Nobody's Angel

9

PATRICK WOUND ALONG TO THE EAST OF THE RIVER. IT BURST out blue in segments whenever a hay or grain field dropped away. Also, there were tall mountains and a blue sky. But they only go so far. Patrick would have liked a silent, reverent involving of himself with Claire. In another era he could have been her coachman. “Might I assist, Ma’moiselle?” She can’t help but notice how good he is with the horses. One must put aside one’s silk-bound missal and duck off into this grove of elms. The horses graze; the springs of the little coach can be heard for miles. Screeching like fruit bats.

Patrick approached the ranch as though in an aircraft, sitting well back, making small adjustments of the wheel with outstretched arms as the buildings loomed, moving his head with a level rotary motion. We are making our approach. The stewardesses are seated in the little fold-down chairs. Claire is alone in first class; the surface of her gin and tonic tilts precisely with each directional adjustment. And now we are stopped and the dogs are gathering. Lilacs are reflected in the windows. Grandpa dashes to the truck. Must be with the ground crew, perhaps a baggage handler. That or a fucking woodpecker. Turn off the ignition. Engine diesels and quits. Opposite door flung open by Crew Chief Grandpa. This man is excited.

“Your sister has gone mad!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I smelt turpentine,” the old man roared. “I went down to her room and she was painting everything. She was painting curtains! I couldn’t get her to listen to me. She just talked on like I wasn’t there.” Patrick’s heart sank. “When I went back, she was gone.”

“Where is she now?”

“That’s it. I don’t know!”

They were hurrying toward the house.

“Why are we walking this way, then?”

“Well, maybe she’s back in her room. Pat, what the hell’s the matter with her?”

“I really don’t know.” He didn’t, either.

They hurried up the walkway and went in through the kitchen. Patrick could smell the paint and turpentine from here; and as he went down the hallway, it got more intense. He expected for some reason that she would be in her room, and his grandfather, pressing behind him, seemed to agree. Patrick knocked and got no answer. So he opened the door. She wasn’t there. If it wasn’t for the fact that the paint was blue, the room would have looked like the scene of a massacre. A house-painter’s broad brush soaked blue paint into the bedclothes. The upended gallon can directed a slowly moving blue tongue under the dresser. There was no turpentine in sight. The curtains had begun to dry stickily, with a cheap surrealistic effect, around a window full of sky and clouds.

They went back to the kitchen. But by that time the barn was already burning. It was visible from the kitchen, a steady horizontal pall moving downwind from between the logs. Patrick started for the doors. “Call the Fire Department! I’ll run to the barn.”

Patrick sprinted around the bunkhouse to the barn. He climbed the wooden strakes into the haymow. Mary sat under the rafters. The hay was on fire and the wind blew through the separations in the logs, creating innumerable red fingers of fire that worked through the bales, collided and leaped up into longer-burning lines, a secretive, vascular fire.

“We are without tents. We’ll do anything to stay warm. There are tracks in the drifts. We used to have a chairlift to get us down, but my mother interfered with the mechanism and confiscated my lift pass. She put rats in the last empty gondola.”

“I’ll get you down,” said Patrick. “But we must go now. And stop talking like that.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “We must think of the baby.”

The volunteers arrived in a stocky yellow truck, threw the intake hose into the creek and doused the barn inside and out. Steam roared into the sky and cast shadows over the house like storm-driven clouds. The firemen were dressed in yellow slickers and had plexiglass shields in front of their faces. They guided the heavy canvas-covered hose inside their elbows and against their backs, like loafers leaning on a village fence. Only one man aimed the nozzle into the smoke and flames. Patrick thought that he could see in their expressions that this was an unnecessary fire. Perhaps it was his imagination.

Afterward the phone rang; it was Deke Patwell, still somewhat blurred. The phone in Patrick’s hand felt like a blunt instrument.

“Understand you’ve had a barn fire.”

“That’s right, Deke.”

“Any suspicion of foul play or is it all in the family?”

“It’s all in the family,” said Patrick.

“Hope like heck it stays out of the papers.”

“Thank you, Deke. I’m one hundred percent certain that it will. You know what I mean, Deke? I’m really that sure.”

It did seem, though, that Deke was intoning some small, minatory announcement and that it might have been better if Patrick hadn’t kicked him onto the sidewalk. But weren’t there a few things one was obliged to do? Perhaps he hadn’t paid enough attention to Mary over the years. He might have written more often. If he had, Patrick considered, the kick might have been vague or symbolic and not shooting some ass-pounding moron onto the sidewalk. And Mrs. Patwell pursuing the children like a wounded pelican — that, too, would have its consequences. The Patwells had the solidest marriage in Deadrock.