Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “Be back in a sec, David, I’ve got to get a few things.” Patrick hurried off down the corridor.

  “You been staying busy?” asked the grandfather.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Punching cows.”

  “Where’s this at?”

  “Different places. Roundup, Ekalaka, Grassrange, Sumatra. Different reservations. Up on Rocky Boy.”

  “I’m hardly ever horseback,” the grandfather said angrily. “Time was, irrigated ground was considered modern.”

  Patrick walked in. He was carrying a small valise. His grandfather went to the window.

  “Are we ever going to eat?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Catches, what about you?”

  “I stopped in town and got a hamburger.”

  “You know what I can’t remember?” asked Patrick. “Whose idea was it we talk?”

  “I don’t know,” said Catches. “Doesn’t matter. What d’you got in the sack?”

  “Whiskey. Number-one kind of bourbon.”

  “Okay,” said Catches.

  “That way we’ve got a shot at some actuality, medicine man. I mean, this isn’t going to be the sweat lodge.”

  “You’re not gonna do your well-known mean-drunk thing, are you?” asked Catches. Patrick gave him a long look.

  “All it is, is for loosening tongues and to make sure we don’t have any mystical ceremonies.”

  Catches put his hat on and walked over to the sink. He twisted the faucet, cupped his hand under the stream, drank, turned off the water and wiped his face. “No more cracks. I tried to save her too.”

  Patrick sat down. “Save her from what?”

  “You people and her own thoughts.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” said the grandfather.

  “Stay where you are,” Patrick ordered. “Have a seat, Catches.” Catches drew a chair with the same fatal gesture he extended to the hat. Now the hat was foursquare on his head and he was looking at the whiskey Patrick unloaded on the table. The yellow electrical light contained the three of them in the dying day. Catches couldn’t keep his eye off the bag. Patrick filled a jug with cold water and set three glasses on the table. He filled the glasses nearly full with whiskey. “The ditch is in the jug, boys. We’re all throwed into this mess. So make yourself brave.”

  Catches tilted the whiskey back to his face and, pausing very momentarily, produced a wicked little knife from its leather encasement, a narrow blade with dark, oxidized steel, a maple handle with stars and silver faces. He didn’t seem to mean much by the gesture.

  “Is that anything special to you?” Patrick asked. His grandfather got up and walked out. “Spooked the old boy. Well, is it?” They could hear the grandfather slamming doors down the hallway.

  “Just a little knife. I cut binder twine with it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you think you helped Mary an awful lot, being an Army officer who kind of looked down on her no matter how much she thought of you?”

  They drank another glass of whiskey before Patrick answered: “Is that what happened?”

  “You didn’t save her. I am saying that.”

  “Maybe you should have saved her,” said Patrick. “And I didn’t look down on her. I neglected her. It’s different.”

  “You didn’t do jack shit.”

  “This is a pretty state of affairs,” said Patrick. “Who’s to pour our whiskey?”

  “I’ll do it.” Catches refilled the glasses.

  “I have something you can take to the powwows,” Patrick said. “You’ll be the talk of the town.” He left the room for a moment.

  It was the sheet Mary had painted of herself and the baby. He draped it over the shoulders of David Catches.

  “This was Mary’s way of saying, ‘Adiós, amigos.’ I want you to have it for whatever gala occasions you chaps have down on the reservation, social events that inevitably produce the Budweiser flu and well-known Cheyenne jalopy crashes. Having said that, we will now drink heap more deathbed whiskey. You didn’t take care of her.”

  “What care could you take of her? She was a grown woman.” Catches stopped. “Besides, we are now to the place where one of us is inclined to kill the other.”

  Patrick moved very slightly in his chair.

  “On the basis of what?”

  “On the basis of two men revenging themselves upon each other for what they haven’t done themselves. Boy, I don’t know what that means.”

  “You came close.”

  “I know,” said Catches, “but I fell on my ass.”

  “More sourmash for my lieutenants,” said Patrick. “Away with the offending mystery.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Catches, are you an educated man?”

  “I certainly am. Let’s drink at high speed.”

  “Okay.”

  “We have a shot at murder tonight. I’ll wear this sheet to remind me of your insult.”

  “I think that would be appropriate.”

  “What do you have for a weapon?”

  “I have my skinning knife,” said Patrick.

  “Get it,” said Catches.

  “I am in considerable pain.” Patrick found his skinning knife in the hallway. It had a deeply curved blade and a worn birch handle.

  “Not a bad knife,” said Catches.

  “It is designed,” said Patrick, “for disheartening an aborigine.”

  “But what’s at issue?”

  “Oh, dear. The noble savage displays his vocabulary. At issue, let me see. At issue is whether you caused Mary despair.”

  “I thought it was like flu.”

  Patrick stared at this arrogant Indian whose infuriatingly expressive hat drew a jaunty line above his eyes.

  “What do you think about us getting drunk?” Patrick asked.

  Catches said, “A warning has come to me that there is no escape.”

  “I’ve had no such warnings. Everyone hears footsteps. But no sacred eagles bearing messages.”

