Shotgun Riders

by Orrin Russell

  In a soft rustle of movement she stood. Without a word between them they switched places; Summer facing the stove and Balum behind her. His hands told him she was bent faintly at the waist, her legs spread. With a palm on her hip he took the base of his cock and pressed the tip into the tight crack of her ass. He pressed it against her, felt the wetness of her pussy cover him, though still he had not entered. By motions smooth and gliding, he ran his cock along her pussy and between the firm meat of her cheeks, until finally she huffed and reached around and thrust him inside her.

  At the sensation of his cock filling her she squealed. The sound was short but sharp. She clamped her own hand suddenly over her mouth, but in the other room the snores had suddenly stopped, and outside Balum heard one of the watchmen wonder aloud what they had just heard. He breathed softly, waiting for some audible inclination of what might unfold from that squeal of shocked pleasure. His cock was slung to the hilt inside Summer. The smooth warmth of her butt pushed against his hips like a cushion.

  In the darkness he could feel his heart pounding, smell Summer’s sex rising into his nostrils. After a moment, the stutter of snores resumed in the adjoining room. Balum rocked his hips back gently, then forward again. He attained a slow rhythm, the only sound being the light pat of his hips striking her ass. He leaned forward and reached around to fondle one of her breasts swinging freely over the stovetop. He squeezed one, then the other, pinching the nipples and gliding his hand up her chest and neck and to her mouth where she licked his fingertips. The soft drumming of his hips against her sped up. The slaps came harder. Tiny, almost inaudible grunts escaped her throat in perfect timing with his pounding.

  With one hand on her hip and the other gripping her shoulder he felt her body shudder, felt the clamp of her vagina tight around his throbbing member. The slightest squeak came from her like the sound of a door swinging on its hinges. Balum’s head floated. The backs of his legs ached, he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. The sensation most intense was Summer’s heat around his shaft, the smooth wetness of it and the smell heavy like the humidity hanging in the air when the sun breaks after a storm.

  Almost without realizing what was happening he felt Summer pull away. He heard her move, felt the air move around him. It blew against his cock standing rigid in the open kitchen. And then suddenly her mouth enveloped him. The feel of it around his shaft was similar yet not quite the same as when he had been inside her. Her slurps seemed dangerously loud, but he had no will to quiet her.

  Outside, the moon was rising. It came finally to an angle that allowed a beam of blue fluorescent light to shine through a crack in the thin rooftop. The blackness surrounding them gave way. Cutting like a blade, the ray of moonlight landed in one thin line over Summer’s chest. She drew his cock from her mouth and let the drool fall to her breasts. She rubbed them and spat and placed his cock between them.

  Looking down at her he watched as his cock glided up and down her cleavage. He could just make out the whites of her eyes looking up at him, her open mouth. He felt his body clench. He tried holding his breath to stop the moan of orgasm shooting up into his lungs.

  He erupted suddenly, cum spraying into the beam of moonlight and coating Summer’s throat. She bent her head and took the tip of his cock in her mouth as the final throes wracked his body. When she pulled her head away he saw his cum sparkling on her lips. She smiled, ran her tongue over them. Her finger traced a path between her breasts, collected his load on it, and she stuck it into her mouth and sucked it off and allowed herself the quietest giggle Balum had ever heard.

  12

  They rode out on the morning of the third day, Joe with two full night’s sleep behind him and Balum with one. As the stage rocked its way up the muddy grade trailing out of Blacktown, the folks that had gathered waved them off. Summer stood amongst them. She put her fingers to her lips and blew a kiss to Balum.

  Caleb rode close beside the stage. The horse beneath him was the color of smoked ham, and whatever lineage it had descended from was a mystery free for any man to work over. It stood a massive eighteen hands high and the cinch under its belly had no further holes by which to extend itself. Riding alongside the stage, the top of Caleb’s head wasn’t much lower than Joe or Balum’s.

