Balum's Harem

by Orrin Russell

  ‘How’s it look?’ he asked.

  She stood stiffly between the two men. The doctor at the curtain, Balum on his back behind her. ‘Marvelous,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he nodded. He glanced at the gunbelt hanging over the chairback. ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but you’ll want to know it.’

  Balum leaned up on his elbows and looked past Josephine to where the doctor stood.

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Pat Swinton’s got half the town gathered in the Broke Lode Tavern. He’s telling quite a tale about how he outdrew the gunfighter named Balum.’

  15

  He wished he had brought his moccasins. Another oversight. Seemed he couldn’t think a full thought as long as Valeria was in danger. His boots made only the softest crunch in the sand, but a soft crunch was still a crunch, and if he were wearing his moccasins, there would be no clue whatsoever to betray his presence. A ghost in the darkness is what he was. A ghost with a knife and a gun.

  The fire smoldered in dying coals too weak to cast any more than a dull red glow like a fallen miniature comet half-buried in the sand. Men lay scattered around it, each bedroll unfurled wherever a patch of flat ground existed not riddled with rock and cactus. It made his work that much more difficult. He couldn’t see them until he was on top of them, but there was no other way. To get to the horses he needed to work his way through the sleeping men. It occurred to him he just might sidle up to each one and slit their throats as they slept, all eleven and Big Tom the twelfth, but the idea was fantasy. He’d seen plenty of men die by the blade, and it was only the rarest that folded quietly into death. Most went gurgling and spitting and thrashing about.

  The horses stood together with their heads down and their tails unmoving and all the tack and saddlery and gear piled up haphazardly beside them. Sections of rope had been tied together to create one long tether that bound them one to the next. He would have to work the knots in the dark.

  Some of the men had begun to snore, which made the going easier. At least he wouldn’t step on them. He wound his way around a mound of stone and across a cut of loose pebbles, past another snorer. If he knew which of them was Big Tom, he might risk plunging the knife hilt-deep into the man while he slept. But they were only shapes in the dark.

  Closer to the horses, his leg brushed against an ocotillo whip and immediately their heads came up. Hooves shuffled. One of them snorted a cloud of vapor into the night. Joe dropped to a squat and became a statue.

  A few yards away a man stirred. He half-rose in his bedroll.

  ‘Hey,’ came Pete’s voice. ‘Fletcher…’

  ‘Shhh.’

  ‘I heard…’

  ‘Shush,’ Fletcher hushed him quickly and harshly. A moment of silence drifted by. Then Fletcher’s voice, barely audible. ‘I heard it.’

  ‘You think it’s a coyote maybe? Horses is acting nervous.’

  Fletcher didn’t respond, or if he did Joe didn’t hear it. Either way, he didn’t move. He remained in his crouch and watched the animals with his knife held low to the ground and waited. He was good at waiting. Others weren’t, and this fact, in this situation, was the difference between a stolen horse and a bullet in the head.

  After a while, just as he guessed, they spoke again.

  ‘Go see to ‘em,’ said Fletcher.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Cause I told you to.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just a coyote.’

  ‘Don’t matter what it is. Go see to ‘em.’

  ‘How long I gotta stay up?’

  ‘Goddamn it, Pete. Anything happens to them horses and we’ll be neck deep in shit. So stay up. Till morning if need be.’

  Pete grumbled, but the hierarchy between the men was clear, and Pete was on the bottom. He gathered himself up and wrapped himself in a blanket and walked out to the horses. He kicked stones and crunched over gravel. Men stirred. Some woke. They called out to him and he answered back that coyotes were about and bothering the remuda.

  Joe clenched his jaw. He wasn’t leaving without a horse. In the best scenario he would have ridden out with three saddled mounts and not a single man the wiser until morning, but the facts had changed. If he could get away with just one, albeit bareback, he would. Didn’t matter if it meant leaving a dead man behind.

