We took our supper right there in the main room with everybody else that evening, and we didn’t have a spot of trouble from Missus Reynold or anybody else. People stared and whispered, sure. But no trouble.
I guessed the Great Hero of the Plains Tom Willocks had already put his mighty influence to effect in that regard.
What a damn fraud, I thought.
Boon had some kind of soup. It looked watery to me and she barely touched it. She was a thousand miles away, maybe farther. I tried not to stare, and every time I was on the verge of asking her what was going on in that noggin of hers, I all but bit my own tongue off. If it wasn’t Willocks on her mind, then I supposed it was the fact that she wasn’t any closer to her goal now than she was when we first started out. And that was not to mention the years she spent on the hunt before she ever met me with a rope around my neck.
I was on a roan horse with my hands tied behind my back. The rope went up and over a juniper branch as thick as my thigh, where it was secured to the trunk in a double knot that looked like it was going to hold just fine when that roan was shooed away. In front of me, backlit by the afternoon sun so that I could hardly make out their faces, were three riders. The one in the middle was wearing my hat. He was the one who started the whole mess.
Of course, it was his opinion that the fault was mine. We were at cross-purposes, he and I. He had walked into a saloon south of Comanche to find the love of his life seated on my lap, and he saw red. Thing was, the place was a crib house and his beloved was in its employ. And I might have been a paying customer had the fellow not dragged the poor girl off of me and hauled me outside by the front of my shirt. I had only been in Texas for five days.
The heartsick idiot demanded I fill my hand, which was a request I declined. I had only my rifle, which did not at all suit the situation he was trying to put into place. He then commanded one of his two pals to give me his revolver. This turned into an argument between them, during which I started for the alley between the crib house and the gambling den next door. The third fellow cracked off a shot at me, slamming lead into the corner of the building not three inches above the crown of my skull.
“If he won’t fight like a man,” said the heartsick idiot, “then I ’spect we’ll just hang the son of a bitch.”
I weighed the two options, but I was wasting my time. The first idea was off the table already. The girl who’d been on my lap was on the porch now, clasping her hands to her breast and gazing lovingly at the man who had just decided to lynch me. I thought bitterly about how something like this wouldn’t have happened back in Arkansas, but it probably would have. Honestly, it was only a matter of time.
That was the sort of luck I had.
I got tossed onto a mount with the grubby fellow who’d taken that potshot at me and the four of us went loping out of whatever lousy little cow town we’d been in, in a westerly direction, where they sought privacy and the right tree for the job. Once I was strung up, I asked as politely as I could that the fellows look after my horse. The heartsick idiot said he was going to kill my horse and let it rot in the desert next to me. It didn’t look like we were going to be friends. I said as much, in a manner sufficiently colorful to excite their rage. Though I was about to die, I couldn’t help but laugh a little. It must have been what I said about the heartsick idiot’s mother. Tough jaspers like him were always mama’s boys in the end.
I couldn’t quite make out what he was doing, but it was quiet enough out there in the still, hot air that I could hear the click of the hammer as he eared it back. The usual chain of events in tights like this, at least according to the dime novels, was that he’d fire a round into the air to startle the roan. The roan would then move off, leaving me to hang. That would be that, until the next poor bastard met his beloved whore at the crib house, anyway.
And a shot did indeed come. It echoed out over the cacti and scrub brush and I squeezed my eyes shut to wait for death. The horse fell away from beneath me, and I dropped toward the earth, but my neck stayed in the noose that was now choking the life out of me while my toes scraped the dust. Well, old man, I told myself, I expect this is the end, then. I felt unusually calm, given the circumstances, and tried to hold my breath for some reason but my lungs weren’t having it. Three more shots followed, one right after the other, pop, pop, pop. I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to a whole lot of commotion in the ensuing seconds. Shouts and hooves beating the dirt, what sounded like sacks of grain falling to the ground from a reasonable height. My eyes opened again but by then I was half-dead already and couldn’t see much, or what I could see was as that esteemed disciple said, as through a glass but darkly.
The rope broke. I hit the ground, hard. Had the heartsick idiot had a change of heart? If so, that certainly did nothing to explain the three shots that followed the one that spooked my horse. My face was full of dust and there were hooves beating perilously close to my head. Nothing was going the way I expected it to that day.
When I did finally open my eyes, I found myself staring at the heartsick idiot, who appeared to be staring back at me. Our faces were lined up perfectly there on the ground, only his sported a fresh hole right in the middle of the forehead which leaked blood onto the dirt. A horse nickered nearby and boots hit the earth. I tried to roll over but my back barked at me and my hands were still tied.
