As they travelled, Balum searched for tracks, but on the rocky ground and at the pace they rode, he didn’t hold out much hope for picking up sign. Another quarter of an hour they wove through stands of tree cholla and prickly pear. The horses choosy in their steps. They topped a ridge and came out on the other side where the desert changed briefly to sand. Balum’s eyes dropped.
‘You would think we’d pick up Big Tom’s tracks,’ he called out ahead of him.
‘Huh?’ said Swinton.
‘He’s got eleven men with him. That many tracks don’t just vanish, not in sand like this when there’s no wind to blow them out.’
Swinton scanned the horizon but there was nothing of note there. More rocks ahead where the land morphed into hills and canyons.
‘He mighta done took the wrong trail,’ was all Swinton said. ‘Come on now, we ain’t far.’
The man spurred his horse on, and Balum pointed the roan’s nose after. It seemed an odd thing for Joe to do — hole up in an abandoned mine shaft so close to town. But maybe Valeria knew something. Maybe in the maze of shafts they could find concealment.
They reached the rocks that broke the land into uneven ground, and there they dismounted to drink again and water the horses. By now Pat Swinton’s hands were shaking. When he tilted the canteen back he spilled water down his chin and stared wild-eyed at Balum while his throat pistoned up and down in massive rapid gulps. He pulled the canteen away and panted. Smeared a dirty sleeve over his mouth.
Balum watched him. ‘How did you come to know their hiding place?’
‘How do I know?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I uh, I got connections.’
‘What connections?’
‘I ain’t at liberty to say.’ He wiped his mouth again but it was dry, and the sleeve only scraped roughly against the stubble. ‘Come on now, man. We got to hurry — it’s just up ahead.’ He took hold of the reins and led the horse down a shale slide. He waved an arm for Balum to follow.
Ahead in a string of gorges, a pile of tailings stood out from the land around it. The work of miners. Evidence of man’s bottomless quest for riches. Mine shafts opened up everywhere; dark tunnels leading into caves.
They rounded the tailings and pulled the horses over hard flat rock and listened to the clip-clop of hooves and their bootheels scraping rock, all of it ringing and bouncing off the sheer canyon walls in an eerie symphony of reverberations. The way the land rose and dipped and jutted up with caliche rock and sandstone, it gave Balum a nervous feeling. Big Tom’s men could hide twenty feet away and one wouldn’t know it.
At a cavemouth in no spot in particular Swinton stopped and pointed. ‘That’s the one, right there.’
Balum let the reins go. He took a few steps forward and bent at the waist and peered into blackness. Nothing felt right about it. He would make Swinton go first.
He turned to tell him and before he came fully around he saw the man’s gun barrel, Swinton’s face twisted above it, the flash of gunpowder and the strangely desolate roar that accompanied it, and then the slam of the bullet that spun Balum back around, back into the mouth of the cave.
He fell and rolled, deeper into blackness, deeper into the shaft. He felt nothing of the bullet. Only a heaviness in his feet and hands.
He came to a stop and pulled himself to an elbow and realized he held the Dragoon. No memory of having drawn it. Beyond the cave mouth he could see only the bright white glare of the sun mirroring off the rock and sky beyond. His breath calmed some and he waited and watched and made no sound or movement. His hip throbbed something awful. After a while he put his free hand to it and discovered his trousers were torn, the threads wet and stringy around the hole.
Pat Swinton spoke first. ‘I get you?’ The shout came from beyond the cave rim.
Balum took an inhale through his nose and let it seep through his lips. The Dragoon weighed heavy. His hip stung.
‘I said did I get you? Answer me you son of a bitch.’
Balum touched his fingers to the wound again. They came away moist and glistening in the darkness. He wished he could see. Suddenly he wished a lot of things.
‘You say something if you can, Balum. You hear me? I’ll wait all day if need be.’
Go ahead, thought Balum. You won’t come in here.
