One of the characters in back of my head rejoiced that I would be rid of the Grand Duchess by nightfall and another rejoiced that I would have her with me for the rest of my life.
I was quite abjectly in love, in other words, though perhaps not willing to admit it to myself yet.
Three-quarters of an hour later I joined her at the breakfast table, where she was eating corn flakes, raspberries and cream, and reading Fyodor.
“My, we look crisp and fresh in our white shirt and shorts,” I said as I sat down.
She glared at me above her book. Maybe a little of the twinkle remained.
“You wind up early in the morning, don’t you, Commander?”
“Always a bearer of good cheer and enthusiasm.” I signaled the waiter. “Exactly what my daughter has, and some wheat cakes.”
“She has eaten the wheat cakes already, sir,” he said with a conspiratorial grin, as he poured a cup of coffee for me.
Daughter, hah.
Little do you know, buster.
She closed her book and essayed a tight little grin. “Two helpings of pancakes, actually.”
It was my turn to be childish. I opened my guidebook, spread out my map and, coffee cup in hand, began to plan the strategy for today’s mission.
With an audible sniff she returned to Raskolnikov and Sonia, as I had gathered were the names of the characters in Crime and Punishment when I peeked at her book.
I was only pretending to be mapping out the mission. In fact, I was worrying about Andrea. I wondered if I had offended her the night before. Perhaps she had expected me to make love to her. She was, after all, sexually experienced. I had treated her like a seventeen-year-old virgin on a prom date. Perhaps she was disappointed and frustrated.
Still, she had acted like a seventeen-year-old virgin on a prom date, hadn’t she?
She had given no sign that she wanted me in bed with her, had she?
How would I know what the signs were like?
And pushed by the demons of curiosity that had almost landed me in naval intelligence instead of in the cockpit of an F6F, I had made my cursed phone call to the manager of the Del Coronado before I came to breakfast.
“No, Commander, we have not employed a woman named Andrea King since we reopened. No Andreas and no Kings. Not at all, Commander, glad to help.”
Right.
“What’s on the tour agenda for today?”
I looked up. Dostoyevksy had vanished. I figured it would not be too wise for me to comment on that fact.
“Drop you off at the Arizona Biltmore—built in 1929, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and looks a little like the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Wright was the architect—”
“I know who he is—”
“Then I tackle the Superstition Mountains.”
“Why do they have such a terrible name?”
“Maybe because they look so strange; there are lots of legends about ghosts and Apache Thunder gods.” I picked up the guidebook next to me and opened to the page where there was a picture of the Superstition Range—stern, foreboding fortress of volcanic tufa that seemed to warn you to stay away. “They are a bit intimidating, aren’t they?”
She opened her eyes, looked at them, and shuddered. “How terrible.”
“Just dactite rock.”
She crossed her arms in front of her breasts, huddling from the cold that the mountains seemed to radiate for her. “That’s where your Dutchman is?”
“And your Dutchman wanders around on a ship, wandering around singing melancholy Wagnerian songs!” I touched her arm in cautious reassurance. “Weird people, the Germans!”
Her face relaxed in that wonderful smile, as though I had pushed a button. “Aren’t we Irish terrible bigots?”
I gulped and leaned back against a seat. “Has anyone ever told you about your smile?”
“No.” She was watching me suspiciously. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It turns out all the other lights.”
“The Irish are terrible indeed.” And she smiled again. I was captured. Years of celibacy, partly voluntary, partly involuntary, vanished in the mists. I wanted her.
“Tell me more about your Dutchman.” She turned, embarrassed by my desires which she seemed to absorb like everything else I thought or felt. Embarrassed, but not frightened or repelled.
I gave her my second lecture in American Folklore 101.
I told her about the pre-Christian Indian mines, and Coronado, and the early Spanish mines, and Peralta’s Sombrero Mine in the shadow of Weaver’s Needle, and the Apache massacre, and the survival of one Mexican woman who for a time was “married” to Jacob Walz—the Dutchman. Then I added the more recent parts of the story: Walz’s murder of his Mexican workers and eventually of his friend Meisner, the earthquake that closed the door of the mine, the floods which the Thunder gods sent; rumors of Apache warriors still guarding the approaches to Weaver’s Needle; the death of Walz and his legacy of a map to Clara Thomas, a Negro ice-cream-shop proprietor; the search for the mine by Thomas and her friends the Petrasch brothers; the discovery of bodies with arrows in the back, the death of the woman doctor Ruth just before the war; the persistent stories of Apache horsemen seen on the tops of mountains just at sunset or on nights with full moons—horsemen dressed in the old warrior garments of the best light cavalry that humankind has ever produced.
I’m sure the lecture ended with my eyes shining. Jerry Keenan as committed treasure hunter, the man who would resolve forever the Lost Dutchman legend.
“And you want to find that treasure!” She regarded me with a mixture of terror and disbelief. “How could you?”
