by Ed Kurtz
“You have killed my son,” he said through clenched golden plates.
“You shot me,” I countered. I sounded drunk to my own ears.
“I will do worse than that, fat man. Far, far worse.”
I made like I was going to grin at him, just to piss the old bastard off, but my face decided to quit on me and fell slack like an old buffalo hide hanging by a nail in the wall. Best laid plans and all that.
My eyes made their way around the dead man on the floor, past the barstool he’d knocked over when he died, and landed on the little pop gun I’d dropped after accidentally killing him. Somewhere deep in the folds of my thinking meat I made a weak attempt to command my arm to scoop it up, but the old thinker just wasn’t having it. Instead, I plumb passed out cold.
When I came to again, I felt cold water pelting my face. I wasn’t dead, which came as some surprise. It was also something of a disappointment, considering how bad my side still hurt. I sputtered at the water splashing into my nose and mouth and strained to turn over onto the side that didn’t have a hole in it. In doing so, I determined that I was out of doors, that it was still raining, and that I had been tossed into the back of an open wagon like so much cow shit. I also discovered that my wound had been bandaged, the cloth wrapped tautly around my midsection, the same as Boon’s. Stanley or the Irishman had taken the time and effort to see that I didn’t croak. Or at least, not just yet.
Which meant I was bait.
It sure as shit wasn’t the first time, either.
Round about the winter of ’72, Boon started to gather that Chinese folks were moving into Texas. Not in great waves like further west, but still a fair big number of people, on account of all the railroad construction. Seemed that a year or two before there had been a good-sized group in Houston performing some kind of construction, but when we got there, there wasn’t any of them left. All the same, we spent that winter wandering from one end of the Lone Star State to the other, following migrant camps and questioning them that could understand a little English whether they’d ever seen or heard of old Pimchan back California way or anyplace else for that matter. It was still hotter than Satan’s ass along the border in December, but once we hit the Panhandle in late January, there was snow on the ground and more coming in.
I recall riding hunched over my saddle horn in a buffalo coat and a ridiculously big fur hat that made me look like a Cossack, the snot freezing in my moustache as I asked her, “If you’re so hell-bent on getting information about California, whyn’t we just haul our asses out there and see for our own selves? It’d sure beat this cold by a damned sight, anyhow.”
“Need something to go on,” she’d said. Sure enough, we never did go that way until she got that something.
“I never did think it snowed in Texas,” I said.
“It does everything in Texas,” was all she had to say about that.
Over the course of those bitter cold days we traveled clear up to the northeastern corner of the state until we crossed over the border into the Cherokee Strip. I’d never been in Indian Territory before, and I wasn’t too sure I was in it, then. The Strip in those days didn’t truly belong to anything or anybody. Most of it was just the Outlet, which wasn’t anything but lousy land the white-eyes swindled the Cherokees into inhabiting in order to take the best of their lands, but the uppermost part of it was the real Strip, a surveying error that meant nothing even vaguely approaching law or order could touch it for a few square miles. I’d heard tell of any and all kinds of depravity that went on in those few miles, and to this day I believe every single story I ever heard.
For some, it was a hellish place they’d never want to get within a hundred county miles of. For quite a few others, it was paradise on Earth.
Boon was tracking a caravan of workers that was moving up into Kansas to work on the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railway and, according to her, didn’t expect to tarry long in the Strip. A white cook down in Sugarland had told her he’d taken over for one of her countrymen, a detail he was sure of because the old cook couldn’t speak to either the whites or the Chinese and, when he asked about it, one of the workers explained the man’s provenance. Given the scarcity of Siamese in the U.S. and her territories, Boon wasn’t about to give up the chance to see if there was anything to be gained by talking to him. Only she wasn’t too happy to find that the caravan decided to camp over right in the middle of the Cherokee Strip so that the foremen might get their ashes hauled and raise a little Hades.
“This is just the kind of place where a filthy-minded man like you finds trouble,” she told me, to my chagrin. “You ain’t got to ride with me, but keep your head screwed on if you are.”
