Boon Ed Kurtz (the little red hen read aloud txt) 📖

We raised glasses, Boon and me, and clinked them together before downing our liquor and ordering another round. We got drunker than Cooter Brown that night, rehashing old stories and telling each other all the new ones worth telling, half of which were made up out of whole cloth. Spent a couple years in Chile, she told me, where things weren’t much different than the Territories used to be, only prettier. Told her about the time I accidently foiled a bank robbery in Beeker’s Hope, Montana when I recognized one of the gang right outside and called out to him just as he was pulling the bandana over his face. We slapped backs and laughed a lot, cried a little. I didn’t mind. Not with her.

After the Mex closed up shop, we took a bottle back to the hotel I temporarily called home and whooped it up until the wife of the owner came pounding on the door to simmer us down. In the quiet of the wee dark hours before morning, we finally talked about Meihui. Turned out Boon buried the girl her ownself someplace in the High Sierra known only to her. Dug the grave, filled it back in, marked it in a way nobody would ever notice so as to ensure the kid never got disturbed.

“I have visited three times since,” she told me. “She’s still there. She’s fine. Resting.”

I nodded and she softly wept. I had an inkling there were some other hurts in there, pains from the time between then and now, but I kept my mouth shut and put an arm around her shoulders. To my surprise, Boon leaned into me and let me hold her a while, even after she was all cried out. Just a couple of gray old killers, sharing the pain they largely brought down upon themselves.

I never did clearly remember passing out that night, but I did recall telling her that I had always loved her before I did.

“I know, Edward,” she said. “I always knew.”

And that was good enough for me. She was, of course, long gone when I rose late into the morning. I sat on the edge of the bed a long time, savoring those last hours. I could still smell her on my clothes, on the linens. Still feel her in my arms.

A couple fingers remained in that bottle of mescal the Mex sold me the night before, so I finished that off for breakfast, flattened my hair with my hands as best I could, and stumbled downstairs to settle up for the room before heading off again. It was getting warm, and I had never been to Minnesota but I met a drummer on a stage once who called that northerly clime home and invited me to drop in should I ever find my way that far north. Seemed like an idea.

After that, I couldn’t say. Mayhap in another eight or ten years I’d run across Boon again. I knew it would take at least a couple more years before I stopped thinking about her each and every day. Until then, I enjoyed the thoughts. Most of them, anyway.

A preview of

VENGEANCE OF BOON

Available Spring 2021

Prologue

Something on the order of four years had come and gone—some fast and some slow—since I’d last laid eyes on my old friend Boon when, in a wide place in the road called Sahuarita about halfway between Nogales and Tucson, I made the acquaintance of Lily Contreras.

I have little doubt that you have heard tell of her.

I hadn’t been in the Arizona Territory that time around long enough to make up my mind about staying or leaving, but I was pretty decisive about the poor beer and even worse whiskey I was putting back at the bar in a roadhouse that had no name I knew of. It was into that same roadhouse that Lily came into my life, however briefly, just long enough to drink me under the table and tell me a thing or three about old Boonsri Angchuan.

The last I’d seen of her had been up in the northern part of California, just days after she and I finally tracked down the worthless son-of-a-bitch who sired her, a man she dutifully killed in the bowels of a depleted placer mine in a forgotten ghost town name of Handsome Frank. I can’t say for sure or for certain how that killing affected her, but I do know the moment her soon-to-be-dead father killed a young girl we thought we had rescued from a Barbary Coast hook shop, Boon changed. The kid’s name was Meihui. She was a good kid, and I am forced to confess I get all broken up about it all over again any time I remember her small, sweet face. For Boon’s part, I reckon that day just about broke her, period.

She rode off to parts unknown to me, taking Meihui’s body with her, and in the years that followed I never did achieve much on my own apart from drifting from one stop in the trail to the next, drinking a hell of a lot of rotgut firewater, and waiting out the days; some of them in jail cells, most of them under the stars instead of a roof. I never did make it to Minnesota like I planned, but I came back to the borderland where last I’d seen Boon, a few years earlier, in a place a lot like the one where I first saw Lily. Half the time I was so deep in my cups I didn’t even know which side of the border I was on, which happened to be the case in Sahuarita that spring in 1891. For the most part, all evidence pointed toward it being on the Mexico side of the line, what with all that adobe and the heat and, naturally, the Mexicans. But the bartender swore on the vile popskull he so proudly served that I remained in the good old United