14
He told himself not to sleep, and a good job he did of it lying there in the shaft like a blind and wounded creature with his leg shooting spasms and the sky outside dark as a bear pelt. But sleep took him anyway. He woke once, startled, whether by noise outside or by the turmoil of his own dreams he didn’t know. He cursed himself for his predicament. It was his own fault. Thoughts of Joe spun into scenarios of the darkest possible outcomes. He grit his teeth and lied in the hollow shaft listening to absolutely nothing until exhaustion overtook him and stole him away into a realm of guilt and nightmare.
When the sun finally appeared he was already awake. Head resting on the cold floor. Dragoon clutched tight. Leg and hip and waist an absolute flare of agony.
He had hardly moved throughout the night and the leg was stiff with cold. He got an elbow beneath his ribs and pushed his torso up and shoved forward and nearly screamed aloud from the pain of it. Like a branding iron still hot from the fire. He looked down but the morning light was still too weak to penetrate the shaft.
For a minute he lay there blinking. Staring ahead. When the pain died down the first thought that came to him was that he wished he had a plug of tobacco in his cheek. That and a long drink of water. He shook his head, angry with himself. It was his own fault he had no water. His own fault he’d been shot.
His only option was to move. To hell with the pain; he’d have to deal with it.
Another shove, another stab of fire. He inched along the stone floor until he lay only a few yards from the opening. For a while he listened, but no sound came from the desert. As he watched, a sand lizard scampered off a rock and crossed the sand beyond the cave mouth. After it moved on, Balum worked himself into a seated position, then eased forward, hammer drawn back, the gunbutt warm from his grip.
Outside nothing moved. The air already hot.
A look at his leg made him turn his head away. He took a long breath and looked again. The pantleg was painted dark, the hole in the fabric small and neat, and from that small neat hole a pulsing gore. His own muscle tissue torn open.
He reached a hand to his backside to search for an exit wound, but he knew before he did that the bullet was lodged somewhere just below his hip. He rolled to the knee of his good leg and tried to pull the wounded leg beneath him, but at the first bit of weight the leg gave out and he fell face first into sand.
From a pockmarked rock the lizard watched him rise again. This time with the wounded leg folded beneath him and the good leg taking the weight. He made it to his feet and stood listing to one side, and without risking a step he let his eyes work the ground to see what story he might find.
The tracks were not as confusing as the first glance suggested. Pat Swinton had climbed up into the rocks and taken a seat there, rolled several cigarettes, tossed the butts down into the sand, and then, after what looked to Balum like a six hour wait, had crawled back down and taken up the two horses and ridden out.
So there he was. Wounded, no horse, no food, no water.
It could be worse. He had his gun. His hat. He knew the path to town, and on foot a man could make it in half a day. A man with two good legs anyway.
He holstered the Dragoon and swung the bad leg out for the first step of his trek back and the leg buckled and he hit the sand again. His head swam. He brought his eyes level with the lizard, his vision wet and blurry. When it cleared, he gathered himself up again and fought for a step and again he went down hard, hands and face smacking the earth. The lizard flinched at the sudden crash but didn’t run. Balum stared at it, envious of its working limbs, then drew himself up to all fours like a deformed jackal with the bad leg stretched out to one
side.
He wasn’t walking back. He had to accept that. He wasn’t exactly crawling back either, not when one leg refused to bend.
‘Alright,’ he said to the lizard. It cocked its head. ‘I’ll drag myself back.’
He covered three miles until he collapsed in the shade of a creosote bush. He’d lost feeling in the leg, which was mostly a good thing, but his head pounded and his vision had gone blurry almost to the point of blindness. His tongue swelled up. It filled his mouth like a wad of sandpaper. The deranged idea came to him to unsheath his knife and cut it out — be done with it.
He took air through his mouth and then through his nose, but whatever way he took his breath it cut him. Dry air, hot air. Angelique’s voice spoke in his head and he felt sorrow rise up in him, then anger. He pushed out from the creosote and crawled fifty yards to a barrel cactus and there he sat for a moment while he fought the urge to lop the top off and drink. The liquid inside was toxic, but it was also liquid, and it beckoned him like a nymph on a fairy pond.
