Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “I wish that movie hadn’t gone away,” said his grandfather. “Maybe there was movie people in that helicopter.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “They could have been scouting locations.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Everybody loves a Western.”

  “How do you know it was a Western?”

  “Hondo’s Last Move? What else could it be?”

  “The word around here was it was about a child molester named Hondo.”

  “I didn’t know that. God, I didn’t know that.”

  “Can you eat chicken and dumplings again?”

  “Sure. Can we go to the movies?”

  “I’m pretty tired, Grampa.”

  “Or there’s one with Greer Garson on TV. It’s about a factory, I think.”

  “Maybe that would be better. Besides it’ll be late once these dishes are cleaned up.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tomorrow can we look at apartments?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t remember which rifle this went to,” said his grandfather in disgust, placing the cartridge next to the Jell-O. “I think it was that one that the horse fell with coming out of Falls Creek with Arnie.”

  “I didn’t know Arnie, Gramp.” Patrick was sick of these unreferenced tours of memory. Fucking Arnie, anyway.

  “He was the scissorbill from up around Plentywood. I don’t know. Anyway, I know it’s gone.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “No. That was a funny-looking machine, that helicopter. Shame Mary couldn’t have seen it. I didn’t have my hat and my hair was blowing all over. I got dirt in my nose. It went straight up and I lost it in the sun. It was exactly like the movies. Maybe it was full of prisoners and there’s this guy who didn’t shave, with a tommy gun.”

  Patrick was getting depressed as he cooked. Tio, he guessed, was home. He literally pined for Claire and there wasn’t anything he could think to do about it. And there was something about his grandfather’s running on, which didn’t usually bother him, that was getting at his nerves. Still, he could fall back on the day’s work, a new regime toward bringing the ranch back to order. There was some warm memory tugging at him that he couldn’t quite isolate; and as he cooked, he searched his mind for it, feeling that it would cheer him up. Then it came: It was the velvet hydraulic rush of his tank over Germany, the orderly positions of the crew, and being the captain.

  “Fitzpatrick.”

  “Hey, Tio.”

  “Awfully sorry about your sister.”

  “Thanks for saying so.”

  “And remember, it was her right to do that. She’s the only one to know if it was a good idea. It can be just the thing; I’m persuaded of that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say, how much do you want for your ranch?”

  “It’s not for sale, Tio.”

  “I just went down and dumped that Cat-Track joint that was such a thorn in our sides, that quicksand trap on the north Canadian, and the money’s burning a hole in my pocket.”

  “This is my grandfather’s and my home.”

  “Well, move ass to town. I want to spend this dinero. The old man tell you I came and looked at the place?”

  “Were you in a helicopter?”

  “That was me. That you come out in the yard at suppertime?”

  “Yup.”

  “I thought so. Say, are you sleeping with my wife?”

  Not a word in reply.

  “Leafy, am I not thoughtless? I am. Left you in a cold corral with no kisses. Here is a kiss. What a beautiful horse you are.” Leafy exhaled and changed weight on her feet. It seemed so extraordinary to Patrick that this watermarked mare with eyes like tide pools could also be twelve hundred pounds of orchestral muscle, could trust and work for you, could ride the continually moving hands of the mortal clock with you, could take you in the hills, help you win a rodeo or work cattle, could send you gliding with new tallness on a part of the earth that was worth all the trouble. “What do you know of trouble, Leafy? Or do you take the position that it is my department?”

