Bandit Queen

by Jane Candia Coleman

  The woman who came was tall and gaunt, like a broomstick upended. “Lord, child,” she said, seeing me. “Get in this house and get warm.”

  She took me down a hall and into the kitchen where another woman stood over a stove and turned to stare at us, a wooden spoon like a sword in her hand.

  “What on earth!” she said.

  “Poor thing’s near froze,” said my rescuer, shoving me into a chair. “Froze and hungry, probably. Where’d you come from?” She’d addressed me, but I wasn’t in any condition to answer.

  “All right. Set. Get warm,” she said, pressing my shoulders with heavy hands. They fed me soup out of the big kettle and bread, and coffee laced with cream, and I ate like the starving creature I was, without stopping, until the bowl was clean, the cup empty. Then, half asleep from the food and the heat of the stove, I answered her questions.

  When I finished, Lottie, the one with hair like broomstraw, folded her arms. “I reckon there’s enough to do around here,” she said. “What with all these men tramping in dirt, and if you ain’t fussy. But two dollars a week and meals is all I can pay.”

  It was the meals that made me nod my head. I’d be fed, and Joe could take the money and keep on digging. “I’ll do whatever you want,” I said, I believe, just before I fell asleep at the kitchen table.

  The snow began that night, burying the streets, the newly laid tracks, and the locomotive that had been ready to make its return trip. Everyone was stranded, but the party mood had taken over the whole town. Children were sliding down the hills on makeshift sleds, and men and women were out with shovels, brooms, whatever came to hand, flinging the snow into piles higher than my head. I fought my way through the drifts to the livery to find Joe and tell him about my arrangement.

  “The money’s yours,” I said. “Just come in and get it every week.”

  He grabbed my hands and did a kind of dance in the snow that was up to his knees. “You’re a damn’ fine partner,” he said, panting from the effort. “Ye-siree.”

  When I got back to Lottie’s, I borrowed a pencil and a piece of paper and wrote a letter to my mother, telling her I was now running a boarding house and would soon have enough money to come home. Why did I lie? Maybe to convince myself, or maybe I simply couldn’t admit to defeat. Not then.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Lottie’s boarding house burned to the ground on the May afternoon when the telegram reached me. She and I stood helplessly in the street and watched as the fire raged, and black smoke drew a curtain across the sky.

  Tears ran down her cheeks that were streaked with soot. “Everything I owned,” she mumbled. “Every damn’ thing.”

  In the few months I’d been with her I’d learned her story, one of simple determination and hard work. She and her husband had come West, hoping the dry climate would be good for his lungs. Together they’d put all their money into the house. And then the husband died, leaving Lottie to succeed or fail. Now all her scrimping, all her labor was turning to ashes, along with the belongings of her boarders and the few things that were mine. I put my arms around her, but was helpless to console her for the loss, and suddenly I was crying, too. No matter how hard I tried, or what I did, I seemed always to find myself facing a blank wall.

  And then Ruby, who worked in the kitchen, came running, sweating and redfaced, up the hill toward us. “Oh, Lord,” she kept saying, “oh, Lord, what’re we going to do?” which didn’t help.

  “For heaven’s sake, hush!” I said, but my words were drowned out by the arrival of the fire wagon, too late. The roof fell in with a crash, spattering sparks that threatened the neighboring structures and caused us to move farther down the road.

  Suddenly Ruby began digging in her market basket. She’d gone shopping, as she always did, and at the sight of the vegetables and meat, useless without even a pot to cook them in, Lottie and I cried harder.

  “Telegram!” Ruby said breathlessly. “They gave it to me, ’cause I was headed up here.”

  When at last she found it and handed it over, crumpled, stained with blood that had leaked from the meat, I wanted to throw it away and run, run until my legs gave out, and my lungs collapsed. Telegrams meant disaster. I held the envelope as if it were a rattlesnake, and my hand shook like an aspen leaf.

  “Open it!” Ruby demanded, curiosity overcoming her horror at the fire.

