by Ed Kurtz
Arthur Stanley, who I was sure I’d heard, was nowhere in sight. Alarmingly, neither was Meihui.
The next time I aimed and squeezed the trigger, the hammer landed on an empty chamber. The butt stock was empty, and I had no more cartridges.
“I am out,” I called to Boon, taking the risk of letting Stanley’s last man know, as well.
By way of response, he squeezed off another shot at me. I dropped to the rock, scraping my chin. As glad as I was to avoid a bullet in the head, my chin smarted terribly and I could feel the blood welling up in my beard.
“I’m out, too,” Boon bellowed from her position on the opposite side of the camp. “Get you a gun if you can. I don’t think I can make it.”
My head might have spun on my neck upon hearing this, but the initial shock wore away right quick. She was playing the part of the frightened woman. She had to be. This man knew little better; it was more or less what he’d expect of her, or of any woman. One learned a thing or two about men when one listened to somebody who looked in from the outside.
On the other hand, she might have truly run out of ammunition and couldn’t reach any of the fallen men’s guns without getting cut down herself. I was betting on the former, but the latter chilled my skin when I dropped the carbine and started back toward the gunman.
“I am unarmed,” I told him. “You got us dead to rights, friend.”
“Fuck you,” he spat. “I ain’t no friend of yours.”
He lifted his Henry repeater until I was looking straight down the barrel.
The gunman half-smiled.
I said, “Boon?”
“God damn it, Splettstoesser,” she said. “Ain’t a ploy, you fool. I’m out.”
“Well,” I said, “son of a bitch.”
I never was any damned good at poker.
Chapter Forty-Two
My knife was up and out as fast as I could pull it, which wasn’t as fast as anyone in my position would have liked. I was along in years and long in the tooth, not to mention fat, exhausted, and in tremendous need of a drink. Nonetheless, up came the Arkansas toothpick, and off went the gunman’s repeater. All in all, it could not have taken more than two or three seconds, but in the thick of it I could have sworn on a crate of sealed bottles of Old Crow that it was much longer. Smoke and fire erupted from the barrel and the blade of my knife struck the man’s hand on the forestock, knocking the rifle upward as one and one half of his fingers dropped wetly downward. The gunman shrieked and his stumps spurted darkly. He didn’t exactly drop the rifle but it wasn’t doing him a lot of good with his one hand mangled and jetting blood like it was. I was so damned proud and glad of my luck that it was another fifteen, twenty seconds before the pain started to make some noise in my brain and it slowly dawned on me that I had, in fact, been shot.
“You bastard,” the man cried. “You bastard, you whore’s son.”
I ignored him for the most part and checked my shoulder, where I found my shirt was torn and the flannel soaking up the blood, and for some reason my head went light and I feared I was about to shame myself no end by fainting right then and there. It was the second time I had been shot in all my life, and both of them within a day of each other. For sure I had been living on time unearned ever since Boonsri saved my neck from the lynch party in Texas, but I had grown cocky and accustomed to continuing life without much fussing about things like injury or death. At least, not my own.
“My God,” I said to no one in particular. “I am finally gone and dead.”
“No, you are not,” Boon said, and I spun round to find the gunman turning in tandem with me so that we both faced her. She had emerged from her hidey place and found a cap and ball revolver, which she shoved hard into the gunman’s belly. “But you are.”
The pistol barked and the man’s shirt caught fire, the flames crawling quickly over his trunk. He dropped the repeater, clawing madly at himself with half a mind on the bullet in his gut and the other half on the fact that he was aflame. The fire died out soon enough, but what remained was blackened skin and a deep, seeping hole in the center of his belly that spelled a slow, agonizing death.
“You fucking witch,” he spat at Boon. “You have gutshot me.”
Instead of answering him, Boon just pushed him over. The gunman collapsed onto his side with a low yowl. She then approached me, roughly handled my shoulder for a closer look, and said, “You’ll live.”
