The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Long way to Phoenix.”

  “In a hurry?”

  “No, but I might fire the tour guide and mechanic for inefficiency.”

  I mounted the driver’s seat of Roxy, went through the starting ritual, and—naturally—she started promptly and complacently.

  “See. It was that funny little black part.”

  “Get in the car.”

  She deposited the blanket and her book in the backseat and climbed in next to me.

  “Aren’t we going on?”

  “How did you know it was the funny little black part? And I’m serious; none of this ‘I’m-a-good-guesser’ stuff.”

  “Don’t be angry at me,” she pleaded.

  “Did you know when we stopped?”

  “I was afraid if I told you, you’d be mad. And I was right. When I did tell you, you were mad.”

  “You let me work for an hour?” I was fuming. Pretty rear end in tight-fitting blue slacks or not, she was an infuriating—and scary—wench.

  “I don’t know how I know.” She was close to tears for the second time in this crazy day. “I just know, that’s all. Please don’t be angry at me. Don’t be like the others.”

  “Did your uncle beat you?” I had made a quick guess.

  “He thought I was a witch. I don’t know”—tears appeared on her smooth skin—”maybe I am.”

  “A good witch.”

  “No, if I’m a witch, I’m a bad witch.”

  I eased Roxy back on the road. “I’m impressed, not angry.”

  “You’re a good guesser too. About my uncle, I mean.…”

  So indeed I was. Instincts, my group commander had once remarked. Sound instincts.

  “I’ll make a deal with you, lovely Witch of the East. I promise that I won’t ever, for the rest of our lives, be angry at you like the others, and I’ll never, never hit you. Never, never, never. You, on the other hand, promise that you will never, never withhold information from your guesses about mechanical malfunctions of this or any other automobile. Deal?”

  “Deal.” She shook my hand and dried her tears.

  “Fine.” I relaxed.

  Only for a few seconds.

  “Well.” I heard a sharp intake of breath. “If I’m going to hold up my end of the deal, I think I better tell you that I guess all day long we will have a lot of trouble with that silly little part. You’ll probably have to buy a new one.”

  “Where am I going to do that?” I demanded irritably.

  “That’s not part of the deal.”

  Deal or no deal, desert furnace or no desert furnace, I felt a cold chill creep up my back.

  A witch at least.

  CHAPTER 9

  “DOES WINE SPOIL IN HEAT?”

  We were slipping down into a valley from which we would soon ascend again into the Dripping Spring Mountains, a drive which the guidebook promised would be spectacular. With a problematic distributor, that prospect lost much of its appeal. On the other hand, Roxy was purring along smoothly. Maybe my resident witch was not right a hundred percent of the time.

  “After several days. Why, are you thirsty?”

  “And hungry.”

  “You ate two breakfasts.”

  “I know.” She sounded sheepish.

  “Was last night the first time you drank wine?”

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “You seemed to enjoy it.”

  “On my way to being a wino. Can we stop for lunch, please?”

  “Sure, this is a town called Winkelman, a Mormon place, they’re really good at bringing life out of the desert. Whenever you see an irrigation setup like those fields over there, you can be pretty sure that it’s their work. The Mormons, you know, were founded by Joseph Smith—”

  “Lunch now. Tour lecture later.”

  “All right!”

  We found an oak tree near a large cotton field, spread our blanket and watched a bearded farmer drive a tilling machine as we disposed of our picnic. She ate both of her sandwiches and one of mine and my banana as well as her banana and orange. And all of our cookies. It was hard to measure our relative consumption of the Cabernet because we passed the bottle back and forth, but I’m sure she drank more than I did.

  Ghosts don’t have that kind of appetite.

  “Lemonade?”

  “Thank you, Andrea King. You’re a useful little servant girl, all things considered. Once you learn proper manners.”

  “Huh. Do you realize you’ve been yawning all during lunch?”

  “So have you.”

