Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

lot more lines in that face than I could ever have imagined were there. By God, but I was starting to look like the spitting image of my old grandpappy back in Arkansas, and me only in my forties. I was far from a vain man, as my habits could attest, but the experience was alarming.

“You’re getting old before your time, Edward Splettstoesser,” I told the hoary old boy in the glass. He frowned back at me, displeased with my observation.

When next I saw my dear friend Boon, I could have dropped dead on the spot. I will never understand why I didn’t.

Her face scrubbed so clean it shone pink, she stood with her back to the window facing Grand Avenue in her pillowy new gown, pink with green embroidery at the hems of its flowing sleeves, her feet squeezed into the slippers and hair combed through and plaited into an elaborate braid that spun down and over her shoulder like a pet snake. There was a small but noticeable tear in the stitching of the gown at her right hip, but it did nothing to ruin the overall impression of the getup. I guessed the intended effect was to fool onlookers into dismissing her as any one of the city’s thousands of Chinese women, and though she would not have fooled me, I knew almost any other white man would only give her a second glance on account of her inherent loveliness.

I had only ever seen Boon in the raiment appropriate to your run-of-the-mill Texan drifter, the clothes of a man, for whom she was so often mistaken. No one would make that mistake now.

“By God, Boonsri,” I said as soon as I could breathe again. “You surely look plumb pretty.”

A smile played at the corners of her mouth, but she valiantly fought it back.

“Oh, shut up, Edward,” she said in spite of the blush on her cheeks. “Pretty is the last God damned thing I want to be.”

“Well, you are anyways.”

“And you could pert near pass for a civilized human being,” she said.

I did not bother to fight my own smile. Compliments were rare and shrouded when it came to Boon, so I took them when I could get them.

I pulled on a pair of stockings for my feet and set to sorting out the waistcoat she had purchased when I realized Boon was fighting much more than a simple smile. She was struggling not to cry.

“Boon,” I said, rising with only the one stocking on.

She waved me away, her shoulders trembling, and turned to the window for several minutes, breathing loudly through her mouth until the tremors passed. I wanted more than anything to go to her, to comfort her in some way, but I knew better than to try. There were just too many years of scar tissue encasing that heart of hers for me to ever dream of penetrating it.

And, as if reading my mind on that subject, she quietly spoke to me about a few of those scars.

“I sailed the first time I came here,” she said, surreptitiously wiping her eyes on one of those tremendous sleeves. “Forty-three days from New London to San Francisco, by way of the Isthmus of Darien in Panama. Apart from the voyage from Siam, which I don’t remember at all, it was the longest journey of my life. And bad, Edward. They were bad, bad days.”

She heaved a long sigh and dropped her chin to her bosom. I remained where I stood, half-afraid to move the way one was when they didn’t want to spook a deer in the woods.

“My mother and I were sold when we landed in New England. I told you that. But here, not a mile from this spot, I was sold again. I thought I’d escaped all that, but I didn’t. And here, in this fucking place, it was so much worse than Connecticut.

“They took me right off the sloop, bundled me up like sundries, and carried me off to some awful cellar. It was just down yonder, on Washington Street. Nothing but a shanty up top, but all of us were crammed in that cellar. You had to climb down a wobbly ladder just to get down there. It was so decrepit, I doubt it would survive the weight of a big man like you.”

Boon raised her head again and blew a snort of air through her nose. She then turned, just slightly, to meet my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Edward,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know,” I said.

“It was such a queer set-up, that cellar,” she continued, pacing the length of the window to the edge of the curtains. I sat down on the edge of the bed, but let my one foot stay naked. “It was a bagnio, to be sure. Rickety cots, lined up like a barracks. I was only thirteen, but there were girls in there young as eight. Every one of them right off the boat from China—every one except me, but the slavers couldn’t tell the difference. Dressed us all up like little porcelain dolls, the bastards.”

She paused, composed herself. I could hear myself swallow. My own heartbeat in my ears.

“Some days they brought in a dozen or so Chinese men, but not for us. They were performers, if you can believe it. Some of them skulked about with knives and hatchets, others smoked tobacco in opium pipes and acted like they were hoppies, out of their heads. They brought people down to look at it all, charged them fifty cents to gawp at the depravities of the yellow man. Not any of it real, of course. Except the whores. We were real.”

My breath hitched in my trunk. She had said it. She said she was a whore, and only a child. Slaved into it. She’d never said a word about any of it until that very moment. I didn’t know if I wanted to weep or throw the lamp through the window and scream