Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “Sit up there, old buddy. I can’t stand it. Come on, now, you’re gonna get me going.”

  “Well, what’s the fucking use?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the use?”

  “There isn’t any use. I thought Indians knew that.”

  “Somebody steered you wrong, Fitzpatrick.”

  “Well, you better figure it out. There seems to be signs everywhere that there’s no use.”

  “Spoiled my fucking hat tipping over on it.”

  “See?”

  “I don’t take it as a sign.”

  “It’s a sign that there’s no use. Well, let’s take aholt here. Let’s show them different,” said Patrick. It was about as strong as he ever got. All he wanted to do was shriek, Demons! Zombies! The dead!

  The Indian was trying to restore the crease in his hat. “My chapeau,” he said and laughed. “You should have written her more.”

  “I know,” said Patrick.

  “Drift in bad here in the winter?”

  “Oh, yeah. We had some cattle trapped in the Moccasin draw one time and the bears raided into them, got ’em all. Bears just padded over that snow and started killing cows. Quite a wreck in there when it thawed. Looked like a Charlie Russell painting of the ’86 blizzard, these half-gnawed skeletons up against the rocks …”

  “Hunh.”

  “I have to throw up,” said Patrick.

  “If you’re loud about it, crawl off away from the horses. I don’t want to walk home.”

  Patrick got off a way, his hands deep in the lichen, and let it pour everywhere.

  Catches continued in a louder voice: “My dad was a great one for throwing up on his horse and going on a blind-ass bronc ride into the cattle.”

  By the time Patrick found his way back, navigating by the white hat and the shapes of the horses when he couldn’t find the hat, Catches was getting pretty choky. “See, she was what I had and she left me about thirteen different times and all this was, was the last time. And that’s it. That’s all she wrote. But she was crazy and I’m not. And sorta like you said, I won’t be getting her back. All I’m going to say is this, and it might be the thing we fight over: She was more to me than she was to you.” Catches got out his knife. High above them, a heavy moon turned the scree brilliant as miles of quartz, and every so often something would come loose and roll, making a noise light, dry and clear as a single piece of bone.

  “Do you deny what I said?” asked Catches.

  Patrick followed the serration of forest, divided at the pass, and the vertical curve to the south of unearthly luminous granite.

  “I don’t deny it,” said Patrick, absolutely letting something break in the name of some small, even miserable decency, something in its way perfect and unmissed by David Catches, who said, “Thank you.”

  The rest was the ride home.

  28

  BOTH PATRICK’S DESIRE FOR PRIVACY AND HIS MISTAKES IN human judgment sprang from the same vague feeling that things were very sad. This feeling had predated the death of his sister by some time. Still, he had not always felt this way. Now he did seem to always feel this way. And so he tried to stay on the ranch or make some blind attempt to get rid of the feeling that everything was sad-for-no-reason. The latter seemed to fail with absolute regularity; whereas staying on the ranch and working would just do. And he still thought Claire could change it all. Sometimes he felt that she had to. It made him uncomfortable.

  Patrick got up suddenly, feeling he wasn’t reacting appropriately to anything, that he wasn’t doing any good. He heard the spring creak on the kitchen door and wondered who had come in. He shot the front of his shirt into his trousers with his hands, wobbled his head about and acted in general like someone trying to renew his concentration. This was getting to be a quieter house and the steps in the hallway, now plainly his grandfather’s, were clear; but Patrick thought they were slow, and when the door opened, revealing Patrick standing in no particular place in the room and his grandfather exactly in the doorway with a newspaper, Patrick knew there was something not right. “Have you read this?” his grandfather asked, revealing little in his face to give away what was to be seen. Patrick started to read, then sat down. The newspaper had reported the funeral on the first page in unbelievable detail, including Patrick’s rash remarks. The tone was unmistakably satirical and in the patented style of Deke Patwell. Basically it took the position that Patrick and Mary, long a local variety act, had pressed on amusingly after death.

