“Rosa would like that fine,” she said.
Once I’d thought I loved Dan, but that had been long before, and I’d been somebody else, a woman I could hardly remember. Still, he’d cared enough about me to arrange this tour, to be at the prison gates, waiting. The question was, what did I want now? And who was I? Life had forced me into playing so many parts that, standing there in the station in Yuma, I felt like a spinning top, whirling out of control and waiting for a hand to stop me.
Suddenly I was dizzy. I took a deep breath. No one could help me but me, and Rosa was welcome to Dan, if that’s what they both wanted. Taking Tally’s hand, I marched toward the train and the unknown future.
Dan was bubbling over with plans and talking so fast I couldn’t get a word in.
“We’ll play the Bird Cage first. Tombstone’s a good place for a dress rehearsal, and folks there don’t get much first-class stuff these days. Then we’ll hit the Orpheum in Bisbee. Pearl”—he darted a glance at me—“you’ll come on and sing a lullaby for your kids so far away. That’ll get ’em. It always does. Then you change into a shirt and pants and come back and sing that poem you wrote. I’ve got a pistol you can use. Shoot a few blanks and give ’em a thrill. Then I’ve got a little prison number I’ve been working on. There won’t be a dry eye in the whole damned house. How’s that sound?”
“Awful,” I said. “The whole thing. And that poem stinks.”
“Nobody’ll notice. They’ll be too busy looking at you. And I’ll cover up weak spots with the piano.” He cocked his head. “I went to a lot of trouble booking this act, so what’s eating you? You got any better ideas?”
The trouble was that, as usual, I had none. All I knew was that I couldn’t go home until the baby came, and even then I’d be in disgrace with a bastard child and a black nursemaid who’d murdered her own baby in a fit of terror. How was Toledo society going to swallow that? I leaned back in the seat and looked out at the desert that had captured my heart and imagination from the first. There was the green lace of the paloverde trees, the saguaros jutting up like sturdy thumbs, and behind them, shimmering on the horizon, a forest of mountains holding up the sky.
To survive with any decency, one needed the fortitude of those mountains and the patience of a desert plant that waited for the time to bloom. There was a lesson to be learned, a taking of a kind of knowledge that had always been foreign to me. I’d spent my life running, grabbing what I thought I wanted, and disregarding the consequences—to myself and to others.
I turned away from the sun-scorched landscape and blinked as I looked into Dan’s sparkling eyes. “The first thing,” I said, “is that I have to leave Arizona until my prison term is up. And the next is…,” I hesitated, not wanting to say the words. “The next is that I’m pregnant.”
His eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and his mouth opened, a red “O” in the midst of his black beard. After a minute he said wryly: “And is there anything else?”
I shook my head. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Who’s the happy father?”
Rosa caught my wrist before I could hit him, and I felt her anger humming in her fingers. “You damn’, dumb cabrón!” she hissed. “You think she wanted this? You think in prison she played whore? You want to know, I’ll tell you how it was. How that guard watch her day and night, drooling like a mad dog. How he drag her off and do it…that thing you men do best…and you sit there and speak to her like she’s trash. You dare to make fun.”
She threw my hand back into my lap, and I looked down at it, and at the slight swelling of my belly. What was it I’d been thinking about fortitude?
“Jeezuz.” Dan leaned across and patted my knee. “I’m sorry. I never thought…” His voice trailed off, and he looked at me perplexed. “So how you going to live? You have any money?”
“No.”
He thought for a minute, humming under his breath. “OK,” he announced then. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll play Tombstone and Bisbee. They can’t expect you to disappear out of here overnight. Then we’ll go across the border. Naco. Cananea. Agua Prieta. Those places. You have a few months before…” He stopped. “Before. Right?”
I nodded.
“So you need money. We’ll make it. Then you go and have the kid. How’s that sound?”
