Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

Mex. No Chinese. A chubby white gal played a piano in bad need of repair in the corner opposite the bar. It was the worst playing I ever heard, but the fact that she wore nothing but her bloomers and an enormous feathered hat explained how she got and maintained the job. Plenty of other doxies made their rounds, flirting with fellows who smelled of sweat and cow shit, plying their trade on the drunkest of the lot. Pert near every man was visibly armed. My crotch got to itching just looking over the place.

But I didn’t really mind.

Sure, I loved Boonsri even then, but I didn’t entertain any notions about that. Way I figured, she knew it, too, and she never had to put words to it for me to know I better not, either. As such, acting the fool I always was didn’t particularly bother me in terms of harming my chances. There were no chances to harm.

One of the working girls, a skinny little thing with ice-blue eyes too big for her face, offered me a wink from the lap of a one-eyed vaquero in a battered straw sombrero. I winked back and the vaquero growled. Probably jealous he couldn’t join in on all that winking. Boon put her elbow into my ribs. I moved to the bar.

She ordered two whiskeys and I flushed with embarrassment. She was the only woman in there who wasn’t working the floor, and here she was acting like the boss of me. A man fatter than me by a long shot chuckled at my shame, leaning on the bar and eyeballing me like I was a sideshow curiosity. The man with no balls. I shot him a look. He blew me a kiss and laughed out loud.

“If she wasn’t a chink, I’d of figured she was your mama,” he said.

Boon downed her whiskey in one gulp and smashed the glass against the fat man’s forehead. Most of the glass tinkled down his front, but some of it stuck in the network of bleeding cuts she’d left. The fat man howled like a coyote and threw his hand to the Peacemaker holstered underneath the sagging sack of his stomach. If he hadn’t been so fat, he’d have gotten to it fast enough to plug at least one of us. As things stood, he had to struggle some with his belly, which gave me plenty of time to throw my fist under his chin and knock him off his stool. His right temple slammed the edge of the bar on his way down and he was out cold before he hit the floor.

Half the hard-cases in the place erupted into applause. No one took offense at the altercation, or least not enough to do anything about it but clap and laugh.

To the unconscious man on the floor, Boon said, “I’m Siamese, you son of a bitch,” and she spit on him.

“No shit,” said another man behind her.

She swung around, ready for a fight, but the man kept both hands on the glass of flat beer in front of him and just smiled with his eyes half closed from drink. He wore a long, dragoon-styled mustache and was bald on the top of his head with the rest of his greasy black hair draping down to his shoulders in back. He swayed a little, but his hands never left that glass.

“You want to make something of that, friend?” Boon challenged him.

“Me? Hell, no. Just never reckoned I’d ever meet one of you people, never you mind two. World’s gettin’ smaller all the time.”

She flashed her eyes at me, and I returned her interested gaze.

“That’s for sure and for certain,” I agreed. “Who’s the other one?”

“My fucking cook!” he bellowed. “I thought he was mute for a week until he got to babbling at one of the Chinamen works for me. I don’t talk any chink, but I know it when I hear it. Them Chinese don’t cotton to him at all, but I think he’s funnier than all hell.”

“Ain’t that something,” Boon said.

I leaned in to keep it going, but she pushed me back. Instead, she nodded at my drink, which I put away, and then we ambled back out to the mud outside.

“Didn’t like the way he looked at me,” she said.

“You’re not a bad looking woman,” I said.

“You’re a white man. You don’t see what I see.”

“Might could be, but what about the cook?”

“Wait and watch.”

“Out here? In the mud.”

“Out here,” she said. “In the mud.”

We lingered until after dark. I rolled one corn husk quirley after another and smoked the evening away, leaning against a hitching post and watching group after group of drunken scoundrels come and go from Devil’s Bargain, wishing to heaven I was among them. My sense of things was that we were wasting our time—surely that boss in there wouldn’t come back out again until after sunup, once he’d spent all his spending money on women and wine. But Boon had other ideas, and as usual, she was right.

The foreman staggered out about an hour after dusk, alone.

“Well, how do you like that?” I said.

Boon hushed me. The boss splashed down from the front doors to the mud and, jerkily, waded his way around the corner, down a narrow alley, and out of sight. Boon held up a finger to hold me off a minute, then motioned for me to follow.

The mud in the alley was ankle-deep. I whispered a string of curses as my boots sank into it, making progress to the other side slow and tedious. We emerged onto another mud street lined with thrown-together buildings lit by burning lamps and filled with shouting and song. Our quarry wandered down another alley. I said, “Shit.”

Once we practically swam through another, still deeper river of mud, we came out on open prairie. The middle distance was spotted with the flickers of campfires beneath a canopy of bright starlight. It was a whole different world from the