“It should never have gotten this far.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because it’s just to where it maybe could be extremely shattering. Besides it’s … everything is …”
“What? Everything is what?”
“More than just coming home from the Army.”
“No, it’s not,” said Patrick. “Everything is coming home from the Army.”
“Okay, let’s break it up. Boys, I want you to come out clean and punching.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“Well, we’re down to that.”
Suddenly there were details, tree trunks to bump into, rocks to trip over. In a Norway spruce next to the door, an old strand of Christmas lights deteriorated.
“I wish it could be like in books,” said Patrick. “I wish it could be a big simp love story.”
“I don’t want to be in a big simp love story.”
“My job would be to save the ranch.”
“You’re thinking of Gary Cooper.”
“I guess there’s a difference.”
“A big difference. Gary Cooper saved the ranch. He had simp romances, too. Gary Cooper had his in barns. Book romances often take place in Europe. Cafés instead of barns. Me and Tio been to Europe. He brought his own ketchup and Pepto-Bismol. It was a gourmet tour.”
“Sounds like quite a guy.”
“He is,” she said plainly.
“Well, I don’t want to hear about him.”
Inevitably Patrick drove home listening to a professional reminiscer on the radio who did Western topics twice a week:
“The awesome force of men and animals belittles all the images etched into the retinal filmstrips of my mind … The arena dust!… Churning hoof sounds … a truckload of hogs! Magnifique!”
31
PATRICK WAS BACK THE NEXT DAY. HE WAS LOSING IT. IT WAS late afternoon and their throats ached. He thought that there was fire in the daylight.
“We could fall in love,” said Patrick, sickeningly swept past all reason.
“And then he’ll hire a detective.”
“What?” From the trance.
“Have you been listening?” She flicked a fox-spur from his hair. “We pull this and it’s ‘Katy, Bar the Door.’ ”
“What?” Where was he?
“Put on your boots. If we can keep walking, I won’t feel so nervous. My God, what is this we’re doing?”
Down toward the stream that swept past the fine old house, the heavy-trunked cottonwoods seemed to hold their dismaying branchloads of greenery in the awkward and beautiful whiteness which at a distance gives the valley river bottoms of the West almost their only sentimental quality. The rest consisted of towns with the usual franchise foreshore at either end; or in the case of Deadrock, the whirring elevations of the interstate, quiet only when the arctic storms of middle winter feathered every concrete radius with snow. Patrick felt drunk. The house hung over him. Claire pulled herself against him in the warm air. He panicked at the driveway. There might have been too many cars. There might have been chartered aircraft or police. There might have been dead people or banshees to militate against this surge that held him in its force.
They were in a bed in a room with a south-facing window that the sun crossed like a bullet. When the horses whinnied to be fed at the end of the day, gathered below the darkening window in a plank corral, Claire’s tears chilled all over Patrick’s face. The old dive-bomber comic they found in the trunk was crumpled under the pillows. A pale star had bravely arisen to follow the sun across the window; brave, thought Patrick, because it privately knew it was two hundred thousand times the size of our solar system, though its millennial flames are the only thing that would stop me now. All it is, is this small evening star. The horses are hungry. We are sore. Saying she loved me made her cry. In the iron-cloistered control station of the fast American tank was the glossy photograph of a German princess’s strangely expressive anus, and beside that the release buttons for the rockets. The whir of treads on deep Teutonic sod brought peculiar memories. Marion Easterly, the mystery heartthrob, the archangelic semaphor known as the Dead Father and now the snowy grid beneath which his sister would lie forever were all contained in that upendable shallow bowl, the rim of which divided past and future. I am finally outside the bowl.
32
PATRICK DROVE HOME IN THE NIGHT. THE YARD LIGHTS WERE strong in the blackness of the valley’s gradual elevation southward like the scrambled approach to a bridge. After he had said to Claire, Leave everything and come with me, she had asked, Where? And at first he had been hurt, searching, as men do, for blind love, but then, even to his credit, he did indeed wonder where they could go and it became clear that he still, as of the Army, hadn’t exactly returned to the ranch and they might just as well go there; and that that in turn might give him the handle he had long sought on his situation there, might carry him back to the sense of purpose his great-grandfather had had upon his return from Aguinaldo’s Native Insurrection, the dynamite firecrackers on the Fourth of July and the general feeling of being able to see farther than your nose in front of you. He nearly strangled on his last idea, as though Claire should provide this firelight; he felt ashamed. There was a porcupine waddling across his turn-off; he stopped the truck, stared at its awkward purpose and wondered if the porcupine had anyplace to go. Patrick ached. He thought, literally, that he was aching like a fool. Chest pains. Incapable-of-judgment. The best thing would be for us to move to the ranch together. Nevertheless, he imagined the center of his mind looked like an asshole taped on the dashboard of the tank.
He walked into the dark kitchen and turned the light on over the stove ventilator. He made himself a drink. He didn’t know what time it was and he felt guilt but could not pin it down. He would rather have felt the guilt than the sadness-for-no-reason. The latter was a ball breaker, whereas guilt was easily anesthetized with not all that much bourbon. Then the phone rang and of course it was Tio.