Some ways ahead a rock with a streak of quartz glistened in the sun. A goal. Get to it without stopping.
In such a fashion he made another mile; setting small goals, attaining them. At the sun’s most violent angle he took shelter on the north side of a boulder where he hallucinated spread-eagled in the shade and danced between sanity and its counterpart. When the angle of shadow flopped and lengthened across the desert, he woke and composed himself and, like a wolf released from a trap, slunk hunchbacked under a wilted sky.
When he crawled into view of Tin City his palms were raw and the knees of his pants had torn away. The impression he might have made, were anyone to have seen him, was of a man only half-human, something conjured from ancient folklore. But no one saw him. Night had fallen.
He reached the door of Doctor Friedman’s office and clawed at it. It opened. The doctor appeared in its frame. He bent wordlessly and hooked his old strong arms under Balum and heaved him inside and onto the medical table in the examination room and drew the curtain closed behind him.
Balum shut his eyes. A moist rag touched his lips. Sounds of the doctor at work filled the room. He felt himself be jostled, heard the buckles of his gunbelt release, the tug as his trousers were pulled off, and the light caress of air against his skin.
He fell unconscious and snapped out of it wide awake in a gush of pain, and when his eyes sprang open they landed on the doctor smiling in the light of an oil lamp, a pair of long metal tongs in his hand, a flattened bullet clutched in the tip.
‘You’ll be wanting to save this?’ the doctor asked.
‘Eh?’
‘I’ve taken bullets out of plenty of men. Some dead, others still breathing. The second type, sometimes they like to save what didn’t kill ‘em. For good luck I guess.’
Balum tried to lift his head but it was heavy and he let it drop. He grunted and waved the bullet away.
‘Don’t feel so good, do you?’
‘Dog,’ was all Balum answered.
‘You’re a lucky dog then. That bullet didn’t hit nothing important. Damaged muscle tissue, but the body knows how to repair that. Nothing a couple solid beefsteaks won’t fix. See,’ the doctor went on, ‘the reason you feel like you do is because you’re as dry as a West Texas corn stalk.’ He chuckled at his joke, then got up and retrieved a pitcher of water from the other side of the room and poured a glassful and set the glass and the pitcher on the table beside Balum. ‘You drink this and you’ll be surprised how good you feel. And how fast. Now rest up. You can pay me for my troubles later.’
Balum didn’t argue. He drank and lied back down, and when he opened his eyes again it was morning and sunlight was warming the room.
He looked down, looked around. For a moment he forgot where he was. A small room, books on the shelves, medical paraphernalia on the countertops. A pitcher of water beside him. He poured himself a glass and drank, and while he drank he noticed that his pants lay folded and bloody in a nearby chair, his gunbelt hanging over the back. A white sheet covered him from the waist down. Naked beneath it. He lifted up a corner and peeled it back and looked at the wound. Gauze and bandage covered it. All he could make out was a purplish-green bruise flaring out around the edges. He put the sheet back and drank another glassful of water and laid his head back down.
When the doctor drew the curtain back it woke Balum, but he’d not been asleep long.
‘Feeling better?’ the doctor asked.
‘A fair bit.’
‘Water and sleep. It’ll do a man wonders. Now listen, I’ve got to make a housecall but the nurse will be in shortly. I’ll leave her a note to clean and dress the wound. Don’t worry, she’s capable.’
The doctor turned and left through the curtain. The door clicked opened and clicked closed and a second later the doctor’s shadow flitted past the window.
Balum closed his eyes and tilted his head back. He rested and drank, rested and drank, dreamed of Angelique in a half-stupor, and woke and drank again. His leg felt stiff but the pain had mostly gone from it.
When the nurse arrived he was staring at the window with a glass of water half-full beside him. He heard the click of the door when it opened and again when it shut, then a span of silence while she read the note. Balum watched the curtain over the doorway. It didn’t move. Instead he heard the swish of movement and the soft patter of the woman going about her chores in the main office.
