Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“I will do worse than that, fat man. Far, far worse.”

I made like I was going to grin at him, just to piss the old bastard off, but my face decided to quit on me and fell slack like an old buffalo hide hanging by a nail in the wall. Best laid plans and all that.

My eyes made their way around the dead man on the floor, past the barstool he’d knocked over when he died, and landed on the little pop gun I’d dropped after accidentally killing him. Somewhere deep in the folds of my thinking meat I made a weak attempt to command my arm to scoop it up, but the old thinker just wasn’t having it. Instead, I plumb passed out cold.

When I came to again, I felt cold water pelting my face. I wasn’t dead, which came as some surprise. It was also something of a disappointment, considering how bad my side still hurt. I sputtered at the water splashing into my nose and mouth and strained to turn over onto the side that didn’t have a hole in it. In doing so, I determined that I was out of doors, that it was still raining, and that I had been tossed into the back of an open wagon like so much cow shit. I also discovered that my wound had been bandaged, the cloth wrapped tautly around my midsection, the same as Boon’s. Stanley or the Irishman had taken the time and effort to see that I didn’t croak. Or at least, not just yet.

Which meant I was bait.

It sure as shit wasn’t the first time, either.

Round about the winter of ’72, Boon started to gather that Chinese folks were moving into Texas. Not in great waves like further west, but still a fair big number of people, on account of all the railroad construction. Seemed that a year or two before there had been a good-sized group in Houston performing some kind of construction, but when we got there, there wasn’t any of them left. All the same, we spent that winter wandering from one end of the Lone Star State to the other, following migrant camps and questioning them that could understand a little English whether they’d ever seen or heard of old Pimchan back California way or anyplace else for that matter. It was still hotter than Satan’s ass along the border in December, but once we hit the Panhandle in late January, there was snow on the ground and more coming in.

I recall riding hunched over my saddle horn in a buffalo coat and a ridiculously big fur hat that made me look like a Cossack, the snot freezing in my moustache as I asked her, “If you’re so hell-bent on getting information about California, whyn’t we just haul our asses out there and see for our own selves? It’d sure beat this cold by a damned sight, anyhow.”

“Need something to go on,” she’d said. Sure enough, we never did go that way until she got that something.

“I never did think it snowed in Texas,” I said.

“It does everything in Texas,” was all she had to say about that.

Over the course of those bitter cold days we traveled clear up to the northeastern corner of the state until we crossed over the border into the Cherokee Strip. I’d never been in Indian Territory before, and I wasn’t too sure I was in it, then. The Strip in those days didn’t truly belong to anything or anybody. Most of it was just the Outlet, which wasn’t anything but lousy land the white-eyes swindled the Cherokees into inhabiting in order to take the best of their lands, but the uppermost part of it was the real Strip, a surveying error that meant nothing even vaguely approaching law or order could touch it for a few square miles. I’d heard tell of any and all kinds of depravity that went on in those few miles, and to this day I believe every single story I ever heard.

For some, it was a hellish place they’d never want to get within a hundred county miles of. For quite a few others, it was paradise on Earth.

Boon was tracking a caravan of workers that was moving up into Kansas to work on the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railway and, according to her, didn’t expect to tarry long in the Strip. A white cook down in Sugarland had told her he’d taken over for one of her countrymen, a detail he was sure of because the old cook couldn’t speak to either the whites or the Chinese and, when he asked about it, one of the workers explained the man’s provenance. Given the scarcity of Siamese in the U.S. and her territories, Boon wasn’t about to give up the chance to see if there was anything to be gained by talking to him. Only she wasn’t too happy to find that the caravan decided to camp over right in the middle of the Cherokee Strip so that the foremen might get their ashes hauled and raise a little Hades.

“This is just the kind of place where a filthy-minded man like you finds trouble,” she told me, to my chagrin. “You ain’t got to ride with me, but keep your head screwed on if you are.”

“Why, Boonsri, I am insulted.”

She scoffed.

“No, you ain’t.”

I shrugged.

We found the foremen and the rest of the whites leading the crew first. Naturally, they were encamped in the ricketiest derelict house of ill-repute I’d ever seen in all my sinning days. Painted in fresh red on the false front of the two-story building was DEVIL’S BARGAIN. I liked it already. Boon watched me like a hawk. I made a mental note to return one day when the stakes weren’t so high. I had plenty of ashes that needed hauling, too.

Inside Devil’s Bargain was the most motley-looking crowd of dead-eyed bastards that side of Deadwood. Most were white, but some were Negro or Indian or