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

Lawyer Laramie knew which side of his bread was buttered. He shut his mouth.

Boon did not.

“I never saw such a twisted joke of a courtroom and I reckon your appointment to judge is a fiction and fancy you made up from thin air,” she said. “You go on and try to hang me and my friend, Dejasu. I’ll bring your head to your brother for you.”

My dear and only friend Boonsri was not given to hyperbole. It happened once in a rare while, as that is just the way folks express themselves sometimes. But when most people might say it’s hotter than a hundred suns, Boon most often would not, simply because she knew it was not, in fact, that hot. Boon would only say it’s awful hot today. All of this is to illustrate that she was the sort of person who, in most cases, said precisely what she meant without need for embellishment or metaphor.

Which is to say I felt my stomach rotate a full circuit in my trunk as I thought about her intent to separate the judge’s head from his neck, and I had more faith in her intent to do so than all the saints in heaven.

Things only got troublesome from there.

Chapter Ten

In the years I’d spent in the company of Boon, I’d seen her end more than a handful of arguments at the barrel of a gun or the edge of a knife. I did not take it upon myself to record incidents of this nature in a timely or faithful manner, but offhand I could conservatively estimate that my friend brought about the demise of some fifteen souls between the three she blew out of their saddles in the moments before we first met and our arrival in Red Foot, Texas. But that’s on the low end. It might have been closer to twenty-one.

Arithmetic is not my strength.

More than once, I’d thought about whether she was crazy. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the violence, because I don’t believe she ever did. It just came so easy to her, and with such skill. She was a tightly wound coil of Siamese snake-woman daring any and every passerby to draw near for her strike. Sometimes I waited with bated breath for the moment to come and it never did. Other times I hadn’t any notion what was coming and ended up every bit as shocked as the man dying on the floor.

Had she inherited a meanness from her gold-mouthed father, whom she claimed was evil through and through? Or was it instead the result of a life lived harder than most? Nothing was ever easy for a half-Siamese orphan left to her own devices at a tender age, with nobody to speak to and too many hours spent gathering bitterness and rage like wool. Nothing but the rage itself, I reckoned.

And rage was what spilled out of her next, that evening before Judge Selwyn Dejasu in the Red Foot Saloon. She was up and over the table before the chair she’d been sitting in hit the floor, agile as a bobcat, and she vaulted so that the table tottered violently and Lawyer Laramie scrambled for safety. I just sat still as I had been, watching everything happen like it was a dream. I wished that it was.

The judge had his pistol out faster than I would have thought possible and against my better instincts, I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation of the shot. The gun fired and I smelled the acrid smoke before something clattered and broke.

“Boon!” I cried.

Sure she’d been hit, I opened my eyes and leapt to my feet to find the barman screaming to my right, the side of his head awash with blood where an ear had been moments before. Boon had gotten to the judge’s wrist before he squeezed the trigger, forcing the gun away from her. Now the barman hollered almost as loudly as the judge himself, who kept repeating, “She broke my wrist, she broke my wrist.”

Still grasping the fractured joint with one hand, she curled the other hand into a fist and introduced it to the judge’s nose, which squashed flat in a spray of bright red blood. His gun finally dropped from his fingers to the floor. I watched it fall, the barrel cutting a groove into the wood floor, and spin away toward the bar. So, too, did one of the underutilized jurymen, a stout old boy who’d helped to convey me inside for the trial. The two of us squared off, more or less the same distance from the pistol, as if we were already armed and fixing to throw down in the street.

I went for the gun, but the old boy was a second quicker. My fingers grazed the cylinder while his secured the grip and raised it up to push the barrel against my nose. He grinned. I considered praying, but dismissed the idea outright. I never was too sure about whether the preachers were right about God and, if they were, that the Old Man ever had my best interests at heart. I figured I’d let Him do what He wanted and just worry about the bullet that was about to take up residence in my brain.

Seemed to me I’d been living on borrowed time ever since Boon showed up to ruin my first hanging anyhow, and an extra three years wasn’t anything to spit at. A damn fine three years, too, for the most part. In spite of myself, I got filled up with warm feelings about it, never mind the iron in my face, so I decided to give Boonsri one last look before facing a more serious judgement than Selwyn Dejasu could ever mete out.

She’d sure gotten the better of the old judge, too. He was on his back, still in his chair, and Boon had one boot planted firmly on his flabby neck. She had also reclaimed her Colt, which