The Chili Queen (23 page)

Emma, too, was friendly to wayfarers, but she didn’t like the looks of Yank and his companions. She was glad Tom was in the barn that day instead of working the fields. He emerged with his disarming smile, holding out his hand to Yank and saying, “’Light, stranger, and take a drink. There’s a dipper for yourself there by the well, and a trough yonder for your horses. My wife has been frying doughnuts. I guess this is your lucky day.”

“Guess ’tis,” Yank replied, dismounting.

Emma, who was at the well, called, “Come along, Cora Nellie,” for she didn’t like the way one of the men stared at the little girl. But as Cora Nellie passed the man, he reached down and grabbed her arm. “Hello there, girlie,” he said.

Cora Nellie was not afraid. She had not known cruelty in her life, and she smiled up at the stranger. But Tom was alarmed. “Hold on there,” he called, starting for the man.

Without warning, Yank pulled a gun and shot Tom in the leg. Tom fell to the ground, looking up at Yank more in surprise than fear. Then Yank shot Tom in the shoulder, and the awfulness of what was happening seemed to hit him.

“Emma,” Tom cried, “I—”

Yank did not let him finish. Grinning, he shot again, shattering the top of Tom’s head with a bullet. Emma heard Cora Nellie scream—or maybe it was her own screams she heard; she was never quite sure. She rushed to grab the little girl from the outlaw and run with her to the house. If she could get inside the soddie and bolt the door, she would fire at the men from the window. She could use a gun. But Yank caught her hair and wrapped his hand in it, and the second outlaw dismounted, gripping Cora Nellie in such a way that Emma knew he had pulled the little child’s arm from its socket. In a single movement, he ripped the little girl’s dress and drawers from her and threw her onto the ground.

Cora Nellie began to cry and talk in her gibberish. The man stopped unbuttoning his pants long enough to turn to his companions and remark, “Why, she’s as dumb as a jackass rabbit. Be quiet, little dummy, and pretend I’m your pawpaw.” He reached over and smacked Cora Nellie across the mouth to shut her up. Then he dropped down on top of her.

Yank twisted Emma’s arm behind her back and taunted her. “He likes the little ones. Not me. I go for the ladies like you.” Emma kicked Yank very bad, so he held her head between his huge, rough hands and forced her to watch as the man raped Cora Nellie. Emma never could erase the sight from her mind, remembering every detail of that time. The grain in the fields was full and yellow, and the roof of the sod house was green with weeds that had sprung up after the moisture. The ground was muddy from the night’s storm, and Cora Nellie’s pale yellow dress lay in the barnyard, covered with grime, like trampled yellow tulips. There was mud on the little girl’s face and hair, too. As she wrenched her head free to plead with Yank, Emma could see the bits of tobacco that clung to his beard and the filthy red bandana around his neck. Yank breathed through his mouth, and Emma remembered the rotten teeth behind the thick lips, and the fetid breath. There was the scent of stinkweed, too, and some flower—lilies, she thought, although she’d never planted lilies and couldn’t have said what their smell was. Maybe there had been lilies at the service afterward.

“Stop him. Please stop. You may take what you want, but leave her alone. She’s only a pitiful child,” Emma begged.

“I expect we could take most anything we want without your say,” he laughed.

Cora Nellie screamed then, as her eyes rolled back into her head until only the whites showed. She went limp as the outlaw covered her with his large body. Then finished, he slowly stood up and stepped on Cora Nellie’s mouth. Emma thought she could hear the little girl’s bones crack. He kicked her until she lay facedown in the mud and smothered. Then he looked at Emma with yellow wolf-eyes and said, “I guess I done full justice to her.”

The men watched until Cora Nellie stopped moving. Then they commenced with Emma. Yank was first. “Show me your tater hole,” he told her, moisture running down his face from the corners of her mouth. When she did not move, Yank pulled at her skirt so hard that she fell to the ground.

After Yank was done, Emma was bleeding, and her arm was broken. The others followed, even the man who had just raped and murdered Cora Nellie, and when it was over, Emma was unconscious. The men probably thought she was dead, so they did not shoot her. Instead, they ransacked the house and ate the doughnuts. Then as they rode off, one set fire to the barn.

