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 rapidly 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.
Yet there had been horror of some sort, had there not?
Perhaps the poor woman’s nervous breakdown had somehow enveloped me. I was exhausted, tired, hungry, troubled by the war, haunted by my lost comrades, stimulated by sex. Perhaps … perhaps what?
Perhaps it was a kind of joint nervous breakdown. No wonder people are looking at me oddly—an unshaven man with wild eyes and wilder questions about a missing girl.
A little bit crazy?
I resolved to get control of myself, calm down, relax. There was just so much one person could do, as my father always insisted.
I’d try the Biltmore. If she wasn’t there, I’d fly one more sweep over the ocean to make sure. Then I’d find somewhere to sleep and calculate my next move only after sleep and a meal and a shave.
How could I help someone who did not want my help?
And was I not, after all, well rid of her?
So I drove to Phoenix and found the Biltmore without any difficulty in that small city. It did indeed remind me of the Imperial in Tokyo, a little newer and a little bigger, but unmistakably Wright.
The hotel was being refurbished, as was everything else in America at the time; the manager responded to my Irish charm despite my bedraggled appearance. No, they had not hired any waitresses recently and they did not anticipate any hirings in the immediate future. When the reconstruction was finished. He shrugged. “We really do expect a boom this coming winter, sir. It looks like we may have prosperity before the Depression sets in again.”
That seemed to be that. I could check other hotels in Phoenix, but … If she had lied to me about the hotel, what else might she not have lied about?
I walked around the grounds, thinking about what came next. It was a romantic place—palm trees, flowers, Frank Lloyd Wight building blocks, citrus smell, paths wandering through gardens. Very romantic, I thought. She’d like it, just as she had liked the Arizona Inn. Whoever or whatever she was, she could act as if she belonged in a classy environment.
I wandered into the gold-domed Aztec Lounge, thought about having a drink, and decided that I wasn’t thirsty. She’d like it in here too, I thought.
Was she real? If I could imagine her in here, must she not be real?
Should I stay the night at the Biltmore? Get a good rest and search for her tomorrow?
No, I wanted to get away from Phoenix, as far away as I could. Tucson … back to the Arizona Inn and start over.
I called home from a public phone booth in the Biltmore. Joanne answered.
“I don’t see why you pick the middle of the summer,” she began with her usual whine, “to drive through the South. It must be terribly hot. We’re having wonderful weather here in Chicago. Mom and Dad can hardly wait to see you.…”
“Tell them I’ll be back in the Arizona Inn in Tucson,” I cut through her sermon, “and will phone them tomorrow.”
“What’s this about a girl?” she continued accusingly, as if she had not heard what I said—Joanne never acknowledged any message given her. “You’re not bringing some trollop home, are you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
I ended the conversation as quickly as I could without being rude. Prudence dictated staying here. A good night’s sleep, then make up my mind.
No, get the hell out of this part of the world.
One more flight over the ocean?
Because that’s your own rule.
Doggedly I filled up the tank of my Chevy and, ignoring the rain that had started while I was in the Biltmore, drove back through Tempe (where there is now a big university replacing Tempe Teachers College) and toward Apache Junction.
At Apache Junction I noticed for the first time Superstition Mountain itself. I had driven by it twice before that crazy day, but had paid no attention to it.
It did indeed look like a vast fortress in which demons or Thunder gods might hole up for aeons. No wonder there were so many legends about it and the rest of the range.
A five-star angel with a BAR under his arm up there?
What decent, self-respecting seraph would bother with such a place?
Yet the image of the angel was as vivid as anything else in my crazy nightmare—for such was the label I was using for the experience. I did not want to let the words “nervous breakdown” into my mental vocabulary.
I was not—repeat, not—losing my mind.
It was dusk when I climbed the trail from the road up to Clinton for the last time. The rain had stopped. There was no wind. The smell of rain-soaked earth and waterlogged creosote was strong and somehow reassuring on the dark-purple mountain air, a slide shot that I might label “Twilight Peace in the Mountains.”
Flashlight in hand, I strode bravely into the main building. Navy Cross hero at work.
The hero nearly jumped out of his shoes when the glare of his flashlight caused a stirring in one corner.
Only rats. Or some similar desert creatures.
After they had left, there was total silence.
Carefully I explored every corner, as though my precision would exorcise the demons. As the minutes slipped away, I realized that I was no longer afraid.
The full moon bathed the desert outside in quiet light. Inside, everything seemed peaceful. How could I ever have thought that the moon was sinister? I swept the ground in front of the “main street” with my light. No trace of the mine shaft into which I thought I had fallen.
Was that part of the nightmare too?
My light was getting weak. It would not be wise to try to walk back to the car—I no longer called it Roxinante—by the light of the silvery moon.
I began to hum the tune about the silvery moon.
Time to return to Tucson.
