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

Each transaction left her a little broker than she was before, but we’d made the train this time around. The chief difference now was in the cash and coin we’d pilfered from the pockets of dead men, back east beneath the shadows of the Caprock Escarpment. Probably we didn’t get everything they’d had on them, being in the hurry we were in. But if nothing else, we’d be able to sleep in clean beds when next we disembarked, wherever that would be.

And to think we’d been so flush there for a moment, back in Darling with two hundred dollars in double eagles. Easy come, easy go.

I dozed a bit, nodding in and out as the monotonous clank and grind of the piston rods and valves beneath us lulled me, and the whistle screeched to snap me back awake again. All the while, Boon clamped her long, slender fingers down on that watch and gazed at the gathering dark over the rise and fall of the Southern Rockies in the distance. Whether or not she actually saw them, rather than whatever was playing out inside her head, was another matter altogether.

I was in one of the dozing spells when she woke me to say, “Remember Percy Watkins?”

At first I did not. I was groggy, and a hell of a lot had gone down since last I thought of the fellow in San Francisco she’d butchered at the dawn of her life’s mission. Only when she made a cutting motion at her crotch did all the pieces come together in my mind. A shudder rocked up my spine and I said, “Oh, sure. That jasper.”

“My first,” she said.

“I remember you saying.”

“What about yours,” she said.

It was not Boon’s habit to ask me a lot of questions about my life, and most of what I’d told her was because it was my habit to run my mouth when the quiet made me too nervous to stand it. On account of this, I was more than a little surprised by the question, and still more so that she didn’t already know the answer, given my reaction to it at the time.

Because she was right there when it happened. Well, she did not witness the event, but she was close enough to hand. I’d missed the war, and the only lives I’d ever taken in all my days before Boon arrived were chickens, hogs, and the odd cottonmouth or copperhead here and there. But Christmas Day of 1871 was the first Christmas I’d spent with anybody I much cared for in a damned long time, and it was also the first time I ever found cause to kill another human being. That she had never known this to be the case alarmed me some, for I now wondered whether I gave the impression that it hadn’t hit me like God’s own fist right in the breadbasket. It surely did.

Never mind how badly Red Chester Stamp deserved it.

Stamp wasn’t an Indian, and he wasn’t called “Red” for being Irish-colored, either. In fact, his hair was coal-black and skin sallow, unfreckled. He dressed in white and black every time I ever saw him (which wasn’t much or often), like a circuit preacher, which was exactly what he claimed to be. The appellation “Red,” according to Chester Stamp, derived from the color of God’s righteous anger at the wicked sinners on all the Earth in general and Texas in particular. Among their number, it so happened, I was counted. Boon was too, but she was beyond salvation and beneath contempt, being a “breed.” In the eyes of Red Chester Stamp, only I was within reach of the glorious and everlasting Kingdom of God, if only I would raise my hand up and take it.

She still wasn’t looking at me after she’d asked about it, the Rockies turning a spooky pinkish purple before the slow setting sun through the window of our car. It almost seemed like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud, or that she wasn’t aware she had. I cleared my throat a little and rooted around in my coat pockets until I found the small bottle of clear Mexican mescal I’d purchased from a pock-faced drummer before boarding that morning. Train-riding wasn’t any kind of thirsty business like horse-riding, but I wasn’t looking for an excuse to take a nip or two. I just wanted it.

“You remember that preacher man,” I said after swallowing my dose of medicine and jamming the cork back into the neck. “Red Stamp.”

“Red Chester,” she said. “By God, he was your first.”

It wasn’t a question. She was just marveling over the revelation. In a way, I was surprised she recalled him at all.

“He was,” I said, savoring the liquor but not the memory.

Red Chester Stamp got started on his circuit after the big flood of ’69, or at least that was the first anyone had heard of him, according to the Caddo scout we’d hitched up with in Bastrop, southeast of Austin. Nayawsa’, who locally went by the name of Thomas Song, was recommended to us by my favorite Bastrop bartender, who told Boon that Thomas had done a fair bit of scouting for the Army under one General Augur and that there wasn’t hardly a square inch of Texas that Thomas didn’t know like the Devil knew Scripture. More than this, Thomas Song was reputed to be a man with information, or ways to get it. Thomas came into that very bar later the same evening, and as it happened, it was he who directed us north to the panhandle, where in time we made our acquaintance with good old Tom Willocks.

That same evening, we also encountered Red Chester Stamp, who Thomas laughingly called the Wet Preacher, on account of his history of traveling by canoe on the floodwaters by torchlight, shouting Bible verses at the top of his lungs in the dead at night. That appellation carried with it a double-meaning, too—Red Chester was as much a