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

Willocks waited until full dark to halt and called on the deputies to make camp. We gathered tight at a copse of cottonwoods beneath the escarpment where everybody dismounted and hitched to the trees, forming something like a small remuda. The marshal directed men to collect firewood and get the cookfire going. I awaited my orders but none came. Instead, I stood in the middle of the clearing with Willocks mugging me down and the other men fussing about to get the camp in order.

“Don’t go worrying your fat head about nothing,” he said to me. “Tonight ain’t the night.”

“Why the hell not?” I said.

“I’m enjoying this too much.”

“If there’s coffee and biscuits,” I said, “I’ll enjoy it some, too.”

There was. The coffee was like tar and biscuits that could have killed a man at ten paces, but a captive couldn’t be all that persnickety. And credit where credit is due, Marshal Tom Willocks did not withhold anything of the night’s victuals from me.

His men took turns playing cards, mumblety-peg, and watching the perimeter of the camp, while Willocks and I sat by the fire and stared at each other. The night sky got so dark I might have guessed all the stars had blinked out, and after a while the four deputies were reduced to two on guard and two asleep on the hard ground. It had started to rain a little bit, but nobody mentioned it or much seemed to mind. I hunched my shoulders and pulled up my collar, which didn’t do much good.

Late into the night, or early in the morning, the shifts changed and the men who had been looking out went to sleep while the other two went groggily to duty. I was getting to where I was exhausted, but the marshal looked as pert and bright as ever, or as pert and bright as a man as savaged as he was could look. I quit meeting his gaze after a while. I could still feel his on me.

“Hey, Lefty,” Willocks said, hours after the last thing anybody said out loud. “Whyn’t you go fetch that sack from my saddle?”

“Shit, Tom,” Lefty said. He was a small man who wore a tremendous bushy beard as if to make up for it.

“Just get it, God damn it,” said Willocks.

“Christ,” said Lefty.

Lefty tromped off to the remuda, and he fussed and cussed until he had what Willocks wanted. He brought it back to the fire like he was carrying a bundle of dynamite with the fuse lit. Conversely, Willocks took it from Lefty as though it was his own newborn child, with care and glee.

I watched him closely. Lefty scampered back to his lookout position. The other lookout—an Irish Paddy—ignored us altogether.

Tom Willocks opened up the sack. The smell slammed into my face almost instantly. I spun away from it and heard Willocks chuckle. The smell got still worse and I knew he was taking it, whatever it was, out of the sack. I heard a thump on the hard-packed ground and though I resisted looking, it didn’t matter. The head rolled right up to my boots.

It was Franklin Merrick. Willocks had given him the same treatment Boon gave the judge back in Red Foot. Only this time, what was left of him had time to rot, which gave poor Franklin a gray pallor with milky eyes, shrunken and sunken into their cavities. I puked right into the campfire. It sizzled, same as the rain.

“First and middle, since you wanted to know,” Willocks said, and when I turned to look at him he was holding his bandaged paw up. “I took this one’s head for the first, and I’ll take the woman’s head for the other. Got the idea from her, as a matter of fact, so I reckon she’ll appreciate it.”

He grinned broadly, showing gleaming teeth. My gorge rose again, but I fought it back down.

“I don’t know she ought to’ve done what she done to that judge,” I said. “But he was plum crazy and aimed to hang us for nothing. His brother shot his own self, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

“Never met me a judge wasn’t just a little touched,” he said. “But it’s your breed friend who’s crazy. Like a mad dog, that one, and she’ll get put down just the same.”

I opened my mouth to retort—to defend my friend—but it just ended up slamming shut without a word. I would have given my own life to spare Boon’s, but I was not at all convinced that Willocks was wrong about the state of her mind. Killing was a grim business, and it was always different, which is to say that no two killings ever went down the same way. Sometimes they are justified and a hell of a lot of the time they are not. What’s more is there is a very great deal of murky water in between the extremes. The law would have liked to classify all killings in a simple manner for efficiency’s sake, but the reality of it was each one had to be considered individually and of its own variables. In a proper court of law, if I was asked at that moment whether or not the killing of Judge Selwyn Dejasu was justified, I would have to answer in the affirmative. Yes, it was. Yes, he was loco, no doubt about that. Boon and me had no choice but to fight for our very lives, and that’s just the way it was.

But the saw.

The God damned saw.

“Tomorrow, then,” I said low after a while.

“Likely so,” the marshal agreed.

“Bring me back for burial?”

“And let the buzzards starve?” he said, laughing. “Have a heart, Dutchman.”

I pushed Franklin Merrick’s head away with the side of my foot. Still chuckling, Willocks gathered it up and stuffed it back into the burlap sack, which he tossed on top of the fire. The fabric burned up quick, revealing the head once again, this time searing and