The first thing Boon ever said to me, the knife she used to cut the rope still gripped in one hand, was, “You ought to stay away from whorehouses.”
To my credit, I did.
Most of the time.
She gave up on her soup and lay the spoon down on the table. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her look quite as tired as she did that first evening in Darling, Texas, and for reasons I couldn’t seem to pin down it made me feel sad to see it. To tell the God’s honest truth, she was the only friend I had in all the world, and though I knew she had a rough go of life, when it piled up on her mind there was rarely anything I could say or do. At the end of the day, I wasn’t ever much help to her. I was just there.
“Turning in,” was all she said before rising from the table and going purposefully to the stairs.
I signaled the bartender for another drink, but he only pursed his lips at me and shrugged. With a sigh, I got up and went over to him to get my damn whiskey.
When I returned to the table, I was surprised to find Boon’s chair now occupied by none other than Marshal Tom Willocks. He struck a sulphur match against the underside of the table and touched the flame to a cigarette perched in his mouth. Blue smoke spilled from his nostrils once he got the thing going, and he waved the lucifer out before letting it drop to the floor.
“Bad habit,” he said without looking at me. He bent over to retrieve the dead match. “This ain’t that type of place.”
Willocks dropped the match into the ashtray on the table, heretofore clean and empty, and puffed away while I sat down and stared at him over my glass.
“Soup’s cold,” I told him, “but I don’t reckon Boon would mind if you finish it.”
“Thanks, no,” he said. “I took my supper at my desk like always. There’s a little diner at the far north end of Willoughby Street run by the Widow Perkins. She brings me a bowl of beef stew or chili most every evening, bless her heart. I heartily recommend it.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
He drew in a lungful and held it for a moment before expelling the smoke in a great plume that filled the space between us.
“Siam,” he said at some length. “You know, the only reason I ever heard of it is those twins. The Siamese Twins, you know what I mean.”
I didn’t.
“Come again?” I said.
“Couple of brothers, born stuck to each other or some such thing. Used to tour all over the county, charge a quarter to look at ’em. I never did, but I read all about it in the papers from back east. Anyway, they’re from Siam, too. Just like your pretty friend.”
Pretty friend. I wanted to stuff that cigarette up his nose, hot end first.
I said, “I don’t reckon Boon is stuck to anybody.”
“No,” he agreed, “I don’t reckon she would be. How do you suppose she speaks English so well? That on account of her daddy?”
“She grew up in America,” I said. “Back east mostly, way to hear her tell it, though she’s muttered something or other about California, too. I don’t know if she talks any Siamese or not.”
If she did, it was no better than my German, but I’d never heard her say anything that wasn’t in English apart from the odd Mex word, which was the same for just about anyone.
“Abandoned,” the marshal said low.
That was about the size of it. Near as I could tell, the old Englishman had brought them both—Boon and Pimchan—first to Cuba, then to America, with the glowing promise of making them a right and proper family. Boon in a fancy Yankee school and Pimchan made a right and proper wife. Instead, Pimchan ended up in something like indentured servitude but more akin to slavery, never mind the law. By the time Boon ran off to California in search of her mama, she wasn’t but twelve years old and landed in an orphanage for Chinese children because nobody would believe she wasn’t Chinese. Came up the rest of the way with kids she couldn’t understand and grown-ups who wouldn’t listen to her. Seems she was no older than fourteen when she broke out of that awful place, though it was another couple-few years before she learned the full truth of her provenance and parentage.
That was when the hate started.
But I didn’t tell all of this to Willocks. My big mouth had already spouted more than enough. I blamed the whiskey. It was a damned sight better in Darling than I was accustomed to.
“It ain’t been all that easy for her,” I said.
“Between two worlds,” the marshal waxed, “belonging to neither. No, I don’t ’spose that is very easy.”
“Everybody has a cross to bear,” I said, and I slammed the rest of the liquor down my gullet. I’d have loved to follow it up with another, but Willocks was beginning to get on my nerves. “It’s been a right smart pleasure, Your Honor, but I’m sure looking forward to that clean bed upstairs.”
I stood up a little too fast and stumbled a little, grasping the edge of the table to keep from toppling over. Damn fine whiskey. I tried to remember the name on the bottle, but I wasn’t too sure of my own name by that point in the proceedings.
“Hang on just a minute there,” said Willocks. He reached over and grabbed me by the wrist. I did not care for that one whit and I snapped my hand away from him.
“Listen,” I started.
“Just a minute, partner. No need to get riled any.”
“Who’s riled?” I spat.
I was.
“I only wanted to let you know—let both of y’all know—that it looks like I got some good information out of Goliad.”
“That fast?”
