WE TOOK THE BENSON ROAD OUT OF TUCSON, ACROSS THE harsh brown desert. I tried to forget about God and death, war and peace, and other cosmic issues. There was a pretty young woman next to me in the car, who seemed, astonishingly, to find me both attractive and amusing. My fantasies about her became more respectful and respectable. She was now a person to be protected and cared for.
And hence even more appealing sexually—as I was beginning to learn. Barbara was a girl whom I’d necked with and petted on another planet.
This would be a brief tour through the desert, nothing more. I should enjoy it for what it was worth and then bid her a quiet good-bye in Phoenix at the end of the day.
Which was one of the most idiotic notions I ever had in all my life.
“My guidebook says that this was all cattle country until the end of the last century. Tombstone folded because the silver minds flooded and the ranch land dried up.”
She nodded, a favorite gesture, conveying appropriately different reactions. God, she was lovely. I was glad that she would be with me for the day.
“Did you work in San Diego?”
A waitress at the Del Coronado Hotel after it reopened. She was not very good at it. Couldn’t concentrate. Too many memories. Too much Navy. She thought she should start over somewhere else. They had been very nice to her, but she couldn’t exist forever on pity.
“I used to drink there occasionally. I’m sure I would have remembered you.”
“After how many drinks?” Her laugh, I decided, was pure magic.
“Touché. But you are the kind I would remember, even drunk.”
“If we’re going to exchange compliments, Commander, I think I would remember you, too.”
Young and innocent, but somehow experienced and wise. I thought I might just be falling hopelessly in love with Andrea King.
How do you explain a young man who on the one hand thinks he’s going to rid himself of an alluring young woman at the end of the day and on the other speculates that he is not only falling in love with her but hopelessly in love with her?
Endocrine secretions, is what my daughter the doctor would say.
And I would have remembered her if I had seen her at the Coronado.
So I didn’t say much on the road to Tombstone. Just short of Benson, US 80 branches off from Arizona 86 and heads due south. We slowed down to twenty-five miles an hour on the outskirts of St. David.
“Mormon town.” I glanced over at her. She seemed far, far away from southern Arizona.
Tombstone was even less impressive then than it is now. Wyatt Earp had yet to become a TV hero, and the old town had yet to discover it could squeeze a few extra dollars a year from tourism. I pulled up in front of the Post Office Café on Main Street.
“Want another cup of coffee?”
She was staring out the window, seeing neither the Post Office Café, nor 1946 Tombstone.
“Andrea?” I said gently, touching her arm, the first of what I was beginning to hope would be many touches.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Do you want a cup of coffee before we do the O.K. Corral?”
“No … Commander, uh, Jerry … Do you mind if I stay in the car? I’m afraid of this place.”
She huddled against the door; her body was tense, her face tight with fear.
“Don’t you want to see the real town on which My Darling Clementine is based?”
“I did till I realized that they were real people. Now I’m afraid.”
“It’s just an old Western ghost town.” I took her hand.
“Please.”
“Of course.”
The O.K. Corral was a disappointment—merely a yard next to a house. Reality was so much more bland than story. But I explored Tombstone with a singing heart. A new challenge had entered my life to replace war, just as war had replaced flight training and chemistry and football. Pretty, haunted young women were, I told myself, the best excitement yet.
Still, as I stood at the site of the shoot-out, I had no trouble conjuring up images of Wyatt and Doc and the Clantons. One part of my personality wished I’d been there. Another part cringed in horror from the brutality of the few seconds of gunfire that wiped out the Clantons.
As a young man I was an odd mixture of competitiveness and fear of conflict. Or, as my wife would say later, fear of my own deep reactions to conflict. I was (and am, I add proudly) a moderately skillful athlete. I lacked the raw ability to be first string in college and the motivation to work hard to make up for that lack of ability. But when I played alley basketball or prairie softball, I played to win. Even today I can shoot in the middle eighties most of the time at golf without working at it too hard. So I don’t work at it too hard, but I am a fierce competitor on the golf course, until someone else in the foursome becomes unpleasant about the contest. Then I lose interest.
My wife tells me I am afraid of my own anger. I was gifted at only one sport in high school—boxing; I was a quick, hard puncher and a deft dodger of the other kid’s fists. The coach at Fenwick wanted to enter me in the Golden Gloves, a scheme that my father wisely vetoed. Once a boxer from another school took a cheap shot at me after the bell at the end of the first round. I was furious, maybe to the point of irrationality. I knocked him out, a rare event in high school boxing, in the first ten seconds of the next round.
