Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

“The hell with what?” she asked.

  “The consequences.”

  “Some people do,” she said, without much warmth for those people.

  “Did you ever want someone so much you didn’t make love because you’d be too close to see them?”

  “That hasn’t happened, but I think it’s not impossible. I guess that would be adoration.”

  A harrier hawk flew low against the meadows, banking and casting on new angles in the wind.

  “How much of you is there left?” Patrick asked.

  “I’d be the last to know. How much of you is left?”

  “Well, my major foray into self-pity is the belief that it’s all left,” Patrick said.

  “I certainly don’t have that belief. You have to have lost a thing or two along the way.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “Okay, but you’re a very silly boy. And certainly don’t embarrass yourself for me by listing the things you’ve lost and left behind.”

  “It’s fair.”

  “So it’s agreed, we’re going dancing.”

  “I’d love to,” said Patrick, lying reversed on the bed, leaning on his elbows, facing Claire’s closet. Claire was trying on clothes for him. She had immense vanity, enhanced by the sunny pleasure she took from it. Patrick thought, I could never make this up. He tried to puzzle out the pretty petulance of women picking through their clothes, as though every blouse, every slip or dress, seemed to personally let them down a little. Claire held a spangled silk blouse up to her eyes and said, “What in the world could I have been thinking?” Finally she lay on the floor to pull on a pair of tight jeans. She put on a pair of rose-and-silver high-heeled shoes, a silver belt and a loose silk top with short sleeves. This had all been quite measured. Patrick was cotton-mouthed.

  “And you mustn’t get terribly drunk.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And if I see you starting, I will ask you to stop.”

  “How?”

  “As proof of your love. As proof of how mortally serious it is to go dancing.”

  “Then it will work. Where shall we go?”

  “The Northbranch.”

  That was the spot all right; but it would make an unmistakable announcement that would fly through Deadrock.

  “It’s not exactly a hideout.”

  “I’m not ashamed.”

  Unless you’re on the dance floor under the wagon wheels and lights, you have to walk sideways in the Northbranch on a Saturday night; and inevitably, to get a drink you have to wedge into the service bar and irritate the barmaids. Then when you dance you have to leave your drink on someone’s table, and it is considered to be in the tradition of the West for others to finish your drink for you while you are away.

  No amount of lovemaking replaces dancing, though there’s a connection. The band played “Faded Love,” then “Please Release Me” and “The Window up Above.” Patrick and Claire slow-danced to a fiddler with a smoky, reminiscent style and to the singing of a short man whose Stetson couldn’t quite hide all his baldness and whose voice was fine and deliberate and haunting as trains in distant night.

  Claire seemed strong and light as Patrick held her, curving his hand around her back and holding her hand rather formally and elevated. She rested her face straight against his chest. A few people stared; but the dancing continued, the whole crowded floor graduating slowly in a circle. Young cowboy couples with their hands in each other’s back pockets and toothpicks in their hat brims; older people in fox-trot postures with crazily fixed expressions; indifferent couples counting the house or watching Patrick and Claire; a drunk in a green suit, his hand upraised, his index finger extended, trying and failing to cut in: these and others were bound to the slow circle toward the music. Patrick could feel Claire’s back expand now and then with a sigh. Then some gruesome story-song commenced about dogs and children and watermelon wine. They left the floor.

  They managed to find a spot at the bar. In the mirror Patrick could see Calamity Jane and remembered being here last: love and death: Claire and the sled dog Dirk. The bartender came up.

  “Man wants to buy you both a drink.”

  “Thank you,” said Patrick and ordered. “Who is it?”

  “He phoned it in from the hospital. Man down there’s gonna cover for him.”

  Man down there was Deke Patwell. Weak waves, Deke with a little painted grin. I don’t know and I don’t care, thought Patrick. Claire had been watching. Deke must have phoned the hospital with the latest.

  “Do you want to throw up and go to sleep?” she asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “Shall we dance?”

  “Yes.”

