Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  38

  “TIO?” PATRICK HELD THE PHONE SLIGHTLY AWAY FROM HIS head.

  “How’s Patrick?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What can I do you for?”

  “You know when we talked earlier?”

  “Yes,” said Tio. “Sure do. But we finished that conversation.”

  “Well, not entirely.”

  “Yeah, we did. Now, don’t y’all be stupid. I’ve got to ease up on this beast with my rocks and sling. So don’t go to jumping me out with some Yankee love of truth. Guy in my position needs to exact some teeny form of retribution without resorting to a bunch of bald statements and unusual self-righteous Yankee speeches, calling me up in the middle of the day with y’mouth hanging open, this man-to-man horseshit, which you have my invitation to give back to the Army.”

  “I can’t understand this.”

  “Myself!”

  “How does it turn out?”

  “You just shake and it’s snake eyes time after time. They’re loaded.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You never answered me about Claire.”

  Patrick was not used to this form of evangelical yammering, if indeed anyone was. The best gloss of Tio’s speech he could come up with went: There are things one doesn’t say; in which case, they had just had a rather traditional moment together, man-to-man, in vacant splendor.

  39

  IN TIMES OF GREAT TRIBULATION, A VISIT TO MARION Easterly often seemed important. Mary claimed that Marion had been his greatest love, that no one would ever equal her in Patrick’s eyes. But Patrick was sure that they had been apart long enough now, that the Miss Palm side of Marion had sufficiently diminished and that his new and real love for Claire was deep enough that a chat with Marion wouldn’t do all that much harm.

  Marion was living with a Lutheran clergyman on Custer Street. They had a white marriage and a view of the mountains. An irrigation overflow babbled through the childless lawn. Or, rather, a trout-filled brook. Anyway, babbled.

  “Heck,” said Patrick. “You’re only a hop, skip and a jump away from Loretta’s place.”

  “I know, but I’d be afraid those little dickenses would … ensnare me!”

  “You could be right.” Patrick had made a big Dagwood sandwich. He was trying to eat this three-decker in the fetal position without getting mayonnaise on the bed.

  He told Marion that he was in love. He told her that his lady was married to a man of the oil. He mentioned that they had gone all the way and that he thought that the man of oil knew this. Marion raised her hands to the sides of her face, pretty as a picture. “Oh, oh,” she exclaimed. “I fear very much for you at the hands of this person of oil.”

  In the afternoon Patrick expelled two West Coast coyote hunters from the ranch. They had started out on the Mojave, hoping to set a record that would make one of the gun magazines. They were, respectively, a Sheetrocker and a Perfataper. They had been taking amphetamines for four days and had nearly filled their powerful Land Cruiser with dead coyotes. The Sheetrocker did most of the driving, while the Perfataper stood through a “shooting station,” which was kind of a sun roof. He had a two-sixty-four magnum and his best lick was blasting. They were four pelts shy of the record and were just working their way east, broadcasting the squeals of dying rabbits from speakers mounted behind the grill. They hadn’t had a good day since the Wasatch range in Utah. They were losing weight, running out of money and pills. The Sheetrocker said that he just wanted to touch one off. And the Perfataper said not just one; we’re taking a hard run at the statistics.

  “Well, your dead-rabbit record is scaring my horses.”

  “So?”

  “And you’re on my land.”

  “So?”

  Patrick thought about mayhem; but again, that could cheat him of Claire. He directed the coyote hunters up to Tio’s ranch. The yellow Land Cruiser rolled off and in a moment began spitefully broadcasting the deathsqueals of the rabbits again.

  Patrick wondered why he had sent them to Tio’s ranch. It was not to create further trouble, certainly. Searching his mind, he decided that it became impossible to call over there again; and just maybe he could elicit some response with these yo-yos in the Jap land-gobbler.