  Onward to the restoration of order: mucking stalls, wheelbarrowing the manure across the road onto the rich pile that would be so useful to a determined gardener with a nice ass. Then he went up on the metal roof of the granary before it got too hot and tarred over the nail holes as he had to each year. He had put the roof on and had nailed in the troughs of the corrugation instead of the lands, as one is supposed to, and so it had to be tarred yearly. He was determined to ride Leafy today because he thought he glimpsed sadness-for-no-reason in her eyes. When Leafy was born, her mother dropped her in the last piece of snow in a spring pasture. Patrick found the foal, a clear, veinous membrane around her shoulders, shivering in the snow, her seashell hooves just beginning to harden in the air. He put an arm under her butt and one under her neck and lifted her out onto the warming prairie grass while the mother nickered in concern. Then he drew the membrane down off her body and let the mare lick her dry. The watermarks in her coat were like leaves and Patrick named her while the mare contracted and drove out the afterbirth; Patrick lifted the placenta, shaped like the bottom of a pair of long underwear with one short leg, and scrutinized it for completeness; a missing piece retained in the mare could be fatal. Leafy wobbled to her feet after pitching over a few times and stood, straight-legged, springy-pasterned, with her exaggerated encapsulated knees. Patrick put iodine on her navel stump, which made her leap. The mother stood and Leafy ducked under to nurse. The mare kept lifting a rear leg from the pain of new milk; then the two, big and little shadows, glided away to their life together. Patrick went off through the orchard; and by the time he had started down the hill to the house, he could hear the birds arguing in the afterbirth. In his mind he had marked the foal for himself.

  “At least can we look for apartments tomorrow?”

  “I promise. I’m just tired, Grampa. Besides, you want to see them in the light.”

  “They have lights, Pat. They have electricity, for crying out loud. They’re about two blocks from the movies.”

  “Still, you want the outside to be nice. You want to look around.”

  “If I was worried how they looked on the outside, I’d stay on the ranch.”

  “I don’t know what this bee in your bonnet is, anyway. Why aren’t you staying on the ranch?”

  “Because I see things I can’t do anymore, and in an apartment I won’t. I won’t have to watch you do things worse than I did them. I’ll be protected from such a sight.” Patrick was angered this time by his grandfather. But even irritated, he dreaded seeing the apartments.

  35

  THE LIGHTS WHEELED AGAINST THE HOUSE AND STOPPED. Then Patrick could see only the darkness. But when the car door opened after quite a long moment and its interior lights went on, he saw that it was Claire. He raced down the stairs to the front door. He turned on the hall light and stepped outside. When she got to the door, Patrick felt the ardent flush of blood through his chest.

  He said, “I had a sore knee,” then held her and kissed her. She seemed limp or exhausted.

  “You what?”

  “I wanted to tell you yesterday I had a sore knee. You weren’t here. It’s not sore anymore, but I wanted to be a baby about it.”

  Claire followed Patrick through the doorway, past ten year’s history of overshoes, overshoes with lost buckles, overshoes covered with the manure of cattle long since vanished through takeout windows, and overshoes of drunks who failed to return. They sat in the kitchen and Patrick found her request for whiskey an inspiration; so now the cheerful label of George Dickel’s bourbon was between them, and if it had not been for Claire’s strangely stricken look, all would have been not just happy but beyond belief. It was the middle of the night and they were alone together on Patrick’s ranch. He knew there was something going on; but he was determined to turn things into his first impression no matter what.

  “
He’s home.”

  “I know. I talked to him.”

  “Well, I don’t know what his problem is.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s just kind of raging around. He sent his pilot into town. First he was going to sleep in the helicopter. I kept saying what’s the matter, and he says it’s boring. I’m bored. I said I was sorry. When he goes down there and they get on those phones, a lot of them start using pills and they get very cross. But this time I don’t know. He used to be so sweet. I think he must know something. Then he came inside and said we were going to forget it; but first he just wanted to know what in the hell I had achieved in his absence. I said nothing and he said he didn’t think so. Well, we even got over that, which maybe was too bad”—she refilled her drink one-handed, leaning on the other, the pale thick braid coming over her shoulder across her pretty breasts—“because when we went upstairs, he grew extremely nasty with me.”

  Patrick’s stomach twisted. “How?”

