Bandit Queen

by Jane Candia Coleman

  Cal pulled up in front of a small house. “Here we are.”

  I saw a porch, a yard, the glossy leaves of citrus trees brushing the roof. I saw a place where people could live and shut out the harshness of the world, and I sat there bemused, lost in a daydream.

  “Come on.” Cal held out his hand, and I took it, noticing its strength and the hardness of his palm.

  Inside, there were four rooms, curtains on the windows, hardwood floors carefully fitted together, and behind, across a dog-trot, another, larger room.

  “My boys bunked here when they got old enough to want a room for themselves,” he said, and my happiness vanished.

  Of course, he had a family. And a wife somewhere. What had I been thinking? That he belonged to me? That this snug house was mine?

  “Boys?” I said timidly.

  “Two sons.”

  “And…and your wife?”

  He swallowed hard. “She died two years ago.”

  “Oh.” It wasn’t right that I should be happy in the face of another’s grief. I said: “I’m sorry.”

  “Life goes on. For a while I didn’t want to stay here. Too many memories. So I went to work. Now…well, as I said, life goes on. Sometimes it even gets better.”

  The light was back in his eyes, and I was glad.

  “Your sons? Where are they?”

  “In Phoenix with my brother and his wife. They’re nearly grown. Finishing up with school.”

  I thought of Emma and Little Joe, so far away. My sorrow must have shown on my face.

  “You miss your children,” he said.

  “Soon I’ll have enough saved to send for them.” Brave words, but I believed.

  “Can I help?” he asked, concern furrowing his brow. “Lend you money?”

  It was one of those turning points. If I’d said yes, everything might have been different. But I was proud. And cautious, not wanting to be in his, or any man’s, debt, wary of being owned. So I shook my head. “I’ll manage. But thank you. No one’s ever cared enough to offer.”

  He ran his hand over the surface of a wooden table, leaving finger marks in the dust. “Well,” he said, “the offer stands. I’m leaving for Mexico. Probably be gone at least a year. But maybe…when I get back…” His voice trailed off like the dust motes that danced in a beam of sunlight.

  “Maybe,” I agreed, looking around the little house and seeing it with a woman’s eye. New curtains, a good scrubbing, and it would be a happy place again, watched over by the hills, the creek, the dancing branches of the paloverdes. It was a dream, but dreams, as I knew, had a way of turning into nightmares in a split second. I turned on my heel.

  “Can I pick some flowers before we go?”

  “If you can find any that don’t have thorns.”

  I didn’t care about thorns, or the fact that, when I got back, I had nothing but a bucket to use as a vase. I wanted only to extend the day by a few more hours, to wake in the morning and see a cloud of gold, and recall the too short time spent with a man who wanted nothing but my company, and had gone to some lengths to make that possible. Just my luck, he was leaving. But he’d be back. There was always that slim hope to hold onto.

  We had a happy lunch in town. Cal had been right. It was a treat to be served instead of doing it all myself. And on the way back we drove up onto one of the hills overlooking Pinal Creek. Stone foundations and shards of pottery marked the ruins of a long-gone race, and the wind blew softly over it all.

  “May I write to you?” he asked.

  “I’d like that,” I said. Letters would be something tangible to keep.

  I put my hand on a crumbling wall. The stones were warm from the sun, and I thought of those who had loved and died there and left a mark. Perhaps letters would be all that I left. But how could I know?

  “I’d like that very much.”

  At first Cal’s letters came regularly—colorful descriptions of Mexico, its people, food, geography, and his endless curiosity about what lay beneath its ground. These weren’t love letters, at least not in the accepted sense, but they did establish a kind of understanding between us, and I kept them all, tied with a piece of ribbon, in my trunk.

  With the arrival of each, Harry grew happier, more certain that a romance was blossoming through the mail.

  “He make good husband,” he’d say. “You write back nice things.”

  “I always do.”

  “When he come home? I cook special for him.”

