Balum's Harem

by Orrin Russell

  ‘I reckon,’ said Joe.

  Balum unlaced his fingers and stood up. ‘Don’t you worry. Rest up. Let Valeria take care of you, get some food down your gullet, and we’ll be riding out in a week.’ He picked the chair up and walked it back across the room and set it against the wall.

  ‘It’s too bad about that dynamite,’ said Joe.

  Balum reached the door. He stopped in the frame and looked back.

  ‘You sure there’s no repairing those wicks?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Ah hell. At least you found it before they did. Talk about kindling — there’s nothing like blasting powder to get a fire going.’

  An invisible hand seized Balum’s throat. It squeezed, choked him. The yoke fell over his shoulders. He felt the color leave his face.

  ‘Balum?’

  Balum swallowed.

  ‘You brought that dynamite inside the saloon, right? Tell me you did.’

  31

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Kiki.

  ‘You just left it there?’ Chloe tilted her head sideways. ‘The whole box?’

  ‘It was a mistake,’ Balum raised his hands. ‘I aim to fix it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll go get it.’

  The two girls exchanged a look.

  ‘It’s only three doors down,’ he said.

  ‘Balum,’ said Kiki. ‘They’ve been through every building in town by now.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t see it.’

  ‘Of course they did.’

  ‘They do their snooping around at night. It would be hard to spot in the dark.’

  ‘Balum…’

  ‘It’s got to be done. Now listen. It’ll take me less than five seconds to cross that distance at a run.’

  ‘That’s a long time when bullets are flying.’

  ‘That’s why I’ve got you two. You give me some cover fire, and maybe they’ll only get a couple shots off.’

  ‘Balum,’ said Kiki, ‘There’s two of them in the jail, one inside that gold buyer’s shack, and I’m pretty sure I saw somebody moving in the confectionary. The rest of them are scattered around who knows where,’ she crossed her arms and set her lips in a pout. ‘You’re going to get yourself shot. Again.’

  He raised his eyes over the window sill and looked across the street at the jail, then Elsworth’s shack. They looked quiet enough. He looked back at Chloe and Kiki. His eyes dropped to their cleavage. Their skin was beyond smooth. Inviting.

  ‘Balum,’ Chloe snapped. ‘You need to think of something better. There’s no way you’re going to run down the street with all of them shooting at you.’

  ‘What about the back door?’ asked Kiki.

  ‘No good,’ said Chloe. ‘They’ll be watching that too.’

  ‘I got it,’ said Balum. His eyes rolled upward. Kiki’s followed.

  ‘The rooftop?’

  ‘That’s right. You two send some lead through those windows across the street, and I’ll make it to the munitions shop unnoticed.’

  Chloe shook her head. ‘This doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘If they get their hands on that dynamite, all they need to do is cut it open and pour the blasting powder out. They’ll fling it against the sides of the saloon, then they’ll throw a torch, and the whole building will catch.’

  He didn’t wait for any more argument. He told them to give him five minutes, then unleash hell. They started to protest but he was out the door and gone.

  The Independent Saloon had no attic. It did have a trapdoor built into the ceiling of the far room. Balum dragged a chair beneath it and reached up and pulled the catch rope and in a leap caught the edges and pulled himself through.

  Under open sky, the sunlight burned. He wished he’d brought his hat. He set one hand against his brow to block the afternoon glare and shucked the Dragoon with the other, then scanned the rooftops from a crouch. Then he moved. Bent low, he reached the edge of the roof and squatted there for a moment staring at the next building in line. The Banner Brother’s Hotel. He’d thought it was closer. It looked close riding past, felt close walking through the alleyway between, but now that he was up against it and facing the prospect of jumping, it was anything but. A good eight feet. And then some. After that, the Candelabra, the distance at least as far, then the munitions shop. Too much to think about. He turned and retraced his steps nearly to the trap door, then dropped the gun in his holster and came out of his crouch just as the sound of the Sharps blasted from the window below.