  “I can’t.” Pictures flew through my mind—Emma, Little Joe laid out like angels in small coffins, calling for me in despair. The world was a pit opening at my feet, a hole in the ground from which there was no escaping. But at last I ripped the seal and read the message that marked me, changed me, left me a fugitive, a fallen woman forever.

  Mother dying. Children ill. Come at once.

  There was a rock on my back that kept me from moving, and a blackness in front of my eyes. There was a buzzing in my ears, as if a swarm of bees surrounded me. There was the fire, red tongues whipped by a sudden wind that blew sparks that lit on my arms, burned holes in my skirt, and I unable to help myself or even to speak. I remember I put out my hands, as if I was holding off another blow, and Lottie, in spite of her troubles, grabbed them.

  “What is it? What, child?”

  I had no words, simply handed her the telegram. She read it and looked at me, defeat in her eyes. “What’ll you do?” she asked, as if I had answers.

  One thing I did know. I was going home if I had to walk every mile. I wasn’t thinking, only feeling. I didn’t think until later when there was nothing left to do but think—and regret my hasty action.

  “I’m going home,” I said. “Home.” And with the words spoken at last I turned and ran, leaving the holocaust, the women, the firefighters openmouthed behind me.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Joe’s plan was madness, and I was mad to agree to it. But desperation and poverty do strange things to a person. For a few hours I stopped thinking and latched onto his wild scheme as if it were a lifeline. He made it sound easy, and I believed. We would hold up the stage in Cane Springs Cañon where the road took a bend before it descended to the little settlement of Troy near the San Pedro River. Travelers always carried cash. We’d rob them and ride south to Benson where I would get on the train and head home. It sounded so simple when he said it, but, then, talk is always easier than the doing.

  Joe stole two horses for us. I hacked off my hair and took a pair of pants and a shirt off a miner’s clothesline. And then I was Pete again, my pants held up with a piece of rope, my feet blistered in the boots I’d also stolen—too large, but thieves can’t be choosy.

  The sky was that washedout blue it turns before the summer rains. Along the base of the mountains was a haze, half dust, half heat waves, and somewhere off in the brush a cicada buzzed. Otherwise, the land was still as if it were holding its breath, as if it were waiting, like I was, for the sound of hoofs, the signal for action. Suddenly I was scared. What was I doing there in the stillness, my heart thumping in my breast? How had I fallen so far from grace? I was Pearl Hart, raised as a lady, and I was about to take a pistol in my hand and use it to commit a crime. And there was my partner, grinning at me as if it were all a game, a lark, an everyday occurrence.

  “Loosen up,” he said suddenly. “This ain’t the time for female hysterics.”

  “Let’s go back.” My jaws and throat ached from holding in tears. “Let’s forget it. I changed my mind.”

  His smile vanished, and he put his hands on my shoulders. They were big hands, hard from shoveling rocks and sand. “And then what?” he wanted to know. “Then we’ll starve, and you’ll go crazy over those kids, and it’ll be my fault.” He gave me a shake.

  “But…?” “But nothing. They’ll get us for horse stealing no matter what, so you’re over your head already.”

  The truth of his words sank in. It was too late. For me it had always been too late. If I got out of this, if I got home, I’d never leave it again.

  “Please, God…,” I started to pray as I hadn
’t prayed in years, but even that plea came too late.

  I heard the sound of hoofs, the jingling of traces, and Joe looked at me out of narrowed eyes.

  “You going to chicken out?”

  I wiped my nose on my sleeve, not caring how it appeared. “I’ll be all right.” My voice came out in a croak.

  “You better be. This ain’t no game.” He pulled down the brim of his hat. I could smell his sweat and my own. To me it smelled of fear and all the poverty of the last ten years. I gritted my teeth. Never again! I was never going to be poor again!

  And then the horses came around the bend, and I stepped out in front of them and fired into the air. I can see it still—the terrified animals, their yellow teeth in open jaws, how they plunged and squatted down on lathered haunches as the driver hauled on the reins.

  “Toss down your pistol. Then keep your hands where I can see ’em.” Joe sounded menacing, and the driver obeyed fast.

