“Maybe I’ll complain all day. But then”—more laughter—”you won’t be able to glue your eyes to the next curve, will you?”
“Just watch me.”
I was quite sure that there would be no more kissing till Tortilla Flat. If then.
So I tried for a whole day’s kissing. It was very modest kissing, like our affection in the corridor of the Arizona Inn. We both tried to pretend that nothing more explosive had happened in the interim. We were starting over with a clean slate.
“You still like to be kissed,” I observed.
“Of course.”
Reluctantly I released her, started the car and lurched back on the highway. The words “I love you” were on the tip of my tongue, but did not quite break free. Hadn’t I said them already in front of Our Lady of the Angels?
We continued through the lush grass and oak country toward Roosevelt Dam.
“It’s so much like in the movies,” she said, again a little girl admiring the cattle standing patiently in the shade of the trees.
“You haven’t seen anything yet … what do you think of Barry Storm?”
“It’s lucky you told me it was folklore. I would hate to think you felt this stuff was history.”
“The book ought to be taken seriously. The man did a lot of work.…”
“And forgot to offer any evidence.”
Her judgment would prove later on to be solid. Storm’s book was more fiction than fact, though it was closer to fact than the film allegedly based on it—Lust for Gold, with Glenn Ford as Jacob Walz—that was made several years later. Can you imagine Glenn Ford as the Dutchman, a scruffy, mostly alcoholic ne’er-do-well? He is one of my favorite actors, but as Ben Hogan the golfer, not Jacob Walz the Dutchman.
Barry Storm was not the author’s name, I would learn many years later, but the nom de plume of a man named John T. Clymenson. He borrowed the first of his plume names from his photographer, a young Phoenix department-store heir named Barry Goldwater.
I remember how happy I was when we defeated that “extremist” in the 1964 election. We all knew that he would involve us in a war somewhere. Lyndon Johnson would never do that. So instead of a reactionary with common sense, we elected a phony liberal whose first election to Congress was accomplished by vote theft and who would later prove to be a crook, arguably a murderer, and at the end of his term a lunatic.
How could anyone forget the lesson of Korea and involve us in another land war in Asia so soon?
I feel strongly because I lost one child in the Viet Nam fiasco and almost lost another.
“I take it,” I observed on that July day in 1946 when my world was not so much complicated as mysterious, “that you are not fascinated by the hunt for buried treasure.”
“I feel like Becky Thatcher chaperoning a boy who is a mixture of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn … and don’t even think of stopping the car to kiss me as reward for such a remarkably humorous comment. Keep your eyes on the road.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll catch up with the kissing later.”
“I bet you will.”
I wanted to be rid of her in Phoenix at the end of the day and I wanted her next to me in the car for the rest of my life. Huck Finn and Dante and I ought to be a writer.
“You might even make a good writer,” she completed my thought. “You certainly seem to understand women better than most male writers.”
At the Tonto National Monument, I halfheartedly suggested that we climb up to the ruins of the pueblos where the salados (the “salt people,” after the Salt River along which they had lived) had moved when unfriendly tribes invaded the flood plain.
“Please,” she said with a shudder, “no.”
We did get out of the car at Roosevelt and admired the shimmering blue lake. “I could stay here forever,” she said, and then sighed. We watched the fishermen and inspected the dam, mostly masonry, but impressive for the early part of the century.
Then we returned to the patiently waiting Roxinante and turned up 88 toward Fish Creek.
There were two mental and emotional processes going on in my soul: fascination and increasing desire for this marvelous little woman whom I had made my own and fear for the increasingly haunted (or so it seemed to me) mountain range.
In the tug-of-war between these two emotions my love for Andrea King was a temporary winner as we cautiously picked our way around the treacherous curves and climbed up over the dull-blue lakes that humans had carved out of the barren desert valleys. Above us the ruthless sun glared ominously. In the back of my head one of the various voices, perhaps CIC, warned me to turn back.
