by Ed Kurtz
She rode off to parts unknown to me, taking Meihui’s body with her, and in the years that followed I never did achieve much on my own apart from drifting from one stop in the trail to the next, drinking a hell of a lot of rotgut firewater, and waiting out the days; some of them in jail cells, most of them under the stars instead of a roof. I never did make it to Minnesota like I planned, but I came back to the borderland where last I’d seen Boon, a few years earlier, in a place a lot like the one where I first saw Lily. Half the time I was so deep in my cups I didn’t even know which side of the border I was on, which happened to be the case in Sahuarita that spring in 1891. For the most part, all evidence pointed toward it being on the Mexico side of the line, what with all that adobe and the heat and, naturally, the Mexicans. But the bartender swore on the vile popskull he so proudly served that I remained in the good old United States, or at least her territories, and I didn’t much care one way or the other anyway, so I bought myself another shot and dumped it down my gullet before I had time to think twice about it.
By then, Lily was already seated no more than ten feet away from me, on the far side of the bar by the back wall, and I would never paid her much mind at all had she not pulled a man’s pocket watch from her coat pocket to check the time. I did not know her, but I knew the watch. It was Boon’s, all right, by way of a dumbass cowboy she’d had to blow out of his saddle half a day’s ride south of the former town of Red Foot, Texas. Boon used to take the damn thing out so often I came to be mighty familiar with it, so when I spied the watch in Lily’s hand, I was fit to drop right off the stool upon which I was perched.
“Excuse me, señorita,” I croaked at her, “but if I don’t miss my guess, that there watch of yours is in fact the property of a friend of mine.”
My voice sounded slow and labored in my ears, not at all the way I’d intended the words I spoke. A man never did realize just how drunk he was until he had to put a sentence together after a passel of drinks. I was in for a real skullbender, but for the time being I was solely concerned with the provenance of the señorita’s timepiece.
Lily said, “Leave me alone, gringo.” She didn’t so much as look at me when she said it, her dark hair hanging like a veil over her narrow face. For half a second, I could have been buffaloed into thinking it was Boonsri her own self sitting there across from me.
“I don’t reckon I made myself clear,” I said to that, but before I could clarify, she closed the gap between us with two broad strides and unsheathed a Bowie knife at her hip, the blade of which kissed my throat.
“I said, leave me alone,” she hissed.
The barman muttered something in Spanish and waddled away from us. Now that we had some privacy, I gave her a lopsided smile and tried not to swallow, afraid that my Adam’s apple would bob against the blade and open my neck.
“I hear you,” I said in a sort of careful whisper. “It’s only that your watch surely does put me in mind of my friend, Boon.”
Her eyes narrowed, boring into mine, and the knife came away from my throat an inch or two; still close enough to cut, but allowing me to speak a little more comfortably if need be.
“What friend was that again?” she said after a deep breath, probably to calm herself.
“Boon Angchuan. I was with her when she got it, matter of fact. ’Course, might could be I am sore mistaken. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
I could see her jaw twitch, real up-close like, and though her eyes kept staring into mine, I shifted my gaze back to that knife. My mouth had a terrible bad habit of getting me in scrapes and tights, even with my own friends, and I was not yet convinced this was not one of them.
“I will be fucked,” Lily said then, her south-of-the-border accent syrupy and musical. “You are Edward.”
“Always have been,” I said. “Edward Splettstoesser is my name, but I do not expect you to try that out for yourself.”
“The fat man from Arkansas,” she said then with something like a small laugh, and the knife went back where it belonged, in the sheath at her hip. I reckoned myself to have lost ten or fifteen pounds in all my wandering since my glory days with Boon, but I let it go. Instead, I motioned for the bartender to return to us from where he hid by the front door, one hand twitching fair close to a scattergun propped up in the corner.
“No need for that, amigo,” I told him. “We’re all friends, now.”
“Sure,” he said, looking the two of us over. “Friends.”
With a shrug, he returned to the bar and set to pouring out two stiff shots of whiskey, one for me, and one for—
“Lily Contreras,” she said, offering a small, calloused hand.
I shook it, and before we were done with the handshaking, she swallowed her shot with one swift motion of her other hand. She was damn fast with those hands, I had to give her that. Almost as fast as Boon.
