The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Normally I would have relished the opportunity to embrace again this attractive young woman. But there was too much terror in that slim frame for me to permit any erotic feelings. Anyway, I reassured myself, the heat and the trance we’re both in has pretty well stifled sex.

  “What should I do?”

  “Get me out of here. Quickly.”

  So I led her to the car, closed the door after she had collapsed into the passenger’s seat, and sauntered confidently around to the driver’s seat.

  Inside the car, the pathos of her fragility changed my perspective completely. I still loved her. I still wanted her.

  “Do you know what, Andrea King?”

  “You’re not finished kissing me?” Her smile was wan, but still sufficient to drag a temporary curtain across the blazing sun.

  “You got it.”

  I tried to be even more tender and soothing than I’d been the night before. She responded with a total gift of her self. Kiss me as long as you want, her meek surrender said, anyway you want. I belong to you.

  It was frightening, but I enjoyed what I was doing too much to notice my fears.

  I eased her back against the car seat, leaned over her like, I hope, a good genie, unbuttoned her blouse, moved it off her upper arms, and kissed and caressed her shoulders, her chest, her belly, her breasts. I salved what little conscience my hormones left me by leaving her bra undisturbed. Also, although it was a much lighter and less complicated variety than the one with which I had briefly dealt the day before, I still was not sure that I could sort out its mysteries.

  At last she sighed deeply and eased me away.

  She sat up, shook her hair back into place and stretched sensuously, her blouse still hanging on her arms.

  “You’re trustworthy, Commander,” she laughed enthusiastically. “Barely trustworthy.”

  I almost told her I loved her. Instead I said, “You’re the most perfect woman I’ve ever met.”

  “You are wonderful, Jeremiah Thomas Keenan, even when you’re fibbing.”

  “Do you expect to arrive at the Arizona Biltmore tonight sound of life and limb, young woman?”

  “Well.” She stretched again. “Roxy may have trouble with that stupid distribution thing, but we’re almost over the mountains, aren’t we?”

  “If you plan to survive, you’d better button up your blouse. Otherwise I won’t be able to keep my eyes on the road.”

  “No.” She twisted giddily away from me. “I like me this way.”

  “So do I.” I pinned her with one arm and set about the task of rearranging her blouse with the other. “But not a thousand feet above a canyon floor.”

  She resisted my efforts just enough to make the task enchantingly difficult.

  “Finished? Am I properly modest?” She sighed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll curl up and take a nice little nap so I’ll be prepared for whatever wonderful wine you’re going to weaken my virtue with at supper tonight. Don’t drive off the side of any mountains while I’m asleep.”

  “Pleasant dreams.”

  But she was already asleep.

  I was too happy with my performance to pay any attention to the questions of my intelligence officer—like how had she known that my middle name was Thomas?

  Roxy conked out at the worst hairpin curve, as I thought then, in all the world. Carefully I climbed out, clung to the hood as I eased around to the front and pried it open.

  “Don’t fall,” she murmured in her sleep, and twisted for a more comfortable position.

  “Shut up,” I said as I polished the silly little cap thing.

  While I made plans for what I was now convinced would be our long life together, we chugged up the mountains, across the sweeping curves and down toward Superior, driving slowly not only because of the dirt road, but because, inexperienced mountain driver that I was, I was scared stiff of the steep canyons that yawned only a few feet off the road.

  Roxy limped wearily into Superior, a town two-thirds of the way down Queen Creek Canyon from Phoenix to Globe on US 80. The copper area on the upper end of the canyon, I announced to my sleeping beauty—Superior, Miami, Globe—had produced more wealth than all the gold and silver mines in the state. It was twenty miles to Globe and forty miles to Phoenix on 80, either way on paved road. If I drove around the back of the Superstition chain, it was eighty-one miles, half of it on a dirt road that skirted the mountain wall—not something to try at dusk, especially since I was still far more frightened of such roads than I had ever been of Zeros.