I didn’t believe him. Telegraphs were lightning fast, to be sure, but there were plenty of other details to consider, too. Getting the message to the right person, for example, not to mention the time it took to track down that sort of difficult information.
“Like I done told y’all, I know some good old boys in Goliad,” he said with a grin.
Horse apples, I thought. Horse apples and dog shit.
I said, “All right, then—what have you got?”
The grin broadened, slicing across his big face.
“Not so fast,” he said. “Way I see it, between my hospitality this morning and my additional work on y’all’s behalf this evening, the two of you owe me a little something in return.”
“There it is,” I said. I was sobering up quicker than I wanted.
“Don’t misunderstand me, sir,” the marshal said. “It’s not that I won’t pass this information along to you and your lovely friend—” The nerve of this rube! “—I merely want for us all to come to an amicable arrangement that benefits all parties equitably.”
I should add here that though Marshal Willocks tended to turn a pretty phrase with more than a few five-dollar words peppered in, he pronounced them so poorly that he sounded more the fool for saying them. I might have laughed right in his face had I not been so irritated. So too, I was eager for the man to get to the damned point.
“Let’s have it, Willocks.”
The grin faded. I didn’t think he cared much for my impertinence, which sat just fine with me.
“You ever hear tell of an outlaw name of Bartholomew Dejasu?” he asked me.
“Are you just collecting hard names now?”
“Killed five men, and that’s just in Texas. There’s papers on him in the Indian Territory, Arkansas, and the New Mexico Territory for almost a dozen more, on top of a handful of robberies and a fair amount of rustling down through into Mexico. This one is the sort whose neck was made for rope, if you catch my meaning.”
“We ain’t bounty hunters,” I said. With that, I steadied myself and turned for the stairs. The room tilted some, but I did my best to hide it.
Willocks launched to his feet and cut me off at the bottom step. I thought he was going to put his hands on me again and I tensed up. He didn’t.
“Now, wait just a damn minute,” he said. “I could easily have thrown your friend in the hoosegow for what she pulled with Lenny today on the street. That’s assault, plain and simple, and I just let it blow right over, didn’t I?”
“Boon’s in room five,” I told him. “Go arrest her.”
“Knock that malarkey off. I don’t aim to arrest her and you know it. I’m just saying we’re all friends now, and friends help each other out, damn it.”
“Help yourself, Marshal.”
I shouldered past him and, grabbing the railing, started up the steps. I recalled there being fewer of them earlier in the day, but if I had to climb a hundred of them to get clear of Willocks, that was what I’d do.
Halfway up, I was startled to find Boon standing a few steps down from the top, her arms crossed over her chest and leaned up against the wall. She’d been listening to the whole conversation, though the stone face she wore betrayed no thoughts on the subject one way or another.
“How do, Boon,” I said.
She looked past me to the marshal at the bottom of the stairs.
“Information first,” she said. “Then we’ll get your man.”
“Ah, hell,” I said.
Willocks licked his lips and thought it over.
“See, I figure it’s your turn to pay out a favor, after today,” he said. “Matter of fact, when it’s all said and done, I’ll have done you two favors and you only one for me.”
“All favors ain’t created equal,” she said.
“That’s a fact, Miss Angchuan.”
The smooth son of a bitch had been practicing the name after she wrote it down for him. I just knew it. He sure as hell hadn’t said Splettstoesser in all the time we’d been talking.
“I’ll tell you what,” Willocks continued. “Meet me for breakfast at the diner on Willoughby—Edward here can find it. We’ll jaw over the particulars and you can make up your mind then.”
“And the information you promise?” Boon said.
“Make it eight o’clock,” said the marshal. “We’re not farmers.”
“Or bounty hunters,” I reminded him.
“Eight o’clock,” Willocks said, and it was the final word on the matter. He left, and I went the rest of the way up to where Boon still leaned against the wall.
“Horse apples and dog shit,” I said.
“Get some rest, Edward,” Boon said. “Tomorrow may be a long day.”
“And the day after that?” I asked, worried that we were entering into some kind of long game.
She said, “Maybe longer.”
Was that a phantom of a smile on her lips? Who knows? I made a noise and grumped back to my room without another word.
I lay in bed for what felt like a while before finally drifting away into a dreamless sleep. In the meantime, I tossed, turned, and worried. I worried that this Willocks really did have information worth hearing, and that Boon would soon locate her father, kill him, and probably end up dead, or in prison, or forever on the run. I had no intention of following her through the first two, and the third did not sound too pleasant either. Alternatively, the slippery bastard might have received word on Boon’s mother, whereupon a happy reunion could take place. This was a lovelier outcome to ponder, but also one in which I would have no place. Either way, I feared I was soon to lose Boon.