Bandit Queen

by Jane Candia Coleman

  So I made plans. I was going to run away, to Alaska, perhaps, or Mexico, or Ontario where I was born, someplace where Frank would never find us. I was still young enough to believe I could cast off selves and live as I chose. Such arrogance I had! Well, I’m glad of it. Without that arrogance and that flame for living, I might not have survived the next five years.

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about a place to hide. In February, 1898, the Spanish blew up the American battleship, Maine, in Havana Harbor, and the entire male population of Phoenix, Frank included, talked of nothing but war.

  Ready to fight, the men marched, drilled, shouted, and, when war was declared, they went off with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders or whatever hastily formed regiment would have them.

  Barely concealing my relief at his departure, I waved good-bye at the station one hot day in April, and then went home to the children. If God was just, Frank would never return. Most women were praying for the safety of their husbands or lovers. I prayed that a bullet would take him, and I’d be free once and for all.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A month later I took Little Joe and Emma to my mother in Toledo. My money was almost gone, and there was no way I could go back to work at the Valverde and leave them at home alone most of the night. I had tried working, briefly, as a clerk, taking the children to Angelita when I left. But her five ran wild in the streets and set an example far different from what I wanted for my own.

  On the train, going East, the children and I stared out the window, all of us seeing the country for the first time. My first trip had been passed in the dark, and I was amazed at the glittering desert, the empty plains, the prairie that, even then, was still a surging sea of grass, with here and there a town built in response to the arrival of the railroad. And after the towns, more grass, on and on, until it seemed the entire world was a plain that rippled in the wind and seemed to breathe in and out like a tawny animal.

  “Big,” said Little Joe. “Big. Big. Big.” He bounced in his seat a minute, then turned serious. “Papa?” he asked, his eyes wide. “Papa come?”

  “Papa’s gone to war,” I explained as gently as I could.

  “What’s war?”

  “It’s men like your papa fighting for their country.”

  “Fight?” he said. “Like you and Papa?”

  His comprehension hurt. Between us, Frank and I had made him a victim. I pulled him onto my lap and kissed his cheek.

  “Sometimes grown-ups get mad,” I explained. “But we love you just the same.”

  He seemed happy with that, and he was happy to meet my mother, who was waiting for us at the station. She had tears in her eyes as she welcomed us, but for me it was like meeting a stranger, a woman I hardly remembered, a dream person to whom I had written years of lies. In fact, I hardly recognized myself as I stood there in almost the same spot where I had waited with Frank the night we ran away. Who had I been then? Who was I now? I was twenty-eight years old and had lived through what seemed like a hundred lives, variations of someone named Pearl, a woman whose depths and motivations I still didn’t understand.

  My initial doubts turned into frustration as I tried to settle back into the surroundings of childhood. The house where I’d been brought up was unchanged: high-ceilinged, cluttered—the way most houses were then—with pictures, figurines, plants, antimacassars, flowered carpets, souvenirs from the many places my father had been in his job with the railroad.

  I couldn’t breathe in that house where my mother, sister, and their friends gossiped over tea and seances. My mother was ever hopeful that she would make contact with my dead father, Maude praying that she would learn that her future would not be that of unmarried daughter and companion. It wasn’t any better outside. The summer was rainy. Dampness rose from the ground and fell from the skies, and I, used to the high, dry atmosphere of the desert, felt stifled, squeezed into myself, as if I were wearing a too-tight corset.

  I had had a taste of independence and now discovered that, when you live on another’s charity, even that of your family, your independence is given away in exchange for comfort. I would gladly have gone to work to supplement my mother’s income. She was living on my father’s pension, and having extra mouths to feed stretched her budget. But there were no jobs available, certainly none that suited her visions of propriety.

  “I’ll manage,” she said. “Haven’t I always?”

  “Of course,” I agreed. “But everybody can use extra money.”

