Balum's Harem

by Orrin Russell

  The cigar at the barbershop had guessed only a few of Big Tom’s men remained in town, and when Balum walked through the main gate he saw only three loafing at the fence posts. They were passing a bottle around and when they saw Bucky stumble in with Balum right behind him they dropped the bottle and darted their eyes around. One slapped a hand to the gun hanging at his waist, but when Balum raised the Dragoon he froze and stared back with his mouth open.

  Balum waved the barrel over the three of them. ‘Unbuckle those belts. Let ‘em fall.’

  The men obliged.

  ‘You three along with Bucky here are going to round up fourteen horses, and one of them goddamn better well be the roan I rode into town on. I want him saddled and harnessed along with three others. Now get to it.’

  Two of them looked to the third for guidance. Bucky didn’t look anywhere.

  ‘Mister,’ the head of the three said. ‘These is Big Tom’s horses.’

  ‘I know whose they are.’

  ‘Well we can’t just give his horses away. You got any idea what he’d do to us?’

  ‘I’ve got an idea what I’ll do to you, and it’s worse than what happened to Bucky.’

  ‘You saying you’d shoot us?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘We ain’t even armed no more.’

  ‘I could give a damn. You hire on with a man like Big Tom and you give away the right to be dealt a fair shake. I’m giving you a deal right here. You ready up those horses and I’ll let you live. I’ll turn you over to the town and they can do with you as they see fit. Any of you want to argue with that?’

  Ten minutes later Balum rode out of the corral gates on the back of the roan. His own saddle, his own tack. Behind him were thirteen horses held together by a trailing rope, three of them saddled. Bucky and the three hired hands walked in front. Balum walked them down the side street the way he’d come and back onto the main drag. Folks hadn’t left. In fact, more had gathered. He looked around and saw the barber standing in front of his canvas-tented shop and, not knowing who else to address, directed his words that way.

  ‘I’m leaving you with these four to do with as you see fit. My advice is to string ‘em up. But it’s your town, your decision.’ He looked around at the men gathered in the street. The women at the balconies. Then he gave the roan a tap and left Bucky and his friends behind.

  In the hotel all was quiet. His room was untouched, the saddlebags still stashed under the bed. Before he left, Balum fished out a five dollar note and tipped the clerk behind the desk, thanked him for keeping the room, and tossed the key over the counter.

  Outside Doctor Friedman’s office, the women waited. On the ground beside the door were bundles of supplies wrapped tight in brown paper packaging and tied with string. Kiki and Chloe wore dresses hardly suited for anything but seduction, but at least it was more than the brassieres and panties they’d worn only an hour ago. Josephine had swapped the nurse’s uniform for the same light grey dress she’d worn when he toppled into her the other night. It wasn’t half as revealing as the other two girls’, but the way it hugged her body, and knowing what was hidden underneath, Balum found he had a hard time taking his eyes from it.

  Kiki came forward and took the reins of a sorrel. ‘You got extra horses,’ she said.

  ‘Damn right I did. You get that tobacco I asked for?’

  ‘It’s in the small bundle there,’ Kiki pointed.

  ‘Good. It’s been long overdue,’ he glanced at the sun and back to the women lined up in a row. ‘Saddle up, girls. There’s a lot of trail to cover.’

  20

  A mile north of Tin City they struck Big Tom’s trail. It could be no other; that many horses traveling at such a speed in that direction were not miners or travelers or anything other than men in pursuit of prey.

  Chloe saw it first. She knew the route, knew the trail they’d have taken, and when she saw the hoofprints she caught Balum’s attention with a bob of her eyebrows, and kept on moving.

  If the expression was meant as an I told you so , Balum didn’t much care. He dug a wad of tobacco as big as a lemon out of the fresh pouch, crammed it in his cheek, and spit a stream of tobacco juice into the dust. Already his head began to float. The tension eased from his shoulders, his hip stopped biting.