“I been shot twice,” I said.
“This one’s just a graze. Quit your bellyaching and let’s get in that mine.”
She bent at the waist and snatched up the gutshot man’s rifle from his trembling, half-ruined hands.
“The mine?”
“That’s where he went,” she said, pressing the rifle into my hands. “Where he took her.”
“I didn’t see.”
“I saw.”
“The mine,” I said.
“The mine.”
“I don’t know nothing about mines.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s honest work.”
“Fair true,” I said. “You ’spect it opens up somewhere else?”
“Reckon we’ll find out.”
I nodded, reckoning the same. We made for the mine, and the man on the ground reached out to snatch at Boon’s foot. She jerked it away but looked down at the dying man.
“You know this ain’t no way to die,” he said. “You got to take care of this.”
“You mean kill you quick.”
“Do it.”
Boon grinned.
“No.”
We went into the mine. The night had seemed warm to me, probably due to the fire and the action, but only a few feet into the mouth of the mine it got cold. The timbers bracing the opening and the walls and ceiling, lit dimly by campfire and moonlight, looked like they were so much a part of the rock that they’d grown there like that a hundred thousand years ago. Iron and steel tracks started up a little further in, and I realized they probably kept going a ways out, only time and disuse had blown them over with dust and scrub. There was no telling how much ore they’d cut out of this hole, but it sure hadn’t done anything for making a man like Arthur Stanley worth half a damn. I had no illusions about either Boon or me being particularly good. Stanley, though, was pure damned evil through and through. Slaver, flesh peddler, killer. Worst of everything, how he’d done his own flesh and blood, not to mention Boonsri’s mama. Was she truly dead and gone? Boon seemed convinced of it, though I still couldn’t see why. Mayhap blood just knew.
My mind was wandering. We hadn’t gone very far, but without light we’d never get any farther. I started to say something about it when Boon struck a lucifer, the sulphur stinging my nostrils, and touched the flame to a lamp wick.
“How’d you find that?” I said.
“Lower your God damned voice,” she whispered, “and I see better than you in the dark, which you know perfectly damn well.”
She did, that was true. Truth was my eyes were starting to go. I’d wear spectacles like some back-east dude the same day it rained rye whiskey and the trees grew cash money instead of leaves. Didn’t matter. I had Boon.
“Come on,” she said, and we continued into the tunnel.
The campfire and all of the outside world gradually shrank to a pinprick behind us until the track dipped down and we were fully swallowed up into the dead mine’s throat. While I’d given heaps of thought to how it would feel hauling wealth out of a place like that, I had never much considered the finer mechanics of the thing. As such, I had no sense of how far or how deep it would go, or of anything in front of us. The walls seeped and sweated and there was a constant, arrhythmic drip, drip, dripping all around. Step by step the air grew colder, though oppressively dank and humid. Hard to breathe.
It was an awful place to be, sinking ever deeper into the tight darkness, and every second of it the panic was rising in me that the lowdown son of a bitch might already have done something terrible to poor little Meihui.
She was, I figured, a lot like Boon in a lot of ways. The biggest of those ways was that she was one who never caught a break, never got a bit of luck or the decency of love that a lot of folks presumed human beings deserved from the start. She was a sufferer like Boon, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that meant she would become a killer like Boon, too. If she survived.
If any of us did.
“Here,” Boon said, snapping me back from my thoughts. “It splits off.”
She raised the lamp and the flickering flame illuminated the tunnel, still descending slightly into the rock, but to the left, a new drift was cut with creaking lengths of wood forming an entrance into a new unknown. We stood still and silent for a moment, just listening. Nothing. Then she moved toward the branch tunnel, peering into the shadows.
“Let’s go,” she said.
