I was against it from the start, but the girl came with us when we went out from that slum and snuck away back to the docks. There was a word somewhere in my brain for it, for the danger of bringing a child along on our flight, but I stammered and spat trying to search it out.
Boon said, “Liability.”
“Mayhap,” I said. It wasn’t the word, and I did not know its meaning, but I wasn’t in the mood to nitpick. “I can for sure understand what you are doing with her, what with her being in the same sort of trouble you was in before.”
“Trouble,” she said flatly.
“Probably there’s a hundred girls like that,” I went on. “A thousand. I don’t know. What’s saving one? ’Specially if we get our own God damn selves killed for trying?”
Boon’s eyes flashed on me. She looked every bit the same as she had that day in Revelation, the day she knocked me down and I ended up in the hoosegow. I clenched my jaw and braced for the hit. It did not come.
“I do not expect nature ever came up with a dumber creature than a man,” she said, those eyes still huge and bright. “But the worst part of it is how willfully stupid you sons of bitches are, Splettstoesser. You choose stupidity because you can and because it is easy.”
She spit off the edge of the embankment, into the oily water sloshing up against the posts dubiously holding up the docks, crawling with algae and barnacles.
I said, “Boon.”
“I have killed a mess of men,” she said. “Only the boys hurt me, because maybe there was still time for them to choose better. Grown men are what they are. Most of them deserve worse than I can ever mete out to them, and that’s a fucking fact.”
For the briefest instant I thought she might cry, but she steeled herself and turned her face down to the small, withdrawn kid standing just apart from us. Neither of us knew her name. She had not spoken a single word. It was my assumption that she understood no English, and since neither Boon nor I could speak Chinese, we were at a deadlock. If nothing else, I worried she had no idea what we were about. For all she might have known, we were only more slavers come to steal her away to the same circumstances or worse.
“All men are stupid, little one,” she told the child. “But do not worry. I am here and I will keep you safe.”
To my astonishment, the child appeared to listen closely, and she nodded when Boon finished speaking. Boon smiled at her. The child did not, but kept her gaze upon Boon. An understanding was there that had nothing to do with me—something I could never understand or be a party to. I felt vaguely guilty in that moment, and I could almost grasp what Boon had been talking about. Not quite, but on the cusp. She was no fool, my dear friend Boon. But Christ knew I was.
Gulls screamed overhead and men shouted from every skiff and ship’s prow. Animals wandered free underfoot and the air at the water was cool and rank and felt thick in my throat. Boon touched the child’s face, studied her closely. So slight and pale, in need of a bath. She was all Boon could see for all the pell-mell madhouse confusion all around us. I tried to read her face, to see if it was the case that we were simply beaten. Her revenge aborted, her mission replaced with this silent child in whom she seemed to see so much of herself. And if so, what of all of it? The killings, the blood and bone, the fire and iron? Death did not mean much, most times. I never figured mine would. There would never be any children to carry on my worthless line, and I could not think of a single soul apart from Boon who would ever have reason to recount my name and life long after I got put in the cold earth to rot. Nevertheless, I liked to think I never took away a man’s life without cause, and that cause was in service to the private war into which I was conscripted. For all my effort to keep away from the War Between the States, Boonsri Angchuan snatched me up into battle all the same. And now, it appeared all for naught.
All except for the little ward now with us.
God in Heaven, I could have cried myself.
“I don’t know what we’re about no more,” I said. “And I do not care except for I will need a bottle of something strong wherever we are going.”
“You been sober so long I can’t say as I’m not shocked to hell you ain’t shaking all over,” Boon said.
“I drank some last night.”
“You never get your fill.”
“I ain’t yet, no.”
She shook her head. The girl looked from her to me and back again. I had no experience with kids, really. To be honest, I was mostly spooked by her.
“We are not done,” Boon said then, and as though that settled anything, she took the child by the hand and they walked together along the docks to the north.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“She’s dead, you know,” she said.
“Who is dead? Your mother?”
She kept walking, the child’s tiny hand in hers.
“Boon?”
No answer came. There was nothing else to do but catch up.