Balum's Harem

by Orrin Russell

  He turned in a small painful circle, favoring the bad hip, and eyed the town, all of them waiting; Earl the liveryman, the barber, the cigars, the girlie show bartender, even Josephine and Doctor Friedman far down the lane.

  ‘Listen here,’ his voice carried in the dry air. ‘You folks are tired of Big Tom and the way he runs this town. Well here’s your chance to do something about it. He’s out there right now,’ Balum pointed an arm at the desert, ‘chasing down my partner and an innocent woman. I’m going after him. I’m asking any able-bodied man to saddle his horse and charge his weapon, and go with me. Now is the time.’

  A crow perched high above the town on a weathervane answered with a single squawk. The baker turned his back and disappeared through the bakery door, and when a long minute went by and he didn’t come out, the crowd dispersed. They filed back into the brothels, back to the saloons. Several walked down the alleyways to their canvas shelters staked in tent city, the entire crowd leaving by one’s and two’s until the street was empty save for the crow and the tumbleweed and Pat Swinton’s riddled body staring into the sun and turning the dust around him dark with blood.

  17

  The crow squawked again. It was an effort not to pull the Dragoon from its holster and shoot it off the weathervane. A bunch of cowards. The whole damn town. He told himself that, but at the same time he understood that the boomtown was made up of men focused on hard work. They’d traveled a thousand miles or more to work a pickaxe, not take up guns and chase men like Big Tom and his gang across the desert. Still, it bothered him. He looked away from the crow and up the street where the tumbleweed was making its way out of town, and had to blink hard when he saw two women dressed in thin brassieres and garter belts walking toward him. He blinked again, but it was no apparition. It was a day in Tin City.

  He dug a knuckle into his eyes and rubbed, and when he opened them the two girls were close enough that he recognized them.

  ‘You finally going to tell me where they’re headed?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll tell you,’ said Chloe.

  ‘Good. Out with it then.’

  ‘First we need to get provisions together. Water and food, ammunition of course.’

  Balum felt a corner of his mouth turn up. ‘What are you talking about?’ he snapped.

  ‘You asked for volunteers, didn’t you?’ said Chloe. ‘Well, here we are.’

  He looked the two up and down and halfway opened his mouth but nothing came out. They wore lipstick and blush, their hair thick and luscious, enormous chests barely covered by the brassieres. Their garter belts clasped onto panties — Chloe’s white and Kiki’s pink — and the sight of them standing in front of him showing more skin than clothing made him want to grab ahold of the two and taste every inch of their bodies.

  He composed himself and shook his head. ‘I asked for able-bodied men,’ he said.

  ‘Well you didn’t get any,’ said Kiki. ‘So now you’ve got us.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course it is. I’m not hauling you two through the desert. I already told you that. One woman was enough.’

  Chloe stepped forward and stuck a finger in his chest. ‘I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. A man with a bullet in his hip who thinks he’ll run off into the desert after a dozen murderers without a stitch of help. That’s ridiculous.’

  Balum snorted.

  ‘What do you think you’ll do when you find them?’ she went on. ‘If you find them. Shoot all twelve?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. But he knew even as the words left his mouth how unlikely it sounded.

  Kiki shook her head. Her eyes rolled.

  ‘Come to your senses,’ said Chloe. ‘Your friend needs help. So does ours.’

  ‘The help they need is someone on the end of a gun. Not…’ his eyes ran down their bodies.

  ‘Not floozies?’ said Kiki, and laughed out loud.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  Chloe cupped a breast in each hand and gave them both a wiggle. ‘These are all you can see,’ she said. ‘What you don’t see are two shootists.’

  Balum’s eyebrows lifted.

  ‘You don’t believe me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Give me your gun,’ she let go of her tits and held out a hand.

  ‘Doesn’t do me any good-- you shooting my gun. What do you plan on shooting Big Tom’s men with?’