I had no idea why she chose to explore the drift. I didn’t ask. We just went, same as the miners went some twenty-odd years earlier when a new vein was detected in the quartz. They’d have pounded out the quartz, blasting deeper and deeper into the rock, to truck it out to where the camp we’d infiltrated now stood, then crushed it all to powder with an arrastra or maybe that big old stamp mill to get at the color until they bled the vein dry.
Our task wasn’t altogether that different, really. Me and Boon, we’d been bleeding veins dry for years to get to that place under the world. Mayhap if we kept on long enough, far enough, Boon would end up back where she started in Siam, town of Korat, almost like none of this had ever happened at all. We could start us a farm together, people farmed everywhere you went, with livestock and rows and rows of whatever crops grew best there. Rice, maybe. Chinese seemed crazy about rice, so maybe the Siamese did, too. Suited me fine. So long as she and I were together, I’d break my back to do it.
Only there wasn’t any farm at the end of the drift. No Siam or town of Korat. Just a bedraggled old Englishman, his face dark with dirt and golden teeth shimmering in the lamplight. He looked every bit the wraith or goblin, some terrible dweller of the darkness, even without the cocked pistol he pressed against the young girl’s side.
Meihui’s eyes bulged, wet and pleading. None of us said one word for several long, dragging seconds. When that silence was finally broken, it was Stanley, of course.
“You really are something,” he said. “Maybe you’ve got a little bit of me in you, after all. The tenacity. I don’t think your mother had that. She was a follower. Meek. Weak, really. But you’re not weak, are you, Boonsri?”
She said, “I reckon not.”
“How many of my men have you killed? Just this night alone?”
“I wasn’t counting.”
“Really something. A kind of cruelty there, I think. Admirably so.”
“You would admire cruelty,” said Boon. “I do not. I do what needs doing to get where I am going.”
“And this is where you’ve come.”
Meihui struggled a little. Stanley tightened his grasp on her, and she stopped.
“This is it,” Boon said.
“Because you believe I am your father.”
“You arguing that point?”
“I’m arguing that it takes a lot more than some seed spilled in an Oriental farm girl to make a father out of a man. You have made too much of this obsession. You are nothing to me, and I am nothing to you.”
“I’m not here for hugs and kisses.”
“Indeed not. You are here to kill me. That’s all you know, is it not? Killing. And once you have killed me, what then? Who next? You don’t really think you can just stop, do you? At your age, simply transform into a real human being? You are no human being, Boonsri. You are an animal. You’re the coyote in the chicken coop, the wolf among the herd. All this blood is natural to you but an abomination to actual people. You are something that needs be destroyed.”
Tears streamed down quiet Meihui’s face. But Boon was a rock.
She said, “I believe you may be right about that.”
“You don’t say.”
“People like you and me, we’re simply no good. Born bad. We’re like cholera. Locusts. So, let’s do it, Arthur. Let’s be destroyed.”
I didn’t quite follow her plan, and all I could squeak out was her name.
“Shut up, Edward,” she said, and she raised that old ball and cap pistol so that it was aimed at her father’s face. “Let the kid go. Just you and me. It’ll be like a duel, if you want.”
Stanley laughed.
“I don’t think there’s quite enough room in here for twenty paces and all that. And I haven’t a second. No, I don’t think that will do.”
“Coward,” Boon said.
The Englishman sort of half-shrugged and showed those grotesque golden plates in his mouth again. For the first time it occurred to me that the gold used to make them probably came from that very mine. There was something poetic about returning it to where it came from.
“There are nothing but cowards here,” Stanley said. “It’s so terribly easy for people to call one a coward when watching out for one’s own ass is the paramount instinct of all living things. That, I should suppose, is why your fat friend here escaped conscription when Arkansas joined the Confederacy. It’s certainly why I’ve done half or more of the things I’ve done in my days. How about you, Boonsri? It is your supposition that this brazen act of self-sacrifice at the eleventh hour makes you—what—brave? Surely you cannot be that stupid, or you would not have made it this far.”
“How did…,” I started to say, but Boon cut me off.
