Desperadoes

Eugenia Moore was her alias; she was baptized Florence Quick. She was five-feet-nine inches tall and twenty-five years old and wore her blond hair in a bun. She was brown-eyed and pretty, if somewhat boyish, with teeth so white it looked like she’d never drunk tea. She had a sultry voice and a sturdy, broad-shouldered body and breasts that were not large; her hands were strong and branch-scratched and calloused; she chewed her fingernails down so close to the quick they looked like cuticle. When she wasn’t in boots she was barefoot, but that evening she was wearing a white calico dress with ties on the sleeves and looked more like a lady than she was. She’d been to Holden College and she taught school for two years and there was a lot of that in her speech; when she didn’t hear what was said completely, she’d say, ‘I beg your pardon?’ She had blond bangs that she kept brushing with a finger as she talked. She said meeting us was a pleasure and glided away to sit at a smaller table by the burlap-curtained front windows. Her face was brown from the sun.

Bob leaned forward with his elbows on the arms of his chair, staring at her. He seemed about to speak and then thought better of it. He stood from the table, bumping it, and to Canty said, ‘Excuse me. There’s something I wanted to ask her.’ Then he walked over and straddled the chair opposite her.

‘Looks like somebody’s in love,’ Canty said.

I said, ‘He’s going to wind up in bed with her tonight. It always happens that way. You wait and see.’ I cut my steak up into forty pieces and then I added, ‘Dang it.’

Bob asked her if he could join her and she nodded her head. He said, ‘You’re really Florence Quick, am I right?’

She said, ‘You may be. Where did you hear it?’

‘That’s the least interesting thing I could say.’

She said, ‘I hate the name Florence. It sounds like I crochet and gossip and succumb in the afternoon to hot flashes.’

‘Whereas I hear you’ve rustled saddle stock and cattle and you came to Silver City after a chase. Some prevaricator even told me you wear chaps of Angora goat hair and pretend you’re a boy named Tom King. That’s the most peculiar thing I ever heard.’

The woman blushed a little and turned a page of the menu before her; my brother snatched up the second menu and glanced at it, rocking back in the chair. ‘Can I eat with you? I’m famished.’

Miss Moore said, ‘Certainly.’

Bob gazed at her. ‘Well, isn’t that the most peculiar thing you ever heard?’

She smiled. ‘Lots of people are famished. Often two or three times a day.’

Bob thumped forward on his chair. ‘I’m talking about the rustling and all the rest of it. They say you’ve busted out of every jail the marshals locked you in. They hint that you kneel for the deputies.’

‘And are you repelled?’

He crossed his legs. ‘I find it mysterious.’

The woman cook lumbered out of the kitchen to the table and listened to each of them order with her red wet hands on her hips and her black hair all in spikes. When the cook was gone, my brother lifted up his water glass in toast. ‘I’ve just been recalling my past and I’ve got to say that you’re the most beautiful and striking woman I’ve ever shared a table with.’

She said thank you like she was bored.

He said, ‘I’m not a flatterer. If you were ordinary I’d just go out to some porch chair and snatch the wings off blue-bottle flies. When I say I’m a true admirer of yours I want it taken seriously.’

‘Serious is a little hard for me, given the circumstances. How would it be if I just winced now and then?’

Bob rocked back in the chair so that the front legs were off the ground. Then the chair thudded down and he sat forward close to the table and said, ‘You’re an available woman in a city stacked high with cowboys who grab at themselves and miners who share sleeping bags and drummers who can’t remember the time the chippy under them wasn’t looking at the clock, and not one of those optimists won’t slide you notes and say how like a rose you are when what he’s really wondering is how he’ll get his hands under your dress. I’ll leave off all of that, thank you. I’m here to say I’m interested; that’s all.’

Miss Moore considered him with some amusement. ‘There’s this suddenness about you.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, there is.’

The cook put their suppers down on the tablecloth like she was irked, slopping beef stew out of my brother’s bowl, ham and split-pea soup out of Eugenia’s, with a basket of hot buttered biscuits between them.

My brother stared and stared at Eugenia’s soup. “Can I have that?’

‘You’re smitten by everything, aren’t you.’

‘Can I trade? I suddenly got this craving for split peas and ham. I don’t think I could stomach beef stew. I think it’d just lump up in my cheeks.’

There was such an appeal in my brother’s eyes that she passed her bowl across to him and he grinned around his soup spoon.

She asked, ‘Do these cravings come over you often?’

‘Yep. Usually get my way too.’