We were two days west of a bump in the road called Stiff Neck, Texas, when Boon told me she was a right smart parched from the trail dust. It was the first thing she’d said since the morning we rode out from that damned place and I knew her canteen wasn’t empty, so she wasn’t talking about water. To tell the truth, I was startled when she said it. I had gotten used to the quiet, and for a second, I thought someone else had appeared out of thin air to talk to me. But there wasn’t anybody else as far as I could see, and that part of the panhandle was flatter than a sunbaked johnnycake on the flushest part of God’s green Earth.
Stiff Neck might not have been the town’s proper name, if one could call it a town at all. I never did see a sign proclaiming its right name one way or another, but it was what Boon said it was called and I saw no reason to contradict her. Whatever the place was written down as on the map, there hadn’t been hardly anybody left when Boon and I arrived. Stiff Neck had two problems. The first was, the railroad did not come anywhere close to it, which choked the little settlement off from the parts of Texas that sat on the tracks. The other problem was cholera, as evidenced by a hand-painted sign some enterprising soul had posted in the dry earth at the easternmost edge of town.
GIT AWAY, the sign read. SICK TOWN.
Naturally, I voiced the opinion that we should ride around and skip Stiff Neck altogether. Cholera was serious business in Texas—serious enough to have once killed hundreds in San Antonio, which was the largest settlement in the state at the time. Just as naturally, Boon was uninterested in my view on the issue, so we rode right into the middle of town. The first couple of locals I saw both wore copper charms around their necks to ward off the plague. I got to wishing I had one, too.
It was the charms that told me a couple of things about Stiff Neck: that these were probably Germans, like my people were, and that the sickness killing them off wasn’t typhoid or yellow fever or anything like that. I only knew about San Antonio from what I’d read. My people came from someplace called Kleinpudlitz, but I grew up in Arkansas. Now that I was riding into a dying sick town with a tenacious woman who cared more about asking questions I didn’t think would ever get answered than she did about the possibility of neither of us getting out of town alive, I sort of missed Arkansas. Things tended to be calm and quiet back home, and things tended to make sense. I couldn’t often make much sense of Boon.
“Hitch up here,” she said, gesturing toward the rail in front of a tumble-down, rough-board building that passed for the sheriff’s office. “I’ll talk to the law. You go wait in yonder saloon for me.”
That was how it usually was with Boon. I was well past recommending she take me along whenever she went pushing her weight around. Time was that I figured having a white man behind her would lend some gravity to her demands, but that was before I’d really gotten to know her. Boonsri Angchuan didn’t need anybody’s gravity, Anglo or otherwise.
I said, “Okay.”
She tied off her palomino and me my paint, and we went our separate ways. From the boardwalk I spied a water well across the main street, beside and sort of halfway behind a two-story house. The well was built of sandstone and it was in a bad state of disrepair. A dead mule rotted beside it, unmolested by anybody like it wasn’t a bother. I walked on until I came to the saloon Boon pointed out, which was named Lucky Star. Sometimes optimism was a son of a bitch.
Some folks probably take a good look at the room when they walk into a public house, just to see who’s sitting in there and if there’s anyone they know, but my way was always to keep myself pointed directly at the bar from the start. As such, I was a bit puzzled to find the bar inside Lucky Star to be vacant and covered with more than one layer of dust. It was only then that I turned to glance around the place. There was only one man inside, and he was staring right at me.
“I can pour you a brandy if you’re sick,” the man told me. “Black pepper and brandy, that’s the thing. Won’t save you, but it helps.”
“I’m not sick,” I said. “I only just got here.”
“Then you are a God damned fool,” he said.
I was not particularly inclined to disagree. I did think a brandy sounded like a decent enough idea, though. I accepted the recommendation but told him to hold off on the pepper.
The man went behind the bar and located a bottle to his liking. He blew some dust off a glass and poured three generous fingers before sliding the drink across the bar to me, leaving a trail in the bar dust.
I went digging for some coin to pay for the drink, but the man only shook his head and laughed.
“Hell,” he said, “this ain’t my place. Belonged to old Joe Lieber, and he’s been dead six days now. Way I see it, that’s on the house, courtesy of Joe.”
“Danke schön, Joe,” I said.
Bitte schön, I imagined the ghost of Joe Lieber responding.
The first swallow wasn’t quite down my throat when Boon walked through the doors, her boots clomping the floorboards and her face a sour frown. Her long, dark hair was twisted into a French braid that swung down to the small of her back like a horse’s tail and she kept her head tilted slightly back. In one hand she held her flat-brimmed hat, its ever-present red feather jutting up from one side. She kept her legs apart, draped in dungarees comprised of more dirt than cloth.
“Sheriff’s dead,” she said.
