Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

The sky was steel-gray despite the relatively early hour, and the air was both chilly and damp. Small boys scuttled beneath the rickety wharves, banging traps with knobby stobs to torment the rats they’d caught. Boon led the way, not bothering to wait for me as she went boldly forth into a narrow alley with mucky water almost as high as our ankles stagnant on the ground. An old man, his face an impenetrable network of deep lines and blue veins framed top and bottom with tobacco-stained white hair, either slept in the muck or had died in it. I couldn’t tell which. Boon paid him no attention. I struggled to keep up with her.

“Stay close,” she said. “Stay awake. You’re as like to get stuck with a knife as looked at here.”

Judging by some of the cold, hard stares I was getting from beady-eyed locals lurching or lounging around the mouth of the alley, I believed her. So, too, I felt like I was beginning to get a much clearer idea of how Boon got so hardened than I ever had before. This was surely a place that hardened people, if they meant to survive it.

“We need a room,” she said when we emerged onto Davis Street. “Here, in Sydney-Town.”

“Sydney-Town?”

“I don’t know if it’s still called that. Used to be. It’s rough, but we’ll be more noticed coming and going than if we just stay here.”

“Okay,” I said. “A room. And then what?”

“Then we go shopping,” Boon said.

The room, which for once we shared for reasons of security, was in the old St. Francis Hotel on Grand Avenue. As for the shopping, Boon collected me and took us both to an auction house called The Grand Eastern, a curious building with no windows, no doors, just a wide-open space like an urban barn wherein a scrubby man in a ruffled shirt presided over a pulpit like a pastor. Behind him, shelves were stacked and stuffed with most every imaginable good from floor to ceiling. Men shouted over one another to be heard by the auctioneer at the pulpit, scrambling over one another to get their hands on what they wanted for the best possible price. It was pell-mell pandemonium, and the prices were so high I could have fainted from shock.

“Boon,” I said, “we haven’t much money left.”

She smirked and said, “The Barbary Coast is a place where you can both spend and make money in quantities greater than you ever saw. Settle your nerves, Edward.”

I stayed quiet, but my nerves kept on jangling.

Boon shouted and haggled with the best of them, snaking her way through the throng to the front, where she raised and dropped her hands as if in some secret code. I stayed in the back, watching with puzzled interest as she procured one item after another: a ruffled shirt much like the one the auctioneer wore, boiled collars, a maroon silk waistcoat and matching trousers, black pointed shoes, a plug hat, ornately embroidered slippers, a long silken robe with wide sleeves, an ornamental hair pin adorned with blue and pink flowers. I did not know what to think or expect, but if I’d thought she aimed to buy victuals, liquor, and ammunition, I for sure came away the more confused for it.

A coolie climbed after the goods on a rolling ladder, and once they were all purchased, he wrapped them one by one with brown paper and twine. Boon carried the tower of packages back to me and unloaded them all into my arms.

“And now?” I said.

“Back to the hotel,” she said. “I want you to bathe and tame that damned beard of yours. And get a little rest. I reckon there’s a long night ahead of us.”

“I got to get presentable in a lousy place like this?”

I rolled my head around at the countless wretched souls pressing against us from every direction.

“Ain’t anybody looking for a presentable man,” she said.

Which was a fair point.

At the St. Francis, Boon accosted the drowsy bell captain behind the front desk, whose sour face betrayed his distaste with the interruption.

“Say,” she said, “the Sydney Ducks still quacking in the pond?”

“Christ, you’ve been away,” the bell captain scoffed. “It’s the Rangers you worry about now. Vigilance Committee ran them Aussies off ages back.”

With a nod, Boon left the desk and proceeded to the stairs. I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about and she wasn’t forthcoming to address my growing bewilderment at everything I saw and heard in that strange, filthy town.

“What’s a Ranger here?” I asked when we reached our room.

Boon shrugged.

“Reckon we’ll find out.”

“And all these fancy duds?”

“An investment,” she said, “in anonymity.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

Each floor of the St. Francis Hotel had a bath, and since the one on our floor was occupied, I snuck down one level to use that one instead. It was the first proper bath, not counting rinsing away the trail dust in my underclothes in a stream or just scrubbing my face and neck in a basin, that I’d had in several months. I found dirt in places I didn’t know I could store dirt and felt curiously more naked without it once it all got scrubbed off. As for the beard, I made use of a straight razor and a decorative, if cracked, mirror made available in the bathing room to trim and shape it into something resembling the Van Dyke style I’d seen on quite a few faces since entering California. On me, I thought it looked ridiculous, but I also found myself hardly recognizable, which I expected was the aim.

Like the bath, the mirror was sort of a first in a coon’s age, too. I could not help but marvel with a mix of awe and horror at how old that sunbaked face in the glass was, looking back at me. With the cheeks shaved to the skin, and the dirt scraped off, I could identify a hell of a