Nobody's Angel

41

PATRICK’S HEART WAS POUNDING WHEN HE CLIMBED FROM the truck. He deliberately walked past the front window so that he could glance inside. The Cadillac was tilted up on the slope to the lawn; and he remembered that that was where he had seen it last — a precise parking habit. But mainly he noticed the huge tire prints of some powerful machine across the new lawn in a big arc that took them out of the place — not down the road but directly out through the sagebrush. Then, he noticed the flies on the window, thousands of them.

He knocked without getting an answer. So he knocked again. He craned to see past the angle of the hallway into the kitchen, but could discern nothing. He tried the door and found it open. He walked in among coatracks festooned with deluxe sporting clothes and was overpowered by some awful smell. He was completely frightened, but he worked his way into the kitchen, calling out Tio’s name ahead of himself through the kitchen and into the living room.

The living room was ruined with broken bottles and glasses, turned-over furniture and, worst of all, the carcasses of coyotes, some skinned so that they looked alive, veined and bug-eyed, in reaching-out postures so distinctive as to suggest they ran even in death. Hides, curled up and stinking, one hanging on the ninth largest whitetail ever killed in Texas, all swam under a mantle of flies. Patrick rolled open the windows and turned the heat off.

He started upstairs; and by the landing he could see Tio’s boots, toes down over the top step. Patrick thought, He’s dead. He climbed the rest of the way, and as he moved around Tio’s rumpled body, the body moved, the head turned up for a look. “Fitzpatrick.”

“What’s the problem here, Tio?”

“Had some bounty-hunter friends on a visit. God-amighty, did I sleep here?”

“Evidently you did.”

Tio struggled into a kneeling position and let his head hang for a long moment. “Godamighty. Last thing I remember, we was trying to get them coyotes skinned. We was a little far gone.” Tio got up. “I was shooting at something in the fireplace. I guess they panicked. Up till then, our plan was to hunt you down like an animal. Which is all you are. Then I had kind of a fit and they run off on me.”

Tio wandered toward the bathroom and closed the door. Patrick expected him to emerge with a gun. He looked around the room for the weapon Tio had mentioned and didn’t see it. He began to be sure that it was in the bathroom. Then he heard the shower running. In the eerie situation it sounded like some kind of weather behind the closed bathroom door, like a distant storm that ended suddenly. Patrick then thought of Claire, on the chance his minutes were numbered.

The bathroom door swung open. Tio, wrapped in a towel, was drawing broad stripes through the shaving cream on his face. Still standing at the top of the stairs, Patrick could hear the sleepy drone of the flies downstairs. Tio spoke to him, shaving accurately and without a mirror.

“Eat up with the dumb ass,” he said, grimly.

“Looks like it.”

“What … in the fuck are you doing here?”

This sent Patrick spinning: Was it to lay claim to the first thing he seemed prepared to fight for since coming home? Was it to bring to closure a mystery he couldn’t bear in all the tranquility of the cabin? He really didn’t know; but he understood that those were the questions.

“Well, Claire got kind of frightened by your guests.”

“That’s not it,” said Tio, leaning over the sink and scrubbing vigorously at his teeth. I’ve got it, thought Patrick, I’ll tell Claire I shot him. No, Christ, that’s hysterical. Tio stood and turned toward him. “You could drive to my house, but you couldn’t tell me the truth. Pitiful. I’m supposed to need professional supervision, but you’re pitiful.” He threw the towel behind and wandered naked to the closet, where he took the utmost care in picking his wardrobe for the day: Levis, a green chambray shirt and his tall boots. The buckle on his belt had the cat-track brand overlaid on it in gold. It was Claire’s family brand. Patrick was relieved he’d gotten his clothes on. And he was still thinking about being called pitiful. He felt his blood rise.

“I love Claire,” he said.

“Oh, I bet you do.”

“That doesn’t seem important to you?”

“I’d hate to see you get her killed. That’s important to me. I’m crazy about the girl.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you say you’re in love with her. How would you like some clown putting her life in question?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Well, as the lady’s husband, I’m here to tell you that that is exactly what you’re doing. Nothing will happen to you. You’re not important enough and nobody is going to make you important enough. Otherwise this little turn with Claire would look like it meant something, and it don’t. It’s just a momentary case of the dumb ass. Basically, we’re up north on vacation and maybe it got a little rowdy. Oklahoma can be brutal hot in the summertime. But it’s starting to cool off now. It’s time Claire and me headed home. So you fetch her. Tio’s gonna carry her back to where being with her people makes her feel bulletproof again.”

Patrick started down the stairs ahead of Tio, and just as they moved to the level of the flies, he heard a sudden noise behind him, one that revealed the fear within himself, and the gasped word “Fitzpatrick.” Patrick turned and saw Tio half-seated, half-sprawled on the steps above him. He was changing color quickly and had lost control of his body. A stain spread at his crotch and Patrick could see in his struggling eyes that he now could no longer speak. Patrick remembered Claire’s words: “I’m the doctor and Tio is the patient and you are a cruel outsider.” Was this it?

Tio was lighter than Patrick had expected. He carried him to the truck in the crazy daylight and felt the gusts of Tio’s malady. Then, on the drive to the hospital, Tio twisted up against his door and his teeth began rattling against the window. Patrick pulled him upright and kept on driving.

They wheeled Tio through emergency. The doctor on call said they’d had him once before, explaining this while he tapped the nail of his forefinger on the crystal of his wristwatch. He held the watch to his ear and directed Patrick to the lobby to check Tio in. Tio glided off, wheeled by an orderly, his tall boots immobilized by a retaining strap. His face was locked in some terrible rictus, but his eyes blazed toward Patrick; Patrick would never forget their blaze.

Patrick checked him in, writing Claire’s name under “Next of Kin” and his own on the bottom line.