Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  In July, Patrick roped at the Wilsall rodeo, then joined the rioters in front of the bars. He’d tied his calf under eleven and was considered quite a kid, one who deserved many free drinks right out on the sidewalk. Patrick and his friends sat on the hoods of their cars until the sun collapsed in the Bridger range. By three in the morning he was back at the ranch, careening around the kitchen, trying to make a little snack. He banged into a cabinet, showering crystal onto the slate floor. A pyramid of flatware skated into fragments. He dropped the idea of the snack.

  Patrick’s mother and father popped into the kitchen in electric concern. Patrick reeled through the fragments in his cowboy boots, crushing glass and china noisily. He looked at them, his mind racing.

  “Marion is dead,” he blurted. “A diesel. She was going out for eggs.” His parents were absolutely silent.

  “I just don’t give a shit anymore,” Patrick added.

  “You can’t use that language in this house,” his mother said; but his father intervened on the basis of the death of a boy’s first love. Patrick waltzed to his room and passed out.

  After ten hours of sleep ruined by guilt, booze and the presence of all his rodeo-dirtied clothes, Patrick awoke with a start and was filled by a sudden and unidentified fear. He cupped a hand over his face to test his breath, then smeared his teeth with a dab of toothpaste. He ran to the kitchen to clean up his mess; but he was too late. He really was.

  His mother and father were waiting for him. The kitchen was immaculate. His father wore a suit and tie, his mother a subdued blue dress. It seemed very still.

  “Pat,” said his father, “we want to meet Marion’s folks. We wanted to help with the preparations.”

  Patrick’s mother had thin trickles of tears glistening on her cheeks. But they fell from eyes that were wrong.

  “We can’t find Easterly in the book.”

  “They don’t have a phone.”

  “Could we just drive by?”

  “I don’t think they could handle it, Dad. I mean, this soon.”

  The ringing slap sharpened Patrick’s sense of the moment. “You were blotto at Wilsall,” his mother said. “Marion Easterly doesn’t exist!”

  “Kind of embarrassing, Pat,” said his father. “We went to the hospital, the morgue, the police. The police in particular had a good laugh at our expense, though the others certainly enjoyed themselves too. I’m afraid you’re kind of a no-good. I’m afraid we’re sending you away to school.”

  “It’s fair,” said Patrick.

  “I’m afraid I don’t care if it is or not,” said his father. No unscheduled landings for that test pilot.

  16

  THIS WAS DARING BUT IT HAD REQUIRED TWO BAR STOPS: THE front door flickered open.

  “Tio, where’s your wife?”

  “Pat, d’you just walk in?”

  “I drove from my place and walked the last forty feet.”

  “God, what an awful joke. This your first time up here?” The effect of Patrick’s joke still hung on Tio’s face.

  “Yes. A beautiful spot.”

  “It’s all lost on me.”

  That seemed a strange piece of candor to Patrick. The ranch was beautiful, a close dirt road lying in a cottonwood creek that arose to find old stone buildings, then meadows that spread above the ranch to adjoining cirques at the edge of the wilderness. It had the quality of enamel, detailed in hard, knowledgeable strokes, a deliberate landscape by an artist no one ever met.

  Somehow the handsome oilman seemed harried, stranded on this picture-book ranch in his bush jacket and as anxious to be back among his oil-and-gas leases as Patrick had been for the loud bar.

  “Claire is gypping horses in the round pen. Just go back the way you came and around the old homesteader house. You’ll see it in the trees.”

  “I guess if I’m going to be looking after her, I’d better get the hang of it.”

  “That’s it, good buddy. I’d fall down dead with my hand raised if I told you I couldn’t get off of this vacation fast enough. You two go out and play. You can take her anywhere. She’s more adaptable than a cat. All I do is dream of crude.”

  “You sure know your own mind,” Patrick said, fishing for sense in Tio’s remarks.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  Claire appears to him as follows: at center in a circular wooden pen a hundred feet in diameter. Deep in river sand, it seems a soft, brown lens in the surrounding trees. Claire directs a two-year-old blood-bay filly in an extended trot around herself, the filly’s head stretched high and forward, the flared and precise nostrils drinking wind on this delightful, balsamic and breezy flat.

  It was on enough of an elevation that you could see the valley road mirroring the river bottom, the switchbacks to the wilderness, the flatiron clouds, the forest service corrals and the glittering infusion of sun-born seeds moving with the brilliant wind. But you couldn’t see the house, and from the glade of young aspen, you couldn’t see anything.

  “Hello, Patrick.”

  “Hi, Claire.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Drank a bit too much, I’m afraid.”

  “You like this filly?”

  “Sure. Isn’t she deep through the heart?”

  “I think she’s great.”

  “Go for a walk with me.”

  “You rather ride?”

  “I’m too dumb today to get a foot in the stirrup.”

  Claire left the longeing whip in the sand, and the filly swung gracefully forward, ears set, watching Claire leave the pen.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Where does this path go?”

  “An old springhouse at the top of these aspens.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to talk,” said Patrick, “and it’s easier if you keep moving, and to keep moving you need to be going somewhere.”