So bemused was I by the precious treasure next to me in the front seat of Roxy that I didn’t even notice that my shirt was wet with perspiration—heat and fear working together on my pores.
“We’ll probably encounter only one or two cars today,” I commented, trying to sound like a briefing officer before a routine mission. “It’s hot and we’re coming from the opposite direction early in the morning, and it’s midweek and it’s not tourist season. But after noon tomorrow, Friday, there’ll be a lot more fishermen.”
“I’m reassured. But suppose that despite all your well-reasoned arguments, a Packard or a Cadillac or a truck appears from the other direction.”
“Well, first of all, we’ll both be moving at only ten or fifteen miles an hour and driving carefully, so there is no danger of a crash. Secondly, one of us would have to back up.”
“Which one?”
“The one driving downhill … I think.”
“Marvelous.” My tourist with the sweet and willing, even eager lips, had turned sarcastic.
“Sorry.”
“I wonder if I can make the Stations of the Cross on my fingers too.”
“I’m keeping my eyes on the road.”
“It’s terribly hot, isn’t it? Could we go down to one of those lakes and swim?”
“We’d have to unpack our swimsuits.”
“Why?”
That was an interesting idea.
“If I swam with you in the nude, you’d end up being ravished.”
“No flat place down there.”
“That wouldn’t stop me.”
“Brave officer hero.”
I stopped the car, regardless of the possibility of another car coming around the bend, and silenced her taunts with vehement kisses—lips, throat, neck, breasts.
“Oh, Jerry …” She closed her eyes and sighed. “I love you so much.”
I almost pulled off the side of the road into the desert and carried her down to the sinister blue lake that seemed to be inviting us. I was within a hair’s breadth of doing just that. Fear of the stark, grimly watching mountain peaks and the malevolent desert sky won out over desire.
My life might have been very different if I had not been so afraid.
Of what was I afraid?
I didn’t know then, and even now I’m not sure. But the closer we came to Clinton, Arizona, the more the icy tentacles of fear clutched at my gut.
“You are going to get yourself savagely assaulted, young woman, when we finish this damn road.”
“How wonderful!” she whispered.
While I would not dream of returning to the Tonto National Monument, one of my kids—the woman doctor who, before she married, used to travel with a sleeping bag in the trunk of her Chevy and has been known to spend the night in cemeteries—went to Arizona on her honeymoon. (She had married a man who had accepted her condition that, before she considered him, he would have to spend a night in a sleeping bag in a graveyard with her, separate bag too, but that’s another story.) She reports that the upper half of the Apache trail has not changed. It’s still a one lane dirt trail clinging dubiously to blood red, rust brown, and burnished gold cliffs with smooth blue lakes below and soaring mountains above. I was too busy watching the road to enjoy the scenery very much.
“Why are we going up here?” Andrea demanded impatiently. “I thought you were taking me to Pho
enix.”
“The Flying … I mean the Lost Dutchman Mine.” I stole a glance at her. “Remember, we’ve talked about it?”
“You think you can find in a few hours what others have hunted for decades?” Her lips curled in withering contempt. “You’re a bigger fool than I thought you were.”
“I wanted to be able to tell my kids that I looked for it, if only for a few minutes. And saw Clinton, the Dutchman’s ghost town.”
She did not choose to respond to such foolishness but instead curled into a tight, hard knot, turned away from me, and ignored both the tour and the tour guide.
Fifteen minutes and three miles later, she uncurled.
“Who was that snippy little bitch that was in this car while I was away? Don’t let her in the car again.”
“I didn’t get too close a look at her. I was watching the road.”
“Well, don’t let her back in, she’s a pain.”
“She comes and she goes.”
I was rewarded with another kiss on my right ear.
“I’m jittery for some reason, Jerry. Forgive me. I guess it’s the heat. And this place scares me. Now don’t say I insisted on coming. I know I did.”
“Yes, Miss Thatcher.”