  “Not for a while.” I sighed, reading over the most recent letter. “He says he’s going south into Mexico to look over some old mines for somebody named Greene.”

  Harry shook his head. “Not good. Dangerous. Mexico very bad place.”

  But I had no influence over what Cal did with his life. The fragile connecting thread of our correspondence was just that—fragile—a link between two strangers who were, gradually and at a distance, enlarging a friendship.

  About Joe, Harry had nothing good to say. “Why you give him money? Food? He no good for you, missy.”

  “He saved my life once.”

  “So.” In Harry’s eyes that was a debt of honor. “All right. Feed. But no money. You keep money.”

  But none of his words or my thrift mattered. By the end of that year I was broke and homeless again, and all because of an act of nature, one of those happenings that suggested I had been born unlucky and that my life would never change.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was a Sunday, my day off, and I’d promised Joe I’d go out to the mine. I was actually looking forward to it, and had packed a picnic lunch. He came for me in a rickety buckboard pulled by a scrawny red mule with a wicked eye.

  “Just dropped off some rocks at the assay office,” he said, helping me up on the splintered seat. “This might be it.”

  My heart leaped, he sounded so sure. “You really think?”

  “There’s a good chance, or my name ain’t Joe Boot.” He flapped the reins, and the mule moved off slowly, head down, feet dragging.

  “First thing, you’d better get another mule,” I said. “This one’s half dead.”

  “Naw. He’s just in a sulk. Sunday’s his day off usually.”

  We headed in a direction opposed to the rest of the mines and diggings, and I was apprehensive.

  “You’re out here?” I exclaimed. “There’s nothing out here.”

  He turned and grinned. “Hell, you got to have some brains in this business. Why dig where everybody else is?”

  How could I know? The strategies of prospecting were beyond me. I trusted him. What he said made sense to me who knew nothing about faults, layers, the old, old structures of earth made before my time, or anyone’s, and lying there, waiting for the pick and shovel, the sharp eyes of men who knew the secrets of the desert, the mountains, the history that paid out fortunes to so many. What I knew was that gold, silver, copper, and the thrill of discovery had brought more men West than all the cattle ranches ever had. And Joe and I were no exception. We were simply two of the tens of thousands who believed in the strike to end all strikes and the life of ease after.

  But when I saw Joe’s diggings, I felt as if I’d been shot in the heart.

  “This?” I screamed, and I remember my voice spun away in the wind like the screech of a hawk. “This is why I lent you money?”

  I stood there, looking at his shack, tinroofed, sorry as a chicken coop, at the hole dug into the side

  of a crumbling hill, the pathetic pile of tailings, spilling out.

  “Hey!” he said. “Hey! I’ve done what I could. And the stuff’s here. That’s a promise.”

  I pushed in the door of the cabin, saw a dirt floor, filthy blankets piled in a corner, unwashed pots and plates in a bucket, and I turned and said the first words that came to mind.

  “You live like a hog. If your claim’s as sorry as this, we’re both in trouble.”

  He began: “Now, Pete…”

  But I was disgusted. “Don’t you ‘now, Pet
e’ me. Don’t you dare even talk to me. This place is a disgrace. No wonder people warned me about you.”

  “Who?” He was mad. His eyes narrowed to slits. “Who’s been talking?”

  “Everybody.”

  “God damn them!” He punched the air like it was a human face. “God damn! I’m onto something.”

  For the first time I was frightened of him, the fury of his expression, the hatred with which his fist had lashed out into space.

  “Joe,” I said. “Joe.” He blinked, focused on me. “What?”

  “Let’s eat.” I got busy, laying out plates and food, hoping hunger would get the better of his rage.

  He squatted down beside me. “Does the Chink know?” he asked.

  “Know what?”

  “That you’re stealing off him.” “I’m not,” I said, irritated at his slang. “He let me take what I wanted.”

  “He in love with you?”

