Nobody's Angel

12

NEWS OF A FAMILY VISIT TO THE RANCH — PATRICK AND Mary’s mother, her second husband and their son, Andrew — was sending Mary into one unearthly disjuncture, cycles of recollection, some assertions of a nonexistent past; and producing, for Patrick, the question, How in the world will she raise this child? He was now quite frightened; and his love for her prevented him from considering anything that would actually be a solution to her troubles. He kept on with his patchwork of concern, trying to stay available when she seemed to be slipping. His grandfather had been terrified by the barn fire, as Patrick had. And the lingering picture of the smug volunteers troubled Patrick, as though, for him, it was they who had set the fire. But then, that was a little simple, too.

When Patrick first returned to the ranch, he didn’t quite know what he was doing there. Yet he couldn’t look back on his years in the service as a period in which things had made much sense. His tank-driving lay somewhere between an update on a family tradition and the dark side of the moon of a highly camouflaged scholarship program. Still, he blamed himself because he had let things drift, and he now occasionally noticed that not only was he not in his teens, he was actually at an age when a certain number of people died of heart attacks. Heart attacks! He knew he was under stress but he didn’t know stress of what. Maybe it was just the jaggedness-of-the-everyday. He thought of the term “stress-related” and he wondered if that was why he behaved sometimes in ways he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t, for example, like drinking as much as he did; yet he liked and approved of some drinking and the occasional comet binge with all bets off. But lately he was waking up in the dark with his heart pummeling its way through his chest and a strange coldness going through his body, waking nightmares in the dark; and he didn’t know where it was coming from. He tried the trick of counting blessings like sheep, but the personal components would not cohere. He loved his sister and grandfather and horses; he loved the place. But he couldn’t help thinking that it was edges and no middle. And as soon as he’d had that thought, he began to doubt it, too. He worked hard for the conclusions, then evaporated them with doubt. Worst of them all, though, was the one he called sadness-for-no-reason.

He had come home hoping to learn something from his grandfather. But the old man was still too cowboy to play to nostalgia for anyone; though as a boy he had night-hawked on the biggest of the northern ranches, had seen gunfighters in their dotage, had run this ranch like an old-time cowman’s outfit, building a handsome herd of cattle, raised his own bulls and abjured farm machinery. Still, he got closer to the past in recollection: “It’s not like it used to be. They’ve interfered with the moon and changed our weather. That’s why the summer clouds sail too high to rain on our old pastures. The goddamned sonic booms have loosened all the boards in the houses, and that’s why we have all those flies. Didn’t used to have those. Things up there affect us. Like when you have an eclipse and the chickens fall asleep. Something happens inside and we don’t know what it is. And the ground water is going in the wrong direction … twisting, turning sonofabitch. I had a surefire witch out here try to douse me a well for a stock tank. He said, ‘I can’t help you, Fitzpatrick, the inside of the world is different.’ Used to be I’d have that water witch out and the bark would peel off that stick and that old willow butt would jump and buck with him and hell, we’d go fifty feet and have more gallons a minute than a guy could count.” Ground water danced in his eyes.

“I thought it always changed.”

“Go up on Antelope some night and look down at the yard lights. Used to be coming off any these mountains it was dark. Just throw the reins away and let the horse take you home. When that sheepherder went crazy in 1921, Albert Johanson, who was sheriff, went up to Hell Roaring and shot him between the eyes and left him. I packed in there and took the stove and tent down for Albert and then I had to put this dead Basque on a mule and pack him out. Well, it got dark. I come clean out at the west fork of Mile Creek and I could see maybe one light on the flat. But I didn’t know whether I had that stiff or not till I got to Wellington’s ranch and we got a lantern. I had the herder but my hitch had slipped. I had him face down on a little Spanish kind of a mule with a cross mark on his back, but the hitch slipping turned his face up, rope laid acrosst his gums like he’s snarling. Old boy killed a young rancher’s wife with a sickle, rancher name of Schumbert, down to Deer Creek now, older feller now. He finds this herder trying to pour cement over his wife in the cellar. Her head’s set over next to the scuttle where the sickle took it off. He’s so stunned the Basque taps him and he’s out. He wakes up and his man is gone to the hills and his wife is waist-deep in soft concrete with her head setting on a small deal of firewood scantlings. Schumbert goes to town, notifies Albert, calls the funeral home and puts hisself into the hospital. Directly Albert goes to tracking and finds the herder’s camp, just a wall-side tent and a barrel-headed horse with his front legs coming out the same hole, and old Albert, he hallos the camp. Directly here comes our Basque, packing a thirty-thirty with a peep sight, and cuts down on Albert and Albert puts him away. Then me, I’m Albert’s friend. Albert has had enough for one day: He don’t want to pack that camp to the valley. So I’m Albert’s next victim. I hated packing that stiff because he scared the mule and all I had was a basket hitch with nothing really to lash to. When I got to Wellington’s I was surprised we still had our man, and I guarantee you this: We had that mule broke to pack anything. That was one mule you could call on. God, what a good mule.” The mule had replaced the ground water and sleeping chickens in the grandfather’s eyes.

