Bandit Queen

by Jane Candia Coleman

  He grinned at me. He had brown teeth behind his stained mustache. “New case,” he said. “Nobody said anything about the pistol before. Now come on to jail and no more trouble. Maybe you’ll get off easy. If you keep your mouth shut…,” he added, as he shoved me down the street ahead of him.

  But I didn’t. I was sentenced to five years in Yuma Prison for the theft of that damn’ Forty-Five. When the sentence came down, I wept. They might as well have hanged me. Yuma Prison was two steps lower than hell.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  All across Arizona people were gathered, waiting to see me, the infamous Pearl Hart. Men, women, children gaped through the window when the train stopped for water. I could hear them. They didn’t bother to whisper. It was as if I wasn’t really there, or had no feelings, as if I were a lifesize doll without a heart.

  “That’s her! That’s Pearl!”

  “I seen her. I did.”

  “She looks like anybody else.”

  “Ugly as sin. That comes from a wicked life.”

  Wicked, indeed! I stared back at the crowd on the station platform, crossing my eyes, sticking out my tongue, aping their gestures. If they wanted to see a freak in a circus, I’d give them one.

  Some laughed. One child, a boy about six, screamed and buried his face in his mother’s skirts.

  “Shame!” she called out. “Scaring an innocent boy.”

  “Damn you!” I yelled back. “Damn you all!” And had the pleasure of seeing them fall back, frightened of me, of what they imagined I could do if I chose.

  “They’ll stick you in the snake pit in Yuma if you don’t behave,” the guard said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Solitary. And dark. You stay in there till they figure you’ve been broke. It don’t take long.” He leered like a gargoyle.

  “You don’t scare me,” I said.

  “Missus High and Mighty. You’ll find out about scared soon enough. When the snakes and scorpions get after you.”

  He went to the end of the car and lit a cigar, leaving me handcuffed to the arm of the seat like a circus monkey chained to a stake.

  “I hate you,” I whispered, too low for him to hear. “I hate all of you.”

  Hot wind blew through the window, and dust, and cinders. Beyond was desert, miles of it, broken only by the arms of cactus, the frail green branches of paloverde trees. And rock, lots of rock, rustcolored like old iron. Even that changed as we moved west. Rocks turned to mountains, harsh and black. Nothing grew on those slopes or peaks, not even weeds, and I tasted the beginning of despair.

  For the next five years I was doomed to live in this place that might have been the desolation of the moon. For the first time in many years, I said a prayer.

  “Open your mouth.”

  Humiliated, standing in the prison doctor’s office, wearing only my underclothes, I did as I was told.

  Like a mare at auction, I was being weighed, checked, looked over for defects. What I wanted to do was bite his fingers as he probed my teeth. Instead, I closed my eyes.

  “A couple of loose ones,” he said, stepping back. “Are you having any pain?”

  The pain was in my heart, hidden from his probing. “No,” I said. “No pain.”

  He sighed. “It’s a wonder.”

  “It isn’t when you had a husband who knocked you around.”

  Dr. Milton Tatum, for all his businesslike manner, was kind. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell me if they hurt, will you? We have a dentist here.”

  I nodded, let him weigh and measure me, ask questions that would haunt me for the rest of my life and beyond.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Yes. Cigarettes.”

  “Anything else I should know about?”

  “Laudanum. Morphine when I can get it.” I said that to shock him and succeeded.

  “Are you having any difficulty?” he asked finally.

  I shook my head. “I’ve been in jail since June. They don’t pass out dope to the prisoners.”

  “Good girl,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He put down his pencil and looked me straight in the eye. “Because I’ve had prisoners on withdrawal before. It’s not pleasant. For me. Or them. Or anybody else.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to remember my own symptoms. “I guess I was too busy to notice.”

  “Then you’re one of the lucky ones.” He picked up the pencil. “Religion?”

  “Catholic. At least I was. Once.”

  He pretended not to notice the tears in my eyes. “Do you drink?”