  I was thinking of the tips I’d made just for singing the sentimental songs men loved to hear. I was thinking of the pleasure of being alone with no one to tell me do or don’t. I was thinking about the desert and how, when you looked out, you could see a hundred miles to where the sky reached down and curved around mountains like a hand in a blue velvet glove. I was homesick, missing the saguaros that thrust up out of red rock and that, in early summer, wore crowns of white flowers that turned quickly to sweet fruit, the thunderstorms that swept in on a wave of scented air and passed quickly, leaving the arch of a rainbow to be wished upon.

  How is it that home means such different things? And how many never find their place of belonging? Through bad judgment and accidents, I had found my home, and it was far from the stifling environment of my childhood. Dimly I knew that if I didn’t make an effort, my life was as good as over. I needed silence. The constant, empty chatter of idle women split me into fragments. I wanted, needed to be whole. So, after three weeks, I took a hack to the station and purchased a one-way ticket home.

  “But you can’t!” My mother was stunned by my plan. “You have children to think of. You can’t just go running off. Not again. It isn’t done. What will people think?”

  Ah, yes. The question of last resort. The question by which I’d been raised. What, indeed? And what, I wondered, would they have thought, those friends, those bastions of virtue, if they had seen me traveling bruised, broken, dressed as a rag-tag boy in a freight car? If they had watched me relieve myself in a dark corner in front of a man? In spite of myself, I grinned at the image of horrified faces, and irritated my mother even more.

  “Why can’t you settle down?” she wanted to know. “Why can’t you be like everybody else? I had such plans for you. But no…you never make anything easy. Always hard-headed. Selfish.” She stopped for a breath and then went on. “Well, I’ll tell you. You aren’t taking those babies with you. They stay here with me, and that’s the end of it. At least, till you come to your senses. Children need a home. You go on and make a fool out of yourself. You’re no lady, I’ll tell you that. Running around the country like a gypsy, first with that man you ran off with, and now by yourself.”

  It was the longest speech she’d ever made, and I knew I was supposed to be chastened. Instead, I was exultant. Little Joe and Emma would be cherished and watched over while I struggled to earn enough money to make them a proper home. It would take time, but I’d learned thrift the hard way. And, besides, fortunes were being made in the West. With any luck at all, I’d have both children with me in no time. Still, my mother’s criticism hurt me, and made me angry, too. I wasn’t the daughter she’d hoped for, was, instead, a disappointment. But why should I be punished for my differences? I stuck out my chin.

  “I can’t help what I am,” I said. “I can’t be like you, but that’s not my fault.”

  She always had the last word. “I hope you don’t live to regret it,” she said.

  It sounded like a curse.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At the Valverde, all the talk was of the signing of the armistice with Spain. The war, the fighting, was over, and the men would be coming home. I listened to the news with dread, for, although I hadn’t heard a word from Frank, I hadn’t been notified of his death, either. He’d be back, and the cycle of our marriage would begin again. The thought was more than I could bear. I could, I supposed, file for divorce, but in my bones I was still Catholic enough to fear being a total outcast. There was also my moth
er, who would never recover from a divorce in the Taylor family. Something had to be done, but what? Circumstances made up my mind for me before the month was out.

  There was a new moon. I stood in the alley after work, tilted back my head, closed my eyes, and made a wish the way I used to do as a child. A wish on a new moon was sure to come true, so I mumbled to myself in the dark. “Tell me what to do, and where I’m going.”

  “Sayin’ your prayers, Pearl?” Al Burke had stepped out into the alley behind me.

  I was startled. “Where’s Huey?”

  “Busy. I’ll walk a ways with you.”

  “I’ll be all right.” Maybe it was only instinct, but I didn’t want his company.

  “Sure you will,” he said. “I’m here to see to it.” He was keeping pace with me, though I had begun walking fast. “Guess you were prayin’ your man comes home soon.”

  I answered him with a laugh and kept going. Something in his tone seemed out of place, frightening in the dark alley where usually the whores sat smoking or looking for last-minute customers. That night, however, none of them was out, and the emptiness frightened me even more.

