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

Dejasu dropped to his knees, baring his teeth like a wolf would. He carefully set his brother’s head down on the ground and got a better grip on his weapon.

“Don’t do it,” Boon warned him.

She had him covered, but old babyface Barry was quicker than either of us anticipated. He had that iron up and against his temple faster than lightning, and he squeezed the trigger, blowing his brains out the other side of his skull. He was still holding the gun when he hit the ground, face to face with the judge. I could not in that moment remember ever having seen anything sadder.

Boon, on the other hand, wasn’t in a mourning mood. She held her Colt on Barry for a minute longer, as if she expected him to get back up again and want to throw down after all, but once she was satisfied that he was dead, she leathered the gun and walked slowly over to the remains of the Dejasu brothers. She bent at the waist, picked the judge’s head back up by the ears, and walked back to the saloon where she chucked the head into the inferno. She might as well have been playing horseshoes, for all the effect it had on her.

For the first time in a long while, I silently questioned my only friend’s sanity. But not the first time. Not by a damn sight.

“Go fetch that horse,” she instructed me. “I’ll stow him.”

I didn’t argue.

Chapter Thirteen

It took most of an hour before we’d gotten far enough away from town that the smoke wasn’t blotting out the sun. The fire had spread to neighboring buildings, just as I reckoned it would, and by the time we were mounted and moving, half the town was in flames. A body could probably see that smoke clear to Goliad, though there wasn’t anybody left in Red Foot to wonder about that. Those that didn’t perish in the saloon or out in the street lit out the night before or as soon as the fire really got going in the morning.

Red Foot, Texas was no more.

I’d gotten stuck with a scrawny nag that didn’t appear to have eaten once in all its miserable life. The skinny thing was just wandering outside of town, wide-eyed from the fire and smoke and gunshots, and since my own mount was in all likelihood stolen by one of the fleeing locals, it was that or walk back to Darling. No saddle; just a blanket, Indian-style. I could feel every knobby bone in the nag’s spine every step of the way.

Boon rode ahead of me, Bartholomew Dejasu slung over the palomino’s hindquarters with a black mist of flies to keep him company. I kept trying not to look at him, the way I’d looked away in the street after he caught the judge’s head, but my eyes were drawn to the corpse time and again. I’d seen plenty of corpses in my years, and some of them had died about as badly as possible. I had even seen a man shoot himself before, though that time it was through the heart and I was in no way responsible for the man’s grief—just some pitiable dipsomaniac in a Little Rock dance hall. It wasn’t any one detail of how Dejasu ended up flopping dead behind Boon’s saddle on the trail back to Darling, but each and every detail mixed all together, from the minute Willocks brought out the bounty paper to the stupid cow and her even stupider cowboys, from the red foot in the Red Foot in Red Foot to that awful saw I stole for Boon to cut off a man’s head. It was all of it so ghastly and all I could think was how terribly I needed a drink, but every drop in Red Foot turned to fuel and the damned nag hadn’t come equipped with any liquor when I stole her.

I sure felt sore and sorry, and it didn’t help much that Boon hadn’t uttered a single word since we rode out. Was the gravity of what she had done weighing on her? Mayhap, I thought. Then again, for all I knew, she was remembering every bit of it and savoring the memories with a warm smile on her face and joy in her heart. There wasn’t any telling. She was just as quiet as Bartholomew Dejasu and her back was to me.

Besides, there was that gnawing old question pertaining to her mind and whether or not all of it was where it ought to have to been. That all her rows had been hard to hoe was without doubt or question, and it seemed to me that anybody who went through enough hell kept a measure of hell inside them. You couldn’t hardly turn around in some parts of the country without smacking plum into one crazy war veteran or another, some twisted up husk that used to be a man before the things he did and saw during those bloody, terrible years. And that wasn’t but the four years; I wasn’t precisely sure how old Boon was, but I guessed her to be about my same age, which meant her bloody, terrible years were some ten times longer than that war and counting. More than enough to wear one’s brain down to a nub, I reckoned.

Of course, she wasn’t raving or anything. She didn’t think she was the Queen of Sheba or piss in the street or kill people at random. Sure, she’d sent quite a passel of men off to their judgments, but like I said, there wasn’t a one of them didn’t have it coming. Judge Dejasu had it coming for damn sure, and had she merely shot him I wouldn’t have even been thinking about it the next day. But that wasn’t how it happened at all. I couldn’t say that Boon particularly enjoyed what she’d done, but the fact alone that she’d thought it up at all, never mind