Territory (34 page)

“The receipts,” the man gasped.

“To hell with ‘em.” Doc stuffed the bartender out behind the others and looked back the way he’d come.

He couldn’t see the front of the room for the smoke. It roiled toward him along the ceiling like storm clouds, like an animal stalking him. There were flames in the smoke—the cloth-covered ceiling had caught. The fire passed from growling to roaring.

He crouched and squinted—was there anyone left, anyone lying on the floor, maybe unconscious? Flames ran along the seams of the floor planks, smoldered and burst in the carpet edges. Between the daylight and the fire, there should be plenty of light, but the room was in eclipse. Something crashed to the street outside.

His collar came up sharp against his windpipe and half choked him. He fell over backward—no, was dragged. Then the sunlight blinded him, and the air, though hot, was almost clean. He coughed and coughed, and thought an apology to what was left of his lungs.

“Christ, did you want to see how long it would take you to catch?” someone snapped above him.

Against the dazzle of light, the silhouette of a head and shoulders. As his eyes adjusted, he recognized Jesse Fox. “Couldn’t—” He coughed and tried again. “Looking for others.”

“Was there anyone?”

Doc shook his head.

Fox turned to a frightened man in a sack suit. “Help him out of here. Get north of Fremont and stay there.” He hoisted Doc onto his feet and passed him to the man in the suit. “You may now leave the barbecue to the rest of us.”

Startled, Doc looked into Fox’s face and found him grinning. “Don’t burn anything,” Doc croaked.

Fox laughed.

Doc tried to keep as much of his weight on his own feet as he could, but he was afraid he still made a good bit of work for the man in the suit.
A lunger with a chest full of smoke,
he thought.
My, I do know how to pick my fights.
And he laughed, even though it hurt.

“Fly’s Boarding House,” he ordered the man whose shoulders were under his arm. He needed to make sure of Kate.

The balcony outside the Arcade Saloon had fallen in a fountain of spark and flame. Now the porch of the building next door had begun to burn. Allen Street was lined with verandas and second-floor balconies that shaded the sidewalks. They would spread the fire down the street the way forests carried wildfires through the treetops, handing it across the faces of brick and adobe buildings to ignite the wood frame ones beyond.

Jesse thrust the handle of his borrowed axe into his gunbelt and climbed a post of the balcony next to the burning porch. The turned wood gave him hand- and footholds.

He dragged himself over the railing and ran back to the burning structure. Below him, men were hacking away at its support posts. He chopped at the beams that held the porch to the building. Jesse felt the floor shudder and sway beneath him, and leaped for the next-door balcony. The porch groaned, gave way, crashed into the street.

Too late. A spark had found the dry wood shingles of the roof. Jesse swung the axe blade into the fancy painted posts of the railing. After that balcony, there was another. It caught, too.

Soon he lived in a bubble of blazing heat and deafening noise. He knew there were things outside the bubble—shouting, sweating men throwing buckets of water at wooden façades, people running to save belongings, horses screaming in fear. He thought,
Is this what Shiloh was like, and Gettysburg?
This was battle. On the other side of the charge, instead of men, there was fire, that advanced on all fronts in all directions, breaking their lines everywhere.

He swung the axe until his shoulders and arms burned with weariness. Then, because he had to keep on, they ceased to burn. At some point they would stop doing what he asked.

The fire had jumped ahead of him. He knew without looking; he could feel it as he’d felt the metal ore and the water in the rock. It was netted along Allen Street like the workings of a drunken spider, devouring air and wood and turning them to ash. Straw into gold, in reverse.

Suddenly his bubble had another soul in it. A man climbed over the railing with an iron bar, nodded to him, and began to pry away at the the supports on the other side of the balcony they stood on. It was hard to say what he looked like, other than that he had thin hair in disarray, and that his long face around his moustache was black with soot and striped with sweat. Jesse swung harder at the post on his side.

Fire ran in rivulets over their heads in the roof beams. Jesse heard the crack of heated wood exploding. He screamed, “Jump!” to the other man, but there was no time. The beam dropped toward Jesse.

Then it caught, changed course. It struck the other man in the face, splintered end first, and he fell back over the swaying railing.

Daylight gaped between the front wall and the balcony. It was coming down.

Jesse jumped to the balcony rail and felt it wrench loose under his feet as he leaped again, into the blazing air above Allen Street.

The dirt slammed into the soles of his feet, his shoulders and back. He knew he’d rolled once he stopped, but not until then. Someone grabbed his arms and yanked him out of the road.

He wanted to shout that the balcony was about to fall. He couldn’t get breath in his lungs to do it. The fire fighters fled as the balcony leaned outward, wood screaming, and toppled in a curtain of sparks. He looked for the man who’d been hit by the timber. Two men carried him off at a half run.

Jesse stood up and promptly fell down again. “You’re all in,” said the man who’d dragged him out of danger. “Garza!” he bellowed. “Get him out!”

A big man, his eyes black and red in his smoke-black face, appeared and flung Jesse over his shoulder like a child. Jesse wanted to protest; but it was that, or lie in the street in everyone’s way. He calculated that Garza carried him at least two blocks before letting him slide off and propping him against a wagon bed.

Then Garza was gone, and a dark-haired lady was helping him sit up against the wagon wheel in the wagon’s long shadow. She held out a dipper of water. He was so dry he could hardly pull his tongue away from his teeth. He didn’t know whether he was glad of the water that dribbled over his chin and onto his chest, or sorry that it hadn’t made it down his throat with the rest.

