ’round so that the butt jutted out. Then she smashed it against Sam’s forehead.
Sam hollered.
“For Arthur Stanley?” she asked Sam.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Where did he hire you? At the Palace?”
“Naw. Custom house.”
“That right,” she said. “Why there?”
“Why, he’s the collector.”
He said it like it was common knowledge and that he couldn’t believe Boon so stupid as to not know it. She knew it now. She looked both astonished and like it was the most expected thing in the world at the same time.
“He’s the Customs Collector, Edward.”
“I heard.”
“Guess that means he’s the boss of what can or can’t come through port.”
“Reckon it does, Boon.”
She nudged Sam in the ribs with the toe of her shoe.
“Stanley own any other whorehouses besides the Palace?”
“You kidding?” Sam said, wincing. “A shit-load of ’em.”
“Quite the mack,” I said.
“A mack who controls the human chattel he deals in,” she said coldly.