“Not really.” I removed the guidebook gently from her hand and closed it. “I don’t need the money or want it. But since I was a kid and read Treasure Island I’ve been fascinated by buried treasure.” I shrugged indifferently, not exactly having an explanation. “It’s a great American legend, like Wyatt Earp. And I’m on a great American tour.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said decisively. “I think it’s horrible and I’ll be scared every moment. But I can’t let you go up into that terrible place”—she gestured toward the guidebook—”by yourself. You might get hurt.”
“And what would you do then?”
“Well …” She actually grinned. “I could drive for help.”
“Can you drive?”
“No … But please let me come. I promise not to smile too much.”
And she smiled again and I couldn’t say no. I touched her red hair, glinting in the morning sunlight, and said, “Delighted to have you.”
It sounds like the beginning of a romantic adventure story, which is just what I was looking for at that troubled time in my life. But even then it did not quite ring true. I had not forgotten the manager of the Del Coronado. And I had not shaken my strong instinct that this pale, pretty young woman was not quite alive, not the way the cashier at the Arizona Inn and I were alive. She was some sort of in-between creature, a red-haired Irish Flying Dutchman. Or Lost Dutchman. Or lost Irishwoman. Or whatever. Wandering for a time between life and death and seeking my help, even though she knew that I could not help.
It’s been forty years, yet I don’t think I embellish my memory of that feeling. Why did I not drive her to Phoenix and get rid of her?
Because she was young and beautiful and she needed help and because I was young and I wanted her?
And also because I didn’t seem to have much choice. We were both, I thought as I gathered up my maps at the end of breakfast, fated, and that was that.
“Be ready in forty-five minutes?” I asked.
She drained her coffee cup. “Half hour.”
“Andrea King.” I tilted her chin up, so I could look into her eyes.
“Yes,” she said as she closed her eyes so I couldn’t see them.
“Even in a bad breakfast mood, you are still one of the two or three most exquisite women in the world.”
“Really?” A wonderful tint
spread across her face.
“Really.”
“Queen Mary type?”
“Not good enough for you.”
“Give me a half hour”—she still wouldn’t look at me—”and don’t worry, please; you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s all inside of me.”
I wasn’t so sure, but I realized that it was not the time to argue. I packed my bag, loaded it in the tiny trunk of the Chevy, and went back to the dining room to collect the lunches that we had ordered.
“Sorry we’re not going to have the lovely young lady around a little longer,” said the hostess, who fetched the two neatly packed lunch boxes and the bottle of Cabernet I had ordered. “She brightens up the whole inn.”
“Doesn’t she?”
“Bring her back.”
“You bet.”
A promise I never kept.
I put the lunch boxes and the wine in the backseat under the blanket I kept there in case I should want to curl up in the car and spend the night with my Roxinante (“named after Don Quixote’s horse?” she had demanded). Then I went back into the inn to pay the bill.
I gave the cashier one of my hundred-dollar bills and waited for the change.
“Very lovely young woman, sir.” He had a leathery cowpoke’s face. “Terribly pale, isn’t she?”
“Pigmentation,” I murmured.
“When she talks and smiles you don’t notice, but before that you wonder if she’s stepped out of a coffin.”
I checked the remaining bills. Nine of them all right. “Doctor says she has very sensitive skin. Should stay out of the sun.”
Already lying to protect her. Andrea King, or whoever she might be, was lonely and alone. She needed my protection. Everything else would take care of itself.
She looked as if she needed my help, if not my protection, when she carried her luggage out to the car, exactly a half hour after we’d left the breakfast room. I jumped out of the car to take it from her and encountered no protests. There was certainly an iron in the bag I hefted into the backseat of the Chevy.
She waited for me to open the door.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I closed the door and considered her charming legs.
“Something wrong, Commander?”
“Your legs.”
“Last night they seemed to rate at least a C plus.”
“Much higher marks than that, but I don’t want them to get cut up and maybe infected by cactus. Do you have any slacks inside that boxcar you’re lugging around?”
“Wool.” She frowned miserably. “Should I go back and change?”
“That might be worse; the high today is supposed to be a hundred and eighteen.”
She was not wearing her thin wedding band. What did that mean?
I was not sure I wanted to think about that subject.
“What should I do?”
I walked around to the driver’s seat. “We are going to stop at Steinfeld’s and buy you some new summer slacks, of the kind you lusted for when we walked by their window display yesterday.”
“I can’t afford … I don’t have …”
“I said ‘we’.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t make me.”
“Yes, I can. I’m bigger and stronger and smarter.”
“You are not smarter.”
“Anyone who wants to go up into those mountains on a day like this in shorts or wool slacks is stupid.”
“And you’re stupid if you think I intend to heal you of your virginity for some cheap clothes.”
Nasty, huh? Very nasty. And strike right for the jugular.
“Expensive clothes?”
No response.
“Okay, what price?” We turned on Campbell so I could show her the university.
Again no response.
“That’s the university over there.” I turned onto Speedway Boulevard, which was later rated by Life, not without reason, as the ugliest street in America.
Dead silence.
I then pointed out the Hotel Geronimo, near the university, a red-and-green resort, not as elegant as the inn, but still attractive in a mixture of Miami and Mission architecture.
