She was.
“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 boy child.
“They don’t use horses anymore. The picture in the hotel suggests a very old motorbus. 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,” she said with more laughter, “you won’t be able to kiss me and 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. This time she returned my enthusiastic affection.
“You like to be kissed,” I observed.
“By you.”
“Why?”
“You’re a good man.”
“And a poor kisser.”
“No, Commander.” She considered me thoughtfully. “A pretty good kisser, too.”
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.
We continued through the grass and oak 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.”
At the Tonto 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, no.” She quivered more violently than she had the day before at the Ray Mine. I began to think that, delectable lips or not, I would be happy to get rid of her in Phoenix. She was too odd to run the risk that I might fall in love with her.
I realize now, after four decades, that lost soul or not, I had already fallen in love with her.
We admired the shimmering blue lake (“I could stay here forever,” she sighed), inspected the dam, mostly masonry, but impressive for the early part of the century, and turned up 88 toward Fish Creek.
While I would not dream of returning to the Tonto National Forest, one of my kids—the woman doctor—went to Arizona on her honeymoon. 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.
“What happens if a car comes in the other direction?”
“There aren’t many. We may not even see one today.”
“And if we do?”
“One or the other backs up.”
“Marvelous.” My tourist with the sweet and willing, even eager lips, had turned sarcastic.
“Sorry.”
“Why are you going up here?” she demanded impatiently. “I thought you were taking me to Phoenix.”
“The Flying … I mean Lost Dutchman Mine. Remember, we talked about it yesterday.”
“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 want 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.
You wonder if you are still on earth.
The Superstition Mountains earn their name. While the colors and the sweep of orderly ranks of mountain ridges are stunning, the general effect is still to create a feeling of the uncanny—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 which seem 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. I carried the thermos of water and the oranges and bread I’d bought in Globe and she brought the cheese and meat and the blanket I had stored in the trunk of the Chevy.
We clambered down the side of the mountain on a steep and barely visible trail.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t wear my shorts. The cactuses are as bad as rattlesnakes.”
“It would be a shame to scar those pretty legs.”
“I think you’ve been a virgin too long, Commander.”
It was true enough, but nasty of her to say it.
“After a while you hardly notice. Like being a priest.”
“You’re not a priest.”
“My brother is going to be one.”
“Does he know you don’t believe in God?”
“No.”
He would laugh it off, as my clever, witty younger brother Patrick laughed everything off. I dreaded telling my parents I would not attend Mass with them. But there was no point in being a hypocrite.
We found an oak tree clinging to the side of the lake, spread the blanket, and settled down for the picnic. She made the sandwiches, with the quick gracefulness which characterized all her movements. We ate them slowly, tasting the water and munching on the oranges. We were alone, the only two people existing in this strange, twisted cosmos of God-made mountains and man-made lakes.
“You’d like him.” I nibbled on an orange slice.
“Who?”
“My brother Patrick.”
“Priests scare me. I’m afraid that they know. Do you think they do?”
“Know what?”
“That I’m already damned. You know it, don’t you? I’m sure your brother does.”
“That’s silly, Andrea King, just plain silly.”
Again I almost told her I loved her. Life might have been very different if I had.
“Is it?”
We sat there for a long time, each of us with our own thoughts, our own fears, our own hungers. I was in no hurry to assault the road again, a more frightening experience than diving into the antiaircraft fire of the Japanese destroyer which was trying to run down some of my ditched squadron mates.
I studied the lovely, slightly bent figure next to me. It dawned on me, unpardonably late, that she was not so much angry at me as frightened. She hated and feared these mountains and had come with me only because she thought I needed protection. A squadron commander with a Navy Cross and Star needed protection!
Well, maybe I did. It had been a couple of years now since the tiff with the destroyer, years in which my imagination had had time to learn how to reflect on possibilities.
No longer did I resent her sarcasm. I felt only tenderness for her generosity. A dangerous emotion, tenderness.
“Is the lake cold?”
“I don’t think so. It’s probably in the seventies.”
“Too bad we didn’t bring our swimsuits. It would be nice to jump in. Is it deep?”
�
�Sure. The walls of the lake are an extension of the canyon walls. I’d hold you.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“We could swim in our underwear.”
“No.”
