In the years I’d spent in the company of Boon, I’d seen her end more than a handful of arguments at the barrel of a gun or the edge of a knife. I did not take it upon myself to record incidents of this nature in a timely or faithful manner, but offhand I could conservatively estimate that my friend brought about the demise of some fifteen souls between the three she blew out of their saddles in the moments before we first met and our arrival in Red Foot, Texas. But that’s on the low end. It might have been closer to twenty-one.
Arithmetic is not my strength.
More than once, I’d thought about whether she was crazy. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the violence, because I don’t believe she ever did. It just came so easy to her, and with such skill. She was a tightly wound coil of Siamese snake-woman daring any and every passerby to draw near for her strike. Sometimes I waited with bated breath for the moment to come and it never did. Other times I hadn’t any notion what was coming and ended up every bit as shocked as the man dying on the floor.
Had she inherited a meanness from her gold-mouthed father, whom she claimed was evil through and through? Or was it instead the result of a life lived harder than most? Nothing was ever easy for a half-Siamese orphan left to her own devices at a tender age, with nobody to speak to and too many hours spent gathering bitterness and rage like wool. Nothing but the rage itself, I reckoned.
And rage was what spilled out of her next, that evening before Judge Selwyn Dejasu in the Red Foot Saloon. She was up and over the table before the chair she’d been sitting in hit the floor, agile as a bobcat, and she vaulted so that the table tottered violently and Lawyer Laramie scrambled for safety. I just sat still as I had been, watching everything happen like it was a dream. I wished that it was.
The judge had his pistol out faster than I would have thought possible and against my better instincts, I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation of the shot. The gun fired and I smelled the acrid smoke before something clattered and broke.
“Boon!” I cried.
Sure she’d been hit, I opened my eyes and leapt to my feet to find the barman screaming to my right, the side of his head awash with blood where an ear had been moments before. Boon had gotten to the judge’s wrist before he squeezed the trigger, forcing the gun away from her. Now the barman hollered almost as loudly as the judge himself, who kept repeating, “She broke my wrist, she broke my wrist.”
Still grasping the fractured joint with one hand, she curled the other hand into a fist and introduced it to the judge’s nose, which squashed flat in a spray of bright red blood. His gun finally dropped from his fingers to the floor. I watched it fall, the barrel cutting a groove into the wood floor, and spin away toward the bar. So, too, did one of the underutilized jurymen, a stout old boy who’d helped to convey me inside for the trial. The two of us squared off, more or less the same distance from the pistol, as if we were already armed and fixing to throw down in the street.
I went for the gun, but the old boy was a second quicker. My fingers grazed the cylinder while his secured the grip and raised it up to push the barrel against my nose. He grinned. I considered praying, but dismissed the idea outright. I never was too sure about whether the preachers were right about God and, if they were, that the Old Man ever had my best interests at heart. I figured I’d let Him do what He wanted and just worry about the bullet that was about to take up residence in my brain.
Seemed to me I’d been living on borrowed time ever since Boon showed up to ruin my first hanging anyhow, and an extra three years wasn’t anything to spit at. A damn fine three years, too, for the most part. In spite of myself, I got filled up with warm feelings about it, never mind the iron in my face, so I decided to give Boonsri one last look before facing a more serious judgement than Selwyn Dejasu could ever mete out.
She’d sure gotten the better of the old judge, too. He was on his back, still in his chair, and Boon had one boot planted firmly on his flabby neck. She had also reclaimed her Colt, which was at that moment aimed directly at the juryman’s head, which split open at the sound of a shot once she pulled the trigger. I got a mouthful of blood and pushed the dead man off of me. He rolled into a fresh pile of cow slop on the floor and Shitbrains stepped on his eye. I didn’t think he much minded.
The fat padding the judge’s windpipe protected it enough that he was still uttering any number of blue oaths that would have made Squirrel-Tooth Alice blush to beat the Dutch. Most of the remaining jurymen either lit out or hid under tables after Boon’s timely shot, though the barman was still standing and still screaming his fool head off. That set the heifer to moaning, though I couldn’t tell if she was frightened by the ruckus or just thought she was accompanying the barman’s song.
I picked up the dead juryman’s pistol and might have put an end to the cow that started the whole miserable business, but Lawyer Bob Laramie came tramping down the stairs with a scattergun bigger than the judge he sought to rescue. I hadn’t noticed him going upstairs in the first place and wouldn’t have worried much if I had; he didn’t come across the sort to worry about. I was plenty worried about that scattergun, though.
Boon said, “Edward!”
I replied by way of swinging the pistol away from the cow and around half the saloon to Laramie, who by then was charging Boon and weeping from terror.
“Don’t you hurt the judge!” he cried.
He took aim at Boon’s chest, so I shot him in the neck. The shotgun went up and he fired at the same time as he was shot, missing me but taking off most of the rest of the barman’s head. The heifer’s accompaniment turned into a solo. Lawyer Laramie slapped at his ragged, bloody neck and dropped backward, flat on his back.
Conscious of the possibility of other surprise avengers, I took stock of the rest of the room. The air was filled with smoke that burned the eyes and scratched in the throat. Beneath the picture where the judge had earlier dined, one of the appointed jurymen stood with his hands out like he was being robbed. I turned the pistol toward him.
A working girl seated comfortably nearby, looking a little bored, said, “Aw, let Pete alone. He’s gone and pissed his Levi’s.”
I motioned with the pistol for the batwings. Pete bolted for them and staggered out into the night. That left only one member of the original jury, who cowered with his hands over his head beneath a table in the back by the stairs, and two whores, including the uninterested one. The other girl took advantage of the relative calm and, gathering up her threadbare skirts, went running up the stairs, taking two steps at a time. A door slammed shut somewhere up there. I didn’t reckon she’d be going for another scattergun—she’d have left the door open otherwise.
Boon took her boot off the judge’s throat and hauled him up to his feet by his whiskers.
“I’ll hang you yet,” he said. “You and Arkansas Edward, both.”
“You got a chance to keep your head attached to your body,” Boon told him. “Don’t go lousing it up with that talk.”
The judge emitted a hoarse laugh.
“Take you to my brother, that it? I’d sooner cut my own head off than give Barry to you.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, and she pushed him hard to the floor again. To me, she said, “Go back to the undertaker’s we passed by. He’ll have a saw for cutting timber.”
“You’re bluffing,” said the judge. “I been a judge long enough to know a liar when I see one.”
I said, “You don’t know Boon,” and went back out to break into an undertaker’s storefront. The place wasn’t far, as Red Foot wasn’t but a pile of wood and adobe in the middle of nowhere, and I had to kick the front door in to gain access. It was dark, naturally, and although I did find a lamp, there were no matches in sight, so I fumbled half-blind for a quarter of an hour before finally finding what I wanted: a steel saw with a smooth wooden handle and teeth as sharp as the day it was sold.
The whore was asleep in her chair when I returned, despite the judge’s ranting and raving, which I could hear long before I passed through the batwing doors for the fifth time that day.
“If I could hang you twice, I’d hang you three times,” he said. “You ought to be burned for a witch and buried face down in cow shit.”
“Just for that,” Boon said evenly as I set the saw down on the table formerly used as the judge’s bench, “I ain’t going to shoot you first.”
“You’re mad,” he said.
“Judge Dejasu,” she said, “I’m madder than hell.”
She kept her Colt trained on the little man when she picked up the saw.