  His bootheels slammed across the rooftop. Hot dry air against his face. Left foot hard on the edge, he leapt, sailed, arms whirling, legs pedaling empty steps in space, then he hit the roof slats and rolled and rose again and continued running with one hand pressed against his hip that was screaming in hot surges of pain. The cadence of his run was a slow and clumsy lope. His bootheels clacked against the rooftop like smaller versions of the gunshots clacking in the street. Three paces from the edge, the hollow whump of doubt hit him, but the guns were barking, the time was now, and he jumped.

  Mid-air he knew he wouldn’t make it. He was falling. He flung his arms out and his chest thwacked into the corner ledge of the Candelabra. His fingers scraped and caught the lip. He slammed his boots into the wall and clawed his way over the edge and onto the rooftop, rolled, dragged himself to hands and knees, and nearly wretched.

  On all fours he gasped and spat, then forced himself to his feet. He didn’t run. He walked with a hand on his chest and traced his fingers over each rib one at a time. When he reached the edge of the Candelabra and looked down to the munitions rooftop a full story below, he was fairly certain that he’d not broken a rib, and almost just as certain that he would break one on the next jump.

  He had been sure the munitions shop had a second story. He was wrong. He looked again at the drop. The gunfire behind him was tapering off. He needed those shots to mask the noise he was about to make. He swore and held his hip and coughed up a ball of phlegm. The hell with it.

  He took off in a hobble that gained to a crooked trot, timed out his steps, and lunged off the rooftop and into thin air.

  Wind rushed past his ears. It whipped his shirt and stung his eyes and he turned, twisting, like a bird shot and spiraling earthward.

  His breath left him even before he hit.

  He landed on his left arm and heard a snap like a toy gun go off. The boards beneath him popped and broke, and his fall continued right through the rooftop and into the storeroom where two men sat loafing on chairs beside the shop door. They flung their arms over their faces when Balum came smashing through the rafters and smacked onto the countertop in an eruption of dust and debris. He landed on his back with shards of wood cutting the backs of his knees, and even before the dust settled, the Dragoon was bucking in his palm.

  The two men each held shotguns, but neither had time to fire. Both were dead before the dust settled. One fell from his chair and the other remained in his with his head tilted back and the shotgun across his lap, and all of him head to toe covered in the dried blood of horses and his own fresh plasma pumping from his neck.

  Balum’s ears rang. He felt nothing; not his hip or his chest or the wood digging into his legs. He brought himself to his knees and pushed off with a foot and stood weaving slightly with the Dragoon aimed at the deadmen. He crossed the shop floor with the gun still covering them. At the shelving he stopped. Looked down. The pine box was there, empty.

  Light poured through the fresh hole in the roof. Men shouted in the street.

  He spun back around and holstered his weapon and climbed up the unbroken section of countertop beneath the hole, swung his arms up and jumped. His right hand caught the wood, his left hand did nothing. His body flailed beneath him and his fingers slipped and he crashed onto the countertop again and smacked his head against the floor.

  He pushed himself back up and looked at his left arm. The forearm was bent and the white broken tip of bone stuck thr
ough the skin. It felt like nothing. Nothing at all.

  He walked back to the deadmen and pulled an old Navy revolver from the fallen man’s waistband and stuck it in his own, then picked the shotgun off the other’s lap and leveraged the stock one-handed against his ribs and kicked open the front door.

  The first thing he saw move, he shot: a man in a frayed bowler hat. A bullet from somewhere else answered. It smacked into the doorframe, but Balum was already moving, already stumbling down the single wooden step and lurching toward the Candelabra. He cast aside the shotgun in exchange for the Dragoon and fired back at the sniper’s position.

  The man who’d taken the shotgun round lay dead in the street with the bowler hat sitting crooked over his head. Another shape lay slumped beside him. He’d not been there before, Balum was sure of it. That would be the girl’s doing. He couldn’t see their window but he could hear the rifles blasting from it. The uncanny thunder of the Hawken rifles. He hoped Josephine and Valeria were reloading for them.