  They were back in the dense wheel, a hundred faces strangely anesthetized by three cheating songs in a row. It seemed unlucky.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m going to be able to stand it,” said Claire. “Just.”

  “Won’t you go with me somewhere a long way off?”

  “No.”

  The little flame lights overhead lent the place a peculiar ecclesiastic air. Patrick couldn’t remember why. It seemed in the Bible there were always flames dancing over things and that the flames were meant to be a positive sign. These dusty light bulbs weren’t going to be quite all that. But there, after all, was Claire’s imaginary precursor, the impossibly ugly Calamity Jane in the clothing of a scout. However, the latest song from the bandstand referred to two-timers as snakes crawling in the night. Patrick remembered Tio calling over the phone that he was down among the snakes; and that when you threw the dice they always came up snake eyes.

  “Claire, do you fear Tio?”

  “I know him too well.”

  “Most people are murdered by people they know well. Do you think you’re in any danger from him?”

  “If I am, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You sound like my sister,” said Patrick; then he remembered that he had it exactly wrong, that it was Mary who had accused him of being more fatal than any Hindu. “Actually, I’m not right about that,” he said. “You’re more like me.”

  They danced from cheating to trucks to lost love to faded love again, which seemed sadder than lost love, to the green grass of home, double beds, jobs you could shove, a ride to San Antone, yellow roses, the Other One, caring and trees. Claire put her arms around him and began to cry. She said, “Oh baby, do something.” When the first, most ardent wave had passed over him, he thought, and not without fear or confusion but still shot through with ardor, This is it.

  “If we could only remember …” Patrick trailed off with the quality of dramaturgical preplanning; but then, helplessly, having at this moment seemed inauthentic even to himself, he just doggedly fell silent, because he was certain that if they both could remember any of their original intentions, something would occasion a rescue, something astral; but not, certainly, this assaying of present requirements. A former captain of tanks encounters a former Oklahoma golden girl still actively married to a current person of the oil, with difficulties, none of which appear on the apparatus: What values shall we assign to each, that is, from loyalty to practicality to romance? Do we subtract for the premature curtailment of tank? Do we dock for nonamplification of golden-girlism? Do we quantify our reservations as to the nondocumentable nature of oilperson’s helpless flaws? How about this: Altruistic cowboy tank captain rescues princess of the Cimarron from mock-epileptic oil-and-gas-lease scoundrel. No, well … no. But if we could only remember. Anyway, Claire caught that, knew the long thought was genuine, even if the deck was stacked and, for her as for practically everybody, the matter of remembering first intentions was as reproachful as anything could be. The road to hell has seen more paving materials than the Appian Way, I-90 and A-1-A combined.

  “Okay, let’s buck up here now.”

  “Very well,” she said.

  “Are we at the crossroads?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Can
one have fun at the crossroads?”

  “I have had no reports as to that,” she said.

  “For instance, having disguised myself as a nurse, shall I pull Tio’s various life-support connections?”

  “There are none.”

  “But if there were.”

  “There aren’t.”

  “Ball breaker.”

  “Now, now.”

  Of course, they were trying to work themselves into a reckless state of mind, a form of play in the face of grave consequences familiar to the bandits and thrill-killers of history. This time it wasn’t working. It was undemonstrated that Claire lacked love for Tio. It was not clear that Patrick had a plan. Most of all, everything with respect of the heart’s grave and eternal sweep seemed at odds with the constant machine-gunning of the age.

  “I do love you,” she said so fatally as to put it beside desolations he had already come to know, ones which played human hope against arithmetic and impossibility. Meanwhile it seemed that not only was Patrick drunk but he was about to break down. Who wanted to go dancing and put up with this?

  “I know what you’re thinking. But you’re going to have to pull yourself together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cheer up.” It was the only thing she could have said to return Patrick to the ground and make him stop circulating with ghosts and faulty desire. A car crashed outside and there was a long jingle of glass, a stuck horn.

  “They’re playing our song,” said a revitalized Patrick, sweeping Claire to the floor for a turn.