A neighbor, an early settler and old Indian fighter named Ben Bondurant, saw the smoke and went to investigate. When he found Emma lying in the mud, he thought she was dead, but then, he rolled her over, and she moaned, so he took her to a nearby homestead. He had never seen a woman “so strewed with mutilation. A white man beats an Indian any day for pure evil,” Bondurant said, as he carried Emma into the house of her neighbors, the Spensers.

“We’ll get them. We’ve dealt with evil before,” Mr. Spenser said darkly, but Emma begged him not to organize a posse, telling him Yank and his gang were too far away by then to be caught. The real reason she did not want them to go was that her neighbors were farmers, not killers, and if they caught up with Yank Markham, they could be murdered themselves. So Emma’s friends buried Tom and Cora Nellie. Then the men tended the Sarpy farm; the women cared for Emma.

She recovered in body but not in the heart. She had accepted the deaths of her parents, but the loss of her husband and daughter—she had never expected that. She tried religion, but it didn’t help. The idea of revenge did, however, and she sold the homestead to the Spensers. Then she went to Denver, because it was said that Yank frequented that city. She found work singing and acting a little at the Palace, a gambling hall, which seemed the most likely place to encounter Yank or one of his men. She didn’t know the others’ names, but she would recognize them, each one of them. And when she did, she would kill them. At night, after the nightmares came, she planned ways to prolong their agony, telling them why they would die, but in truth, she knew she would not do that for fear something would go wrong and they would get away. The minute she spotted one of the men, she would take a gun and shoot him. And if she were hanged forthwith, what did it matter? She had such lowness of spirits that she would be glad for death.

Yank never came into the Palace, but a year or two after Emma arrived in Denver, Yank was arrested for killing a man in a saloon, tried, and sentenced to die. Emma attended the hanging. As Yank walked past her on the way to the gallows, Emma spit at him. “Filth!” she cried.

Yank stopped and looked at her curiously. He narrowed his eyes as if trying to place her then muttered, “I’d take you, whore, but I ain’t got the time just now.” And she knew the man who had murdered her husband and daughter, who had destroyed her life, did not even recognize her. Watching Yank die brought her some relief, but not enough. Three other men had not paid for killing Tom and Cora Nellie.

Some time later, John Roby found Emma in grief. He’d come into the Palace and seen her perform, and he was curious about why a woman with such obvious breeding worked there. “It would be my pleasure to buy you a drink,” he said one day, as she sat by herself at a table in the Palace. Drinking with customers was part of Emma’s job; the girls made a profit from every glass of whiskey sold. But Emma did not seek out men, did not want to drink with them. She preferred to drink alone, and she drank a great deal.

She gestured to a chair, and John sat down. “You may buy me a whiskey if you will do the talking,” she replied.

“A bargain,” John told her. He bought her whiskey that night and the next and many nights after that. And one evening they sat and drank and drank and sat, and when the bottle was empty, Emma blurted out the story of Tom and Cora Nellie. After Emma was finished, John took her hand and held it, and Emma, looking up at him, thought she saw tears in his eyes.

“They wait for you where the dead wait for the living,” he said, and that comforted her. They became lovers after that.

John was a complicated man. “I am as cold as a dog’s nose,” he told her. He was, but not where Emma was concerned. His treatment of her was always loving, and he sometimes surprised her with his kindly acts toward others. Emma wondered if they atoned for something in his past. Once, for instance, they were walking late at night when they saw three mule skinners tormenting a Negro. Two held his arms while the third struck him with a whip. The man’s shirt was in shreds and his back bloody. The men frightened Emma, and she thought the black man must have done something terrible. But in reality, he had only failed to step off the boardwalk into the mud to let the ruffians pass, and that had enraged them. Several men who had stopped to watch muttered about the injustice, but only John went to the black man’s aid. He grabbed the whip from the bullies and struck the man and his companions with it, and they ran off. Then she and John took the injured man to a chemist and purchased a salve for his wounds. Later John convinced the proprietor of the Palace to give the man a job as an entertainer.

If John would risk his safety so easily for a stranger, what would he not do for her, Emma wondered, and that made her feel truly safe for the first time since Tom died. In the years following, Emma had grown to like John dearly, although it was not the deep, abiding love she had shared with Tom. The feeling she had for John was as much gratitude as love. Emma had been wearied out in body and mind when she met John, tired of loneliness. John had returned to her a certain pleasure in living. And Emma repaid him by calming the demons in John’s life.

