“How horrible.”
“Sherman wasn’t strong enough about war,” I said. “I tell myself there’ll never be another one, but only a small minority of us were ever in combat, and we may not be making the decisions.”
I thought about asking what kind of God would tolerate the combat I had described. Better not.
“You see,” I went on, wildly, I fear, because in swerving to avoid an old truck I almost drove off the highway, “even the GIs in the infantry will tell you they can’t be sure that they’ve ever killed anyone. It’s impersonal, for which they thank …”
“Yes?”
“Their lucky stars. They rarely see the enemy. For fighter pilots it’s different: you see the fellow in the cockpit of the Zero, you squeeze the trigger, he blows up. One second he’s alive and the next second he’s dead. You killed him.” My hands clung so tightly to the wheel of the car I thought I might crush it. “Or if you’re in a TBF, you put a fish into the side of a ship that’s motionless in the water and see it explode out of the corner of your eye as you turn away. You know you’ve killed a lot of people, the only question is how many.”
“Does everyone feel that way?”
“No.” I thought about it. “At least they don’t talk that way. But then I never talked that way before either. Don’t misunderstand, my war was much better than that of the combat marines. I lucked out.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know.”
I drove on to Colossal Cave, alone with my thoughts, yet no longer alone.
Colossal Cave did not help Andrea. If anything, the entrance frightened her more than the streets of Tombstone. The young woman who could listen calmly while I poured out my private horrors was terrified at the sight of the entrance to a very mild natural wonder.
“I can’t go in there. I’d die.”
She sounded as if she meant it.
“You don’t mind waiting?”
“No.”
The cave was dark and slimy and disappointing.
“Not very scary at all,” I said as I climbed back into the car.
“I would have died,” she repeated, as she closed the book and laid it next to her—and between us—on the front seat. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s nice to have someone waiting.”
She didn’t smile or nod. Still scared.
She did get out of the car at the old Saint Xavier Mission—the “white dove of the desert”—south of town, and walked into the quaint old church (1796) with me. She fell on her knees in the back of the dark nave and prayed fervently, like someone pursued by demons, I thought. Outside, she pleaded to be excused from visiting the tiny cemetery next to the church and scurried back into the steaming car.
“What frightens you?” I tried to keep my voice soft and reassuring as I started the old Chevy.
“Everything.”
I didn’t pursue the matter.
We then drove up to Gates Pass to glance for a moment at the vast acres of saguaro cactus spread out as far as you could see, an exotic, shadeless forest on harsh desert hills and rocks that might easily have been a landscape on the far side of the moon.
We left the car and walked for a few minutes. Updrafts of hot air, “sun devils,” in the local term, my guidebook told me, were whipping desert dust into the sky. A pair of gambel quail were noisily hectoring each other near us. Through the dust clouds the mountains seemed to stretch forever. Just as my life did in those days. I tried to take a picture with my new Leica, “liberated” by a fellow officer in Germany, of the valleys beyond the pass. I was pretty sure that I had messed up the shot because I had the light angles wrong.
“Let me get one of you.”
“I’ll spoil the film.” She ducked out of the camera range, but not before I had pushed the release. I was still learning to use color film (still am forty years later, as a matter of fact) and I ruined most of the pictures I took during the next couple of days. She continued to jump out of most of the shots in which I tried to capture her. Weeks later I calmed down enough to send the two rolls off to Kodak to be developed (the only way in those days). When the slides were returned, some of those in which I was sure she would appear had been ruined and some of the others showed only scenery.
On the basis of my color slides, then, I would have been hard put to prove that I had not been alone during those days in late July.
There was one exception, however, a slide I will describe later and which I still have, next to my computer as I write this story.
We walked back to the car. She waited till I opened the door for her. “Dulcinea is becoming spoiled.”
“And loving it.” She bowed in response to my bow, displayed her elegant legs again, and fed me a hint of her magic smile.
Yes, the smile. How could anyone be evil with such a smile?
There are a lot of answers to that question, but they’ll have to wait.
I was about to start the car again, when she put her hand firmly, almost imperiously, on my arm.
“Jerry, tell me about how you won your Navy Cross, the first one, I mean.”
“What makes you think I won the star?” I shook her arm off. “I know I didn’t tell you that.”
“Good guesser.” She was close to tears.
“I didn’t pick you up in the railroad station to dump my nightmares on you,” I shouted. “Leave me alone!”
“I know you didn’t.” She was contrite, penitent.
I stared grimly at the patient saguaros.
“What I feel is none of your damn business. Leave me alone.”
“Yes, Commander.” A long pause. “May I say my act of contrition now?”
“I don’t give a goddamn what you say!”
“You need someone to talk to, Jeremiah Keenan, you want someone to talk to; now you have someone who somehow is able to understand.” She sounded as wise as the elderly waitress in the hotel that morning had looked. “Don’t be foolish and waste the opportunity.”
“I suppose you think God sent you so I could cry on your shoulder?”
I did indeed want to cry on her shoulder.
“Does it matter who sent me?”