We drove on, her left hand now protectively on my arm. I hoped the right was tolling the imaginary beads. I was not so far along in my reconversion that I believed God was capable of protecting us from the dangers of the Apache Trail. But I was sufficiently frightened by the narrow road and the hairpin turns to welcome prayers “to whom it may concern.”
The Superstition Mountains earn their name. While the colors and the sweep of orderly ranks of mountain ridges are beautifully stunning, the general effect is still to create a feeling of the eerie—huge rocks poised over the dirt road as though they were ready to plunge down on you; steep, dark canyons; mad hairpin turns; brooding mountains that seemed ready on an instant’s notice to become dangerous volcanoes again. The foothills of hell, perhaps. Any evil that could be, might be here.
We paused for a picnic lunch on the side of Apache Lake. And some mild necking and petting. It was too hot even to think of anything more affectionate.
I smothered her breasts with gentle kisses, affectionate and respectful, not demanding.
“I love you,” I said when I knew it was time to stop and removed my hungry lips from her warm skin.
“I love you, Jerry,” she said simply as she buttoned her blouse.
I kissed her lips. Then, as quiet as the watching mountains, we assembled our gear and scrambled up the canyon wall to my patiently waiting and overheated car.
In the distance, at the far end of the range, perhaps over Superstition Mountain itself, there appeared a coal-black thunderhead, a smudge on the hard-blue sky, no bigger, as the Bible says, than a man’s hand, an apparent harbinger of a colossal storm.
Were the Thunder gods, fanatically puritanical like most Indian gods, angry that I had fondled a half-naked woman in their sacred domain?
CHAPTER 17
I INCHED PAST CASTLE MOUNTAIN, AWAY FROM THE LAKES and up the walls of Fish Creek Canyon. The eighteen-inch guns of the Yamoto, blazing away at us till the bitter end, were less dreadful than the steep drop of thousands of feet that seemed just a few inches outside the window.
The heat was insufferable, a blast-furnace door left open; water quenched our thirst for only a few minutes; we were enervated, exhausted, drained. The road was designed by the same architects who had worked on hell. Even on a cool day, driving it would have been a nerve-racking experience.
“That’s Castle Mountain on the left, Andrea,” I said through gritted teeth. “Doesn’t it look like a blood-red medieval fortress with turrets and towers and battlements?”
“No.”
“Well, what does it look like?”
“It looks like a mountain trying to look like a medieval castle with—watch out!”
I’ll admit we skidded a little.
“Nothing to worry about.” The sweat was pouring off my forehead as if the Thunder gods were emptying buckets of water on me. From not believing in any God I had quickly drifted to wondering whether the Thunder gods could be real and might punish me for violating their sexual rules.
That’s ridiculous. Surely there had been other lovers along this mountain range. You’re losing your nerve, that’s the problem, not the Thunder gods. Cool Jerry Keenan, never frightened in combat. Right?
“Are you scared, Commander?” she asked as her fingers dug into my right arm.
“Sure am.”
“Good.” She sighed in mock relief. “Then I don’t have to be.”
The turns and curves became a little bit less spectacular as we drew near the side road up the side of Fish Creek Peak to Lost Dutchman Canyon.
And today’s batch of ominous thunderheads were already building up—dark, fierce, angry.
I stopped the car in the area where there was supposed to be a road back to Clinton. Ought I to call the game on account of darkness? Did I want to drive down this mountain goat’s trail in a storm? Or after it had turned into an instant river with treacherous waterfalls?
Take her on to Phoenix before dark. Be done with her. She’s haunted. Bad news.
The F6F pilot with his Navy Cross and Star tucked away somewhere, not quite sure where—would he lose his nerve and turn back?
I would, instead, compromise.
“We’ll look at the ghost town for a few minutes and then come back. It’s maybe a half-mile up from here,” I said to my reluctant tourist. “It’s called Clinton; most ghost towns have Anglo-Saxon rather than Spanish—”
Her mood changed instantly. She was no longer a scared but witty companion on an unnerving auto ride, rather like the girls who used to ride with me on the bobs at Riverview Amusement park. Now she was crazy. “Ghost town!” she screamed hysterically.
