Balum's Harem

by Orrin Russell

  They came under full cover of dark. Some quiet, others scraping stone as they walked. One even ran into a cactus and yelped a sharp cry that was cut short as soon as it started. If Joe had cared to give away his location he could have drawn his Colt and shot the fool. Instead he waited.

  The cave dwellings stretched nearly a hundred yards along the cliff faces. Multiple stairways were cut into stone. Just where Joe was hiding, no one could guess, and this Joe knew was one of his few advantages.

  His ears picked out one clumsy individual who’d chosen the correct stairwell. He didn’t pick his feet up all the way and his boot soles brushed the stone when he set them down. Faintly, but loud enough. Joe rose out of his squat. His moccasins made not even a whisper. That he’d remembered to put them on this time seemed a good sign to him — perhaps he was beginning to think straight again. He stepped around a boulder and down the first step and when he could hear the man’s breath he paused and sank back to his haunches and waited with the knife turned point-out in his palm.

  The man wheezed. Paused. Huffed a few dog-like pants. When he started up again Joe spotted the movement and lost it immediately against the backdrop of stone, but didn’t matter. The man’s wheezing gave him away. He came up one more step and Joe lunged with the knife low and sliced upward. Its point found the man’s shirtbutton and sent it through his stomach along with nine inches of steel. He gave another pant, this one more out of surprise than exhaustion, then folded at the hip and sank to his knees. Joe ripped the knife free from his belly. A moan escaped him, a strange bleating like a goat lost in the woods, and Joe stepped around to the man’s back and straddled a leg over each side and grabbed the man’s forehead in his palm and bent it back and drew the blade across his throat in one quick easy motion.

  The moaning stopped. A gurgle of blood replaced it, then silence.

  For several minutes Joe didn’t move. He stared into the night and listened. He thought about descending the stairwell further, about hunting the hunters, tracking them down and making quick work of them with the knife. He imagined the sun rising on twelve dead bodies strewn among the cliff dwellings and how its rays would shine down on Valeria’s hair as she rode beside him out of the Scarlands and on to somewhere better.

  He did not do this. He would not lose himself that deeply into fantasy. He waited motionless another half an hour then turned up the stairway and climbed two flights back to the uppermost level. He did not go to the stone wall where Valeria hid with the horses. He’d given her the Spencer and told her to shoot at any approaching sound. Instead he knelt on the blanket still spread where he had lain with her, and waited like a long-eared owl for sounds not belonging to the night.

  Twice he shifted positions, once for comfort, once to move closer to a scraping sound that he later realized was a mouse at work somewhere below.

  When morning came his eyes were sore and heavy and he knew if he didn’t sleep he’d be useless when the day ran short of light. He drank from the canteen Valeria brought him and edged closer to the rim, but the body two levels below was hidden by the overhang. It was still there — he’d have heard it if they had moved it. Big Tom could see it from below. Good. Let it be a message.

  A noise he didn’t immediately recognize filled the hollow. When he realized it was his stomach grumbling he put a hand over it and thought back briefly to when he’d last eaten, then shunned the thought from his mind, for it was a sorry thing to dwell on, and only led to more desperate machinations of the mind.

  He closed his eyes and let Valeria take watch. Big Tom would not attack during the day; he’d be a fool to expose his men that way. On these thoughts he slept, and on these thoughts he was jarred awake by the high-pitched twang of bullets ricocheting off stone. They came from below, from Big Tom’s men shooting recklessly into the dwellings, counting on the ricochets to replace their lack of accuracy. The shots whined and screamed in angry searing whistles and smacked into rocks like the flats of hands slapping skin, each bullet multiplied and new angles discovered as they careened off stone and shattered and bounced against the cliffs. He lunged up and flung his arms around Valeria and they ran the length of the floor with his body in a shield around her and the bullets searing air and popping against the walls.

