Chapter VI
By Joanna Phillips
Jimmy burst through the swinging doors of the saloon, and he hit the heat like it was a brick wall, even before the smoke had time to send two streams of water running from his eyes.
"What the hell are you doing, Jimmy?" A voice suddenly screamed above the crackling wood. Jimmy spun around to see Kid, right behind him, clawing at the smoke.
"Get out of here Kid!"
"Not till you get out of here, Jimmy! I ain't leaving without you!"
"Kid, I got to go after Callie! You don't! Lou is outside, and that's where you belong! Now, go damn it!"
Jimmy wasn't all that surprised when Kid instantly began following him further into the building.
"Damn it, Kid!" Jimmy screamed back, but knew he could spare no more time arguing with his bull headed friend, "If anything happens to you, I'll kill you!"
Kid shook his head, "You won't have a chance cause Lou will kill both of us!" He kept following.
They both looked at the scene with wide, fearful eyes. "Damn, look at that," Jimmy whispered, his voice lost in the roar of the fire. He faltered in mid stride as he noticed how the flames moved up the walls like liquid gold, consuming all they touched. The wood popped and split, and the fire itself screamed like a banshee from Hell. Jimmy couldn't remember ever being so frightened. He glanced back and could barely see Kid, only a step behind him, in the smoke. The outline of his friend wavered in the heat, like the mountains in the distance beneath a hot desert sun.
Jimmy pushed his way up the stairs, which swayed and creaked dangerously. He only prayed they'd still be standing after he found Callie. Why could she not get herself out of the saloon? What had happened in the short time since he'd left her smiling gently after him?
He forced his way down the hall, and tried to open her door. He screamed and beat on it when he found it locked. He and Kid wordlessly backed up and tried ramming the door a few times, but it wouldn't give.
Just then, Kid heard a faint cry coming from down the hall.
"Jimmy, some one else is trapped in here! You keep trying here, and I'm going to go see about them!"
"Careful Kid!" Jimmy cried out, but his friend had already disappeared in the blinding, choking smoke.
Jimmy felt weak and dizzy, and knew that they wouldn't be able to survive much longer in the smoke. The heat was unbearable, and he was soaked in sweat. Finally, Jimmy drew his gun and fired it into the lock, praying that the bullet wouldn't pass through the door and hit anyone on the other side.
The door was still blocked with a chair, but Jimmy put so much force on the door that the chair snapped underneath the pressure. It was hard to see much of anything in the smoke, and the fire was worse in this room than the others. It licked at all the walls and ran across the ceiling in waves of red, orange, yellow, white, and blue.
Jimmy staggered toward the bed, then tripped over something in the floor and crashed down, hitting his head on the night table as he fell. Something fell from the table onto his head, and he felt even dizzier. He fought the darkness swimming at the edges of his eyes, and knew that if he allowed himself to black out, he'd never wake again. His hands closed around the object that had clubbed him in the head. It was a framed picture of Callie, seated with an older couple he took to be her parents and four handsome young men. They sat on the porch of a massive colonial mansion. He shoved the picture into his pocket.
He slowly pushed himself to his knees, and finding the air to be clearer closer to the floor, he crawled. He might never have seen the body laying on the floor if he hadn't.
He recoiled in horror as he recognized Jarvis Malone.
"Jimmy come on! We don't have much time, and I've found Callie!"
Jimmy picked himself up and glanced again at the dead body of the saloon owner. He found Kid in the hallway. Callie was lying limply in his arms. Even in the desperate need to hurry, Jimmy couldn't help but notice that she'd been beaten up badly. She was now unconscious, but alive, and Jimmy snatched her from Kid and quickly followed him down the stairs. They were no sooner clear of the wooden staircase, when with a final heave and groan, it collapsed.
The roar was deafening, and Kid glanced at the doorway. They were almost there. Glasses exploded into millions of pieces as the fire raged through the bar, and the whiskey only served to breathe new life into the blaze. A loud splitting noise caught Kid's attention, and coughing, he looked up, fighting the dizziness that assaulted him as he did so. The ceiling was a canopy of flames. Suddenly, a large timber glowing with fire came crashing down, heading right for them.
"Jimmy get back!" Kid screamed, shoving him backwards just in time
They both fell down as the floor quaked with the impact.
"It's blocking the doorway!" Kid cried.
"We'll have to find another way out!" Jimmy yelled, as he gathered Callie even more tightly in his arms and jumped to his feet.
Kid looked at the wall of flames that was closing in on all sides and then looked at Jimmy as if to ask and where would you suggest we try looking?
Lou stopped in her tracks as she saw the flaming timber crash in front of the doorway through the shattered windows of the building. The bucket she had been lugging crashed to the ground, spilling icy water over her feet and legs, but she didn't notice.
"No!" She screamed, and bolted for the saloon.
Cody spotted her first and took off for her. His long legs closed the gap between them quickly, and he reached out and grabbed her shoulders, pulling her backwards. She screamed, but her voice was lost in the roaring fire.
"Lou, you can't do anything for them! Understand? They'll get out!"