I went back to the main building—the dance hall of our danse macabre—and shone the light around it for the last time. Then I noticed that the dust had disappeared from the floor. Maybe I had only imagined that there was dust yesterday.
Or maybe the dust had been cleared out by a dance the night before.
Or maybe by a rainstorm.
And I saw in one corner of the room a bit of white cloth crumpled into a loose ball. I picked it up and rubbed it with my fingers. Cloth from her blouse?
Maybe.
It was my turn to shiver. I should call the state police. What could I tell them? A woman whose name I did not know had disappeared I knew not where, because demons out of hell had swept through a ghost town in the Superstition Mountains. What had happened to the demons? Oh, Saint Michael had shown up with a BAR and eliminated them.
Sure.
I’d be locked up for psychiatric observation. No one would search for her.
I tossed the cotton rag on the floor, limped back to the Chevy, backed it up, turned around and went down the mountains.
Ought I not return for one more search? Had I not discovered two rafts after the Mariannas Turkey Shoot and saved seven lives?
Yeah, and your tank had a thimbleful of gas when you landed on the E.
Fuel is not a problem in this mission.
She’s not there. She’s not anywhere.
In Apache Junction I passed a Catholic church. There’s something that’s ingrained in a Chicago Irish Catholic from birth, if not before: when you have a problem, go over to the Rectory. From term paper to terminal illness, as Packy says.
The light was on in the rectory. An old Irish priest answered the door when I rang the bell. He looked as if he might be a relative of the man in Globe. Or maybe all men in cassocks with brogues look alike.
He was dressed in a tattered old cassock, open to his waist. I’m sure it would have smelled of human sweat, but the aroma of whiskey was much stronger than that of sweat.
I poured out my story.
“Oh, those are terrible places up there altogether, young man,” he wailed in a near-soprano voice. “You shouldn’t go up in those mountains at night, not at all, at all. There are demons in them, if you take my meaning, terrible demons.”
He seemed to have missed the point that I was searching for a lost young woman.
“I can’t find the girl I was with, Father. I’m afraid she might be lost up there.”
“Had you known her long, my son?”
“Only a few days, Father.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, save and protect us,” he said as he made the sign of the cross. “Isn’t it just the way young people are these days? Isn’t it what the terrible war has done to all sense of morality? Were you in the service now, young man?”
“I was, Father.” I felt as if I were admitting a mortal sin.
“Ah, wasn’t I after knowing it? Brigid, Patrick, and Columcille, hasn’t all human decency vanished from the earth? Your war was nothing more than an excuse for immorality, isn’t that the truth now?”
“There were real enemies out there, Father.”
What was I doing in a debate about the war with a drunken old priest?
“Did you take indaycent liberties with the young woman?”
The question came at me like a sniper’s shot.
In Chicago they trained you always to tell the priest the truth in confession. Somehow it seemed like I was in the confessional.
“Yes, Father.”
“Up there in the mountains, was it?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Did you violate the holy virtue completely?”
In those days the “holy” virtue, the only virtue, as a matter of fact, was purity.
“Not in the mountains.”
“Don’t try to trick me, young man, with your clever answers. Did you violate the holy virtue completely with her?”
“I did, Father.”
“And how many times?”
Good question.
“I don’t remember, Father. Often.”
“Over what period of time?”
“A couple of days.”
“Glory be to God, you’re damned to hell, young man, don’t you realize that? …” He rushed from the room and returned a few seconds later with a massive vessel of holy water and a huge aspergil. He sprinkled me with a tidal wave of holy water and waited to see what happened.
Nothing happened, to his considerable disappointment.
“Well, you’re not a demon yourself, anyway. But the woman was, a succubus sent straight from hell to capture your soul. You must spend the rest of your life in a monastery doing penance or you’ll be damned forever. She’ll fight with God for you and she’ll win. They’re terrible demons, and them mountains up there are filled with them, they’re getting stronger. If it wasn’t for the power of the Blessed Mother, they’d come down and carry us all off to hell tomorrow. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Father.” I rose to leave before he sprinkled me again.
“God have mercy on your soul, poor young man.” He had begun to weep. I suppose he needed a drink badly. Well, I’d give him something to think about.
“Something else I forgot to tell you, Father.”
“What else, poor damned sinner?”
“I had an ally up there. Saint Michael. He was dressed like a fleet admiral in the United States Navy and was carrying an automatic rifle.”
It was a nice note on which to leave.
I know that I probably would have been treated very differently in other rectories. The poor lonely old man was not typical. It was just my bad luck to encounter a loony when I needed help. As a lot of other Catholics have encountered loonies these last forty years when they needed help, a point I make, perhaps ad nauseam, to my brother and my son.
When, months later, I told Packy most of the story of the night at Lost Dutchman’s Canyon, he said the part about Saint Michael was the only thing in the story he found reasonable.