  A stab caught his calf and burned like an iron laid against it. He kept running. Another bit into his shoulder and something grabbed him and spun him around and he lost Valeria and hit the ground hard. She stopped and turned and he shouted through the thunder for her to run. Only a few yards she needed to cross to reach the stone wall where the horses waited.

  She reached it in a sprint. Joe pushed up with his hands and hobbled after. He turned the corner and saw the two horses squirmed into the corner and prancing nervously, their eyes large and wild. Valeria grabbed him and pulled him in. He sat, dropped, stared uncomprehending at the fresh blood beneath him, and realized it was his own. His leg was on fire and his pants were speckled red. The bullet in his shoulder was buried two inches deep, and the shot that had spun him around had caught him in the ribs and left an open gash that bled down his chest. He breathed and pumped blood over himself. Valeria said something, he couldn’t hear it. She took his head in one hand and had him lay flat against the stone floor.

  A wave washed over him. Not the cloudy wash of alcohol, but a straight pointed arrow of clarity that snapped his brain awake. He was shot, wounded. They were out of food and nearly out of time. They needed to move, fast.

  Valeria tore his shirt open and unstoppered a canteen and dabbed his wounds with water. While she worked he brought to mind every detail he could think of about the surrounding country. Gossip he’d head in saloons, talk around campfires. Landmarks, statements concerning natural springs. There wasn’t much to recall. What he needed was someplace with food, water, ammunition, and cover, but the land around was nothing but harsh country even the Apaches stayed clear of. Joe himself had only ventured into this section of land once before, and that had been with Balum when they chased Johnny Freed from the San Carlos Reservation clear to Denver. They had skirted the high ridgelines far to the southwest, and at one point sat their horses and looked down into the hot bowl of barren earth where steam seemed to swelter right up from the ground, and Balum had pointed out the worst of it. A stretch of red clay a hundred miles wide that folks referred to as Hell Country. No place a sane man wanted part of. A place Balum had been through on more than one occasion.

  Joe reared up suddenly and grabbed Valeria by the arm.

  ‘You said that path winds down the other side? Past the well?’

  ‘It starts right there,’ she pointed to a shadow just around the wall.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘We’ll fill the canteens. If we can make it through a stretch of bad country, there’s a place we can hole up.’

  ‘Joe, you’re wounded, you need a doctor.’

  ‘It won’t have a doctor,’ said Joe. ‘It won’t have a soul in it. But it’s a place. If we leave now we can get a good start before they realize we’re gone.’

  22

  The girls slept. Lucky for them, thought Balum. He’d spent the better part of the night staring at the empty spot where the moon should have been after being jarred awake by thoughts of Joe mangled and dead in a desert wash. Each time he twisted or squirmed, either Chloe or Kiki would elbow him and tell him to lie still. He almost told them to find another spot to sleep, but he didn’t; the temperature took a nasty drop at night, and having the girls sleep on either side of him kept him warm. He didn’t know how Josephine managed, curled up by herself under a single blanket.

  Finally he gave up on sleep. He crawled out of the blankets and slammed on his boots and limped out a ways onto a sheet of flat earth not far from where the horses were staked and stood there a while with his shoulders hunched against the cold. He pulled the pouch of tobacco from his pocket. He pinched out a gob and crammed it in his cheek and packed it tight and folded the pouch closed and tucked it in his pocket. He spat.


  From the remuda he selected the four freshest horses and led them back to the burned-out fire. The girls turned at the noise he made. He threw blankets and saddles over their backs and cinched the girth straps and tied on the saddlebags and gear, and when all this was done and the girls had still not risen he walked over and tapped Kiki’s foot beneath the blanket.

  ‘The sun’s not up yet,’ she mumbled.

  Balum ignored her. He grabbed Chloe’s foot and gave it a yank, then crossed through a row of blooming kingcup cacti all ablaze in red petals and thorns, and skated down a small slope to where Josephine had made her bed.

  Her eyes were open when he reached her. He stood over her and rolled the tobacco to the other corner of his mouth. He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes,’ she said.

