by Ed Kurtz
A lot of times.
I hadn’t really paid much attention to the rhythm of Boon’s whittling, a measured scratch and slice, until it stopped. I narrowed my eyes in the dark and cast a look at her as she tossed the stob off and rose to her feet with my knife in hand. She winced as she stretched her back and sauntered over, where she turned the knife hilt out toward me.
“Whyn’t you just keep it?” I said.
“Ain’t my knife.”
“All right, then.”
I took it back and sheathed it under my trouser leg, and Boon said, “Plenty more miles to cover tomorrow. Best get some rest.”
I nodded sharply. The kid mimicked me, nodding with equal seriousness at Boon.
Boon grinned, tousled the kid’s hair, then returned to her spot away from us, where she curled up on her side to sleep. And seeing that, I realized that sleep sure as shit sounded mighty fine right about then.
I’d been resting my head on my bedroll, but I took it up and pushed it over to the kid, who tested it out with her hands before laying her head down and, apparently, considering it workable for a pillow.
“Sweet dreams, kid,” I said.
“Meihui,” she whispered back at me.
“Huh,” I said. “That Chinese for good night?”
“No,” she said, pointing at her chest with her thumb. “It’s me. Meihui.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Good night, Meihui.”
“Good night, Edward.”
“Meihui. I’ll be damned.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was another two days’ ride from the first night’s camp after Sweeney’s Crossing. On the first day, we stopped over in the town of Burnside, which, like every other little Podunk town in that part of California, was built from the remnants of an old mining camp. The placers were all dug out by then, but now something like a proper town rose up from the ghost of what was, and they had pert near everything a little town needed—taverns and saloons, merchants of food and clothing, churches and cemeteries, a blacksmith and two livery stables. There were three hotels, and the first one we picked out gave us no trouble on account of our little party being only half-white right down the middle. I would never say that California was better than Texas even upon pain of death, but in this specific regard it won right over the old Lone Star State.
After stabling the horses and seeing after their grooming and feed, and taking into account supplies for the rest of the journey ahead including victuals, oats for the mounts, ammunition, and whatever else Boon could think up, our stake was starting to feel mighty light in hand. As such, all three of us bunked up in one room, which would have been heavily looked down upon just about anyplace I’d ever been whatever the color of the persons involved. There in Burnside, however, it seemed to most eyes that we were a case of a man, his Oriental mistress, and the accident that could happen to anybody in the heat of the moment. Most like they’d all seen it before, and while there were whispers and chuckles, nobody gave us any guff.
We took our dinner in the hotel restaurant, where it was determined that Meihui had never before been introduced to the art of the knife and fork. Chicken-fried steak was on the menu that evening, and the kid had the meat in both of her little hands before the plate ever touched the tablecloth. She sank her teeth into it and tore off a chunk like a wolf. At first blush I thought it was terribly funny and got to laughing, but for the life of her Boon looked about to cry at sight of the spectacle the child made. It was not that she was embarrassed by Meihui’s poor manners. Boon just understood.
“Here, honey,” she said, taking the kid’s hands in hers and wiping them clean with a napkin. She then took up her own knife and fork and demonstrated to Meihui how to use them. To her credit, the kid tried to do the same, but it just didn’t come natural to her. While I was laughing at what seemed like simply silliness, Boon saw that the girl had been living like an animal down there on the Barbary Coast. Treated like one, too. Or worse.
I wasn’t so hungry anymore after that.
After supper I wandered alone to the nearest of Burnside’s watering holes, a place called Dry Diggings after the town’s previous life. I had been thinking of what should be done with Meihui, who was in better shape with us than she had been, but that wasn’t saying altogether too much. Where we were headed amounted to danger and most certainly death for somebody or other, and I was starting to form the opinion that this was no place to take a kid like our new friend. Much of the weight from these ruminations seemed to lift away from me the moment I passed through the swinging batwing doors and laid eyes on the cornucopia of beautiful bottles lined up nice as you please behind a mustachioed bartender in an apron and sleeve garters pouring rye whiskey for an old drunk with a face full of gin blossoms. It was church to me. I could have wept.
And I was in no small way relieved to find no parts of the human body on display behind the bar, either.
I ordered the same rye and downed it fast. The amber fluid burned pleasantly in my throat. The second one I took slower. It was my method.
While I sipped it, a black-haired jasper with bushy eyebrows and patchy stubble sidled up to the bar and asked for a beer. While the barman poured it from the barrel, the fellow turned to look me over and grinned.
“Say,” he said, “ain’t you the fellow came into town with them two Chinese?”
“I am not,” I said, and left it at that. In point of fact, I had come into town with one Chinese girl and one Siamese woman, so it was not a lie. I turned my back to the man and continued to enjoy my rye, which was mighty fine as rye went.
“Here’s the thing about a question like that, mister,” the jasper went on, to my substantial dismay and chagrin. “That’s what they call a rhetorical question, which means I already knew the answer to it. Only reason I asked was to get the conversation started.”
“That so,” I said. “Well, I don’t much feel like conversating tonight.”