  “How much of that is there left?”

  “Another bottle.”

  “Brought out this sheet, did you?”

  “How do you like the fit?”

  “A little long in the back.”

  Patrick asked, “Do we each have a fair chance?”

  “Depends,” said the Indian. “But not if it’s up to me.”

  “Last Indian I remember making the papers was a Northern Cheyenne named Paul Bad Horse who killed that supermarket clerk, cold blood, for what was in the till. Paul wasn’t charging the cavalry. Paul got our clerk in the back of the head.”

  “Stop this small stuff.” They topped off water glasses with brown whiskey. Patrick thought, This Cheyenne is going to buckle under the sourmash. He thinks he’s got something for me to buckle under; but it’s going to be a cold day in hell. I’m going to ice this redskin.

  “See, where you’re just exactly one pickle short of a full jar, Tank Captain, is that you think you’re going to come to me as my equal in matters concerning Mary. Besides, you are less educated a man than me.”

  “She’s dead and we’re not.”

  “Neither of us is wily,” said Catches. “Neither of us is getting paid to do this— Give me a refill … thanks. But if it went just right, one is prepared to kill the other. We should have a complete agreement about that.”

  “I think that’s real fucking boring and obvious.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “We can’t bring Mary back.”

  “No, we can’t,” Catches began, tears gleaming down his face.

  Patrick’s grandfather appeared in the kitchen doorway dressed in his long johns. He was in a red-faced rage.

  “I’d like you two to go. All right? Go away. Go to the barn. Go anywhere. Go away. I’ve listened to as much of this as I will. It’s terrible. It’s terrible what you both say, pouring that out. But on this place the answer is no. Take i
t away, take it to such-and-such a place, but get it out of here.”

  The two younger men went outside. It was a cold night and the stars crowded down upon them, the buildings of the ranchstead scarcely visible in their light. Patrick was utterly lacking in anger. All he wanted to say was the right thing. “Don’t know just where to go here. David, you bring the bottle?”

  “I got it.”

  Patrick thought he could see him gesture with the whiskey. They were already drunk, and Patrick had it in his mind to get down to a thing or two if he could think just what those things might be. Then it struck him with a shock that it might have been no more than that he was still trying to get close to Mary.

  “Let’s get us a couple of horses,” said Catches. “Ground’s all beaten down around here. We’ll get up in those hills. We’ve got one and a half bottles of whiskey to go.”

  “Nobody says we have to drink it all.”

  “Only that’s what’s going to happen.”

  They’d already diverted toward the corral, where the barely shifting shapes of horses moved at their sound. There were stars over the horses’ backs and you couldn’t see where their legs reached the ground. When his mare Leafy turned to him, though, he identified the space between the glints her eyes made; and the sound of her relieved exhalation at recognizing his approaching shape helped Patrick sort the horses.

  “Here’s my mare. Why don’t you go in there and grab that claybank? I’m supposed to been riding her more.” Patrick saw Catches’ halter flip up around another horse, a bay.

  “I got one I broke.”

  The two saddled up in the deeper darkness in front of the saddle shed. Patrick could hear the steady, rapid preparation of Catches, the heavy noise of the saddle slung up on the bay’s withers, the slapping of billets and latigo, then the tight creak when he cinched up. They swung into their saddles and each rigged a bottle against the swells with the saddle strings. Catches still had Mary’s sheet.

  “North Fork suit you?”

  “That’d be fine,” said Catches.

  “What do you carry that little knife around for?”

  “You know Indians: homemade tattoos, drinking and knife fighting.”

  “That kid Andrew wanted an arrowhead. You might have got him a yard rock and chipped on it a little.”

  “I was relaxing at a dinner party,” said Catches. “Life is more than just work.”

  Remove the offending silliness, Patrick thought. Make it all fair. But then he felt even sillier. They went through three or four gates before they hit the forest service trail, trickling up through the trees in the starlight while Patrick felt sillier and sillier, looking back every now and again to see the floating white shape of Catches’ hat above the dark form of the moving horse.

  “I like this whiskey, David.”

  “You bet.”

  “I like it in bars as well as out here in the widely promoted high lonesome.”

  “Right, Patrick.”

  “But in the bars—watch that deadfall—but in the bars, a fellow tends to act up because of the social pressures. After you act up once, you’re expected to act up again. Grown men on crying jags, pistoleros wetting their pants—” An owl fled rapidly up the trail on beating, cushioned wings, and they watched it go. “I would like to build myself a big stroller,” Patrick continued. “Like babies have, y’know, shaped like a doughnut with a sling seat in the middle. Wheels that let you go in any direction. It would have drink holders and cups for poker chips. You could just scoot around and not worry about falling.”

  “That’s quite an idea. You ought to write that down. Yeah, I’d get that one on paper.”

