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

teat-fire cartridge revolver up and ready, hammer back and trigger squeezed before I knew what was what. I rolled as fast as my girth allowed and narrowly missed the bullet that struck that poor girl in the leg. She screamed to beat the Devil. I swung my pilfered popper to the right and drilled a fresh hole in his cheek. It wasn’t a killing shot. Rather, he spun round and round, howling like mad as the blood washed down his face. He didn’t let go of that belt gun, either, but triggered it again and again as he twirled, sending everyone else scattering.

Boon rushed into the firelight, tracking the thick boy with the sight at the end of her barrel as she came on. The second girl, the one who wasn’t shot in the leg, scampered up and behind her, panting and terrified. I reckoned Boon had the thick boy covered so I went looking for Rangy. He was, of course, gone.

“Can’t let him go,” she said, and she fired at Thick Boy, a clean shot through his left eye that dropped him to the ground through a crimson haze, dead.

“Guess not,” I said, and I went looking for the squirrelly bastard.

I rounded the nearest tent to the fire, where I found half a dozen men standing in a close cluster, all of them in woollens for sleep, all of them Chinese. They regarded me with wary uncertainty, but one among them silently pointed at a canvas tent with the front flap wavering as though in a breeze. There was no breeze. I nodded at the man who pointed, then went slowly toward the tent. Once I was within ten paces of it, the flap shunted back and the rangy man burst out of it with a shooter in each hand. One fired, the bullet going wild into the air. The other misfired, clicking harmlessly.

I shot him point blank in the heart, and he fell back into the tent without a sound.

The cluster of laborers to the other side of me watched a moment longer, then started to wander back to their own sleeping arrangement, which consisted of rude pallets on the open ground, away from the white men’s tents. For a second, I thought they were all just returning to sleep, but instead the men got dressed, pulled their shoes back on, and commenced packing their meager belongings. No foremen, no job.

Not that any of them shed a tear at the men’s passing.

Back at the campfire, Boon tended to the one gal’s leg wound. She cried quietly while Boon doctored it, ran cold water from a canteen into it, wrapped it up with a length of flannel she’d torn from one of the dead men’s shirts. The other girl squatted on the ground close by, her knees tight together and eyes wide open, shimmering in the glow from the flames.

One of the laborers approached apprehensively, keeping his eyes on Boon and me, and went over to her. She raised her eyes to his, and when he offered his hand, she took it. He helped her up, and together they walked back to where the other men prepared to leave. From darkness apart from them, I watched the Siamese cook come into the light. He stopped just close enough to be visible and watched Boon finish up with the girl she was tending to. The girl stood on one leg, tried the other, and winced. In another minute or two, she figured out a limping rhythm she could live with, and made her way to join the others.

Boon stood and faced the cook.

The cook said, “They’ll all go back together. West.”

“You speak English,” Boon said.

“Not to most.”

She nodded that she understood. The cook—Chang, he’d been called—invited her over to the fire where they sat and talked in low, hushed voices. I found another bottle of firewater in one of the tents and sat off by myself, just enjoying the company of the liquor. And when, some time later, Boon returned to me, I saw Chang moving back into the darkness away from us and the laborers.

“Not going with them?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Not one of them.”

“Tell you anything?”

“A lot of things,” she said. “But he doesn’t know anything about my mother.”

“That’s a damn shame,” I said. “I’m sorry, Boon.”

“Thanks for being the bait there.”

She gave a sideways smile, and it was the first time it occurred to me that I’d been used in that manner. And now, two years down the road and clear across to California, I was being turned into a worm on a hook all over again. I had little doubt that Boon was smarter than her old pappy gave her credit for being, but that certainty did next to nothing to assuage my fear. People had a tendency to die around us, and this wasn’t any different. But there was something about being at the end of the line, at long last, that wasn’t sitting swell in me.

I reckoned a substantial part of me never truly thought we’d ever get this far. And now that we had, I was far from convinced it was going to end up being worth the trouble—never mind all the bodies.

Chapter Forty

The first I saw of Handsome Frank was a scattering of adobe huts and some shreds of canvas that used to be tents where, I suspected, miners once lived in squalor when they weren’t breaking their backs in the mines. The huts weren’t habitable anymore; time and weather had stove them all in, reducing them to crumbled wreckages without roofs. Within the piles of adobe and dust, remnants of pallets and chests and other personal effects remained, abandoned by the miners when the mines dried out and no color was left to be blasted out of the earth. I wondered idly what could have inspired them to leave in such a hurry. Chances were, that was all Arthur Stanley’s work. He wanted them gone and didn’t give them either