  The smallest aspens jumped up along the path with their flat leaves moving in a plane to each touch of breeze. When Claire went ahead, Patrick stared at the small of her back, where the tied-up cotton shirt left a band of brown skin.

  The springhouse, now in complete disrepair, had been used to cool milk. A jet of water appeared from the ground and flowed into the dark interior of the house, gliding disparate over cold stones and out of the house again. Inside, the cold stones chilled the air and seemed to cast a dark glaze on the wood floor and sides. There was one old tree shading the house and minute canyon wrens crawled in its branches. But the wet stones were what you sensed even looking outside.

  When they went inside, Patrick tried to seize Claire. Then he sat down on the plank bench, and over the water and the round river rocks their breathing was heard, as well as the catches in their breath. Patrick stared at his open hands. Claire gazed at him, not in offense or terror but in some absolute revelation. She now wore nothing but her denim pants; the shirt was in the dark stream that brightened the stones. And Patrick’s face was clawed in five bright stripes. She finished undressing and made love to Patrick while his attempts to remember what it was he was doing, to determine what this meant, seemed to knock like pebbles dropped down a well, long lost from sight. He was gone into something blinding and it wasn’t exactly love. Patrick supported himself on his arms, and splinters of the old floor ran into the tension of his hands. In a moment they were both shuddering and it was as if the four old windows above had lost the transparency, then regained it. And details returned: the mountain range of river stones against the wall, the electrical cord approaching from the ceiling, old saw marks and hammer indentations around the nail heads and, finally, the beautiful woman’s tears running onto the coarse planks.

  “You ought to get out,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t do that kind of thing.”

  “You just did.”

  “I know. I bet when we’re old it makes us fe
el lonely and empty.” This could be a long, slow wreck.

  They heard Tio call: “Anybody around?”

  From the southwest window his distant figure could be seen trudging to the sand pen. Claire said, “I’m going straight down to the house around behind him and get a shirt. If you can think of a good cause for those scratches, you’re welcome to join us.”

  “I wish I hadn’t done that,” came Patrick’s contrition.

  “It’ll pass. It better. I’m just sick.”

  “Where is everybody?” came Tio’s voice. Claire disappeared and Patrick followed her. About halfway down the hill, they heard him call out, “Come on, you guys! I’m getting insecure!” They rushed along in the trees. Claire was giggling.

  “This makes me nervous,” said Patrick as he went, realizing how preposterous the situation was.

  “You shouldn’t do this to me!” Tio called from afar as Patrick started his truck. Claire looked up toward the springhouse.

  “He’s such a little boy,” she said with affection. “Listen,” she added quite suddenly, “won’t you have dinner with us tonight? I insist, and it’s the least you could do.”

  Patrick drove off, thinking once again of the little walk-up in Castile, the stone counters scrubbed concave. He wondered why that came to him at these times or during summer war games at seventy miles an hour with the self-leveling cannon, the hurtling countryside on a television monitor. In the Castilian walk-up an unfuckable crone has the say of things and brings vegetables.

  He cut down Divide Creek and went the back way around Deadrock. No supplies needed. Coming from this direction, you could see the ranch’s high meadows cross the river bottom. You could see the old schoolhouse road and used-up thrashers and combines, drawn like extinct creatures against the gravel bank. Then this way you could run along the curving rim to the ranch itself, seeing now from above the original plan, a little bit like a fort and old-looking. Though around here nothing was really old. A woman in town was writing a book called From Deer Meat to Double Wides to chronicle the area and show it was old. There was a chapter on Patrick’s ranch as well as one on high-button shoes, plus prominent Deadrock families, all written at very high pitch. The ranch chapter had a romantic version of the foray against Aguinaldo’s insurrection, as well as of Fourths of July celebrated with dynamite. When Patrick grew older, the ranch meant less. The trouble was, he had charged it with meaning while he was in the Army, and left without benefits. He wanted his heart to seize the ancient hills, the old windmills and stock springs. Now all he seemed to care about were the things that lived and died on a scale of time an ordinary human being could understand. Then he wanted to know what those things were there for, taking every chance for knowledge about that. Nor was he about to press his grandfather about death’s nearness. But he would watch him for accidental revelations. He had a feeling that the little churches around Deadrock, all of them so different, were trying to duck this question. He was tempted to attend every one of them in a string of Sundays to see how this fatal ducking worked.

  He knew that one reason he still felt so incomplete was that his father had farmed him out, left him as crow bait to education and family history. And his grandfather hadn’t given his father much. All that cowboy rigidity was just running from trouble. Patrick had wandered away and Mary had flown into the face of it, the face of it being the connection they never had, an absence that was perilously ignored. The connection had not been in the airplane on the mountain; it had not even been a sign. Mary in pursuit of the ghosts was close; Claire was nearer. But he had been indecent. Had she? He was inclined to think she’d been worse than that.