  44

  AT CLOSING TIME SHE WANTED TO BE TAKEN HOME; AND IT was clear she meant to be dropped off, that Patrick was to go to his own place. He said that he didn’t understand. They were both slightly drunk. Couples swarmed past, carrying plastic to-go cups. One bartender had moved next to the door opposite the bouncer, who was sitting on a Naugahyde-and-steel kitchen chair. His thighs pressed together all the way to his knees, and he reviewed departing customers as though they were only going on parole.

  Patrick started the engine. “What is this?”

  “What is what?”

  “Just dropping you off?”

  “Time to think. I mean that, Patrick.”

  “You mean as if there were an answer.”

  “That’s just what I mean.”

  “Well, you’ll have to outgrow that,” said Patrick. He meant nothing enigmatic by his remark, and in fact the notion hung over the entire ride to Claire’s ranch, suggesting there was something to it. Therefore—though it had been a superb evening, given the time and place, most of the immediate gloom kept at bay—Claire went straight to the house. Patrick wheeled the truck’s lights against the scattered buildings and suppressed an urge to go back into town and look for some kind of trouble. He was beyond that; he headed home to the Heart Bar Ranch—that is, his inheritance with its increasingly vacant buildings and rooms.

  By nine in the morning he had reduced the broader effects of his hangover by ruthless scrubbing in the shower, harsh versions of the remaining ablutions, clean clothes and coffee with his grandfather.

  “I forgot to send in the meter reading. So they came out and did it and charged us.” His grandfather delicately tested the layer of cream on his coffee with the tip of his spoon; then he gave it a stroke and it all twirled to color. He sipped. “One guy to drive the truck. One guy to read the meter and write it down. There’ll be a third person to bill us for the extra, which is five dollars. The electric company is gonna be fifty bucks in the hole.”

  “Everything else all right?”

  “Seems so. I’ve been out on Truman. Everybody looks sound. One yearling pulling up a back leg. I don’t see a stifle there or anything to be concerned about, though.

  I’ve paid no attention to the irrigated ground. I shut off the wheel line and the hell with it. Seems like Truman’s gaits have improved. That old dogtrot’s practically a rack now. Wish I could take him to town.”

  An hour later, ignoring official visiting hours, he was sitting next to Tio’s bed. Tio said, “This is just foolish.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You reach a certain age, I think, when you haven’t got your house in order and you start seeking out bad situations.”

  “You think that’s what I’m doing?” Patrick asked.

  “I see you as some character who joins the Foreign Legion hoping to be killed by Arabs because his dog has died. And if everything goes well and they put a bullet in him way out there on the desert, the dog is still the only one to feel sorry for.”

  Patrick was silenced, not simply by the creeping appropriateness of the speech, but by the glimpse of that in Tio which had drawn Claire: the character, the oil-field voodoo.

  “Who do we feel sorry for in your life?” Patrick asked.

  “Always been hard to say. I had begun, once I began, to figure out who’d had who. Got close, I mean extra close, when—snap—I started my rigor mortis routine. Never been much in the long run. Casts its little old shadow on things. Course, from a cold-ass business point of view, a guy doesn’t want to weigh in as a nut. But some things can’t be helped. And if I could help this, then what could I do? Kill you? Kill her? Kill myself? God works in mysterious ways, I’m a bald-ass liar if he don’t. Nothing more ruinous to my expectations in life than waving a pistol around or farming out crimes that point an accusing finger at me. Slow grind don’t set you in your place, then I’m a nigger aviator. Just remember this, Fitzpatrick: I’ve got a gadget-filled mind. And I’ve got a gadget for every situation.”

  A brilliant light—brilliant suggesting something momentary, as a flare—fell upon Patrick, who staggered very slightly and acknowledged acquaintances with a quick sideways tip of the head, a gesture he had not formerly used in America. At Front Street in the clangor of the shunting yard, he grinned to himself and thought: Rue Northern Pacific … Calle Caboose. Perhaps this is the caboose. The noose of the caboose. The last car before the vanishing rails, a view entirely different from that from the engine.

