The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  What happened next seemed like the whole of eternity. In fact, it lasted at the most only a few hours, and maybe only a few minutes. It was like being tumbled down the side of a mountain in a landslide of nightmares.

  My nightmares and Andrea’s fused and consumed us both. I was being destroyed by these combined nightmares and, even if I could no longer hear her screams, she was being destroyed with me.

  My first accusers were the men I’d lost in VF 39—Rusty, Hank, Tony, Marshal, all the others. They circled around me, their dead distorted faces and empty eyes fading in and out in the blackness, screaming curses and accusations. I had cut short their lives, stolen them from their wives and sweethearts and from the children they never knew. I had sent them all to hell.

  I shouted my innocence. I had tried to protect all my men, war was hell, casualties were inevitable. I had done my best.…

  Either they did not hear or they did not care. They were dead and in hell and I was still alive.

  And the heat of the wall to which I was pinned became with each accusation more like a frying pan.

  Rusty turned into a tiny baby, gurgling helplessly as it was held under water; Tony changed into a sailor half of whose head had been bashed in. They too accused me of cutting short their lives.

  “I didn’t kill you,” I shrieked. “She did!”

  So much for taking care of Andrea.

  My betrayal did not save me, the screams of outrage continued. My frying pan was now white-hot, my clothes were ripped off, the invisible hands tormenting me became more insistent and determined. I too was spun around to be tortured by the steel-tip whips, which tore off my flesh in great bleeding hunks. I was to be flayed alive and not permitted to die.

  Then the new dead were replaced by the old dead—brown-skinned, primitive people from long ago; the timid, diffident Salados from their pueblos high above the river valley; Spaniards; Apaches; other Indians; Americans; my grandparents from Ireland, Jeremiah and Maggie Keenan, both drunk; men and women whom I did not recognize, from her past, not mine.

  The Dutchman was there, a horrible grin on his ancient bearded face. And Peralta and Meisner and the Mexicans the Dutchman had killed. And the victims of the Apache massacre. And Clara Thomas—all the people in the legend, all come back to judge me guilty of their deaths.

  They all died horribly: tortured, scalped, raped, butchered, ravaged by disease; men burned at the stake; women cut into tiny pieces that were then roasted over campfires; children whose heads were smashed against the rock walls of the canyon.

  They all accused me; I was the master murderer, the true Hitler of all history. I was the death that had slain them all.

  “No! No!” I screamed. “I didn’t do it! She did! She is death, not I!”

  Even then the one or two sane cells that still were working in my brain wondered when the Japanese whom I had undoubtedly really killed in aerial combat would come to accuse me of their murder.

  They never showed up.

  The dead and the dying faded into the blackness and the blackness itself slowly lifted, to hover like the threat of pestilence beneath the ceiling. Then the dead returned to dance.

  They whirled and spun, leapt and cavorted, jumped and gamboled as if they were celebrating a graveyard Mardi Gras, all the time performing unspeakably lascivious acts on each other. I was pulled off the wall, like a prize trophy, and made to dance with them. Why not? I would soon join them, if I had not done so already.

  It was as real as the Compaq 286 on which I am setting down the story of Andrea King.

  Maybe the horror was on a different plane of reality (whatever that means) than my micro, but it was still real. More real.

  Why am I alive then? Why did I receive a several-decade—still indeterminate—stay of execution?

  I don’t know. Not for sure. Anyway, they didn’t get me that night in the Superstition Mountains. Or, obviously, I wouldn’t be writing this story.

  The dead left me, with a strong promise that they would be back in a little while. I was still pinned against the wall in total blackness. I shouted for Andrea, but she did not or could not reply.

  Then I heard a clink beneath my feet, coins falling on the floor. Despite the darkness I could see the glint of gold. Hundreds, then thousands of gold coins piled up beneath me, around me, rising rapidly to my throat. I was being buried in gold.

  I pleaded with the horror to spare me. I had not come looking for gold.

  But you did, the darkness screamed, you wanted to search for the mine of the Dutchman.