  It didn’t take more than an hour for the Bell brothers to come out of the woods and lock in some thousand yards behind them. Balum turned around on the bench and stared after them awhile, but they knew the Spencer’s range and remained beyond it. He tore off a plug of tobacco and spent most of the first day spitting over the side and enjoying the memory of Summer illuminated in a beam of moonlight.

  When they pulled up that evening by a patch of woods, Buford was in a foul mood. He came out of the door in a cloud of profanity, his face drawn and haggard.

  “That ain’t right keeping me in the stage two nights in a row. A man can’t get no sleep thataway,” he shook a shoulder uselessly when Balum guided him into the woods. “Who’s that big nigger?”

  Balum didn’t answer.

  “I said who’s that big nigger?” Buford said again.

  “He’s a man who doesn’t suffer fools easy,” said Balum. “So shut your mouth and stay out of his way.”

  “I ain’t scared. Hell, back in Georgia I seen bigger. Whipped bigger too. You let me out of these chains a minute and that son-of-a-bitch will learn to stay out of my way.”

  Caleb had picketed his horse in the tall grass and was walking toward Balum with the tarp in his arms. “This dumb cracker going to go on like that clear to Texas?”

  “He says he’s going to give you a whipping.”

  Caleb’s feet stopped and he bent back at the waist and let a laugh cascade into the trees. It caught like a contagion. Even Joe some thirty paces off with the draft team heard it and began to laugh.

  “I’m serious,” said Buford. “Just cause he’s big don’t mean he’s tough.”

  “You want a sock in your mouth?” said Balum.

  “No.”

  “Then shut it.”

  Buford raised the corner of his lip but there his insults ended. He only snarled a bit when Balum tied a rope around him and fastened the other end to a tree.

  When the tarp was spread and the animals picketed and the blankets laid out for the night, Caleb said, “Why wait till night to stick the sock in his mouth? I say we keep this fool quiet clear to Texas. I ain’t got no patience gonna last five weeks to Texas.”

  “Or six or seven,” said Balum.

  “What you mean six or seven?”

  Balum threw a look at Joe. “There’s a little detour we’re making.”

  “My ass ain’t signed up for no detours.”

  “You might enjoy this one,” said Balum. He explained what waited ahead in the silver town.

  “Aw hell, Balum, my old lady’ll tan my hide she finds out I been to a girlie show. And yours too. You know Angelique ain’t gonna stand for that.”

  Again Balum glanced at Joe, and this time Caleb narrowed his eyes. “What’s that look?”

  “It’s no look,” said Balum.

  “I seen a look. Now you gonna tell me or do I have to get it out the hard way?”

  When Balum didn’t say anything, Joe said, “Angelique and Balum have an arrangement.”

  “An arrangement?” Caleb looked from one to the other. “This some kind of cracker shit? What kind of arrangement?”

  Joe laid out the nature of it, to which Caleb’s eyes widened and shut suddenly with a shake of his head. When he opened them again they landed on Balum. “Uh huh,” he said. “I thought my eyes was fooling me, but now it makes sense.”

  “What’s that?” said Balum.

  “You gonna tell me I didn’t see Summer blow you a kiss on the way out of town?”

  Balum turned his hands over. He kept his lips pressed tight. He knew the look on his face was no more convincing that anything he’d ever mustered up at a poker table.

  “You old dog,” grinned Caleb. “Every
last single man in town is after her, and here you come walking in slinging your johnson around like you the damn mayor.”

  The expression sent Joe toppling backward, holding his belly in laughter.

  “Uh huh,” said Caleb. “I see how this trip is gonna be.” He sat on the tarp and pulled the blanket over him. “Just don’t do nothing that’s gonna give my woman cause to whup my ass. We ain’t got no cracker arrangement, and we ain’t about to get one neither.”

  Joe agreed to take first watch, Caleb the second. Balum closed his eyes as night filled the wooded area, and though he expected to be woken soon by the blast of gunfire, he woke instead to the sound of chirping birds and the morning sun threatening to break the horizon.

