Nobody's Angel

44

AT CLOSING TIME SHE WANTED TO BE TAKEN HOME; AND IT was clear she meant to be dropped off, that Patrick was to go to his own place. He said that he didn’t understand. They were both slightly drunk. Couples swarmed past, carrying plastic to-go cups. One bartender had moved next to the door opposite the bouncer, who was sitting on a Naugahyde-and-steel kitchen chair. His thighs pressed together all the way to his knees, and he reviewed departing customers as though they were only going on parole.

Patrick started the engine. “What is this?”

“What is what?”

“Just dropping you off?”

“Time to think. I mean that, Patrick.”

“You mean as if there were an answer.”

“That’s just what I mean.”

“Well, you’ll have to outgrow that,” said Patrick. He meant nothing enigmatic by his remark, and in fact the notion hung over the entire ride to Claire’s ranch, suggesting there was something to it. Therefore — though it had been a superb evening, given the time and place, most of the immediate gloom kept at bay — Claire went straight to the house. Patrick wheeled the truck’s lights against the scattered buildings and suppressed an urge to go back into town and look for some kind of trouble. He was beyond that; he headed home to the Heart Bar Ranch — that is, his inheritance with its increasingly vacant buildings and rooms.

By nine in the morning he had reduced the broader effects of his hangover by ruthless scrubbing in the shower, harsh versions of the remaining ablutions, clean clothes and coffee with his grandfather.

“I forgot to send in the meter reading. So they came out and did it and charged us.” His grandfather delicately tested the layer of cream on his coffee with the tip of his spoon; then he gave it a stroke and it all twirled to color. He sipped. “One guy to drive the truck. One guy to read the meter and write it down. There’ll be a third person to bill us for the extra, which is five dollars. The electric company is gonna be fifty bucks in the hole.”

“Everything else all right?”

“Seems so. I’ve been out on Truman. Everybody looks sound. One yearling pulling up a back leg. I don’t see a stifle there or anything to be concerned about, though.

I’ve paid no attention to the irrigated ground. I shut off the wheel line and the hell with it. Seems like Truman’s gaits have improved. That old dogtrot’s practically a rack now. Wish I could take him to town.”

An hour later, ignoring official visiting hours, he was sitting next to Tio’s bed. Tio said, “This is just foolish.”

“Maybe not.”

“You reach a certain age, I think, when you haven’t got your house in order and you start seeking out bad situations.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?” Patrick asked.

“I see you as some character who joins the Foreign Legion hoping to be killed by Arabs because his dog has died. And if everything goes well and they put a bullet in him way out there on the desert, the dog is still the only one to feel sorry for.”

Patrick was silenced, not simply by the creeping appropriateness of the speech, but by the glimpse of that in Tio which had drawn Claire: the character, the oil-field voodoo.

“Who do we feel sorry for in your life?” Patrick asked.

“Always been hard to say. I had begun, once I began, to figure out who’d had who. Got close, I mean extra close, when — snap — I started my rigor mortis routine. Never been much in the long run. Casts its little old shadow on things. Course, from a cold-ass business point of view, a guy doesn’t want to weigh in as a nut. But some things can’t be helped. And if I could help this, then what could I do? Kill you? Kill her? Kill myself? God works in mysterious ways, I’m a bald-ass liar if he don’t. Nothing more ruinous to my expectations in life than waving a pistol around or farming out crimes that point an accusing finger at me. Slow grind don’t set you in your place, then I’m a nigger aviator. Just remember this, Fitzpatrick: I’ve got a gadget-filled mind. And I’ve got a gadget for every situation.”

A brilliant light — brilliant suggesting something momentary, as a flare — fell upon Patrick, who staggered very slightly and acknowledged acquaintances with a quick sideways tip of the head, a gesture he had not formerly used in America. At Front Street in the clangor of the shunting yard, he grinned to himself and thought: Rue Northern Pacific … Calle Caboose. Perhaps this is the caboose. The noose of the caboose. The last car before the vanishing rails, a view entirely different from that from the engine.

