Boon

could relate, in my small way—Arkansans never did much take to Splettstoesser, either, which was my name.
Maybe that was part of why we were friends, Boon and me. Though I was born in America, I was the first and only in my family to have been. Both of us were first-generation, outsiders in a sense. Once I’d related to her, that made us peas in a pod, but Boon said I was Anglo so I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. A funny name didn’t hurt much when you looked and sounded like everybody else.
It was a privilege I overlooked, she said. I was still working that one out by the time we got to Stiff Neck, and for some time after, too. Most times I didn’t feel much privileged. Boon said that was because I’d only ever walked in my own boots and didn’t know what the blue hell I was talking about.
“An Englishman called Arthur Stanley,” Boon repeated to the barman. “And a woman from Siam called Pimchan.”
The barman showed his teeth then, few that they were, and slapped his right hand so hard against the bar top that it raised a cloud of dust that hung in the air while he chuckled over what Boon had said.
“This dumb fuckin’ squaw of yours ever talk any sense?” he chortled.
By way of instinct, I left the glass on the bar and took several long strides back, away from it and the barman. The shot cracked out before he’d ever finished talking, and the bullet struck his left eye in the same instant he spoke his last word. I saw the bloom of red in the dust, but the barman collapsed out of view before either the dust or the blood settled. Boon was just that fast when she was offended.
“Well,” I said, “if he did see your folks, we’ll never know now.”
“A little politeness goes a long way,” she said, returning her pistol—a .44 conversion Army percussion Colt—to the leather rig around her waist.
I couldn’t argue with that.
I wanted to return to the brandy, but to my disappointment it was now contaminated with bar dust as well as blood from the dead man’s eye where Boon had shot him. Instead, I moved behind the bar, gingerly stepped over the corpse, and seized the bottle he’d poured from in the first place. There was a picture of an apple on the label. I tucked it into my armpit and followed Boon outside.
She stood on the street and squinted in the sunlight as she set her hat back on her head.
“It doesn’t really cure anything,” she said.
“I guess not,” I said.
I pulled the stopper and took a swig just in case. Across the street from Lucky Star, the mule beside the well continued to rot. I wondered if there was ever going to be a place Boon wouldn’t stop to ask about Arthur Stanley and Pimchan Angchuan, and I decided there probably wouldn’t be. At the very least, it didn’t always end up with her firing a bullet into some yokel’s brain. It was the little things, I supposed.
We rode out of Stiff Neck less than an hour after we’d ridden in. The place was a bust, and I reckoned in another six months it would just be another ghost town among the dozens or hundreds of them dotting the landscape. Settlements came and went. A lot of the time they failed without ever needing something like cholera to ruin them. Texas was just like that sometimes. Capricious, you might say.
Two days later, I offered what remained of the brandy I’d stolen to Boon when she commented to me that she was parched.
She said, “Edward, was there ever a day in your life you didn’t have a drink?”
I thought hard, and I had a drink to facilitate the thinking. But it turned out to be one of those rhetorical questions, because Boon changed the subject before I could pin down an answer.
“Next town we hit, let’s hole up a spell,” she said. “Pim needs shoeing and I need rest. One more day on this saddle and I’ll have hemorrhoids like a damn drover.”
Pim was what she called the palomino, which I took to be short for Boon’s mother’s name, Pimchan. I hadn’t ever heard of somebody naming a horse after their mother, leastways a mother they were fond of, but I’d never known a woman to speak frankly about whether or not she had hemorrhoids, either. I had no way of knowing if all the women in Siam were as hell-fire tough and occasionally mean as Boonsri Angchuan, but I felt certain she was a rarity in Texas.
I said, “Okay.”
She didn’t utter another word until we arrived in a town called Darling at dusk. I thought she was a hell of a woman then, just as I did every day.

Chapter Two
If two places could be as different as Stiff Neck and Darling, I didn’t know about them. Where Stiff Neck was derelict and vacant except for the dead and dying, Darling was a bustling little settlement with structures going up everywhere you looked and people in clothes as fine as possible that far west of Fort Worth. The streets were dry and raked, like nobody ever walked or rode over them, and there was hardly a living soul in sight who wasn’t engaged in some manner of polite business or another.
Of course, when we rode in on the main drag, the business that seemed to occupy most folks was staring at me and Boon. Suffice to say, there wasn’t anybody in a place like Darling who had ever seen someone from Siam before. If there was anybody in Darling that had ever heard of Siam, I’d have gladly eaten my paint horse, bones and all.
She chose the rooming house, but I went inside to rent the rooms. We often did things this way in fancy-pants places like that, as it saved on any potential trouble up front. A