  “Everybody out,” came the next order.

  It seemed Joe had been born to be a road agent, as if he’d done this many times before—and I wondered if I knew him at all, this man in whose hands I’d placed my future. But I didn’t have time to wonder much.

  “Stop gaping!” he snapped at me. “Get them to hand over what they’ve got.”

  He gestured at the three men who were coming slowly out of the coach, their hands in the air, and my heart sank as I recognized the last one. Gilbert Hu was staring at me as if he thought his life was over.

  “Oh, God,” I said, hesitating.

  Joe lost his patience. “Hurry up! We don’t have all day!”

  I pulled the brim of my hat down low. Why hadn’t we thought about masks? Why hadn’t we thought about the consequences if we were identified and caught? But, once again, it was too late for me. I was in it—and I’d get out. Somehow.

  “You heard him,” I said, trying to disguise my voice. “Put your money in the sack. And no tricks.”

  They did what they were told, so frightened their hands trembled. Except for Gilbert. He dropped his money purse into the sack and looked straight at me. Then he said two words: “Please, missy.”

  “Shut up!” I stepped away from his all-seeing stare as memories came at me. Harry serving me bowls of soup, Gilbert offering me shelter when he had none for himself. I wanted to cry then, for all of us—Harry, Gilbert, their wives somewhere in China, waiting, waiting, as so many women did—waiting until their hearts gave out and with nothing to show for their patience.

  As I hesitated, Joe yelled: “Jesus! Come on, we can’t stand here all day.”

  I reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of bills and coins and tossed them on the ground. “Here,” I said. “So you won’t be flat broke.”

  Then I ran, breaking stride just long enough to grab the driver’s pistol where it lay at the side of the road.

  “Smart girl,” Joe said, throwing me the reins of one of the horses, a bony old mare with a mind of her own.

  She wanted to go back where she belonged, and I was never a good horsewoman. When I climbed into the saddle, she took off at a lope back to town and the stable. I was alone in the brush, fighting a creature as determined as I was. Sweat poured into my eyes and blinded me as I tried to get the animal to obey. She was strong and getting mad. I could feel her anger through the saddle leather, see it in her laidback ears. If she bucked, I’d go off and land in the rocks where the buzzards would find me before the law did.

  “Where the hell you going?” Joe burst out of the brush and grabbed a rein.

  “I can’t get her to listen.”

  “She damn’ well better.” He headed off, pulling me with him.

  I held onto the horn as we moved off at a lunging trot. I’d lost my hat; the sun burned through my hair to my scalp. My face was bleeding from the whiplash of thorny mesquite and catclaw branches. It seemed that, for a long time, we looked for the trail that would take us south. Then I recognized a pile of rock I’d seen before.

  “You damn’ fool!” I yelled at Joe. “We’re going in circles.”

  He slowed and looked back at me, and I saw a kind of panic in his eyes. I snatched the reins and pulled up the mare.

  “Can’t you tell what direction south is?” I was still yelling, furious that I was depending on this man who didn’t know his directions, who I’d trusted with my life. Below us the sun reflected off the river, but the western mountains were already in the shadow of afternoon. “Come on, and let’s get out of here,” I said, forcing the mare past him down a rough trail. Strangely, with my determination, she obeyed me, and, leading the way, I rode fast down the valley of the San Pedro River, going for broke like the criminal I was.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It’s not an easy trip, that game trail south out of Cane Springs. That’s brush country. And rock. Miles of rock that wears down a horse’s feet and drives the rider crazy with the need to go carefully. There are holes and dry washes where you don’t expect them, so that suddenly your horse jumps off a level plain into sand up to its hocks and flounders with you holding on for dear life. And there’s the brush—thorny mesquite—the branches clawing at you, raking you raw, and the blaze of ocotillo flowers hiding more thorns beneath their beauty, all laying a trap, waiting for the unwary.