“Used to be there was lots of Chinese hereabouts,” he carried on, as though unaware I’d said anything at all. “This was back in the James Dry Diggings days, you understand. Worked the placers, them and the micks did. All the color went out and the chinks did, too. It’s how come I came to be so surprised to see a couple of them come into town with you, which is why I asked in the first place, though I already knowed it was you.”
I slammed my glass down on the bar and turned around, whiskey dribbling from my beard onto my shirt.
“I do not care for the disparaging language you employ, you son of a bitch.”
Truth be told, I was trying to sound a little like Boon. Of course, if Boon had heard him talk the way he’d talked to me, things would most likely have already escalated to violence in one fashion or another.
The jasper grinned some more and held up his hands, palms out.
“Hey now, no hard feeling, pard.”
“I ain’t your pard, cocksucker.”
“Christ Jesus, you’re a touchy old bastard.”
“I’m an old bastard, all right,” I said. “And a right mean one. Now if you got a point to make, make it quick before I make you eat this glass.”
“I expect that would upset my stomach,” he said. He was still grinning. I had half a mind to make him chew the glass until there wasn’t anything left of his big mouth.
Instead, I stood up so that he could see the belly gun I had stowed in my belt. He looked at it, then back up at my face. He wasn’t grinning anymore, but he sure didn’t look scared, either. The bartender, on the other side of the chip, looked downright terrified. He popped the cork out of that rye again and filled my glass without my asking before scattering through a backdoor to the side of the bar. It was only then that I knew I was in some kind of trouble. My first thought, I’m more than a tiny bit proud to say, wasn’t about my own sorry ass but rather the ladies back at the hotel. Whatever the hell this was, it was bigger than just one loudmouth cocksucker.
I pulled my belly gun and jammed its barrel
against the soft spot in the hollow of the jasper’s throat.
“Let’s have it, then.”
“Figured you could guess by now, Edward.”
Edward.
I’d been sweating a bit—fat man’s curse—but my whole damned body turned cold at the sound of my own name.
I said, “Stanley.”
The jasper said, “There you go. Not quite as stupid as you look.”
“Where is he?”
The jasper shrugged. I pressed the barrel harder against his throat and glanced quickly around the small room. The old drunk was gone, and so was most everybody else who was sitting around when I first came in. Whether or not the dandy was there when I arrived, I couldn’t say. But he was for sure and certain there now.
Dressed to the nines in an emerald frock coat, matching brushed cotton trousers, and a Safford vest of crimson, the dandy wore a felt derby, perched jauntily on his mess of bright red curls, and smoked a long brown cigarillo that he pinched between forefinger and thumb. When he smiled at me, I saw that he was missing the very same front tooth I’d had knocked out back in New Mexico. I didn’t think it was going to make us friends.
“You ought to’ve killed Sam Gay,” he said with an Irish lilt.
“That son of a bitch came after us in Grizzly Flats?”
The Irishman nodded his head.
“That son of a bitch.”
“Made it back to Frisco.”
“He did.”
“How’s his mouth?”
The Irishman chuckled at that, but he did not answer the question.
“Your friend,” he said instead, “appears to be under the impression that Mr. Stanley is her sire.”
“She does.”
“Not quite looking for a happy reunion, though, is she?”
“She ain’t.”
My guts twisted up inside me. There were two of them here, but how many more were in their posse? They’d seen us come into town; surely they’d seen us register up at the hotel, too. And if they knew even just a small bit about Boon, they’d be mighty careful in their advance on her. I jabbed the jasper at the bar again with my Derringer.
“Well,” the Irishman said, “a reunion she shall have. You, I am sorry to say, are not invited.”
“Maybe I’ll just blow your friend’s brains out the top of his pointy little head,” I said.
“Maybe you will.”
The jasper said, “Christ, Bill.”
The Irishman, Bill, offered an empathetic face to the jasper.
“He won’t hurt you, Monty.”
“He had better not,” came a voice behind me. A familiar one.
An English one.
“Pop,” Monty whined, “he’s got a fucking lady’s gun on my neck.”
Pop?
Keeping the Derringer where it was, I craned my neck just enough to catch sight of Arthur Stanley standing between the two swinging doors. He held one aside with his left hand and leaned against the other. In his right hand was an Army Colt Dragoon, a .44 just like Boon’s.
“You will do me the courtesy of releasing my son,” he said, “and in return, I shall do you the courtesy of not shooting your balls off.”
“I’d sure appreciate that,” I said. “Kind of fond of the old boys down there.”
“I figured you might be.”
“Trouble is, that’s nothing to say you won’t shoot me right in the face.”
“That is true. I said nothing of the kind.”
“And then there’s the matter of our common friend.”
The Englishman’s lined face drooped.
“That creature is no friend of mine,” he said.
“Say, Monty,” I said, keeping my eyes on Stanley. “Your old man anywhere near as shitty to you as he is to your sister?”
“Sister?” Monty said. “The hell are you talking about?”
“Bullshit is what he’s talking about,” Stanley said. “This is not a man who understands anything about family.”