He looked at each of us, but it was Tally who answered. “We do what we have to,” she said. “We all done it before.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Tombstone, at the end of 1902, was not the boom town it had been only twenty years before. The mines had flooded, and this, together with a drop in the price of silver, had contributed to its slow degeneration. Yet some believed that the town was on its way back to the days of former glory. The Tombstone Consolidated Mines Company had installed pumps to pump out the water, and mining had begun again on a small scale, bringing people back to the little town on Goose Flats—miners, storekeepers, freighters joined the ranchers and Mexicans who had never left.
But on that winter day when we got out of the stage and stood looking around, it seemed to me I’d arrived at the end of the earth. Smoke from mesquite fires scented the air, and a bitter wind blew off the Dragoon Mountains and sang in my ears like a funeral dirge. Trash and tumbleweeds skittered down the dusty street and piled up against crumbling adobe walls and empty hitching posts.
“Tombstone,” I muttered between chattering teeth. “An appropriate name.”
“Believe me, there’s worse places.” Dan took my arm. “Come on. Let’s get settled and then go look at the theater. It hasn’t been used for a while, but I talked the mayor into letting us use it. For old time’s sake.”
“You’re a hopeless romantic,” I said, laughing.
He looked startled, then said: “Isn’t everybody? Isn’t that what show business is about?”
“I never thought.”
“And look where it’s got you.” He gave a tug at my arm. “Now let’s go before you catch cold and lose that pretty voice of yours.”
We registered at the Arlington Hotel on Allen Street as the Sandeman Acting Troupe, but news of my arrival had gotten there before me. The clerk at the desk appraised me over the top of a pair of spectacles and smiled a welcome. “Glad to have you with us, Miss Hart,” he said. “You’ll draw a full house tonight.”
Suddenly I was afraid, remembering the faces that had stared at me in the train, faces belonging to people who seemed to want my soul. I turned away without answering and stumbled over Dan’s trunk.
Rosa caught me. “She needs to rest,” she said. “Then we go to see this theater.”
“I need to write a letter before anything,” I said.
Rosa smiled grimly. “Yes. The letter. And I will mail it for you.”
The three of us shared a room that had a window looking out onto the street. Outside, clouds were gathering over the mountains, and the light that shone through them was weak, old, as tired as I felt. Life on the road was obviously not all pleasure.
I sent Tally to the desk for pen, ink, and writing paper. When she came back, she was frowning.
“What?” I asked.
She put down the inkwell and stared at me. “He say…that man…that he’s stretchin’ the rules, lettin’ me stay here. He say there’s a law in town that black folks ain’t allowed out after dark, and I better take care.”
“That’s nonsense!” I said, then remembered how Harry Hu had been treated. “What did you tell him?”
She folded her arms and looked fierce. “I say I’d go out whenever I pleased. That I was part of the troupe. He didn’t much like it.”
“Chica, you will go with me, and I’ll take care of anybody who even looks at you.” Rosa had lit a lamp and, in the fragile glow, she reminded me once again of a santo, one of those carved saints so beloved by the Mexicans.
I picked up the pen and began my letter to Herbert Brown, naming Ed Simmons and the guard I did not know as the cause of my downfall. When I finished, I struggled to find
the words for what I felt, the hopelessness of the situation in which I found myself. “We’re still prisoners. Never mind that we’re not behind bars. I’m stuck with a baby. Tally’s an outcast because she’s black, and Rosa’s a Mexican. All three of us are women. We’re stuck with that, too. The deck was stacked the day we were born.”
Rosa brought me up short. “I, for one, am glad to be out of jail, and so should you be. Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself. Not ever. You only shame yourself.” Then she softened her words with a smile. “Take a siesta. Then we go see this Bird Cage Señor Dan thinks is so wonderful. Me, I go to mail this and light a candle in a church, if there is a church in this place.”
What for?” I asked, diverted as she had no doubt intended.
“For the devil to take Simmons,” she said wickedly. “What else?”