  She set her fists over her hips and huffed, mad as hell, then turned and marched into the mercantile shop across the street. Balum watched her ass sashay back and forth while she walked. Plump and bare to the world. The panties did almost nothing to cover it.

  What she said or did inside he couldn’t guess, but she came out less than a minute later holding a Smith and Wesson Model 3 revolver in one hand and shoving cartridges into the cylinder with the other. She didn’t look Balum’s way or say anything, just turned the corner of the mercantile and walked into the alley. Kiki tugged Balum’s sleeve and took off after.

  Discarded bottles lay strewn all about the alleyway, and several of these Chloe picked up and tucked under her arm. The three of them came out where the building ended and just like that the town gave itself back to desert. Balum followed the two girls without a word. His hip ached and his head had begun to go light. He wondered if he was wasting more time. He was dehydrated, he needed water, needed his horse and food and a canteen, he ached for a plug of tobacco, and he wanted to be riding before sundown.

  He limped after them and watched Chloe pass the bottles to Kiki. Without stopping, Chloe told the girl to throw one. Kiki obliged. She flipped one up underhanded and, before the bottle reached its nexus, Chloe raised and fired and the bottle burst apart.

  Balum threw his hands up and bent his head. Shards of glass rained over him.

  ‘Throw the rest of them,’ said Chloe. ‘All of them.’

  Three bottles of varying shapes and sizes remained in Kiki’s arms. She threw each as fast as she could, one high, one low, one as far as she her arm would allow.

  Each bottle shattered while airborne.

  ‘Jesus,’ was all Balum said.

  Chloe swung around and raised the gun, and for a moment he thought the next bullet was meant for him. But instead she fired past his ear and the weathervane twanged out and spun several revolutions on its squeaky hinge.

  ‘Alright,’ he raised his hands up. ‘Alright. So you can shoot.’ He jutted his chin toward Kiki. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m not as good as Chloe, not with a revolver anyway. But give me a rifle and I’ll hit whatever I’m looking at. I’ve shot plenty of Mississippi rifles. I grew up on a Sharps, I can work a Winchester or a Springfield Conversion or even a double-barreled scattergun if that’s what’s at hand. Point is, I can shoot.’

  Balum let out a long breath. He was impressed and it showed. He had no poker face. He put a hand to his jaw and scratched the stubble and said, ‘I want to be riding before sundown.’

  ‘We’ll be ready,’ said Chloe.

  ‘You going to tell me where they went?’

  ‘Valeria always said if she could run away she’d go straight to the Scarlands.’

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Old cliff houses the indians used to live in.’

  Balum scratched his jaw again. He’d seen plenty of them and, as impressive as they were, they made no sense as a hideout or a place to make a stand. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s where they went,’ she said. ‘I know it.’

  He shifted his weight off his bad hip and onto his good leg. ‘How fast can you be ready? You’re not going off dressed like that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about us,’ said Kiki. ‘We’ll be packed. We’ll also get food and water and supplies together. You concentrate on getting us each a horse and a spare and two packhorses. Ten horses altogether.’

  Balum counted them up in his head. ‘Don’t you mean eight?’

  ‘You’re forgetting
Josephine.’

  Balum almost choked. ‘Josephine?’ he sputtered. ‘Josephine Wilsey? The nurse?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Kiki.

  ‘What the hell does she have to do with this?’

  The girls had started back down the alleyway and they stopped and turned and looked at him like he was the one out of his mind.

  ‘Look at you,’ Kiki held her hand out toward his hip. ‘You just got shot. You need that wound cared for.’

  ‘I can care for myself,’ Balum growled.

  ‘And what about Valeria? What about your friend Joe? There’s a dozen men after them — what if they’ve already had a run-in? What will you do if we find them and one of them is wounded?’

  Balum felt his shoulders drop. He was just about out of fight. He was tired and thirsty and the two girls standing half naked in front of him seemed to have all the answers ready before he could form the questions. And their answers were pretty damn good. They had him and they knew it.

