I guess I expected the coachman would carry us right out of town, away from the shanties and the stenches and the masts like treetops in the middle distance, cluttering the bay. Instead, we did not travel far at all, only the far side of the Barbary Coast, maybe half a mile away. Mayhap the fellow was afraid to leave the confines of that tiny area he knew well enough, but it was not for me to say. I barely understood white men and I did not know any one thing about Chinese. I never understood Boon much at all. Most times I reckoned I could not even understand myself.
He lived in a tiny, fusty room, or at least that was where we ended up, and he left us there to drive the carriage someplace else. While he was gone, it was Boon and me, and an old Chinese woman who lay so still and silent on a pallet that at first I reckoned she was dead. Besides the three of us, there was a younger woman who crouched on the floor beside a guttering candle and a young boy, maybe five or six years old. They all of them regarded us with great suspicion, which I did not mind, as I would most like have felt the same way in their shoes. We were strangers to them, disheveled and one of us leaking blood. If any of them spoke a word of English, I never knew it.
The fellow who rescued us returned late into the night, and he brought with him an older Chinaman with a long, yellow beard and his hair shaggy and only neck-length in the back, beneath his silk cap. He caught me studying it and read the question in my mind.
“White boys cut it off,” he said dryly. “Great game for them. Know it shames men. Sometimes they wear the queues like belts. Same as scalping.”
He shrugged sadly. I looked from him to the fellow from the Palace, who pursed his mouth and leaned in to take a closer look at Boon’s wound.
“Bad,” he said.
“Bad enough,” she said.
“Doctor, him,” he said, gesturing at the old man, who nodded.
“All right,” said Boon. “Get on with it, then.”
I did not think she sounded particularly grateful for all that was being done for us, and I might have said so had she not pulled the ruined chemise up and off her torso with a low groan. It might could come as a surprise, but there was never a time in our years together that ever I saw my friend in such a compromising position, which is to say in the buff, and I could happily have continued that trend if she wasn’t dead set on breaking the streak then and there. I must have turned red as a strawberry because I could feel the hot blood in my cheeks, spinning away like I’d been slapped and gasping at the thick, wet air.
“Chrissakes, Splettstoesser,” she rasped. “I know for a fact you been with a passel of whores all your grown days. Ain’t hardly like you never saw a pair of titties before.”
I sputtered something that was no known language and stared at my boots. I tried like to hell to think about anything else, which became successful when I heard her yelp like a cat with its tail caught underneath a rocking chair and knew the Chinese sawbones had gotten to work. The old woman on the pallet turned her watery eyes on me and chuckled.
Without turning back around, I said, “How bad is it?”
“Lung okay,” said the doc. “Rib broke. Two, I think. Bad, but she live.”
“Thank God for that,” I said.
“Been nice God saw to it I wasn’t shot to begin with,” Boon groused. I could not disagree with her assessment.
The surgery took up most of the rest of the night, and I dozed some on the floor during, my back still to Boon and the doctor and the man who saved our hides. The boy and the younger woman played some game that looked like dominoes if dominoes was a hundred times more complicated. The room had no windows, and eventually the candle died out and the younger woman lighted another one. I lost all sense of time, wondering if the sun was up or if it was even the next night already.
Next I laid eyes on Boonsri was some hours after the last time, and she was bandaged up with rags that were already bleeding through. The sight of it reminded me of Willock’s ruined hand, which got me to thinking about all that business the preachers blabbered about eye for an eye. She was hunched over on one of the pallets, her whole chest wrapped up, studying the pocket watch she took off that cowboy back in Texas. I could not think of where she’d hidden it away in that Oriental getup she’d been wearing, but more than that I couldn’t understand why she bothered to bring it. Our old duds were back at the St. Francis hotel, along with my rifle and a load of other things, and it occurred to me that all of it was lost to us now. I reckoned Boon prepared for that contingency and took the watch along just in case. It was something she was not willing to lose.
The doctor was gone and soon after the woman took the boy up in her arms and left, too. The old woman slept and the man who drove us away from the gunfight at the Palace sat in a corner reading a Chinese newspaper. Would it ever have a story about the Siamese woman who came to town with a .44 caliber Colt and her blood hot for killing the Englishman that whelped her? I’d never know, but I kind of hoped I might get a mention in there if it did.