  “What did we do to them?” asked his grandfather. “I don’t know.”

  “Patwell wrote that.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Where’re you going, Pat?”

  “To see Patwell.”

  “I think you better. I think this has to be fixed.”

  Strangely enough, nearly his first thought was, If they send me to jail, I’ll never see Claire again. And finally, the almost infernal concentration of anger, the numb and almost stupid feeling in the front of the brain. His grandfather came down the front hall and gave Patrick a revolver.

  “I don’t want that,” Patrick said.

  “You ought to take something.”

  “I’m taking me, Grandpa.”

  “I think you ought to shoot the sonofabitch until you get tired of it.”

  “Well, I’m going to go down there and that’s about all I know about it.”

  Patrick left the house and went to the barn and got an English blackthorn cane that had an ingenious ruler which slid out to measure the height of horses in hands.

  The appointment desk lay in the eyeline of Patwell’s open door, so that Patwell, sighting over the blue-washed Deadrock crone at the phone bank, could see Patrick had arrived. There were about ten reporters and secretaries in a large blond room without a view and a wilderness of baked-enamel office equipment in soothing gray. Patrick stared back at the faces and was refueled in his anger to know that these were the typists and copy editors and that they possessed a little glee that didn’t belong to them.

  Patwell called out, “What took you so long?”

  Patrick just strolled around the receptionist into Patwell’s office. He felt cold and peaceful.

  “You want to close that door, Pat?”

  “Not really, Deke. I just came by to find out why you wanted to talk about us in public like that.”

  “I run a newspaper and I thought you deserved it.”

  “Is that how it goes in editing? You give what you think people deserve?” He seemed to be helping Deke with his explanation.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel. It’s an old-fashioned newspaper.”

  “I feel you deserve that, you cuntful of cold piss,” said Patrick, caning Patwell across the face. It took Patwell off his chair. “Get up,” said Patrick. “Get back to your chair quickly. If I begin flailing your bottom with this thing, I’ll lose my self-control.” There was a livid mark across Patwell’s face as he scuttled to his swivel chair. “Now,” said Patrick, “that was meant to correct your attitude. You have hurt my feelings with your filthy fish-wrapper and you have hurt my grandfather, who is an old man. Do you follow me so far?” Patwell nodded hurriedly. Patrick wondered how many fingers in the outer office were dialing the police. “People just kind of live their lives, Deke. Y’know, they’re not out there just as cannon fodder for boys with newspapers.” Patwell nodded furiously. Patrick stared at him, feeling Patwell turn into an object again, one that had managed to besmirch his dead sister, and he could feel the crazy coursing of blood that he knew, unchecked, could turn him into a murderer. But then the police arrived, among them the chief of police, who demanded an explanation, and handled his gun.

  “Deke wanted me to act out the Ronald Colman part from The Prisoner of Zenda. Isn’t that so, Deke?”

  The chief of police turned eyes of patented seriousness to the editor. “Do I arrest him?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Becau
se he’ll be put in jail.”

  “He’s been before.”

  “When he gets out he’ll kill me.”

  So something, after all, got through. Patrick just departed; when he passed through the large room with numerous brave-dialing employees, he said, “When this doesn’t make tonight’s newspaper, you’ll know what kind of outfit you work for.” They wrote that down, too; they were untouchable.

  The cop caught up with him outside. “What else you have in mind for the day?”

  “What’s it to you?” Patrick asked, about a half-inch from the chief’s face. It was turning into a Western.

  “I don’t know. You’re still packing that cane and you aren’t limping.” The chief meshed both hands behind his head, thrusting forward an impervious abdomen.

  “Don’t let that throw you,” said Patrick. Then he withdrew its inner slide. “See? You can measure your horse. This would be a Shetland pony and this—this would be Man o’ War!”

  “Well, thanks for the explanation, cousin.”

  “Anytime.”

  “I hope you don’t need no help of any particular kind in the future.”

  Patrick smiled. “Not a chance. Not unless my car doesn’t start or something. I might borrow your jumper cables.”