  “No.”

  “Where’d you get those scars on your leg?”

  “My husband,” I said with scorn. “I already told you about him. Actually, I think he’s dead, and thank God for it. Any more questions, Doctor?”

  He finished writing before answering. I watched him fill in the blank spaces. Hair: black. Eyes: gray. Weight: one hundred pounds. Height: five feet two inches. There I was, down on paper, except they’d left out everything important. They’d left out my life and the fact that I had scars on my heart. Now I was merely a number—1559. My humanity had been left at the prison gate.

  I swallowed the bile that threatened to choke me. “I don’t think I’ll last five years.”

  He looked up at me. “You have no choice,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Yuma Territorial Prison was built in 1876 on a bluff above the Colorado River. Its location alone was enough to strike fear into the heart of any prisoner planning to escape. The current, where the Colorado and Gila Rivers meet at the base of the prison hill, is swift and dangerous, death to all but the strongest swimmer. To the south lies Mexico and a desert of sand and lava beds, and the same desert surrounds Yuma on all other sides. It’s desolate, lonely country, and it’s damned hot.

  My cell in the women’s yard faced west. From May to November I was subject to the sun’s merciless eye until it set in a mass of fiery clouds. My cell, dug into the rock of the hill, held the heat until nearly dawn when it was finally possible to sleep. Well, sleep of a sort. The prison was overrun with cockroaches, bedbugs, and the mosquitoes that bred in the backwaters of the river. I scratched myself raw most nights, and the weekly bath they allowed me wasn’t enough to keep the bedbugs away. As a result, I kept my hair cut short as a man’s, unflattering but easy to care for, and, in the heat, cool.

  The women’s yard was separated from the men’s by a fence, so I had privacy, but it was unwanted. As the only female prisoner, I was alone most of the time, day and night. Oh, the people who lived in town came up to the prison to sell tobacco and fruit and candy, and many were curious about me and stopped to talk, but when they were gone, the place seemed even emptier, and I was left with only my thoughts for company.

  In the mornings some of the men were taken out to work in the fields across the river, while the rest worked in the laundry or the kitchen. I would watch them go, all dressed alike in their prison uniforms, and wonder if Joe was among them, if he could see me, my face pressed to the bars of the cell where his incompetence had put me.

  I’d watch, wishing I could go with them just for an hour, just so I could talk and have an ordinary conversation with someone other than the guard who brought me my meals, let me out to walk around the yard, and brought the curious to stare at me as if I were an animal in a zoo.

  One visitor, a woman, brought me a copy of cosmopolitan magazine with my own story in it. I read the piece over and over, laughing at the lies I’d told and crying over the parts that were true. About Joe they quoted me as saying: “He’s got no sand.” I couldn’t remember having said that. It was an odd phrase, one I wouldn’t have chosen, even though I had lost all respect for him.

  Sand. Well, there was enough of that in Yuma. Sometimes, when the wind blew hard, we’d be suffocated in sand. It got into my eyes and nose, my ears, my blankets, and piled up in the corners of the cell so deep I needed a shovel. Sand, stone, sun, solitude. There were da
ys when I’d have killed for a drop of rain or a kind human voice.

  “Why can’t I eat in the dining room like all the rest?” I asked Ed Simmons, the guard. “Why do I have to stay here by myself all the time?”

  He looked me up and down before he spoke. “There’s two hundred and fifty men out there, and you’re a woman, that’s why.”

  “Is that my fault?”

  “Nope. But it’s a fact, and the super don’t want no riots.” He put my dinner tray on the table and eyed me again. “You lookin’ for company?” he asked.

  His meaning was plain. “Go to hell,” I snapped.

  “Just checking.” He grinned and stepped through the metal door that he locked behind him. Then he peered back through the bars. “Let me know if you change your mind. Five years is a long time.”

  I picked up the bowl of stew, intending to throw it at him, but he moved off fast and left me to eat alone.