Everything from finding the truck to returning to Silver Stake seemed to happen at half speed. Why in a movie camera did you have to run the film through at high speed to produce slow motion? Why couldn’t things happen “in a wink” as they did in the books he read as a boy? The desire to use up the road in a wink is the way the highspeed camera of the drunk’s brain produces accidents, the mad wish for change.

In the last mile before camp, perhaps some admission was at hand, no sheepish acquiescence to the occasion, but an actual acknowledgment of all the signs and semaphors and general messages from headquarters that the very thing he had begun to hang his fatigued hopes upon was out of the question.

He opened his jackknife to cut the black twine on the baled prairie hay. He separated that into flakes and fed them into the small corral so that the horses could eat well away from one another. He knocked the grain pannier to scatter possible mice and brought Leafy a bucket of oats. He sat down rather heavily before her and held the bucket. She exhaled across his head and face questioningly before dropping her muzzle into the grain. She ate with the regularity of a horse who will be fed again; and when Patrick held his hands around the strangely delicate pasterns, feeling the heat that arose from the coronal bands of hoof, she stopped, pricked her ears forward, stared with the black and endless eyes that had made him cut her out from the other foals numerous springs ago and went back to eating. Patrick had imagined she was worried about him, that he was somebody. Then the patterned movement, observed from this crazy angle of legs — hoofs all as different as seashells — and the disappearance of everything into the dark: the orderly rotation of big animals according to their decorum from feed to water to standing sleep, a movement throughout the night that never disturbed Patrick, sleeping face down in the mountain corral.

Claire found him there, not before he had awakened but before he’d had time to reconstruct and too late for him to jump up and pretend to be doing anything else. Storewide gala on mortification of the flesh. Patrick was sick of it but couldn’t think what there was to be done.

“I wanted to see if you were all right.”

“Of course I’m all right.”

“I see.”

He sat up and gazed around the corral: horses, poles, the crowding evergreen slope; how absurd, the sort of thing to give you the sweats. Claire’s hands seemed to plunge deeper into the pockets of her blue dress. Beautiful as usual, thought Patrick angrily. In the meanwhile I’ve become a laugh.

“What are you doing today?” she asked tentatively. It was as if they were starting all over again.

“Reading a book.”

“What book?”

“It’s called The Life of Marion Easterly and it’s by all three Brontë sisters.”

He thought, I shall not be tempted by any of this. I prefer the concerned breathing of my horse upon my much-abused head in the night — though Claire would have seen to it that I went to the cabin. On the other hand, waking up and seeing there was nothing to eat, I would have gone on my own.

Creeping in was a new light-heartedness. Patrick ruefully considered that Claire might get away with this one. Just as well head indoors, then, and tidy up.

The broad-bottomed tin kettle sent clouds of steam into the room, and the stout wood stove beat gentle heat against Patrick’s bare knees. There will be shaving; there will be brighter eyes. The wandering part in his hair would be rediscovered and traced to the crown of his scalp. Teeth only the madmen at Ipana could dream of. A nice shirt from the clutches of the Armed Forces in Europe. But it was pathetic.

Soon, however, they were shouting.

“Tio seems very used to your indiscretions.”

“He’s not.”

“It seems he is.”

“Shall I just go, Patrick?”

Now he was sorry, at first because of his shouting. Then he remembered her shouting and he was less sorry. Besides, the way moods swept back and forth over lovers like tide seemed now to Patrick a humiliating process. I love you I hate you I’ll kill you I can’t live without you blah blah blah. This last thought took him to the final button of his shirt. He dropped his hands to his sides, watched the steam carry to the door past Claire and believed he felt like the Ancient Mariner at an abandoned bus stop. Then Claire stirred together some breakfast — a rather scientific attempt, he thought, to raise his blood sugar, going to Jerusalem with a Bible and a soil-test kit. I should start shouting the moment I’ve eaten my breakfast. I mean shouting.

“Can we ride again?”

“Let’s load up and get the fuck out of here.”

“This has been so lovely out here. Are we about to be actual?”

“We’ll quit while we’re ahead. I’ve got things that have to be done.” What if she asked for examples? Change the cat’s whisker on Grandpa’s crystal set? Milk the elk?