  He made it past the alleyway and cleared the awning of the Candelabra before the first shot caught him. It felt like someone hit him in the back with a sledgehammer. He toppled forward and tripped and fell just as two more shots seared overhead. He landed but didn’t stop. His hand still clutched the Dragoon. The Candelabra had no proper door, only batwings that swung each time a bullet smacked against them. Splinters showered Balum as he wormed his way forward on his belly with his broken arm almost useless and the back of his shoulder seizing tight.

  He rolled under the batwings. A bullet clipped the floor and threw needles of wood into his neck. He came up on the other side and wiggled himself against a wall and pulled the impaled shards from his neck even as more rifle shots screamed through the doorway and into the gambling hall. He flicked the splinters away like giant bloody toothpicks, and leaned his head against the wall. The air felt hot suddenly in his throat. He coughed.

  He needed to move.

  He swiveled around to his knees and suddenly the pain hit him, all of it, all at once. His hip throbbed in a dull beat, his ribs felt like tuning forks struck over metal. The pain in his forearm was a tar fire flaring hot and neat. He looked at his chest to see if the bullet had gone through but realized if it had he’d probably be dead already. The bullet was lodged somewhere in his back.

  He needed to move. He said it again to himself, but his body wouldn’t oblige. The battle in the street died out. Shots faded away.

  He took a breath and forced himself up, through the pain and deeper into the maze of baccarat stands and roulette wheels, all of it covered in a thin film of dust that glistened white as snow in the slanted beams of sunlight that carved themselves through the windows. At a poker table that seated five he collapsed into a chair. He set his arms on the tabletop and watched the blood pool onto the felt. He stared at the bone poking out of his skin, then looked away from it. The pain kept growing. It would keep growing.

  He made a count of Big Tom’s men. Twelve to start. Joe killed two in the desert, the girls shot two when they rode in. There were the two Balum killed in the munitions shop, the bowler hat, and that extra body lying in the street. His fingers moved as he counted. Four left.

  A shudder rippled up from his throat and he pulled the Dragoon out and set it on the table, then the Navy after it. More pain. He blinked through it. Made himself think.

  He ordered his priorities: Don’t pass out. Reload the weapons. Make it back to the Independent.

  All before Big Tom burned it to the ground.

  32

  He managed the second point alright. He’d fired a total of three shots from the Dragoon and, though it took some doing, he managed to ram three more balls and three more drams of powder and three more wads all into the cylinders. Next the Navy. He drew the hammer back and turned the cylinder one full rotation, then eased the hammer forward and tucked the gun barrel into his waistband at the small of his back. His shoulder blade flared at the movement. He took up the Dragoon again and fought through a wave of pain, then stared across the empty poker table like a man gone all in on his bluff, and sometime later, fell asleep.

  When he woke, dusk had mostly edged out the last light of day. Shadows hung everywhere. The layer of dust over the gambling hall turned from a white snow to a grey frost — the same look he’d seen in Angelique’s garden when the dirt was freshly tilled and the crystals glimmered in an early morning freeze.

  He had told himself not to let that happen. Not to lose consciousness. Not to fall asleep. But he had, and now something had woken him.

  He still held the Dragoon. He rolled his thumb up over the hammer and paused and listened. After a while it came again — the voice of an idiot.

  ‘Hey Fletcher, look. Ain’t that blood there, cutting through the dust?’

  Balum turned his wrist a quarter inch and thumbed the hammer back and fired. The man had started to speak again. His voice stopped short and his body smacked the floor, and from beside him blazed out three small spits of fire. Two burrowed into the poker table, the third struck the Dragoon and whined out in a long metallic screech, and the gun spun out of Balum’s hand and off into the darkness.

  He dropped backwards from the chair, but Fletcher wasn’t firing, he was running. He skipped around the craps tables and dove for the edge of the bar that stretched half the length of the room.

  As suddenly as it was broken, silence returned. Balum didn't go anywhere. His hand stung, his back ached. His ribs felt like they’d been trampled by a two-ton steer. He stayed put where he was, aware that sound could be his enemy. Then Fletcher spoke.

  ‘I know what that sound was,’ he said. ‘Makes a nasty whine — a bullet striking iron. A nasty whine and a nasty feeling in your gut — knowing you ain’t got no weapon no more. Knowing you about to die.’ He chuckled, but his humor didn’t last long. ‘Am I right?’

