Nobody's Angel

22

PATRICK’S GRANDFATHER SEEMED TO BE RETURNING FROM A long trip. One imagined his hands filled with canceled tickets. It had rained a week and now the sun was out.

“Just take and put the mares with colts on the south side. Everybody else above the barn. The open mares will fight across the wire.”

“I did that,” said Patrick to his grandfather.

“That’s the boy,” said the old man, and closed the door; then, through the door: “You better look for your sister.” Patrick was tall and the old man was short and looked a bit like a stage paddy, an impression quickly dispelled by his largely humorless nature.

Through the kitchen window Patrick could see his mare sidestep into the shade. The old Connolly saddle looked erect and burnished on her chestnut back. She tipped one foot and started to sleep.

“Mary’s all right,” he said, and went outside and mounted the horse with an air of purpose that was at odds with his complete lack of intentions. The mare, Leafy, was chestnut with the delicate subcoloring that is like watermarks. She had an intelligent narrow face and the lightest rein imaginable. Patrick thought a great deal of her. So she had not been ridden while he was away in the Army. A captain of tanks on the East German line in 1977 who comes from Montana has unusual opportunities to remember his home, and apart from the buffalo jump, where ravens still hung as though in memory, Leafy was the finest thing on the place. Downhill on a cold morning, she would buck. Like most good horses, Leafy kept her distance.

When Patrick got to the spring, its headgate deploying cold water on the lower pastures, he found Mary reading in the sun. The glare of light from the surface of the pool shimmered on the page of her book, and she chose not to look as Patrick rode up behind, leaned over and guessed she was reading one of the poet-morbids of France again, enhancing her despair like a sore tooth. Over her shoulder, on the surface of the pool, he could see Leafy’s reflection and his own shimmer against the clouds.

Mary said, “Patrick, when Grandpa slapped the senator, was it something he said to Mother?”

Patrick said, “What brought this up?”

“I’ve been reading about mortal offenses.”

“Grandpa slapped the senator for saying something about the Army, and the senator put Grandpa out of the cattle business.”

“That hardly seems like a mortal offense.”

“It does to an Army man.”

“How do you feel?”

“Better by the minute.”

“Do you miss your tank?”

“I miss loose German women.”

Patrick got down and sat by the spring, holding Leafy’s reins. He glanced at the book — De Laclos, Liaisons Dangereuses. I could very well figure out who these corrupt French bastards are, he thought, but it plays into the hands of trouble.

Patrick pulled some wild watercress and ate the peppery wet leaves, covertly looking up at Mary with her pretty, shadowed forehead. Cold water ran on his wrists.

“What are we to do, what are we to do?” He smiled.

“I don’t know, I don’t,” she said. “We get the family this month. That will be a trial by fire, me with child and you without tank.”

“I shall fortify myself with whiskey.”

“The last time you did that, you went to jail. Furthermore, I don’t believe your version of Grandpa slapping the senator. The Army never meant anything to him.”

“Actually, I don’t know why he slapped the senator.”

“He slapped the senator,” said Mary, “because the senator disparaged the Army. You just said so.”

“And you said the Army never meant anything to him.”

“That’s right, I did.” She looked off.

Perhaps, thought Patrick, being a captain of tanks for the Americans facing, across the wire, the captains of tanks of the Soviets has not entirely eradicated my own touchiness as to such disparagements. Although now I’m in a tougher world.

Patrick rode away. Mary turned anew to the French, and the trees at the spring made one image on the water and a shadow on the bottom. It was a beautiful place, where the Crow had buried their dead in the trees, a spring that had mirrored carrion birds, northern lights and the rotation of the solar system. It was an excellent cold spring and Patrick liked everything about it. Ophelia would have sunk in it like a stone.

When he was young, and one of the things he was managing now was the idea that he was not young, but when he was very young, a child, he and Mary picked through the new grass in the spring of the year, when you could see straight to the ground, for the beads that remained from the tree burials. Their grandmother, who was still alive then and who remembered that the “old ones,” as she also called the Indians, had at the end died largely of smallpox, made the children throw the beads away because she was superstitious, superstitious enough to throw her uncle’s buffalo rifle into the river on the occasion of the United States’ entry into World War Two. The family had had this absurd relationship to America’s affairs of war, and the Army had been a handy place of education since the Civil War. The great-grandfather went there from Ohio, and from a gaited-horse farm now owned by a brewery, only to die driving mules that pulled a Parrott gun into position during the bombardment of Little Round Top. It is said that the mules were the part he resented. Later, with the 1st Montana Volunteers, he helped suppress Aguinaldo’s native insurrection.

Apart from his death, there was the tradition of rather perfunctory military service, then, starting at Miles City in 1884, cattle ranching, horse ranching and a reputation of recurring mental illness, persistent enough that it tended to be assigned from one generation to the next. Mary seemed to have been assigned this time. The luckier ones got off with backaches, facial tics and alcoholism.

