Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “What’d I do with my hat?” asked Patrick. “I’ve got the whirlies.” Claire sat up, a broad snail’s track on her thigh, and in her molten eyes was something Patrick had never seen before because it had never existed before, not exactly.

  Patrick managed to get dressed, walking back and forth across the front of the stairs, feeling a sick and depressed giddiness, not even rememberable from the Army years, of having threaded a miserable, shivering, narrow trail to wrath and humiliation, for which he knew hell fire in one of its uncountable manifestations would someday be handed on as silver a platter as the one that held Tio’s dinner. A headache set in behind his temples and he was rather in love and in a bad mood. Claire stopped him in the yard, where he walked in his socks, carrying his tall boots, staring in a dumb, fixated way at his drunken target.

  Claire’s small, strong hand turned him around blank by the shirt, and he looked once more into the pained eyes, forcing his own off as one awaiting a lecture. “Cruelty is something I hadn’t seen in you before.”

  “I saw it in you. I thought I was treating you for it. I thought I was the doctor.” Patrick’s anger, partial product of his damages and certainly of his drinking and his indirection, formed thickly in this inconsiderate remark.

  “No, I’m the doctor,” Claire said. “And Tio is the patient. And you are a cruel outsider.”

  She walked back inside and Patrick knew which of them had lost and what had been lost. As he drove off he saw all the upstairs lights clicking on in series and he was in genuine retreat.

  18

  HIS EYES WERE SWOLLEN SHUT FROM THE BUTTS OF THE CUES when the chief of police shoved him into the drunk tank. “I don’t know which one of you snakes bit the other first. It’s all cowboys and Indians to me. But you’re in my house now. And you’re for sure snake bit.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Patrick.

  “ ‘Yeah, right,’ ” laughed the policeman. “Shit, you can’t even talk! Look at it this way: This is probably the only bunk in town where they won’t keep beatin on you. You’ll get breakfast and we’ll see you on home.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Patrick, angling for the narrow bunk catercorner to one other amorphous form, foreshadowing, Patrick thought, his future. “Nothing to read. Someday I’ll be a dead bum.”

  “I’ll tell you what: You just as well throw in with me, mean as you are.”

  “Am I mean?”

  “You’re plumb mean.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” Patrick said in simpleminded drunkenness. “Oh, I wish you couldn’t say that about me.”

  “Well, I can!” said the chief of police brightly.

  And the lights dropped to minimum observation, just enough to get a vomiter’s tongue cleared or keep some whitecross detox bozo from beating his head on the fixed steel table where, it was intended, one would eat, play cards and be polite about the finger paints. As Patrick fell off to sleep, he felt that it was a good jail, one where they preferred your being a civilian to your being a jailbird, suicide or rising crime star.

  Patrick didn’t know whether he was dreaming—he didn’t think he was—when he heard the chief’s voice, coming in through the alpha waves and alcohol, say, “The lady left your bail.”

  As for now, his belongings, his keys and directions to his truck were what he most required.

  The note from Claire read:

  Patrick,

  Tio flew to Tulsa early this A.M.

  Stop/call for details as needed.

  Claire.

  Oh shit oh god oh now what. Can this be more sadness-for-no-reason? Pig’s conduct is what I’ll stand accused of, you can bet your hat on that. And my feeling is that the chaps who have made such a stretch of bad road out of my body with their cues are, at any other time or place, universally considered good fellows who never reverse their cues to beat on a human and who, all agreed, had been driven to the limits of their patience and who, moreover, when the jury returned, were universally acquitted and not a little applauded by all familiar with the particulars of the case. Except that Patrick couldn’t remember anything about it. Therefore he would join the cheering throng in its endorsement of each lump’s administering; for though he was the recipient, democracy did call for backing one’s fellows, even on limited information.