  Very generously, Catches had had the film developed of the cat stalking moths in Grassrange. In most of them the cat was a light-struck incubus figure, the light something like a separate galaxy, and the moths strangely technological creatures, as aerodynamic and systems-ridden as ICBMs. Patrick thought this was a lovely gift and hoped that the wherewithal had come from the night of Loretta, Deirdre and Tana. The letter said, “What are you doing?”

  Patrick decided that in the Castilian walk-up he could go native. He would wear his hair swept back from the forehead and hold his black tobacco cigarette out at the ends of his fingertips. He would bring the pimentos back in the oiled paper, the anchovies and the terribly young lamb. He’d go to the odd mass or two, not in preparation, as he might now in the remorseless West; but in the healthy, ghoulish attendance of Spain, to stare at the wooden blood and pus of the old Stations of the Cross. He could have fun there and not have foreboding. He could have the time of his life making smart salads by the stone sink. It could be tops in mindless. He could duck the English secretaries like the plague, as each had already been hopelessly wounded by her own London travel agent. In any case, his crude post-coital bathrobe slopping about was sure to cause no harm to anyone; and the question of smelly imbroglios starring oil-minded Southwesterners could not happen to him, stainless in Madrid, with day help. The black olives in the salad would have wrinkles like the faces of men who have lived a long time, innocent of violence.

  “What have you done!”

  “Oh dear.”

  “I have narrowly escaped with my life!”

  “I see it now. I said the wrong thing.” Patrick was thinking of his conversation with Tio.

  “You sure did.”

  “Give me the headlines.”

  “Well, they rolled in and shot everything that moved. They’re in the living room now, knocking back Turkey and getting too close to Tio for comfort.”

  “Wait a minute. What are you talking about?”

  “The coyote hunters.”

  “Have you talked to Tio?”

  “Not yet. But he’s crazy about them. He’s in there yelling First Amendment and States’ Rights. They’re real drunk and it’s getting crude.”

  “You haven’t talked to him …”

  “I talked to him right up till the coyote hunters and that was all she wrote. He said he might make a trip today in the helicopter. But if he didn’t, I’d of wished he had.”

  “Did you know that Tio and I spoke?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I’m not sure what was said. But I think we agreed you and I were sleeping together and we wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Do you really think that?” Claire asked in an exhalation of terror.

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “I better start running, then. I better clear out.”

  She rang off in panic. Had Patrick endangered her? He thought to himself, I’d better not have. That would have been well beyond the jaggedness-of-the-everyday.

  Something was making him feel that he had touched something he didn’t completely understand. He had once, washing dishes, reached deep into the suds and been flattened by electrical shock. The root system of the China willow had carried a power line into the septic tank. From Patrick’s point of view, the tree had nearly electrocuted him. It took a plumber and an electrician to explain the occasion. Patrick said, “I was only washing dishes.”

  The plumber said, “When lightning flew out your ass.”

  Something about Tio was like washing those dishes.

  40

  CLAIRE ARRIVED AND SAID THAT THE RANCH WOULDN’T DO. The same applied to hotels, motels, rest stops and locally notorious zones of cohabitation.

  “How about
a johnboat?”

  “No.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Did I do the wrong thing? Can’t you say you want to be with me?”

  “I just don’t want to get nailed in the crosswalk.”

  They ended up at the line shack on Silver Stake. Patrick rammed and jammed his way in there, missing the vacant shafts, in his truck. Meadowlarks showered out of the buckbrush at the advent of grill and bumper. The combination to the lock, hanging on the warped plank pine door, was that of Marion Easterly: four zeros; easy to remember. The roof was made from sheets of aluminum used in the newsprint process. A practiced eye could invert them to the unweathered, unoxidized side and find the same old crap in aluminum immemorial. Dog eats baby. Indiana woman gives birth to five-pound bass. Silver Stake was on the Heart Bar allotment. The walls were made of the miserable little east-slope logs with their millions of pin knots. It had a patent heater and a pack rat bunk. It was kind of a cowboy joint, hidden upside a terrific wilderness. Patrick missed his Charlie Parker records.

