The Chili Queen (12 page)

That day, Ned showed Emma the ranch country around Nalgitas. The following day, he took her to What Cheer, a deserted mining town on the rail line between Nalgitas and Jasper. The tracks had looped north to What Cheer because of the area’s once-promising gold discoveries. The deposits proved to be shallow, however. The precious metal played out, and the miners moved on. But the railroad still jogged north through the old town, then turned abruptly southwest to Jasper.

Now, not so many years after the town was founded, What Cheer was rotting into the earth. A depot, a store, and a saloon built of milled lumber sagged; their windowpanes were broken out. The only other buildings were a few log cabins that squatted along the single street, weeds growing on their dirt roofs. They had been thrown up hastily, without windows. Their doors were open, as if the occupants had been too anxious to leave to close them. Only one of them had a front porch, and Ned and Emma stopped beside it, tying their horses to the porch post. Emma found a chair with three legs and sat down on it, carefully leaning her head against the wall and rubbing her hands over her face. Then she leaned foward, balancing herself on the chair, and looked down the street. She seemed to find What Cheer an interesting scene. “I always liked a mining town,” she said.

Ned, seated on the porch at her feet, asked, “When did you see one before now?”

Emma’s chair wobbled as she looked down at him. “Oh, I haven’t. I’ve just seen pictures is all. Mining towns always appear so…so haphazard, you know, as if people didn’t care what they looked like, as if the life itself was more important than the place they lived in.” She gave up on the chair and stood up. “I have lived with too much order.”

“I never liked farming myself.”

Emma took off her hat, and unpinned her hair, shaking it out. She separated it into strands with her fingers and began making a single fat braid. “You were a farmer?” she asked.

“Like I told you, I ran off when I was kid. It was during the war, and I tried to join up as a drummer with the Union. But my father found out about it, and he whipped me. So I just lit out west instead, all the way from Ft. Madison, Iowa.”

“And procured a new name. ‘Ned Partner’ is much too grand to be real.”

Ned grinned. Even Addie hadn’t figured that out. “I kind of liked the sound of ‘Ned Partner.’ It’s better than ‘Billy Keeler,’ at any rate.” Ned had never told anybody his real name, but after all those years, what did it matter? Besides, there was nobody Emma could tell.

“Do they know where you are?” Emma extracted a piece of string from a pocket and tied it around the end of her braid.

“Nope. I’ve got a sister, Alice. I write to her every now and then, but she doesn’t know how to reach me.”

“Maybe she’s dead.”

Ned thought that over. He reached for a stem of dried grass and stripped it. “I wouldn’t like to think so.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it is the writing alone that matters. Have you thought about seeing your family again?”

Ned shook his head. “I’m not much for going back. Now take Addie, she’s different. She’s all the time talking about going back to San Antonio. She loves San Antonio.”

“But not Iowa?”

“Now why’d she want to go to Iowa? Far as I know, she’s never been there.”

Ned thought about what he’d said and looked at Emma to see if she’d caught it. She gave him a wry smile, and he wondered how long she had known he and Addie were not brother and sister, maybe from the beginning. He threw away the stem and reached for another, pulling it out by the roots. “I never wanted to farm, leastways not along the Mississippi. You could drown in your own sweat back there. But ranching, now there’s something different.”

Emma didn’t seem to hear him. She shaded her eyes as she looked out over the town. Then she stepped off into the dirt and began to walk slowly down the street, peering into the houses. Ned followed, and in a minute, they reached the depot and stopped. There was no platform, and the train station itself was just a board shack with a sign above it that read
WHAT CHEER
. The sign was as warped and faded as the town.

“There’s no stationmaster. Does the train stop here anymore?” Emma asked.

“I suppose, if somebody wanted it to, that is. But why would anyone want to stop at What Cheer?”

Emma shrugged. “Maybe a cowboy.” She peered into the dark building. “Does anyone still live here?”

“Not that I know of. Every now and then an old prospector says he’s coming out here to find the mother lode. He never stays long.”

Emma stepped into the depot, Ned behind her. The room had been stripped except for a bunk built into one wall, and a broken table that was overturned. Weeds grew between the broken floorboards. A piece of ragged muslin hung from a string stretched across the single window. There was a rustling in the far corner, and Emma shivered. “It’s just a rat,” Ned told her. “A pack rat.”

