Vengeance of Boon by Ed Kurtz

Author:Ed Kurtz [Kurtz, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: western
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2020-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

I lost track of the days after the storm. It was as if all of my days could be divided into two types, before that terrible southeaster and after, and the latter simply didn’t keep time the same way as the former. I still didn’t figure I had much salt in me, if any, but I didn’t feel altogether the same landswoman any longer, either. I was something and someone in between, drifting ethereally in a time and place not quite this and not exactly that. I dreamt constantly of Ángel, but also of the others who had died since I began my journey with Boon, from the men I saw shot down in the plaza at Traiguén to the massacre at Soto’s estancia. My thoughts were drenched in the blood of the slain, awake and asleep. I began to fear I was going mad.

The one thing I held onto tightly was the fact that I had something of a destination at last—a plan. But once we reached that lonesome grave in Yuma and Boonsri made her peace, then what? And when—how—would I ever make my peace?

On an oppressively hot afternoon, several days since the restoration of the mizzenmast, I stood at bow with Boon and watched some of the men scamper like little monkeys up the spars and nettings, applying tar from pots they carried with them and checking the riggings. At the same time, other men laid about anywhere there was room for them to duck out of the sun and catch a few minutes’ sleep. As I’d seen time and time again, these two groups would soon swap roles, over and over again, until everyone was asleep apart from the night watch, Boon, and in all likelihood, me.

We had our supper at four bells—two rings, plus two more, right at six o’clock—but I could barely choke any of it down.

“Sick of it, too?” Boon asked me.

“I miss real food,” I said.

“I hope to Christ I never set eyes on cold salt beef again,” she said, and we both laughed about that.

“To tell the truth,” I said, “I hope to find my rear-end landlocked with no sea in sight for as long as I can.”

“It ain’t an easy life,” she said, eyeing some of the sailors. They were hardened men, no doubt about it; sun-browned skin like leather and muscles taut as ropes, each of these fellows wore a wearied expression with a kind of uncanny danger lurking just beneath the surface of it. “But it’s like most lives I’ve ever come across, I reckon. Just about everybody’s running away from something, and most times, it’s their own selves.”

I chewed on that for a while. Like gristle that refused to break down it just rolled over and over in my head.

“Most times?” I said at some length. We’d left the mess and stood together at the bow again, narrowing our eyes against the salt spray. “Seems to me you’re always running to something. After your padre, or now, looking for your mamá’s grave.

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