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

a moron make. A man didn’t need to know Boon too intimately to reach that conclusion, and I reckoned I knew her better than anybody. She was smart as a quirt and thrice as mean, and though her face rarely betrayed what was going on inside that skull of hers, there was no question that a lot was going on all the same. Just because I could not read a prairie lizard did not mean I knew it. But did the lizard feel a thing when it caught its prey and crushed it between its jaws? Did Boon?

If she ever shed a tear for the judge, I never knew it, but there was a time when the scales dropped off and something warm and alive showed underneath—and I’m not thinking of the drover she shot back in the panhandle. Before that dumb cowboy made up his bed and laid down into it there was a boy.

The boy, name of Beck Hill, wasn’t but sixteen years of age, which she and I knew because some months later she made us both return to the place it happened and visit his gravesite. The age was inscribed on the marker. The thing of it was, she never once spoke of the event after it happened, never gave sign that it had affected her one way or another. In the course of those months, it was my assumption that it had not, that it was like nothing to her. Then, one April morning, she rode west instead of east, which was the direction we were going. I had no idea where she was headed and she was not interested in answering any questions. I thought I’d choke on my own throat when it became apparent that we were returning to Beck Hill’s own hometown, Cutter, Texas, where the winter previous Boon had shot the boy dead in the street.

We never entered the town proper that day. The cemetery was set on a hill on the westerly side of Cutter, apart from the rest and behind one of its two churches. Boon rode directly to the cemetery gate, hitched Pim to a rail, and walked inside. She had not spoken for hours. I waited, still on my horse, for a spell. Eventually I dismounted, tied off, and followed her in. I found her by the grave, on her knees, bawling like a child with her face in her hands. It was, at that time, the only time I had ever seen her cry whilst sober. I never did again until the cowboy. The sight of it was so startling and so affecting to me that I, too, burst into tears. Upon hearing my hitching sobs, Boon jumped to her feet and screamed at me in a rage.

“Get out, you poor, spying bastard,” she cried. “Get out and leave me be.”

I went without argument. Boon remained by Beck Hill’s grave, sitting in the grass beside it, and from where I waited outside the fence I thought I could hear her muttering to the dead boy, her voice soft and incomprehensible in the wind. Perhaps she was apologizing, I thought, for being too fast for a hot-headed and piss-drunk kid to outdraw and knowing it full well when she met his challenge to stand against him in the street. Maybe again she was speaking the words she wished she’d said instead when Beck, his head swollen with whiskey and terror, slapped Boon full across the face and demanded she act like a man so long as she was going to dress as one. Do you want to die tonight, little boy is what she did say. And boy howdy, how the miners and cowboys filling that raw timber palace laughed at that—and at Beck Hill.

There never was a disease so fatal as male pride, and in the case of Beck Hill, it was quick. He demanded she draw down on him, of course, but instead Boon left without a word, tired as she was of the idiot child’s badgering. With that, the laughter changed course, directed now at her instead of him, and rising like a wave to wash Boon right out into the street. She reddened, I can say, for no woman or man can much stand to be mocked, but she walked firm out of that hole in the earth with me chasing after, whereupon she said to me, “Let’s go.”

I must have nodded or grunted my agreement, but I didn’t speak. And had I wished to speak, I would not have anyhow, on account of the loud, squeaking voice that erupted behind us from the open doors of that damnable Cutter saloon.

“I will shoot your fat man if you do not draw down on me, bitch,” said Beck Hill, and Boon turned at the same time I did to find the boy tickling the butt of a revolver strapped against his side.

“You will not shoot anybody,” she told him. “You are a child, and children should be in bed at this hour.”

More laughter, uproarious. Beck Hill turned pink. His draw was deliberate and practiced—none of that fluttering his hand out for him, but straight down and up again—yet slow. The barrel came against me, as promised. A boy of his word. I reached for the belly gun I kept on me in those halcyon days but there appeared a dark, black hole in Beck Hill’s forehead before I could manage it into my hand. Boon had drawn fast, faster than I’d ever seen her, and fired just the once. Once was all she needed. The boy stood upright for several long, agonizing seconds, his pale blue eyes round and wet but not seeing. The ruffians who had so enjoyed the spectacle before were scattered now, leaving Beck backlit by the lanterns and chandelier inside the tavern, wavering side to side until at merciful last, he collapsed to the boardwalk like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Got what he asked for, the addle-brained stupid-ass,” cried