  Why not drive her up to Phoenix, turn Andrea over to the Arizona Biltmore, stay the night there myself perhaps, and then continue on my tour? Once I was settled back home, I could cart her back to Chicago, if not for the Harvest Festival at Butterfield, then at least for the Christmas Ball.

  It all seemed perfectly reasonable.

  “Were you afraid you’d have to make love to that dreadful woman if you didn’t get rid of her?” my wife asked me when I told her about my thoughts on this part of the trip many years later.

  “Yes, though I wouldn’t have admitted it quite that bluntly then.”

  “Why were you afraid?”

  “Because I knew she’d be good and I wasn’t sure whether I would be.”

  “Reasonable grounds for fear,” my wife admitted.

  Roxy settled the issue for us. She died, quite definitively, in the service station into which I’d driven at the corner of 177 and 80. Superior, at that time mostly a depressing collection of wood and corrugated-iron shanties clinging to the side of the hills, was evidence, if I needed any, of the failure of the copper-mining companies to share much of their wealth with the miners. Small wonder that communism was strong in Superior, Arizona.

  The rawboned youth who was working the gas pumps ambled over to my car. “Sounds like you have some trouble.”

  “Distributor, among other things.”

  “You come over the mountains in this?” He poked around under the hood.

  “From Tucson.”

  “Land sakes.… Little lady sound asleep, is she?”

  “Marvelous sleeper.”

  “Pretty, too.”

  He then noticed my “Naval Air Station” parking sticker.

  “Fly-boy?”

  “Enterprise.”

  “Land sakes. I was in subs myself.”

  “A lot worse.”

  “You know it. Ensign?”

  “Thanks for the compliment. Two-and-a-half striper.”

  “Land sakes, you must have done some damn-fool things.”

  “Nothing like going down in one of those sardine cans.”

  He leaned back on his heels and rocked with laughter.

  “On your honeymoon?”

  “What do you think?” I tried to grin like a brand-new husband.

  “Can’t beat it for fun.” He laughed with me.

  An iron law I have propounded to my children whenever the occasion permits is that if you find a potential mechanic who is sympathetically disposed in some wilderness or quasi-wilderness area, you do all you can to maintain that sympathy, even to the extent of modifying the truth a bit.

  “Tell you what, Commander.…” He cocked his head. “You heading for Phoenix?”

  “I thought we might.”

  He shook his head sadly. “You’ll never make it tonight. Needs a heap of work. Can you stay around till tomorrow afternoon?”

  I felt my stomach tighten, for reasons I did not want to ask.

  “If we have to.”

  “You’ll never make it in this heap tonight. You don’t want to break down on the road at night, not with that pretty little lady in the car with you. Tell you what: There’s a hotel down the road a half-mile. Picketpost House, after the mountain. Right above the arboretum. Good food. No fancy air-conditioning. But big windows and powerful fans, and it cools off here at night anyway. Thirty-five hundred feet above sea level. You leave the car here. I’ll drive you up there and have the car ready by five-thi
rty tomorrow afternoon. You can get a good night’s sleep and maybe look at the arboretum in the morning. Fair enough?”

  “Carry on, Chief.” I grinned and stuck out my hand, guessing at his rank.

  “Yes, sir.”

  We shifted the baggage, including my mumbling sleeping beauty, to his pickup, which had probably been old in 1935, and rode up to Picketpost House, an appealing-looking inn on the edge of a cliff. High-arched windows and long balconies suggested that it had once been a home for a very baronial copper baron.

  They were only operating a few rooms, the handsome middle-aged woman at the desk told me, since it was summer. But there was a honeymoon suite on the top floor, with big windows and a balcony. I gulped and registered Mr. and Mrs. Keenan. The distaff side of this hastily assembled team was drooping over her suitcase, looking much like a two-year-old who had been unceremoniously awakened from a nap.