“Tio, where are you?”
“Cain’t let on, Pat. Where are you?”
“Right where you called me. In my kitchen.”
“Well, I was just settin here wonderin if anybody there in Montana had got so eat up with the dumb ass they life was endangered.”
“I can’t see that they could be.”
“How’s my stud colt?”
“He’s rank and squeally. He’s going to make a great gelding.”
“Well, Fitzpatrick, I’m down here shootin quail and thinkin about things. We got good dogs and a bunch of Mexicans to shag dead birds. It’s the life, but they practically raise snakes and you can’t get through that blackjack and cat’s-claw with a horse. So you’re down among them. You’re down among the snakes, Fitzpatrick. You follow me?”
“Yes, I do.” Patrick tilted his glass until he no longer saw movement among the ice cubes. He was getting nervous.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be leavin Claire to fend like that. Most generally a man’s a fool to leave one that Cadillacky to its own devices.”
“How did you get down there, anyway, Tio?”
“In a Bell helicopter with full avionics and a walnut interior. Had to fly around all them bullshit mountains up there to get to a place fit for human habitation. I knew that colt was dumber than Fido’s Ass, but I want you to turn him back to me double tough. I expect that. And if Claire’s lonely, call her and give her that Dial-a-Better-Day exchange in Deadrock; I’ll be back when I get back.”
“Okay.”
“Fitzpatrick, life is a shit sandwich and I take a bite every day. You do too. But if you had to eat it in one swallow, you’d choke on it and die a very unpleasant death.” He rang off and that was that.
Patrick stood still and then trickled whiskey down the inside of his glass like a chemist in a high school play performing an experiment; and in fact the glazed look on his face did seem very much like bad acting. “ ‘Okay,’ ” he said aloud. “Why did I say okay? That Oklahoman shit-heel suggested
that I give Claire the Dial-a-Better-Day number. And I said okay!” But he looked up Dial-a-Prayer in the directory and made the call. With God, it turned out, every loss is a gain. Hello. Thank you for calling Dial-a-Better-Day. Disruption and sadness will be banished. I wonder if they’re thinking about that sadness stalking me, that evil ferret sadness that ingests five times its weight each day. Hearts will be healed and God will lift us up. Garlands instead of ashes. Sixty-first chapter of Isaiah. God will see you in the next reel. He is Our Projectionist. I will wring His Little Neck if I get another instance of sadness-for-no-reason.
“Darling?”
“Yes.”
“It’s me.”
“I know it is. Oh God.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m in bed. I’m here, scared of the dark.”
“Should I come over?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Guess what.”
“What?”
“Guess.”
“Tio called,” said Claire. Panic was in her voice.
“How did you know?”
“It was easy. Where is he?”
“He wouldn’t say. He was quail hunting. All he’d say was that life was a shit sandwich and we had to take a bite every day.”
“He was being very intimate with you. Normally he saves the sandwich speech until much deeper into the situation.”
“What do you mean by that?” Patrick demanded, thinking this had happened before.
“I mean like in an oil deal or something. By the time they’ve cased the well, fractured and done their logging—y’know, kind of late in the game—he tells some new-corner in the business up north here in the Overthrust or something that life is a shit sandwich etcetera. Just when the guy is hanging on by his teeth. So he is either being intimate with you or he thinks you’re hanging on by your teeth.”
“I think I’m following.”
“Did he menace you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How not sure?”
“Well, he said that if you had to eat the sandwich in one bite, you’d choke to death.”
“He was menacing you.”
33
PATRICK LAY IN BED AND STARED AROUND AT THE FURNISHINGS of his room. There was only one lamp and, overhead, a moth-filled milk-glass ceiling fixture that gave off an awful light. The bedside lamp was a real must. How many things, he wondered, shall we call real musts? What about ball bearings? A real must in defending one’s self against the natives was a handful of stout ball bearings. The 2nd Division went up against Villa with only their uniforms and their ball bearings; without a belief in The Maker, a real must, all there would have been to show would have been the ball bearings, while Villa took his false gods to Deauville for the races. Jesus Christ, he thought, let us turn our thoughts to Claire; the mind is no boomerang. Throw it far enough and it won’t come back.
Did Tio in fact smell a rat, or only a quail? Was Patrick the Montana version of the Tulsa hidey-hole, where ole Shit proved bulletproof? He felt ashamed of having had this thought. Shamed and chilled. Himself as part of a test of sexual allegiance. Maybe he meant to out-Tio Tio, to get just hopelessly Western about this situation, this fix, to see who, just who, was the standup gunslinger of the two. It is typical of me, he thought, to foresee a major showdown well before an acquaintanceship has been struck between the principals. Am I not rude? I am.
He hadn’t been rude yet, but he would have to cut back on his drinking or it was going to all burst forth in a clenched and dangerous teetering toward love, requited or otherwise. This was the sort of isolated dam break that Patrick was susceptible to. When he could identify it, he thought it was ridiculous. He didn’t see anything now at all and he was therefore wide open to any repetitious mistake, precisely at a time in his life when he could least stand repetition. But then, where was the repetition; and couldn’t this just be a fear, as guilt is a fear, of something that didn’t exist?