“I was married once, too, in Cairo, where I had a dry goods business. It was very prosperous,” he said one evening, not long after he had saved the life of the Negro. They were dining at Charpiot’s restaurant. John liked her to dress up so that he could take her to fine places.

“We had no children, so I thought it my duty to answer the call for volunteers. I then took as partner a banker, who would oversee the business.” His eyes went pale in the gaslight. “I stayed until the end of the war. When I was mustered out, I went home to find my partner had sold the store only a few weeks before and run off with my wife. I was wretched in the extreme and thought to take my life.”

John stayed in Cairo for a year or two, hoping his wife would return, he continued. Then he received word that his wife and the banker had gone to the Colorado gold country. John followed them as far as Breckenridge, then lost track of them. Having learned cards in the army, John was good enough to support himself as a gambler, and gambling let him move from camp to camp, for, like Emma, he was consumed with revenge.

John stopped talking then, and a look of such sorrow as she had never seen in a man came over John’s face. Emma reached out and touched his hand. She sensed he had not told the story to anyone, and she knew that it was excessively painful for him to recall.

John gripped Emma’s hand so hard that he hurt her, but she did not pull away. “It was years later, and I had despaired of finding her,” he continued. “I was playing poker in one of the Tiger Alley hellholes, in Leadville. A woman approached me. I thought she was a beggar, so old and emaciated was she. Then she spoke my name.”

“Your wife,” Emma said.

John nodded, unable to speak. He dug his fingernails into Emma’s hand, but she did not flinch. “She was dying of tuberculosis,” he said at last. “The banker had gone through the money and placed her with a madam in Stillborn Alley, who forced her into despicable acts. When she sickened, that evil woman threw her out, to live on charity.” John took a moment to control his anger, then explained that he had nursed her until she died. “I forgave her, for I still loved her. And I promised myself I would avenge her,” John said. Now Emma knew why there was a rage that burned white hot in John Roby. He’d never turned his anger on Emma, for he had a true softness for her, but she had seen him direct it at others. She had seen how his eyes grew pale whenever he recognized the proprietor of a house of joy.

“I have an abiding hatred for both madams and bankers,” John explained later that evening, as they sat in the Palace, following Emma’s performance. She nodded in agreement. She didn’t care for them herself. Emma had no use for women who made their living off other women’s bodies, and she despised the pompous, well-satisfied bankers who frequented the Palace, one in particular. A prostitute whose fancy man had given her a sum of money to hide for him had entrusted it to the banker. A week later, when she asked for it, the banker denied that he had received so much as a half-cent from her. The fancy man beat the woman nearly to death.

“It’s too bad someone can’t trick him out of money—and get revenge for her,” Emma said.

“Maybe someone can,” John told her.

That was the beginning of their partnership. The next time the banker was at the Palace, Emma asked him for a loan of two hundred dollars. She pointed to John and said he had on him stock in the Mineral King that he had been trying to sell the night before. “He has been drunk since then and does not know that the mine has announced a rich discovery this very day, tripling the price of the stock.” Emma parted her lips and smiled at the banker. “If you will loan me the two hundred dollars, I will buy the stock and repay you with an extra hundred.” The banker refused Emma the loan, and as soon as she left, he went to John and bought the shares himself, just as John and Emma knew he would.

But the stock had not gone up threefold in value, for the officers of the mining company had not revealed a discovery. Instead, they had announced that the ore was played out, and the stock was worthless. The banker had no recourse. After all, he had taken Emma’s information and used it for his own advantage. And to complain, he would have to admit he had tried to cheat John.

The two hundred dollars John and Emma cleared, minus the few dollars they paid for the Mineral King shares, wasn’t much, but it made them realize they had a talent for defrauding others. The bunco schemes required all their abilities—intelligence, coolness, acting skills, and detachment, for both of them could be as unsentimental as mathematics—and it allowed them to satisfy their demons. Emma needed someone to keep her from the lonely hours. John’s dark side required that others pay for the hurt done to him. And he seemed to need a woman to protect, as he had been unable to protect his wife.