Nobody's Angel

25

THE INDIAN WAS ON THE SIDEWALK, CARS DISAPPEARING fast around him. He dropped his face slightly at Patrick’s appearance in the door and then looked once behind him. Patrick saw something guarded and ready in his stance, the clear, round, pale brim intersecting his delicately modeled forehead.

“Do you need to see me?” Patrick asked.

“If there is something between us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is that Indian talk?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“David Catches.”

“Well, they’re going to bury my sister. Will you be going?”

“You’ll make another speech. I don’t want to hear that kind of thing.”

“Then why don’t you come to the house tonight?”

David Catches followed a police cruiser with his eyes as it rounded the corner and vanished at low speed.

“What time?”

“Before the sun goes down and we lose our light. That way we won’t be stuck inside. Do you know the way out there? Do you know how to get to our place?”

“Of course. I helped your grandfather.”

“I guess I knew that.”

“You were in the Army. At that time your grandfather didn’t take care of himself. I didn’t have any rattles. I had a Goldenrod fence stretcher and a slick-fork saddle. Mary brought me there to make him an Indian. I punched cows and peeled broncs for a couple of years. But I saw a way to get out one night and I was gone. I got away just before I learned to think like him.”

An old man walked by, leading matched springers. He walked his dogs according to the National Bureau of Standards, so that people could set their watches by him. In Deadrock there were children who thought one told time by dogs.

“When did all this occur?”

“We went to Grassrange and I worked for an Indian who ranched on Flatwillow Creek. A guy sent me some horses to break, from over at Sumatra. Mary came with me! We had a trailer house down in the trees. We had a good dog and four good saddle horses. We were happy. Then something must have gone wrong. Anyway, Mary was gone, one day just gone.”

“She turned up in Roundup.”

“I don’t know.”

“Then on down to Warm Springs. Hey, I’m giving you the details.”

“I just don’t know.”

A silence fell over them, an unresisted silence like a trance. Then David Catches said, “You’ve got to go now. I will see you tonight.” To Patrick it seemed a moment later that the silence resumed. Except that this time an arrangement with straps and pulleys lowered Mary into the earth between panels of artificial turf that covered the scars that the machinery had left making the hole. Only the family was there, and since Patrick was responsible for the absence of the priest, it was felt he should say something by way of a benediction. He said, “I’ll never see her again.”

It required three cars to carry the family. The cars were parked down on a blacktop crescent below the mausoleum. You could see the foothills from here and a few farm buildings along the base of the escarpment, like curious physical interjections in the landscape. Patrick viewed this all helplessly as Mary’s habitat, knowing that on this broad hill, picked for its view, gale-driven snow stretched immense drifts toward the west, over everything, over stones and monuments, and that there was nothing that could be done for that. On the upper end of his own ranch, a miner had, years ago, filled coffee cans with cement and pressed marbles into its surface, picking out the name of his three dead children. So anyway, except that there was nothing new in this, it was the one thing that was always new.