“I hate them,” Emma said, taking a step backward and bumping into Ned and losing her balance. Ned caught her and held her. Emma’s arms were lean and corded, not like Addie’s mashed-potato flesh. Except for helping her onto a horse or into a wagon, Ned had never touched Emma. And he felt a shiver go through him.

“It’s cold in here,” he said, but he didn’t move. Emma stood where she was for a full minute then she turned, and without looking at him she stepped out into the sunlight. Ned followed, fighting off the urge to touch her again. He didn’t want to grab her. He didn’t even care to hold her, but he wanted to touch her arm again.

As they walked back through the town, Emma stopped to pluck a dead flower from a thorny bush. “It’s a rose, a climber. A woman lived here. She planted a rosebush.” Emma let the brown petals fall from her hand as she returned to the horses. But she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. She took the canteen from Ned’s horse and sipped, then handed it to Ned, who drank.

“What’s so different about ranching that you like it better than farming? It all seems the same to me,” she said.

“What?” Ned asked.

“You said you wouldn’t mind ranching.”

Ned was surprised. He’d thought Emma hadn’t been listening. “Well, for one thing, ranchers don’t have to raise pigs. I hate pigs.”

Emma laughed, and Ned liked her laugh. It was a medium laugh, not high and shrill like most women’s. But neither was it whiskey-deep and throaty like Addie’s.

“And you don’t have to plow. I promised myself when I left home, I’d never plow another row.”

“I guess you wouldn’t be much of a farmer then.”

Ned returned the canteen to his saddle, then went through his saddlebags until he found some hard candy and gave a piece to Emma. She dusted it off on her shirt and put it into her mouth, then sat down on the porch step, sweeping her split skirt to one side.

“There’s a ranch I could buy,” he said suddenly. “I never told anybody about it before. It’s in Colorado, up around Telluride. I figure I could sell beef to the mining camps.”

Emma bit down on the candy, then tilted her head as she asked, “Why don’t you—buy it, that is?”

Ned leaned on the porch post and looked down at her. “Well, for one thing, it costs twelve thousand dollars, less if I paid cash, but I haven’t got it.”

“I thought you had five thousand dollars. Addie said you got that when you robbed a bank.”

“Addie talks too much. Besides, that’s less than half of what I’d need.” He was silent for a moment, looking out over the prairie. “Anyway, Addie, she’d never live on a ranch, and I’d get lonesome by myself.”

“You might find a woman who was partial to ranching,” Emma said softly.

“Yeah,” Ned said, thinking it over. “But it doesn’t matter since I don’t have the money.”

“You could borrow it.”

Ned laughed. “You think a bank would loan to me?”

“You could rob another bank, then,” Emma said.

“It’s not that easy,” Ned replied. He stood and untied the reins of Emma’s horse. “I expect we better get to home.”

Emma stood up and mounted her horse. Ned untied his reins, then looked down at the dirt at a red flower that poked out from under the porch floor. He broke it off, and without a word, he handed it to Emma. She looked startled, then reached for it. But instead of giving her the flower, Ned put his hand over hers and held it for a minute. Then he let go, and grinning, he fixed the flower to her horse’s bridle. He felt a little foolish then, and mounted quickly, spurring his horse into a gallop and leaving Emma behind. She followed at a slower pace, and after a mile, Ned stopped to let her catch up.

“There is a bank not so far from here, at Jasper. It would cost only the taking,” Ned told her, as they walked their horses. “Addie’s after me to try it, but the farmers at Jasper are dirt poor. I don’t guess it’s got more than two dollars in it.”

Emma thought it over. “Who’s to say how much a bank has? It’s a bank, isn’t it? Banks have cash. Besides, there must be merchants and ranchers who deposit their money there.”

Ned nodded, and he began to tell her what he knew about the bank. He’d been in Jasper a time or two, although not lately, but he guessed the town itself was doing well enough. After all, the railroad went through it. When he finished, Emma was silent for a time, then she said that nobody would suspect a man and woman of robbing a bank. Ned reined in his horse and stared at her. “A woman’d get scared,” he said.

And Emma replied, “I didn’t get scared with a runaway team, did I? If you are of a mind, I am determined to join you.”

“I wouldn’t take a woman as a partner,” Ned said.

“And would you take a man you know less well than me?”

Ned thought that over and repeated, “I wouldn’t take a woman.”

“I thought you wanted to buy a ranch, and I believe I may be the means for you to do so. Or am I mistaken?”