  Balum turned his head and spat. ‘Why not two?’

  ‘Because I’m going to change my undergarments, if you must know. Does that suit you?’

  A hard rumble left Balum’s throat.

  She pulled the blanket down past her chin and glared back. ‘I’m going to go behind that rock right there,’ she stuck an arm out, ‘and undress and put on a fresh bra and panties. Then I’ll put on a clean dress. Would you like to watch?’

  Balum nearly swallowed his chaw. He coughed and waved a hand at her. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’ll have your horse ready.’

  He scratched the stubble at his jaw as he walked away. That woman was something else. Fact was, he would very much like to watch. The way she’d worded the question, it had almost seemed like an invitation. The nurse knew how to poke his buttons, he’d give her that.

  When he returned to the burned-down campfire, Kiki and Chloe had risen and had already stripped down and changed into a fresh set of dancehall dresses.

  He’d missed that show too.

  The rarity of it all struck him suddenly. The bizarre situation he found himself in; trekking into a swath of inhospitable desert in the company of two showgirls and a prudish nurse. Each of them stunning in their own right. And he had hardly paid them any mind. It wasn’t like him. But then again, it wasn’t every day that his friend was being hunted down by a gang of thugs. Not every day that Balum was needed like he was right then. Not every day he felt such crushing responsibility, not every day that his thoughts were consumed with pushing forward without concern for anything or anyone around him.

  They rode out from camp and onto a windswept plain that held within it clumps of dry grass and a few sagging agaves. The buzzards reappeared. They followed the riders up a terracotta slope and along a shallow ridgeline and down the other side, and when they stopped for water the buzzards lit upon the ground and watched from a distance with their hollow patient eyes sliding in their sockets.

  Balum uncapped his canteen and tilted his head back and drank. He thought about the deadman buried under the rocks, killed by the knife. Joe’s handiwork. It didn’t make a lick of sense for Joe to traipse in there at night with the notion of whittling their numbers down. Then again, Joe hadn’t been thinking clearly of late. The man was loopy as a puppy dog — taking out for old cliff dwellings. But no. Not that loopy. He would have had a reason to risk his neck, and the only one that figured was that he had gone after another horse.

  For the next couple hours Balum rode with his head alongside the roan’s neck, staring at the ground, but Big Tom’s men had trampled out whatever trail Joe had left, and if his partner had indeed snagged another horse there was no way to tell it.

  They rode down into the Scarlands shortly after noon. Rain had fallen long ago, and when the ground dried out it cracked and split in ragged gashes that hardened tough as stone. They topped out on a rise and got a glimpse of the cliffs, dipped back down, and when the party came out of a stretch of low ground and around a stand of caliche, they found themselves in the valley of the cliffs.

  Balum raised a hand. The girls behind him stopped. Dust from the remuda settled over them. It was sound he waited for. Gunshots, shouts. He heard nothing. Kiki nudged her horse up alongside the roan but Balum only stared ahead as if he might see Joe waving from the cliffhouses. After a long while sitting there cooking under the sun he told the girls to hold tight, then prodded the roan forward with one hand on the reins and the other just above his hip, the Dragoon easy in his palm.

  He walked the horse out fifty yards and pulled up and sat. He sat a long while. From somewhere came a sandfly. It settled on the roan’s nose and the roan shook it off. He advanced another fifty yards and stopped again. Listened. Nothing.

  By the time he reached the casings scattered over the ground he had already guessed that the place was empty. He crossed from the dry gully to a stand of rock and read what the tracks told him; how long Big Tom and his men had waited there, how long the fight might have lasted. He wondered if anyone had died. The buzzards answered that. They fluttered down onto a pile of stone and picked their beaks into the cracks, and when Balum shooed them off they squawked and hissed and beat their wings while he kicked the stones away.

  He didn’t reckon he’d uncover Joe. Big Tom wouldn’t have bothered with a burial — Balum realized this now. He flipped a stone away with his toe and saw two wide-open eyes staring back, the mouth in a grimace and a gash running the length of the man’s neck. He turned away and mounted up and rode back to the women.