  Only as a joke.

  The clinking stopped.

  Then the Dutchman again. Not the Flying Dutchman. The Lost Dutchman, though he did not think he was lost. And he wasn’t lost. It was the mine that was lost.

  Jacob Walz was only dead.

  He was a tall, cadaverous old man with a bald head and a dirty white beard. He told me where his mine was. All the searchers are totally wrong about where it might be.

  More gold than in South Africa and Russia put together. A mountain, quite literally, of gold. I know exactly where it is.

  The Dutchman disappeared with his hoard of gold and the dead—the other dead—returned for more dancing. The men of VF 39 and Andrea’s half-headed husband and drowned baby were with them.

  They told me there was going to be a trial. I was guilty, no doubt about it, but I was going to be tried officially and formally before my sentence of eternal damnation was passed.

  The charge? Violating the sanctity of these sacred mountains by fucking a cunt who had already been damned to hell.

  Andrea’s husband was the judge, her little girl the prosecutor, the dead from VF 39 were the jury. Maggie Keenan, my grandmother, of all people, was the defense attorney. And she was roaring drunk.

  They turned on the light of the full moon. Andrea’s body, flayed, but still breathing, a twisted, squirming mass of agony and disease, was staked out on the floor in front of me.

  “Fuck my mommy now,” the baby screamed. “Is she a good lay when she’s rotting flesh?”

  “No, no,” I pleaded.

  “Not till he’s convicted,” her grotesque, one-eyed father cautioned. “But let him know that he is already damned to screw a skinless corpse for all eternity.”

  The men of VF 39 cheered enthusiastically.

  The trial was quick. Instant replays were flashed on the wall of the dance hall. My love was made to seem a hideous obscenity.

  After each terrible scene, Andrea’s husband chanted mechanically, “Your witness, defense counsel.”

  “Let’s all drink a toast to the damned!” Grandma Keenan would shout.

  Producing bottles of wine magically, they all drank, “To the damned, long live the damned!”

  Andrea’s baby summed up the evidence, “He fucked the cunt who murdered my father and me, her husband and her daughter.”

  “And violated our sacred hills because of his greed and lust,” the thunder boomed out.

  “How do you find, officers and gentlemen of the jury?” shrieked the hideous judge.

  “Guilty!” my shipmates shouted gleefully.

  “Hey, can’t I defend myself?”

  “Guilty!”

  They began to dance again. I was dragged into the dance, forced to pair with Andrea’s repulsive body. I searched for some sign in her eyes.

  But there were no eyes, only empty sockets.

  I knew I was going to die. The danse macabre was for me. I spun faster and faster as I was passed from one set of obscene hands to another. I teetered on the brink of an eternity of hell, where the torments of my dance of death would endure forever.

  Then, from the depths of my being, so deep down that I doubted there could be any reality there, something powerful, indeed indomitable, began to struggle to break free. I lost it, groped for it, found it, lost it again, and then had it thrust unceremoniously into my hands. What was it? A magic sword? A massive pike? A deadly lance? An eighteen-inch gun from the Yamoto? An FH-1,
the jet I had flown in Hawaii?

  All of these and more.

  Made bold by the surge of courage which that mighty weapon gave me, I informed my tormentors that they could jolly well fuck off.

  Well, I was using the same language they used.

  “What do you mean, you poor damned fool!” Andrea’s little girl screamed at me. “You are going to hell for screwing my mommy, that goddamned cunt!”

  I told the child and the rest of them I was very sorry, but I was not about to join them on their return trip to Hades. I didn’t belong there. Purgatory maybe, but not hell. So the bus would have to leave without me.

  They didn’t like it. The violins screeched more wildly, the dancers whirled more insanely. Jeremiah Thomas Peter Keenan, USNR, dug in his heels. “No. And I mean no.”

  “All right, we’ll take her.” John King glared furiously at me from his single bloodstained eye.

  “She’s the one we want anyway,” the men of VF 39 shouted barbarously. “You took our women, we have come to take your cunt to hell with us forever and ever. Amen.”

