Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

when I heard him wail in anger and pain, I realized that it was Thomas Song. The poor fool had sprung into action to save my hide, and in the process got most of the preacher’s makeshift weapon stuck between his ribs.

Thomas, in his buckskin coat and store-bought trousers, shiny rattlesnake-skin boots and hair like a magpie’s wing, crumpled to the floor as though all his bones had turned to ash. The whole front of him was awash with blood, and his smooth, boyish face puckered into a twisted mask of agony. I had not known him quite long enough to consider him a great friend, but I liked Nayawsa’ a good deal more than most men I’d ever met. And it was not as though white men carrying Bibles hadn’t caused his people enough grief already.

I guess I saw red. Looking back, it seems as though I really, literally did—that the whole of the saloon and everything in it turned the same glassy, dark red as the blood pulsing out of Thomas Song’s chest. It was a saying I’d heard plenty before but it never occurred to me that there was any truth in it. Red, red, red.

And slow. In those days you’d always hear tell of gunfighters, faster than lightning to the man looking on and yet to them it all happened slow as molasses. I was no gunfighter and I had no gun, but it was for sure like that. I could see the other men rising from their chairs and stools, the lookout spinning ’round up front by the doors, 12-gauge in his hands, a scatter of hats and coats and boots, all of it slowed down to a crawl around me. But me? I was fast.

So fast I hardly knew what I was doing until it was done. And what I did was yank that sticker out of Thomas’s ribs and jam it as hard as I could right into that crazy son of a bitch’s mouth. When I let go of the hilt, my hand was tacky with blood and Red Chester Stamp was trying to scream with that chisel stuck clean through the back of his neck. The preacher dropped down, smashing the small of his back against a chair and breaking it on his way to the floor. He twitched and squirmed like he was all filled through with the Holy Spirit and dancing to beat the Dutch. The blood kept coming out of him, too—more blood than I’d ever reckoned a single man could keep in his body until that night. So much damned blood I doubt they ever got it all off of that floor.

And still that cruel, wild bastard did not die. Not right then, anyway. A couple of men carried Thomas out of the place to a sawbones up the street, but he was dead by the time they reached the doc’s front door. Red Chester Stamp, on the other hand, hung on for another two and a half days, which I spent sitting in the Bastrop city jail awaiting the arrival of a judge from Austin, who aimed to hold a preliminary hearing to figure it all out. I’d have run once that red mist cleared away in the saloon, but the lookout had that scattergun on me before I knew up from down.

It was the judge who informed me of Stamp’s passing, to which I said, “I am sore sorry I could not have watched him die.”

“I expect I understand how you feel,” the judge said. “And given the circumstances, which was witnessed by a fair half of the men in this town, I can’t say as you committed any crime necessitating further inquiry, never you mind punishment or recompense.”

I thought that amounted to a lot of fancy words and asked the judge was I free to go, and he agreed that I was. Boon had been visiting me on the regular the entire time they had me sitting in that little cell—which was a damn sight nicer than the ones they had in Revelation, New Mexico—and she was there when the judge from Austin made his last appearance in my life. She’d heard the whole story as I explained it to the city marshal first and the judge second, and she’d heard a passel of witnesses come through the office upstairs to corroborate every word I’d said. So, when at last we were riding away from that place on what we reckoned, incorrectly, was our way to Wyoming, she asked me if I’d ever killed a man with a tool like that before.

“No,” I told her. “I have not.”

It was only those two years and some days later, on the train through the Southern Rockies to the Golden Gate of San Francisco, that she learned Red Chester Stamp was in fact the first man I’d ever killed at all.

“Hell’s bells,” she said to that. “Way it sounded, I had you made for a seasoned killer even then.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I just couldn’t stand what had been done to my friend.”

“Good to have a friend like that,” Boon said. I could have sworn she smiled a little, or almost.

“Glad you think so, Boon. I’m sure glad.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In the three years I’d spent with Boon, from my near-death outside Goliad to our journey by train to the westernmost points of the continent, she never once came within shouting distance of her mother, her father, or anyone who could be reliably said to have known them. Hers was a herky-jerky quest, given to mount up and gallop after the faintest rumor or lie. And me, of course, along for the ride. I did not mind it one whit. But I could tell she was growing tired. More tired than I had ever seen her or would have believed possible for a wildcat like Boonsri Angchuan.

“Texas took too long,” she said, slumped against the window with her hat perched over her eyes. The red feather bounced against the