Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

light and looked straight down the road that led out of what used to be Handsome Frank, California. In the middle distance was a small black shadow shrinking into the hazy, shimmering horizon. I gigged the mount with the heel of my boot and followed.

It was past noon before I got within hailing distance. I called out to her, but she did not acknowledge me. She just rode at a fair clip, me maybe a quarter mile behind. I kept that distance between us, more or less, until we got back to Burnside, where I got buffaloed by old Arthur Stanley, who I reckoned now lay in pieces scattered in worthless hole in the ground.

Boon’s mount was hitched up at a rail between a general store and what I took for an undertaker’s given the fresh pine boxes on display out front. She was not in sight. Neither was Meihui’s body. I hitched up, too. And I waited outside, trying not to think about anything at all.

In my haste to catch up with her, I’d left the bottle and the tobacco makings back at the miner’s camp. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, looking for stray coins to spend at the general store, when the shouting erupted inside the undertaker’s. A lamplighter in the street rushed over to get a look through one of the two glass windows in the front of the place. At the same time, someone smashed right through the other one, slamming against the porch in a tinkling rain of glass and rolling off into the grass. Boon appeared in the broken window, her fists balled up at her sides.

Seeing me, she said, “Won’t bury the girl proper on account of she’s Chinese.”

“God Almighty,” the bruised and bloodied undertaken said. He scrambled to get to his feet. “It’s nothing personal.” He looked around in a panic and alighted on me. “Fetch the marshal, would you?”

I shook my head, but the lamplighter fell into a clumsy sprint down the street. Boon heaved a sigh and vanished from view. She reappeared at the front door, the bundle back in her arms, and on her way to where she’d hitched up, she delivered a sound kick to the undertaker’s shin. He dropped back to the ground.

“To hell with this place,” she said, and she set lashing the body back up on her mount.

There were some raised voices and milling about, and a crowd of onlookers began to form in the street while Boon and I climbed back onto our saddles and turned back out of Burnside, this time together. I kept looking back for an hour or so after we cleared the town, but nobody gave chase. We camped rough that night and only because it was too dark to keep on and risk one or both of the horses stepping in some critter’s hole and breaking a leg. The only thing I said the whole night was, “I am sure sorry things went this way.”

She said nothing at all.

I dropped into sleep before she did, and I slept fitfully. At dawn I awoke with a full bladder and hardly looked one way or the other before taking care of business on some coyote brush. Once that was done and I had my trousers buttoned up, I turned ’round to discover that there was only the one horse hobbled nearby.

Boon was gone.

Chapter Forty-Four

It was a lot of years before I ever saw Boonsri Angchuan again, though I thought of her often. Practically every minute of every day at first, later quite damn frequently. After the first couple of years I started to go decent stretches without thinking of her at all when out of the blue she’d be right there again, front and center in my mind for no particular reason at all. I did not seek her out, asking after everyplace I roamed as she had in search of Arthur Stanley, but I did keep my eyes peeled and my ear to the ground. A woman like that did not go unnoticed, though I managed to travel entirely different circuits than she and heard nothing of interest in that regard. For a long time, I presumed she had to have either died or left the country. Either of those potential outcomes led me into a dreadful state of melancholy, which inevitably led me to the bottom of a bottle. I spent a right smart of those kind of nights in jail cells. When I got sick of the insides of jails I rode the chuck lines, meandering from one ranch house to another, looking for handouts and something warm in my belly. Montana, Wyoming in the summer. Back down to Texas, Indian Territory, Kansas in the wintertime. Spent a spell back in Arkansas. Both my folks long dead and buried. A brother gone off but no one knew where. Thought about staying put, doing some honest work for a change, but I was long past too old to change. I was just killing time until time killed me.

I was well north of fifty leaning against the bar in an Arizona border town cantina, not fifty miles from where old Geronimo finally surrendered to General Miles a few months earlier, wagging my chin with the Mex bartender when a vaguely familiar voice said, “Shut up, Edward Splettstoesser.”

A little huskier than I remembered, and when I craned my neck to see her, a bit rounder at the middle, too. Hell’s bells, who wasn’t at our age? Her hair cut to barely reach her shoulders, shot through with silver. Sun-browned face a little more deeply lined at the corners of her big brown eyes and along the sides of her mouth. A flat-brimmed hat against her back, suspended by a stampede string round her neck. Still packing that .44, by God.

She propped one boot on the bar rail and rested her hand on the bar. Said to the barman, “Whatever my friend is having,” and he poured her a mescal.