Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

carried it out cut by horrible cut, wasn’t something I was apt to forget any time soon. And by soon, I mean to say ever in my life.

It was far and away the worst thing I’d ever seen my friend do, though not the worst she’d done, to hear her tell it. That came some years before she ever made my acquaintance, long before they tried to string me up outside Comanche. Well before I left Arkansas for good, and before she came east, by her reckoning, to look for her mother and kill her father. I never was completely sure, but the way she told it made it sound like this happened during the war, back in the sixties. I spent those years hiding out from conscription. Boon spent them getting warmed up for the road ahead.

And it took her some warming up to me to tell it—that and an equal share of the corn whiskey I’d had that night. I’d pulled the stopper by the campfire and settled in for another night of silent, solitary drinking until I passed out in my roll, but she sidled right up to me and said, “Pass that bottle here.”

She’d been kind of spooky all that day, not just quiet like she most always was, but sort of worried and always looking around from side to side like she expected a good old fashioned bushwhack. I didn’t ask, but after two or three healthy swallows from that bottle’s neck, she volunteered.

“March the fifth,” she said, even though it wasn’t but the third then. I elected not to correct her. “Puts me in mind of some black things, since you’re wondering.”

“Who says I’m wondering?” I said.

“Don’t never play any poker, Edward. You ain’t got the right face for it.”

I never did, but I took her point. Most Germans had a good market on the stone-face routine, or so I always heard it said, but somehow, I missed that particular trait when the rest of them got passed on down to me. Boon could read me like a book and it didn’t take that much practice.

“Some heavy fighting in Georgia, Tennessee around then, I reckon,” she went on. “Of course, I didn’t know about it then. I hardly even knew there was a war on at all. I was still in California, pressing big shirts for fat white men who more often n’ not figured I came with the price of the laundering. They’d call you a dirty yellow chink in the light of day and try to get a hand up your skirt soon as the sun was down. Men are a bad sort anyway you cut it—white men, ’specially—but they get badder in the dark.”

She confiscated the bottle again to drink some more and let me stew on what she’d said. Boon always had an endless variety of choice words about men, but I never took it personal. Way I figured, she wasn’t wrong. Still, any time she got onto things like that and gave me a little knowing look, a sort of you-know-what-I’m-jawing-about look, I did exactly what she wanted me to do, which was remember all the times I wasn’t altogether jake myself when it came to certain sorts of people. She did that then, by the campfire that night, and I shifted uncomfortably on my roll.

Men aren’t nothing but trash, Boon liked to say. She said it again then, and I nodded.

“There was this one fellow I’m not like to forget,” she said. “Not in a century of Sundays, I won’t. Name of Percy Watkins. Son of a forty-niner, but one of the rare ones that actually found his color, so Percy sat high on the hog. Shit, he was a hog. Never wore the same collar two days in a row, which I knew damn well since I was the one who boiled and starched them. Most days it was a Negro girl brought in his laundry, some poor creature talked less than me and looked for all God’s green earth like she was defeated the day she was born and she knew it. For Mister Watkins, she’d say. Just them three words, every time, and she’d take the ticket and leave. For Mister Watkins. Christ. I swear she winced when she said it, too.

“Once in a while, the fat man came in his own self. Usually on Fridays, though I can’t say why. Mayhap he gave the girl Fridays off. Twice, maybe three times a month, his breath coming in a full minute in front of him, smelling like a still exploded right next to a cigar factory. Now, this is twenty-five, thirty times he’s done this already, you understand? And still he comes in with a slobbery grin and pulling the skin away from his eyes, says China girl, velly pretty, velly pretty. I tell him I come from Siam and I talk American just as good as he does, just like I did every God damn time he played that fool act on me. God Almighty, Edward, I had some kind of hate in me for that man.

“You yellow bitch, he says to me next. Do you know who I am? I told him his own name to show him I did, and I asked him had he forgot it. Old Percy was getting awful red by then, sweating up a storm, so the other girl up front there, she hurried off to the back with the rest of the family what ran the laundry. Six of them, as I recall, and they all lived back there, too. The Huang family. Weren’t but sheets dividing it into rooms, but I’ll burn a thousand lifetimes in hell if they weren’t the cleanest, smoothest sheets you ever saw, boy.

“The Huangs didn’t fool around with big men like Percy Watkins. There wasn’t any percentage in it. You kept your head down and did what was expected of you, and you got through the day most of the time.