"They can't!" She sobbed, pointing at the flaming doorway, "They are going to burn to death!"
Cody put his arm around her, and pulled her away from the building, feeling the searing heat on his back. The whole town now formed a line, quickly passing buckets to be thrown onto the fire. The building next to the saloon, the land office, had also gone up in flames. However, it was the last building on the street, and it caused less concern than if the building on the left had caught fire, becoming a threat to the rest of Main Street and the heart of Rock Creek.
Cody decided that he and Lou could be spared, and so he pulled her to a safe distance and wrapped his arms around her, feeling panic constrict his own chest. Tears were washing down her soot covered cheeks, making canyons in the soot and dirt caked there. She pushed her face into his buckskin jacket and tried to pretend that none of this was happening; that the last words she had said to Kid hadn't been angry words, that he wasn't trapped in the burning building with Jimmy, who she loved dearly also.
Teaspoon came to stand beside Cody silently, his face alarmingly pale. He watched the fire with Cody, reaching out to rest a hand on Lou's shoulder in whatever comfort he could offer. The old wooden building didn't stand a chance against the fire, which had taken only minutes to spread to fatal proportions. Now, it rolled and pitched dangerously, and the people of Rock Creek moved back fearfully. Knowing there was nothing else they could do, Noah, Rachel, and Jesse joined them, and they stood together with bleak, uncomprehending stares.
With a final roar, the saloon slowly caved in on itself, sending up a cloud of dust and smoke that blinded the citizens and rolled out over the entire town.
Lou stirred at the noise and pulled away from Cody, but Teaspoon was quick to step before her, "Don't look, sweetheart, you don't want to see this."
Lou looked at him fearfully, "But I have to see it!"
Teaspoon nodded and closed his eyes, which shone with tears. He'd just lost two of his boys in one night.
Lou very nearly doubled over at the sickness that passed through her when she turned to find the saloon flattened. Cody and Noah both grabbed her arms to keep her weak knees from failing her. Lou couldn't take her eyes off the building.
Then, in a dreamlike fashion, she saw something. She wasn't sure of her eyes at first as she spotted the two silhouettes emerging from a cloud of smoke, both of them walking tall. She found herself unable to blink her smoke filled eyes or to look away. Then, the figures broke out of the cloud of dust and smoke surrounding the saloon and into the lighter haze hanging over the street.
"Kid! Jimmy!" Lou screamed suddenly, and took off for them, sobbing again, but this time with relief.
The others cried out in relief also, and started after Lou.
Kid stopped and stood on unsteady legs as Lou rushed for him. He laughed weakly when she flung herself into his arms, but that laughter soon turned to coughing. Her tears wet his scorched neck, and left trails in the black soot covering him from head to foot. She stood on her toes and kissed him fully on the mouth, not caring what any of the townspeople would say if they saw them.
"Oh I'm sorry! I didn't mean anything I said earlier! Oh Kid! Thank God! I thought you both had been killed!" She rambled on and on, her hands pressed against his cheeks as if she couldn't believe he was safe unless she touched him.
"Well, I had to make sure the saloon burned all the way down so you couldn't go work in it!" Kid said wearily, raising his scorched eyebrows.
"All you had to do to guarantee that was quit being an ass, and admit I was right," Lou said, a slight smile working its way to her face.
"Thought running into a burning building would be more pleasant," Kid laughed, but was instantly wracked by a series of coughs that rendered him breathless and weak. He crashed down on his knees, and Lou kneeled with him, wiping at his sweating brow. He was beginning to shiver with the dampness against the cold air. Not far away, the others gathered around where Jimmy had laid Callie on the dirt and was now having a coughing fit of his own. Callie was slowly coming to, and started coughing also.
"We'll yall are a fine bunch," Teaspoon said, "We'd better get all three of you to a doctor!"
"Aw, Teaspoon, we don't need no doctor!" Jimmy started, but then a wave of nausea hit him, and he was only able to turn and run a few steps before he found himself being sick on the street.
"You're heroes, boys!" A man cried out. Several townspeople raised a cheer.
As Jimmy stood there, doubled over, dizzy, sick, singed, and hurting like hell from jumping out of the back window and diving for the dirt just as the saloon collapsed, he didn't feel like much of a hero at all.
"Hey, where's Jarvis Malone?" Someone asked.
"Didn't he make it out of the fire?" Another one asked.
"I didn't see him inside," Kid supplied between gasps for air.
"I did," Jimmy panted, "He was dead."
"How?" Teaspoon wondered.
"I don't know. Suffocated, I guess…"
Kid's eyes narrowed as he looked away from Lou to Jimmy. If he hadn't seen Malone and Jimmy had, then that meant the saloon owner had been the one locked in Callie's room. Callie had been down the hall, after trying to escape the fire by climbing to the porch but had been stopped by the flames. She had crawled into another bedroom, where Kid had found her. If Callie had time to escape the suffocating smoke, then Jarvis should have too…
Unless he had already been dead when the fire started.