Leafy kept testing the floor of the trailer with her forefoot, then finally loaded up. Delicate as she seemed to Patrick, the trailer set down on its springs. Panniers, lash ropes, spoilable food, all were piled in the truck.

And now a simple dialogue between the two engine exhausts, G clef by Patrick, revving a bit between ratios as he swung about and headed the rig down the mountain, manifold resonating in the gee-haw of faded romance. One of the West’s last and smallest wagon trains, he thought; an observation that exhilarated by its brief coldness and necessary stupidity. The two vehicles separated and headed into the distance.

But by the time he reached the ranch, the phone was ringing and she was asking without any introduction, “What can I do? What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you just don’t do anything you please. Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s all I wanted to know.”

She rung off and left Patrick even less enlightened. He decided that it was partly the phone’s fault; that even notepaper was inadequate to such an enigma. He played bebop and cooked Chinese food. It seemed the only answer. He wouldn’t see love to its senescence without a middle period.

Then she called again. He was eating a trout, curry and rice invention wrapped in won ton skins and playing the Jazz Messengers so loud he almost didn’t hear the phone ring.

“Tio’s home. But he’s so demoralized, it’s not like him.”

“I don’t know what to say to you.”

“I wanted to talk to somebody. He’s a sick dog.”

“There are bigger things than pairing off,” said Patrick.

“Like what?”

“Life and death.”

“Take the easy ones, cowboy.”

“Well, I asked you to leave with me.”

“That’s another one. You’re going downhill. People promise people, Patrick. How is it with you — strand people with all your speeches? Some of us still own up to the ones we made on homecoming day, for crying out loud.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.”

“Well, I’m getting off before you ruin my dinner.” And he did.

Then, to make up for it a little, he took Tio’s stud out to ride in what light was left. His food had begun to digest, and the smell of the horse was obviated by the smell of hoisin sauce and curry. They went up the road, the stud spooking about in the shadows but advancing into new darkness with the pressure on his sides. A partridge dusting in the pale light went off at an angle, and the stud watched bug-eyed, side-passing through the spot in the road just vacated by the bird. My God, what a stupid bastard, thought Patrick. He once had a farrier who claimed that the two most ignorant things a man could do were to refuse to cut a stallion and to turn down a drink of whiskey. Then Tio’s stallion gave out a terrific scream as if to tell any mares in earshot that he feared no bird. As for Patrick, his love of Claire kept him, with some struggle, from acknowledging that the thoroughly faulty Tio was coming to seem human. It wouldn’t do.

And anyway, it wouldn’t last; that is, it didn’t. Coming back down the road in nearly complete darkness, past one small ranch with its generator thumping in the cow barn, Patrick found it necessary to two-hand the horse once more, like a colt; his muscles felt short and bunched. If he could have gotten his head down, he would have bucked.

He took the saddle off, hung the bridle and closed the stud up when Tio materialized from the next, empty, stall; he must have been sitting on the feed bunk.

“How’d my stud go?”

“He went all right. We didn’t do much.”

“I’ve got a gun.”

“Oh, great.”

“You can’t see it, can you?”

“No. Are you going to threaten me?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do! Been made to feel pretty poorly about myself and that leads direct to your doorstep.”

“May I sit down?”

Tio nodded affirmative, but with a crazy, loose-necked gesture. Patrick sat on the bench next to his forge, hiking up on his hands and swinging back onto it. Unconsciously, he looked about at the things with handles: chisels, screwdrivers, hammers.

“Are you drunk, Tio?”

“No.”

“What’s the deal?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“Except it ain’t right.”

“I guess not.”

“We go’ make it right.”

Patrick sighed. “Okay.” He guessed he wanted it made right; and he could find nothing actual in this suggestion of gunplay. He didn’t think Tio could, either. At the same time, he didn’t want to be some dim, surprised bozo who couldn’t read the cards and got shot.

“Not like you think.”

“Why don’t you just get rid of the gun so that we can talk?”

“There’s no gun.”

“Why did you say there was?”

“I thought it would have a different effect.”

“I can see that,” Patrick replied.

“Gun’s like a big car. Just something to arrive in. Real anger you do in your shirt-sleeves.”