  The air currents changed and then the smell, cool and balsamic, came from the high draws in the darkness on either side of them. Sometimes when the trees were closed solidly overhead and they moved in absolute blackness, Patrick could tell the direction of the trail only by feeling the mare’s body turning beneath him. When the trees opened once again like a skylight, Patrick stopped and offered Catches the bottle. Each of them took a deep pull, rerigged the bottle to Patrick’s saddle and moved on. Patrick inhaled deeply through his open mouth, carbureting the sourmash and piny air into a powerful essence. A peculiar feeling rose through him, seemingly a glimpse of time’s power: roping, soccer, Germany, the ride on I-90 with Mary, even the fine mare creaking underneath him. Then that evaporated and the Indian floated behind him on the bay.

  “We could use a couple of those strollers you mentioned,” said Catches. “Perfect for going down the mountain.”

  “One time when Mary and I were small—”

  “Look back at those lights.”

  “I know. One time when we were small—”

  “See how they drop into the groove the trail makes as we go up? There’s only four left. Now three.”

  “Then can I tell my story?”

  “Okay.”

  Patrick kept riding until the last ranch light dropped into the trail.

  “We shared the same room, see. And my folks came back back from a party at Carlin Hot Springs. And they were having words. Well, my dad gets out his duck gun and blows away the plumbing under the kitchen sink. They used to just endlessly do stuff like that, you know, really hating each other. And we’d lie in bed thinking, Please don’t get divorced, please please please. That and the atomic bomb were our big scares. So anyway, the water is running everywhere and my grandfather comes in, smacks my father in the face and disarms him. So my mother just shrieks at my grandfather, who’s trying to fix the plumbing. My father keeps saying, ‘Sorry, Pop, sorry.’ And pretty soon my mother comes down to our room and opens the door. The water was right behind her. She turns on the light and sees we’re awake. She’s real drunk, but she gives us this long looking-over. Then she announces, ‘Why don’t you two just get out? Why don’t you just get the hell out and quit causing all this trouble?’—How’s that for a family tale?”

  “I thought your dad was supposed to be so terrific.”

  “Well, we’re up here on a truth mission, aren’t we? He wasn’t so terrific. But when your father dies he becomes terrific through the magic of death.” Patrick thought, with releasing clarity, Especially when he falls out of the sky in flames. Wow and good-bye.

  “Y’know,” Patrick mused, “some things are like a watershed. They mark between the before and the after.”

  “Name one.”

  “Like the first time … the first time you put your shirttail between the toilet paper and your ass.”

  “Aw, for crying out loud.”

  Then Patrick thought what he really meant and his throat hardened and ached and it was necessary for some time to ride in silence to combat sorcery and recollection through the metronomic sound of horses.

  They dropped down into a swampy spot, the horses drawing their feet heavily from the muck; and as soon as they stepped up the other side, they woke a half-dozen blue grouse, who thundered off and scared the horses into staring and motionless silhouettes. Then once again they were going.

  “If it was daylight, we could’ve shot a couple of them to eat at our powwow.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “Nope.”

  God Almighty, Patrick was thinking, I am indeed away from the tank and must, as I had said I would, begin anew or at the very least go on to the next thing undaunted by either failure or death, neither of which I have mastered, though I cannot be accused of facing them with fear; but what did you know about them, relieved in fear at the arrival of adrenaline, relieved in death at the arrival of the embalmed dummy, relieved in separation by the dazed and unremitting sense that there had never been connection, not with people and not with places? What had Germany been? Three or four colors, twenty vulvas and strudel? Growing up, as life blind-sided you with its irreversible change, the heart pleaded for rituals that would never come: the West, the white West, a perfectly vacant human backdrop with its celebrated vistas, its remorseless mountains-and-rivers and its mortifying at
tempts at town building. Patrick longed for a loud New York bar.

  “When they reached the slope where the ranges divided, it looked like an enormous open lawn in the dark. There were the shapes of animals out on this expanse, deer or elk, and those shapes drifted away as Patrick and David picketed their horses, then sat facing the slope that elevated darkly to sky. Stars disappeared as the black shapes of clouds cruised the bright space. And for a while, all you could hear was the drinking.

  “Had this cat living in the trailer at Grassrange,” said David. “Could walk upside down on the acoustic tile all the way to the overhead light and kill moths and eat them and, y’know, like let the wings stick out of the corners of his mouth up there next to the light.”

  “Think the glare would get to him.”

  “He wouldn’t even take his shot. Just hang there alongside the bulb and prettyquick a moth would fly into his mouth. Fat sonofabitch and I never seen him mousing during moth season. Then in the winter he’d move out of the trailer into this Amoco barrel used to be a dog’s house there at Grassrange and hunt mice. He snagged one bat at the light in two summers; otherwise, it was all moths. He had to get down on the floor and fight that bat, though.”

  “What did Mary do while you were there?”

  “She’d just be reading, mostly; cooking. Then people’d bring her young colts to halter-break and gentle. She had chickens. She took a lot of pictures of that cat on the ceiling, but we never had the money to get them developed. I could drop the film by, if you’re interested. I mean, if you felt like getting them developed. Mary was afraid the light bulb would overexpose the film and we’d’ve spent our money on nothing at all. Really, we didn’t have no money.” Catches started crying.

  “Jesus Christ, David.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on now.”

  “I just don’t know.”