So I drove on to Tucson. Arriving after midnight, I collapsed into bed in my old room at the Arizona Inn. The registration clerk had not asked about Andrea, thank God. None of the lies I had concocted on the way back from the Superstition Mountains would have been very persuasive. Nor did I have the courage to ask him whether he remembered her.
I slept till noon the next day. If I had any dreams, I don’t remember them.
I woke up with a terrible headache, a thick tongue, a bad sunburn, and an acute fit of depression. Having demanded black coffee and orange juice from room service, I gave the depression my full attention.
Who was she? Or, better, what was she?
A lost soul doomed to wander the earth like the Flying Dutchman?
A demon sent to tempt me? God knows she’d been successful at that.
A creation of my disturbed imagination? So maybe I should see a therapist, as my father had suggested when I told him I wanted to tour the whole continent before coming home.
I would never know.
I soaked a washcloth, put it on my head, and pitched back into bed.
Only to be pulled out of it by room service. The Arizona Star headlined WALLACE PROPOSES TRUMAN APPEASE RUSSIA.
A secret letter had been released in which the former Vice President advocated that the United States destroy its atomic bombs because the Russians resented the American monopoly.
Most senators ridiculed the suggestion. Wallace might be a nut, I thought, but how many of those who ridiculed him had seen Nagasaki?
Halfway through my first cup of coffee I had an idea. My contact at the Bureau of Personnel quickly confirmed what I had suspected: a radar technician named John King had never served on the USS Indianapolis.
Who was I to think, I could hear my sister’s voice, that I was someone special? The great war adventure, ugly but exhilarating, was over. There would be no more adventures, and I should accept that and settle down. Right?
Besides, this last great romantic adventure with the widow of a radar technician who had never lived, turned into a nightmare, a real-life nightmare, that made the kamikaze attacks seem boring.
Forget it, Keenan. Go back to River Forest and act like the ordinary human being that you are supposed to be. Marriage, family, career are enough for everyone else, why not for you? Why do you need some special purpose in life?
Your sister and your mother will find a nice Trinity-grad virgin who will be a good, unexciting, spouse.
In fact, get on with it. Since you’re horny again, go home and inspect the girls they’ve lined up.
I drained the coffee cup and filled it again.
Abandon this quixotic jaunt across the continent and fly home tomorrow. Catch a plane in Phoenix. Who flies there? TWA? They must. What sense does it make to call yourself Transcontinental and Western if Western doesn’t include Phoenix? (In 1946 they had just become Transworld, but no one paid attention to that title yet.)
I had the money for a ticket, didn’t I?
I stretched out on my bed, reached into the pocket of my soiled jacket and pulled out my wallet.
Sure enough, the thin stack of bills was still there. I counted them. Seven. Just as there should be.
I replaced the wallet and returned to my coffee.
Seven?
I reflected very carefully, while my heart pounded like a damaged engine on an F6F. I had ten of them when I drove into Tucson. I used one to pay the charges here the night before last. I broke the second at the Picketpost Hotel.
There should be eight.
I thought about that. Go on, dopey, count them again.
Fingers trembling, I recovered my wallet. I removed the bills gently and counted. My heart sank. There were indeed eight, just as there should be.
Try again.
This time there were seven.
You’re losing control.
I spread the C-notes out on the bed in pairs.
Three pairs and one single. Three times two is six and one is seven.
I felt my painfully burned face cracking into a grin.
I replaced the wallet, set aside my coffee cup, and relaxed on the bed, hands behind my head in complacent satisfaction.
My grin widened as I reviewed the bidding. I whistled “Anchors Aweigh,” extraordinarily pleased with myself.
A thief would have taken all eight.
A ghost would not have needed any.
So she was a human girl—lonely, frightened, perhaps in some crazy way possessed. Or maybe only working on a nervous breakdown to which she was entitled. Yet she was out there, still running. Still in the grip of her fierce desire to live.
She was mine. Had I not won her? Was she not the real buried treasure? The real lode of gold on which I had staked a claim?
Mine. And I was hers too. Fair enough.
Had she murdered her husband and child?
Had I murdered Rusty and Tony and Hank?
No.
If she was out there, I would find her. And drag her home by her thick red hair. With a stop here for purposes of lovemaking. Honeymoon. Second honeymoon. Whatever. We’d see about how hard indeed it was for a determined lover to remove a corsetlike wet swimsuit.
Not too hard, surely.
Then River Forest. It would never be the same.
I would hunt down my leprechaun girl with her pot of gold.
My own Holy Grail to pursue, to drink from, to keep, to treasure.
She was somewhere out there. Terrified. I would find her and save her from whatever was causing the terror.
No, with someone like Andrea King—if that was her name—you helped her to save herself from the terror. And then you protected her from more terror by loving her passionately and tenderly forever.
There was no room for doubt. I would indeed love her forever.
Pilots, man your planes!
CAG One called room service again and ordered pancakes.
And steak.