She was not, Ned decided. He mulled over her suggestion for a long time before he told her grudgingly that it might work. And by the time they reached The Chili Queen, they had put together a plan. It had almost fallen apart, however, when they disagreed on what percentage of the take Emma should get. Ned thought he was generous to offer a third, but she demanded half. Finally, they settled on forty percent, and Ned had added, “We’ll split fifty-fifty if we ever pull a second job together.” It was a joke, but Emma had nodded seriously.

Ned wasn’t sure that in the end, he would go through with it, or Emma either. And maybe they would have called it off, but then they saw how much Addie opposed it. That made Ned more determined, and Emma seemed to be more resolved, too. Ned didn’t understand women much. He’d have thought Addie and Emma would have been of one mind. Instead, they seemed to pull him in different directions.

“I’ll hold you to account if anything happens,” Addie had warned. Ned was about to say he wouldn’t let anything happen to his partner. Then he realized that Addie was not speaking to him, but to Emma.

Once the sun rose in the sky, the day turned hot. Emma removed the blanket, then her cape and, in a few minutes, the jacket. After a while, she unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and rolled up her sleeves. Finally, she put on a droopy sunbonnet. “Do I look like a homesteader?” she asked. The night before, she had inquired of Addie if she could borrow a dress that would be suitable for a farm wife, but Addie had scoffed and said the women at The Chili Queen didn’t have such. Ned said what she wore wouldn’t matter because farm women in New Mexico put on their best clothes to go to town. Besides, he’d never seen Emma wear a dress that anyone would notice, although he didn’t say as much. The sunbonnet gave the right touch, however. Only a farm wife would wear it with a silk dress. Besides, it hid Emma’s face, not that anyone would notice that, either.

Ned didn’t mind the sun. He enjoyed looking over the prairie where clouds made shadow patches on the gold-brown vegetation. Spring was his favorite time of year on the Great Plains, when the wildflowers bloomed, sprinkling brightness like colored glass through the green of the new grasses. But late summer was pretty, too, when the grass dried to the color of wheat, with clumps of purple wild asters. Ned pointed to a streak of them, and Emma smiled.

“I don’t believe I ever saw a flower I didn’t like,” she said, then frowned as if recalling something.

“Looks like there’s one you don’t like,” Ned said.

“Lilies. I never liked lilies. They always remind me of the dead.” She shivered, and Ned raised his eyebrow, but Emma didn’t explain, so Ned didn’t ask who’d died. Perhaps Emma was thinking about her father—or her mother; Emma had never mentioned her. Or maybe there was something deep in Emma, some dark secret that terrorized her in the night. Addie was like that. Ned was sure there were things Addie hadn’t told him; he knew her life had been dark. He doubted that life had been excessively bad for Emma.

Ned himself was remarkably free of conflict. The only part of his past he regretted was losing touch with his sisters, Alice, and the older one, Lizzie. If he ever settled down, he might write them and tell them where he was. He didn’t even know if they had survived the war, and that was more than twenty years before. Alice’s husband had been a Union volunteer; Ned wondered if he had made it through the war. Lizzie’s husband had too high an opinion of himself, and Ned didn’t care much about him. Ned had other sisters and brothers, too, and he was curious to know if his parents were still alive. He wondered about all of them, and sometimes he thought he’d like to go back to Ft. Madison and find out if they were still there. He wouldn’t have to see them, just check into a hotel under another name and inquire about the Keelers. He’d never been sorry he’d run off. In fact, he had few regrets at all about his life. Ned had killed a few men—three to be exact. He was sorry, but it couldn’t be helped, so he didn’t dwell on it. The world was a better place without all of them.

One thing was sure. If he had stayed at home, he’d never have met Addie. He had no regrets about her. Ned had known many women, but he had loved Addie best of all. Ned didn’t care much for clinging women, and he’d liked Addie right well from the first time he saw her. They’d had an understanding that they were both free as frogs. Addie’d made it clear she didn’t want to settle down. The Chili Queen was hers to run, and she didn’t care for any interference from Ned. If he was looking for a wife, she’d told him, he best move along and not waste his time. Did he want to settle down? Well, he hadn’t back then, but recently, he’d thought about it once or twice. Probably it was the ranch that made him consider a wife and a family. Every now and then a picture flitted through his mind of a house, a baby in a cradle, a rocker with a woman bent over her sewing in the quiet of the evening. Ned couldn’t picture Addie in that rocker. And lately, things had been unhandy between them. Addie had gotten crabbed, and Ned had grown a little dissatisfied with her. He was reluctant to move along, however. Ned didn’t like making decisions.