  He came out of his crouch and moved forward. The horses had not fully calmed. They could sense him, an unknown human in their midst. The trick to stealing a horse in the desert at night was not so simple; he could not simply cut one of the tethers and leap up and gallop off into the night. Not over ground riddled in cacti. He would need to lead it out from the rest, slowly, quietly. Which was an unlikely outcome, what with Pete pacing down the line of animals, but Joe needed to move, he needed to advance. If daylight caught him still in Big Tom’s camp, he’d be dead.

  The horse tied to the end of the remuda measured fifteen hands high. Aside from that, Joe couldn’t see a thing. It side-stepped when he neared it. It snorted, shook its head. Joe reached a hand out and grabbed the rope and whispered in its ear. He was close enough to look into its eye. He transferred the knife to the hand holding the rope and stroked the horse’s neck with the other, whispering a few Apache words all the while, rubbing the animal’s jaw, letting it smell him. When the animal calmed he reached around and cut the rope and wrapped the end of it over his palm and pulled it forward a step. He took it another couple paces and stopped when he heard Pete counting.

  The man was walking down the line making a head count. A smart thing to do, and one that Joe couldn’t afford to have happen. He let the rope go and stepped toward Pete’s voice. Turned his blade in his palm. The voice came closer, the number higher. Close enough to see him outlined against the night sky, a shadow against the blackness. Ten feet away. Eight. Five.

  Joe stepped in and swung the knife around and buried it into the voice. Pete lurched. His hands swung up even as he fell, and Joe went down with him. He ripped the knife from Pete’s throat with a great wet sucking sound and stabbed it back down. The man’s legs shot out and his bootheels kicked stone and he made a strange croaking sound and spewed blood up like a geyser in a hot spring. Joe grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head back and with a slashing motion over the throat the man’s last frantic kicks faded and his body went still.

  Too late. Men had risen, voices called out. The horses jerked at the rope line and whinnied and smashed their hooves into the ground.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ shouted Big Tom.

  ‘Pete!’ yelled Fletcher. ‘Pete!’

  ‘Calm down them animals,’ ordered Big Tom.

  Joe slunk back to the horse, which had danced further out from the remuda and now stood shaking and snorting and flicking its mane over its crest. The smell of fresh blood did nothing to calm it, and it huffed and turned on Joe when he approached.

  ‘Pete, say something,’ shouted Fletcher. When Pete didn’t respond, Fletcher shouted to the rest. ‘He’s in camp!’

  ‘Who?’ said Big Tom.

  ‘The damn indian.’

  In a collective whir, men grabbed their weapons. Voices sounded all at once, and in the commotion Joe stepped closer to the horse, close enough to grab the rope. He pulled the horse’s nose close and rubbed its neck again, and when it fought he only pulled it tighter until the animal was eye to eye with him and the smell of fresh blood was heavy in its nostrils.

  ‘Everybody quiet!’ yelled Big Tom. ‘Quiet!’

  Sound evaporated. Night returned.

  ‘He makes a sound,’ ordered Big Tom, ‘we shoot him. He stays quiet, we kill him when the sun rises.’

  Joe leaned against the horse’s shoulder and stared into camp. There was nothing to see but he stared anyway. Neither was there anything to hear. The order Big Tom had given made sense. Walking out with the horse would give him away. Only a few hours remained until sunrise, and if he was still around by then he was a dead man.

  He slid the knife back into the belt loop and ran
a hand over the horse’s cheek. It had calmed, as had the others. He turned his head and let his eyes trace the contours of the ground, but in the faint starlight, without the moon to help, he could see only ten feet out and then all was black. Too black to jump across the horse’s back and ride out at a run. And so he waited.

  An hour passed. He thought maybe the men would grow restless and move. Make sound. But they weren’t fools. Killers yes, but not fools. Two more hours and the sun would reveal him. Two hours after that and Valeria would be found and caught.

  He bent and ran his fingers over the ground until he found a stone the size of a bullet. A desperate act, he knew it. He stood back up. He wound the rope tighter over his wrist. Then his free hand glided back and whipped forward and the rock went sailing. It hit and clattered and drew forth the thunder of cannons as gun muzzles barked and flared in the night.

  Joe jerked the horse across a stretch of sand and around a clump of creosote. He pulled it clattering over a flat rock and just as they reached sand again the shooting stopped and all that was left was Big Tom shouting for silence.