“Why not?” I reached over and opened the two remaining buttons on her sweat-soaked blouse. She remained rigid, neither accepting nor rejecting.
My fingers touched the flesh of her breasts, warm, inviting, reassuring.
Gently she removed my hand and said the same words as at the Tonto Monument. “Please, no.”
“No,” my wife tells me, means no except when it means yes or maybe. She also insists that a man who knows his woman understands the code.
I didn’t know either my woman or the code in 1946.
If I had persisted that day, I might have found that her no meant only maybe. I did not persist, perhaps because the strange mixture of terror and eagerness on her tense face spooked me. I buttoned up the blouse, including the one she had left open in the morning.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m flattered.”
Finally, as silent as the watching mountains, we scrambled up the canyon wall to my patiently waiting and overheated car.
I inched past Castle Mountain, away from the lakes and up the walls of Fish Creek Canyon. The eighteen-inch guns of the Yamoto, blasting away at us till the bitter end, were less dreadful than the steep drop of thousands of feet which seemed just a few inches outside the window.
“That’s Castle Mountain on the left, Miss—oops, Mrs. King,” I said through gritted teeth. “Doesn’t it look like a blood-red medieval fortress with turrets and towers and battlements?”
“No.”
“Well, what does it look like?”
“It looks like a mountain trying to look like a medieval castle with … watch out…”
I’ll admit we skidded a little.
“Nothing to worry about.” The sweat was pouring off my forehead like the thunder gods were pouring water on me. Cool Jerry Daugherty, never frightened in combat. Right?
“Are you scared, Commander?” Her fingers dug into my right arm.
“Sure am.”
“Good.” She sighed in mock relief. “Then I don’t have to be.”
The turns and curves became a little bit less spectacular as we drew near the side road up Fish Creek Peak to Lost Dutchman Canyon.
And today’s batch of ominous thunderheads were already building up—dark, fierce, angry.
Ought I to call the game on account of darkness? Did I want to drive down this mountain goat’s trail in a storm? Or after it had turned into an instant river with treacherous waterfalls?
Take her on to Phoenix before dark. Be done with her.
The F6F pilot with his Navy Cross tucked away somewhere, not quite sure where, lose his nerve and turn back?
I would, instead, compromise.
“We’ll look at the ghost town for a few minutes and then come back. It’s maybe a half mile up from here,” I said to my reluctant tourist. “It’s called Clinton; most ghost towns have Anglo-Saxon rather than Spanish—”
“Ghost town!” she screamed hysterically.
“Relax, Andrea King, if that’s your name; ghost towns don’t have ghosts. They’re just old abandoned mining towns. Relics of the past.”
She changed her tactics. Instead of the hard knot at the far end of the front seat, she became a soft little girl, clinging to my arm as she had at the worst of the hairpin turns. Notable improvement.
“Sorry.”
“What I like is a satisfied tourist.”
She laughed and I laughed, too. Contagious enthusiasm.
One glance at the “road” marked on my map, jutting off at right angles from Arizona 88, told me that we could not drive it. I parked the car close to the wall of the mountain, turned to her, and tilted her chin up. “I’m afraid we’ll have to walk. Do you want to wait here? I’ll be back in an hour.”
“I’ll come with you, Commander. That’s why I’m here.”
“Lost Dutchman Canyon,” I told her as trudged up the tilting path, “is a long way from Weaver’s Needle, where the mine is supposed to be. But a considerable lode of gold was found up here a few years after the Dutchman died. Clinton was founded to extract the gold, and later on, after it closed down, the name was given to the canyon.”
“Oh.” She accepted my helping hand and held on to it. “Why did it close down?”
“Various reasons. Earthquakes. Rainstorms which flooded the mines, revenge of the thunder gods, if you believe the legends.”
“There’s still gold?”
“Probably not. The veins were running out anyway.”
“Can’t blame the thunder gods for that, can you?”
Ghost towns don’t have ghosts, right? I mean, you can buy a book even today in any Tucson bookstore and read all about the ghost towns and never read a word about haunting. Ghost towns are so called because they are dead towns, not because they have the spirits of dead people.
Keep that in mind.
If you’ve ever visited an Arizona ghost town, your first reaction, very likely, is disappointment. Just a few old buildings without any roofs or windowpanes, vegetation growing through the floorboards, an occasional sign tilting at a crazy angle, wind maybe rustling loose clapboard, an occasional small creature darting away in righteous surprise that its haven has been invaded, broken pieces of what might have been furniture littering the land between the buildings.