Kid's watering eyes narrowed even further, to veritable slits, as he looked at the girl lying on the ground. Was she cold enough to be a murderess?
She suddenly regained her senses and sprang to a sitting position, glaring at everyone around her in confusion.
When her gaze met Kid's, he saw such fury glowing there that he thought he had his answer…
Kid shifted uncomfortably in the unfamiliar bed. The doctor had demanded the three fire victims stay over night. Lou, who had been sitting in the chair by the bed all night, keeping a diligent watch, had finally nodded off, and her forehead now rested on the bed, her face pressed into the covers. Kid wondered how exactly she could breathe.
He moved slowly, not only because of the incredible stiffness of every muscle in his body, including some new ones he never noticed before, but so he wouldn't wake Lou. Finally he eased out of the bed and stood on his feet. A wave of dizziness hit him hard and he grabbed onto the bedpost to keep from crashing to the floor.
In a moment he felt stable, and began creeping toward the hall and the room they'd put Jimmy in. He let himself in slowly, not wanting to startle his sleeping friend. However, light poured into the hallway as he opened Jimmy's door, and Kid found him sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, staring at a picture in a charred silver frame. Jimmy looked at him with placid eyes as Kid pushed his way into the room and sat down on the bed across from Jimmy.
"Jimmy, I been thinking," Kid started.
Jimmy looked back down at the picture and set it aside. Kid reached for it, and Jimmy obliged him by extending it toward the bed.
"What have you been thinking about?" Jimmy humored him.
"Callie," Kid said cautiously.
"I owe you thanks for helping me save her," Jimmy said earnestly.
"I wasn't exactly charging in there for her, I was going with you to make sure you didn't get yourself killed!" Kid argued.
"For whatever reason then, thanks!" Jimmy said, unhappy with having to repeat the words of gratitude. He'd never been comfortable with that. Not even given that the friendship between them was so much greater than the rivalry that had always been there too.
Kid let his eyes rest on the picture and his jaw tightened. So Callie was a planter's daughter. He should have figured that. His eyes looked over the large colonial mansion that filled the background of the photograph. "Well, you guys were right. At one time she was rich," Kid said bitterly.
Jimmy raised his eyebrows in surprise, "Got a problem with that, Kid?"
Kid shrugged, then shook his head. He had no desire to explain how Callie's kind had walked over his kind in the South for years. In fact, he suspected that not so long ago, Callie would have crossed to the other side of the street rather than walk by the likes of him. Or Jimmy for that matter. The planters considered themselves the aristocrats, the dirt farmers their surfs-no better, and in many cases worse, than their slaves. Poor, white trash! The hated words that Kid had grown up hearing nearly rolled off his tongue, but he stopped them.
"Jimmy, we got to talk."
"Bout what, Kid? It's late!"
"Yeah, and you're still awake and worrying over the same thing I am!" Kid charged him.
"And what exactly is worrying me Kid?" Jimmy asked sarcastically.
"Jarvis Malone's death! Now I know you've put two and two together by now! He was dead before the fire started! And Callie more than likely started the fire!"
"What are you talking about? That's crazy! All I've been thinking about is how Callie went from that," he waved a hand at the picture, "to a saloon girl!" Jimmy protested.
"Oh, come on, Jimmy! Don't be a fool again!" Kid snapped, ignoring Jimmy when he bristled, "I know that Jarvis was in Callie's room! That's where you saw him, right? And you say the smoke got him. But how is it that Callie had time to get out of the room and avoid the smoke and Malone didn't? The only way that could be is if Malone was dead when the fire started."
"You're talking crazy Kid! Jarvis is the one who beat Callie up! He wasn't shot or stabbed! There wasn't a mark on him! I would have noticed!"
"You said yourself that the smoke in that room was worse than anywhere else! How can you be sure he wasn't shot or stabbed? And while we're on the subject of how smoky that room was, did it ever occur to you that the fire started in there? It had to! And I think Callie started it on purpose to cover up Malone's murder!"
"You're crazy," Jimmy repeated, but his wheels were turning. Had Malone finally pushed Callie to the edge? Had she in her desperate attempt to be free of him seen no other way out than to murder him and then burn the evidence?
Kid shook his head and stood up, "You're a fool Jimmy! You've still got smoke in your eyes!"
"Get out of here, Kid!" Jimmy growled, angry at Kid for trying to open his eyes.
Kid started to leave the room.
"So, are you going straight to Teaspoon with this bit of testimony?" Jimmy growled.
Kid didn't turn around, but put his hands on his hips and looked at the floor, "No, Jimmy, I won't. God knows I should, but I'm going to leave this up to you. If I were you, I'd go ask Callie a few questions, though."
"Alright Kid," Jimmy agreed, "Thanks for that at least."
Kid shook his head and still didn't look at his foolish friend, "You may not be thanking me when this is all over."
Jimmy furrowed his brow in confusion.
"Watch your back, Jimmy. I mean that. You don't know she wouldn't turn on you too," Kid warned and left the room.
TO BE CONTINUED…On to Chapter VII
Copyright 1998-This work is not to be reproduced without the permission of the author
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