Like the rest of the town, the Bird Cage was showing its age and results of neglect. The curtains were dusty and tattered, the boards of the stage were splintered, and spider webs decorated the boxes where once, so Dan told us, gentlemen had entertained their women in privacy. But it was a theater, and I had never sung in one, or acted anywhere.
I stood on the stage, looking out at the empty benches, the battered chairs, and fought off nerves. “Are you sure I can do this?” I asked Dan.
“Talking isn’t any different from singing,” he assured me. “You come out, sing the lullaby, tell about your children waiting for you to come home, wipe your eyes like you’re bawling your head off, and exit. Believe me, baby, they’ll be eating out of your hand when you come back on and start shooting.”
I guessed he was right. It was a sentimental time, and nobody was more sentimental than a bunch of men away from home.
“Just listen to me,” he went on. “I been in this business since I was born. Now get back here and try on these clothes.”
In the first scene I was to wear a cape and under it, breeches, shirt, boots.
“So you can walk off and come right back without changing,” he explained. “Try these pants. I guessed at your size.” He tossed a pair of denim trousers at me.
Tally, who had been watching us, began unbuttoning my dress. “Those pants ain’t going to fit,” she said. “Lucky I can sew.” “Babies!” I wanted to throw a tantrum, to lie down on the floor and howl and pound my fists.
“Now you quit!” She put her hands on my shoulders and gave me a shake. “I can fix these in a minute. Just let me get a needle and an extra piece of something. And, besides, you can leave your shirt hang out. Folks won’t know about the pants or the baby.”
Sane, sensible Tally—so different from the woman I’d first known. With something to do, a contribution to make, her face shone, her needle flashed, and she hummed to herself as she sewed. From then on she was our wardrobe mistress—a title given her by a grateful Dan—along with a pile of his mending.
That night I caught a glimpse of what Tombstone had been like in its heyday. All kinds of people came to the theater—ranchers down from the hills and up from the valley, shopkeepers and their wives, miners with dirt still clinging to their clothes, and whole families of Mexicans, some of the women carrying babies. With the lamps lit and the old curtains in shadow, it was easy to think back, to feel the echoes of all those others who had been on the stage before me—minstrels and magicians, Eddie Foy, Pauline Markham and her “Pinafore on Wheels,” roving thespians of all kinds. I was in fine company. Dan went on first. “To warm them up,” he explained. And then Rosa in a red gown, carrying her guitar as if it were a living thing, which in her hands it was.
“Break a leg,” Dan whispered to me before the curtains parted, and, when I looked at him in horror, he laughed low in his throat. “It means good luck. Now git!”
And then I was alone on stage, and the faces that watched me were the faces of everyone who’d ever been curious about Pearl Hart, but with a difference I could almost feel. It was as if I belonged to them, as if they were proud of what I’d done, and they’d boast about me later to their friends. It was as if they’d all ridden alongside that afternoon in Cane Springs Cañon, urging me on, shouting encouragement. Sentimental? Perhaps. And violent, too, longing for the thrill of the chase, the success of the underdog. And in that moment, I understood and became one of them as, indeed, I had been all along.
I sang my heart out that night as I relived my past. I sang for my children, even the one unborn, and the audience came with me, cheering, whistling, clapping, and never mind that the poetry was dreadful, and my acting stilted. When I shot off the pistol, the entire theater rose to its feet and roared. They called me back for encores again and again, and I obliged with the songs I knew and loved until I couldn’t sing any more. My performance was praised in the paper and the review was reprinted in others, and, in my moment of triumph, I forgot that I was leaving a trail anyone could follow. What mattered was success—and the money jingling in my pocket. What mattered was the glory of it all.
Chapter Forty
The road to Bisbee ran south through the San Pedro Valley. I can close my eyes and see it still, that valley spreading out, graceful and mysterious, the grass a dull gold and the mountains on either side the pale rose and faint lavender of winter. And on the horizon another mountain loomed.
Rosa pointed. “From here you can see into Mexico. That’s Cananea.”
How I stared! How I clutched my hands together and ignored Rosa’s next words. “Why so sad, chica?”