  “Never mind. It was simply too coarse for words. It was nasty.” She took a long breath. “So what I told him was he had the wrong person. He needed someone you just pay, because he sort of saw it as I was to do as I was told. So Tio yells, ‘Are you talking about a whore? Fine! I’d like three!’ He said that I was a whore in every way except the one that counted. So that’s where I am.”

  “Where?”

  “Trying to find three whores for Tio!”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. And I told him so.” She smiled weakly. “I was hoping you’d know where I could find them.”

  “Is he safe?”

  “Oh sure. It’s just that he can get right repulsive with me. He’ll treat them like queens and overpay, too—”

  “Are you calling his bluff?” Patrick felt as though he’d fallen in the middle of a dispute wherein he feared discovering some passion. This had some of the signs of revenge and he was not entirely happy to help.

  “I’ll help,” he said.

  So instead of being alone together on the ranch with the dwarf owls drifting across the yard through the yard light, the coyotes trickling down out of the hills toward dawn when the cool inversion changed the smell from cottonwood to evergreen, instead of that, they were barreling through the night toward a Deadrock cathouse. At least, thought Patrick, we are in her car and I’m damn well going to insist on a ride home. Purgatory at the very least.

  Once again—that is, not since he had first come home and sought rumors of Mary and had overcome his resistance to the facts—once again, this time with Claire, he crossed the footbridge over the clear-running ditch and knocked on the whorehouse door. He remembered the television debate as to the fetus’s right to life, the coffee cans naming the girls, the kitchen timers. The door opened and David Catches greeted Patrick and Claire. Patrick introduced Claire to David and they went in.

  “What are you doing here, David?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I can’t give you the instant replay. The story’s a little hard to tell.”

  They passed into the living room; the television was on and girls were scattered in teasing fragmentary bits of clothing. Loretta, the former homecoming queen, wearing almost nothing, gave Patrick the kiss of a very old friend; but still he felt something tighten in his crotch. There were somewhat brutal sounds continuously to be heard in neighboring rooms; and Patrick thought, This wonderful spot is good for our town! Loretta’s playfulness had taken some of the sting from his situation.

  “I met Mary here,” said David. “I guess I came back, y’know … old times. Anyway, I make sure everything is okay. In other words, I got a job.”

  Suddenly a door opened and a very happy, inebriated man of fifty pirouetted into the room. He was naked and tumescent and he had spotted Claire. “Where were you when I ordered?” he demanded to know.

  “She doesn’t work here,” David said politely.

  “Someone’s trying to hog her,” he said. “I’m gd cstmr and I won’t stnd fr it.”

  “She’s with the police,” said David. Patrick couldn’t take his eyes off Loretta, and the shadowy, lounging figures watching television were getting under his skin.

  “That’s just great,” said the drunk. “Now I’ve lost my hard-on. Where my shoes?” He stumbled disconsolately toward the door he’d emerged from. “Where’m I gone get nother? Can’t get nother. Only hard-on I had. But who cares? None of you care …” He drifted away. “You’re all women’s libbers,” he added.

  Once the situation had been explained to David, whom the girls called Cochise, and a cash settlement made by Claire, they were ready to head for Tio Burnett’s ranch. “Let’s get a head count here!” David called as the three girls pulled on revealing one-piece quick-draw dresses. Claire noticed Patrick staring. She was very slightly and most delicately irate.

  “You think they’re pretty, don’t you?” she said very close to his face. His heart soared.

  “Well, they are pretty.”

  “I thought the best things in life were free.”

  “This is the major exception.”

  Patrick, Claire, Loretta, Deirdre and Tana went out through the door, Patrick shaking hands once more with Catches, considering that friendship was somewhere possible, and in the mixture of perfume, mysterious sounds behind doors, weak drinks and TV, he thought he had seen Mary’s ghost for the first time in a form he didn’t believe would kill him.