  19

  GRANDPA WAS DISCOVERED KNEELING ABOVE THE KITCHEN sink, killing yellow wasps against the window with the rolled Sunday Deadrock News. This seemed a little tough in one of our older cowboys, thought Patrick; this could be sadness-for-no-reason, although well short of harbinger-of-doom. There were dirty dishes containing glazed remains. Patrick’s thought—that he’d only been gone a day—had a minute hysterical edge. What would he find with a week’s absence? It seemed his grandfather had become unnaturally dependent upon him since his return. Before that, he could help, hire help, ask for help or do without. But now, silhouetted behind stacks of dirty dishes, he crawled after wasps, backlit brilliant yellow on the glass, and swung at them so hard he was in danger of losing balance and rolling to the floor.

  “Did you get that editor?”

  “No.”

  “Over to some woman’s.”

  “Exactly.”

  “See you had a night in the hoosegow.”

  Patrick stopped. “Where are you getting this?”

  Grandpa slung his legs down and unrolled the wasps’-guts-encrusted News. There Patrick reviewed a photograph of himself being removed from the Northbranch Saloon by the police. A lucky motorist from Ohio got the photo credit. The small crowd did not look friendly and the police looked like heroes. There was only a caption, no text; it read:

  WAITING FOR RAIN

  It’s fair, thought Patrick.

  “Well,” he said to his grandfather. “Let’s tidy this joint up.” His heart soared with the thought of stupid little projects.

  Deep in the grain bin the mice swam fat and single-minded while Patrick’s coffee can sliced around them to fill the black rubber buckets. The young horses turned at the pitch of tin against oats and moved to the feed bunk, first in disarray and then in single file; and then snaking out at each other, rearranging the lineup as the yellow granules poured from the bucket.

  The laminations of heat-and-serve yielded to the hot suds rising about Patrick’s reddening forearms. He looked at the pleasant inflammation and thought: It proves I’m Irish. Then, with the bucket and brush, he could better see the undersides of the table as well as scrub the floor.

  Here’s something new: He’s wetting the bed. And where does that lead? Is it a little thing, as incontinence? Or is it a nightmare with the impact of a cannon, rending and overwhelming, that would soak the tunic of the bravest grenadier? We will not soon have the answer to this. As of the here and now, we have a bed that needs changing.

  At the very moment the Whirlpool goes from rinse to spin, it bucks like a Red Desert Mustang and would continue to do so if Patrick didn’t heave a great rock on top of its lid, a rock that, as an interjection to its cycling chaos, restores order to as well as performs the last cleansing extraction of Grandpa’s socks, underdrawers, shirts and jeans. This recalcitrant jiggling is, Patrick’s old enough now to know, the deterioration of bearings and the prelude to a complete collapse—not necessarily an explosion of Grandpa’s soiled linens around the laundry room, but certainly, in a year of poor cattle prices, a duskier and less fragrant general patina to this two-man operation. So Patrick views the rock as a good rock, keen stripes of marble and gneiss, a rock for all seasons.

  “I have no idea what he saw. But it’s sure enough undignified.”

  “Let me put it another way: Why did he go to Tulsa?”

  “What he said was, his quail lease had come up for renewal and his father is sick, which I know is true.”

  “Your note said to stop by for the details.”

  “I guess I just wanted you to stop by!”

  “Of course I would. And I owe you for bail.”

  “Anyway, what is this?”
>
  “Damned if I know.”

  “It’s sort of got this painful side to it.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe nothin but ole remorse.”

  “Yeah, ole remorse.”

  “At least you’re—whatchasay?—‘unencumbered.’ ”

  “I decided to marry my grandfather yesterday morning. As I am doing all that a wife could do for him, there’s but little sense in our not making it legal. So don’t go calling me unencumbered.”

  All of this was said, and nothing more, through the screen door of a porch, silhouettes freckled by afternoon light; they barely moved.

