Boon by Ed Kurtz (top 100 books to read .txt) 📕

The barman nodded sagely and soberly. “’Less’n there’s some other saloon has most of a skeleton hung up in it.”

“All but the foot,” I thought aloud.

The genial fellow cast another dark glance at the foot, and I wondered how often he and it reenacted this standoff. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, because my thirst was only getting worse by the minute.

Once I had my two glasses in front of me, one large and one small, I said, “What makes it red, anyhow? Was old Maynard Indian on top of Spanish and French and whatever else?”

“Just turned that color when the judge cured it,” he explained. “Used to be a queer old timer name of Estherhaus, worked as both the undertaker and sawbones in the settlement formerly southwest of us. It was him made up the fluid the judge used to keep it in. Big ol’ jar with the damn foot floating in it, and you can be sure he took it to every term of court.

“Whatever it was old Estherhaus put in that jar, it stained the foot red, and here we are.”

“Here we are,” I agreed, and I raised a glass to the late Maynard Francisco Boulliette’s severed red foot in the Red Foot in Red Foot.

The barman looked to Boon, who hadn’t said a word all this time. He raised his brows, a quiet sort of question any woman or man accustomed to being in her or his cups understood to mean What can I get you?

But Boon didn’t look too thirsty.

She said, “What’s this about a judge?”

Some jasper at the end of the bar with the tip of his nose cut off snorted. The barman didn’t seem to notice, but both me and Boon turned our eyes on him.

“Bounty hunters,” he said without looking up from his drink. It was clear as water, but I couldn’t bear to think that’s what it was. “Came in with a cadaver apiece. Probably looking for a reward.”

He said reward like it was the filthiest word in the language.

The barman shook his head sadly.

“Nothing for y’all here, then,” he said. “We ain’t got any sheriff or marshal in Red Foot. Only the judge. And the judge gives sentences, not rewards.”

“That a fact,” Boon said.

The barman shrugged.

I drank my whiskey in one gulp and sent half the beer in close pursuit. The barman wiggled his eyebrows at Boon again, but she just shooed him away like he was a bothersome old blackfly. I wished she hadn’t, seeing as I was pert near done with my beer and about ready for another round. He went to set to lighting the lamps, which served mostly to fill the air with greasy black smoke, which blessedly smelled better than the denizens of Red Foot.

“We can do one of two things,” she said. “Either leave the boys with the judge and hope he gets word to their kin, or ride on with them to the next town with some proper law.”

“I ain’t riding another mile with them cowboys ripening up to a hellacious stink,” I said. “You act like any little speck of this was our fault when they came shooting.”

Boon narrowed her eyes at me like the sun was in them.

“Do you know what nuance means?” she said.

I do now, having read some since those days, but I did not then. I said so. She pushed a sigh out through her nose.

“Let’s see this judge,” she said. “It’s not too late, and we can put dust between us and that spooky foot before camping out somewheres else.”

“You find him,” I said. “I’m having another drink.”

“Hell,” the barman squawked, eavesdropping. “The judge’ll come to you. This is his place.”

The jasper with the clear liquid laughed.

“This whole puddle is his,” he said. “Guess you didn’t notice there ain’t no courthouse, though. No church or meeting house, either. The judge holds court right here in the Red Foot.”

“Fine,” Boon said. “When’s he get in?”

“I been here all the time, young woman,” came a booming voice, loud but wet with phlegm. “I don’t never set foot outside this sacred place unless when I got to, and I don’t never got to.”

Up to then, the few dark-eyed intemperates in the saloon had maintained a low buzz of talk, but once that voice piped up, every mouth slammed shut like the gates of Hell on John Wilkes Booth. We turned our backs to the bar, Boon first and then me, to peer through the smoky darkness in search of the man who owned that voice. She located him first and I had to follow the path of her eyes to find him, which wasn’t such an embarrassment since the man was so small. If I had been any farther away, I would have mistaken him for a child.

As if anticipating my puzzlement, the judge stood up from the small, round table where he sat, at the back of the room beneath a greasy painting of a naked Indian woman wrestling a bear. He was almost as round as he was short, a little cannonball of a man with untamed side-whiskers curling out from his face like black fire. His chin was dimpled and his raven-wing hair was greased back, tight against his skull, where it flowed down the back of his neck before forming curlicues that vanished into his boiled collar. He wore both braces and a belt. Attached to his belt was a brown leather holster, comically huge on his hip, with the pearl grip of a single-action Starr revolver jutting out in such a way that I concluded he must have been left-handed.

The judge wiped his oily fingers on a red-checked napkin—he had been dining on some fowl without the benefit of cutlery—and took a bow.

“At your service,” he said.

Boon went directly to the judge’s table. I waited a minute more for the barman to set me up, then followed her trail with a glass in each hand.

“Join me, join me,” the judge said. “Forgive my savagery. I