  He rode in back and off to the side, enough to avoid their dust. He spat again and studied them and shook his head. All three carried parasols. One pink, one purple, the other grey to match Josephine’s dress. The edges rimmed in lace. If anyone were to have seen their party riding under that miserable sky through such wanton country, Balum could only imagine what they would make of it. Three women, three beauties, two of them dressed like dance hall girls and the other prim and proper, all in the company of a cowboy roughened by hardship and by weather and by every manner of violence a lawless country could hurl at a man. Pounding across the flatlands beside them were eight spares and two packhorses, the latter carrying jerked meat and coffee, tinned beans and cheese and potatoes and whatever else the girls had reckoned would fill their bellies. They carried clothing — too much in Balum’s opinion — multiple canteens and waterskins, and enough ammunition to hold off a small army. What further added to the oddity of their appearance were the guns. Not Balum’s Dragoon, or the Winchester slung in his scabbard, but the Smith and Wesson tucked in a holster around Chloe’s waist and the Sharps Buffalo rifle that Kiki balanced across her saddle. If they’d stolen them or bought them, Balum didn’t ask. He hardly cared. He spat another stream of tobacco at the desert and, as the late afternoon sun broiled him, admitted to himself that he wished he had a parasol of his own.

  That evening they made a fireless camp on the lee side of an outcropping where cholla and creosote grew in spindly fingers pointed skyward. Kiki poured water into a pail and tended to the horses strung along the remuda. Chloe cleared an area of stone. She spread blankets, carved up slices of cheese.

  The noises accompanying the women’s bustling, Balum heard from his back. At Josephine's suggestion he had unbuttoned his pants and snaked one side down over a hip and stretched out like a deadman over the sand so that she might appraise the wound. The posture suited him; he felt fairly close to death. He’d not fully recovered from the injury, and the day had sapped him. He closed his eyes and surrendered to Josephine’s proddings. If her expression revealed a woman upset or dutiful or bashful or bold, he had no idea; he was asleep within minutes.

  When he woke it was under a starry sky. Cold night air. The showgirls had covered him with a blanket and bedded down beside him. As they slept, they wormed their way closer to him in search of warmth. Chloe and Kiki, anyway — Josephine kept her distance. She chose her spot away from them, her back to them.

  He thought he had been woken by the sound of gunfire. Human screams. Cries for help, cries of agony, tortured souls wailing and wounded and unbearable in their suffering.

  ‘Balum?’ Kiki whispered in his ear. ‘Are you alright?’

  He flinched. Blinked away the sounds.

  ‘You’ve been restless all night.’ She touched a finger to his jaw and traced its contours to his chin. ‘It’s just dreams. Go back to sleep.’

  Before the sun rose he was up and rousing the women. They made no fire, drank no coffee, only watered the remuda and took to their saddles and set themselves in motion with the hazy gloom of pre-dawn shrouding the sight of their passage.

  He set the pace so aggressively they were forced to swap mounts every two hours. The animals’ hides became coated in white lather and his own shirt hung limp and wet with sweat. Before midday they came upon the ruins of a stone house that long ago had been built beside a stand of mesquite. The walls lay half-crumbled in heaps of rubble, but the trees still clung to life, and there they stopped and watered the horses while Balum paced over the ground and deliberated whether to build a fire for coffee or simply push on. Joe hadn’t stopped. Neither had Big Tom’s men. The tracks ran parallel to the old ruins and disappeared off into the endless rea
ch beyond.

  The hell with it. They needed to keep pushing.

  But Chloe wasn’t having it. ‘The horses need to rest,’ she said when he announced that coffee would have to wait. ‘And so do you. Isn’t that right, Josephine?’

  Josephine answered with a single nod of her head and turned away. She walked off and busied herself with gathering sticks.

  The entire preparation took under twenty minutes, each of which Balum realized was worth it when the first gulp of black coffee hit his throat. He swallowed half the mug in one go and sipped the rest. The two showgirls sat nearby. Shoulders and cleavage exposed to the world. Soft skin. They engaged themselves in senseless gossip while Josephine walked to a bare window ledge and sipped her coffee alone in the shade. It was the first he noticed the rift between them. Or better put, Josephine’s cold shoulder. Both Kiki and Chloe spoke freely to her, but not once had Josephine addressed them back. She seemed indignant, set above them somehow, but that wasn’t it either. It was something else. Upset, flustered, Balum didn’t know.

