Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“Okay,” is what I said.

She took the tall drover, the blond lad with the picture of his mother in his pocket watch. I took the fat one, which meant all the more work for me, loading his enormous bulk onto the black mare he’d ridden to his death. That most of his face had passed through the back of his skull led to a certain degree of gagging and spitting from me, but I was loath to complain to an already riled Boon. Once she got the tall one tossed up and over his own saddle, she was already taking another long and quiet moment to weep and mourn. I was damned if I understood, but twice-damned to say a word sideways about it, which I didn’t.

I just took up the fat man’s reins to lead his mount and waited on Boon to lead our caravan of two living and two dead north, to Red Foot.

Which was quite precisely the last place we should ever have gone.

Chapter Eight

The horizon was an eerie bruise-purple as the night-time lights of Red Foot became visible in the middle distance. I led a black horse with an overweight corpse draped over the saddle. Boon held the reins of the tall drover’s paint with him slung over its back. I didn’t much like riding into a strange town with as many dead people as live ones in my party. But that’s how it was.

The oil lamps on the main street stunk, but not as much as the people. If there was one bathtub in all of Red Foot, nobody knew about it. It wasn’t exactly a cow town, but it wasn’t within a fair piece from any railhead, either. Just a filthy hole in the ground with a name and more saloons than anything else. The biggest of these was dead in the middle of town, two stories with rooms to rent and vaguely feminine company to rent along with them. The largest saloon in Red Foot was called the Red Foot. We hitched up in front of it and Boon dismounted, her face a mask of weariness. She looked up and down the street.

“You seen anything resembling law around here?” she said.

I’d seen three other saloons, a general store with a sign that read only WERES (which I took to mean “wares”), an undertaker, a shuttered printer with the roof half stove in, a tannery and brine pit filled with bones and offal but otherwise long beyond use, and the livery stable where we came in. But no law in evidence. In fact, beyond the main drag and a few scattered shacks on the outskirts, there was nothing at all left of Red Foot. I said as much.

“Some jasper in this place might know about it,” I suggested.

“Mayhap you just want to take a look at the merchandise they got.”

“If the women ain’t any cleaner than the men, I’d rather not get their lice on me,” I said. “But I would be more than happy to see what’s stocked behind the bar.”

“I’d imagine so,” Boon said. “It’s been a while now. I can’t say as I’m not surprised you aren’t shaking all over like a cricket on a skillet.”

That she was back to sniping at me seemed a good sign. She hadn’t been much for palavering since we loaded up the corpses. I guessed she was still thinking about the cowboys’ mothers. I still couldn’t get a hold on that in my mind, but I was just smart enough to keep my chuck-hole shut about it. There wasn’t any sense in arguing with a brick wall, and this brick wall in particular had a sharp tongue and quick draw.

Our horses dunked their muzzles into a community trough full of murky rainwater, and I hoped they had one inside that was full of whiskey. They didn’t. Just the regular assortment of bottles one would expect, a great many of them with the labels torn off so as to not disappoint the paying customer when they discovered they weren’t drinking whatever used to be glued there. Mine was a powerful thirst and I was not feeling particular. I’d have hung my hat on the stand by the batwing doors on the way in if I still had one, but all the same I went straight for the bar, where I said, “Whiskey and a beer.”

The public house, such as it was, was ill-lit in the setting sun, none of the lamps inside having been touched by a match. Still, I could make out the few patrons—grubby Texans in mud-caked boots and poorly repaired homespun breeches—and a pair of crib girls lounging lazily by a silent piano missing all of its black keys, waiting for their marks to come to them. Much more importantly, I could see the bar.

The barman—fat, with a drooping red mustache that cast a sad pallor to his otherwise rosy face—reached for a bottle on the shelf behind him, and that was when I first took notice of the foot.

Here I’d thought some dimwitted son of a bitch couldn’t think up a name for his saloon, so he named it after the town. This was not so. The town was named for the saloon, and the saloon was named for the actual red foot mounted on a square of polished oak behind the bar. The severed appendage was withered, shrunken and wrinkled by age and its general state of decease, but otherwise in startlingly good condition given the eulogy engraved by hand underneath its fallen arch.

THE FINAL EARTHLY REMAINS OF

MAYNARD FRANCISCO BOULLIETTE

RED FOOT’S FIRST SENTENCE SERVED

BUT NOT ITS LAST

July 5, 1866

“Maynard Francisco Boulliette,” I read aloud. “That’s three different kinds of names for just one man.”

“More’n he deserved,” said the barman. He sneered at the foot as he said it. “Turkey buzzards got their fill of the mean old bastard, though. That there foot was all they left when they couldn’t eat another bite.”

“Bones, too?”