  “But I don’t have to drive in the mountains.”

  Maybe, I thought, too late, I should have gone easy on the wine.

  “I never had an accident in four years of carrier flying—except that one day on Lake Michigan.”

  “And you drank a half bottle of wine before each flight.”

  “Less than half.”

  “Regardless. And it wasn’t the Yamoto that kept you awake last night, was it? That was terrible, but something else was more terrible.”

  “My dreams are not part of our deal.” I stood up, brushed the crumbs off my trousers and stared up at the mountains. “They’re none of your business.”

  “I never said they were.”

  I sat down again and picked up her inert hand.

  “You want to know everything about me, don’t you, Andrea King?”

  “Only if it will help.” She watched me solemnly, an acolyte trying to guess what the Monsignor would do next.

  I hesitated, fully aware that I had sworn the day before never to tell her. I was trapped, however, in the pathos of her concern for me. It would not hurt to talk about Rusty and Hank, Tony and Marshal. I knew that I would have to start to talk about them someday.

  “I was given my own squadron in December of 1944, VF29, fifteen planes, twenty pilots. Remember that the war was almost over, the Japanese didn’t have any air crews or carriers left and only a few land-based planes. There were big battles for Okinawa Jima, and kamikaze attacks, but nothing like what had happened before. I suppose I should have expected I’d have trouble with casualties. I knew how hard I was hit by the death of buddies; if I’d had any sense I would have known that the death of my own men, men for whom I was responsible, would be much rougher. They offered me a desk job in Pearl, which I suppose I should have taken.”

  Her dagger eyes probed at the core of my soul, gently, kindly, and with reassuring concern.

  “Ten of those men are dead, Andrea. Two in accidental crashes, one in an auto collision in Japan after the war, another disappeared in a storm, two of them were shot down by our own antiaircraft fire—trigger-happy idiots mistaking them for kamikazes.”

  She wrapped both her hands around one of mine. “You don’t have to …”

  “The other four I killed. Rusty, Tony, and I were strafing a Japanese position on Okinawa—marine work but there were not enough marine pilots. I directed them to follow on my left as I led the way down to the deck. It could just as well have been on the right. But I was the boss and I made the decisions. I chose them for the run—no particular reason other than that they were the best flyers in the squadron. We knew that it was a little risky. The Japs were sending up some pretty heavy automatic-weapon fire from the ground. But I was the CO, they trusted me; if I gave the order they obeyed, and that was that.”

  “You went first.”

  “Sure, I went first, giving the Jap gunners a chance to get ready.”

  “You thought of that?”

  “No, but I should have. Anyway, I didn’t see it because I was ahead of them. I heard an explosion as I pulled up from my run, looked behind me and saw nothing but a cloud of smoke and a fire on the ground. I later found out that Tony took some ordnance in his engine, lucky hit, I suppose; he veered to the right and crashed into Rusty, who was behind him. In a couple of seconds they both had been blown into little pieces.” I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, but expelled them as unwanted intruders. “Two kids, both ju
st twenty, Rusty with a wife and a little boy he’d never seen, dead because of my incompetence.”

  She continued to explore my soul with her devastating eyes.

  “You think I’m too hard on myself?”

  “Of course, but what I think doesn’t matter.”

  “Another day we were flying cover on a run up to Osaka. A couple of Zeros—they had only a handful left—got behind Hank and me. I told him to dive and I began to climb. The Japs usually left the wing man alone, especially on a dive because the F6Fs were faster on a dive and the Zeros climbed quicker than we did. So they went after him instead and splashed him. I went down to see if there was a life raft and another Zero appeared behind me; Marshal dove after him to give me support. I evaded the Jap easily, probably a poor kid without any flight training, and Marshal never came out of his dive. He plunged into the ocean like a falling rock. Hydraulic failure, probably. They both were married, too.”

