Nobody's Angel

1

YOU WOULD HAVE TO CARE ABOUT THE COUNTRY. NOBODY had been here long enough and the Indians had been very thoroughly kicked out. It would take a shovel to find they’d ever been here. In the grasslands that looked so whorled, so cowlicked from overhead, were the ranches. And some of these ranches were run by men who thought like farmers and who usually had wives twice their size. The others were run by men who thought like cowboys and whose wives, more often than not, were their own size or smaller, sometimes quite tiny. The farmer-operators were good mechanics and packed the protein off the land. The cowboys had maybe a truck and some saddle horses; and statistics indicate that they had an unhealthy dependence on whiskey. They were not necessarily violent nor necessarily uneducated. Their women didn’t talk in the tiny baby voices of the farmer-operator wives nor in the beautician rasp of the town wives. The cowboys might have gotten here last week or just after the Civil War, and they seemed to believe in what they were doing; though they were often very lazy white men.

The town in the middle of this place was called Deadrock, a modest place of ten thousand souls, originally named for an unresolved battle between the Army and the Assiniboin — Deadlock — but renamed Deadrock out of some sad and irresolute boosterism meant to cure an early-day depression. To many people Deadrock was exactly the right name; and in any case it stuck. It was soon to be a major postcard.

Patrick Fitzpatrick lived on a ranch thirty-one miles outside of town. He was a forth-generation cowboy outsider, an educated man, a whiskey addict and until recently a professional soldier. He was thirty-six years old. He was in good shape; needed some crown work but that was about it.