Nobody's Angel

30

CLAIRE CAME TO THE SIDE DOOR AT PATRICK’S KNOCK, AND HE was astonished to see how genuinely stricken she seemed. “Patrick, I haven’t any idea what to say to you.”

“It’s all over. There isn’t anything to say.” Then he added, with ungodly bitterness, “The angels came and took her away.”

He walked into the house and got his own coffee as though he lived there. Claire circled the kitchen in a preoccupied way, knocking cupboard doors shut. Patrick felt somehow choky when he looked over at her, so extraordinarily pretty in a yellow wash dress that seemed to belong to another time, like some unused memento of the dust bowl, something a girl driven off her bridal farm in Oklahoma and since gone on to old age in some anonymous California valley might have saved.

But the daughter of a desperate man of 1932 might well have worn such a yellow dress on a pretty day like today or worn it in hopes of seeing someone she loved. What if that turned out to be me? Well, a person could work at it. And then what? Then-what equals implications and I don’t know what they are. I’m getting to know very damned little.

“When do you suppose Tio will come back?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“You still haven’t talked to him?”

“No, and I’ve tried to. He showed up in Tulsa for a short time and now he’s gone from there.”

“Does this make you nervous?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. But I’m not sure why.”

“If you knew Tio better, you’d know why.”

“I would?”

“You certainly would.”

The phone rang and Claire got up from the table in her yellow dress to answer it. She answered twice and put the phone down. “Whoever it was hung up,” she said, trying not to let that seem significant.

Suddenly she grinned. “Can you press your weight?” she asked.

“No.”

“I can. One fourteen.” Patrick thought about a hundred and fourteen pounds in a yellow wash dress.

“Can you do the Cossack Drag?”

“I never tried.”

“I did. I almost got killed.”

They went up a stretch of white, chalky-looking road into a beautifully fenced pasture, almost a paddock; there were half a dozen old-time quarter mares with colts at their sides. Claire ran down their pedigrees; it was all front-of-the-book: King, Leo, Peppy, Rey del Rancho, Zantanon H and a granddaughter of Nobody’s Friend. Patrick looked at them with their deep hips and shoulders, real cowman’s horses of a kind that seemed to be vanishing, the kind that made you think of Shiloh, Cold Deck, Steel Dust, and Rondo, all legends of border fighting, match racing and the trail drives.

“Where did you find this set of mares?”

“Well, one by one, really. They were all scattered and neglected because they wouldn’t raise running horses for Ruidoso. They’re all old horses, and I bred every one of them to a last son of Poco Bueno, who’s a three-legged fifty-dollar cripple in Alice, Texas, who belongs to a scrap-metal dealer. I figure those colts are a half-century old the day they’re born. That chestnut mare is blind. Her foal will stand off by itself and be perfectly still just to tease her mother. Her mother will keep nickering because she can’t locate her. Then that baby speeds up and nurses, and the crisis is over. — Why aren’t you married?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Never came up.”

“Have you had girl friends?”

“Oh sure, lots of those. But I didn’t have a good picture of home life. I think that has kept me from settling down. Also, I can’t get my own intentions straight. First I was a kid growing up. Then I was cowboying for a while, riding around in sedans from place to place with a saddle in the trunk. Then I was in school, out of school and in the Army. Now I’m on the ranch. I don’t have an orderly approach. I don’t see me with a Nobel prize or managing a Houston heart clinic.”

“What about running your beautiful ranch?”

“Got my doubts there, too. I’d like to just see to the horses, but it ought to be farmed up quite a bit more. I always thought farming was a highly evolved form of mowing the lawn.”

“It is.”

The wind changed directions, gusting around the pasture, warm and piny, with the faint cool afterbreath of fall.

“Are you superstitious about things,” Claire asked, “that have to do with life and death?”

“I haven’t been so far.”

“My grandmother lived with us in our old house near Talalah. And one day the nails in the walls started falling out of their holes. That same day my grandmother died. There were nails all over the floor.”

“I’ve never seen things like that. I don’t believe my eyes are open to that sort of occurrence. Mary saw things like that. My experience with death was, it was real bluntlike and didn’t send any calling cards.” Suddenly gloom dashed in on him like some palpable dismal animal. They walked past the horse pasture with the deep-bellied mares grazing with their shadow colts, all the way to where the jack fence changed to steel-posted five-strand barbed-wire cattle fencing; and uphill of them, yearlings drifted along a hill to escape the flies in this new cool breeze.

The irrigation water came through a gap in the hillside like a bright tongue, and south of that a few hundred yards, they crossed into a piece of old meadow, full of original prairie flowers, all sweetly angled back toward the foothills by the prevailing wind, the same wind that swept Claire’s yellow dress close around her long legs, the same dress that Patrick folded on the ground, the only thing that she had been wearing, so that she shivered and watched his gentle folding of the yellow cotton upon itself, then let him make love to her in something of the same way. Afterward, he glanced over and saw the one flat shoe, almost a slipper, she had crossed on the other, pinning a pale scarf in the light ground breeze, and with death and superstition and signs one could not read temporarily at bay, he felt a sweeping ache that in a child would have been the prelude to tears.

He said, “Leave everything and come with me.” He was the one with the conviction. It scared her for a moment.

Immediately it struck Patrick that this attempt to spark his intentions across a gap not yet measured would never succeed. Nor was Claire shocked. Maybe she could have said the thing herself. Properly speaking, neither of them thought so. But Patrick felt like a sap — not a sap like the gland puppets of sudden love, the first-sighters and the stars of the one-night stands; but a sap of the heart, the amorous equivalent of someone who throws his clubs during a golf tournament.

“It should never have gotten this far.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because it’s just to where it maybe could be extremely shattering. Besides it’s … everything is …”

“What? Everything is what?”

“More than just coming home from the Army.”

“No, it’s not,” said Patrick. “Everything is coming home from the Army.”

“Okay, let’s break it up. Boys, I want you to come out clean and punching.”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“Well, we’re down to that.”

Suddenly there were details, tree trunks to bump into, rocks to trip over. In a Norway spruce next to the door, an old strand of Christmas lights deteriorated.

“I wish it could be like in books,” said Patrick. “I wish it could be a big simp love story.”

“I don’t want to be in a big simp love story.”

“My job would be to save the ranch.”

“You’re thinking of Gary Cooper.”

“I guess there’s a difference.”

“A big difference. Gary Cooper saved the ranch. He had simp romances, too. Gary Cooper had his in barns. Book romances often take place in Europe. Cafés instead of barns. Me and Tio been to Europe. He brought his own ketchup and Pepto-Bismol. It was a gourmet tour.”

“Sounds like quite a guy.”

“He is,” she said plainly.

“Well, I don’t want to hear about him.”

Inevitably Patrick drove home listening to a professional reminiscer on the radio who did Western topics twice a week:

“The awesome force of men and animals belittles all the images etched into the retinal filmstrips of my mind … The arena dust!.. Churning hoof sounds … a truckload of hogs! Magnifique!”