  In the distance, somewhere in the thick haze of humidity, the Mormon farmer’s tractor motor was clunking away. A sound not like an F6F warming up. “Pilots, man your planes.” A few lazy flies made desultory passes around my head, no kamikazes they. In addition to Andrea’s sweet fragrance—she must have purchased perfume, which was not strictly within my rubrics—I smelled not high-octane aviation fuel but new-mown hay: a prudent Mormon preparing for winter.

  “Each of those ten men had more reason to live than I did. If I had made different decisions, they would be alive still.”

  She moved my fingers up and down, as if experimenting with them to make sure they were still working. “Maybe you should have been the priest in the family.”

  “Instead of Packy? Funny, but I thought about it for a couple of years. The family expected me to join the firm, just as Dad did when he came home from the last war. Packy is certainly more at ease with girls than I am.…”

  “I don’t believe it.” Her brilliant smile tore at my thumping heart. Did she love me? I wondered. Foolishly, so foolishly.

  “They all trusted me, Andrea. I let them down. Why am I still alive?”

  “Perhaps to do some great things that the rest of us desperately need.”

  “That’s not very likely. In a well-run universe, I would be the one whose body is rotting at the bottom of the Sea of Japan.”

  “Who would be driving me to Phoenix?”

  “You’re not going to argue with me?’

  “About God, sure; not about your men. You know all the arguments. I can’t possibly know your feelings. I do respect them and love you.”

  She did say it. And I let it slip by.

  Why?

  Isn’t it obvious? I was afraid of her. She knew too much. She was too much.

  I rose from the blanket, my heart throbbing, my eyes watery, my legs weak. “Thanks for listening.”

  “I wish I could make the pain go away. Time …”

  “I know. I just have to live with it.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  But I did not want to talk anymore. We gathered up the remnants of our lunch and, like good environmentalists long before our time, packed them neatly in the boxes provided by the Arizona Inn.

  “On to Globe,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.

  “Roxy willing, on to Globe.”

  Outside of Winkelman the road rises quickly on the way to Hayden and the Ray Mine.

  “Who are you really, Andrea King?” I asked once I had regained some of my composure.

  “What do you mean?” She stirred uneasily next to me.

  “Sometimes you’re a child, occasionally an imp child; yet other times you’re a grand duchess; you have been known to be a raging fury.…”

  “Threatened with dire punishment.”

  “That’s the imp.… Then you’re in rapid disorder a mind reader, a haunt, a chaplain, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a lover with wonderfully inviting lips, a wise old woman again, and now one who heals pain.… You delight me, confuse me, intrigue me, scare me. Who are you? What are you? Why are you?”

  Rather heavy-handed and roundabout for a response to a declaration of love, don’t you think?

  “I can’t answer any of those questions, Jerry; sometimes I think that I don’t really exist at all, that maybe I’m a creature in someone else’s dream. Your dreams maybe? Or in God’s dreams? Perhaps we’re both characters in a story someone else is telling or figures in some lesser God’s dreams. The Indians, I mean the ones in India, think we are all products of the dreams of the gods. I don’t think that is so unreasonable, not for me, anyway.”

  “Huh?” I had no idea what to say in response to that outburst.

  “Since my husband died and my daughter, I’m often not sure whether I’m still alive. My existence is so … so transparent, like it really isn’t there at all. Do you understand?” She didn’t give me time to answer, but raced on, as though determined to reach the finish line of improbabilities. “For days I live a kind of shadow existence, then, when I come out of the mists, I’m often not sure who I am or where I am. I wonder if I’m really alive at all and whether other people can see me. Yesterday in the station in Tucson I wondered whether the waitress saw me. At first I thought I might not be there at all. Then I saw this big, handsome, officer-type person across from me and said to myself that I must be invisible to him too. Only I wasn’t. So as long as he sees me, I’m alive, suspended between earth and hell.”

  “I still think you’re an imp/grand duchess with wonderful lips.”