  The impact of Catches’ love of Mary was driving him in circles. Even after Mary’s death, it meant more than anything he had. Patrick was closest to it with Claire, and that was not very close.

  29

  AT ONE END OF THE GRANARY WAS AN OPEN SHED WITH BIG tools hanging on its walls, truck-sized lug wrenches, a scythe for the beggar’s-lice that grew tall around the buildings and got into the horses’ manes. There were also old irons for brands that the ranch owned, ones they quit using when they finally got a single-iron brand. There was a stout railroad vise, and Patrick’s grandfather had been at it all morning, making a skinning knife out of a broken rasp.

  “I’m going to kill me one more bugling bull, skin him with this and move to town.”

  “That’s your plan, huh?” Patrick was kneeling on the ground, crimping copper rivets that had gone loose in the rigging of his pack saddles. That morning there had been a stinging fall breeze, and gear needed going through if he would make it to the hills before winter. “Got a spot picked out in town?”

  “Those apartments across from the library.”

  “Sounds awful nice,” said Patrick. “This has sure gotten to be a can of worms.” Patrick wondered what he meant by that. The place wasn’t at fault, but maybe something about it had begun to smell.

  “That’s what any ranch is, and this is a good one. It’s got two hundred fifty miner’s inches of first-right deeded water, plus a big flood right and the adjudication—y’know, if a guy cared to irrigate.”

  “I’ll wait for some farmer to chase that water. My horses would rather be on prairie grass any day than wallowing around in alfalfa.” They were starting in again.

  “Well, I’ll kill the one bull. Then look out town, here I come. After that, you can irrigate, not irrigate or piss up a rope.”

  “And you can be a star at the lending library.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Patrick worked away on the pack rigging, oiled the straps, coiled his lash ropes and canvas manties. It seemed crazy on a cool day, the two men polishing away on things they needed in order to get out, to go into the hills, to disappear. And yet Patrick didn’t really want to disappear. All recent losses drove him to thinking of Claire. And he had no sense she did the same. Living on the ranch, which from his tank had seemed a series of bright ceremonies, was now more like entrapment in a motel on the interstate. Nor was he filled with a sense he could do something about it. It had stopped meaning anything.

  30

  CLAIRE CAME TO THE SIDE DOOR AT PATRICK’S KNOCK, AND HE was astonished to see how genuinely stricken she seemed. “Patrick, I haven’t any idea what to say to you.”

  “It’s all over. There isn’t anything to say.” Then he added, with ungodly bitterness, “The angels came and took her away.”

  He walked into the house and got his own coffee as though he lived there. Claire circled the kitchen in a preoccupied way, knocking cupboard doors shut. Patrick felt somehow choky when he looked over at her, so extraordinarily pretty in a yellow wash dress that seemed to belong to another time, like some unused memento of the dust bowl, something a girl driven off her bridal farm in Oklahoma and since gone on to old age in some anonymous California valley might have saved.

  But the daughter of a desperate man of 1932 might well have worn such a yellow dress on a pretty day like today or worn it in hopes of seeing someone she loved. What if that turned out to be me? Well, a person could work at it. And then what? Then-what equals implications and I don’t know what they are. I’m getting to know very damned little.

  “When do you suppose Tio will come back?”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  “You still haven’t talked to him?”

  “No, and I’ve tried to. He showed up in Tulsa for a short time and now he’s gone from there.”

  “Does this make you nervous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too. But I’m not sure why.”

  “If you knew Tio better, you’d know why.”

  “I would?”

  “You certainly would.”

  The phone rang and Claire got up from the table in her yellow dress to answer it. She answered twice and put the phone down. “Whoever it was hung up,” she said, trying not to let that seem significant.

  Suddenly she grinned. “Can you press your weight?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I can. One fourteen.” Patrick thought about a hundred and fourteen pounds in a yellow wash dress.

  “Can you do the Cossack Drag?”

  “I never tried.”