“And you just happen to be a good-enough guesser to have figured out that it was the time they gave me the Navy Cross that I realized there couldn’t be a God?”
I hadn’t quite figured out that myself, not till then.
“Does that matter?”
“No. I suppose not.”
We were silent for a few moments, or a few eternities, perhaps. I wanted to hold her in my arms as I told the story. Instead I buried my face in my hands.
“It was the second day of the Marianas operation. I was flying back to the Enterprise at the tail end, looking for strays or life rafts, not exactly my job, but still what I did and what everyone knew I did.”
“Dangerous?”
“Regardless. There were a lot of mists and rain showers in the area. The surface of the ocean was in and out of clouds. I thought I saw a couple of rafts and banked around to make sure, coming in only a couple of hundred feet above sea level. Sure enough, three rafts, close together, a couple or three men on each one of them. I radioed the sighting back to the Big E, knowing that they’d get a fix on me and send a float plane if they could find one. Just as I was about to pull up, I saw this Jap DD—destroyer—come racing out of a rain squall, headed at flank speed for my guys. I knew what they were going to do and it wasn’t rescue they had on their minds.
“Even if they could slow down and pull some of them out of the water, the reason would be to chop off their heads for the entertainment of the crew.
“So dummy decides to stop them. I had the advantage because I knew they were there, but they hadn’t caught on to me yet. I came at them, bow on, maybe only fifty feet above the waves, held my fire till I was maybe only a quarter of a mile away, got their bridge in my sights, and squeezed the trigger button. As I veered away I could see the heads on the bridge go down like bowling
pins.”
Her arms were around me and she was holding me tight. She smelled of inexpensive scent and railroad washrooms and desert dust—aromas that now seemed erotic.
“They woke up and began to fire at me. I was crazy by then, convinced that I was immortal, that I would win the whole fucking war myself if I obliterated this DD with my fifties. I banked around and came back at them from the stern, diving straight through their antiaircraft fire. I knew I would die, but so would they.”
Dear God, the woman is stroking my hair!
“I don’t know how many passes I made, but I must have damaged something pretty badly. The ship slowed down and turned in a big uneven circle. Either the steering mechanism was dead, or I had killed everyone on the bridge. The last time by I emptied my guns into them. I guess I hit a torpedo or something because there was a big explosion aft of the funnel. For a couple of seconds I thought the blast would knock me into the waves, which would have served me right for being such a damn fool. They were blazing like a Christmas fire—the very image I had—as I pulled away and into another rain squall.”
My head was against her breasts and I was clinging to her for dear life, the immemorial posture of a man home from the horrors of war.
“Did they save the men on the rafts?”
“Some of them. Maybe all. I didn’t want to ask. Enough so the report of what I did got back to our Air Group Commander. I told them by radio about the destroyer too, but I didn’t say what I’d done to it. I knew I killed hundreds of them. We never did find it the next day, so maybe I killed them all. And, Andrea …” I was sobbing now. “It only took five minutes!”
An enormous burden seemed to rise from me and swirl off into the desert updrafts, sun devils carrying away guilt.
“They were planning to kill those Americans.”
“But don’t you see,” I said as I fought for control of my tears, though I was not ashamed of them, “like the Maryknoll priest told me in Yokosuka after the war, they have different attitudes. To kill the enemy for them represents a way of honoring the enemy’s courage. They were happy to die for their country rather than be captured. They could not understand why we didn’t feel the same way.”
“You saved the lives of your fellow Americans.”
“And destroyed the lives of hundreds of my fellow humans.… I know, Andrea, I know. I had to do it.…” I took a deep breath and recovered some of my self-discipline. “Thanks for listening.”
“Glad to help.”
I drew away from her, reached for the ignition, and paused. Acting on its own, I tried to explain to myself later, my hand reached for the side of her face, caressed her cheek and neck, slipped down to her chest and then to the remaining buttons on her blouse.
She drew a deep breath, sat up rigidly, her back against the other side of the car, neither acquiescing nor fighting me.
My fingers crept deeper, searching for, and finding, the firm, warm, reassuring flesh of her breasts. I realized that in a moment I would have to remove her bra and wondered exactly how that was done.
Gently she removed my hand. “Please, Jerry, no. Not now. Please.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt my face flame with shame. Stupid, clumsy novice lover. I rebuttoned her blouse, including the button she had left open.
“Don’t be.”
“I didn’t intend to …”
“I know that.” She smiled at me, I thought lovingly. “I’m flattered, to tell the truth. But it would not be right.”
“I know.”
But it would have been so wonderful.
And she had said “Not now,” hadn’t she? Maybe later.
I started the car and turned back onto Speedway Boulevard.
“Andrea King.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.” I hoped I had said the two words with all the fervor I felt.
“Thank you for telling me.”
A strange answer, don’t you think?
As we drove away from Gates Pass I wondered about the run up to Phoenix. A hundred miles, three and a half to four hours in my overworked Chevy. Yes, we would have to do it. As much gratitude as I felt toward her, I wanted to be rid of her by nightfall. Already I was ashamed of my tears and my clumsy attempts at love.