She released my hand, and I sipped my whiskey, and Lily just kind of gawked at the man she’d heard tell about but never seen, until now. I wondered what on earth my long-since vanished friend had told her about me, but a great deal more than that, I wanted to know what Boon had been up to. How did Lily know her and what had they been doing in one another’s company? As a first step toward finding out, I asked her.
She said, “Chile’s where it started. Guess you know they got a war on down there.”
I didn’t, but I kept my own counsel, eager for her to continue. Chile? I wasn’t even altogether sure where that was on the map, apart from south. But I did vaguely recall Boon mentioning it, now that I was thinking on it. Some years had come and gone since then, too, but I didn’t mention that just yet. I only wanted to listen—for once.
“Boon only ever went down there looking for Ernesto Díaz,” Lily told me, “but damned if she didn’t get swept up in all that ugliness just for getting too close to it. We both of us did.”
“Who’s Ernesto Díaz?” I asked her.
She explained.
Chapter One
Neither of us was there when it all started. I got there first, Boon maybe six or eight months later. By then, in ’81, the war was raging between Chile on the one side and Bolivia and Peru on the other. They killed each other on the ground and out on the sea, all over borders and bat shit, and that’s no lie. Nitrate deposits in the old región de la Araucanía they all of them wanted, fertilizer and gunpowder and like that. There was more to it than that, but not really all that much more. For my part, I just tried to stay out of it. Boon did, too. We had each reckoned by sticking to the south and keeping close to the coast, there would be no chance of falling afoul of any bloodshed. We were wrong.
Traiguén was a long way from the war, but another one was just cooling its heels down in la Araucanía and about to heat up again, and fast. The Angol fort outside the village was burning by September, and the Mapuche were swarming before anyone knew who set the fires. I was in the village when it happened, looking for something to do that might put a few centavos in my pocket so I could have a hot meal for once.
A group of men had gathered in front of a taberna, drunk as lords, and started shouting, “Huasa, huasa!” They thought it was pretty damn funny, a small woman like me looking for work usually suited for a man, never mind that I typically dressed like one, too. I didn’t like being laughed at, so I picked up a good-sized rock from the ground and threw it at them. Only one got hit, but he dropped like a turd from a cow’s ass and his friends got plenty mad about it. There wasn’t but ten feet between us and closing fast when the screaming started and the guns got to popping in every direction.
I did not have a gun, so I ran.
Blue-tunicked soldiers from the smoking fort hurried into the fray, shooting their rifles indiscriminately with their slouching kepi hats bouncing on their heads, and for a brief moment I worried that I might look like an Indian to them from behind. Or close enough to take a bullet in the back and let God sort it out when the smoke cleared. Either way, I ducked and crouched as well as I could while still running f
rom one street to the next, careening into alleys between the adobe shops and cafes whenever I saw the glint of metal barrels.
I had no stake in the matter, myself. I knew little to nothing about the Mapuche, other than the typical conflict all indigenous people have with colonialists and their descendants. The Mapuche wanted la Araucanía, where they had always been, and the Chileans wanted to take it away from them. Of the soldiers, I knew considerably more, so probably I liked them less. For the time being, however, I could not say with any conviction that I supported one side over the other; both were shooting, and I did not wish to be anyplace near either of them. Not without something to shoot back, anyway.
Por Dios, I wasn’t even supposed to be there—I was Mexicana, and the only reason I wasn’t five thousand miles north of there at that particular moment was my God damned husband, may he burn in hell forever. If I hadn’t stuck that dagger in his heart back in Chihuahua, I would never have set foot in Chile, never mind found myself in the middle of a shooting war that had absolutely nothing to do with me.
Ángel was surprisingly easy to kill, when it came right down to it. But this did not embolden me against however many dozens of Indians and soldiers were pouring into Traiguén, making it harder and harder for me to find a place to run, much less hide.
Around and behind a church, past the small cemetery and across the plaza, I spied a livery and stables with no one watching the horses. Escape was paramount on my mind, so I risked the sprint across the plaza, where more than a few bullets fried the air, and all but dove at the ground when I reached the nearest stall. Without bothering to peer in at the horse inside, I threw open the gate and prepared to mount, forgoing all saddle and tack in my hurry to get the hell out of that village. Instead, the barrel of a huge Colt pistol stopped me cold.
