Nobody's Angel

23

“ALL I WANT TO KNOW,” SAID HIS MOTHER, “IS WHAT TRIBE?” Her eyes lifted to cut across the original buffalo grounds.

Dale, her husband, took the Igloo cooler out of the back of the station wagon, desperately surveyed the ranchstead with the rectangles of snow-line meadow between the buildings and said:

“High, wide and handsome!” His smile revealed that if no one was buying this, he wasn’t selling it.

But Patrick’s mother in her hearty kilt was steadfast. She locked down on tan, angular calves.

“What tribe?”

“I don’t know. We will have to wait and see.”

Dale said, “Anita, I thought we had an agreement about this.”

And Anita said, “You’re right, of course.” She was still establishing Dale. Dale didn’t care. His original enthusiasm had flown the coop. Now he was with his screwy fucking in-laws.

If it wasn’t my mother, thought Patrick, I’d swear it was Shrew City Sue. It goes without saying that Andrew had a cap gun and that he fired away with it like a rat terrier yapping around the feet of an arguing couple. Patrick thought his mother would club Andrew, but she had turned her attention to unloading the wagon onto the lawn. Dale accompanied everything with a stream of chatter. He sensed his wife’s short fuse. Dale, Patrick thought, was giving it his best. It was kind of not much.

Patrick’s mother and her husband had matching snake boots. Of all the people on the ranch, it never occurred to Patrick that he in his knee-high M. L. Leddy cowboy boots and tank captain’s shirt was the most anomalous. Besides that, he was now sick of America.

“Lordy, lordy,” said his mother, stooping for her camera bag. “I’m going to have to control myself, if only with respect to promises I made to Dale.” She’d build up Dale if it killed her.

“I think you are, Mother. Mary is a little shaky.”

Dale said, “The old days seem never to have died.” He wore a fixed expression memorized from a hairstyle illustration in a barbershop.

Mary’s disease, if that could be said, was, Patrick thought, an insufficient resistance to pain of every kind. When she was a child, the flyswatter could not be used in her presence. Patrick watched tears stream down her face in the supermarket as an elderly couple selected arthritis-strength aspirin with crooked hands. Some of this ought to have been noticed and remembered by his mother.

The grandfather made his greetings somewhat perfunctory. After all, this was only his former daughter-in-law. His son was dead. He didn’t ever pay attention to Dale and he detested little Andrew. He couldn’t really understand what they were doing here. He smiled and said, “It’s a big ranch. We can all damn sure keep out from underfoot if we half try.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Andrew.

“Why don’t you stay out in the bunkhouse?” roared the grandfather, senility kicking in like rocket fuel.

“I think it would be nicer being near the kitchen etcetera,” said Patrick’s mother with a taut smile. It was clear she saw her former father-in-law as someone to be humored.

“Not a damn thing wrong with the bunkhouse,” his grandfather barked. Dale started off with the bags straight for the main house, right in the middle of the conversation. Andrew was galloping, and Patrick helped with a great sagging valise that felt like it had a thick dead midget inside. They fanned out toward the house, resisting a very insistent silence. Patrick walked behind his grandfather and watched his rolling gait. Dale and his mother were in his periphery. It was a movie with the sound track gone. Andrew now bore a wretched face; his fake gun dangled at his side. For him, the West stank.

They were winding down to seeing Mary. There was the luggage, the general greeting, the formal exclamations about returning to the ranch, and then it would be faced. They rushed into the kitchen. Patrick’s mother tried the cupboards; Andrew asked where he could find an arrowhead fast. Down the wooden hallway, bebop poured from Mary’s room.

“Make your own,” said the grandfather.

“I can’t make an arrowhead,” wailed Andrew. “I’m no Indian!”

When Patrick said, “Let’s go say hello to Mary,” a kind of familial smile not unlike saying “Cheese” befell the little group. They followed Patrick through the narrow hall toward a drum solo coming from the farthest door.

They lost the grandfather right away. Then Dale detained Andrew. Patrick and his mother arrived as the applause began at the end of the drum solo, recorded live at the Blue Note, and the room was empty. The sheet on the bed was drawn taut, and Mary had outlined herself in ink, life-size, carefully sketching even the fingers. Across the abdomen she had traced the shape of an infant; and she was gone. Patrick went to the window; he could see across the meadow to the forest. She was either in the forest or at the spring.

“Orphanages,” said Patrick’s mother, “were made for good and sufficient reasons.” Dale ducked his head in shame.

Then Patrick had a thought that dazed him and he panicked. He ran to the corral and caught his mare, but twisted the cinch and had to start over. Leafy felt his bad nerves and kept side-passing away from Patrick until he got a foot in the stirrup and swung up on her. She started running before Patrick could touch her with his feet, carrying him into the cold wind from the trees. Thus the ground, the sky, the vaulting motion of the horse against a static earth, seemed like life itself. The ground resisted the speed that Patrick desired, like history.