“Boonsri’s about the best kind of family I ever had or heard of,” I said. “You’d think yourself lucky to have her if you wasn’t such a filthy fucking puddle of wet horse shit.”
“Pop?” Monty whined. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Finally, I turned back to the quivering shit at the end of my belly gun and said, “Turns out you got yourself a half-sister, Monty. Damned finest woman I ever knew, never mind that your Pop over there sold her like she wasn’t anything to him or anybody else. Did her mama the same way, too. Guess you know he runs him a passel of whorehouses down in Frisco, but I wonder whether you know how many of the girls in them cribs ain’t nothing but kids?”
“Chinks, Monty,” said Stanley “We’re not talking about white girls here, for Christ’s sake.”
“You really that lady’s daddy?”
“I’m your daddy, Monty. That beast is hardly even human. You don’t know what she is, what she has done. How desperate she is to hurt me. To destroy our family.”
“But, Pop…”
“That is enough, Montgomery.”
His voice low and loud, it was sufficient to silence Monty, who no doubt had learned the hard meaning behind the change in his father’s tone long ago.
“You know where she is, Monty?” I asked.
Monty didn’t answer.
“How about you, Art? You want to tell me what you done with her?”
“See, now, that’s quite the issue at stake here, fat man. My men watched quite carefully as she and the Chinagirl went into the hotel, but despite keeping watch, they never saw them go back out again. And yet, neither of them are there. How you suppose this can be?”
“Boon is one to surprise you, and that’s a fact.”
“Indeed.”
Of course, I couldn’t tell him anything about it. As far as I knew, she and Meihui stayed in the hotel while I went for a drink or three. But I believed him. She was in the wind—they both were. So all I had to do was wait for her to figure out her approach and come make a little noise.
I chuckled a little under my breath.
And then Arthur Stanley shot me.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Somehow, probably due to my infinite arrogance and almost limitless stupidity, it never really occurred to me that I might take a bullet while riding the vengeance line with Boon. I’d reckoned those teeth I got knocked out back in the New Mexico Territory would be as bad as it ever got, and even after Boon took that metal in the back down in San Francisco, I never thought I’d catch any bullets, too. Yet here I was, in some one-horse Northern California booze hole, keening like a brand-new widow and bleeding like a stuck hog.
Stanley’s Colt Dragoon barked and belched flame from the barrel, and the next thing I knew there was a fire in my side that turned the whole world white as a blizzard for a long couple of minutes while I gave voice to the hot agony of it. I tasted blood like copper pennies in my mouth and I was sure he’d struck something necessary—I was no master of my own anatomy, but I knew enough that coughing up blood from a body shot wasn’t any kind of good news. What was the point of being so God damned fat if the padding didn’t protect me any?
All the rest of the room, the rest of the world, was nothing more than a blur to me as I raised my shaky hand to touch the blood on my lips. The short barrel of my belly gun grazed my cheek, hotter than the devil’s ass. It singed my beard and I could smell the hair sizzle. My forefinger was curled tight against the trigger, pushing it all the way to the guard. It was as though my hand had frozen that way, clutched permanently in the position it formed when I unknowingly squeezed that trigger the moment Stanley shot me.
Unconsciously, I licked my lips. Even then, I knew the blood wasn’t mine.
I heard Bill say, “Oh, my Christ.” He rolled the R musically. He sounded very far away.
Slowly, painfully, I lowered my hand until it was down by my waist and the Derringer dropped to the floor clattering against the boards. My other hand went to my si
de, which was warm and wet and sticky with blood. My blood.
“Well, hell,” I muttered and, turning clumsily against the bar, I found Monty on the floor behind me. His throat was a ragged, red mess. I’d blown it right through the back of his neck.
“Oh,” Stanley said. “Oh, Monty.”
My thoughts were a jumble. For the most part, my brain was occupied with the searing pain from the new hole in my trunk, though I tried like hell to draw some measure of focus onto the situation at hand. I considered Boon, and Meihui, and I tried to recall whether or not I knew where they were. Weren’t we all just talking about them? And why was the damned saloon getting so cold all of a sudden?
Somewhere distant there came a grumble and a crack and for an instant I was certain I’d been shot again—a killing shot, this time. I tensed up and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the pain or just cold, black death to take me. I guessed I’d reckoned my time was mostly borrowed ever since I got strung up by those boys in Texas, that while me and Boon were tracking Stanley, Death its own evil self was tracking me. Now that each of us had found his quarry, it seemed we’d reached the railhead.
But neither death nor pain came. Instead, the night sky opened up and dumped raindrops as big as dimes right outside the batwings, turning the street almost instantly to mud. It was only thunder I’d heard. I did not feel relieved by this.
To my side, Irish Bill rose from his chair and drew a pearl-gripped pistol. He was a slow draw, but I was in no shape to critique his technique. My hands were empty, my brain a sludgy fog. He had me dead to rights.
“Don’t,” Stanley said. “Not yet.”
Bracing myself against the bar, I turned again to face Arthur Stanley. My body made it first, then my head. My eyes lagged behind and when they finally caught up, it took a moment to pull him into focus. His Colt was back in the holster at his hip, both hands at his sides, trembling.