He drifted away. One of the first lines he ever learned from a song was, “I got a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill.” He was hitchhiking from Two Dot and he heard it in the back seat of a hot-rod Ford. He had never seen a two-dollar bill. Up front an older boy necked with his girl. Patrick could smell something … well, something. He had not imagined that there would be anything to smell. He tried not to stare or draw breath through his nose. Breath through his nose, he knew, would be a mortal sin. He looked instead at the sagebrush flats and streaks of water running from spring-flooded culverts in the creek bottoms.
“How far you going?”
“What?” Seal off that nose, she’s wriggling.
“Where you getting off at?”
“Deadrock.”
“We ain’t going to Deadrock. I’m shutting down this side of Harlowton— You ever seen a rubber?”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t. He was mouth-breathing and gaping into the sagebrush.
“Ever seen one like this?” It was a Ted Williams brand and it had the ball player on the label, ready to pound one out of Fenway Park.
“No, I sure haven’t.”
“Came out of a machine,” said the girl. “In Great Falls because of the air base. It’s a year and a half old. It’s give out and it’s still in the wrapper. That’s about how I was raised, buddy.”
“Up around them bases,” said the driver, “a rubber don’t have a long life to look forward to.”
“It does in Harlowton,” said the girl doggedly.
“I ought to rape your ass!”
“You and what army?”
The driver went into the hot-rod slump, left hand fingering the wind vane, upper body wedged between the wheel and the door. It worked; she crawled on over and Patrick craned at the landscape, wondering if this was going to end up in confession, then finally filling his lungs with the immemorial musk that fogged the interior of that hot-rod Ford, thinking: Purgatory at the very least.
He would have to go back to that, just to find one level of the power Claire had come to have for him. At the very minimum she was the lost ghost of the gold dredge.
34
TODAY WAS GOING TO REQUIRE A DEPARTURE, A MIGHTY DEPARTURE, from the recent pattern of thinking, drinking, funeral attending, cooking, baby-sitting his grandfather, caning editors and tampering with love. Because the ranch was falling apart. It was somehow terrific to rediscover that the ranch was not a dead, immutable thing. He could see from the upper road where one headgate had washed out, and there was a great mean scar where the water had gouged at the pretty hillside, and the topsoil from that particular part of the ranch was now in the Yellowstone River on its way to North Dakota. That had to be fixed. There were four places where the wire was down on the west-division fence; that would have to be pulled up and restapled. Things were a mess and he was getting excited. He was going to need his fence stretcher and fencing gloves and it was still going to be tops in mindless. But if he had any luck at all, this was going to last for years. It was like the heart trouble he wished for and never got.
He started hurting about halfway through the day. He hauled salt and mineral blocks, ponying a second horse up to the forest line. Then gathered thirty black yearlings from the brush along the creek where the flies had driven them from their feed. He gathered them into one end of the corral and he penned them off with a steel panel. He hung the heavy spray canister from a canvas strap over the sore muscles of his shoulders and waded among the fly-swarming backs, pumping with one hand and directing the nozzled wand with the other. When he was nearly done, one white-eyed steer flicked out a rear hoof and kneecapped Patrick, and he had to go sit down until the pain subsided and the knee swelled up tight within his jeans. He sat on the dirt of the corral, the canister still in place, tapped one dirty boot with the spray wand, looked through the steel panel at the milling steers as they felt the flies’ liftoff; like them, he rolled fool eyes to heaven and thought: Claire, my knee hurts.
He hung the sprayer on a corral post and rode back down
to the ranch. He was so tired that when he unsaddled the horse, he just drop-kicked the saddle out of his way and threw the bridle in a heap. He grained the horse and kept her down for the next day and went inside.
Then, while he was making dinner for his grandfather, who was sorting a shoe box of assorted cartridges, he noticed through the kitchen window that everything was covered with a thin layer of dust.
“Did the wind blow real hard here today?”
“No.”
“How come everything is covered with dust?”
“A helicopter landed in the yard.”
“What?”
“Helicopter.”
“Who was in it?”
“Nobody got out. Here’s an old Army Springfield round.”
“How long did it stay there?”
“Oh, bout an hour. Made quite a racket. They never shut that big propeller off. I really didn’t want to walk near it.” Tio had made an aerial visit under power and Patrick had missed it: a lost effect, like rabbits jumping from a top hat in an empty room.
Patrick had given up on his cooking since his grandfather had gone off his specialties. So now he made dopy chicken casseroles or things he could cook all day in a crock; and today he had prepared, of all things, a big bowl of red Jell-O to set beside the aerosol can of Reddi-Wip; and it was in its tremulous surface that he first detected the return of the helicopter, a faint sound, a drumming, like one’s pulse; then rapidly magnifying as it moved toward them. Its horizontal motion could be felt to stop, and high above the house the waves of sound centered.
Patrick walked out the front door and could see the great insect shape high above the ranch. It made him nervous. The moment he stepped into the yard, the helicopter began to move toward the mountains, disappearing finally through a narrow pass. Patrick went back inside and thumbed open The Joy of Cooking.
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