  Claire gave the girls a wide and too-sunny smile, the lightest crow’s feet at the corners of her slate eyes, and said to the women, “Get on in.” The three climbed into the backseat; Claire got in and Patrick prepared to drive. No amount of air-conditioning could daunt the garden of scents that filled the interior of the car. Patrick felt thrilled.

  “Where exactly we going, Pat?” Loretta asked.

  “Remember the old Leola Swenson place in the Crazies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there.”

  “You two know each other?” Claire asked.

  “Yes.”

  They headed up north on Main Street. The brick false fronts, the glitter of the bars and keno parlors, the sight of the grand old stone railroad station’s arcades lit only by passing cars, seemed to make things extraordinarily cheerful. Patrick could hear the polishing of silk stockings on shifting legs in back, and it occurred to him that he hardly knew anyone who wore them anymore; they were worn to be removed.

  “Is this a Cadillac?” Deirdre asked.

  “Yes,” said Claire.

  “I was going to get one. Montana has such tough usury laws you can make great deals with General Motors’ financing plans. But I wanted front-wheel drive. So I got a Toronado.”

  Tana said, “I’ll never pass the driver’s test. I cannot parallel park.”

  “That’s because you refuse to pull up even with the car in front of you. That is absolutely the only way it will work,” Loretta said.

  “It gives me the creeps to pull up that far. I keep thinking someone will get my spot.”

  “They get your spot anyway, because you never get it.”

  “Who is this person we’re going to see?” Loretta asked.

  “My husband,” said Claire. The car was silent. Shapes passed the window in that silence: sawdust burners glowing in the night, various spots of lights on the remote hills like beacons, patterned somehow, as though they were to be read from space.

  Deirdre piped up innocently, “You sure are understanding!”

  “Thank you,” said Claire grimly.

  “Will there be any rough stuff?” Loretta inquired.

  “No.”

  “Good. I sure wouldn’t want to cross that sagebrush in the dark.”

  Tana asked, “Will you be with us, Claire?”

  “I’m sorry, no,” said Claire. This was really getting appalling to her. The impulse, it seemed to Patrick, had long since disappeared into the gritty logistics.

  “I think, ladies,” Patrick said, �
��that it would be best, all things considered, if nobody saw me tonight.”

  “Mum’s the word.”

  When they got to the bottom of the road, Patrick turned off the lights and crept toward the house. There were low brushy willows at one side of the road, and they glowed in the moonlight with an extraordinary pallor. The darkness, the glow of the instruments, the invisible female presences, made Patrick think of the Army. Or the inside of aircraft. It seemed to him that Claire was sitting extremely upright and that that was somehow distinct from the warm, crowded people in back. She was lit by instruments.

  “You’ll have to walk from here,” said Patrick. “Just to be safe.” The house, emerged from the elevation to the road, was completely lit from within; but nothing other than windows were illuminated, a crazily assorted series of panels in the darkness itself. It looked unfinished, like a sketch for something unearthly. Nobody crossed one of the panels; it was a terrifically detailed emptiness.

  “I’ll pick you up in three hours, ladies,” said Claire.

  “Here?”

  “No, I’ll drive up.”

  They watched the women walking toward the lights until they were absolutely perfect silhouettes, moving like three black flames to the house.

  Patrick turned the car around and started downhill. When he had gone far enough, he turned the lights on and glanced over at Claire. Her face was shining with tears. For three hours, they were on their own, the thud of freedom. Patrick thought of, and rejected, numerous simple questions before he spoke. Then he asked, “Why did you marry him?” She turned quickly to look at Patrick.

  “Because I loved him,” she said; she was angry.

  At the bottom of the hill, you could turn north or south on the pavement, or west toward the Bridger on the county road. “Boy, this is a quiet car,” Patrick said, then stopped to think. He turned left to get closer to his ranch and to calm his nerves. They were nearly to Deadrock, circling slowly above the lights on the interstate, before Claire spoke: “Will we wake anybody up if we go back to your place?”