Later, our savior disappeared again, and when he came back he brought with him a clay pot full of some sort of chop suey with fried chicken feet in it. We all ate like we hadn’t eaten in weeks, all of us but the old woman, who kept on sleeping. And once our meal was done, the fellow said, “Now you go. Not safe for me. Not safe for her.”
He pointed with his chin at the old woman and gave Boon an apologetic look.
Boon nodded. She moved to get up, faltered, moaned, sat back down. The fellow and me flew to her and helped her to her feet. He set us up with some fresh clothes that weren’t much more than rags, but they were clean and wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. We left with our bellies filled but our hearts low. San Francisco wasn’t going well at all.
The building was a hive of little rooms like the one we’d been in. We slinked out into the narrow hall where faces peered out from cracked doors at us. The air was thick with a dozen competing odors that confused my senses, though they stirred my belly, too. I wasn’t all too sure about those chicken feet when they were offered, but I was damned if the whole stew wasn’t one of the tastier things I’d ever had the pleasure of devouring.
Boon led the way, found the stairs.
I said, “I never even thanked him.”
“I did,” she said.
“Don’t even know his name.”
“Fong,” she said. “Jing Fong. Came west looking for a friend he says went to Australia. Got hitched up and stayed. Never found the friend.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Says he was a killer.”
“So are we.”
“So are we,” she said.
We wormed our way down the stairs and through another narrow hallway where the floorboards creaked and crackled. Ahead of us was mostly darkness until a door squealed open and a shape filled the brightness of the sun outside. I paid this no mind, but Boon reached past me to the closest doorknob, opened the door, and pushed me into the room without a word. She shut the door gently once were both inside and clamped a hand over my mouth.
“Policeman,” she said.
“Fong,” I said.
“Will be fine. Be quiet.”
I stayed quiet. Boon pressed close to the door and listened. The floorboard creaked some more on the other side of it. My blood pounded in my ears.
The room was almost pitch black, the only light in it leaking in from the doorframe. So, when I heard a small whimper somewhere behind us, I came close to crying out myself. Boon touched my arm, as if to settle my nerves, and she plunged into the darkness where I heard a voice whisper but could not make out what it said. A moment after, a match struck, filling my nostrils with a devilish, sulfurous smell, and Boon lighted a lantern atop a three-legged stool. Beneath the stool was a pallet much like those in Fong’s room, except upon this one was a filthy, slumbering white man beside a young Chinese girl. The girl’s eyes were wide and shimmering in the lantern light. Boon pressed her finger to her lips and pointed at me. The girl hesitated, but she rose from the pallet, careful not to upset the ugly man beside her, and she padded softly across the room to me.
She couldn’t have been more than twelve, maybe thirteen years old. Right about the age I reckoned Boon had been when she first reached the Bay from old Connecticut—and it looked to me that this one had been shanghaied into the same, awful circumstances. I watched her closely, as sure that she was going to act as I was unsure of what exactly she was going to do.
Boon cleared up my confusion by pointing to my boot. I nodded, pulled my knife. She took two long, silent strides to retrieve it and returned the same way. I put my hands on the girl’s slight, slender shoulders and turned her away from the pallet, toward me and the door.
“Don’t look,” I whispered.
Boon shushed me. I covered the girl’s ears and she pressed herself against my leg. It was all over in an instant, the blade sinking point first into the hollow of the man’s throat and Boon using the heel of her left hand to push it all the way down to the hilt. He never had a chance to make any sound other than the awful wet gurgling of so much blood filling up his airway. Was she thinking of the dirty men who crowded her memories and nightmares? I have always assumed so. And I knew even then that the girl would not be free of such horrors in her future, either, no matter what Boon did for the child that no one ever did for herself.
She had to stand on the dead man’s chest to wrench the knife free. She wiped the blade clean on his shirt. Her hands and sleeves were still coated with the blood, and when she handed the knife back to me, she smeared it on the back of my hand. I imagined that it was hot, so hot it burned, and fought to stop thinking about it. My stomach roiled.
It was catching up to me. Three years, so much God damned ugliness.
It was catching up to me.