Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  At this point there were no gestures that could accompany such extreme statements. It just had to be said across the table. Anyway, Patrick was going. He didn’t look sure of himself and Claire seemed too depleted to respond.

  41

  PATRICK’S HEART WAS POUNDING WHEN HE CLIMBED FROM the truck. He deliberately walked past the front window so that he could glance inside. The Cadillac was tilted up on the slope to the lawn; and he remembered that that was where he had seen it last—a precise parking habit. But mainly he noticed the huge tire prints of some powerful machine across the new lawn in a big arc that took them out of the place—not down the road but directly out through the sagebrush. Then, he noticed the flies on the window, thousands of them.

  He knocked without getting an answer. So he knocked again. He craned to see past the angle of the hallway into the kitchen, but could discern nothing. He tried the door and found it open. He walked in among coatracks festooned with deluxe sporting clothes and was overpowered by some awful smell. He was completely frightened, but he worked his way into the kitchen, calling out Tio’s name ahead of himself through the kitchen and into the living room.

  The living room was ruined with broken bottles and glasses, turned-over furniture and, worst of all, the carcasses of coyotes, some skinned so that they looked alive, veined and bug-eyed, in reaching-out postures so distinctive as to suggest they ran even in death. Hides, curled up and stinking, one hanging on the ninth largest whitetail ever killed in Texas, all swam under a mantle of flies. Patrick rolled open the windows and turned the heat off.

  He started upstairs; and by the landing he could see Tio’s boots, toes down over the top step. Patrick thought, He’s dead. He climbed the rest of the way, and as he moved around Tio’s rumpled body, the body moved, the head turned up for a look. “Fitzpatrick.”

  “What’s the problem here, Tio?”

  “Had some bounty-hunter friends on a visit. God-amighty, did I sleep here?”

  “Evidently you did.”

  Tio struggled into a kneeling position and let his head hang for a long moment. “Godamighty. Last thing I remember, we was trying to get them coyotes skinned. We was a little far gone.” Tio got up. “I was shooting at something in the fireplace. I guess they panicked. Up till then, our plan was to hunt you down like an animal. Which is all you are. Then I had kind of a fit and they run off on me.”

  Tio wandered toward the bathroom and closed the door. Patrick expected him to emerge with a gun. He looked around the room for the weapon Tio had mentioned and didn’t see it. He began to be sure that it was in the bathroom. Then he heard the shower running. In the eerie situation it sounded like some kind of weather behind the closed bathroom door, like a distant storm that ended suddenly. Patrick then thought of Claire, on the chance his minutes were numbered.

  The bathroom door swung open. Tio, wrapped in a towel, was drawing broad stripes through the shaving cream on his face. Still standing at the top of the stairs, Patrick could hear the sleepy drone of the flies downstairs. Tio spoke to him, shaving accurately and without a mirror.

  “Eat up with the dumb ass,” he said, grimly.

  “Looks like it.”

  “What … in the fuck are you doing here?”

  This sent Patrick spinning: Was it to lay claim to the first thing he seemed prepared to fight for since coming home? Was it to bring to closure a mystery he couldn’t bear in all the tranquility of the cabin? He really didn’t know; but he understood that those were the questions.

  “Well, Claire got kind of frightened by your guests.”

  “That’s not it,” said Tio, leaning over the sink and scrubbing vigorously at his teeth. I’ve got it, thought Patrick, I’ll tell Claire I shot him. No, Christ, that’s hysterical. Tio stood and turned toward him. “You could drive to my house, but you couldn’t tell me the truth. Pitiful. I’m supposed to need professional supervision, but you’re pitiful.” He threw the towel behind and wandered naked to the closet, where he took the utmost care in picking his wardrobe for the day: Levis, a green chambray shirt and his tall boots. The buckle on his belt had the cat-track brand overlaid on it in gold. It was Claire’s family brand. Patrick was relieved he’d gotten his clothes on. And he was still thinking about being called pitiful. He felt his blood rise.