She curled up into her familiar knot against the car door.
“Relax, Andrea,” I said, firmly gripping her shoulder, “ghost towns don’t have ghosts. They’re just old abandoned mining towns. Relics of the past.”
She changed again. Instead of the hard knot at the far end of the front seat, she became a soft little girl clinging to my arm, as she had at the worst of the hair turns.
“Sorry.” She struggled upright in the car seat. “It’s that little bitch again. She sneaks into your car when I’m gone. You really shouldn’t tolerate her. Send her home.”
“I’ll keep that recommendation in mind.”
“I’d never act that way.”
“What I like is a satisfied tourist.”
She laughed and I laughed too. Contagious enthusiasm.
I started the car again and crept along the road, map in one hand, searching for the Clinton turnoff. I finally found it and wished that I had not.
One glance at the real-world counterpart of the “road” marked on my map, jutting off at right angles from Arizona 88, told me that we could not drive it. I parked the car close to the wall of the mountain, turned to her, and tilted her chin up. “I’m afraid we’ll have to walk. Do you want to wait? I’ll be back in an hour.”
“I’ll come with you, Commander. That’s why I’m here.”
The two of us climbed out of Roxinante, she with more vigor than I.
“Are you sure?”
“Pilots, man your planes,” she said gamely.
“Make love first,” my CIC insisted; “screw her real good and tell her irrevocably that you love her. Wrap it all up before you go up that road.”
“You’ve never recommended anything that impulsive before.”
“We’ve never been in a situation like this before. Have I ever been wrong?”
I turned him off, put my arm around Andrea and led her up the trail toward Clinton, Arizona.
“Lost Dutchman’s Canyon,” I told her as we trudged up the tilting path, “is a long way from Weaver’s Needle, where the mine is supposed to be. But a substantial lode of gold was discovered up here a
few years after the Dutchman died. Clinton was founded to extract the gold, and later on, after it closed down, the name of the Dutchman was given to the canyon.”
“Oh.” She accepted my helping hand and held on to it. “Why did it close down?”
“Various reasons. Earthquakes. Rainstorms which flooded the mines, revenge of the Thunder gods, if you believe the legends.”
“There’s still gold?”
“Probably not. The veins were running out anyway.”
“Can’t blame the Thunder gods for that, can you?”
“I don’t think the Thunder gods”—I tightened my arm around her—”would approve of the way I feel about you. They were puritans.”
“Well”—she snuggled closer to me—”the God you claim you might believe in again is not a puritan, is He? Not according to what you said this morning.”
“She’s as eager to be laid as you are to lay her.” CIC was back, using uncharacteristic language. “Take her back to the car, fuck, and wind up this mission. Who needs a ghost town?”
I ordered him to the brig and continued climbing up the dusty, cactus-strewn trail. We finally arrived at the top and beheld the shabby relics of Clinton, Arizona. Drenched in sweat, as wet as if I’d stood fully dressed under a shower, all I wanted to do was collapse and sleep for an hour or two.
Andrea, calm now and self-possessed, stood next to me examining the town curiously. “I don’t think it looks scary at all. Run-down and kind of cute.”
“No reason why it should be scary.” I was struggling to remember how to breathe. “As I said before, ghost towns don’t have ghosts.”
Ghost towns don’t have ghosts, right? I imagine that you can buy a book even today in any Tucson or Phoenix bookstore and read all about the ghost towns and never read a word about haunting. Ghost towns are so called because they are dead towns, not because they have the spirits of dead people.
Keep that in mind.
If you’ve ever visited an Arizona ghost town, your first reaction, very likely, was disappointment. Just a few old buildings without any roofs or windowpanes, vegetation growing through the floorboards, an occasional sign tilting at a crazy angle, wind maybe rustling loose clapboard, an infrequent small creature darting away in righteous surprise that its haven has been invaded, broken pieces of what might have been furniture littering the land between the buildings.
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 18