  They broke camp in silence, eager to get back onto the grasslands and make breakfast on the safety of the open plain. Once seated around the fire with eggs from the Blacktown hens frying in the skillet, Caleb shared his thoughts.

  “It’s a nice system you got,” he said. “Safe in the woods when it’s dark, safe on the plains when it’s light. But what we gonna do a hundred miles south when the trees thin out? They’ll creep up quiet in the dark.”

  “Tell you the truth,” said Balum, “we haven’t figured that part out yet.”

  “Shit. I done teamed up with a circus.”

  “You got any ideas?”

  Caleb took hold of the skillet handle in his massive hand and poured out his share of eggs onto a tin plate. “I do,” he said. “Back before I became a free man, there was a time I was slaving for a family that didn’t treat folks kindly. Bad enough it was worth risking the punishment of running off. To stop us they strung wire all around the slave’s quarters. Tripwire, they called it.”

  “It work?”

  “No one got away.” Caleb spooned up a mouthful of eggs. “I figure it can catch people sneaking in just as good as it can catch ‘em sneaking out.”

  “How far is the next town?” said Baum.

  “Couple days out. They’ll have wire.”

  “They’ll have food and baths and hotels, too,” added Joe.

  “What about him?” Balum jerked a thumb toward the stage.

  “They got a sheriff and a jail, too,” said Caleb. “Stow his foul ass in there for the night.”

  Balum scraped his spoon over the plate, piling up the last bits of eggs. He popped them in his mouth and pointed the spoon at Caleb. “See that?” he said while chewing. “That’s why we needed you. Brains of the operation.”

  “There’s just one thing,” said Caleb. “That town I’m talking about is full of folk that don’t cotton to no blackman walking through their streets. No indian neither. Don’t matter if his blood runs half white.”

  Balum only shrugged and swallowed the last mouthful of eggs. “Give us another few days missing out on sleep and putting up with Buford cussing us out and I doubt either one of us will be in any mood to put up with a town full of idiots. Besides,” he patted the shirt pocket over his heart, “I’m a U.S. Deputy Marshal. What I say goes.”

  Once again on the trail, they fell into simple habits. Caleb rode close to the stage, Joe drove. Balum rode beside him with the Spencer balanced over his lap. They camped before twilight, rose before the sun. They made both breakfast and supper over small fires built on empty ground, and when they spied water worth drinking they would stop to fill their canteens. The Bell brothers hovered like storm clouds on the horizon. They made camp on the same schedule, slept and ate and pissed like mimes copying the actions of the men in front of them. For three more nights they made no attempt to attack at night. On two of those nights Balum stayed awake for guard duty, wondering just what the Bell brothers were waiting for. By the time the stage rolled into view of a town called Muckville he was as ready as Joe and Caleb were for a bath, a shave, and a home cooked meal.

  The place deserved its name. Not a flower or green thing grew in it. The streets were nothing but hardened clay, cracked and broken and potted such that the stage walloped over them like it ran on square wheels. Buford cried out in the back, but no one answered. The few storefronts lining the street possessed no raised boardwalk. Their doors opened onto clay and mud. In the center of town was a pig wallow, beside that a burned out building that looked like a giant wart being stabbed by charred beams of wood that leaned out in all directions. The few people in the street wore clothing the same color as the ground beneath them. Their faces looked on in disgust at the three men driving the stage into town. One man raised a finger to point, and though Balum couldn’t hear him, there was no mistaking the slur uttered from his lips.

  The sheriff’s office didn’t measure more than fifteen feet wide. Its facade was gnarled and dirty. In the pitted ground before it Joe pulled up the team of horses.

  When the three men walked through the door, Balum’s first thought was that the sheriff resembled the exterior to perfection. A quick look showed dirt under his fingernails and a layer of grime beneath his shirt collar. Small boils dotted the skin of his face. His clothing was rumpled. When he laid eyes on the three of them, his first words were, “What the hell is this?”

  Balum already had his fingers in his shirt pocket. He pulled out the U.S. Deputy Marshal affidavit and explained briefly that he was escorting a prisoner to Texas and aimed to have him pass the night in the Muckville jail.