The man behind the bar laughed at that, too. Boon ignored him.
“Dead town,” she said. “Dead end. Finish your drink and let’s ride.”
“What’s your hurry?” the self-appointed barman said. “Have some of the cure your friend here’s having. I’ll have one, too. We’ll live forever, the three of us.”
Boon seemed to turn her attention in fits and starts from me to him, as if looking at him was the last thing in all the world she wanted to do. Once in a while, she made me a little nervous. This was one of those times.
“You ever hear tell of an Englishman called Arthur Stanley or a Siamese woman name of Pimchan Angchuan?”
“Woman, I don’t have any idea what the hell you just said to me,” the man said.
“My friend might be in a bit of a snit,” I said in kind of a low tone between swallows. “I’d play it nicer if I was you.”
It wasn’t that I thought he was being particularly unkind. Fact was, most folks in Texas weren’t likely to pick up on the kinds of names people had where Boon came from. Names like that just got garbled and mixed up in their heads and left them feeling like they must have heard wrong. I could relate, in my small way—Arkansans never did much take to Splettstoesser, either, which was my name.
Maybe that was part of why we were friends, Boon and me. Though I was born in America, I was the first and only in my family to have been. Both of us were first-generation, outsiders in a sense. Once I’d related to her, that made us peas in a pod, but Boon said I was Anglo so I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. A funny name didn’t hurt much when you looked and sounded like everybody else.
It was a privilege I overlooked, she said. I was still working that one out by the time we got to Stiff Neck, and for some time after, too. Most times I didn’t feel much privileged. Boon said that was because I’d only ever walked in my own boots and didn’t know what the blue hell I was talking about.
“An Englishman called Arthur Stanley,” Boon repeated to the barman. “And a woman from Siam called Pimchan.”
The barman showed his teeth then, few that they were, and slapped his right hand so hard against the bar top that it raised a cloud of dust that hung in the air while he chuckled over what Boon had said.
“This dumb fuckin’ squaw of yours ever talk any sense?” he chortled.
By way of instinct, I left the glass on the bar and took several long strides back, away from it and the barman. The shot cracked out before he’d ever finished talking, and the bullet struck his left eye in the same instant he spoke his last word. I saw the bloom of red in the dust, but the barman collapsed out of view before either the dust or the blood settled. Boon was just that fast when she was offended.
“Well,” I said, “if he did see your folks, we’ll never know now.”
“A little politeness goes a long way,” she said, returning her pistol—a .44 conversion Army percussion Colt—to the leather rig around her waist.
I couldn’t argue with that.
I wanted to return to the brandy, but to my disappointment it was now contaminated with bar dust as well as blood from the dead man’s eye where Boon had shot him. Instead, I moved behind the bar, gingerly stepped over the corpse, and seized the bottle he’d poured from in the first place. There was a picture of an apple on the label. I tucked it into my armpit and followed Boon outside.
She stood on the street and squinted in the sunlight as she set her hat back on her head.
“It doesn’t really cure anything,” she said.
“I guess not,” I said.
I pulled the stopper and took a swig just in case. Across the street from Lucky Star, the mule beside the well continued to rot. I wondered if there was ever going to be a place Boon wouldn’t stop to ask about Arthur Stanley and Pimchan Angchuan, and I decided there probably wouldn’t be. At the very least, it didn’t always end up with her firing a bullet into some yokel’s brain. It was the little things, I supposed.
We rode out of Stiff Neck less than an hour after we’d ridden in. The place was a bust, and I reckoned in another six months it would just be another ghost town among the dozens or hundreds of them dotting the landscape. Settlements came and went. A lot of the time they failed without ever needing something like cholera to ruin them. Texas was just like that sometimes. Capricious, you might say.
Two days later, I offered what remained of the brandy I’d stolen to Boon when she commented to me that she was parched.
She said, “Edward, was there ever a day in your life you didn’t have a drink?”
I thought hard, and I had a drink to facilitate the thinking. But it turned out to be one of those rhetorical questions, because Boon changed the subject before I could pin down an answer.
“Next town we hit, let’s hole up a spell,” she said. “Pim needs shoeing and I need rest. One more day on this saddle and I’ll have hemorrhoids like a damn drover.”
Pim was what she called the palomino, which I took to be short for Boon’s mother’s name, Pimchan. I hadn’t ever heard of somebody naming a horse after their mother, leastways a mother they were fond of, but I’d never known a woman to speak frankly about whether or not she had hemorrhoids, either. I had no way of knowing if all the women in Siam were as hell-fire tough and occasionally mean as Boonsri Angchuan, but I felt certain she was a rarity in Texas.
I said, “Okay.”
She didn’t utter another word until we arrived in a town called Darling at dusk. I thought she was a hell of a woman then, just as I did every day.