“Edward ran from conscription because he did not believe in their cause. That is not cowardice. It is scruples.”
I hadn’t the first clue what the word scruples meant at the time, but it wasn’t the time to ask. Like many things Boon had said to me over the years, it would take some years yet before every piece of the puzzle fell into place.
She took the smallest of steps forward, slightly leaning back as she did so to hide the fact of her advance. It didn’t quite work, for Stanley curled his left hand around Meihui’s jaw and squeezed, causing her to cry out.
“Do not move any closer,” he said. “It is not you I will shoot if you do.”
Boon stiffened. “Then you would die on principle. For the satisfaction of having murdered a child.”
“You would not have stolen her from me if she meant nothing to you,” he said with a sneer. “You won’t let her die. I have seen firsthand how you Orientals stick together. It is admirable, but nothing that can’t be beaten out of a whelp like this one. She’s still got some worthy years left in her, I should think.” He moved the barrel of his gun up, past her ribs and dragging it over her shoulder, until at last he poked her hard in the cheek with it. “Of course, should she have her brains blown out of her little skull first, it’s hardly as though there aren’t ten thousand more just like her.
“Or just like you, my child.”
Boon was visibly shaking, her face swathed in sweat and purpling with rage in the lamplight. I could all but see the gears turning in her skull, weighing her priorities as to concluding her lifelong vengeance or ensuring Meihui’s safety. In the meantime, I was studying the situation fair hard from my vantage point, looking for a window through which I might act and solve both problems at once. No such window opened.
Finally, she lowered her Colt. Slowly, like the second hand on a clock turning down time.
“Leather it,” Stanley said.
She did. His eyes then shot to me, as though it was the first time he’d realized I was there. He didn’t have to repeat the command. One look from Boon and I complied, laying the repeater on the cold, hard ground. She and I stood there in the near dark, deep in a dead mineshaft, our hands empty. We might as well have been naked.
Though I tried like hell not to think about it, there had been times, usually late at night when all was quiet apart from the noise inside my skull, when it occurred to me that Boon was so myopic in her thirst for this man’s blood that
she’d have cut me down without a second thought if she ever considered me an obstacle. It was not a nice thing to think, but the evidence always seemed to support it. This was what she was. This was all she was. For the most part it was why I rarely allowed my feelings for her to hurt more than necessary—after all, there wasn’t any room in her heart for anything other than this.
But there in the Handsome Frank mine, something had changed. Mayhap it already had, sometime sooner, but it was there that it first became evident. Meihui was an obstacle. One easily solved for a cold, single-minded heart. That was how poorly I’d misjudged her, my lovely Boonsri Angchuan. Perhaps she deserved it once, but no longer. Because the life and safety of that small, broken child was not worth fulfilling Boon’s life ambition. She’d leathered her iron. She had surrendered death to preserve life.
Another day, I thought to myself. She’s waited this long. We’ll just have to wait a little longer.
“Good girl,” Stanley said.
“Let go of her now,” Boon said. “Let her go and we leave you be.”
A low, throaty chuckle worked its way out of the Englishman’s mouth at that. He shook his head and said, “No, you won’t. You think I don’t know what you’ve been about all these years? Asking after me in town after town, shooting any man who stands in your way? No, Boonsri. You will never leave me be. I’ve never been sorrier to have wet my cock than I am of the times I fucked your mother. My son was no great loss, but you—Christ. I should have cut you from her belly rather than allow you to be born.”
“Stanley, God damn you,” she said, but anything more was drowned out by the roar of the shot when he squeezed the trigger.
The shaft lit up with a bright, white flash when the pistol fired, and in that tiny instant I watched as Meihui’s face contracted with fear, screwing up to shut away what was happening, and a dark jet burst from just above her left ear. The dank air filled with the cloying odor of gunpowder and the flash died as quickly as it came, and all the while Boon screamed until there was no air left in her lungs to scream anymore.