  Fine. You can have her. She belongs in hell.

  They tossed me back to the wall and continued their feverish gavotte. Andrea’s skinless, mutilated body was caught up in their dance. She shrieked in her terrible agony but danced with them, tossed from one to another, because this was an assigned part of her eternal torment.

  “Yes, she is the one we want. We will come for him later.”

  “It’s all right with me. I thought she looked like she was dead the first time I saw her. Take her and you’re welcome.”

  Exhausted, burning with heat, terrified, ready to die if only to escape the madness, I thought about my decision.

  The magic sword was still in my hands. “Coward. Use it for her.”

  “I don’t want her. I never wanted her.”

  “Your life will be empty without her. You know it.”

  How did CIC get in this courthouse?

  “Never mind, I’m correct as always. Take her away from them.”

  “Your name and rank and specialty, CIC.”

  “Michael, Seraph, wars in heaven. Now get her back, you stupid bastard. We’ve put a lot of work into her.”

  “Really?”

  “You’ve known all along that she’s special.”

  “I guess. Did you guys make her such a good lay?”

  “Who else? Now stop this stupid discussion and get her back before you really upset us, you worthless, gutless, frigging son of a bitch.”

  “You betcha, sir. Right away, sir.”

  Never argue with a seraph.

  “Wait a minute, guys; I’m the hero of this Western. I’ve just made up my mind you can’t have her either. Why not? Because she’s mine, not yours, that’s why not. I have staked my claim on her. The Dutchman can have his damn mine. I’ll take her. The matter is not subject for discussion.”

  “Who says so?”

  “CAG One says so! Pilots, man your planes!”

  “You can’t have her. She is already damned.”

  “Sorry, that judgment has been reversed on appeal.”

  “No one reverses our appeal.” The Dutchman again.

  “Someone does. And He’s on my side.”

  “You don’t believe in Him!”

  “That’s irrelevant. It has been ruled on appeal that she gets another chance.”

  “Fuck him! We’ve got her.”

  “Fuck you! I’m taking her back.”

  Many years later I wondered if what came next really was a war in heaven.

  Leyte Gulf on a bigger scale. Between good and evil. Was she that important?

  At that moment, despite my pain and fear and near madness, I had no doubt. No one was ever more important.

  Whatever it was, the struggle for Andrea King—if that was her name—was titanic. Not a debate, not a trial, not an argument, but a furious tug of war, a war in heaven. I wanted her and they wanted her. I loved her and they hated her. We fought all night. Often I gave up and consigned her to their mercies for all eternity. Equally often I stopped them at the last moment and, with a mighty stroke of my magic sword or a burst of flame from my FH-1, I recovered her flayed body from them.

  Or so it seemed.

  Sometimes I thought I had won her. Other times I thought the black cloud had defeated me and carried her off. Sometimes I hated her. Sometimes I loved her. Sometimes I wanted to be rid of her permanently.

  The last time, when I was finally willing to give her up and, out of weariness and discouragement and a desire to be done with all this foolishness, to consign her to hell for eternity, CIC appeared momentarily, or so I thought. He was a blond-winged giant in navy dress whites and the five stars of a fleet admiral. He carried a Browning automatic rifle under his arm.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” I demanded.

  “She will be part of your soul forever.”

  “If you say so. But let’s get rid of these guys first.”

  I imagined I heard the BAR rumble.

  Then someone turned off the light of the full moon. Darkness settled in on me, permanently, it seemed. I was not sure whether I had won or lost.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE DARKNESS SEEMED TO LAST FOREVER.

  There were hints of a world beyond the darkness. A whiff of a woman’s scent, alluring, inviting … and then fading away.

  Next the sound of an aircraft engine. Two of them, plugging away through the sky. A C-47. Headed for Sky Harbor. Where was Sky Harbor? And who was I?

  Then, higher in the sky, a whine. A jet? An F-80 or maybe one of the new Sabers.

  What was a jet?

  The final whine was of a pesky fly, circling around my head. It wanted to wake me. I wanted to sleep. For a long time. There was no reason to wake up, was there?