  20

  HEADING HOME, PATRICK NEARLY HAD TO GO THROUGH DEADROCK or around it; and despite that he wanted to avoid stopping in a place renowned for its money-grubbing, bad-tempered inhabitants, a place whose principal virtue was its declining population, he needed an economy-size box of soap powder for the floors. So he went through Deadrock. He pulled off into a grocery store where he and its only other customer, Deke Patwell, ran into each other in aisle three.

  “I see I’m in the papers.”

  “Yup. Real nice type of fellow heading for Yellowstone. Little Kodak is all it took.”

  “You write the caption?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Very imaginative.”

  “Thank you. How’s the head?”

  “Not at all good, Deke. You know those pool cues.”

  “Only by reputation. They say one end is much worse than the other.”

  “Thicker.”

  “That’s it, thicker.”

  Patrick pulled down a large box of soap.

  “Floors?” asked Patwell. Patrick studied the contents.

  “Exactly.”

  “Comet’s a mile better.”

  Patrick got a can of Comet.

  “And you’ll want a little protection for the knees,” Patwell said, and went to the cash register with his impregnated dish pads.

  Patrick followed him. “I’d use rubber gloves with those hands of yours, Deke. Dish pads are full of irritating metal stuff.”

  “God, I wouldn’t think of forgetting the gloves. My hands just aren’t tough enough with the job I’ve got.”

  Outside:

  “That been a good truck, Patrick?”

  “Fair. Had the heads off first ten thousand miles.”

  “Tell me about it. This thing’s been a vale of tears. I’m going Jap.”

  Waves. Bye-byes. Patrick noticed, though, from two blocks away, Patwell giving him the finger. He considered it extremely childish.

  21

  BY FRIDAY, PATRICK THOUGHT HE’D MENDED ENOUGH TO RIDE Tio and Claire’s stud. He had him in an open box stall with an automatic waterer and a runway. The horse had been on a full ration of grain all week with very little exercise. Patrick expected him to be hot. This young stallion spent most of his day looking out on the pasture in hopes of finding something to fight. When any other horse came into view, he’d swing his butt around against the planks and let out a blood-curdling, warlike squeal. So Patrick went into his stall cautiously. The stud pinned his ears at Patrick, bowed his neck and got ready for trouble. Patrick made a low, angry sound in his throat and the horse’s ears went up. Patrick haltered him, took him out to the hitching rack and saddled him. He was a well-put-up horse but he looked even better under saddle. His neck came out at a good angle; he was deep in the heart girth and in the hip. Patrick bridled him with a Sweetwater bit, put on his spurs and led the horse away from the rack, got on and took a deep seat.

  He rode up to a round wooden pen sixty feet across. Inside it, a dozen yearling cattle dozed in a little cluster. When Patrick rode in and closed the gate, the yearlings stood up, all Herefords, about five hundred pounds each. The stud was kind of coarse-handling, no better than cowboy broke. He smiled to think it was Claire who put this using-horse handle on him. But Patrick cut himself a cow and drove it out around the herd. The yearling feinted once and ran across the pen. The stud tried to run around his corner instead of setting down on his hocks and turning through himself. So Patrick just stopped, turned him correctly and still had time to send him off inside the cow. He set him down again in correct position. The stud reached around, tried to bite Patrick’s foot and lost the cow he was supposed to be watching. Patrick didn’t think he liked this horse. Nevertheless, he galloped him hard to get the nonsense out of his mind. That took two hours. This time the stud, having soaked through two saddle blankets, paid attention to his job. Patrick worked him very quietly, never got him out of a trot, but did things slow and correct.