“Why, Boonsri, I am insulted.”
She scoffed.
“No, you ain’t.”
I shrugged.
We found the foremen and the rest of the whites leading the crew first. Naturally, they were encamped in the ricketiest derelict house of ill-repute I’d ever seen in all my sinning days. Painted in fresh red on the false front of the two-story building was DEVIL’S BARGAIN. I liked it already. Boon watched me like a hawk. I made a mental note to return one day when the stakes weren’t so high. I had plenty of ashes that needed hauling, too.
Inside Devil’s Bargain was the most motley-looking crowd of dead-eyed bastards that side of Deadwood. Most were white, but some were Negro or Indian or Mex. No Chinese. A chubby white gal played a piano in bad need of repair in the corner opposite the bar. It was the worst playing I ever heard, but the fact that she wore nothing but her bloomers and an enormous feathered hat explained how she got and maintained the job. Plenty of other doxies made their rounds, flirting with fellows who smelled of sweat and cow shit, plying their trade on the drunkest of the lot. Pert near every man was visibly armed. My crotch got to itching just looking over the place.
But I didn’t really mind.
Sure, I loved Boonsri even then, but I didn’t entertain any notions about that. Way I figured, she knew it, too, and she never had to put words to it for me to know I better not, either. As such, acting the fool I always was didn’t particularly bother me in terms of harming my chances. There were no chances to harm.
One of the working girls, a skinny little thing with ice-blue eyes too big for her face, offered me a wink from the lap of a one-eyed vaquero in a battered straw sombrero. I winked back and the vaquero growled. Probably jealous he couldn’t join in on all that winking. Boon put her elbow into my ribs. I moved to the bar.
She ordered two whiskeys and I flushed with embarrassment. She was the only woman in there who wasn’t working the floor, and here she was acting like the boss of me. A man fatter than me by a long shot chuckled at my shame, leaning on the bar and eyeballing me like I was a sideshow curiosity. The man with no balls. I shot him a look. He blew me a kiss and laughed out loud.
“If she wasn’t a chink, I’d of figured she was your mama,” he said.
Boon downed her whiskey in one gulp and smashed the glass against the fat man’s forehead. Most of the glass tinkled down his front, but some of it stuck in the network of bleeding cuts she’d left. The fat man howled like a coyote and threw his hand to the Peacemaker holstered underneath the sagging sack of his stomach. If he hadn’t been so fat, he’d have gotten to it fast enough to plug at least one of us. As things stood, he had to struggle some with his belly, which gave me plenty of time to throw my fist under his chin and knock him off his stool. His right temple slammed the edge of the bar on his way down and he was out cold before he hit the floor.
Half the hard-cases in the place erupted into applause. No one took offense at the altercation, or least not enough to do anything about it but clap and laugh.
To the unconscious man on the floor, Boon said, “I’m Siamese, you son of a bitch,” and she spit on him.
“No shit,” said another man behind her.
She swung around, ready for a fight, but the man kept both hands on the glass of flat beer in front of him and just
smiled with his eyes half closed from drink. He wore a long, dragoon-styled mustache and was bald on the top of his head with the rest of his greasy black hair draping down to his shoulders in back. He swayed a little, but his hands never left that glass.
“You want to make something of that, friend?” Boon challenged him.
“Me? Hell, no. Just never reckoned I’d ever meet one of you people, never you mind two. World’s gettin’ smaller all the time.”
She flashed her eyes at me, and I returned her interested gaze.
“That’s for sure and for certain,” I agreed. “Who’s the other one?”
“My fucking cook!” he bellowed. “I thought he was mute for a week until he got to babbling at one of the Chinamen works for me. I don’t talk any chink, but I know it when I hear it. Them Chinese don’t cotton to him at all, but I think he’s funnier than all hell.”
“Ain’t that something,” Boon said.
I leaned in to keep it going, but she pushed me back. Instead, she nodded at my drink, which I put away, and then we ambled back out to the mud outside.
“Didn’t like the way he looked at me,” she said.