And quit boxing the next day.
At Iowa preflight, there was some compulsory boxing. I had to do it, so I was freed from responsibility. They matched me against an overgrown bully from Texas who had been hassling me from the beginning of the program. He lasted fifteen seconds. (The poor guy died later in the Marianas when the Admirals turned off the lights on their carriers, although the risks were slight and most of the air crews had not landed, a bigger disgrace than Pearl Harbor.)
Even though it was not fashionable in those days among the Army of Occupation, I even messed around with some martial arts while I was in Japan because you were supposed to learn to discipline and focus your rage.
Maybe I was a pretty good fighter pilot because of restraints on rage that fighter planes imposed on you.
As I left the O.K. Corral and strolled back to my car, my head was filled with images of fighting for and protecting my appealing and fragile young charge.
Reconsidering my state of mind now, I think that, among other things, she provided me with an excuse to legitimize my deep-seated rage. So my daughter the psychiatrist might suggest if I ever told her this part of my life story.
The woman to be protected was still crouched against the door, now reading a book. All the King’s Men.
“Very. About politics and corruption. I’m sorry if I disappointed you.”
“The sights on this tour are an option. We’ll get you to Phoenix ‘fore sundown, ma’am.” I bowed like Randolph Scott.
“Silly.” She grinned weakly. “And I’m not a schoolteacher either, Mr. Scott.”
She was still terrified, even if she had read The Virginian.
“What was it like?” she asked as the Chevy plugged along on the gravel road toward Colossal Cave.
“Tombstone?”
“No.” She seemed to be sitting very close to me, as close as she could with the gearbox between us. “The war … combat.”
“There wasn’t much combat.” At last I had a chance to tell someone things I had never said before. “I was out there for more than two and a half years and I don’t suppose there were more than thirty days of actual combat, and some of that was at the end, when it hardly counted—the Japanese didn’t have anything with which to fight back. They were milk runs, which didn’t mean you couldn’t die from engine failure or get lost.”
“The rest of the time? …”
“Monotony, boredom, rough seas, an occasional typhoon to scare the hell out of you and make you so sick you wanted to die. Training flights, air crew conferences, steaming back to Pearl or San Diego for refitting, waiting for mail, worrying about how you’d act in combat. Dangerous because a sub could always get you or you could die in an accident, but after a while even that danger doesn’t scare you much.”
“Lots of time to think.” I kept my eyes on the highway, but I knew she was watching me, her blue eyes soft with compassion. Hell, I didn’t want compassion.
Oh, yes, I did. The more the better.
“And even on the days of battle, most of the time is spent in preparation, changes of plans, fueling and refueling, flying to the target and coming home. The actual combat—you shooting at them and them shooting at you—sometimes it’s only a few minutes. We won the Battle of Midway in a half hour when McCluskey and his SBDs found the Japanese carriers with refueled planes on their decks. I wasn’t around for that, but in the Philippine Sea—’Marianas Turkey Shoot,’ we called it—the Japanese lost most of their air crews—and for all practical purposes the war—in less than two hours.”
“Such a short time.” Her voice made me want to curl up against her breasts and sleep for the rest of eternity.
“A few minutes, a few seconds, even. When you get back—if you get back—you’re astonished at how quickly it happens. You make your dive or your run if you’re in a TBF, you drop your bomb or your torpedo, you turn around or pull out of it, and if you are still alive, you go home. Or, if you’re in a fighter like me, you get behind him before he gets behind you, you squeeze the button, a few tracers lace over toward him, he explodes in a cloud of dirty orange, and it’s all over. He’s dead or you’re dead.”
“Were you frightened?”
“No time to be frightened. Before, you worry about losing your nerve and letting down your mates. After, maybe, you wake up at night wishing you could scream. In combat it’s all too quick. On shore it’s not too different. I mean, the marines are always in danger from snipers or mines, but it’s mostly boredom too, much more uncomfortable boredom—dirt, smell, sickness, no toilets. The guys I met in San Diego after the war said the actual firefights, even on Iwo, were all pretty quick, finished before you realized they’d started.”
“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.
“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.