Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

side and Bolivia and Peru on the other. They killed each other on the ground and out on the sea, all over borders and bat shit, and that’s no lie. Nitrate deposits in the old región de la Araucanía they all of them wanted, fertilizer and gunpowder and like that. There was more to it than that, but not really all that much more. For my part, I just tried to stay out of it. Boon did, too. We had each reckoned by sticking to the south and keeping close to the coast, there would be no chance of falling afoul of any bloodshed. We were wrong.

Traiguén was a long way from the war, but another one was just cooling its heels down in la Araucanía and about to heat up again, and fast. The Angol fort outside the village was burning by September, and the Mapuche were swarming before anyone knew who set the fires. I was in the village when it happened, looking for something to do that might put a few centavos in my pocket so I could have a hot meal for once.

A group of men had gathered in front of a taberna, drunk as lords, and started shouting, “Huasa, huasa!” They thought it was pretty damn funny, a small woman like me looking for work usually suited for a man, never mind that I typically dressed like one, too. I didn’t like being laughed at, so I picked up a good-sized rock from the ground and threw it at them. Only one got hit, but he dropped like a turd from a cow’s ass and his friends got plenty mad about it. There wasn’t but ten feet between us and closing fast when the screaming started and the guns got to popping in every direction.

I did not have a gun, so I ran.

Blue-tunicked soldiers from the smoking fort hurried into the fray, shooting their rifles indiscriminately with their slouching kepi hats bouncing on their heads, and for a brief moment I worried that I might look like an Indian to them from behind. Or close enough to take a bullet in the back and let God sort it out when the smoke cleared. Either way, I ducked and crouched as well as I could while still running from one street to the next, careening into alleys between the adobe shops and cafes whenever I saw the glint of metal barrels.

I had no stake in the matter, myself. I knew little to nothing about the Mapuche, other than the typical conflict all indigenous people have with colonialists and their descendants. The Mapuche wanted la Araucanía, where they had always been, and the Chileans wanted to take it away from them. Of the soldiers, I knew considerably more, so probably I liked them less. For the time being, however, I could not say with any conviction that I supported one side over the other; both were shooting, and I did not wish to be anyplace near either of them. Not without something to shoot back, anyway.

Por Dios, I wasn’t even supposed to be there—I was Mexicana, and the only reason I wasn’t five thousand miles north of there at that particular moment was my God damned husband, may he burn in hell forever. If I hadn’t stuck that dagger in his heart back in Chihuahua, I would never have set foot in Chile, never mind found myself in the middle of a shooting war that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

Ángel was surprisingly easy to kill, when it came right down to it. But this did not embolden me against however many dozens of Indians and soldiers were pouring into Traiguén, making it harder and harder for me to find a place to run, much less hide.

Around and behind a church, past the small cemetery and across the plaza, I spied a livery and stables with no one watching the horses. Escape was paramount on my mind, so I risked the sprint across the plaza, where more than a few bullets fried the air, and all but dove at the ground when I reached the nearest stall. Without bothering to peer in at the horse inside, I threw open the gate and prepared to mount, forgoing all saddle and tack in my hurry to get the hell out of that village. Instead, the barrel of a huge Colt pistol stopped me cold.

It is hard to make out identifying features of a person standing in the shadows of a stable stall, but particularly so when that person is aiming a gun just inches from your face. To accurately study a face, one must first take her eyes away from the gun, but the eyes are unwilling. So, I stared fair hard at that barrel with one eye, and I tried to get something approaching a look at that gunman’s face with the other. I did not suppose it much mattered what he looked like in the end, only whether or not he intended to squeeze that trigger.

“Por favor,” I said, “no me mates.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” came the voice in English. “But you’re going to have to steal another horse.”

The voice belonged not to a man, but a woman. She nudged me in the chest with the barrel of her Colt, as if to punctuate her statement, and then gestured with her chin for me to go.

“I’m not stealing anything,” I told her in my own better-than-fair English. “I’m running from the bullets.”

“That’s smart,” she said, for all intents and purposes unsurprised that I understood her language. “They tend to kill people.”

With that, she holstered her weapon and stepped forward, further into the light. Her big brown eyes almost sparkled when the sunlight reflected in them, and I marveled at the grit of this strange woman.

“Mapuche?” I wondered aloud. She sure as shit could have passed for it.

“No,” she said, “but I’m on their side, for what it’s worth. Soldiers executed Domingo Melín and his