Nobody's Angel

17

PATRICK AND CLAIRE SAT NEXT TO EACH OTHER IN THE DEEP old leather couch. There were chunks of Newfoundland salmon that Tio had caught, in a silver bowl, and toast points made from bread Tio had baked the previous day. Then Tio brought them a superior cold pumpkin soup and pressed upon them yet another bottle of St.-Émilion before returning to the kitchen. Instead of an apron he had a worn-out hand towel tucked into the top of his tooled belt and he moved at very high speed. He said they did not have many minutes to finish the bottle and move to the dining room. Patrick was impressed. But he felt he was in a madhouse.

“Will dinner be as good as this?” asked Patrick.

“Dinner will be great,” Claire said.

“And he caught these fish?”

“Oh, Tio is a sportman. Got a bunch of records and all. He shot the ninth largest whitetail to ever come out of Texas.” Patrick studied her eyes, hoping he would not find real pride in the bagging of the ninth largest whitetail. He did think he saw a little pride, though. Above all, he saw the beauty of beveled face with its gray-green eyes and ineffable down-turned Southern mouth.

“How does he ever find the time to be a fine cook and record-holding sportsman?” He sensed something aggressive in his own question.

Claire looked up at him. “What else has he got to do?” she inquired.

“He’s got businesses to run and a lot of money to look after.”

“Tio don’t have any money. Doesn’t have any money.”

“Well.” Patrick was finding some embarrassment in this. Claire’s amused and corrected bad English was also a moment he’d liked to have gone back over. “It seems you live well and it seems you can do as you want.”

“We do. But I support Tio.”

“How?”

“Inherited Oklahoma land.” Stated flat. “Including mineral rights.”

Patrick looked straight at her in silence.

“Tio told me,” he said deliberately, “that he had a world of leases and row crops and wells he had to get back to and he couldn’t mess around up here in Montana any longer.”

“Tio has this little problem, Patrick.”

“Which is?”

“He thinks he has those things. It’s not his fault. But he gets carried away. And in some respects Tio isn’t completely healthy.”

“What else does he think?”

The door flew open and Tio brought in a plate of roast lamb chunks with currant jelly. He bore the mad vanity of an Eagle Scout.

“Thinks he’s got a jet plane and a jillion Mexicans.”

Patrick stared at Tio in shock.

“Who’s this?” Tio asked.

“Guy in Houston,” said Claire. She pointed toward the gulf coast of Texas.

“Oh, yeah? Well, finish them lamb and come eat dinner. It a be on in five minute.”

Tio’s manners and his cooking were equally fine. Yet in the tall wavering of candlelight, the conversation — ranch history and oil — carried, against what Patrick now knew, some echo of calamity, something that lingered. “You get a deal,” said Tio, “to where what you’re looking for is the actual lifeblood of the machine age, and this junk pools up where it gets trapped and where nobody can see it in the middle of the earth, and all we’re doing is running little needles downwards toward it. Unless of course you’re some old farmer with a seep. And the last one of them I know about was mounted and hangs over the dining room table at the Petroleum Club. But a man has to suspect his traps before he runs his drill in on down to where Satan is gettin out his book matches. And you got to know your domes.” Then he looked around the table with matchlessly overfocused wide eyes. “I just don’t care to be around people interested in other fuels. They make me sick.” His eyes compressed to refocus on a forkful of perfectly prepared lamb.

“Go on ahead and eat that,” Claire said quietly.

“What happened to your face, Pat? Get scratched tryin to get you a little?”

“Had a colt run through the bridle in some brush.”

“Didn’t know a colt had a hand on him like that.”

“It was the brush that did it.”

“Boy, amo tell you what, you couldn’t carve a more perfecter piece of brush for that job, now, could you?”

“Say, after all this wine, I’m finally seeing what you’re getting at: I try to rape some girl and she claws me. I guess I had a better day than I thought.”

“Aw, good buddy.” Real disappointment, moral disappointment, floods Tio’s face: A man don’t talk like that in company. In the flashing silence Patrick gave himself the liberty of remembering Claire beneath him, one thin arm reaching into the cool quiet, the aerial motion and breath. They ate quietly for a long time. Then he saw Tio’s studying eyes deep against his own; they were, somehow, certainly not normal.

Claire got up. “I don’t like to eat when it’s like that.”

“Food not right?” Tio asked. “Anybody says I can’t cook is dumber than Ned in the First Reader.”

“I’m going to sit in the living room.”

“What about you, Pat?”

“I’m going to finish this good dinner.”

“I’m heading for bed. I’ve got some studying up to do. Then me and about five of my best old buddies around the country are going to hang all over our WATS lines and make a couple of bucks.”

“Well, good night, I guess.”

“Good night. Don’t get scratched.”

“I got my colts rode earlier. What a day.”

The lamb had been defatted the way they did in France. Patrick could see Tio’s shadow when he came to the top of the stairs to look down to the first floor. That kind of came in intervals while Patrick went through a lot of Bordeaux. Then the shadow of Tio stopped coming and producing its simple effect. So Patrick went to the living room, where he penetrated Claire with a peculiar vengeance, noting, only at the clutching, compressive end, the ninth largest whitetail deer ever killed in Texas.

“What’d I do with my hat?” asked Patrick. “I’ve got the whirlies.” Claire sat up, a broad snail’s track on her thigh, and in her molten eyes was something Patrick had never seen before because it had never existed before, not exactly.

Patrick managed to get dressed, walking back and forth across the front of the stairs, feeling a sick and depressed giddiness, not even rememberable from the Army years, of having threaded a miserable, shivering, narrow trail to wrath and humiliation, for which he knew hell fire in one of its uncountable manifestations would someday be handed on as silver a platter as the one that held Tio’s dinner. A headache set in behind his temples and he was rather in love and in a bad mood. Claire stopped him in the yard, where he walked in his socks, carrying his tall boots, staring in a dumb, fixated way at his drunken target.

Claire’s small, strong hand turned him around blank by the shirt, and he looked once more into the pained eyes, forcing his own off as one awaiting a lecture. “Cruelty is something I hadn’t seen in you before.”

“I saw it in you. I thought I was treating you for it. I thought I was the doctor.” Patrick’s anger, partial product of his damages and certainly of his drinking and his indirection, formed thickly in this inconsiderate remark.

“No, I’m the doctor,” Claire said. “And Tio is the patient. And you are a cruel outsider.”

She walked back inside and Patrick knew which of them had lost and what had been lost. As he drove off he saw all the upstairs lights clicking on in series and he was in genuine retreat.