“IF I WEREN‘T TRAVELING WITH SUCH A LITERATE WOMAN, I’d say that the ride from Globe down Pinal Creek Canyon was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. But with you I’ll say it’s like descending from the hills of purgatory to the valleys of hell.”
“If you believe Dante, the bottom of hell is ice.”
“You’ve read the Divine Comedy?”
“Certainly, although my nuns thought part of it was risqué. Actually Dante called it simply La Commedia in Italian. Someone else added the ‘divine’ later on. Haven’t you read it yet?”
“No … It’s …”
“On your list.”
“Right.”
Was she making fun of me? Probably. The light kiss had somehow rearranged our relationship, making it both more personal and less volatile. Now we could laugh at each other, complain, bicker, even argue without fear that something vital would be hurt.
Such is the power of the right kiss at the right time.
“If you intend to be a writer you’ll have to catch up with those books.”
“It’s unnatural how many books you’ve read. Here, tackle this one.” I tossed her Barry Storm’s Thunder God’s Gold. “It will save me the obligation to lecture you.
“After Roosevelt Lake,” I continued, violating my promise not to lecture, “we will enter what is properly called the Apache Trail, named after the Apaches who built Roosevelt Dam at the turn of the century, the first big reclamation project in this country. It was not an original trail used by the Apaches when this was their territory, though they probably did wend their way through the maze of creek and river canyon and washes which crisscross these hills. It is a perfect hideout for light cavalry, as you might imagine.”
“Yes, Professor.”
Since the road down to Pinal Creek Canyon is relatively straight, I took my eyes off it for an instant to determine whether she was laughing at me or reading her assignment.
She was doing both.
“If you don’t like the tour, you can get off and take the stage.”
“Stage? You mean one of those horse-drawn things? That would be even worse than your driving.”
She was still laughing. Damned but capable of being amused by a foolish male boy child.
“They don’t use horses anymore. The picture in the hotel suggests a very old motor bus. Before the war it went through to Roosevelt from Phoenix. Now it stops at Tortilla Flat.”
“What?”
“Not the place in the novel.”
“I’m glad. How far is it to this stage stop?”
“Maybe fifty miles. It’s only a few miles beyond Fish Creek, where Clinton is. That’s our ghost town. In Lost Dutchman Canyon.”
“So I have to stay with the tour till then, Commander?” Now she was chuckling loud enough for me to hear her.
I hunched the old car to the side of the road, turned off the ignition and took her into my arms. “We seem to have forgotten something last night.”
She did not protest or resist, but permitted me to smother her with quick, delightful kisses. “The more you complain”—I paused for breath—”the more I kiss you.”
“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.”
“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 Phoenix.”
“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?