  The sheriff didn’t bother to look at the paper. “Which one’s the prisoner?” he said. “The nigger or the redskin?”

  Balum sensed his friends straighten up. “The prisoner is shackled in the stage outside.”

  “Who are these two?”

  “My partners.”

  The sheriff’s eyes narrowed in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Caleb, Joe, can you bring Buford in here?” Balum ignored the sheriff’s comment and stepped forward to inspect the two rickety cells in back of the jail office. It reminded him vaguely of the jail in Bette’s Creek.

  When Caleb and Joe returned with Buford clanking in his chains, the sheriff raised his hands. “I don’t want this responsibility,” he said. “This man isn’t my prisoner.”

  “He is now,” said Balum.

  “Like hell.”

  Baum turned suddenly. He was hungry, tired, his back ached from bumping along on the stage, and his patience had worn thin. He took a step toward the gnarled man wearing the badge on his chest. “I expect this man to stay the night here, and I expect him to still be here in the morning.”

  “I don’t give a damn about your expectations. It’s coming on evening, and I’m closing up. You can leave him here but if he’s gone in the morning it’s your problem, not mine.” He looked again at Caleb and Joe and shook his head. “Thought I’d never live to see the day a nigger and a savage would be leading a whiteman in chains.”

  Balum stood not two feet from the sheriff. He drew his elbow back and smashed his fist into the man’s boiled face. The sheriff’s feet gave out from under him. He fell in a pile, his legs strangely twisted. Immediately Balum picked him up by his shirtfront. He pulled the sheriff’s gun out from his holster and dragged him over to his desk where he set the gun on top.

  The keys to the cells hung on a hook behind the desk. Just as the sheriff began to regain his senses, Balum snatched them up and began fitting them into the cell locks.

  “Hey,” the sheriff’s voice rose an octave. “What are you doing? Let me go.”

  The second key Balum tried fit perfectly. He turned it and the cell door flung open. He pulled the sheriff forward and kicked him in the small of his back, sending the him toppling forward and landing in a sprawl on the cell floor. The metal bars banged shut behind him. Balum twisted the key and pulled it out.

  “Hey what the hell are you doing?” shouted the sheriff.

  But Balum was already at the second cell. He unlocked the door and stepped aside, and Joe and Caleb sent Buford stumbling forward with a shove to his back.

  “I’m going to give you your gun back,” Balum said. He picked it up from off the
desk and held it in front of the cell. “If anyone comes in here, and I mean anyone, shoot them. If Buford isn’t still in that cell come morning, I’m going to throw these keys in a river. Is that clear?”

  “You’re goddamn crazy!” the sheriff retorted.

  “Now where can we get a meal in this town?”

  “Nobody’s going to serve those two!”

  “We’ll see about that.” Balum tossed the gun through the bars. It landed at the sheriff’s feet. Without another word Balum walked out of the jail office with the keys in his hand and Joe and Caleb close behind.

  In the street Caleb laughed. “I ain’t never seen no shit like that, Balum.”

  “My patience ran out.” He glanced down the street at the pig wallow and the dilapidated buildings across from it. “And I’m hungry. Let’s rustle up a bite of food.”

  They found it in the boarding house. Before the proprietor had time to lay out his reasoning for not serving Joe and Caleb, Balum explained what would happen if they went hungry. The proprietor’s adam’s apple made a long trek down his throat and back up. He turned without further discussion and soon after brought out three bowls of porridge and a loaf of bread. The porridge lacked flavor and the bread was stale, but they ate every last crumb and retired to the boarding house where they slept the night on beds that, lumpy as they were, might well have been those goose down mattresses that filled Balum’s dreams.

  In the morning, after breakfast, Balum bought three hundred feet of wire. The clerk who sold it to him made a face at Caleb and Joe, but said nothing. In that short space of time since they’d arrived, word had traveled; the three men from the stage were not to be trifled with.