  ‘We’ll meet you at the doctor’s office,’ said Kiki.

  They turned to go and he called out, ‘Make sure a pouch of tobacco is in those supplies.’

  The wiggle of their asses was their only response. He took off his hat and brushed a few splinters of glass from the brim and ran a hand through his hair. He said the name Josephine out loud. Then he shook his head and put his hat back on and took a reluctant step toward Doctor Friedman’s office.

  18

  Joe didn’t stop for sleep when he reached her. Only a few hours remained of the night, and he rode on through it with Valeria leading the way and the coyotes calling out around them in a mournful serenade as though sending them off to certain death. The Scarlands lay within reach; Big Tom would not catch them. Not out in the open anyway. Yet as Joe rode behind his querida , his mind began to function. The first time in a long time. He pushed away the clouds of infatuation that had blurred his thinking for so long and considered coldly and without exaggeration what options lay before them.

  Once in the cliff houses he could keep Big Tom and his gang at a distance. The Spencer rifle would see to that. At night would be another matter, but from what Joe had seen of other cliff dwellings, he knew they were built to withstand attack. That was not where the problem lied. It was the waiting. Even taking for granted that a water source existed in the cliffs, there was no food. No fuel for fire. And that was Big Tom’s advantage. But where else to go in all that wretched tundra was a question to which he had no answer. And so he rode in silence behind his woman and quickly let himself be mesmerized by the rising sun reflecting off her silken hair that swayed so gently there before him.

  The horses, on arriving several hours later, swung their heads from side to side, and likewise did Joe and Valeria, for they were wholly unprepared for the majesty of the Scarlands. Two ridgelines folded together to form a wrinkle in the land. In this wrinkle, carved into the cliffs, were the old abandoned homes of the ancients. The silence of the place weighed heavy. Echoes of hooves on stone rose off the ground. The creak of the saddle, the swish of tails.

  At the cliff bottom Joe turned his horse after Valeria and they rode single file up an old stone path that disappeared and reappeared between massive boulders and sudden switchbacks that each time revealed a more stunning vista as they climbed higher into the cliffs. The first dwellings they reached were constructed from clay and brick and bore high walls that served as shields against the open desert. The path they rode gave way to steps dug from stone. The horses walked these mazes with their noses poking curiously into doorways and windows, all of it open and empty and the tan rock worn smooth over time.

  The highest homes blended so perfectly into the cliff face that not until they were directly upon them did Joe and Valeria realize they had reached the uppermost dwellings. They sat their horses a moment and looked back out over the desert to where Big Tom and his men and their horses and spares crawled closer like black moving stains below. Dust plumed up and hovered in a long cloud after them. They were still several miles out but their shapes blotted the land as clearly as red fallen leaves on snow.

  Joe turned from them. He said nothing. He let the horse pick its way through its new surroundings and looped the canteen straps over his shoulder and took Valeria’s hand in his and together they explored their ghostly refuge.

  In a pre-existing pool that sat directly where the two ridgelines met, the old inhabitants of that place had dug a well. The scant rain that fell in the cordillera pooled there, kept cool in the shade of the overhanging cliffs. They drank and filled their canteens, and drank again, then walked back to the horses. They spread blankets over the ground and checked their guns and laid the weapons out on the rock floor, the shapes of the riders shimmering far out in the heat.

  Several minutes they sat and watched in silence. The sun sparkled over the small army; off saddlery and harnesses and the long metal barrels of rifles. Far enough away that their procession made no sound. Silent death approaching. Nothing to be done. And so the two dark-skinned runaways turned away from that awful sight, folded into one another’s arms, and there under the cliff overhangs as cavernous and grand as the domed roofs of Roman cathedrals, they made love.

  19

  Josephine opened on the first knock. Like she’d been waiting for him.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he started.

