Boon

was cholera, as evidenced by a hand-painted sign some enterprising soul had posted in the dry earth at the easternmost edge of town.
GIT AWAY, the sign read. SICK TOWN.
Naturally, I voiced the opinion that we should ride around and skip Stiff Neck altogether. Cholera was serious business in Texas—serious enough to have once killed hundreds in San Antonio, which was the largest settlement in the state at the time. Just as naturally, Boon was uninterested in my view on the issue, so we rode right into the middle of town. The first couple of locals I saw both wore copper charms around their necks to ward off the plague. I got to wishing I had one, too.
It was the charms that told me a couple of things about Stiff Neck: that these were probably Germans, like my people were, and that the sickness killing them off wasn’t typhoid or yellow fever or anything like that. I only knew about San Antonio from what I’d read. My people came from someplace called Kleinpudlitz, but I grew up in Arkansas. Now that I was riding into a dying sick town with a tenacious woman who cared more about asking questions I didn’t think would ever get answered than she did about the possibility of neither of us getting out of town alive, I sort of missed Arkansas. Things tended to be calm and quiet back home, and things tended to make sense. I couldn’t often make much sense of Boon.
“Hitch up here,” she said, gesturing toward the rail in front of a tumble-down, rough-board building that passed for the sheriff’s office. “I’ll talk to the law. You go wait in yonder saloon for me.”
That was how it usually was with Boon. I was well past recommending she take me along whenever she went pushing her weight around. Time was that I figured having a white man behind her would lend some gravity to her demands, but that was before I’d really gotten to know her. Boonsri Angchuan didn’t need anybody’s gravity, Anglo or otherwise.
I said, “Okay.”
She tied off her palomino and me my paint, and we went our separate ways. From the boardwalk I spied a water well across the main street, beside and sort of halfway behind a two-story house. The well was built of sandstone and it was in a bad state of disrepair. A dead mule rotted beside it, unmolested by anybody like it wasn’t a bother. I walked on until I came to the saloon Boon pointed out, which was named Lucky Star. Sometimes optimism was a son of a bitch.
Some folks probably take a good look at the room when they walk into a public house, just to see who’s sitting in there and if there’s anyone they know, but my way was always to keep myself pointed directly at the bar from the start. As such, I was a bit puzzled to find the bar inside Lucky Star to be vacant and covered with more than one layer of dust. It was only then that I turned to glance around the place. There was only one man inside, and he was staring right at me.
“I can pour you a brandy if you’re sick,” the man told me. “Black pepper and brandy, that’s the thing. Won’t save you, but it helps.”
“I’m not sick,” I said. “I only just got here.”
“Then you are a God damned fool,” he said.
I was not particularly inclined to disagree. I did think a brandy sounded like a decent enough idea, though. I accepted the recommendation but told him to hold off on the pepper.
The man went behind the bar and located a bottle to his liking. He blew some dust off a glass and poured three generous fingers before sliding the drink across the bar to me, leaving a trail in the bar dust.
I went digging for some coin to pay for the drink, but the man only shook his head and laughed.
“Hell,” he said, “this ain’t my place. Belonged to old Joe Lieber, and he’s been dead six days now. Way I see it, that’s on the house, courtesy of Joe.”
“Danke schön, Joe,” I said.
Bitte schön, I imagined the ghost of Joe Lieber responding.
The first swallow wasn’t quite down my throat when Boon walked through the doors, her boots clomping the floorboards and her face a sour frown. Her long, dark hair was twisted into a French braid that swung down to the small of her back like a horse’s tail and she kept her head tilted slightly back. In one hand she held her flat-brimmed hat, its ever-present red feather jutting up from one side. She kept her legs apart, draped in dungarees comprised of more dirt than cloth.
“Sheriff’s dead,” she said.
The man behind the bar laughed at that, too. Boon ignored him.
“Dead town,” she said. “Dead end. Finish your drink and let’s ride.”
“What’s your hurry?” the self-appointed barman said. “Have some of the cure your friend here’s having. I’ll have one, too. We’ll live forever, the three of us.”
Boon seemed to turn her attention in fits and starts from me to him, as if looking at him was the last thing in all the world she wanted to do. Once in a while, she made me a little nervous. This was one of those times.
“You ever hear tell of an Englishman called Arthur Stanley or a Siamese woman name of Pimchan Angchuan?”
“Woman, I don’t have any idea what the hell you just said to me,” the man said.
“My friend might be in a bit of a snit,” I said in kind of a low tone between swallows. “I’d play it nicer if I was you.”
It wasn’t that I thought he was being particularly unkind. Fact was, most folks in Texas weren’t likely to pick up on the kinds of names people had where Boon came from. Names like that just got garbled and mixed up in their heads and left them feeling like they must have heard wrong. I