  It didn’t matter. He allowed his mind to puzzle over it for the entirety of two sips of coffee before his thoughts returned to Joe and Valeria and how time was vanishing faster than wind over sand.

  He stood and drained his mug and motioned for the women to get moving.

  They rode through the land as if apart from it. The parasols unnatural in every way. An exposé of skin and breast and hair that never before had the desert seen nor ever would again. And Balum behind them riding half-blind and wholly inattentive to the beauties in whose company he traveled.

  All that day they drove the horses across the earth. They ate from the saddle and drank constantly from waterskins, and when the horses beneath them stumbled, they stopped only long enough to swap the saddles over to the spares and keep on.

  Buzzards found them. They sailed in lazy patient circles and every now and then their shadows would dart over the party of four souls and fourteen horses clambering over dust and rock and through brambles of cactus waiting to jab their pointed stickers into the soft meat of the living.

  By late afternoon the showgirls had quit their chatting. No one spoke. The trail they followed was obvious enough and the overwhelming blanket of heat unarmed them of any thought for conversation. Eventually the day grew old and the sun lowered onto distant mountain ridges and flung shadows out from horse and rider. The first stars winked in the heavens.

  They kept on anyway, through hunger and exhaustion. Scant as the light was at the close of the day, it was enough to spot the cacti, enough for Balum to shout the horses forward beyond their will. He’d have hounded them even deeper into the desert had he not come upon Big Tom’s encampment. He saw first the bootprints, then impressions in the sand where the men had bedded down. And then the casings.

  He forgot about his hip and sprang off the roan and nearly fell when the pain tore up his leg. He lunged up anyway and threw his arm back for Chloe to stop where she was and not ride over the sign that lay all about.

  Suddenly the setting sun was too low, the remainder of the day too short. He stooped over, only half aware of the girls behind him and their nagging questions, and made a loop of the perimeter. Evidence of a battle all around. Spilled blood.

  The grave at first looked like a rockslide. But misplaced, not natural to the land. Balum reached it with a density pulsing through his fists, surging up through his throat, choking him. He could hardly see. He dropped to his knees before the rocks and threw them off. He rolled the larger stones aside, flung the smaller ones off, all the while expecting to see Joe’s ashen face grimacing back from death.

  When he uncovered the deadman beneath, he shuddered and fell to all fours like a jackal after a fruitless chase. He felt, more than heard, the women’s silence. His head swam. The sudden urge to vomit overtook him. Kiki crossed the sand and took his arm and walked him back to where they’d built a fire. He gave no resistance. He drank water and sat cross-legged with his eyes pegged on the black mountain ranges far off beneath the stars, and when given boiled potatoes and jerked meat he accepted and ate and offered no conversation in return.

  Throughout the evening he rolled from side to side and sat up often to listen to the night sounds, half expecting to hear shots or screams or Joe calling out for him. He swore he heard gunshots. He was sure of it. But to discern dreams from reality, with no anchor set in either realm, was an impossibility, and he finally fell back between Chloe and Kiki and stared at the constellations until sleep took him once again into its breast.

  21

  The long-haired man by the name of Fletcher rode point several lengths ahead of the rest, a half-mile out but within range of the Spencer.

  Joe touched his cheek to the stock. His knees and belly and elbows all nestled comfortably on the blanket. The barrel steadied over a flat rock. He could tell the man was nervous by the way he kept looking up. Looking into the cliff dwellings, into the holes and empty windows and into the dark and cavernous recesses.

  He put the bead of the Spencer on Fletcher’s chest and tracked him another few paces. He swallowed. He leaned up on an elbow and turned his head and looked at the stone wall behind which Valeria had taken the horses. Nothing moved there.