  “Silly,” she said as she laughed and poked at my ribs, notably impeding my cautious assent up the Dripping Springs Mountains.

  I’ve learned enough psychology in the days since July 1946 to know that such dissociation from self is the first step to a severe psychotic interlude. Even then, psychological naif that I was, I knew that there was something pretty crazy about what she was saying.

  Or pretty scary.

  Yet I was not prepared to take what she was saying as literally true.

  She gave me fair warning.

  “The kissing is so good that I think I might keep you alive for a long time.”

  “I thought you’d finished that last night.” We were both laughing happily—young lovers at play.

  “Just beginning.”

  As I urged Roxinante up the Dripping Springs Mountains, with the dried-up Gila River, looking like the biggest wash in all the world, beneath us on the left, I thought that so far today could easily be a day in one of my dreams, a continuation of last night’s terrors.

  Roxy expired twice more on the way to Superior and a blessed paved road. The second time I had to clean out the distributor on a hairpin turn at least a thousand feet above a canyon. If a car had come from the other direction, I might have gone over the side in panic.

  “Do you want me to do it?” my dream woman asked helpfully.

  “Stay in the car and shut up,” I snarled.

  “Yes, sir, Commander, sir.”

  At the lookout point above the vast Ray Mine between Hayden and Superior, we stared in silence at the rusty, tarnished, man-made grand canyon, stretching for miles in either direction.

  I managed to take some reasonably good pictures of the Ray Mine. It was mostly luck; the sun was behind my left shoulder at just the right angle to bathe the terraced soft-brown hills in golden light. Only one picture didn’t turn out: a shot of Andrea on the farthest reach of the lookout point, her hair a glowing ruby against the blue sky and copper hills. The slide came back a clear transparency, as though nothing had recorded on the film.

  “Do you like it?” I asked after I surreptitiously snapped the picture.

  “Strange but beautiful,” she said, not having heard the loud click of the shutter release on my Kodak. “And scary too.”

  Still a child on a tour, curiosity and wonder not yet dead.

  I put my arm around her and led her unprotestingly back to the car.

  “People died here.” She shuddered.

  “It has alw
ays been violent in copper mining. Do you know the song about Joe Hill? His real name was Joe Hilstrom; he was a Swedish immigrant and he was shot for attempting to organize a union. What we now consider a fundamental human right, despite Senator Taft.”

  “I don’t think I ever heard it. My uncle is against the unions. So was And—my husband. And the nuns at school.”

  So in my best whisky baritone, I sang,

  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you or me.

  Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead.”

  “I never died,” said he.

  “The copper bosses killed you, Joe, they shot you, Joe,” says I.

  “Takes more than guns to kill a man,” says Joe, “I didn’t die,”

  Says Joe, “I didn’t die.”

  And standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes.

  Says Joe, “What they can never kill went on to organize, Went on to organize.”

  From San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill

  Where working men defend their rights, it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.

  It’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.

  To tell the truth, I didn’t sound much like Paul Robeson.

  “That’s a powerful song.” She was still sagging against my shoulder. “And you sing it very well.… Are you in favor of the unions?”

  “I sure am. So is the Church. Some of my father’s clients are unions. You may as well know the awful truth, Andrea King; we may live in River Forest and we may sail on the Queen Mary, but we Keenans are Roosevelt Democrats.”

  “Really?” She seemed surprised, but hardly concerned.

  “It’s hard to know the history of copper mining and not be. Before the war, the copper companies used to load striking workers into boxcars and, helped by the National Guard bayonets and with the approval of the Republican governor, tow the cars far out into the desert. Then they would throw the workers off and maroon them in the desert. A thirty mile walk through the desert without any water cured the survivors of unionism pretty effectively. The unions haven’t won yet. The Mine, Mill and Smelter Union is Communist. I can’t blame them for being radical.…”

  “Hold me, please,” she said, pressing against me, trembling violently.