  Joe put a hand once more to the horse’s neck and up to its jaw and again whispered in its ear. He’d gained at least forty feet but not enough to put him out of earshot or out of gun range. He searched out another pebble and found one and tossed it in the same direction as the last, but the ruse was up. No shots were fired, the men had realized their error.

  By the turn of the constellations he knew his time was short. Waiting, at this point, would bring him nothing. An unpleasant sensation gurgled in his belly. It was the feeling of desperation, and there was no avoiding it. Only two ideas came to him; the first to leave the horse where it stood and crawl away on his belly. Give up. He knew where that would get him. So instead he took the second idea. This one too began with him on his belly. Crawling. He went through sand and back over the rock surface he had just led the horse across, and when he came upon a cactus he made a mental note of exactly where it grew and then continued on.

  When he finally chose to stop, it was thirty feet away from the horse, no place in particular. He drew the Colt .45 and slid his finger around the trigger and took a long breath before setting his thumb on the hammer. Then he raised it and cocked it and fired.

  He fired five shots into camp and darted back the way he’d come in a hunched sprint low to the ground as Big Tom’s men returned a barrage of gunfire into the night. It didn’t take five seconds to reach the horse. When he did, he grabbed the reins and zigzagged across the ground, not to dodge bullets but to dodge cactus where he saw it. Behind him Big Tom was shouting again, and though the shots stopped, their reverberations continued into the night just long enough for Joe to gain another forty feet, just far enough to be clear of their camp and back into the shrouded sightless wasteland, back on the path to Valeria.

  16

  It took him a long time to dress. Long enough that Josephine’s rebuke had time to work into his mind. You’re a fool if you go out there, she’d said. You’ll only get yourself shot. He shook his head. Damn that woman.

  He made another go of slinking his foot through the pant leg, but his hip didn’t want to hinge high enough for it, so he leaned against the bedside table and almost tipped the water pitcher over. But he got them on, one leg at a time, then strapped the gunbelt around his hips. An action that seemed to require the use of muscles he had never before realized. Lastly he put on his hat. Then he took the crutch they’d left for him and stuck it under an arm and hopped through the curtain.

  Doctor Friedman and Josephine Wilsey waited on the other side. Their eyes moved from the crutch to his leg and up to his face. In unison. Their expressions doubtful.

  Josephine shook her head. ‘You’ll only get yourself shot.’

  ‘You already said that,’ Balum growled.

  ‘Well it’s true.’

  ‘Josephine…’ said the doctor.

  She crossed her arms and turned on a heel and disappeared into the back of the house. The doctor gave Balum a raise of his eyebrows, and Balum only nodded his head and opened the front door.

  His hobbling down the street drew little attention, crowded as the town was. A boomtown saw all sorts of men in all sorts of conditions, and Balum was nothing special. A wounded man was all.

  The Broke Lode Tavern lay up the street near the Acropolis. With two good legs, Balum could have crossed the distance in under a minute. Instead he made his way down the drag one slow hop after one slow hop and his mind all the while beginning to turn against him. He blamed it on Josephine. She had no business talking that way.

  He hobbled down past an assay office and past a rundown brothel with an old woman picking her teeth out front, and halfway to the Broke Lode he paused against a hitch post and let the crutch go and rubbed his underarm. He wished he had a chaw of tobacco right then. He ran his tongue over his teeth and considered the number of gunbattles he’d been in. Nearly too many to count. But rarely had he gone seeking them out. Not like he was doing now.

  He blinked and rubbed his eyes and wiped the sweat off his brow. His stomach felt strange. He stuck the crutch back under his arm and shoved off the post, but it took only a few paces to start questioning himself again. What he was doing. Why he was doing it.

  He was wounded. His palms were still raw from crawling through the desert. His hip would hardly bend. He was dehydrated and short on sleep.

  He limped past a hardware store and paused a moment to allow a man pushing a wheelbarrow to cross. It was loaded with cords of bound firewood, chopped in the far western mountains and loaded onto mule train and carried endless miles back across the desert. Cargo nearly as valuable as the silver dug out of the ground. Standing there watching the wheelbarrow, Balum heard Josephine’s words again. He looked at his raw hands and down at his trousers, shredded away at the knees and stained in blood. He looked at the crutch. It chafed his armpit.