  Sometimes I thought about Cal and allowed myself the luxury of dreaming about what could have been, which made me more miserable than before. Even if by some miracle he was alive, he wouldn’t want me now, wouldn’t look at me with that glimmer in his eyes that had touched me so. He was a gentleman. I was jailbait.

  How I hated myself and my own foolishness! How dreary the days were—and the nights—with no company but the striped tomcat who showed at meals and sometimes curled up on my lap. If only to hear a voice, I sang all the songs I knew, made up others, and, when I’d run out of ideas, started over. I bit my nails and chewed on the skin around them. I even went so far as to try to build sandcastles on the barren floor of the yard, squatting in the dust like a five-year-old, lost in an imaginary place of my own creation.

  Finally, tired of all of these distractions, I asked for paper and a pencil. I’d write my memoirs, such as they were. I’d write poetry, though I’d never liked poetry or paid much attention to it. But poems were like songs. They told a story, and they rhymed, and I sat for hours, trying to achieve a line, a stanza that I liked.

  My favorite went:

  The sun was brightly shining on a pleasant afternoon.

  My partner, speaking lightly, said:

  “The stage will be here soon.”

  We saw it coming around the bendand called to them to halt, and to their pockets we attended, if they got hurt, it was their fault.

  While the birds were sweetly singing, and the men stood up in line. And the silver softly ringing as it touched this palm of mine. Then we took away their money, but left them enough to eat. And the men looked so funny as they vaulted to their seat.

  Then up the road we galloped, quickly through a cañon pass. Over the mountains we went swiftly, trying to find our horses grass. Past the station we boldly went, now along the riverside, and our horses being spent, of course we had to hide.

  In the night we would travel,in the daytime try and rest, and throw ourselves on gravel, to sleep we would try our best. Around us our horses were stamping, looking for hay or grain. On the road the posse was tramping, looking for us in vain.

  One more day they would not have got us, but my horse got sore and thin, and my partner was a mean cuss, so Billy Truman roped us in. Thirty years my partner got, I was given five. He seemed contented with his lot, and I am still alive.

  Ed Simmons got hold of that one and passed it around the yard. For a day or two I was famous, and he told me that Joe Boot laughed out loud when he saw it. Looking at it later, I laughed even harder. Clearly I wasn’t a writer, and certainly no poet.

  My memoirs, as I called them, turned out to be nothing but a list of regrets that depressed me to the point of ripping the pages into shreds and tossing them into the yard. Simmons made me pick up every piece, saying: “There’s enough trash as it is in this place,” and he birddogged me as I moved around with a bucket, always there, always so close that, when I stood up, I brushed against him. He was trouble waiting to happen. I knew it, but I was powerless to change the situation.

  Then they brought in another prisoner, a little brown woman whose eyes seemed to hold all the anguish of the world.

  “Company, Pearl.”

  Ed unlocked the cell and shoved the woman inside. It was a cruel act, and unnecessary. A good wind would have blown her away.

  “Quit pushing her,” I said.

  He frowned. “Shut up. She don’t deserve better.”

  Then he slammed the door and locked it.

  “Hey!” I called after him. “It’s time to let me out!”

  “Not till she settles down, it isn’t.”

  She didn’t seem to need settling. About my height, she was so thin she reminded me of one of those fallen, veined leaves you can almost see through. She wore her hair in a single, long braid that was black and so heavy it tilted her head back, making her seem always to be looking up to the ceiling, or to heaven.

  “My name’s Pearl Hart,” I said.

  She didn’t answer, just lay down on her cot, and curled into a ball like she was defending herself. I understood that posture. I’d done it myself too many times to count.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said gently.

  Still she was silent, and I wondered if she was mute or if they’d shut me up with a madwoman.

  Cautiously I sat down on the edge of her cot. “Hey,” I said, “we’re in here together, and I’m glad of it, but you have to tell me your name. I’m tired of talking to myself.”

  She opened her eyes, and I saw the pain in them. And then she spoke. “My name’s Tally.” It was a whisper, like a breeze had passed through, or a bird.