He finished the water and reclined on his elbows. His legs were stretched out on the table and the white sheet draped over them hung halfway to the floor. He wiggled his toes.
The curtain rings over the doorway spun suddenly on the rod, and through the entryway came Josephine dressed in a spotless white uniform two sizes too small for her. She wore her hair wrapped in a bun, and though Balum knew he must be wrong, he swore he saw a touch of color on her lips. For two hours he had lain on the table dreading her arrival, but when she nearly dropped the medical tray she was holding, he realized he quite enjoyed it.
‘Good morning, Josephine,’ he smiled.
‘Balum!’
‘I thought I might put to use some of those supplies we hauled across the desert.’
She hadn’t moved beyond the curtain. Her eyes ran down the sheet to his feet poking out and back up to his face. He was still grinning.
‘What happened?’ she said.
‘Pat Swinton is what happened.’
‘That’s one of Big Tom’s men.’
‘I realize that. If I’d have caught on before he took a pot shot at me, I’d be in better shape.’
She looked again at the sheet, then set the tray on the counter and moistened a cloth while he summarized the previous thirty-six hours. Aside from raising her eyebrows and shaking her head, she remained silent.
‘The doc says it’s not so bad. Just keep it clean is what he told me.’
‘That’s what I’ve come to do,’ she said. She circled the table and set the rag beside the pitcher and lifted the sheet so his waist, hip and thigh were exposed. Then she folded the sheet over. It covered his crotch, just barely. She peeled the bandage away from the wound and dabbed at the lesion with the rag while the fingers of her opposite hand pressed into his thigh. Bent over as she was with her hair pulled back, Balum could see a few inches down her collar. Not only her cleavage but, tight as the dress was, he could make out the full shape of her breasts beneath the fabric.
He felt his cock shift beneath the sheet. It wasn’t but a few inches from her fingers. He thought of the river and it shifted again.
She finished with the rag and stood up and circled back to the counter and came back with gauze and tape from the tray. Balum’s eyes followed her as she walked. It was a wonder there wasn’t a line of men waiting outside with non-existent injuries for the nurse to attend to. She had to know how she looked in that dress. A world away from the miserable green frock she had worn through the desert.
When she bent over his thigh again, her breasts hung j
ust above his palm. He wanted to reach up and squeeze one. Instead he closed his eyes. He felt her fingertips on his skin, heard scissors cut gauze, the rip of tape, her hands unbearably close his shaft. He felt it swell.
He opened his eyes. She was bent over, her eyes focused on her work, her forearm just above his cock. Only a thin layer of sheet separating them.
She wore perfume, just a hint, and together with the memory of each breast held in a cupped hand, his erection grew until it was full and throbbing and pulsing there like the barrel of the Dragoon beneath the sheet. She either did not see it or pretended not to. She worked at the wrappings, pressing and taping, dabbing the rag here and there against his skin.
When her forearm grazed it Balum nearly choked. She brushed it again, her eyes intent on the wound, and when she turned for the rag, her forearm settled on his shaft long enough for her body heat to transfer through the sheet. The rag beside the pitcher was just out of reach, and when she leaned forward she pressed off with her arm, pushing against Balum’s engorged manhood.
She made only the briefest eye contact, and Balum realized he wasn’t breathing. His dick throbbed beneath the weight of her arm, and when she released it to apply the rag to his skin, the roll of tape fell to the floor. She turned and bent over. The threads of her dress stretched tight over her rear, not three feet from Balum’s face. He ached for her to touch him again. She did. She straightened up and set the tape on the table, then reached for the flap of folded sheet that lay just over his cock. Her fingers ran over it, ever so briefly, and in that half a second he swore he saw a look of satisfaction cross her face.
Were it not for the sound of Doctor Friedman swinging open the office door, he might have grabbed her right there, leg be damned, and pulled her against him.
But the door closed. Boots crossed the floor. The curtained swooshed open and Josephine spun to it. She straightened her dress — an unnecessary act — and Doctor Friedman poked his head in.
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