Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

on me that the man Boon left to die was gone. Either he wasn’t in the dire straits he thought, or he’d managed to crawl someplace else to croak. I really couldn’t be too fussed to think about it. For a short while longer I could still hear the high, desperate screams from deep in the shaft, so mostly I thought about that. About what she was doing to the man she’d waited so long to kill. Her father, except in the sense that he wasn’t. Just like he’d said. Nobody was wrong all the time.

And when the screaming stopped and all I could hear anymore was the crackle of the campfire and the song of the morning birds in the tall California trees, my thoughts turned precisely where I wanted them least to go—to Meihui.

Poor, sweet Meihui. She might have turned down a path like Boon’s, or she might not’ve. I supposed life was riddled with thousands of paths, not just one or two, and it took a hell of a lot of different choices and circumstances to end up anyplace in particular. There was no telling where a kid like her might have gone, and no sense dwelling on it now. She was gone, killed by the man who probably paid to own her like a doll or a dog. That he paid the price did nothing to ease the pain I felt in my chest about it. Stanley’s death would never undo it, would never bring her back.

In spite of my grandest effort not to, I lay my face in my two hands and sobbed. My heart hurt so badly I might have reckoned I was dying if I hadn’t known it was just the loss. The limit, really. The limit of how much, after all the years on the trails and roads and railways with Boonsri, that I could take. I’d taken a lot, and I’d caused my fair share of horror and heartache along the way. I was puzzled when she hauled us clear back to that lonesome grave to mourn the boy she’d shot but mayhap she had limits, too. Degrees of limits, I supposed, that both hardened the heart as she went along but chipped away at it, too. Now that I studied on it, my own heart had taken quite the beating as well. Of all the nasty things I’d bore witness to in my days, it was that fraction of a second when the Englishman’s muzzle flashed that I regretted the most, then and forever. That sight was my last limit. Any more chips to the cold stone in my chest would be the end of me.

I was done.

The sun rose, uninterested in what the night had borne, and I got to rifling through the camp in search of victuals and vice. I came away with half a dozen hand-rolled cigarettes, a quarter-full, unlabeled bottle of something brown, some hard biscuits and a bit of pemmican jerky. Back at the fire I ate and smoked and drank, but none of it was sufficient to fill the hole opened up inside of me. Later, I wept a little more. Later still, I started to doze right there on the scrub and dust and scratchy pine needles that carpeted the ground.

Boon came back sometime after that. I must have sensed the movement because I hadn’t heard a thing, but I turned to look at the mouth of the mineshaft just as she appeared from its shadows. The front of her was awash in dark, drying blood. Her long, black hair hung in oily ropes over her face and down her shoulders. In her arms, the small, lifeless body of Meihui dangled. She looked like she did not weigh anything at all, even less than she had in life. Like the emptiness her death left behind took every substantial about her. Everything real.

I said, “Howdy, Boon.”

She said nothing. Just stopped once she was fully in the sunlight and closed her eyes for a few moments. I watched her. The campfire was dying out by then, just embers. Boon opened her eyes and walked on, past me and into the camp, where she ducked into one of the tents with Meihui. She was in there for a little while. I smoked. When she came out again, she carried with her a bundle. I had to look at it a minute to tell that she’d wrapped Meihui up in a bedroll and tied it up with twine. She didn’t have to tell me it was to keep from turning into the sort of gruesome thing the late Bartholomew Dejasu had become, drawing blackflies behind her saddle on the ride down to Darling.

Boon lay her down on the ground to catch her breath and roll the knots out of her back and shoulders. She was starting to cry, but soundlessly and without so much as curling her lip or wrinkling her nose. Just water running down her filthy cheeks, and her like she hadn’t even noticed it. She hauled the body back up into her arms and continued on, through and past the camp, into the dense trees that marked the boundary between the mine and the ghost town we’d mostly burned to the ground, just like Red Foot before it.

I waited a bit longer, just to see if she’d come back for me. She didn’t, so I rose back up, smarting head to toe and probably still bleeding here and there, and limped the way she’d gone. On the other side of the stand of trees, I found one of the two mounts she’d ground-tied behind the hotel. The other was gone, and so was Boon.

I saddled up, which took a few failed attempts before I made it, and rode alongside the smoldering remains of the hotel and the farrier’s, glancing over at the dead, burnt mules and all the men’s corpses splayed in the street and covered with flies. I squinted in the bright morning