  “She’s a lovely little thing, Commander.” The woman had been filled in on my record by my admiring CPO from the service station. “You’re a lucky man.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  We were conducted to our suite—two vast rooms with Western-style furniture, probably authentic, and Navaho blankets, certainly authentic, on the walls. My “bride” slumped into a deep chair and curled up, fully prepared to go back to sleep.

  “Tell me again.”

  “We are in a suite in a hotel called the Picketpost House, after the mountain behind us. Roxy will be out of action till tomorrow. We’ll have to stay here tonight. You take the bedroom. I’ll sleep here in the parlor. I realize this is a cliché from any number of romantic comedies, but …”

  “For heaven’s sake, Jerry. I told you that you were trustworthy.”

  “Barely.”

  “I’ll settle for that. Now let me go back to sleep.”

  “You take the first shower.”

  “Don’t order me around, Commander.” She snuggled more deeply into the chair.

  “Then we’ll eat supper.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place.” She bounded out of the chair. “Oh, what a lovely place. Where’s the shower? What kind of a suite is this?”

  “They call it the honeymoon suite.”

  As she sauntered into the bath that connected the two rooms, she laughed as if she thought that was hilariously funny.

  Like Queen Victoria, I was not amused.

  CHAPTER 10

  SHE WORE A LOOSELY FITTING PRINT SUNDRESS, WITH THIN straps, mostly blue in color, at dinner. It was appropriate garb for the high-ceilinged dining room with a light breeze that was whipped into a pleasant minor tornado by the giant fans above us. She seemed to have recovered all of her vitality.

  “You’re staring at me, Commander.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been staring since the railroad station in Tucson. Women are meant to be stared at by men. Especially when they are as pretty as you are.”

  “I don’t object, exactly, but people will think …”

  “That we’re on a honeymoon. They think that already. That’s why we’re in the bridal suite. I wish I were that lucky.”

  Darker flush.

  “I’m sure no one thinks that.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “How long did I sleep?” She changed the subject, ignoring what was, for all practical purposes, a proposal. It was a light-hearted one indeed, and I would have been scared stiff if she had responded positively to it. “What did I miss?”

  “I think you were asleep for more than an hour and probably because you consumed more of that Cabernet than I did, just as you are well on your way to drinking more than your half of this Medoc. And I don’t think it’s crazy to imagine you as my wife.”

  “It is, Jerry.” She was instantly serious. “It really is, but it’s nice of you to pretend that it isn’t. Did I dream that you kissed me up there by some horrible copper mine?”

  “Do I strike you as the kind of pilot who would run a risk like that on a dangerous mission through those mountains?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “So it must have been a dream. Was it a nice one?”

  “Very,” she said as she flushed brightly, “but you shouldn’t pry into my dreams.”

  “I won’t.”

  She considered me thoughtfully. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “About what?”

  “About my dream?”

  “No.”

  “You did kiss me.” She clutched her throat.

  “Repeatedly and avariciously. You enjoyed it. Not as much as you seem to be enjoying that steak.”

  Absently she played with a large bit of meat, already impaled on her fast-working fork.

  “I was drunk.”

  “There was a taste of the creature on your breath. You smelled nice, however. Must have been the perfume you bought at Steinfeld’s.”

  She put down the fork, closed her eyes, and turned purple. “Why did you let me drink so much?”

  “I think it was as much horror at the stories I told you about the copper mines. I wouldn’t have kissed you unless I thought you wanted me to.”

  “I’m sure”—her eyes opened—”I wanted you to. I don’t want to be shameless. I’m really not.”

  “You really weren’t.”

  “Sure? I don’t always trust myself.”

  I finally realized that this was not a joke. “Andrea King,” I said as I touched her fingertips, “stop worrying. You were both very generous and very modest. Now eat your steak before it gets cold and drink your wine and remember your pleasant dream with a clear conscience.”