Patrick saw this man, his grandfather, with no pity for himself and less for others, touching the kitchen match to a cold kerosene mantle — ignition and the wavering light on the dead man — thinking then as he would now that it was a matter of available light, a matter of seeing what one had achieved, whether one had successfully descended the mountain from Hell Roaring without losing the load, and at the same time imagining that he was illustrating a story about how there were now too many lights on the valley floor and that it was better when you had to hang the lantern in front of the spooking mule to catch the grimace of face distorted by a single lash rope crossing the mouth of a murderer and looping around the girth of a mule whose scarred flanks were decorated with stripes of blood like war paint. Had this all really disappeared?

As then, when he felt the old man’s past, or when he went among the ancient cottonwoods that once held the shrouded burials of the Crow, Patrick felt that in fact there had been a past, and though he was not a man with connections or immediate family, he was part of something in the course of what was to come. None of which meant he’d failed at ambition, but only that its base was so broad he could not discover its high final curves, the ones that propelled him into the present, or glory, or death.

“How’d they get the wife’s body out of the concrete?”

“Hadn’t set yet.”

“What’d they do with the head?”

“Propped it where it was supposed to go once they had the box. Who cares.”

“What happened to the husband?”

“He wrote away for another one.”

“Another what?”

“Another wife.”

“What do you think happens when someone dies?”

“They can’t do nothin anymore. Most religious sum-buck walkin couldn’t persuade me that they can do much. Don’t add up. God created an impossible situation.”

Patrick thought that this was a dignified appraisal, no Ahab railing against mortality, but simply the observed, which in the end was harsh enough: that for one who could stand it, those who sought to strike the sun for an offense seemed like cheap grandstanders; and they were certainly in no shortage.

Now his grandfather took down his daily missal from above Patrick’s shelf of cookbooks and pint-size bottle of sour mash, a bottle old-timers called a mickey. He sat down in the one comfortable ladder-back the kitchen had, and said, “What’s for dinner?” Patrick thought, Is this our religion? He remembered a clever young tank-gunner with a year at the university who pasted the picture of a new swami above his observation port every month. He wanted war with Communism, then exciting visits to ashrams. He wanted to find himself, but first he wanted to smash Communism. He thought swamis stood for that. His name was Walt. He had records by Carlos Santana but called him by his assumed name, Devadip or something. Walt loved Santana Devadip-or-something for inventing swami rock ’n’ roll. He wanted to go to Santana’s hometown, but he had heard San Francisco was now commanded by fairies and therefore he thought the next thing was to smash Communism, then go on a swami tour of the Orient. Walt had luxurious sideburns that looked suspiciously as if they’d been permanented. He liked Germany but he wanted to raid the East. Sometimes when Walt’s ambition had been fortified by mystery substances, especially the one he called “mother’s little helper”—by all accounts something invented to keep advance-reconnaissance rangers awake for three days at a time — sometimes then Walt asked Patrick to hack a left into what he called Prime-time red, cross the border, head downtown and shell the home of the East German mayor. On such occasions Patrick referred to the gently fatal attitudes of his heroes of the Orient, urging Walt to cool his heels, at least until mother’s little helper wore off. It was ’76, the bicentennial. The East Germans had won forty-seven medals in the Olympics and Walt didn’t like it, was real bummed out, said “Fuck it” all the time.