Patrick got up, uncomfortable, pulled the lamp on over the forge, took the bench brush and tried to be busy, for Tio seemed to bear real forward motion, anger, humiliation, whatever. It was hard to say.

“Usually I get a nap,” said Tio.

“I don’t follow.”

“A nap. I missed mine today.”

“Right …?”

Tio looked dead. “So I’m shot. I gotta go home. I gotta sleep. The restoration process. Let’s pick up where we left off. I’m suckin wind. A big nap will solve that.”

“Well, as you wish.”

“This is me,” said Tio. There when they drove the golden spike, his arms held wide. “Hand in hand with nature. The big snooze.”

Patrick discovered where Tio had parked when the Cadillac pulled out, lights high, from between the oldest cottonwoods. He hung his chaps under the yellow bug light and considered: He missed his nap?

The other thing is, I’ve got to get this bad-minded horse back to his owner. Every time I ride that bastard, I feel like a monkey fucking a football. That’s not a good feeling. And you don’t want to get caught at that.

At evening he was heading for Tio’s ranch with the stud behind in the trailer. By the time he went under the big hanging gate, he could see Tio’s helicopter, and by the time he got as far as the house, he could see Tio inside the helicopter behind its tinted bubble. Patrick felt nervous about this; but he didn’t want the horse around, he didn’t want the business connection, and he didn’t want the excuse for Tio’s visits. Anyway, Tio didn’t bother to look up. Patrick could see vaguely that he had the headset on — probably getting a weather report on the VHF.

So he unloaded the horse and led him carefully, thinking at first, This is this canner’s last chance to get me; recalling Mary’s view that the horse was an instrument of the devil. Leading the horse was like flying a kite: He was just a bad-hearted, bad-minded, uncoordinated canner. And the devil had better instruments.

He put the horse up and stepped out of the stable, a kind of West Coast shack with doors on runners and air-conditioning. Claire was on the porch of the house in her yellow dust-bowl dress, one hand dug into her thick hair.

“Come up here, Patrick!”

“I’ve returned your horse!” he called.

“I see that!”

When he got to the porch, Claire was shaking and her eyes were drawn inward as though to lengthen their focus to eternity.

“He wasn’t any good, really.”

“I couldn’t get him to do anything. As you can imagine, it’s best I return him.”

She stared at Patrick and laughed, either ironically or bitterly — stopping him. Certainly nothing was funny at all.

“Can you come in?”

“This is getting crazy. I don’t understand. I never have understood.”

“Just come in.”

Patrick was lost — lost passing into the house, then lost in its rooms, whose opaque human shadows stood source-less and eerie as the shadows birds cast by starlight. He sensed Claire in her cotton dress no more than he sensed Tio getting his weather forecasts a hundred feet away in an aluminum-and-plexiglass capsule as hermetic and sacrosanct as the Oval Office, Lincoln’s tomb, the seal on bonded liquor, virginity.

“Come here to me.” She shoved the door closed behind him.

“Claire!”

“Shush!” She seized him hard, and by the time he kissed her throat, it was wet with tears.

He whispered, “What’s going on?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Is that true?” Patrick asked emphatically. They each seemed to him terrifyingly unconnected.

“That’s true. Don’t worry about Tio until you go and fetch him.” She pulled — or, rather, twisted — him down onto the divan; and she was barefoot.

She said “Baby” and lifted to slide her yellow dress under her arms. Patrick thought, This is as good a place to die as any. He was not so far gone as not to note that the West’s last stands were less and less appropriate to epic poetry and murals.

“Should I call you baby too?”

“I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t calling you baby. That’s not what it meant.” She was naked now and Patrick awaited a bullet.

“I’ve got to hear what you meant.”

“Last chance.”

“Last chance … Am I going to get killed at this?”

“I don’t see how. I’m not going to kill you.”

Drawing this particular blank, Patrick, in mortal confusion, made love to Claire, who seemed, spasmodic and weeping, finally more martyred than loved. Patrick heard himself a mile off and incoherent.

Then acknowledgment of everything external moving in upon his consciousness appeared as an ice age. He wasn’t a captain or a cowboy. He thought for a moment, literally thought, about what he had set out for; and he knew one thing: he was superfluous.