What I had was a memory of a day spent with a man who had, in spite of my good intentions, turned into a fairy tale. Once upon a time, I told myself, I knew a good man. So I stared out and did not answer her, and the road rose gradually into the Mule Mountains, and Mexico was blotted out by rocks and the dark green of oak trees clinging to steep cliffs.
Up and up. It seemed we would touch the sky. And then we crested, and Bisbee lay at our feet, awake as Tombstone had been asleep, raucous, rowdy, its streets narrow cañons chiseled through red rock, its heart the richness of the copper ore mined in the tunnels that honeycombed the earth.
The Orpheum Theater stood at the foot of Brewery Gulch, where it joined Main Street. And outside it was a poster. Miss Pearl Hart. Arizona’s Bandit Queen, it read.
I turned mystified to Dan. “How did that happen?”
“You’re famous. And people, being what they are, have what my mother used to call ‘an unhealthy curiosity.’ They all want to see you, feisty little critter that you are.”
Once I’d stood, listening entranced to Julia Ward Howe and Helen Modjeska, wishing to make my mark on the world. Now it seemed that I had, but it wasn’t the kind I’d hoped for.
We registered at the Johnson Hotel, though I looked with longing at the newly finished Copper Queen that advertised rooms with private baths and superior dining.
“I’d kill for a tub and hot water,” I said.
“Famous isn’t rich. At least not yet,” came the brusque answer.
“Some day,” I promised myself. “Some day I’ll come back. And have a fancy room. And eat in a restaurant with candles and wine and maybe music.”
We walked to the theater, down streets crowded with people, horses, burros carrying water in huge bags and wood for the cooking fires of the miners’ shacks that were built on the sides of the hills. The saloons and gambling houses were wide open. I heard music, voices, laughter even as I saw the whores from the cribs at the high end of the street, eyeing passers-by like hungry cats.
“We’ll have a full house,” Dan predicted, smiling at one of the whores as if she were a great beauty. “Tonight and tomorrow. Money in the bank, ladies. Money in the bank, or I’m damned.”
As usual, he was right. The first night was a repeat of the performance in Tombstone, and at the matinee, the following afternoon, attended mostly by ladies—women in fine clothes as well as house-wives and a few whores who took care to sit off to the side—I received cheers of approval and left the theater in fine spirits.
My good mood las
ted through the evening performance, and I was singing as I left. The others had gone on without me, when they saw the people crowding the stage door to catch a close-up glimpse of the Bandit Queen.
“I’ll come along soon,” I told them. The streets were still busy, the walk to the hotel a short one.
Dan looked doubtful. “You’re sure?”
I laughed. “I’ve been in tougher places than this.”
But I’d had Huey. Or Joe. Or Harry. When I stepped out onto Brewery Gulch, I had only myself, and that wasn’t enough. I’d taken only a few steps when someone grabbed my arms, twisted them behind my back, and pulled me into an alley.
Pain shot through my shoulders. I struggled as best I could and attempted to see the face of my attacker, but he held me too tightly.
“Bitch!” he said hoarsely, close to my ear. “Little, squealing bitch. You cost me my job. Now I’ll fix you for good.”
I knew him then by his voice.
“Let me go,” I pleaded, realizing it was useless. “I’ll let you go, all right. When I’m finished with you.” He tightened his grip and twisted harder.
It was at that moment that I felt the first fl utter of life in my belly, faint as the wing beat of a baby bird but unmistakable, and I forgot that I hated the child, forgot fear in the suddenness of anger. No matter what, I was going to fight, to get free. I was going to save myself and the unborn baby that depended on me for its life. I took a deep breath, ready to scream. There were people moving on the street only a few feet away, people who would hear and come running. But he read my mind and clapped a filthy hand over my mouth.
“None of that,” he growled, so close I could smell him—whiskey, stale sweat, and something else.
Lust. I could feel his arousal, and terror returned to combine with anger. Not that. Not again.
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