Nobody's Angel

19

GRANDPA WAS DISCOVERED KNEELING ABOVE THE KITCHEN sink, killing yellow wasps against the window with the rolled Sunday Deadrock News. This seemed a little tough in one of our older cowboys, thought Patrick; this could be sadness-for-no-reason, although well short of harbinger-of-doom. There were dirty dishes containing glazed remains. Patrick’s thought — that he’d only been gone a day — had a minute hysterical edge. What would he find with a week’s absence? It seemed his grandfather had become unnaturally dependent upon him since his return. Before that, he could help, hire help, ask for help or do without. But now, silhouetted behind stacks of dirty dishes, he crawled after wasps, backlit brilliant yellow on the glass, and swung at them so hard he was in danger of losing balance and rolling to the floor.

“Did you get that editor?”

“No.”

“Over to some woman’s.”

“Exactly.”

“See you had a night in the hoosegow.”

Patrick stopped. “Where are you getting this?”

Grandpa slung his legs down and unrolled the wasps’-guts-encrusted News. There Patrick reviewed a photograph of himself being removed from the Northbranch Saloon by the police. A lucky motorist from Ohio got the photo credit. The small crowd did not look friendly and the police looked like heroes. There was only a caption, no text; it read:

WAITING FOR RAIN

It’s fair, thought Patrick.

“Well,” he said to his grandfather. “Let’s tidy this joint up.” His heart soared with the thought of stupid little projects.

Deep in the grain bin the mice swam fat and single-minded while Patrick’s coffee can sliced around them to fill the black rubber buckets. The young horses turned at the pitch of tin against oats and moved to the feed bunk, first in disarray and then in single file; and then snaking out at each other, rearranging the lineup as the yellow granules poured from the bucket.

The laminations of heat-and-serve yielded to the hot suds rising about Patrick’s reddening forearms. He looked at the pleasant inflammation and thought: It proves I’m Irish. Then, with the bucket and brush, he could better see the undersides of the table as well as scrub the floor.

Here’s something new: He’s wetting the bed. And where does that lead? Is it a little thing, as incontinence? Or is it a nightmare with the impact of a cannon, rending and overwhelming, that would soak the tunic of the bravest grenadier? We will not soon have the answer to this. As of the here and now, we have a bed that needs changing.

At the very moment the Whirlpool goes from rinse to spin, it bucks like a Red Desert Mustang and would continue to do so if Patrick didn’t heave a great rock on top of its lid, a rock that, as an interjection to its cycling chaos, restores order to as well as performs the last cleansing extraction of Grandpa’s socks, underdrawers, shirts and jeans. This recalcitrant jiggling is, Patrick’s old enough now to know, the deterioration of bearings and the prelude to a complete collapse — not necessarily an explosion of Grandpa’s soiled linens around the laundry room, but certainly, in a year of poor cattle prices, a duskier and less fragrant general patina to this two-man operation. So Patrick views the rock as a good rock, keen stripes of marble and gneiss, a rock for all seasons.

“I have no idea what he saw. But it’s sure enough undignified.”

“Let me put it another way: Why did he go to Tulsa?”

“What he said was, his quail lease had come up for renewal and his father is sick, which I know is true.”

“Your note said to stop by for the details.”

“I guess I just wanted you to stop by!”

“Of course I would. And I owe you for bail.”

“Anyway, what is this?”

“Damned if I know.”

“It’s sort of got this painful side to it.”

“I know.”

“Maybe nothin but ole remorse.”

“Yeah, ole remorse.”

“At least you’re — whatchasay? — ‘unencumbered.’ ”

“I decided to marry my grandfather yesterday morning. As I am doing all that a wife could do for him, there’s but little sense in our not making it legal. So don’t go calling me unencumbered.”

All of this was said, and nothing more, through the screen door of a porch, silhouettes freckled by afternoon light; they barely moved.