“Cute, if you like that sort of thing.”
And that was that.
It was already blisteringly hot, worse than any day I could remember in the tropics. Can’t beat the good old US of A for bad weather. Maybe everything that happened that day can be blamed on the heat. If it happened.
We turned left at Sixth and then right at Congress. I parked in front of Steinfeld’s. Yes, Virginia, in those days you could park right in front of a department store.
I extended three ten-dollar bills in her direction. She wouldn’t take them.
“Young woman, you will go in there and buy yourself some slacks, another shirt, and whatever else you need for a walk in the desert—underwear included. And you will do so this minute.”
“I won’t.”
“Look”—I confess I was shouting—”either you buy those clothes or you get out right here and walk to Phoenix.”
I can talk like that when I’m angry. Ask my wife and kids. I make a fool out of myself when I do but it’s not ineffective.
I dropped the bills on the seat next to her.
She got out of the car and slammed the door shut.
For a moment I thought I had lost her.
Then she reached in the window and snapped up the thirty dollars. Her face would have done an Apache Thunder god proud.
“What color?”
“Huh?”
“You’re paying for the slacks, you should choose the color.”
“Blue to match your eyes. Thunderhead blue.”
“There isn’t any such color.” She stalked away.
God, how much I loved her at that moment.
“Andrea King.”
“Yes.” She turned around.
“Mind you, no corsets! And if you need more money …”
She spun on her heel and stormed into the store, reminding me of one of the jets I had flown in Hawaii before I decided that I didn’t want a career in the Navy.
Her shopping expedition didn’t take very long. In less than half an hour she reappeared, head bowed, stride diffident, carrying several packages. She was wearing blue slacks that matched her eyes—not skin-tight like jeans today, but tightly fitting for the times—a thin white blouse, and solid, comfortable-looking black shoes.
And, I suspected, only the minimal necessities—as judged in those days—underneath.
God forgive me for it, but I whistled at her. She turned the deepest crimson yet but changed neither her stride nor her guilty expression.
“Here’s your newspaper,” she said timidly, passing the Arizona Daily Star and two one-dollar bills through the window. “And your change. Peace offering?”
I got out of the car, took the packages from her, put them next to her luggage in the rear seat, and conducted her to the door on the other side.
“I’m glad to see that you went on a proper shopping expedition.”
“I do what I’m told eventually, particularly when someone shouts at me.”
I took both her hands and extended them at an angle from her body. “Inspection,” I murmured.
“Do I pass muster, Commander?” She flushed but did not avert her eyes.
“No girdle?” I touched her delightful rear end respectfully.
“Certainly not!” Her blush deepened, but she grinned. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“You seem to enjoy it.”
“Regardless.” She slipped out of my grip and into the passenger’s seat. “I seem to like being a kept woman.”
“Prettiest woman I’ve ever kept.”
Back in the driver’s seat I glanced at the sports section. Cubs had lost a doubleheader.
I was about to flip quickly through the comics when I heard soft crying next to me. I abandoned Terry to the pirates and folded my poor litt
le waif into my arms.
“I’m not like that at all. I’ve never acted that way in my life. I was horrible. You really should make me walk to Phoenix.”
I let her cry her heart out.
“It’s okay, Andrea. This hot weather is hard on the old temper for everyone.”
“I’ve only known you for twenty-four—well, twenty-six—hours and I’ve lost my temper with you more than with anyone else in all my life. Even the nuns at school.”
“Maybe I deserve it.”
“No, you don’t.” She shook her head fiercely. “You’re wonderful. I … I’m such a turd.”
“Andrea!”
“Well, I am. I never used that word before, but that’s what I am.”
“Maybe it’s a compliment to my limited, but very real trustworthiness that you feel free to lose your temper with me.”
She blew her nose with a tiny handkerchief she had pulled from her purse and considered that possibility. “Maybe that’s right. You certainly are patient.…”
“Look, Andrea,” I said as I rearranged her in her seat, tossed the Star in the backseat, and turned on the ignition—so filled with trustworthy virtue was I—”we are a kind of strange pair, both with a lot on our minds and a lot of problems to solve. Let’s say that no matter what happens, we’re ready to forgive one another.”
“You forgive me for the terrible things I said?”
I kissed her forehead, still the paladin of virtue. “I sure do, and I expect reciprocity when I say terrible things.”
“Well …” She grinned and threw her arms around me for a brief hug. “I’ll have to see how terrible they are.”
“On to Phoenix?”
“On to the Dutchman and his mine!”
“And I meant every word of that whistle. You look wonderful!”
She poked my arm. “Pilot, man your plane. Let’s get out of here.”
“An F6F is kind of crowded with two people in it.”
“Pilot”—she had to have the last word—”and Aircraft Commander.”
So we drove down Oracle Road toward the Superstition Mountains, across Fort Lowell, and into the empty desert north of the Rilito River, in the foothills of the Catalinas.
Already Andrea’s good humor seemed to have faded.
“Would you mind if we took the roundabout way and saw some mountains and copper mines?”
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 8