  “I love Claire,” he said.

  “Oh, I bet you do.”

  “That doesn’t seem important to you?”

  “I’d hate to see you get her killed. That’s important to me. I’m crazy about the girl.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, you say you’re in love with her. How would you like some clown putting her life in question?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, as the lady’s husband, I’m here to tell you that that is exactly what you’re doing. Nothing will happen to you. You’re not important enough and nobody is going to make you important enough. Otherwise this little turn with Claire would look like it meant something, and it don’t. It’s just a momentary case of the dumb ass. Basically, we’re up north on vacation and maybe it got a little rowdy. Oklahoma can be brutal hot in the summertime. But it’s starting to cool off now. It’s time Claire and me headed home. So you fetch her. Tio’s gonna carry her back to where being with her people makes her feel bulletproof again.”

  Patrick started down the stairs ahead of Tio, and just as they moved to the level of the flies, he heard a sudden noise behind him, one that revealed the fear within himself, and the gasped word “Fitzpatrick.” Patrick turned and saw Tio half-seated, half-sprawled on the steps above him. He was changing color quickly and had lost control of his body. A stain spread at his crotch and Patrick could see in his struggling eyes that he now could no longer speak. Patrick remembered Claire’s words: “I’m the doctor and Tio is the patient and you are a cruel outsider.” Was this it?

  Tio was lighter than Patrick had expected. He carried him to the truck in the crazy daylight and felt the gusts of Tio’s malady. Then, on the drive to the hospital, Tio twisted up against his door and his teeth began rattling against the window. Patrick pulled him upright and kept on driving.

  They wheeled Tio through emergency. The doctor on call said they’d had him once before, explaining this while he tapped the nail of his forefinger on the crystal of his wristwatch. He held the watch to his ear and directed Patrick to the lobby to check Tio in. Tio glided off, wheeled by an orderly, his tall boots immobilized by a retaining strap. His face was locked in some terrible rictus, but his eyes blazed toward Patrick; Patrick would never forget their blaze.

  Patrick checked him in, writing Claire’s name under “Next of Kin” and his own on the bottom line.

  42

  ON THE WAY BACK TO SILVER STAKE CREEK, PATRICK STOPPED at his ranch and put the stock rack on his truck. He loaded Leafy and Box L, saddles, picket ropes and a hundred pounds of sweet feed. He went inside to see how his grandfather was doing and found the place in good order. He discovered the old man in the living room watching Houston play Denver.

  “Hey, Grandpa, I’m running—”

  “Where?”

  “I’m spending time with a real great lady.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “But look, I want to make early elk with you. So will you do me a favor? Will you buy us our groceries? I’ll be back to get us packed in four or five days.”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “You decide. And get me a box of 270’s. Hundred thirty grain.”

  “How long you plan to stay with this young lady?”

  “I told you, four or five days. Nothing is forever.”

  Then he headed south. He could see Leafy’s mane streaming in the rear-view mirror, Box L turning his forehead into it. Sixty-mile-an-hour horses with a highway unraveling behind them.

  The mountains paralleled the valley and the snowy peaks were extending with fall to the valley floor. Patrick wondered seriously if this country had ever been meant to be lived
in. Right now he could only imagine small hot spots of survival, winter seemed so imminent. He could imagine lying in bed with Claire and he could imagine seeing after his grandfather on the ranch and diligently looking after his warm animals so that the cold didn’t sweep them away. But the country lacked the detailed human regimen he imagined he could find in his Castilian walk-up, daily human rituals of coffee, cigarettes, wine, newspapers. The Deadrock region was just exactly the dumb fucking dehumanized photogenic district that would require a bunch of American reformed Protestants to invent. His mood had begun to show.