  “Slow down,” he commanded. “A nice night like this, you ought to enjoy a little walk. Unless…unless you got company waiting at home.”

  “Nobody’s waiting,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

  “And wanting a man, I bet. Alone all these months.”

  I knew then what he was after and turned to run, but he caught me before I’d taken three steps. His hands were rough on my shoulders, and his breath smelled like old cigars and older whiskey. And all I could see in my terror was Frank.

  “Get your hands off me!” I yelled, hoping one of the whores would come out.

  “Shut up. I’m not going to hurt you.” He was breathing hard, his face close to mine. Even in the dark I could see the lust in his eyes, and I struggled to get free, calling for Huey as I did.

  But he was a big man and strong. “You been givin’ it to Huey?” he panted. “Christ! The Queen of Chicago and Huey!”

  The very thought was obscene. I sank my teeth into his wrist and held on like a bulldog. When he tried to shake me off, I raised my knee and let him have it in the groin. And at that moment, Daisy, one of the whores, knocked him cold with what looked like a frying pan. Then she and I stood, looking at each other over the body.

  “Is he dead?” I whispered.

  She snorted. “It’d take more’n that to kill the son-of-a-bitch.” She kicked at him with a bare foot. “He’ll have a set of sore balls and a lump on his head in the morning, is all.”

  “What’ll we do with him?”

  “I’ll take care of it. You’d better skedaddle. And I mean out of town. He’ll call the law on you, if I know him.”

  “But he can’t!” I was more than a little stunned and wasn’t thinking clearly. “I mean…he was…he wanted…” I stopped, wordless.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know. And he’s a big man in town, and you’re a gal that sings in a saloon. Better than a whore, but not much. He can say what he wants and make it stick. The law’s on his side, honey.”

  I sat down on the stoop. “Where’ll I go?”

  She shrugged. “Me, I’m saving to go to ’Frisco. Another year oughta do it.”

  ’Frisco. It sounded like the moon. I put my face in my hands and hoped the whole scene would be blotted out, but, when I looked again, she was still there, and so was Burke’s body, looking ugly and bloated in the faint light. “

  ld;’Course there’s always Silver City,” she offered. “And Globe’s going to bust wide open with the railroad goin’ through. I been thinkin’ of that myself.” She cocked her head. “Come to think…there’s a Chinee looking for a cook to go with him up that way. He came around today, asking did any of us want the job.”

  Globe! It seemed so simple. Everyone had been talking about the railroad and the copper boom. And Joe had gone there with high hopes.

  “Globe,” I said out loud. And then, curious: “Why didn’t you take the job? It’s a way out of here.” And better than giving herself to creatures like Burke.

  She laughed. “Honey, I’d just as soon take my chances with white men. But since you gotta leave, I thought I’d mention it.”

  The way I saw it, white men weren’t any better than any other kind. It was true that the whole country was terrified at the influx of the Chinese. In fact, the Chinese Exclusion Act had been passed to keep them out. But under the circumstances I wasn’t inclined to worry. I’d hitch a ride to Globe and find Joe. Maybe, by now, he’d struck it rich.

  I looked at Burke, lying on the ground, his belly swelling over his belt, and decided I’d take my chances. “Where’s the Chinaman now?”

  “Said he’d be camped by the river in case anybody changed their mind.”

  “You won’t tell?”

  She snorted again. “Nobody’s going to tell this bastard a thing. He owns these damn’ shacks, but he don’t own us.”

  My mouth dropped open, and she laughed at my surprise.

  “Yeah. He collects the rent and anything else he wants. Gets it off for free, the old hog. Don’t look so shocked. It could be worse.”

  “I wish I’d killed him,” I said, and meant it.

  “You and a bunch of others. Now scram. Like I said, I’ll take care of him.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” I said.

  “Shit, honey. We’re all in it together. Go on now. I got work to do.”