Andrea grabbed my arm. “Those clouds over the mountains!”
Great black clouds were piling up behind the Catalinas; huge, ugly, threatening thunderheads building up strength for a mad rush down the side of the mountains and the foothills and a slashing attack on Tucson.
“I’d hate to have to fly through them. But they’re only thunderstorms. Typical late-afternoon phenomenon here.”
Her fingers dug into my arm. “Please …”
I pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the ignition. “Please what, Andrea?”
She turned her head and looked at me sorrowfully, tears forming in her eyes. “Please … do we have to drive through them?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“Leave me at the bus station. I’ll go to Phoenix tomorrow.”
“Do you really think I would do that?”
Her stiletto eyes considered my soul again. “No.”
“There’s a wonderful old resort on the edge of the city, called the Arizona Inn. We could swim and have a decent meal.… I forgot about lunch, didn’t I? … Separate rooms, Andrea King, different wings of the inn.”
“I trust you.…” She hesitated. “I’m not proud enough to say no to a place where I can take a shower.…”
“I’m thoroughly trustworthy.” I patted her arm and started the car.
“Not thoroughly, but sufficiently.” She laughed through her tears. “I’m sorry that I’m being a nuisance.”
“I’m not.”
The summer storm was the turning point.
CHAPTER 5
LATER, WHEN THE STORM HAD SWEPT THROUGH TUCSON, leaving big puddles on the tiles of the patio outside my room in the Arizona Inn, my imagination was excited at the prospect of seeing Andrea King in a swimsuit. I phoned my parents in River Forest.
“Darling, that’s in Mexico!” Mom exclaimed in horror.
My mother was, as my brother Patrick put it, “Mrs. Panglossa.” In her kindness she willed that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Since the evidence was frequently strong to support the opposite position, she defended herself with vagueness and denial. Convinced that Barbara and I would eventually marry, she still thought that somehow it would “work out,” despite Barbara’s balding husband and two children. Certain that I was in no danger during the war, she never mentioned my decorations to her friends. And confident that I would never be in a situation where sin and vice could tempt me, she created for herself an Asia in which Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and the Philippines were much like the western suburbs of Chicago—not as affluent as River Forest, perhaps, but certainly as upright and virtuous as Maywood.
Somehow Mexico didn’t fit this paradigm. And Tijuana was the antechamber of hell. I never went to Tijuana—even though it was as close to San Diego as Chicago was to Oak Park.
“It’s in Arizona, dear,” my father reassured her. “Near Fort Huachuca; that’s were Black Jack Pershing began his search for Pancho Villa.”
My father, despite his fame and affluence, was not on a first-name basis with the General of the Armies and certainly had not been involved in the Border War in which Pancho had led Black Jack on a merry and foolish chase. Yet Pershing was the only general and the “First” War the only war.
He had enlisted in the First Illinois—the 131st Infantry Regiment—the day Wilson asked for a declaration of war, was commissioned a second lieutenant and sent to France, and spent nine days in the line in front of Sedan before the Armistice. I am not sure that anyone ever shot at him or anywhere near him. Poor man, he desperately wanted, however, to share war experiences with me.
Yet he almost died during the war—from the Spanish Influenza—and my F6F had never even been dented by a piece of shrapnel.
What could we talk about?
“Isn’t Arizona in Mexico?” my mother demanded. “Or New Mexico?”
“It’s part of the United States—the last state admitted,” my father reassured her.
“They even have telephones,” I tried to cheer her up, “and the Arizona Inn is one of the great resorts in the West.”
“Americans live there?” Mom persisted.
“Mostly.”
“Well, I hope you find some nice young woman there and bring her home.”
This was another of Mom’s favorite themes. What would she think of the waif into whose breasts I had sobbed an hour earlier?
“I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“You could bring her home for the Butterfield Harvest Festival Dance, couldn’t you?”
Butterfield was the “Catholic” country club in the western suburbs, founded in the late twenties because Catholics were excluded in those days from Oak Park and River Forest country clubs. My father was one of the founding members, and even after it was possible to join the “Protestant” clubs, indeed after they became mostly Catholic, he resolutely refused to have anything to do with them, a practice I am happy to say that I continue.
Well, I won’t join them, but I’ll certainly play at both. And take perverse delight in cleaning up at their Calcutta tournaments!
Anyway, one of my mom’s favorite fantasies was that I would someday appear at a Butterfield formal with a young woman on my arms so dazzling that everyone would forget about Barbara Conroy.
It was in truth a fantasy that I secretly shared.
“If I find her, I’ll bring her home for the festival.”
I found her but I did not bring her home for the festival.
“Hot out there?” my father asked in his man-to-man tone, which I both enjoyed and hated.
“Hundred and twelve or so. But we’re up on a plateau, it changes forty degrees from day to night. So it’ll be in the seventies in a couple of hours.”
“Dry heat.”
“Humid heat this time of the year.”
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 5