But that was long ago and far away, as so much eventually was. Patrick was still midway in the accumulation of his scrapbook, and paramount in that was what he thought of as a less lonely life. For now, bereft of his German girl friends and base-employed bachelorettes, the cowboy captain felt stranded on the beautiful ranch he would someday own, land, homestead, water rights, cattle and burden. He had no idea what he would do with it.

This had not entirely been necessary. There had been nice girls, beautiful girls, German dynamos with degrees who desired to be cowgirls when the captain returned, girls who could do English in the inflection of Tek-Ziz, New York or the late President Kennedy. It had been a long go on the line of the Soviet bloc and it had included paternity suits, arrangements and affection. He had tried Spain on leave, but the Spanish girls wouldn’t go to the beach and the English secretaries on holiday behaved like beagles in heat at a guard-dog show in Munich. He began using an electric razor. He began not to care. He began not to brush between meals. He began to brood about the high lonesome and the girls at the gold dredge and their desire to be barrel racers and then make little babies. By now they’d had bunches of them and the babies were all in 4H. He read Thucydides and asked about soldiers’ homecomings. He heard Marvin Gaye sing the national anthem at the heavyweight championship fight, and that was that. He quit the Army. He had never fired a shot, but he was going home to Montana to pick up where he left off — which was a blurred edge; blurred because of boarding school, the death of his father, the disappearance — intermittent — of his sister and the remarriage of his mother to a glowing, highly focused businessman from California who owned a lighting-design center in Santa Barbara and was a world-class racquetball player.

Now, home for a time and with no good reason to support his feeling, what had seemed the last prospect in his vague search for a reason to come home and stay turned out to be a subliminal inclination toward another man’s wife; which was plainly unrequited if not without charm, and pointless.

Can’t help that, thought Patrick. He turned his thoughts to what could be helped, most of which consisted in learning the particulars of the ranch which he had always assumed he would run but which he never had run and which, in fact, no one had ever run, except his grandfather. Patrick’s father had gone off to test airplanes, and the man before his grandfather — an Englishman with the papers of a clergyman too finely scripted to be doubted by the honyockers and illiterate railroaders who settled the town — that Englishman never lifted a finger except in pursuit of Indian women and in operatic attempts at suicide in the six inches of running water from which the place was subsequently irrigated. He did leave, however, large academic oils that he had commissioned as decoration in the dining room, depicting smallpox epidemics among the Assiniboine from the point of view of a Swiss academic painter in his early twenties, eager to get home and tend to the clocks. The paintings showed all Indians in Eastern war bonnets, holding their throats in the paroxysms of dehydration, popularly assumed to be the last stage of that plague. It had never, to Patrick, seemed the right thing for the dining room. At the same time it did not deter anyone from eating. Today Patrick felt a little like the Englishman who had commissioned the paintings.

But he did have a thought. He went into the pantry, where his grandfather had hung the telephone, and being careful to stay loose, dialed and got Claire.

“Claire,” he said, “this is Patrick Fitzpatrick.”

“Well, hey.”

“Say, I’d just remembered, I never gave Tio an answer about that colt.”

“Fitzpatrick! That you?” It was Tio.

“Yes, it is.”

“You callin regardin that colt?”

“Yes, I—”

“You gonna take him?”

“Yes, I’d like to.”

“You should, he’s a good colt. Bill us at Tulsa. Honey, you still on?”

“Sure am. Where’re you?”

“I’m down to the granary with the accountants. Can you load that horse yourself?”

“Sure can.”

“Carry him out to Fitzpatrick. Listen, I gotta go. Bye.” Click.

Patrick said, “Do you need directions, Claire?” He was happy. Then Tio came back on.

“You oughta breed ole Cunt to that mare of yours, Fitzpatrick. Think on it.” Click. Pause.

“Uh, yes, I will need directions.”

Patrick said, “Let’s just wait a second and see if Tio comes back on.”

There was a pause, and then Claire said, with a little fear in her voice, “Why?”

“I hate repeating directions,” said Patrick. His was an odd remark. He had no such attitude. He was starting to make things up. The last Army officer in this area he could think of who did that was General George Armstrong Custer.