  Patrick was getting sour; he was getting ready to cheat. He drove up into the brush once more. There was still some smoke at the head of the chimney; so he’d done that right. He unloaded Leafy, then Box L. He drove picket pins out in the meadow and hobbled them so they wouldn’t cross lines.

  And then he went inside. Claire had taken down the Hudson Bay and was curled, undressed, in front of the wood stove.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “It said Tulsa.”

  “What said Tulsa?”

  “The note. It said he would be back by hunting season. I’m taking my grandfather in the hills then. And you can go. Or whatever you decide.” All Patrick could think in the indescribable panic that touched him was, I’m sure he’s getting the best of care. He’s going to have to live a few days without her at the side of his bed.

  Claire smiled. “Then we have some time together,” she said.

  “I wish we had a lot of time together.”

  “We don’t, darling. Let’s not pine for what we don’t have.”

  Patrick thought, I’ve lied my way into this. What ever happened to the officer and the gentleman? He concluded that it had never been the case. The hell with it. “What are we to make of this?”

  “I think we’re going to have a perfect time,” said Claire. “I’m real encumbered, but I’m falling in love with you.”

  “That’s what’s happening to me.”

  “Isn’t it so nice?”

  “I don’t know if those are the words,” he said.

  Shortly thereafter, packing saddlebags to take some limited supplies to the divide, the horses tied nose to nose at wind-twisted spruce next to the creek, Patrick knew that he was going to have to say something. But he was determined not to say it now. Otherwise the police or the papers or some blind, abstract party would do the work for him. So he was going to have to say something.

  When they got to the top of the world where the lichen made free, unearthly effects, as though the rocks were stained by sky, they tied the horses once more, loosened cinches and made love on cold ground where spring flowers were blooming in the mouth of winter. Then they tied a knot at the corners of the Hudson Bay and enclosed themselves in it, though the blanket now smelled of the four-thousand-foot pull just made by Leafy and Box L.

  “The thing is this: When I got to the house, the thing is, Tio was there, actually.”

  “He was? You say he was there?”

  “And at first things seemed quite normal. He just insisted that I be removed from this situation and that way this would never have happened. I didn’t think I saw him overwrought. He showered and changed. And suddenly he’d fallen and it was kind of … a fit.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted the time with you.”

  “What’s the matter with him? You liar!”

  “I don’t know.” He was stung.

  “Did they get him to the hospital?”

  “I took him.”

  “You were there when he fell apart? He’s not going to like that.”

  “Does he always come out of these?”

  “Yes. I wish you hadn’t lied to me.”

  “Well, I just did,” said Patrick angrily.

  “Is he hurt?”

  “No, and the doctor on emergency had seen him before. So I thought they’d know what to do.”

  “They will. But it doesn’t show up on the brain scan or in blood tests. And it never happened before we married.”

  “That could just be coincidence.”

  “It’s not. But you didn’t tell me the truth.”

  “Are you entirely guilty for these fits? Is that your opinion?”

  Patrick’s question sent Claire on a jag, as though somehow it all had to be pinned down immediately or their own fortunes would be swept under by the same malady.

  “My family persuaded Tio that I had married beneath myself. I could have prevented Tio from believing that. I assure you he was a very nice boy and he bought what my family had to say. Tio never looked up from the work my father had set him to do until he had proven he was a genuine Tulsa patrón just like my father. It took years. And when Tio returned his attentions to me, I just wasn’t really there anymore. He began saying peculiar things. And when my father was dying, Tio hung around his hospital room. He said he wanted to be in at the death. He succeeded, the only one to see the so-called final gasp. Then, sir, we went on a tear: Ruidoso, Santa Fe, Vail, La Paz. I didn’t know whether he was happy or sad. He didn’t know if I was there with him or not, and it just lingered like that until we started on home from Palm Springs. Tio stood up in front of the in-flight movie and went haywire. He was horrible and superhuman and we had to make an emergency landing in Phoenix. They had this center where they could study him, and let’s see, I think it was there that he asked me whether or not I was going to let him go under. And I said I wouldn’t. Two days later, he was pounding that. WATS line. And like I said, it’s not on the brain scan or in the blood tests. But I did say I wouldn’t let him go under. I hope you’ve got that clear.”

