Balum's Harem

by Orrin Russell

  He looked away. Pinched the barrel of the revolver between his knees and ran his good hand over Fletcher’s vest. The upper pocket held cartridges and Balum transferred these to his own pockets. Then he loaded the empty chamber and slapped closed the cylinder and shoved through the batwing doors.

  He thought it would be lighter outside, but it was not. Up ahead a weapon was being fired. For some time he’d heard the shots, but he only realized it then. He paused a second to discern the weapon by its sound, but it was overwhelmed when more shots answered back in hollow pops that bounced through the alleyways and crashed into each other in a drum-like flurry that lasted a full thirty seconds and ended with someone screaming Throw it not once but over and over while rifle shots split the night in useless defense.

  Whoever was supposed to throw the torch threw it. Balum knew by the sound it made — a whooshing sound. The sound of powder igniting. He stumbled along the storefront of the Banner Brother’s Hotel and nearly shot out the window panes when he caught his reflection moving in the glass. He reached the alley just as the flames surged up the Independent’s walls — orange and red and pulsing with the angry senseless thrashing of an ungoverned inferno. It spread along the wood siding as if the whole thing was coated in tar. Up past the windows, onto the roof. The false-fronted facade bearing the name THE INDEPENDENT and rising taller than anything around it caught fire on all four sides.

  The heat pushed Balum back. Great black plumes of smoke rolled and coiled and blotted out the moon. The double saloon doors banged open suddenly and the horses stampeded out, whinnying and snorting and one of them falling when Big Tom’s men fired a volley into them. It was a stupid thing to do, for it revealed their position. They’d circled around the far side of the hotel and crossed the street and taken up spots behind a hitch rail.

  Balum raised his weapon to fire back but the horses were scrambling in all directions, some up the street, some down, some spinning and rearing onto their hind legs. A blur of movement shot out of the doorway after them. Kiki maybe — he thought he recognized the dress — but his eyes were stinging and filled with smoke and his temples felt like a vice was wrapped around them. He staggered forward, gun still raised. The horses parted and he fired through the gap. Fired again. He stumbled closer and fired until the cylinder clacked empty, dropped it, ripped the Navy from his waistband and unloaded into the red blasts of fire answering back. They flared from behind the hitch post, and the sounds they made lost themselves in the raging inferno crackling and smacking and transforming the town of Bette’s Creek into a hellscape of deadmen and wild-eyed horses and two armed women clad in silky dancehall dresses, Big Tom shouting, Balum shooting, the towering wooden facade over the Independent snapping and cracking and breaking suddenly in half. It fell in a great burning crash over the half-Apache being hauled out on the shoulders of his nurse and his lover, and the three disappeared in a swell of red churning sparks.

  A roar left Balum’s throat, inaudible over the blaze. He fired the last round from the Navy and spun and toppled when a bullet ripped along his skull. His face hit dust, dust filled his mouth. Pain soared through his broken arm. He rolled to his knees and sat upright into a storm of burning shards of wood sailing over town. Paper-thin shavings floated like soft glowing feathers, larger pieces crashed and cratered into earth, all of them burning where they landed like hundreds of smoldering campfires strewn chaotically along the streets of town.

  Balum attempted to stand but his leg gave out and he fell. He threw his arms out and felt the broken bone arch back when he landed. He crawled to an elbow, raised himself up. Blood trickled from the gouge on his scalp and ran down his forehead into his eyes. He blinked, coughed on the smoke. Through it all he saw Big Tom’s massive figure marching across the street, still wearing his hat, silhouetted by a wall of fire. The man raised his gun at the mass of burning wood that had fallen in front of the saloon doors. Firelight turned his shirtfront red. The man lowered the gunbarrel a few inches, then flinched suddenly and spun a quarter-turn.

  Balum’s eyes were filled with blood, but they managed to follow the movement. They landed on what Big Tom must have seen: the coal-black eyes of an angry woman, Joe’s Spencer rifle cradled at her waist. Big Tom stood gravely still for that short moment that lasted long enough for him to understand clearly just who was sending him off to death, and ended when the rifle flared and recoiled against her. The shot blew a hole through Big Tom’s chest that lifted him off his feet and chucked him into the flames billowing out from the saloon doors.