  At that I banged down my plate. “Don’t be disgusting!”

  He grinned, showing brown teeth. “That’s what they’re saying.”

  “Who?”

  “Everybody.”

  “Then everybody’s wrong. I work for him. That’s all.”

  “And they’re wrong about my claim, too.”

  We were back to that. I stared at him, silhouetted against a giant thundercloud that rose up from the mountains.

  “It’s going to rain,” I said, changing the subject. “Maybe we should head back.” The sound of thunder reached us, low and ominous. “If we leave now, we can beat the storm.”

  But we did not. Before we’d gone a mile, the rain hit us. We fought our way across washes, axle deep in muddy water, and on the last, steep hill into town we got out and walked ahead of the mule, slipping in muck, drenched, our clothes sticking to us. My teeth were chattering as much from fear as from cold as we stopped and looked down at the destruction. I knew what we would find, knew it as I peered through the dense curtain of rain and the hail stones that stung my face and clattered into the wagon bed. Pinal Creek had become a monster, overflowing its banks and taking houses, animals, people with it. One of those people was Harry Hu, and his wagon, shack, tables, tent, my trunk and savings were all swept away by the violence of the flood.

  Joe and I stood and stared at the madness of the water, at the corpses of chickens, the trunks of trees, and once, a body, its arm raised as if pleading for rescue. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, simply sat down on the hill and watched in disbelief. I think I said: “Harry.”

  And Joe said: “Maybe he got out. We’ll go look.”

  But I knew. Sitting there above the roar of the water, I knew. Once again I was alone, penniless, and the old man I’d loved like a father for his wisdom, his kindness, his grace was gone.

  They found his body out on the flats a few days later. The wagon and my possessions were never found, or maybe they were dug up years later by kids, playing at pirates. Maybe they also found the photograph of Harry’s wife, the woman with the sorrowful eyes who waited, patiently and without complaint, for the return of the husband she barely knew.

  I made Joe drive me out to Gilbert’s farm. His crops had been ruined, his cousin was dead, but he was planning to begin again as he had done so many times before. He and I stood awkwardly in the mud outside his cabin and looked at each other sadly, neither of us knowing how to express our feelings because language—or the lack of it—stood in our way.

  Finally he said: “You be all right? You have place to go?”

  I think he would have taken me in, much as his cousin had, out of that kindness the likes of which I had never known. At that moment I missed Harry with a sadness that would probably remain for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t burden Gilbert with my problems, or give rise to any more vicious gossip, so I nodded and forced a weak smile. “I’ll be fine,” I said, not meeting his eyes. Then I turned and, planting my feet carefully in the muck and debris that was all that was left from disaster, went back to Joe, who was waiting for me.

  “Now what?” he wanted to know.

  I was sick inside, sore from sleeping in the wagon as I’d done for the last two days. Most of the roads had been washed out, so we’d camped in an empty lot and survived as best we could. I fumbled in my purse for the bottle of laudanum. At least, I could deaden physical pain.

  “What’s that stuff?” he asked.

  “Medicine.”

  “You better watch how much you take.”

  At that, tears came. “It doesn’t matter.”

  He flapped the reins. “Crap! You’re alive, ain’t you? And in better shape than the first time I saw you. You got any money at all?”

  I had ten dollars tucked in my purse along with my precious medicine.

  When he heard that, his mood changed. “Well, hey! We’ll get some supplies and you can come out to the claim. You own a piece, you might as well help dig.”

  “And live like a hog in that shack of yours.”

  He shot me a look. “You got a better idea?”

  The trouble was, I didn’t. “I want my babies,” I said.

  “You want it all, that’s your problem. You could be back there right now, bein’ a lady, but no. Not you. You’d rather sit here, feeling sorry for yourself and drinking dope.”

  “I’d rather be in jail than back there,” I said, and meant it.

  “You wouldn’t. Take it from me.”

  I looked up at him. “Have you been in jail?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I have a right to know who my partner is.”

