Chapter Forty-Four

It was a lot of years before I ever saw Boonsri Angchuan again, though I thought of her often. Practically every minute of every day at first, later quite damn frequently. After the first couple of years I started to go decent stretches without thinking of her at all when out of the blue she’d be right there again, front and center in my mind for no particular reason at all. I did not seek her out, asking after everyplace I roamed as she had in search of Arthur Stanley, but I did keep my eyes peeled and my ear to the ground. A woman like that did not go unnoticed, though I managed to travel entirely different circuits than she and heard nothing of interest in that regard. For a long time, I presumed she had to have either died or left the country. Either of those potential outcomes led me into a dreadful state of melancholy, which inevitably led me to the bottom of a bottle. I spent a right smart of those kind of nights in jail cells. When I got sick of the insides of jails I rode the chuck lines, meandering from one ranch house to another, looking for handouts and something warm in my belly. Montana, Wyoming in the summer. Back down to Texas, Indian Territory, Kansas in the wintertime. Spent a spell back in Arkansas. Both my folks long dead and buried. A brother gone off but no one knew where. Thought about staying put, doing some honest work for a change, but I was long past too old to change. I was just killing time until time killed me.

I was well north of fifty leaning against the bar in an Arizona border town cantina, not fifty miles from where old Geronimo finally surrendered to General Miles a few months earlier, wagging my chin with the Mex bartender when a vaguely familiar voice said, “Shut up, Edward Splettstoesser.”

A little huskier than I remembered, and when I craned my neck to see her, a bit rounder at the middle, too. Hell’s bells, who wasn’t at our age? Her hair cut to barely reach her shoulders, shot through with silver. Sun-browned face a little more deeply lined at the corners of her big brown eyes and along the sides of her mouth. A flat-brimmed hat against her back, suspended by a stampede string round her neck. Still packing that .44, by God.

She propped one boot on the bar rail and rested her hand on the bar. Said to the barman, “Whatever my friend is having,” and he poured her a mescal. We raised glasses, Boon and me, and clinked them together before downing our liquor and ordering another round. We got drunker than Cooter Brown that night, rehashing old stories and telling each other all the new ones worth telling, half of which were made up out of whole cloth. Spent a couple years in Chile, she told me, where things weren’t much different than the Territories used to be, only prettier. Told her about the time I accidently foiled a bank robbery in Beeker’s Hope, Montana when I recognized one of the gang right outside and called out to him just as he was pulling the bandana over his face. We slapped backs and laughed a lot, cried a little. I didn’t mind. Not with her.

After the Mex closed up shop, we took a bottle back to the hotel I temporarily called home and whooped it up until the wife of the owner came pounding on the door to simmer us down. In the quiet of the wee dark hours before morning, we finally talked about Meihui. Turned out Boon buried the girl her ownself someplace in the High Sierra known only to her. Dug the grave, filled it back in, marked it in a way nobody would ever notice so as to ensure the kid never got disturbed.

“I have visited three times since,” she told me. “She’s still there. She’s fine. Resting.”

I nodded and she softly wept. I had an inkling there were some other hurts in there, pains from the time between then and now, but I kept my mouth shut and put an arm around her shoulders. To my surprise, Boon leaned into me and let me hold her a while, even after she was all cried out. Just a couple of gray old killers, sharing the pain they largely brought down upon themselves.

I never did clearly remember passing out that night, but I did recall telling her that I had always loved her before I did.

“I know, Edward,” she said. “I always knew.”

And that was good enough for me. She was, of course, long gone when I rose late into the morning. I sat on the edge of the bed a long time, savoring those last hours. I could still smell her on my clothes, on the linens. Still feel her in my arms.

A couple fingers remained in that bottle of mescal the Mex sold me the night before, so I finished that off for breakfast, flattened my hair with my hands as best I could, and stumbled downstairs to settle up for the room before heading off again. It was getting warm, and I had never been to Minnesota but I met a drummer on a stage once who called that northerly clime home and invited me to drop in should I ever find my way that far north. Seemed like an idea.

After that, I couldn’t say. Mayhap in another eight or ten years I’d run across Boon again. I knew it would take at least a couple more years before I stopped thinking about her each and every day. Until then, I enjoyed the thoughts. Most of them, anyway.