After that he leaned his head against the wagon wheel and just sat. He was gradually aware of other men around him, in various states of exhaustion or injury, and women hurrying between them, carrying water or bandages. The air was full of smoke, tinted by the setting sun behind him until the street looked like a view of Hell.

“Mr. Fox?” one of the women said, somewhere above him.

He tilted his head up and squinted. “Mrs. Benjamin.” It came out in a whisper.

She squatted next to him. “Have you started to hurt anywhere yet?”

“Will I?”

“I had a fellow mad at me for cutting his hair, a minute ago. I did it to get at the scalp wound he didn’t know he had.”

“Ingrate.”

“I forgave him. After I told him what I thought of him.” She picked up Jesse’s right hand, and he saw the knuckles were torn and bleeding. He couldn’t remember when that had happened. From a burlap sack beside her she produced a bottle, opened it, and held it over his hand.

He saw the label. “That’s the
good
whiskey.”

“Yes, and there’s more of it in town than there is of tincture of iodine.”

“Half the saloons just burned.”

“And the liquor still wins over the iodine.” She poured it over his knuckles, and over the back of his left hand, too, where the skin was torn away. Then she made a pad of a scrap of bandage, soaked it with whiskey, and dabbed his face.

The alcohol bit into the raw places, and he concentrated on the pain as he looked at her bent head, her curling brown hair escaping from its ruthless knot, her face in profile calm under the dirt. If he thought about the pain in his knuckles and the cuts and burns on his face, he could ignore her strong fingers holding his hands still and steady. In Renaissance paintings, angels had the same look of calm strength, of remote mercy for humanity. He wanted, absurdly, to cry like a child. Instead he leaned his head back against the wagon wheel and closed his eyes.

“You’re not going to faint, are you?” she asked.

Jesse shook his head. He felt her wrapping his knuckles in something. When she was done she let his hands fall back in his lap, and he opened his eyes.

“There was a fellow hit in the face by a falling timber. I was with him …”

She frowned, then seemed to understand it was a question. “George Parsons. If he lives—” She stopped with a little shudder. “I understand Doc Goodfellow likes a challenge.”

“How far’s the fire spread?”

“Nearly half of downtown.” She shook her head and smiled crookedly. “Want to hear a nice ironic bit?”

“That depends.”

“John Clum, in his mayor’s hat, is out of town on a mission to buy us a fire engine.”

Jesse was afraid to start laughing, for fear it wouldn’t end well. “That’s going to be a hell of a homecoming.”

“Won’t it be?” Still with that cracked smile, she looked east and a little north. “That pillar of smoke on the left would be my house, among other things.”

It was like a slap, though he was pretty sure she hadn’t meant it to be. “I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry I didn’t save your house, and let the rest of this damned town burn.

Why in heaven’s name did I tell him about the house?
Mildred scolded herself. “I’m still better off than a lot of people. Unless the
Nugget
office burned.” Fox closed his eyes again, and Mildred thought his face lost color under the dirt. “Mr. Fox, are you sure you’re not going to faint?”

“I’m sure. Anyone know how it started?”

Mildred took a deep breath. “The story I heard was that the owner of the Arcade Saloon was checking the level in a barrel of whiskey, couldn’t see well enough through the bung hole, and so held a match to it. I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“I see the dilemma.” He coughed. It sounded painful. “Do you think, under the circumstances, you could call me Jesse?”

His hair stuck to his forehead. She wanted to push it back to look for cuts or bruises, but something kept her from touching him. “You give a lot of weight to circumstance.”

“It’s shorter than ‘Mr. Fox.’ ”

Hearing it in his mouth reminded her of a nursery story she’d loved, because it terrified her, and because the heroine was brave. There was an old song, too, on the same story. “Be glad of ‘Mr. Fox.’ I could be calling you Reynardine.”

His eyes opened, startled and unfocused. Then he grinned, not at her but like a schoolboy who’d remembered the answer just in time to forestall the ruler. His teeth shone in his dirty face. “ ‘Oh, no, my dear, I am no rake brought up in Venus’ train.’ ”

“And the next line of the song? Something about being on the run from the sheriff’s men?”

He shook his head. Then he frowned. “Well, I’m not welcome in Sacramento and environs. A disagreement about right of way for the Central Pacific.”

“Which side were you on?”

“Not the Central Pacific’s, or I’d be welcome in Sacramento.”

Somehow that seemed in character. Other men quarreled with their fellows, one or a few at a time. Jesse Fox tilted at entire railroads. She said, “No one would want to go to Sacramento, anyway.”

A Chinese boy pushed past her suddenly and stood over Fox, scowling. “You look shit,” the boy declared.

“Chu! Ladies present.”

The boy transferred the scowl to Mildred.

“Is Sam all right?”

“He not okay, I no leave.” The boy spat into the street and looked pleased with himself.

Fox winced and let his head fall back against the wagon wheel. “I apologize for Chu. He’s sleeping at the livery stable. I think he’s learning these things from the teamsters. Chu, you can go back to Sam.”

“Sam okay. I take care you.”

Mildred smiled and stood up. “Then I can leave you with a clear conscience, Mr. Fox.” She started to brush dust off her skirt. No point; there was mud, soot, and a little blood on it as well. “There’s food down the street, under the tent, whenever you want it.”