  “And you been out here long enough to know you don’t ask a man where he’s been or what he’s done. What if somebody asked you that…Pete?”

  He was right. You took people as you found them and hoped you’d made the right choice. I looked out toward the south where the land fell away in mesas and ridges and the limestone crags of the San Carlos Reservation. The Gila River flowed there, its banks shaded by cottonwoods, its source hidden in the mountains of New Mexico that were touched by the sun and lay golden and dreaming. And there seemed to me to be hope in the fact that the earth lay unchanged, had been as it was for thousands of years. I couldn’t know what lay buried in the hollows and cañons of the mountains, or in Joe’s tiny plot of earth, but I could keep on, as I’d been doing most of my life, looking to the future, fighting for myself and my life.

  Joe broke into my reverie. “A couple more months. We’re close. You got to believe.”

  I took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll come.”

  “Sooner or later, our luck’s going to change.” It did that all right. It went from bad to worse.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  What I learned those months I was at the claim was the simple fact that to stay alive takes money. Eating, sleeping, keeping warm, working all require money, and neither Joe nor I had any.

  “We’re a pair of fools,” I said to him over the remains of the meal I’d cooked—our last handful of beans and a rabbit Joe had shot.

  He didn’t answer. I thought maybe he was beginning to understand how desperate our situation was.

  “We’re going to starve out here, and for what?” I went on. Like everybody else, I knew about those prospectors driven mad by dreams of a strike, men who wandered the deserts, the mountains, year in and year out, and whose bones lay bleaching in the sun or buried in the graves they’d dug with their own hands. The way it looked to me, we were no better. Soon it would be our bones scattered among the rocks, our lives that were stamped out. We were, to put it plainly, committing suicide.

  “You take me into town,” I said finally. “I’m going to get a job.”

  Joe raised his head. “Doing what?”

  “Anything. I’m not helpless. But I will be, if I don’t get something decent to eat.”

  A letter from Cal would have raised my spirits. But I hadn’t heard from him in months. Bleakly, I decided that Harry had been right, that he’d died somewhere in the Mexican jung
le, or been captured and sold into slavery on one of the big plantations, and whatever hopes I had were better forgotten. All in all, that day was a miserable one. It was bitter cold, and the wind that whipped off the plateau tasted like ice and felt like it, too, penetrating my wornout shawl and threadbare skirt, the only clothes I owned.

  In spite of the weather, Globe was in a festive mood. The Gila Valley and Northern Railroad had been completed, and the first train, carrying the company’s president, William Garland, was due in at any moment. There were bonfires burning near the station, flags and bunting decorating the store fronts, and from somewhere came the sound of a brass band, warming up. No one was interested in the plight of a small, half-frozen woman who needed work and who trudged through the crowd of revelers, determined to find it.

  “Come back some other time,” I was told. And: “Sorry, not today.” In desperation, I even tried a few of the saloons, hoping my appearance wouldn’t matter, but, of course, it did. No saloonkeeper in his right mind wanted a ragged scarecrow as an advertisement, but one of them, Bill McNelly, sat me down in the back and poured me a cup of coffee.

  “Can’t have you faintin’ on the street,” he said. “Drink up, and go on home before you get knocked down.”

  “I really can sing,” I murmured, hoping he’d have second thoughts.

  But he shook his head sadly. “ ’Twouldn’t matter if you sang like Jenny Lind. It’s looks that count in this business, as you must know.”

  I drained the mug and stood up, wanting to hate him but grateful for the coffee and his kindness.

  “Thank you…for the drink and the advice,” I said, sounding bitter in spite of myself. Then I marched out into the gathering darkness of the winter afternoon.

  Most of the businesses had closed early, and it was, if possible, colder than before. I trudged up the hill toward a long, low structure with a sign that read simply Lodging. By the time I reached the shelter of the porch and knocked on the door, my teeth were chattering.