Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

glass, outside of which the Red Butte rose crimson from the Coconino Plateau, dark and imperious against the violet haze of the rising sun. We’d been in the Arizona Territory two days by then, sleeping in fits and starts on the hard, rough benches as passengers boarded and disembarked, played cards and sang hymns and occasionally argued about things happening in places they’d never see. “Years wasted. Years, by Christ.”

“You got me out of it,” I said.

She smiled wanly beneath the brim of her hat.

“I got you,” she said, and the smile melted away. “A lot of death, too. It took a lot of death just to get us this far.”

“Not for no reason,” I said.

“Mayhap I’m starting to forget the reason.”

“Your ma and pa,” I offered stupidly.

“Sure, Edward,” Boon said. “I know.”

“We’ll find her,” I said. “You will. Both of them.”

“Could be. And then what? Who will she be when I see her? Who have I become? Do you know I haven’t ever thought that far ahead, Edward? To one damned second after I find them—either of them?”

“Well, with him, it’s easier to reckon.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Dead. But that ain’t the end of it. That ain’t ever the end of it.”

“No, I guess it ain’t.”

“You believe in Heaven and Hell?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I don’t. Doesn’t really add up much to me.”

“Just this, then.”

I shrugged.

“I expect so.”

“What the hell for?”

She sat up a little, let the hat slide back to reveal her big brown eyes to me. They were as bright as ever, but the skin around them was dark and tight.

I said, “Does everything got to have a reason?”

“Be easier.”

“Would.”

“But it don’t.”

“Not always.”

“I’m tired, Edward.”

“I know, Boon.”

She slid back down, and so did her hat, and in a matter of minutes, she was asleep. I stayed awake a good long while after that, watching the world grow dark and listening to some of the other passengers snore. Mostly I thought about how tired Boon was, and how close we seemed to be getting to the end—and more than any of that, what good any of this was. Or had ever been.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The rest of the journey was long, but uneventful. Almost as soon as we crossed into California, we moved north, up the length of the state, to Sacramento City, where we disembarked, changed trains, and made the relatively short jaunt down to San Francisco and its notorious Barbary Coast.

I didn’t hear so much about it anymore, not like everyone did from New York to New Orleans back in the old days, the gold days. I’d sure met and known more than a few hopefuls making their way out there, folks who took as an article of faith the stories about just bending down to pick the wealth right off the ground. Most never did find any color out there, and a hell of a big heap of them wasted away, destitute and ruined, never to come home again. Even those few that did get their hands on a little of that Californy glory tended not to know what to do with it; they’d ride their mules back into the city and spend it all up in a matter of weeks or even days. Fine food, silk clothes, fallen women, and when it was all over they had nothing left but the tales to tell at the next rendezvous of other happily ruined mountain men.

Hell, I’d been sore tempted to make the trip myself, once upon a time, but I wasn’t hardly grown yet in forty-nine and yet to see the world outside of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I might still have absquatulated with my grandpappy’s roan in the dead of night had he not scared me off the notion with stories of gangs and desperadoes, men from faraway places like Chile and Australia who would as soon cut your throat as say howdy to you. Your Golden Gate is the mouth of hell, boy. At the tender age of fifteen, mayhap sixteen, I was like to take the old man at his word. I could not help but ponder what he would have thought now, all those years later, as I stepped down onto the filthy platform at Petaluma among the stinking miners, chattering Chilenos, inebriated sailors, pig-tailed Celestials, and pink-bosomed Angelicas all hustling for the ferry at Haystack Landing for San Francisco, by way of the bay.

There were so many places that Boon and I had come to, where the locals stopped and stared at the unlikeliest pair they ever did see in their sheltered little lives. Here, no one paid us the slightest bit of mind. We were wonderfully invisible, or damned near to it—at least until we came to check on that crib house the late Marshal Willocks divulged. Crammed onto the ferry like so many cattle in a pen, I quietly reminded her of what was most likely going to be one hell of a welcoming reception, should we elect to just waltz right up to the front door.

“Pinkertons would be my guess,” she said, failing to keep her voice low as I had. She came across utterly unconcerned, if not exactly confident. I was nervous as all hell.

Our ferry arrived, after a while, at a large seawall constructed over filled-in mudflats on the eastern waterfront of the San Francisco Bay. Here, amongst so many whores and macks, pickpockets and sneak-thieves, zealots, gunmen, knifemen, and men who could murder with their bare hands and very likely did, we disembarked and at last entered that city’s famous Barbary Coast.

San Francisco was a city, indeed, and though I was not so much a rube that I had never seen such a crush of humanity and buildings, this one was dirtier, more debauched, and plain smellier than any I’d ever seen. For a time, I wondered if the terrible mingling of odors was the ocean, but it was not. The waters were not at all so polluted as the people who poured off of