  He missed Bud Powell as well, despite recent associations. He did have the following to protect Guinevere from storm and flood: one sledge, two splitting wedges, a double-bitted axe, kitchen matches, Winchester, twenty rounds Remington Core-Lokt 140 grain, Pabst Blue Ribbon (a case), potatoes, onions, stew beef, fifty-pound sack of pinto beans (“I’ve got to stock up for fall roundup! I am not making an an an assumption!”), peppers and pepper derivatives—Frank’s Louisiana hot sauce, ancho peppers, chilipiquines and Tabasco. Blankets: five-line Hudson Bay, two. Artilleryman’s gloves. Harry Truman biography: “When I hear them praying in the amen corner, I head home to lock the smokehouse.” Something like that.

  “Why do we have all this stuff?”

  “It’s our new life!”

  “What!”

  Drip-baste cast-iron pot; skillet con giant flapjack flipper; and the requisite lid from an old Maytag washing machine. Soap: laundry, dish and personal. Steel wool. Dry rack, dish set with bluebirds, and percolator.

  “It looks like we’re here to stay! And we’re not!”

  Patrick gave the lock the full zeros and they were inside. Rat manure and newspaper bits were strewed on the adzed floor timbers. From the window one little turn of Silver Stake Creek turned up to the right and disappeared like a live comma. It was a world that yielded only to a broom, flung-open windows and wood smoke. They threw the flypaper out in the snow with its horrid quarter-pound load of dead flies. Thermal inversion pushed the first smoke down the chimney, and then the flue heated and sucked. There were empty cartridges on the windowsill, a calendar that didn’t work this year and a coyote skull for a soap holder. Next to the sink was a cheap enamel pitcher, in flecked white and gray, for dishwater.

  “God, I don’t know,” said Claire. “Are we preparing a moonlit rendezvous?”

  “I really don’t know, either. You said you wanted to get out of town.”

  “But this has the earmarks of a shack-up. What I had in mind was my life. Saving of same. I wanted to miss the initial flash. Hold me. There. Oh dear, Patrick. What in God’s name did you do?”

  Patrick split up the small fatty pine chunks for the woodstove. “I’ve been trying to think why I did that. Honestly, I thought it was what you would have insisted upon. Not a shack-up. I know it’s a shack, but … well.”

  “Again.”

  “What?”

  “Hold me.” He could feel her wary, wild shape through her clothes.

  They stood in the cool cabin, the pine beginning to catch and the fog of condensation starting to spread on the cold windows; the awful, clear mountain light diminished and modulated its measuring-stick quality, its cartoon illumination of human events. The cabin filled with golden light, finally; the stove crackled and the cold fall sun hung, suspended and inglorious, in the steamy glass. The minute bough tips of evergreen touched the same glass, casting spidery black shadows in the steam.

  Sling the mattress over on the coil springs, to the side upon which no pack rat has trod. Claire made up the bunk with the woolen blanket so that it looked like a Pullman berth on a silver shadow train flying through the Carolinas in last light. Claire was a bow beneath him, thumbs indenting his arms, intense this side of screaming. Then her face tipped to one side. And Patrick stared down at her strong bare body as he entered again and again. He wanted to say that sufficiency rather than salvation was at issue. Then, jetting into her, there swept over him an indifference to their danger. Therefore, he shut the hell up and for the moment was glad to be home.

  Blanket over his shoulders, Patrick attended to the interior of the little ship set against the hard evergreens, now throwing the peculiar pulsing light of a pressure lantern through the imperfect windows. He took the claw hammer and, clutching the blanket around himself as though modesty continued to be an issue, battered down the exposed nails that years of frost had heaved up out of the flooring. He put perhaps more effort into this than it entirely required.

