Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

The big men never let you forget you weren’t like them, and most of the little ones didn’t, neither. You had your place and you stayed in it, by God, if you knew what was good for you. And that went even when they called you a yellow bitch. That went even when they put their big, tobacco-stained hands on you and insisted that you apologize. That’s what Percy did then, and I did not much care for it.

“Tell me you’re solly, he said. Say solly, solly, China girl. Tell me you’re solly or I’ll sweep you off them bound feet and make you solly.

“Well, Edward, I have to tell you that I did not take kindly to these words.”

I didn’t expect she would have. At the time, we had known one another for less than one year, but there had been some words here and there. They were, I was sad to recognize, to be expected. But never had I witnessed any man take the time and trouble to speak quite so horribly to Boonsri. And yet I knew her well enough, when she was telling me her story, to understand that things would not have gotten better from there.

“What did you do?” I said, knowing too well the answer would haunt me once she told me.

“I put a pair of shears in his neck, opened him from belly to throat, and unmanned him,” she said. “The first two were easy, but a man’s private and personal organ is harder to cut through than you’d think. That last bit took more work than I expected.”

She worked this around in her mind for a moment, remembering the effort, I suppose. It was a thing of instinct that I crushed my thighs together and turned slightly away from her.

“Did you run?” I said.

“I didn’t go back to the Huangs,” she said. “But I didn’t leave San Francisco, either. I knew I could hide well enough. We Orientals all look alike, you know.”

She said this with a sorrowful, sardonic smile, and I would swear before the Throne of God that there were tears in her eyes. It was the first time I ever saw such emotion on her, and though not the last, it was rarer than hen’s teeth.

“He was the first man I ever killed,” Boon said. “I could have killed a hundred before him, some of them worse than Percy Watkins by a mile, but it never happened ’til him. I always wondered why.” She was really crying then. Not loud, not blubbering or anything. But the tears were streaming like brooks. “I always wondered about that.”

Hand on a Bible, I was crying, too. Before that night, I never thought for a minute that killing meant any more to Boonsri Angchuan than stepping on a cockroach meant to anybody else. I figured her for a stone-cold murderess, if I’m to be honest about it. Mad? I was sure of that, too. So how came you to keep riding with her, Splettstoesser?

I’ll get to that.

Watching her back, bouncing on that palomino with Bartholomew Dejasu bouncing in the same rhythm behind her, I thought about Percy Watkins and his split belly, his severed cock, his cruelty and his death and Boon’s tears about it so many years later. Did she recollect Percy’s organ when she removed the judge’s head? Would she cry someday about Selwyn Dejasu, also? I wasn’t with her every hour of the day and night. Perhaps she skulked off to weep away the dead, the killed, whenever she had a private moment to do so. I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.

That night, we made a cold camp that did not involve any storytelling or spilling of the heart’s blood. Just dead quiet in the pitch of night, each of us in his and her bedrolls, Boon having relieved poor Pim of Barry Dejasu’s weight by tossing the corpse to the cold, hard ground while we slept. I doubt his face was farther than five feet from mine while I lay there, pretending like I was gone to dreams of better days behind or ahead. In fact, I stayed awake most of the night, only nodding off when time took its toll. And when I did dream, I dreamed of Percy Watkins, Judge Selwyn Dejasu, and Boon’s tears over my own lonesome grave.

Chapter Fourteen

That this time we only rode into town with one corpse between the two of us, as opposed to the two that we brought into Red Foot, seemed a blessing. Boon no longer had the paper on Dejasu to prove her rightful possession of the corpse, but assuming Willocks had managed to retain his office for the handful of days we’d been gone, I did not anticipate any major problems to trip us up on that account.

My optimism proved fantastical. Or at least plumb stupid.

Marshal Willocks was, in fact, still a town marshal, and he did, also in point of fact, maintain his desk and hat-stand in a musty little room right down the road from the Darling barber shop where first we made that esteemed gentleman’s acquaintance. He was not, however, in an obliging mood when Boon and I arrived to darken his doorstep and collect our promised reward. Nor was he alone.

With Willocks, stuffed tightly in the hot little office, were three other men, all of them dour-faced, fat, and decked out in black suits like preachers or mourners. Willocks sat behind his desk, but the three fat men rose from their chairs when we came in. No one said anything for the best part of a minute. Everyone looked to Willocks. It was his show, I guessed.

“These gentlemen are Darling’s aldermen,” the marshal said. He rattled off their names, which I immediately forgot. It didn’t seem like the kind of information worth storing in my skull for later use. “Built this town from next to nothing.”

“Not next to nothing,” one of the aldermen corrected him. “Nothing a’tall.”

“All right, then,” Willocks said. “Nothing