“You’re not a bad looking woman,” I said.
“You’re a white man. You don’t see what I see.”
“Might could be, but what about the cook?”
“Wait and watch.”
“Out here? In the mud.”
“Out here,” she said. “In the mud.”
We lingered until after dark. I rolled one corn husk quirley after another and smoked the evening away, leaning against a hitching post and watching group after group of drunken scoundrels come and go from Devil’s Bargain, wishing to heaven I was among them. My sense of things was that we were wasting our time—surely that boss in there wouldn’t come back out again until after sunup, once he’d spent all his spending money on women and wine. But Boon had other ideas, and as usual, she was right.
The foreman staggered out about an hour after dusk, alone.
“Well, how do you like that?” I said.
Boon hushed me. The boss splashed down from the front doors to the mud and, jerkily, waded his way around the corner, down a narrow alley, and out of sight. Boon held up a finger to hold me off a minute, then motioned for me to follow.
The mud in the alley was ankle-deep. I whispered a string of curses as my boots sank into it, making progress to the other side slow and tedious. We emerged onto another mud street lined with thrown-together buildings lit by burning lamps and filled with shouting and song. Our quarry wandered down another alley. I said, “Shit.”
Once we practically swam through another, still deeper river of mud, we came out on open prairie. The middle distance was spotted with the flickers of campfires beneath a canopy of bright starlight. It was a whole different world from the cluster of saloons and whorehouses just behind us. And the foreman was striding right out into it.
“His camp’s one of those up ahead,” Boon said low.
“Terrific,” I said. “So, why are we stalking him like we’re braves on a God damned buffalo hunt?”
“Because he could have stayed back there,” she answered, which didn’t mean a thing to me.
But I sorted it out once we got within sighting distance of the camp. There, among a cluster of tents surrounding a well-built fire in the center, the bossman joined three other white fellows, two of whom clutched at two young women. Chinese women. And from the looks of things, far from willing participants in their fun.
“Sporting girls?” I wondered aloud.
“More like captives,” Boon said.
“Explains why Droopy there didn’t stick around to have his poke back yonder.”
“It does that,” she agreed.
“And that look of him you didn’t like.”
“Seems I’m to his taste.” She curled her lip in disgust. I couldn’t blame her. But I still only barely understood.
“Bad hombres, then,” I said. “How you want to play this?”
She told me. Finally, I understood.
I said, “Shit.”
Then I went shambling into the camp, stumbling this way and that, laughing under my breath and mumbling something so incoherent I didn’t even know what the hell I was talking about.
“Whoa there, stranger,” one of the men said. Until the foreman showed back up, this was the only one without a gal to grab at. “Wrong camp.”
“Billy Joe?” I slurred. “That you, old son?”
“Ain’t no Billy Joe here, you old drunk. Move along.”
“Shit and hellfire, you look just like Billy Joe.” I surveyed the scene up close as best I could with one eye half-shut to look as drunk as I wished I was.
“Christ, Clete,” said a rangy one with his long, wiry arms wrapped around one of the girls. Now that I could see her a lot better, I didn’t think she could have been much older than fifteen, if that. She regarded me with wide, pleading eyes. The other gal didn’t look at anyone at all, her eyes on the ground, like she’d just about given up the ghost. “You’re just sour there ain’t enough flesh to go around. Though I ’spect I reckoned the chief here might of come back with more company.”
He grinned at the foreman, who shook his head and spat in the fire.
“God damnedest thing,” the bossman said. “Wasn’t a whore in town but the white ones, but don’t you know a woman comes in says she’s Siamese.”
“Sia-what?” said the rangy one.
“Siamese, you stupid ass,” said the thick, blond-bearded boy who was grappling with the other girl. “Like Chang over there.”
He sort of lifted his chin in a vague direction. I gave a good approximation of a whirling stumble so that I could point my eyes in that same direction, where I found the dim shape of a man in the dark, apart from the main camp, seated on the ground and peeling a potato.