  His finger lifted away from the trigger and he considered his options, and when he’d chosen his course of action, he let Fletcher ride through the Spencer bead and up a sandy shallow. Behind him came Big Tom and his men in a tight grouping. Two stragglers herding the remuda forward. No chuck wagon, no mules. Men on fast horses.

  He searched out the bossman riding tallest among them and sighted down the barrel. He slid his finger through the trigger guard, cheek against the stock. Long breath.

  He fired.

  The explosion bent and swelled against the rock walls and snapped back angrily, and even after Big Tom and his men scattered into the rocks, the noise was still crashing in Joe’s ears. He knew he’d missed as soon as the bullet left the barrel. A sense honed over time. The distance wasn’t the problem, it was the drop in altitude. It made the shot near impossible, but Joe cursed himself anyway. It was unlikely he’d get another shot at Big Tom as straightforward as that.

  He slid the Spencer off the rock and shoved another .56 cartridge into the magazine and pulled back the hammer and inched down again onto his chest with the barrel steadied over stone and the bead hunting out the men below. They’d hidden themselves quickly and they’d done a good job of it. Behind rocks, behind cactus, down there where a dry gully made a sharp turn. The horses were visible, most of them, and after a while Joe moved the barrel a half an inch and set the bead just over the shoulder of a brown quarter-horse with matching white stockings running up its forelegs. He brought his focus tight, right to the spot where the heart and lungs met. He held the rifle like that a long time while sweat collected on his forehead and ran down his temple, past his eye, down his jaw. Then he let the hammer up and set the weapon down and turned away from it.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not that type of man.’

  She walked across the stone floor with steps so delicate that Joe thought she very well might be walking on air.

  ‘What type is that?’ he asked.

  ‘The kind that would slaughter all those horses in desperation.’

  ‘We are desperate, you know.’

  ‘I know it,’ she knelt beside him on the blanket with her legs folded beneath her and off to one side. She brushed the hair from her shoulder with a careful hand. ‘But you won’t do it.’

  Joe twisted his neck and glanced backward down into the bowl of desert. ‘I couldn’t get them all anyway. There’s a good dozen hidden down in that dry gully.’

  ‘Even if you could, it wouldn’t stop them, would it?’

  ‘No,’ he gave her the honest answer.

  They were silent a moment, a look shared between two pairs of black eyes under the domed roof of the cliffs.

  Valeria’s eyes dropped. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘For wh
at?’

  She looked up. ‘For this. I thought it would be the perfect place, but it’s not. We’re trapped, aren’t we?’

  Her eyes quivered suddenly, and a tear welled and spilled and ran in a single line down her cheek.

  Joe took her hand.

  ‘He’ll kill you,’ she said.

  ‘No he won’t.’ But even as he said it he heard the doubt in his voice.

  ‘They’ll come for us at night, won’t they? When we can’t see them and can’t defend ourselves.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again the truth.

  ‘We can run,’ she said. ‘There’s a way out. I found it when I took the horses behind the wall. It’s a tunnel that drops away from the end of the ledge and winds down just below the well. It opens up on the western side, out onto the playa. We can go now — we can run!’

  Joe squeezed her hand. He still couldn’t think straight. It was better, but his mind was still clouded. How could a man concentrate when sitting in front of a woman such as Valeria, holding her hand and watching how her lips moved to form each word, and her eyes…

  He shook his head. They could run into the desert. And die there.

  ‘This is the best we’ve got,’ he said. ‘We have water, they don’t. We’ll stay.’

  What he didn’t mention was that Big Tom had them pinned, and if he needed to send his men clear back to Tin City and bring back a wagonful of water, he would. Instead he squeezed Valeria’s hand and brushed the tear from her cheek.

  In the late evening hour he sent Valeria behind the rock wall where the horses waited, replaced his boots for his moccasins, unsheathed his knife, and descended one level by stairway. The string of moon hanging in the east did nothing to brighten the night. Another week until it would grow large enough to see by. Whether this helped or hindered him, he hadn’t decided. He squatted on his heels and rested his forearms over his knees and waited with the knife gripped softly in his palm.