  She crossed her arms. ‘Yes, Mr. Balum?’

  Balum removed his hat. Limping across town, he’d contemplated several polite versions of his request, voicing each one softly as he walked, hearing the words, considering what turn of phrase might best make his case. Each option felt like groveling. He’d nearly settled on one — a courteous request worded in the most chivalrous tone he could muster — but that was before she opened the door and narrowed her eyes with her lips pursed together and her nose tilted up at him like he was some sort of peasant come to beg for alms.

  ‘Pack your bags,’ he said. ‘Pack light, and pack quick; I want you ready within the hour.’

  She leaned away an inch, taken aback quite literally. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Put together a medical bag. Whatever you might need to treat a gunshot or a knife wound. We’ll be in desert country, so don’t go wearing some silly green frock like last time.’

  ‘Silly green…’ she uncrossed her arms and set her fists on her hips. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘My business here, Josephine, is not whatever you’ve led yourself to believe. I’m here to help my partner. My friend. He’s fallen in love with a woman Big Tom considers his own, and now the two of them are somewhere out in the desert on one horse, nowhere to go, and a pack of killers on their tail. I’m going after them. And so are you.’

  ‘I most certainly am not.’

  ‘You are. Now get moving.’

  Josephine shook her head. ‘That’s preposterous. Give me one reason why I should go running off into the desert with you.’

  ‘Because I saved your life. That was a damn fool thing of you to have done — load that oxcart like you did with only one horse to pull it. You know as well as I do that if I hadn’t come along you’d be dead. So like I said, pack your bags — we’re leaving.’

  He didn’t wait for any more argument. He put his hat back on and spun her around by the shoulder and swatted her rump with the back of his hand. ‘Get on now,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’

  He turned up the street without thought for his leg and when he reached the Acropolis he kept right on past the bartender leaning on one arm with a toothpick poking from his lips, through the curtain and into the den of flesh and vice. He stood against the back wall a moment while his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The noise struck him as something awful. A pianoman clanged out racket through which the customers hooted and clucked, some of them wild-eyed and others curiously shy and nearly all of them drunk on brandy. Some were so drunk they could hardly hold their heads up. Among these counted Bucky.

  Balum cut through the tables to where th
e lush sat and grabbed him up by the hair. The chair went clattering out from under him and he woke startled and frightened and flailing his hands while the few ill-kempt men who shared his table laughed and pointed. One plucked up a bottle and threw it. It hit Bucky in the crotch, which brought a great round of laughter from the others.

  When Balum came through the curtain dragging Bucky behind him, the laughter came through with him. The few customers lined up at the bar set their drinks down and watched but said nothing. The bartender rolled the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. Balum neither addressed him nor gave him a passing glance. He limped through the saloon door and into the street and set his weight on his good leg and hurled Bucky into the dust. The man fell and floundered and when he managed to come to his knees he was already stammering cock-eyed pleas for mercy, a blubber of supplication that ended when Balum smashed the butt of the Dragoon into his lips.

  Bucky tumbled onto his ass. He put a hand to his mouth. When he looked up his eyes were crossed.

  ‘I’ll do the talking,’ said Balum, ‘you do the listening. I want fourteen horses saddled and ready. I want them now, so stand up.’

  Bucky got a leg under him and pushed himself erect. Blood dripped down his chin onto his shirtfront. He brought to mind Shane Carly.

  ‘Start walking,’ said Balum.

  ‘Where?’ said Bucky. The question was a foolish one, but Bucky, drunk as he was, his head rattled by the punch, voiced it in earnest.

  ‘The stable.’

  ‘Big Tom’s stable?’

  Balum nodded. ‘Get moving.’

  Whatever chores the citizenry of Tin City were engaged it, they promptly forgot them. They stood with their jaws agape and watched Balum prod Bucky halfway down the main drag then turn up a side street at whose end stood Big Tom’s headquarters.