Nobody's Angel

16

THIS WAS DARING BUT IT HAD REQUIRED TWO BAR STOPS: THE front door flickered open.

“Tio, where’s your wife?”

“Pat, d’you just walk in?”

“I drove from my place and walked the last forty feet.”

“God, what an awful joke. This your first time up here?” The effect of Patrick’s joke still hung on Tio’s face.

“Yes. A beautiful spot.”

“It’s all lost on me.”

That seemed a strange piece of candor to Patrick. The ranch was beautiful, a close dirt road lying in a cottonwood creek that arose to find old stone buildings, then meadows that spread above the ranch to adjoining cirques at the edge of the wilderness. It had the quality of enamel, detailed in hard, knowledgeable strokes, a deliberate landscape by an artist no one ever met.

Somehow the handsome oilman seemed harried, stranded on this picture-book ranch in his bush jacket and as anxious to be back among his oil-and-gas leases as Patrick had been for the loud bar.

“Claire is gypping horses in the round pen. Just go back the way you came and around the old homesteader house. You’ll see it in the trees.”

“I guess if I’m going to be looking after her, I’d better get the hang of it.”

“That’s it, good buddy. I’d fall down dead with my hand raised if I told you I couldn’t get off of this vacation fast enough. You two go out and play. You can take her anywhere. She’s more adaptable than a cat. All I do is dream of crude.”

“You sure know your own mind,” Patrick said, fishing for sense in Tio’s remarks.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Anything else?”

“Not really.”

Claire appears to him as follows: at center in a circular wooden pen a hundred feet in diameter. Deep in river sand, it seems a soft, brown lens in the surrounding trees. Claire directs a two-year-old blood-bay filly in an extended trot around herself, the filly’s head stretched high and forward, the flared and precise nostrils drinking wind on this delightful, balsamic and breezy flat.

It was on enough of an elevation that you could see the valley road mirroring the river bottom, the switchbacks to the wilderness, the flatiron clouds, the forest service corrals and the glittering infusion of sun-born seeds moving with the brilliant wind. But you couldn’t see the house, and from the glade of young aspen, you couldn’t see anything.

“Hello, Patrick.”

“Hi, Claire.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. Drank a bit too much, I’m afraid.”

“You like this filly?”

“Sure. Isn’t she deep through the heart?”

“I think she’s great.”

“Go for a walk with me.”

“You rather ride?”

“I’m too dumb today to get a foot in the stirrup.”

Claire left the longeing whip in the sand, and the filly swung gracefully forward, ears set, watching Claire leave the pen.

“Where are we going?”

“Where does this path go?”

“An old springhouse at the top of these aspens.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“Why?”

“I want to talk,” said Patrick, “and it’s easier if you keep moving, and to keep moving you need to be going somewhere.”

The smallest aspens jumped up along the path with their flat leaves moving in a plane to each touch of breeze. When Claire went ahead, Patrick stared at the small of her back, where the tied-up cotton shirt left a band of brown skin.

The springhouse, now in complete disrepair, had been used to cool milk. A jet of water appeared from the ground and flowed into the dark interior of the house, gliding disparate over cold stones and out of the house again. Inside, the cold stones chilled the air and seemed to cast a dark glaze on the wood floor and sides. There was one old tree shading the house and minute canyon wrens crawled in its branches. But the wet stones were what you sensed even looking outside.

When they went inside, Patrick tried to seize Claire. Then he sat down on the plank bench, and over the water and the round river rocks their breathing was heard, as well as the catches in their breath. Patrick stared at his open hands. Claire gazed at him, not in offense or terror but in some absolute revelation. She now wore nothing but her denim pants; the shirt was in the dark stream that brightened the stones. And Patrick’s face was clawed in five bright stripes. She finished undressing and made love to Patrick while his attempts to remember what it was he was doing, to determine what this meant, seemed to knock like pebbles dropped down a well, long lost from sight. He was gone into something blinding and it wasn’t exactly love. Patrick supported himself on his arms, and splinters of the old floor ran into the tension of his hands. In a moment they were both shuddering and it was as if the four old windows above had lost the transparency, then regained it. And details returned: the mountain range of river stones against the wall, the electrical cord approaching from the ceiling, old saw marks and hammer indentations around the nail heads and, finally, the beautiful woman’s tears running onto the coarse planks.

“You ought to get out,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t do that kind of thing.”

“You just did.”

“I know. I bet when we’re old it makes us feel lonely and empty.” This could be a long, slow wreck.

They heard Tio call: “Anybody around?”

From the southwest window his distant figure could be seen trudging to the sand pen. Claire said, “I’m going straight down to the house around behind him and get a shirt. If you can think of a good cause for those scratches, you’re welcome to join us.”

“I wish I hadn’t done that,” came Patrick’s contrition.

“It’ll pass. It better. I’m just sick.”

“Where is everybody?” came Tio’s voice. Claire disappeared and Patrick followed her. About halfway down the hill, they heard him call out, “Come on, you guys! I’m getting insecure!” They rushed along in the trees. Claire was giggling.

“This makes me nervous,” said Patrick as he went, realizing how preposterous the situation was.

“You shouldn’t do this to me!” Tio called from afar as Patrick started his truck. Claire looked up toward the springhouse.

“He’s such a little boy,” she said with affection. “Listen,” she added quite suddenly, “won’t you have dinner with us tonight? I insist, and it’s the least you could do.”

Patrick drove off, thinking once again of the little walk-up in Castile, the stone counters scrubbed concave. He wondered why that came to him at these times or during summer war games at seventy miles an hour with the self-leveling cannon, the hurtling countryside on a television monitor. In the Castilian walk-up an unfuckable crone has the say of things and brings vegetables.

He cut down Divide Creek and went the back way around Deadrock. No supplies needed. Coming from this direction, you could see the ranch’s high meadows cross the river bottom. You could see the old schoolhouse road and used-up thrashers and combines, drawn like extinct creatures against the gravel bank. Then this way you could run along the curving rim to the ranch itself, seeing now from above the original plan, a little bit like a fort and old-looking. Though around here nothing was really old. A woman in town was writing a book called From Deer Meat to Double Wides to chronicle the area and show it was old. There was a chapter on Patrick’s ranch as well as one on high-button shoes, plus prominent Deadrock families, all written at very high pitch. The ranch chapter had a romantic version of the foray against Aguinaldo’s insurrection, as well as of Fourths of July celebrated with dynamite. When Patrick grew older, the ranch meant less. The trouble was, he had charged it with meaning while he was in the Army, and left without benefits. He wanted his heart to seize the ancient hills, the old windmills and stock springs. Now all he seemed to care about were the things that lived and died on a scale of time an ordinary human being could understand. Then he wanted to know what those things were there for, taking every chance for knowledge about that. Nor was he about to press his grandfather about death’s nearness. But he would watch him for accidental revelations. He had a feeling that the little churches around Deadrock, all of them so different, were trying to duck this question. He was tempted to attend every one of them in a string of Sundays to see how this fatal ducking worked.

He knew that one reason he still felt so incomplete was that his father had farmed him out, left him as crow bait to education and family history. And his grandfather hadn’t given his father much. All that cowboy rigidity was just running from trouble. Patrick had wandered away and Mary had flown into the face of it, the face of it being the connection they never had, an absence that was perilously ignored. The connection had not been in the airplane on the mountain; it had not even been a sign. Mary in pursuit of the ghosts was close; Claire was nearer. But he had been indecent. Had she? He was inclined to think she’d been worse than that.