  Twenty minutes later they found the well and the bloodstains on the upper level of the cliffs, and the tunnel leading out the backside riddled with horse tracks and specks of blood. They followed it clear down the cliff face to where it spilled into the desert, and they stopped and sat their saddles, all four of them staring off into the empty western horizon.

  Balum settled another pinch of tobacco in his cheek. He tucked the pouch back in his pocket and leaned an inch to the side and spat. Joe had two horses, that much was clear. Balum had seen where the animals had waited behind the stone wall on the upper level. But he was also wounded — the blood attested to that. Balum couldn’t blame Joe for not sticking around — the cliff dwellings weren’t an ideal spot to hole up for a long while — but where else would he go? The country didn’t get any easier ahead. In fact, it got worse. Far into that scorched basin the ground turned into red clay, and not even creosote would grow there.

  He walked the horse out over the tracks, then stopped and followed them with his eyes. What the hell was Joe thinking? There was nothing ahead, nothing at all. He spat again and worked the chaw around. Nothing ahead but Hell Country.

  ‘Hell Country!’ he shouted. The roan flinched and laid its ears flat against its skull like a gunshot had barked overhead. ‘He’s taking them through Hell Country,’ he swung the horse around.

  The women returned blank stares from beneath their parasols.

  ‘Let’s get the horses watered and the canteens filled. We’ve still got a good bit of daylight left.’

  ‘What’s Hell Country?’ asked Josephine.

  ‘A spit of land so nasty you’ll think it was built by the devil himself.’

  ‘Why there? He’s wounded, you saw how much blood he lost.’

  ‘Because right smack in the middle of Hell Country there’s a little town not so different than Tin City.’

  ‘Will they have a sheriff? Someone who can help him?’

  ‘Nope,’ Balum shook his head. He pointed the roan back up the cliff face the way they’d come and trotted it up the grade. The women followed. ‘They built that town on a rumor of gold that never panned out. Bette’s Creek, they called it. When folks realized the claims weren’t much good, the place crumbled faster than it started.’

  ‘He’s taking Valeria to a ghost town?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Because it’s got everything he needs. When that town went belly-up, folks took out like their tails were on fire. Left everything there. Everything they couldn’t load onto a horse or a wagon. Food, clothes, ammunition.’

  ‘Why would anyone leave all their
possessions behind?’ said Josephine. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  Balum stopped the horse and twisted around and looked back at her. Her face was flushed. Several strands of damp hair clung to her temples.

  ‘When a town like that goes bust, the last man out is a deadman. The only way to leave is in a group. Otherwise you risk being left behind with an overloaded cart and only one horse to pull it. Something you can relate to.’

  Josephine huffed, but she broke her eyes away from his stare. Behind her came the showgirls.

  ‘How far away is it?’ asked Chloe.

  Balum looked at the woman and at her breasts glistening wet with sweat and spilling from the low-cut hem of her dress, then out over the parasols and into the desert. He shrugged. ‘If he rides direct, he can get there in five days. That’s how we’ll do it. The route he’s taking, I reckon he’s got twice that long ahead of him. And that’s if his memory serves him correct.’

  ‘His memory?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s never been to Bette’s Creek. He’s never even been through Hell Country. He’s only heard of it.’

  ‘And how do you know all about this?’ Josephine cut in. ‘About this town and what’s in it, and the fastest way to get there. What makes you so sure? It sounds like a silly story to me. The kind men tell each other to make themselves sound interesting. Do you even know if the story is true?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Really,’ she crossed her arms over her chest.

  Balum nodded.

  ‘How?’ she said.

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘That’s right. How do you know that whoever told Joe that story didn’t just make it up?’

  Balum leaned over the saddle and spat tobacco off the cliff edge. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and looked Josephine in the eye. ‘Because I’m the man who told him. I’m the man who’s been there.’