  They didn’t come down from the divide until darkness had fallen and the shining mantle of stars had rotated into the night. The stars looked like matches. There was some word for matches that was very close to the word “lucifer.” They looked like lucifers; and the horses picked down over the blasted rocks. You couldn’t see their legs and down in the trees Patrick and Claire couldn’t see each other and the lucifers were hidden behind the branches and even in the cold you waited for the lightning. “It would be hard for us to be much of anything with that hanging over us,” Claire said, almost asking. Patrick felt the sickness overcome him, the sickness he had known, one way or another, would come. “Tio knows me very well. He studied very closely and saw me falling in love with you. And I’m the one who made him so mean.” Leafy slid on the granite veil that caught the vague light of stars; and sparks streamed from her iron shoes. “What do you wish?” Claire asked.

  “I wish you’d shut up.”

  43

  LOITERING BEFORE THE HOSPITAL SEEMED NOT THE IDEAL thing. Pacing like an expectant father, he had less than the routine beatitude upon his face. Presently Claire emerged, and from an unofficial doorway, suggesting familiarity with the place.

  “He’s resting. He’s completely conscious.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that he was surprised to see me and that he thought I had come because I found sick people amusing.”

  “He’s lost none of his sense of humor. Did he tug at your heartstrings?”

  “Somewhat.” Her eyes clouded over as she turned to gaze at Patrick. A doctor arrived on a ten-speed bicycle and shot past very close, so that for a moment the air was filled with bay rum.

  “Let’s go.”

  They drove toward Claire’s place. Patrick told her about the condition of its interior, the carcasses, the bottles.

  Claire turned on the radio. “The girls all look prettier at closing time.” “I wish things would lighten up,” she said. “I know we’re grown and all. But I’d like to dance my ass off.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “We’ll survive this. But what is that worth?”

  Patrick remembered Germany when the drugged girls were carried screaming from the cafés, the sense of flames in the doorways, the nerve net hang
ing vulnerable in empty space. Now the space was turning to enclosure and that was probably what Claire meant by wanting to dance her ass off. He wasn’t sure; but it had her quality of saying the right thing.

  She was not prepared for the inside of the house. While Patrick raced around filling plastic bags, Claire flung open the windows, upstairs and down. Soon the wind coursed through the place, carrying flies and stink to blue eternity. When Patrick went upstairs he could see a shadow below, just as when Tio had paced the night of their dinner. At the top of the stairs was a photograph of Claire’s wedding. She looked quite the same, except that in the photograph she wore her hair in an old-fashioned chignon; but perhaps that was just the style of wedding pictures, the photographer hoping to give his work a lasting quality by suggesting the newlyweds had died some time ago.

  The curtains in the big bedroom stood straight out the window in the breeze. Reports fluttered under paperweights. Claire made the bed with fresh sheets and said, “Would you like to stay with me tonight?”

  There was no sense that her husband haunted the room, and Patrick said yes. Then they stopped the chores and sat in the window seat holding hands. They could see down to the meadows. The hay had recently been mown and lay in windrows drying and waiting to be baled. They looked at the varied yellow triangles as closely as if they awaited something crossing them. What could that have been? No telling; but it did seem the setting for a mythical creature or a fugitive.

  “May I see your breasts?”

  Claire smiled and undid her shirt, dropping it around her waist without untucking it from her pants. Patrick’s heart pounded. They were small and definite, like a girl’s; and their pallor against the tan of her shoulders and face made them seem secret and powerful. She pulled her shirt on. “Chilly.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Hadn’t you looked before?”

  “I was swept away.”

  “I see. So was I.”

  “Does one ever just say the hell with it?”