  Everything from finding the truck to returning to Silver Stake seemed to happen at half speed. Why in a movie camera did you have to run the film through at high speed to produce slow motion? Why couldn’t things happen “in a wink” as they did in the books he read as a boy? The desire to use up the road in a wink is the way the highspeed camera of the drunk’s brain produces accidents, the mad wish for change.

  In the last mile before camp, perhaps some admission was at hand, no sheepish acquiescence to the occasion, but an actual acknowledgment of all the signs and semaphors and general messages from headquarters that the very thing he had begun to hang his fatigued hopes upon was out of the question.

  He opened his jackknife to cut the black twine on the baled prairie hay. He separated that into flakes and fed them into the small corral so that the horses could eat well away from one another. He knocked the grain pannier to scatter possible mice and brought Leafy a bucket of oats. He sat down rather heavily before her and held the bucket. She exhaled across his head and face questioningly before dropping her muzzle into the grain. She ate with the regularity of a horse who will be fed again; and when Patrick held his hands around the strangely delicate pasterns, feeling the heat that arose from the coronal bands of hoof, she stopped, pricked her ears forward, stared with the black and endless eyes that had made him cut her out from the other foals numerous springs ago and went back to eating. Patrick had imagined she was worried about him, that he was somebody. Then the patterned movement, observed from this crazy angle of legs—hoofs all as different as seashells—and the disappearance of everything into the dark: the orderly rotation of big animals according to their decorum from feed to water to standing sleep, a movement throughout the night that never disturbed Patrick, sleeping face down in the mountain corral.

  Claire found him there, not before he had awakened but before he’d had time to reconstruct and too late for him to jump up and pretend to be doing anything else. Storewide gala
on mortification of the flesh. Patrick was sick of it but couldn’t think what there was to be done.

  “I wanted to see if you were all right.”

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  “I see.”

  He sat up and gazed around the corral: horses, poles, the crowding evergreen slope; how absurd, the sort of thing to give you the sweats. Claire’s hands seemed to plunge deeper into the pockets of her blue dress. Beautiful as usual, thought Patrick angrily. In the meanwhile I’ve become a laugh.

  “What are you doing today?” she asked tentatively. It was as if they were starting all over again.

  “Reading a book.”

  “What book?”

  “It’s called The Life of Marion Easterly and it’s by all three Brontë sisters.”

  He thought, I shall not be tempted by any of this. I prefer the concerned breathing of my horse upon my much-abused head in the night—though Claire would have seen to it that I went to the cabin. On the other hand, waking up and seeing there was nothing to eat, I would have gone on my own.

  Creeping in was a new light-heartedness. Patrick ruefully considered that Claire might get away with this one. Just as well head indoors, then, and tidy up.

  The broad-bottomed tin kettle sent clouds of steam into the room, and the stout wood stove beat gentle heat against Patrick’s bare knees. There will be shaving; there will be brighter eyes. The wandering part in his hair would be rediscovered and traced to the crown of his scalp. Teeth only the madmen at Ipana could dream of. A nice shirt from the clutches of the Armed Forces in Europe. But it was pathetic.

  Soon, however, they were shouting.

  “Tio seems very used to your indiscretions.”

  “He’s not.”

  “It seems he is.”

  “Shall I just go, Patrick?”

  Now he was sorry, at first because of his shouting. Then he remembered her shouting and he was less sorry. Besides, the way moods swept back and forth over lovers like tide seemed now to Patrick a humiliating process. I love you I hate you I’ll kill you I can’t live without you blah blah blah. This last thought took him to the final button of his shirt. He dropped his hands to his sides, watched the steam carry to the door past Claire and believed he felt like the Ancient Mariner at an abandoned bus stop. Then Claire stirred together some breakfast—a rather scientific attempt, he thought, to raise his blood sugar, going to Jerusalem with a Bible and a soil-test kit. I should start shouting the moment I’ve eaten my breakfast. I mean shouting.