  “Patrick, Tio was my neighbor in Oklahoma. His mother virtually raised me. We’d hit it pretty good and there wasn’t time for us kids at our house. There wasn’t a thing wrong with him, there really wasn’t. Anyway, I married him. And then after that—and maybe this is where I feel like I broke with something I never should have—after that, I took up with my people’s views. Which is not necessarily bad in and of itself; but the situation was that I had all the leverage and pretty soon we weren’t in high school and we weren’t at A & M and then we weren’t even in Tulsa. And pretty soon it was pretty damned fast and I had broken his heart one too many times. But by the time I was sorry there was something there in him that was gone for good.”

  “How had you broken his heart one too many times?”

  “That will never be any of your business.”

  Patrick thought, You are in your perfect little cabin, which you have seen as a ship on an empty sea; and the light and the air seem to substantiate your happiness as you putter around in your wigwam blanket tapping back nails. And then there is something not unlike the blind flash experienced by those whose homes have suddenly been illuminated by the voluminous and unwelcome light of a flamethrower, or some self-immolating madman who picked your yard, or a bad wire, a meteor, an act of God … gasoline.

  Patrick said, “That’s enough for me. I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “To start with, Tio was all right. But he’s not all right anymore.”

  “What was all right about him? I don’t want to hear this.”

  “He had just so much talent but he busted a gut for that. And about the two thousandth storage tank my people tried to shove down his throat, his mind quit that little bit, and in Tio’s mind he was an oilman. Then he had airplanes, stewardesses and guns. He learned to farm things out. He bought everything he wore at Cutter Bill’s in Dallas. He never rode a horse but now he couldn’t miss Ruidoso. He began to speak of his daddy. His daddy was what you’d call an Okie with a capital O, little ole thin-lipped Ford parts manager out at the four corners. Despite his redneck ways, he always wanted Tio to buckle when it came to those tanks, however many fourflushers, missed connections or falsified airline tickets that might have entailed.”

  “This has grown too heavy. This is becoming quite brutal. And anyway, all I wanted was your ass.” His throat grabbed.

  “C’mere, Mr. Wretch.”

  “No, now wait a minute.”

  “For what. Give me the blanket, anyway.” She began to sing. It had become obvious that she was, to a highly refined degree, hysterical. “ ‘I’ve been to Redwood, I’ve been to Hollywood—’ ”

  “Oh, stop this. Stop!”

  But by then she was crying and Patrick could only stand by, stove heat to his back, wrapped in his dopy blanket.

  “Please stop.”

  So a night passed without much sleep; then just before light a lynx screamed in the rocks and Patrick got up to fire the stove once again, preparing to make breakfast. He stopped to reach under the blanket, w
hich was pulled over Claire’s head, and with the morning hands of a sleepy cook, examined her entire body, just to do that, before she could wake up. He held his hands against his face, then cracked the eggs one by one, watching them drop into the white bowl. He stared at them. The vague anticipatory birds, too small to shoot, the ones that ruin all-nighters, began to make specific announcements from the surrounding brush. When he went out to the creek to fill the percolator, the stony air stung Patrick’s skin. And as soon as the first brown bubble appeared in the glass top, he slipped back under the blanket to rediscover Claire’s expectant and dreaming heat.

  Patrick put breakfast on the table. The cabin was warm now. He could think of only one fact: Nobody knows where we are. But we’ve been here overnight and that is a declaration.

  “This is extremely wonderful, Patrick.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “I know you must be. But if we could suspend that—”

  “Let’s try. We shall see us try.”

  They made a decent attempt at making an island of the place, like an English couple eating marmalade in an air raid. Patrick had parked the truck nearly against the cabin in case the lantern inside didn’t work; but when he glanced up and saw the one headlight in the window, it frightened him for an instant. He thought, With all my reputation for independence and for being warlike, it would seem I’m afraid of everything; it was one of the secrets he had that he had never cared to keep. But now he wanted to be courageous, because without it he had no chance of holding Claire. There were so many questions about her existence that would have to have help; and it was Patrick who had brought everything to a head with his codified silences with Tio. Hiding in the woods wasn’t going to do for long. Lastly, he realized it was the headlight of his own truck.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said, testing his bravery. “Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go see Tio.”