  In a sidehill above the house was a root cellar made of stone and with a log-and-sod roof. A horse fell through into the cellar one winter and Patrick built another roof, dragging cottonwood logs into place with the Ford gas tractor. He used it as a wine cellar and sometimes as a place to put vegetables if someone maintained the garden that year. In Germany he had raised tomatoes in nail kegs, and the big, powerful red tomatoes sunning on his balcony often touched his lady friends, who found the plants too piquant for words in a NATO tank captain. “You grew these?” “Yes, I did.” “How sweet. You are sweet.” At that point Patrick would know this was no dry run; post-coital depression was already in sight, no bigger than a man’s hand on the horizon. Once Patrick picked up the nail kegs to make room for the lady, now keen to sunbathe, and midway through the effort, his face in tomatoes and vines, he said, “I’m homesick, homesick, homesick. I’m just homesick. Montana has a short growing season, but I’m homesick, just homesick …” After he’d done this for a while, the lady sought her dress and departed. “I don’t want to see you again,” she said. “Ever.”

  “It’s fair.”

  Anyway, Mary headed for the root cellar to avoid a conversation, just at the moment, with the grandfather. When Patrick found her, she was moving down the rack, giving each bottle a half-turn to distribute the sediment, an almost aqueous shadow play on the ceiling, the sun reflecting on the orchard grass that grew to the cellar door. A narrow foot trail wound down the hill to the house.

  “Grandpa isn’t drinking that stuff, is he?”

  “Once in a while. I’ve been cooking for him. He’ll drink a little then. He seems to be taking the cure.”

  “Let’s have a bottle of champagne.”

  “Very well.”

  Patrick found a bottle of Piper Heidsieck and uncorked it. They sat on crates in the half-light and passed it back and forth. It was nearly empty before either spoke. Mary sighed continually. Patrick felt that junkie light go up his insides.

  “I’m sick of going around with my nerves shot.”

  “I get mad.”

  “Well, I get the creeps. I get bats in the belfry.”

  More silence. Patrick examined the sod and rafters. He decided he’d done a good job.

  “Why did Grandpa try out for a movie?” Mary asked.

  “He wants to be better known, I guess.”

  Mary said, “That’s more nails on the blackboard.”

  “I myself would like to be extremely famous, larger than life, with souvenir plaster busts of me available at checkout counters.”

  “I’d like to be ravishing. I’d like to put on the dog.” Her hands were shaking.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Whew … uhm … whew.”

  “What?”

  “… speechless …”

  “Here. Don’t try. Have some more of this.” She took the champagne. “Horse fell through. Up there. Didn’t find him for two days. He ate a hundred pounds of potatoes.” Mary’s breathing was short and irregular. “He didn’t want to leave. Then he heard the irrigating water and gave in. Didn’t I build a good roof?” Mary nodded rapidly. “Anything I can do?” She shook her head. “Be better if I leave you alone?” She nodded her head, tried to smile. Patrick left. He wanted to be quiet going down the hill. God Almighty, he thought, she is a sick dog.

  22

  PATRICK’S GRANDFATHER SE
EMED TO BE RETURNING FROM A long trip. One imagined his hands filled with canceled tickets. It had rained a week and now the sun was out.

  “Just take and put the mares with colts on the south side. Everybody else above the barn. The open mares will fight across the wire.”

  “I did that,” said Patrick to his grandfather.

  “That’s the boy,” said the old man, and closed the door; then, through the door: “You better look for your sister.” Patrick was tall and the old man was short and looked a bit like a stage paddy, an impression quickly dispelled by his largely humorless nature.

  Through the kitchen window Patrick could see his mare sidestep into the shade. The old Connolly saddle looked erect and burnished on her chestnut back. She tipped one foot and started to sleep.

  “Mary’s all right,” he said, and went outside and mounted the horse with an air of purpose that was at odds with his complete lack of intentions. The mare, Leafy, was chestnut with the delicate subcoloring that is like watermarks. She had an intelligent narrow face and the lightest rein imaginable. Patrick thought a great deal of her. So she had not been ridden while he was away in the Army. A captain of tanks on the East German line in 1977 who comes from Montana has unusual opportunities to remember his home, and apart from the buffalo jump, where ravens still hung as though in memory, Leafy was the finest thing on the place. Downhill on a cold morning, she would buck. Like most good horses, Leafy kept her distance.