  She picked up her fork. “Do you feel sometimes that these last two days have all been a dream—that the dreamworld and the other world … I mean …”

  “That maybe the boundaries have slipped somewhere? You raised that question in the mountains too. Maybe, as far as I’m concerned, it has been a wonderful dream.”

  “So far.” She was suddenly terrified. “Please, don’t let it become a nightmare.”

  “It won’t.” I touched her fingertips. “Don’t worry.” Then stupidly I added, “I’ll probably be able to get you to Phoenix tomorrow afternoon. It’s only forty miles from here.”

  “But what about your Superstitious Mountains?”

  “Superstition. I’ll do that by myself.”

  “No, you won’t.” She waved her fork imperiously. “I thought I made that clear.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Carry on, Commander.… Now …” She paused as she wolfed in a large bite of steak and washed it down with a big gulp of Medoc. “Uhm … good … what was I saying? Oh, yes, when I was drunk on your wine up there and scared by your stories, did I persuade you to believe in God?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not even when I was kissing you?”

  “Mostly I was kissing you.…” I hesitated. An interesting answer was forming on my lips. I would not speak it.

  “And if heaven will be like that”—I did say it—”I might sign on.”

  She didn’t laugh. Rather, tears welled up in her vast blue eyes.

  “That’s very sweet, Jerry. Heaven should be much better.”

  Heaven—my lips against her lips, her throat, her breasts, her belly for all eternity. An Islamic paradise, but none of your houris would be as contentious and combative as my Andrea. An interesting possibility.

  A God who would be responsible for that sort of happiness—including especially a challenging and combative foil with whom both to love and fight—might be a God who, as my brother Packy says, would wipe away all our tears.

  “Suddenly very quiet? Have I made progress in my debate with you?”

  “Maybe a little. I was thinking about my lips against your breasts for all eternity.”

  She flushed again. “It would soon be a bore.… I didn’t take off my new bra, did I?” Her hand fluttered protectively at her breasts.

  “Nope. Not that I would have minded.”

  “Let’s
change the subject. I’m confused.”

  “So am I.” My face felt as red as hers looked. “Let me tell you more about how they mine copper. Did you notice the tall smokestacks and the dirty ponds around all the mines? That’s because they do the smelting right here. It’s a lot easier to ship copper after it’s been through the smelter.”

  “Can I have ice cream and that nice cognac drink?”

  “As much as you want. We can sleep late tomorrow morning.”

  Do I have to say I was dizzy with affection and desire? But resolute in my intentions. CAG One does not falter. A Scout is trustworthy. Was that part of my Scout oath? I can’t quite remember. I don’t know whether I remembered then either.

  I arranged to have the coffee, iced tea, and a bottle of Courvoisier delivered to our balcony. Pleasantly warm now, we watched the moon come up and once again bathe the desert mountains, more rugged here than in Tucson, in white forgiveness. For a few precious moments we were enveloped in the peace of the moon-washed peaks.

  “This isn’t the same as last night.” She sniffed at her brandy goblet.

  “That was Napoleon we had at the Arizona Inn. We’re lucky to get Courvoisier up here. It’s high quality, or I would not dare offer it to you.”

  “I wasn’t complaining.…” She stood up and walked to the rail of the balcony and gazed at the serried rows of mountains all around us, like giant protective picket fences. “It’s all so lovely.”

  “It sure is.”

  “This really isn’t the honeymoon suite?”

  “All we could get, honest.”

  “My real honeymoon was in a bus riding from … from the East to San Diego.”

  What do you say to that?

  She stepped back to her chair. “Poor boy. He meant no harm. He was smart but he wasn’t too quick. I don’t think he ever quite figured out what happened. A few drinks, some not very satisfying sex, and a few months later his whole life changed.”

  “For the better, I should think.”

  “Oh, no.” She slipped gracefully back into her chair. “He didn’t think so. He did his duty, however.” Her voice trailed off. “We were happy for a few months, very happy. I think … it might have been all right if …”

  “Any man who would not be happy with you,” I said thickly, “would have been less than human.”