  Balum worked his fingers.

  ‘I’m right; I know that sound.’ He changed position. The rustle of his clothing gave him away, but he kept himself shielded by the bar. Other noises followed. A cylinder opening, cartridges dropping, a click shut. ‘Say, I been thinking. I know who you are. There’s plenty of stories go around about you. There’s one about you shooting Lance Cain in a boomtown in the middle of Hell Country. Well, here we are. You know, it’s funny. You must have killed that son of a bitch a stone’s throw from where you are now. I bet you never thought you’d die in the same spot.’

  Balum on the floor strained his neck forward but there was nothing to see through the table legs. The evening light sunk lower over the dust. Each minute the gambling room descended further into darkness.

  ‘You know,’ Fletcher kept going, ‘I don’t believe half them stories about you. Maybe you killed Cain, but I don’t think he was as good as they say he was. That shit about what you done in that Mexican jail, that Belen jail, or whatever they call it. Ain’t no way in hell that’s true. And all I hear about you being a fast draw… shit. That’s only cause folks ain’t seen me .’

  He was talking, but he wasn’t moving. There was some doubt in the man’s head. He was still trying to get Balum to move, to speak, to divulge his position.

  ‘It’s a shame I’m going to have to do you like a horse with a broke leg. But I’d have beat you in a fair fight anyway. You ain’t what they say you is.’

  ‘You want to know for sure?’ Balum called out. He flinched, half-expecting a shot in response. But Fletcher, besides being a hired killer, was also a man hung up on reputations.

  ‘Your iron ain’t gonna work,’ said Fletcher. ‘Not after that bullet caught it.’

  ‘Toss me your friend’s.’

  A few empty seconds passed. Then Fletcher stood. The light was such that all color had been sucked from the room. The tables and chairs and the bottles along the bar all grey or versions of grey. Fletcher a black shadow. He had holstered his weapon, his hand hung beside it.

  Balum watched him. The man had picked out Balum’s position from the tables, it
was clear by the way he moved. The way he side-stepped closer to his dead comrade. Distrustful. His thumb nearly touching his gun and his eyes never leaving Balum.

  When he reached the body he paused and stood there a moment, then said, ‘I’m gonna toss you this here gun. I’ll trust you to holster it, and we’ll have us a fair fight. You stand up first though.’

  Balum’s throat was as dry as the ox bones laying out in the desert. He wanted to swallow but he couldn’t. His left arm burned clear to the shoulder. He stood.

  Satisfied, Fletcher crouched. He felt around for the man’s gun. He kept his head facing Balum. When he found the weapon he stood slowly. Said, ‘here you go,’ and tossed it.

  The gun flipped end-over-end, the grey butt and the black barrel catching the twilight through the windows. The gun was still airborne when Fletcher’s arm dropped.

  Balum whipped his hand back. His eye winked closed from the stab of pain, but his arm kept moving and his palm hit the butt of the Navy tucked in the back of his waistband.

  The tip of Fletcher’s gun cleared leather, and Balum fired.

  Fletcher’s own shot cracked and smacked into the floorboards, and Balum thumbed back the hammer and fired again, pulled back, fired a third time. He stepped forward with each shot. Fletcher’s back hit the wall and he sank down the length of it, just as the thrown weapon clattered to the floor.

  Balum limped through the tables to where the man lay twisted up with his legs bent oddly beneath him, the gun held out like an extension of his arm, but the man was dead. Two bullets had caught him in the chest, the third in the head.

  Balum dropped to a knee. His head spun. He tucked the Navy back into his waistband and slid the revolver from Fletcher’s dead grip. He held it to the window and twisted his wrist. An 1860 Colt Army revolver converted to take metal cartridges. A damn good gun.

  One-handed, Balum thumbed open the cylinder and rolled through each chamber, then reached out to search through Fletcher’s vest with his left, and nearly vomited at the pain when his fingers bumped clumsily against the man’s chest. He gasped and held his arm up to the window light and gagged when he saw the bone sticking through.