  17

  PATRICK AND CLAIRE SAT NEXT TO EACH OTHER IN THE DEEP old leather couch. There were chunks of Newfoundland salmon that Tio had caught, in a silver bowl, and toast points made from bread Tio had baked the previous day. Then Tio brought them a superior cold pumpkin soup and pressed upon them yet another bottle of St.-Émilion before returning to the kitchen. Instead of an apron he had a worn-out hand towel tucked into the top of his tooled belt and he moved at very high speed. He said they did not have many minutes to finish the bottle and move to the dining room. Patrick was impressed. But he felt he was in a madhouse.

  “Will dinner be as good as this?” asked Patrick.

  “Dinner will be great,” Claire said.

  “And he caught these fish?”

  “Oh, Tio is a sportman. Got a bunch of records and all. He shot the ninth largest whitetail to ever come out of Texas.” Patrick studied her eyes, hoping he would not find real pride in the bagging of the ninth largest whitetail. He did think he saw a little pride, though. Above all, he saw the beauty of beveled face with its gray-green eyes and ineffable down-turned Southern mouth.

  “How does he ever find the time to be a fine cook and record-holding sportsman?” He sensed something aggressive in his own question.

  Claire looked up at him. “What else has he got to do?” she inquired.

  “He’s got businesses to run and a lot of money to look after.”

  “Tio don’t have any money. Doesn’t have any money.”

  “Well.” Patrick was finding some embarrassment in this. Claire’s amused and corrected bad English was also a moment he’d liked to have gone back over. “It seems you live well and it seems you can do as you want.”

  “We do. But I support Tio.”

  “How?”

  “Inherited Oklahoma land.” Stated flat. “Including mineral rights.”

  Patrick looked straight at her in silence.

  “Tio told me,” he said deliberately, “that he had a world of leases and row crops and wells he had to get back to and he couldn’t mess around up here in Montana any longer.”

  “Tio has this little problem, Patrick.”

  “Which is?”

  “He thinks he has those things. It’s not his fault. But he gets carried away. And in some respects Tio isn’t completely healthy.”

  “What else does he think?”

  The door flew open and Tio brought in a plate of roast lamb chunks with currant jelly. He bore the mad vanity of an Eagle Scout.

  “Thinks he’s got a jet plane and a jillion Mexicans.”

  Patrick stared at Tio in shock.

  “Who’s this?” Tio asked.

  “Guy in Houston,” said Claire. She pointed toward the gulf coast of Texas.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, finish them lamb and come eat dinner. It a be on in five minute.”

  Tio’s manners and his cooking were equally fine. Yet in the tall wavering of candlelight, the conversation—ranch history and oil—carried, against what Patrick now knew, some echo of calamity, something that lingered. “You get a deal,” said Tio, “to where what you’re looking for is the actual lifeblood of the machine age, and this junk pools up where it gets trapped and where nobody can see it in the middle of the earth, and all we’re doing is running little needles downwards toward it. Unless of course you’re some old farmer with a seep. And the last one of them I know about was mounted and hangs over the dining room table at the Petroleum Club. But a man has to suspect his traps before he runs his drill in on down to where Satan is gettin out his book matches. And you got to know your domes.” Then he looked around the table with matchlessly overfocused wide eyes. “I just don’t care to be around people interested in other fuels. They make me sick.” His eyes compressed to refocus on a forkful of perfectly prepared lamb.

  “Go on ahead and eat that,” Claire said quietly.

  “What happened to your face, Pat? Get scratched tryin to get you a little?”

  “Had a colt run through the bridle in some brush.”

  “Didn’t know a colt had a hand on him like that.”

  “It was the brush that did it.”

  “Boy, amo tell you what, you couldn’t carve a more perfecter piece of brush for that job, now, could you?”

  “Say, after all this wine, I’m finally seeing what you’re getting at: I try to rape some girl
and she claws me. I guess I had a better day than I thought.”

  “Aw, good buddy.” Real disappointment, moral disappointment, floods Tio’s face: A man don’t talk like that in company. In the flashing silence Patrick gave himself the liberty of remembering Claire beneath him, one thin arm reaching into the cool quiet, the aerial motion and breath. They ate quietly for a long time. Then he saw Tio’s studying eyes deep against his own; they were, somehow, certainly not normal.

  Claire got up. “I don’t like to eat when it’s like that.”

  “Food not right?” Tio asked. “Anybody says I can’t cook is dumber than Ned in the First Reader.”

  “I’m going to sit in the living room.”

  “What about you, Pat?”

  “I’m going to finish this good dinner.”

  “I’m heading for bed. I’ve got some studying up to do. Then me and about five of my best old buddies around the country are going to hang all over our WATS lines and make a couple of bucks.”

  “Well, good night, I guess.”

  “Good night. Don’t get scratched.”

  “I got my colts rode earlier. What a day.”

  The lamb had been defatted the way they did in France. Patrick could see Tio’s shadow when he came to the top of the stairs to look down to the first floor. That kind of came in intervals while Patrick went through a lot of Bordeaux. Then the shadow of Tio stopped coming and producing its simple effect. So Patrick went to the living room, where he penetrated Claire with a peculiar vengeance, noting, only at the clutching, compressive end, the ninth largest whitetail deer ever killed in Texas.