  “So you can talk.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes.

  “Well good,” I said. “Take a nap if that’s what you want. I’ll be right here. Obviously I’m not going anywhere.”

  I laughed, but when I got no response and bent over her, I saw she had fallen asleep.

  For the first few days all Tally did was sleep. At meal times she picked at her food and left most of it. Thin as she was, she seemed to be disappearing while I watched. Whatever crime she’d committed was destroying her from the inside, but prison etiquette, like the etiquette of the frontier, kept me from asking.

  Finally, one evening as she turned away from the table and sat staring blindly out, I came to a decision. Whatever she’d done wasn’t worth suicide.

  “Look,” I said, moving to sit beside her, “you’ve got to eat. No sense starving yourself, and the food’s not that bad.”

  She sighed, one of those little sounds she made that were hardly sounds at all. “Leave me be,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m not going to do,” I told her. “I’ve been sitting here, watching you turn into a ghost, and I don’t like it.”

  “Then don’t watch.”

  “I’m stuck in here with you. But I’ll be damned if I’ll be stuck in here with a corpse.”

  One corner of her mouth twitched, and it almost seemed she was smiling. Then she said: “That’d be something, wouldn’t it?”

  I went along. “About as much fun as you’ve been all week.”

  “Why do you care?” She looked at me for the first time. “You don’t know me or what I done.” Why, indeed?

  Maybe because she reminded me of my old self—hurting and no one to tell.

  “Everybody needs a friend,” I said. “Since we’re in here together, we can at least be that.”

  “Don’t want no friends,” she muttered, turning away.

  Oh, she was irritating! I could feel my temper rising. “That’s what you think. There’ve been times I’d have killed for a friend. Just to be able to talk, to let out what’s inside.” I stood up and looked down at her. “If you ask me, what’s inside you is killing you. I don’t give a damn why you’re in here. I just feel sorry that you hurt, because I know how it feels to hurt. Now I’ve said all I’m going to. What you do is up to you.”

  I went back to my dinner. It had grown cold, and fat floated on top of the stew. Hardly appetizing, but I ate it
anyhow, and watched her while I chewed.

  She was wrestling with herself, that was plain. And she was weeping. I could see her bony shoulders shaking under the calico prison blouse. But she never made a sound, and it was eerie to see that little body dark against the red afterglow of sunset, head bent in despair.

  But I didn’t move or speak. There comes a time when you have to save yourself on your own, take charge of living or dying. I’d learned that much in my solitary days as I looked back at my own history. I knew where I’d gone wrong and why, but it was too late to change the past. The present and the future, though, were still mine.

  So I sat, and the sky faded to purple, and the bats came out, swooping across the yard like tiny black kites. I’d always been afraid of bats until I got to Yuma and watched them, so small, so quick, so determined to live. I heard the rustle of her skirt and saw her turn halfway toward me, and still I waited, saying nothing.

  Then, in a voice so small I could hardly make out her words, she said: “I killed my baby. I killed my child. I rocked her in my arms and sang, and put her in the canal. I watched her little face go under. Then I ran.”

  Silence. Bat wings fluttering. A boat whistle screaming like a lost soul, and the scent of citrus flowers like a drug in the night air.

  “Why?” I was afraid to say anymore.

  She stood up, eyes blazing, anger and pain giving her strength. “Why? You ask me why, white woman? I’ll tell you why. ’Cause I didn’t want a life like I had for my child. ’Cause I had no food, no milk, no place to go, and she was hungry and crying. ’Cause I was nobody. I was black. ’Cause I didn’t even know who her daddy was, and no home. I should’ve killed myself, too. Sunk down in that black water, holding her in my arms, and gone to Jesus with her. But I didn’t, and that’s my shame and my crime. I killed the only thing ever made a difference.”

  The fire went out of her suddenly, and she sat down again. Then she said: “You still want to be my friend, white woman? You woman enough for that?”