Nobody's Angel

33

PATRICK LAY IN BED AND STARED AROUND AT THE FURNISHINGS of his room. There was only one lamp and, overhead, a moth-filled milk-glass ceiling fixture that gave off an awful light. The bedside lamp was a real must. How many things, he wondered, shall we call real musts? What about ball bearings? A real must in defending one’s self against the natives was a handful of stout ball bearings. The 2nd Division went up against Villa with only their uniforms and their ball bearings; without a belief in The Maker, a real must, all there would have been to show would have been the ball bearings, while Villa took his false gods to Deauville for the races. Jesus Christ, he thought, let us turn our thoughts to Claire; the mind is no boomerang. Throw it far enough and it won’t come back.

Did Tio in fact smell a rat, or only a quail? Was Patrick the Montana version of the Tulsa hidey-hole, where ole Shit proved bulletproof? He felt ashamed of having had this thought. Shamed and chilled. Himself as part of a test of sexual allegiance. Maybe he meant to out-Tio Tio, to get just hopelessly Western about this situation, this fix, to see who, just who, was the standup gunslinger of the two. It is typical of me, he thought, to foresee a major showdown well before an acquaintanceship has been struck between the principals. Am I not rude? I am.

He hadn’t been rude yet, but he would have to cut back on his drinking or it was going to all burst forth in a clenched and dangerous teetering toward love, requited or otherwise. This was the sort of isolated dam break that Patrick was susceptible to. When he could identify it, he thought it was ridiculous. He didn’t see anything now at all and he was therefore wide open to any repetitious mistake, precisely at a time in his life when he could least stand repetition. But then, where was the repetition; and couldn’t this just be a fear, as guilt is a fear, of something that didn’t exist?

He drifted away. One of the first lines he ever learned from a song was, “I got a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill.” He was hitchhiking from Two Dot and he heard it in the back seat of a hot-rod Ford. He had never seen a two-dollar bill. Up front an older boy necked with his girl. Patrick could smell something … well, something. He had not imagined that there would be anything to smell. He tried not to stare or draw breath through his nose. Breath through his nose, he knew, would be a mortal sin. He looked instead at the sagebrush flats and streaks of water running from spring-flooded culverts in the creek bottoms.

“How far you going?”

“What?” Seal off that nose, she’s wriggling.

“Where you getting off at?”

“Deadrock.”

“We ain’t going to Deadrock. I’m shutting down this side of Harlowton— You ever seen a rubber?”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t. He was mouth-breathing and gaping into the sagebrush.

“Ever seen one like this?” It was a Ted Williams brand and it had the ball player on the label, ready to pound one out of Fenway Park.

“No, I sure haven’t.”

“Came out of a machine,” said the girl. “In Great Falls because of the air base. It’s a year and a half old. It’s give out and it’s still in the wrapper. That’s about how I was raised, buddy.”

“Up around them bases,” said the driver, “a rubber don’t have a long life to look forward to.”

“It does in Harlowton,” said the girl doggedly.

“I ought to rape your ass!”

“You and what army?”

The driver went into the hot-rod slump, left hand fingering the wind vane, upper body wedged between the wheel and the door. It worked; she crawled on over and Patrick craned at the landscape, wondering if this was going to end up in confession, then finally filling his lungs with the immemorial musk that fogged the interior of that hot-rod Ford, thinking: Purgatory at the very least.

He would have to go back to that, just to find one level of the power Claire had come to have for him. At the very minimum she was the lost ghost of the gold dredge.