  Balum didn’t see him land. His blood-filled eyes were closed, his mouth once more in the dirt.

  33

  Even before he opened his eyes he knew it was his belly that woke him. The room he lay in he didn’t recognize. He turned his neck on the pillow and his eyes skirted over a small bed table, a nightstand, an armoire, one paneless window giving onto sky. A hotel room. The Candelabra, the Banner Brother’s Hotel, he didn’t know.

  A sheet covered his legs, nothing covered his chest. It was purple and green and spotted a strange yellowish-brown at the edges of his ribs. His forearm had been set with three iron bars dug up from the blacksmith’s shop and wrapped tight and knotted in twine. The spot where the bone had punctured through was sewn shut. There was gauze wrapped around his skull, he could feel it. Josephine’s work.

  It struck him that she must be alive, and that Joe was dead. He had seen the women haul him out, seen the false-front break and fall over him and burn like a blazing epitaph in commemoration of his passing.

  His hunger left him. Something foul replaced it. When it returned sometime later it came accompanied by guilt. He thought of the long ride back to Cheyenne and what he would tell Charles and Will and Angelique.

  Somewhere close by, women laughed. He opened his eyes.

  Joe stood at the foot of his bed.

  He felt his head float and the blood rush out of his limbs and his feet go cold. The hair on his neck stood up and a sheet of goosebumps encased his arms clear down to his clammy hands.

  ‘Easy,’ said Joe. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Joe?’

  Joe looked right and left and back at Balum. ‘Who else?’

  Balum frowned. ‘How are you walking?’

  ‘Like a man walks after he’s been shot and chased through Hell Country on two canteens and a waterskin.’

  ‘Ah shit, Joe,’ he closed his eyes and dropped his head back on the pillow. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Came close. That false-fronted section collapsed right as the girls pulled me out. Almost caught me.’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘You see Valeria work my Spencer?’

  ‘Saw that too.’

  ‘She’s worth her salt, Balum.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  Joe took three careful steps to the foot of the bed. Slow steps. The gait of a wounded man. ‘You saved my hide, Balum. Mine and Valeria’s both.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘I mean it.’

  A breeze picked up outside and lifted the window curtain. It calmed and the curtain fluttered back in place.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Balum. ‘You rustle me up some grub and we’ll call it even. I feel like I haven’t eaten in three days.’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Four days I been here?’

  ‘You got beat up pretty good.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘There’s that hip wound Swinton gave you. Your arm’s broke. Looks like a tree fell on your chest the way it’s all bruised up. Your neck was filled with wood splinters and you had a bullet sitting against your shoulder blade that Josephine managed to dig out.’

  ‘Ack.’

  ‘Then there’s the scalp wound. Somebody put a good furrow over your ear. Josephine says it was all she could do to stop the bleeding.’

  ‘No wonder I slept four days.’

  ‘You had us worried.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  �
�The girls are getting impatient. They want you up and moving.’

  Balum crossed his good arm over his belly and fiddled with the twine on the makeshift cast. ‘They all okay?’

  ‘Hear them giggling?’ Joe pointed a thumb at the wall. ‘Driving me crazy.’

  ‘You should be glad I brought them along.’

  ‘They came in handy, I’ll admit it. Josephine patched the both of us up pretty good, that’s a fact.’

  ‘And Kiki and Chloe are good shots. Damn good.’

  A grin opened on Joe’s face. He rubbed his jaw and shook his head and said, ‘Tell me something. Those parasols they got. Did they ride through Hell Country with those things?’

  ‘They surely did. Truth is, it made me envious I didn’t have one myself.’

  ‘Hell of a sight that must have been. You’re the only man I know that brings a harem with him across the desert.’

  ‘A harem?’

  ‘It’s what it is.’

  Balum laughed and let go the twine and turned his palm up. ‘Maybe so. Tell you what — you find me something to eat and you give it to those girls and have them bring it up.’

  ‘All three?’

  ‘That’s right. The whole damn harem.’

  Joe laid his arm against the doorframe and looked over his shoulder at Balum. ‘Will do, friend,’ he said. ‘You’ve surely earned it.’