  Consciousness slowly ebbed back into my organism. At first I thought I was in hell. Well, maybe purgatory. Wherever, I was on fire. I tried to open my eyes. The lids wouldn’t move. I tried again, hard. Finally they flickered open. Before they closed I realized that I was neither in hell nor purgatory but under a blazing sun on the edge of a cliff. On Highway 88 on the far side of the Superstition Mountains.

  What was I doing here?

  Then I remembered the horror.

  Andrea!

  I struggled to my feet. The Chevy stood mutely next to me. I looked in the window. The key was still in the ignition. I opened the door and turned the key.

  My faithful mount purred contentedly.

  Where was Andrea?

  No luggage in the backseat. No trace of her, not even of the remains of our picnic lunch.

  I turned off the ignition and raced—well, hobbled—up the trail to the ridge. It took a couple of eternities to scramble to the top. Clinton, Arizona Territory, what was left of it, stood serenely at the edge of Lost Dutchman Canyon, as though nothing had happened there since the last miners left.

  “Andrea!” I screamed. No response.

  I rushed to the main building of the ghost town. She wasn’t there.

  I searched desperately in every corner of that shriveled old town. Not a trace.

  I collapsed on the dilapidated steps of the main building. Panting for breath, I glanced at my watch—one fifteen in the afternoon. If she had started at, say, midnight, she would have had time to walk to Tortilla Flat, which was only a couple of miles away, and catch the morning “stage” to Apache Junction or even to Phoenix.

  Walk down a mountain road with that big, heavy bag?

  If she wanted to get away badly enough, perhaps she would have been able to lug it along.

  Or she might have thumbed a ride in the opposite direction, back to Globe—if there were any cars on the precarious dirt road. Who would turn down a pretty girl lugging a heavy bag on a hot, dusty morning?

  Improbable? Sure. It was all improbable. Maybe she had been carried off to hell, paperboard suitcase and all.

  I stumbled back to the car and, ignoring the dangers, drove as rap
idly as I could down to the general store, which was about all there was to Tortilla Flat. Yes, the stage had left several hours ago. No, there had been no young woman with dark red hair on it.

  I got much the same answer at Canyon Lake and in Apache Junction. No one could remember. “Well, there might have been a pretty girl, but, gosh, I can’t recollect, young man. Sorry.”

  She might have jumped on a train in Apache Junction and gone back to Globe or to Phoenix or Bowie or El Paso or anywhere in the world.

  Or nowhere in this world.

  I raced recklessly back to Globe on US 60. No, the woman at the registration desk of the Dominion had not seen my wife. In fact, she did not remember either of us. She considered me suspiciously. “Is there something wrong? Maybe you ought to walk down to the courthouse and talk to the sheriff.”

  Back in the car, I realized that I was making a fool out of myself and taking a big chance. If the police became interested and asked for an explanation … what would I say?

  They’d want to send me to an asylum, much to the horror of my poor parents.

  What was there left to do?

  I would drive as far as the Arizona Biltmore, on the chance I would see her. Then …

  Then it didn’t matter.

  What had happened? Had she somehow become a magnet, drawing evil energies down to that sick old place?

  Or was she really dead, as I thought the first moment I had seen her? A lost soul seeking her way to hell?

  Was she being punished, perhaps, for having murdered her husband and child? Doomed to wander the earth like …

  Like the Flying Dutchman!

  Or had I imagined it all?

  Halfway back to Apache Junction, the gray clouds were gathering again, the Thunder gods threatening once more, perhaps their final strike. I turned off the ignition and, as I would do when I was scanning the ocean and searching for life rafts before returning to the Big E, thought about the possibilities.

  Had it all been a nightmare? My body was intact. I had not been whipped as I had imagined. I awoke not in the dance hall but next to the car. I had seen no traces of any of the events that I thought had occurred.

  And the craziness at the end. Saint Michael appearing dressed as a fleet admiral and carrying a BAR? That was low comedy, not horror.