“How do, Chang,” I called to him. He didn’t even look up.
“Why don’t you fuck right off out of here,” said the sour one.
“Hell, he’s just knocked out on tarantula juice,” said the rangy man. “Most like a grub rider. That right, jack? You riding the grub line, you old bum?”
“Grub line,” I parroted. “Hee, hee.”
“This son of a bitch got back-kicked in the head, is what it is,” said the thick boy.
“Wait a fuckin’ minute,” said the foreman. He seized me by the shoulders and pulled me close enough to the fire to make out my face. “This is the fat bastard came in with the Siamese girl.”
“Then where’s his girl now, chief?”
“Yeah,” the boss said. “Where’s your Siam girl, bud?”
“Lost her,” I told him. “No good at poker. Lost my horse, my stake, my girl. Shit, I ain’t even ate yet. Got any beans?”
“Drunk fucking grub rider,” the sour man grumbled. “’Cept he can’t even ride.”
“Lost my horse,” I said. “How’s about them beans?”
“You see any damned beans?” he roared, half-rising from the log he was squatting on. “Get out of here!”
He swung an arm in the air at me like he was squatting at a mosquito. Beside him, his rangy friend fished a bottle with no label out of the pocket of his buckskin jacket and took a long pull.
“No beans,” he said, “but plenty of this.”
He dropped the bottle and with both hands, lifted the girl from his lap and shoved her at me hard. The girl yelped. The rangy man cackled. I caught her before she stumbled right into the fire.
The sour man griped, “Oh, for shit’s sake, Deke! I ain’t even had my turn yet and you turn her over to a bum!”
The girl grabbed fistfuls of my shirt as he stood up, fire in his eyes, and she said close to my ear in a syrupy accent, “Please help me.”
I heard the distinctive click of a hammer being pulled back on a sidearm and looked quickly to see which of the men was about to draw down on me. None of them held any iron. That was when the ball went up.
I smelled that familia
r rotten egg smell as soon as that old Colt barked and a second later the sour man grunted with the impact of the bullet in the middle of his chest. He threw both hands to the wound, blood seeping in between his fingers, and he dropped back over the log. The rangy one leapt to his feet and the thick boy hurled the other girl away from him as the foreman finally went for his Peacemaker. Boon took him, next, slamming a round right into his left ear that blew out a plum-sized hole on the other side of his head in a dark spray of blood and brains. The boss dropped dead to the dust and I went for his unfired pistol, which I turned up at the rangy man, expecting him to fill his hands faster.
I expected wrong. The thick boy had a Moore’s teat-fire cartridge revolver up and ready, hammer back and trigger squeezed before I knew what was what. I rolled as fast as my girth allowed and narrowly missed the bullet that struck that poor girl in the leg. She screamed to beat the Devil. I swung my pilfered popper to the right and drilled a fresh hole in his cheek. It wasn’t a killing shot. Rather, he spun round and round, howling like mad as the blood washed down his face. He didn’t let go of that belt gun, either, but triggered it again and again as he twirled, sending everyone else scattering.
Boon rushed into the firelight, tracking the thick boy with the sight at the end of her barrel as she came on. The second girl, the one who wasn’t shot in the leg, scampered up and behind her, panting and terrified. I reckoned Boon had the thick boy covered so I went looking for Rangy. He was, of course, gone.
“Can’t let him go,” she said, and she fired at Thick Boy, a clean shot through his left eye that dropped him to the ground through a crimson haze, dead.
“Guess not,” I said, and I went looking for the squirrelly bastard.
I rounded the nearest tent to the fire, where I found half a dozen men standing in a close cluster, all of them in woollens for sleep, all of them Chinese. They regarded me with wary uncertainty, but one among them silently pointed at a canvas tent with the front flap wavering as though in a breeze. There was no breeze. I nodded at the man who pointed, then went slowly toward the tent. Once I was within ten paces of it, the flap shunted back and the rangy man burst out of it with a shooter in each hand. One fired, the bullet going wild into the air. The other misfired, clicking harmlessly.