“Why,” he asked, “have we been put up with?”

“By whom?”

“By your husband.”

“Ask him. I’m through. But you could ask.”

“I will.”

“Do.”

Tio was dead, exhaust piped into the bubble until the smothered engine quit and Tio went on to the next thing. He hung forward in his harness as though starting the international freestyle; it looked like a long swim indeed. Around his dead face earphones whispered news of a world cracking; but Tio was spared. Lust and boredom provided no such indemnity. It made thrill-killers of nice people.

“Do you think we can fly this thing?”

“Oh, Patrick.”

“Are you shattered?”

“Not really.”

“Did you love him?”

“Sure.”

“I wonder what happened.”

“No, you ont.”

“I think I really do.”

“We fucked him to death.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“And you thought he was a bad man. You thought if you pushed him hard enough, he’d put you out of your misery, like your sister did for herself. But he wasn’t a bad man.”

“I mean, is it the main thing to be put out of your misery?”

“Are you miserable?” Claire asked.

“Are you?”

“No. I’m in mourning. I wanted to celebrate it with you before you got miserable again. That part of you deserves to live. The rest should be in there with Tio. You might enjoy him like this.” She laughed a high, uncontrolled laugh, one that masked not tears but something wild and unreachable. Patrick felt, as he looked into the bubble, that he looked through the bars of a prison; and that in some terrifying way, the voice of Claire was the bright music of the jailer’s keys fading in the corridor.

“Would you like to go back in?”

“I really don’t think so.”

“Scared.”

“Yes.”

“All you know is what I knew when we went inside before.”

“I realize that.”

“No guts, no glory,” she said.

“I’m not going in with you.”

Claire stretched her arms over the plexiglass and stared inside. “I guess if I’ve done nothing else, I showed one of you how to carry the weight and not go to pieces. I didn’t go to pieces. He did and you’re about to. I’ve got this feeling I don’t want to lose that. The love was real in each case.”

You could see the house in its own lights. It looked like an ad for a paint that was weatherproof and that banished evil. It looked flat.

“Is the love gone?” he asked.

“What if it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s nothing you can do anything with. It makes you go around proving you’re not rotten or spoiled by sin— Look at him.”

“I thought love was all that mattered.”

“Well, it’s very nice. Taxes awful high in that neighborhood. You know what I set out to do? In my little quiet way? I set out to have been around.”

“Get it done?”

“Well, I’ve been around.”

“You learn anything that could help us? See, I’m real in love with you and I’m sort of stuck.”

Claire never seemed morbid, cynical or flippant. Patrick could not see how she had been made into this. Her rakish femininity had first drawn him to her; but now her absolute female power, which men fear will finally be turned upon them, was at hand. He was sure she hadn’t wished this or wanted to be competed for. But the two of them had made a major purchase on a long-term plan. She at least acknowledged the cost, while Patrick compressed it to a dead husband. She wasn’t being cold; she intended to pay.

“I think you should go in with me.”

“Why?”

“For a couple of reasons.”

“What are they?”

“One is it will never happen again. We have to give him that.”

“And the other?”

“You’ll have a real good time.”

Patrick went. She made it seem easy.

Had the love been real? Patrick thought so. He never specifically changed his opinion. Too, he gave Leafy to Claire. He must have meant something by that. In life, he later thought, shoot anything that moves. Otherwise, discouragement sets in. Tio at least had gotten the latest weather.

Patrick’s grandfather shot the best elk of his life. Patrick packed it out for him and arranged for it to be mounted and hung in the Hawk Bar, the place the old man could see from the window of his apartment.

Patrick and Claire corresponded for some time after he went back into the Army and she returned to her childhood place at Talalah. Once she sent a picture of herself, but he didn’t like keeping it around. After that, the correspondence trailed off.

Anyway, his share of the lease money from the ranch allowed him to buy an old second-story flat in Madrid. He spent all his leave time there. Deke Patwell had it from someone who knew someone who knew someone that he had a woman in Madrid, an American named Marion Easterly; and that when she was with him, he was a bit of a blackout drinker. There were some people in Deadrock who had liked Patrick; and a few of them thought, At least he’s not alone.

In any case, he never came home again.