  She bent down and took Burke’s legs to drag him into the little room she didn’t even own, and, as she did, his coat fell open, revealing a wallet stuffed with bills.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said, then darted a look at me.

  Although I could have used the money, there exists a certain honor among thieves—and women. “Looks like you’ll be going to ’Frisco sooner than you thought,” I said with a grin.

  “I’ll be damned,” she repeated, and quick as a snake she reached for the wallet. “You won’t turn me in?”

  I shook my head. “I’m leaving. And you’d better pack and get to the station before he wakes up.”

  “You’re a real lady.” She stuffed the money in her bosom. “I won’t forget this.”

  We stood there in the alley, and the moon turned her dyed-yellow hair to silver.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  She laughed, a harsh sound as if she’d forgotten how. “To you, too,” she said. “Now go on and git.”

  I hiked up my skirts, stepped over Burke’s fat body, and went in search of the Chinaman.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Chinaman was easy to find with his big wagon and team of mules, and the scent of his opium pipe. I followed the sweetness and found Harry Hu sitting beside a dying fire like a genie or a fairy godmother, his slanted eyes full of wisdom. I loved him at first sight.

  “I heard you need a cook,” I said, standing there in my fine dress and probably looking to him like one of his pipe dreams.

  He made a wide gesture. “Come,” he said. “Come, missy, and sit.”

  I did, and we looked at each other across the coals without speaking. I heard the night hawks crying in the fields and saw the sparks rising overhead, and felt that I, too, was in a dream—me and this little man with eyes that saw everything, but passed no judgment.

  He was quiet for what seemed like a year. Then he said: “You cook, missy? You no look like cook.”

  I wondered what he thought I was. Probably a whore, or a runaway wife. “I manage,” I said.

  “You have family?” he asked after a minute.

  “Yes,” I said. “But not here. I’m a widow.”

  “Ah.” The sound was sorrowful, spinning out in the dark like a musical note.

  “I’ll wash dishes. Serve tables. Anything,” I said to break the spell. “I’ll work hard for you, I promise.”

  “Why fan gwai lady want to work for me?” he asked.

  “What’s that? Fan gwai?”


  He smiled, more to himself than at me. “White ghost,” he said, and watched me as the meaning came clear.

  I smiled, too. I’d been called worse. “I need a job,” I told him. “I want my children with me. I want to earn enough to bring them here. Can you understand?”

  Of course, he did. He was Chinese, and revered family, kept a faded photograph of the wife he hadn’t seen in twenty years in a gilt frame that hung on the wall of the wagon. He was fleeing persecution in California where anyone not a merchant was either being deported or refused permission to enter the country. In a way we were two of a kind. We’d both been beaten, robbed, been the object of fanatical hatred. And we’d both survived to keep fighting.

  I knew none of this that evening, but sensed it, the way one animal can sense another’s pain. It was probably against the law for a Chinese to employ a white woman, just as it was illegal for them to marry one. He was taking a chance, and a big one. He sat looking into the embers for a long time, weighing his decision.

  Finally he said: “I leave tomorrow. Sunup. You come.”

  “I’ll be here,” I promised. “My name is Pearl.”

  Neither then nor at any other time did we talk about wages. Harry simply paid me at the end of each week, and I put the money into a stocking and kept it in the small trunk that was all I took with me. I thought of banking it, but decided to keep it handy. I was still thinking like a fugitive—to my eventual sorrow.

  The history of the Chinese in America isn’t pretty. I learned a lot of it firsthand, listening to Harry’s broken English and watching the sorrow cross his face. He’d come to California in the ’Seventies, hoping to find a job, save his money, and send for his bride. But it didn’t turn out the way he’d planned. By the time he managed to do more than earn a meager living, working in the lettuce fields, the Exclusion Act had been passed and women, particularly the prostitutes who had been imported, were no longer admitted to the country. The fact that his wife was a decent person and not one of those poor creatures made no difference.