  “I did. I almost got killed.”

  They went up a stretch of white, chalky-looking road into a beautifully fenced pasture, almost a paddock; there were half a dozen old-time quarter mares with colts at their sides. Claire ran down their pedigrees; it was all front-of-the-book: King, Leo, Peppy, Rey del Rancho, Zantanon H and a granddaughter of Nobody’s Friend. Patrick looked at them with their deep hips and shoulders, real cowman’s horses of a kind that seemed to be vanishing, the kind that made you think of Shiloh, Cold Deck, Steel Dust, and Rondo, all legends of border fighting, match racing and the trail drives.

  “Where did you find this set of mares?”

  “Well, one by one, really. They were all scattered and neglected because they wouldn’t raise running horses for Ruidoso. They’re all old horses, and I bred every one of them to a last son of Poco Bueno, who’s a three-legged fifty-dollar cripple in Alice, Texas, who belongs to a scrap-metal dealer. I figure those colts are a half-century old the day they’re born. That chestnut mare is blind. Her foal will stand off by itself and be perfectly still just to tease her mother. Her mother will keep nickering because she can’t locate her. Then that baby speeds up and nurses, and the crisis is over. —Why aren’t you married?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never came up.”

  “Have you had girl friends?”

  “Oh sure, lots of those. But I didn’t have a good picture of home life. I think that has kept me from settling down. Also, I can’t get my own intentions straight. First I was a kid growing up. Then I was cowboying for a while, riding around in sedans from place to place with a saddle in the trunk. Then I was in school, out of school and in the Army. Now I’m on the ranch. I don’t have an orderly approach. I don’t see me with a Nobel prize or managing a Houston heart clinic.”

  “What about running your beautiful ranch?”

  “Got my doubts there, too. I’d like to just see to the horses, but it ought to be farmed up quite a bit more. I always thought farming was a highly evolved form of mowing the lawn.”

  “It is.”

  The wind changed directions, gusting around
the pasture, warm and piny, with the faint cool afterbreath of fall.

  “Are you superstitious about things,” Claire asked, “that have to do with life and death?”

  “I haven’t been so far.”

  “My grandmother lived with us in our old house near Talalah. And one day the nails in the walls started falling out of their holes. That same day my grandmother died. There were nails all over the floor.”

  “I’ve never seen things like that. I don’t believe my eyes are open to that sort of occurrence. Mary saw things like that. My experience with death was, it was real bluntlike and didn’t send any calling cards.” Suddenly gloom dashed in on him like some palpable dismal animal. They walked past the horse pasture with the deep-bellied mares grazing with their shadow colts, all the way to where the jack fence changed to steel-posted five-strand barbed-wire cattle fencing; and uphill of them, yearlings drifted along a hill to escape the flies in this new cool breeze.

  The irrigation water came through a gap in the hillside like a bright tongue, and south of that a few hundred yards, they crossed into a piece of old meadow, full of original prairie flowers, all sweetly angled back toward the foothills by the prevailing wind, the same wind that swept Claire’s yellow dress close around her long legs, the same dress that Patrick folded on the ground, the only thing that she had been wearing, so that she shivered and watched his gentle folding of the yellow cotton upon itself, then let him make love to her in something of the same way. Afterward, he glanced over and saw the one flat shoe, almost a slipper, she had crossed on the other, pinning a pale scarf in the light ground breeze, and with death and superstition and signs one could not read temporarily at bay, he felt a sweeping ache that in a child would have been the prelude to tears.

  He said, “Leave everything and come with me.” He was the one with the conviction. It scared her for a moment.

  Immediately it struck Patrick that this attempt to spark his intentions across a gap not yet measured would never succeed. Nor was Claire shocked. Maybe she could have said the thing herself. Properly speaking, neither of them thought so. But Patrick felt like a sap—not a sap like the gland puppets of sudden love, the first-sighters and the stars of the one-night stands; but a sap of the heart, the amorous equivalent of someone who throws his clubs during a golf tournament.