Not much.
You think to yourself that it’s hard to imagine that anyone ever lived here and that Hollywood could build better ghost towns than Arizona has.
Clinton produced exactly that reaction after our long and exhausting pull up the trail. It was nothing more than four broken-down buildings, three small ones, and another larger—a town hall, tavern, and hotel all rolled into one, according to my guidebook.
“It doesn’t look very scary.” She released my arm, but still snuggled close to me as we stood at the top of the ridge looking at the remains of Clinton.
“It isn’t. Do you want to stay here or explore with me?”
She looked up at the sky, now a threatening gray. “I want to stay with you.”
Tentatively I extended an arm around her shoulders. Her poor little heart was pounding wildly. She cuddled close to me.
Oh.
“Clinton, Arizona, or Arizona Territory, to be precise. That canyon was a stream fifty years ago.” I pointed to a deep gorge behind the pathetic row of fading shacks, Lost Dutchman Canyon. “They came up the mountains on the same road we did, then down the side of that mountain, and pitched their tents and put up these buildings here. They prospected in the stream and in the caves on the side of the canyon. They found a vein of silver and other people poured in. They sank mine shafts all over the place. We’re supposed to be careful not to put our foot in any of them. They’re not like the coal mines back in the east. Nor the one in the Museum of Science and Industry—”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. You’re not from Chicago. I keep forgetting. Where did you say you were from?”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, anyway, the mines here are mostly narrow shafts sunk straight down into the earth. When the miners left they covered the holes in the ground with boards, most of which have rotted by now. So don’t step on any boards on the ground.”
“Yes sir.”
“Well.” I ignored her laughter. For someone who thought she was damned, she could certainly laugh at me. “Although the vein was a good-size one, they exhausted it pretty quickly with modern mining methods, and then everyone left. Whether this was the Dutchman’s lode or not depends on which legend you believe.”
“How much time did you spend with the guidebook before you left San Diego?” Her eyes glinted briefly with amusement.
“Two weeks.” Damn it, she had made me blush again. “I like to be prepared.… Anyway, they had a lot of sickness, too. Something like typhoid fever, though a li
ttle different. The canyon was supposed to be an ancient Apache sacred place. Couldn’t have been too ancient, because the Apache only came here in the seventeen-hundreds, after the Cherokee chased them out of Texas and Oklahoma, where they were herdsmen rather than rustlers. Anyway, one story says that before each new outbreak of the disease, a huge black cloud came to the town at night. Not much regret when Clinton closed down.”
“Poor people.”
“Any poorer than us?”
“A lot.”
“I suppose.”
We walked along the creaking remnants of a porch on the front of the main building. She stumbled on a loose board and I held her close.
“You’re right. Hollywood could do it better.”
I kicked open the loosely hanging door of the main building. A mouse or some other small creature rushed across the floor, stirring up a cloud of smoke behind him.
“Dust,” she said, “decades of dust. There must be an inch of it on the floor.”
“In the desert, that could be only a year’s collection.”
“Do you want to go in?” she asked respectfully.
“The commander does not want to go in.” I hugged her shoulders. “Not at all, thank you very much.”
A bolt of lightning leaped from one of the immense mountains behind us, jumped across the sky, and buried itself in another mountain. In the distance thunder rolled grimly. Andrea threw her arms around me in abject terror.
“Don’t worry, Andrea King,” I said, trying to sound like the squadron leader of VF 29. “I’ll take care of you. Always. If you give me a chance.”
I touched her face. It was cold, cold as death, I thought, even though the gray sky and the occasional raindrops had not cooled the air.
“If only you could…”
Protectiveness turned without warning to passion. My lips sought hers again, much more violently than earlier in the day, my fingers searched for her breasts, our bodies pushed together. She was mine for the taking. I pushed the blouse off her shoulders.
She pulled away from me.
I stopped. Not this way. Not here.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to…”
“My fault,” she replied miserably.
“My fault…” I insisted. Then we both laughed and relaxed. “I do love you.”
“Don’t say that.” She laid her fingers on my lips. “Not yet. Not ever.”
All About Women Page 18
