Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“White boys cut it off,” he said dryly. “Great game for them. Know it shames men. Sometimes they wear the queues like belts. Same as scalping.”

He shrugged sadly. I looked from him to the fellow from the Palace, who pursed his mouth and leaned in to take a closer look at Boon’s wound.

“Bad,” he said.

“Bad enough,” she said.

“Doctor, him,” he said, gesturing at the old man, who nodded.

“All right,” said Boon. “Get on with it, then.”

I did not think she sounded particularly grateful for all that was being done for us, and I might have said so had she not pulled the ruined chemise up and off her torso with a low groan. It might could come as a surprise, but there was never a time in our years together that ever I saw my friend in such a compromising position, which is to say in the buff, and I could happily have continued that trend if she wasn’t dead set on breaking the streak then and there. I must have turned red as a strawberry because I could feel the hot blood in my cheeks, spinning away like I’d been slapped and gasping at the thick, wet air.

“Chrissakes, Splettstoesser,” she rasped. “I know for a fact you been with a passel of whores all your grown days. Ain’t hardly like you never saw a pair of titties before.”

I sputtered something that was no known language and stared at my boots. I tried like to hell to think about anything else, which became successful when I heard her yelp like a cat with its tail caught underneath a rocking chair and knew the Chinese sawbones had gotten to work. The old woman on the pallet turned her watery eyes on me and chuckled.

Without turning back around, I said, “How bad is it?”

“Lung okay,” said the doc. “Rib broke. Two, I think. Bad, but she live.”

“Thank God for that,” I said.

“Been nice God saw to it I wasn’t shot to begin with,” Boon groused. I could not disagree with her assessment.

The surgery took up most of the rest of the night, and I dozed some on the floor during, my back still to Boon and the doctor and the man who saved our hides. The boy and the younger woman played some game that looked like dominoes if dominoes was a hundred times more complicated. The room had no windows, and eventually the candle died out and the younger woman lighted another one. I lost all sense of time, wondering if the sun was up or if it was even the next night already.

Next I laid eyes on Boonsri was some hours after the last time, and she was bandaged up with rags that were already bleeding through. The sight of it reminded me of Willock’s ruined hand, which got me to thinking about all that business the preachers blabbered about eye for an eye. She was hunched over on one of the pallets, her whole chest wrapped up, studying the pocket watch she took off that cowboy back in Texas. I could not think of where she’d hidden it away in that Oriental getup she’d been wearing, but more than that I couldn’t understand why she bothered to bring it. Our old duds were back at the St. Francis hotel, along with my rifle and a load of other things, and it occurred to me that all of it was lost to us now. I reckoned Boon prepared for that contingency and took the watch along just in case. It was something she was not willing to lose.

The doctor was gone and soon after the woman took the boy up in her arms and left, too. The old woman slept and the man who drove us away from the gunfight at the Palace sat in a corner reading a Chinese newspaper. Would it ever have a story about the Siamese woman who came to town with a .44 caliber Colt and her blood hot for killing the Englishman that whelped her? I’d never know, but I kind of hoped I might get a mention in there if it did.

Later, our savior disappeared again, and when he came back he brought with him a clay pot full of some sort of chop suey with fried chicken feet in it. We all ate like we hadn’t eaten in weeks, all of us but the old woman, who kept on sleeping. And once our meal was done, the fellow said, “Now you go. Not safe for me. Not safe for her.”

He pointed with his chin at the old woman and gave Boon an apologetic look.

Boon nodded. She moved to get up, faltered, moaned, sat back down. The fellow and me flew to her and helped her to her feet. He set us up with some fresh clothes that weren’t much more than rags, but they were clean and wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. We left with our bellies filled but our hearts low. San Francisco wasn’t going well at all.

The building was a hive of little rooms like the one we’d been in. We slinked out into the narrow hall where faces peered out from cracked doors at us. The air was thick with a dozen competing odors that confused my senses, though they stirred my belly, too. I wasn’t all too sure about those chicken feet when they were offered, but I was damned if the whole stew wasn’t one of the tastier things I’d ever had the pleasure of devouring.

Boon led the way, found the stairs.

I said, “I never even thanked him.”

“I did,” she said.

“Don’t even know his name.”

“Fong,” she said. “Jing Fong. Came west looking for a friend he says went to Australia. Got hitched up and stayed. Never found the friend.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Says he was a killer.”

“So are we.”

“So are we,” she said.

We wormed our way down the stairs and through another narrow hallway where the floorboards creaked and crackled. Ahead of