  The wheelbarrow creaked on past, and Balum straightened. The tavern was in sight. A fair-sized crowd milled about the doorway. He took another few steps and the crutch pinched his skin. He felt lopsided on the thing, his bum leg like an extra appendage attached to his hip. A queasiness gurgled in his stomach.

  He stopped right there. Stopped walking, stood in the dusty street with the crutch pinned up under him and sweat beading on his forehead, and he thought of Joe somewhere out there in the wilderness, and he thought of the time wasted, the past two days, and he took up the crutch and flipped it around by its handle and hurled it thirty feet end over end down the street where it landed in a crash.

  Heads all up and down the street swerved in his direction. He didn’t care. He put weight on his bad leg and felt a twinge shoot up his back and clear down to his knee, but he took a step and then another. The sickness left his stomach and in its place something heavy boiled. His breath came hard through his nose. A sense of urgency swept over him and he took several more steps until he could have thrown a stone at the Broke Lode, then he opened his mouth and bellowed the name Pat Swinton.

  Tin City hushed like a rock had been thrown into a pond. Not a bullfrog croaked. So quiet that it seemed folks could hear the ring of pickaxes striking the mines a mile away.

  ‘Pat Swinton,’ Balum shouted again. ‘You’re a backshooter, and a lousy one at that. You want me dead — come out here and finish the job.’

  No one moved. A gust of wind swept down the street and drove a tumbleweed before it. It rolled past Balum, past the Broke Lode Tavern. The only motion anywhere in all that dusty boomtown until finally the batwing doors creaked open and a miner stepped gingerly into the street. He lifted his hands to show he presented no danger, and soon several more followed, then a rush of men; miners, gamblers, drunks and thieves and teamsters and an old veteran missing an arm and wearing a dusty Yankee uniform that had seen better days. They came out in single file and took up positions along the edges of storefronts and against hitch rails. They leaned on water troughs and some climbed up the wooden brothel stairway
s to watch in the company of half-naked whores from the balconies above.

  Word spread to the girlie show where customers and dancers and even Bucky, stumbling drunk, rushed into the street to catch what the whole town knew was coming. A bread baker stood in front of his bakery in an apron covered in flour. He clapped his hands together and a white puff rose from them and, like a signal, Pat Swinton appeared in the doorway of the Broke Lode Tavern.

  He set both hands over the batwing doors and peered out at the multitude gathered there. His feet and knees showed beneath the doors, his shoulders and head visible above them.

  ‘Come out of there, Swinton,’ called Balum.

  The man looked right and left but didn’t move. When he sniffled, the whole town heard it. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked back.

  ‘Kill you.’

  Pat Swinton swallowed. His eyes searched around for an escape, some alternative to reality, but there was none. ‘I ain’t coming out. I got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You wanted a piece of me when my back was turned. Well, you bought it. Here I am.’

  Still he didn’t move. He stood there behind the batwings twisting his mouth, and the longer Balum looked at him the more that heavy feeling boiled in his gut. Each second that passed was another moment lost in time, another degree of danger into which Joe was certainly falling. Joe and Valeria out there in the desert. Big Tom and eleven killers closing in on them. One horse. His friend.

  To hell with waiting.

  ‘You wearing a gun right now, Swinton?’

  ‘Yeah. What about it?’

  Balum’s hand dropped and rose, and for any bystanders who had looked away for even a sliver of breath, they were jolted suddenly by the harsh blast of the Dragoon and the splintering of the batwing doors as Balum fired four rounds into them in such quick succession it sounded as one long violent hammering of chaos.

  He stepped forward without holstering his weapon and crossed the ground where the tumbleweed had just passed. Smoke wafted from the barrel. Balum’s stride came unevenly, each step burned his hip. When he reached the doors he dropped the revolver in its holster and bent down and took a boot in each hand and dragged Pat Swinton’s dead body into the street and let go. The boots thumped the ground.