It is hard to make out identifying features of a person standing in the shadows of a stable stall, but particularly so when that person is aiming a gun just inches from your face. To accurately study a face, one must first take her eyes away from the gun, but the eyes are unwilling. So, I stared fair hard at that barrel with one eye, and I tried to get something approaching a look at that gunman’s face with the other. I did not suppose it much mattered what he looked like in the end, only whether or not he intended to squeeze that trigger.
“Por favor,” I said, “no me mates.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” came the voice in English. “But you’re going to have to steal another horse.”
The voice belonged not to a man, but a woman. She nudged me in the chest with the barrel of her Colt, as if to punctuate her statement, and then gestured with her chin for me to go.
“I’m not stealing anything,” I told her in my own better-than-fair English. “I’m running from the bullets.”
“That’s smart,” she said, for all intents and purposes unsurprised that I understood her language. “They tend to kill people.”
With that, she holstered her weapon and stepped forward, further into the light. Her big brown eyes almost sparkled when the sunlight reflected in them, and I marveled at the grit of this strange woman.
“Mapuche?” I wondered aloud. She sure as shit could have passed for it.
“No,” she said, “but I’m on their side, for what it’s worth. Soldiers executed Domingo Melín and his family on their way to the fort up yonder to try him on some trumped-up horse theft bullshit.”
“I thought there was a truce.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Supposed to be. I reckon those troops were jealous they didn’t get to kill Peruvians or Bolivians, so they were going to kill somebody, by God.”
“Maldita sea,” I cursed.
The woman nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”
Taking a blanket from the wall, she folded it in half and draped it over the beast’s back before turning back for the saddle. Once she did up the cinch straps, she rolled her neck and glanced back at me.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Liliana Contreras,” I answered. “Lily.”
“You don’t sound Chilean.”
“Mexican,” I said, which was mostly true.
“Seems to me today ain’t the first time you got to running.” I didn’t say anything to that. She’d already figured it out and wasn’t asking me to clarify. “You can ride?”
“I can ride.”
“There’s a blood bay in the next stall. Saddle him.”
I still thought she looked Mapuche, but she was dressed like an American vaquera, a Western cowboy or gunslinger, and her accent was undoubtedly Americana, as well. But why was there an American woman who looked like an Indian in Traiguén, of all places, stealing some villager’s horse and commanding me to do the same?
“Cómo te llama?” I said. “What’s your name, gringa?”
“Boon,” she told me, and she stepped up into the saddle. I wasn’t sure I heard her right, but I nodded in reply and got the gate back open so that she could get out and I could get moving with the blood bay.
The gunfire was more sporadic than it had been when the fighting broke out, but there was still plenty of shouting and no small number of guns firing in the distance as well as dangerously close by. Oily black smoke choked the air and turned the midday sky an evil reddish-brown, pouring in tendrils from the blazing fort. The bay I was stealing snorted and stamped his hooves once he smelled the smoke, though he was already plenty spooked by the pop, pop, popping of rifles on three sides of us. Ahead and to the left, at the mouth of an alley, I saw two Mapuche men pull a blue-uniformed officer to the dust, where one of them cut his throat from ear to ear, the blood washing over the soldier’s chest like a dark crimson bib. Not twenty feet away from that horror, a line of soldiers—boys, mostly, barely starting to shave—opened fire with their brand-new breech-loaders into a crowd of fleeing Indians, wounding most of them and killing three or four instantly.
Back-shooters. I grunted at the indignity of it all.
It was absolute madness, a nightmare come to life, and there was nothing more I wanted in all the world than to get as far away from it as possible. Boon had the same idea, and she gigged her black with a growled command, wheeling the mount around and falling into a steady lope east, toward the distant, white-tipped mountains looming there.
I followed suit, my eyes spilling tears down my cheeks from the smoke and the terror, and heeled the bay’s ribs to catch up. I never even questioned why it was I trusted in this gringa, a complete stranger to me, when once I was set on that horse I could have ridden in any direction I wanted. I just did.
Because that, I would discover soon enough, was Boon.