The family had now lived in this part of Montana for a very long time, and they still did not fit or even want to fit or, in the words of Patrick’s grandfather, “talk to just anybody.” They would bear forever the air of being able to pick up and go, of having no roots other than the entanglement between themselves; and it is fair to say that they were very thorough snobs with no hope of reform. They had no one to turn to besides themselves, despite that they didn’t get along very well with one another and had scattered all over the country where they meant nothing to their neighbors in the cities and suburbs. Only Patrick and Mary with her hoarding mind and their insufferable grandfather were left to show what there had been; and when they were gone, everyone would say in some fashion or another that they had never been there anyway, that they didn’t fit. As for Patrick, numerous things were said about him but almost nothing to his face, and that was the only deal he cared to make.

Patrick spent the remainder of the day fixing fences at the head of the big coulee, where the ranch adjoined the forest service. In the deep shadows under the trees, small arcs of snow had persisted into the early summer. The mountains, explained his grandfather, were U.S. territory, and below them were all the people he would see in hell. There was some theater in this remark. But the old man loved his coulee. In years past they had dragged big kettles behind draft horses to make a course for match racing on Sundays, when the dirt savages were at church. You couldn’t see the race, which was illegal, until you got to the rim of the coulee.

Patrick and Mary’s mother, Anita, married Dale in Long Beach and had a son, now eleven, named Andrew. Anita had been in Long Beach to comfort the wife of the copilot, Del Andrews, after the crash. The two widows met Dale in a Polynesian after-hours club and did not speak to each other again after the engagement. Anita, Dale and Andrew were coming on the weekend. It was Friday and Mary had not emerged from her room in days. Dale had connections in Hawaii for winter vacations; but now it was summer, and once Anita got over the matter of Mary’s pregnancy, they could have a super holiday in the mountains.

“If you quit carrying her food to her,” said Patrick’s grandfather from the stove, “she’s gonna have to come out.” The grandfather still made coffee like a camp cook — with eggshells in the grounds and cold water dripping from his fingertips to make it precipitate.

“I don’t believe she will,” said Patrick. He had made a tray for Mary, very domestically, with French toast and orange juice. He really didn’t think she would come out.

Today Mary had armed herself with the New York Times, illuminated from the window facing the juniper-covered slope. The light fell equally upon the nail-head bedspread and the vase of broad orange poppies from around the well pit. The room was carefully and comfortably arranged, a case of battening down the hatches. The family was coming.

Mary stopped the coffee cup at her lips, angled slightly, and said, “I don’t want to deal with them, Patrick.”

“It’s not a matter of dealing. Don’t think like that.” He watched her twist up the corner of the bedspread and watched her eyes. Then the light in the room moved.

On the wall was a painting by Kevin Red Star which except for its hallucinatory colors Patrick would have liked, but which seemed, as furnishing for a troubled girl’s room, to be throwing fat on the fire. More to his liking was the perfect Chatham oil, five inches across, a juniper of shadow on snow and bare ground. The blue paint from the day of the fire was cleaned up and gone.

The truth was that Mary and Patrick thought a lot of themselves at the worst of times, and of each other. This air, despite breakdowns or shooting, earned them the sarcasm of the townies. They each loved the open country where they lived, and big, fast cities. Booster hamlets failed to hold their interest. Town was for supplies.

“I didn’t sleep much,” said Mary. “Perhaps I should avoid the coffee so I can sleep this afternoon. What’s Grandpa up to?”

“He’s writing a letter of complaint to an importer of Japanese horseshoes which includes veiled references to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Yesterday he was bitching about me not making my Easter duty.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d you tell him?”

Mary pressed the tines of her fork into the French toast experimentally. “I said I could buy everything but the Holy Ghost.”

“I’d have guessed the Holy Ghost was the only one of the three you would buy.”

Patrick peered at her, then went down the hall and got an old Bud Powell ten-inch from his endless bebop collection. He came back, played “Someone to Watch over Me,” and the two drifted off for a moment. How could a sick man like Powell bring you such peace, he wondered.

Patrick said, “I wish I could do something that good just once.” Indicating Bud Powell.

“You will, now that you’ve picked another way of expressing yourself than tank driving.”

“I sought to destroy communism.”

“While despos took over America.”

“Despo” was a word Patrick and Mary had — from the song “Desperado”—to describe the hip and washed-up effluvia of the last twenty years. The song itself, which now seemed to belong to the distant past, was the best anthem for a world of people unable to get off various freeways. Mary had invented the subcases: despo-riche and despo-chic.

Mary was getting jittery. Now she would ice the cake. “In bathing suits,” she said, “I prefer D cups, split sizes and matching cover-ups. I love warm-up suits in luscious colors. Even though I’m expecting out of wedlock, I’m heavy into my own brand of glamour. Few days see me without intensive conditioning treatments, Egyptian nonpareil henna, manicures, pedicures and top skin-care products.”

“Are you all right?” asked Patrick.

“I’m in stitches,” said Mary. She began to cry but checked herself and grinned bravely.

When the record finished, Patrick asked if he should turn it over. But she gazed toward him in the concentration of someone trying to overcome stuttering, concentration or paralysis, it was hard to say.

“Try to sleep,” he said. “Please try.”