  You push and you push, and the night isn’t much cooler than the day has been. The horses are drag-ging, and you ache in places you never thought of, but you keep going because you know they’re behind you, on your trail, and you’re running for your life and the lives of your children. That’s how it is, see? You’ve done this thing, done it and be damned, and you’re reaching for freedom like always, only this time it’s everybody’s freedom, not just your own. It’s Joe’s, and your mother’s, and those babies’. It’s the mare under you who’s moving slower now, whose sweat mingles with your own, who needs a rest as badly as you do, maybe more.

  You can feel her heart struggling under your legs. She’s a tough old girl, but she’s done as much as she can, and you feel like she’s part of you. She’s got courage—more than you ever had. And strength. And as her strength falters, you feel your own body crying out. For water. For a chance to stop and breathe the hot night air without the need to keep moving. You want to lie down and look at the stars that splash like a billion diamonds on the dark sky.

  You want to forget what you’ve done, to close your eyes and be a girl again, cared for, laughing, the world at your feet. You want it back, your life before you gave it away for the sake of dreams. You want. You want. And at last you call out: “Stop!”

  And Joe turns around, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the dark. “Not yet,” he says. “Not yet.”

  “Now.” I slump in the saddle. “Now.”

  Above us the sky moves, and the stars. The world spins. We move across the earth like ants—tiny, helpless. Small. So small. So close to nothingness. Over and over I’ve lived that journey. It haunts my dreams, my days. If only…If only…That’s what I say to myself. If only I hadn’t been human, so exhausted that I fell from the saddle and lay on the ground like a corpse, and all the while the posse coming closer, set on capturing a pair of fools.

  There was a drought that year. The river was low, hardly a trickle, and the grass only withered yellow stems. No energy there for tired horses that cropped the leaves of the mesquite after drinking from the slime that passed for water.

  We didn’t make a fire. We didn’t want to be seen, and there was always the danger of starting a bigger one. So we lay on the sand, drinking from the canteen, chewing jerky, and smoking a cigarette or two. I must have slept finally, because, when I opened my eyes, the stars were fading, and the light around us was pale, like smoke or fog, and my clothes were damp from dew.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Time to move out.” Joe was studying the sky.

  “Not yet.” I felt old, unable to move.

  “Pretty soon, then.” He lit a cigarette, and the smell of the match, of the
tobacco, was sharp in the morning air.

  “How much did we get?” I wanted to know. I reached for the sack that lay between us.

  “Might as well count it,” he said. “Probably more’n enough to get you out.”

  There was almost four hundred dollars, what seemed a fortune. I split it into two piles.

  “Half is yours.”

  He shook his head. “You’ll need it more’n me. I’m aiming to sell these horses, get me some clothes, and head back.”

  “To Globe?” I was astonished.

  “Why not?”

  “They might get you.”

  He shook his head. “Naw. I’ll be back diggin’, without them knowing I was ever gone. Don’t you worry.”

  But I was worried. Something kept nagging at me. Something left undone. I sat and replayed the holdup in my mind, while the sky in the east turned yellow, the color of lemons, and the mountains in the west grew red like embers in an old fire.

  “Gilbert Hu knew it was me,” I said at last. “He called me ‘missy.’ ”

  “Well, he don’t know me from Adam,” came Joe’s reply. “Besides, who’s going to believe a Chinaman?”

  “Some people just might.” I sat, still struggling for the missing piece of the puzzle. When I remembered, my stomach seemed to turn over. It took a minute before I could speak again. “We never cut the traces,” I whispered. “They were all back in town while we were riding in circles.” Thanks to you, I thought.

  He stared at me a minute, then jumped to his feet. “God damn us for a pair of fools. Let’s get out of here!”

  That day was worse than the first. We rode along the river with its scum of water, its treacherous quicksand, our flight slowed by the mesquite forest that grew, like the forest in a fairy tale, without a visible trail. Sometimes we got off and led the horses, pushing our way through, fighting off flies and midges that whined around our faces, biting, stinging, landing in our eyes so we had to stop, blinking and cursing and nearly blind. And always the knowledge that behind us was a posse, closer than we’d thought.