Nobody's Angel (10 page)

Patrick saw this man, his grandfather, with no pity for himself and less for others, touching the kitchen match to a cold kerosene mantle—ignition and the wavering light on the dead man—thinking then as he would now that it was a matter of available light, a matter of seeing what one had achieved, whether one had successfully descended the mountain from Hell Roaring without losing the load, and at the same time imagining that he was illustrating a story about how there were now too many lights on the valley floor and that it was better when you had to hang the lantern in front of the spooking mule to catch the grimace of face distorted by a single lash rope crossing the mouth of a murderer and looping around the girth of a mule whose scarred flanks were decorated with stripes of blood like war paint. Had this all really disappeared?

As then, when he felt the old man’s past, or when he went among the ancient cottonwoods that once held the shrouded burials of the Crow, Patrick felt that in fact there had been a past, and though he was not a man with connections or immediate family, he was part of something in the course of what was to come. None of which meant he’d failed at ambition, but only that its base was so broad he could not discover its high final curves, the ones that propelled him into the present, or glory, or death.

“How’d they get the wife’s body out of the concrete?”

“Hadn’t set yet.”

“What’d they do with the head?”

“Propped it where it was supposed to go once they had the box. Who cares.”

“What happened to the husband?”

“He wrote away for another one.”

“Another what?”

“Another wife.”

“What do you think happens when someone dies?”

“They can’t do nothin anymore. Most religious sum-buck walkin couldn’t persuade me that they can do much. Don’t add up. God created an impossible situation.”

Patrick thought that this was a dignified appraisal, no Ahab railing against mortality, but simply the observed, which in the end was harsh enough: that for one who could stand it, those who sought to strike the sun for an offense seemed like cheap grandstanders; and they were certainly in no shortage.

Now his grandfather took down his daily missal from above Patrick’s shelf of cookbooks and pint-size bottle of sour mash, a bottle old-timers called a mickey. He sat down in the one comfortable ladder-back the kitchen had, and said, “What’s for dinner?” Patrick thought, Is this our religion? He remembered a clever young tank-gunner with a year at the university who pasted the picture of a new swami above his observation port every month. He wanted war with Communism, then exciting visits to ashrams. He wanted to find himself, but first he wanted to smash Communism. He thought swamis stood for that. His name was Walt. He had records by Carlos Santana but called him by his assumed name, Devadip or something. Walt loved Santana Devadip-or-something for inventing swami rock ’n’ roll. He wanted to go to Santana’s hometown, but he had heard San Francisco was now commanded by fairies and therefore he thought the next
thing was to smash Communism, then go on a swami tour of the Orient. Walt had luxurious sideburns that looked suspiciously as if they’d been permanented. He liked Germany but he wanted to raid the East. Sometimes when Walt’s ambition had been fortified by mystery substances, especially the one he called “mother’s little helper”—by all accounts something invented to keep advance-reconnaissance rangers awake for three days at a time—sometimes then Walt asked Patrick to hack a left into what he called Prime-time red, cross the border, head downtown and shell the home of the East German mayor. On such occasions Patrick referred to the gently fatal attitudes of his heroes of the Orient, urging Walt to cool his heels, at least until mother’s little helper wore off. It was ’76, the bicentennial. The East Germans had won forty-seven medals in the Olympics and Walt didn’t like it, was real bummed out, said “Fuck it” all the time.

But that was long ago and far away, as so much eventually was. Patrick was still midway in the accumulation of his scrapbook, and paramount in that was what he thought of as a less lonely life. For now, bereft of his German girl friends and base-employed bachelorettes, the cowboy captain felt stranded on the beautiful ranch he would someday own, land, homestead, water rights, cattle and burden. He had no idea what he would do with it.

This had not entirely been necessary. There had been nice girls, beautiful girls, German dynamos with degrees who desired to be cowgirls when the captain returned, girls who could do English in the inflection of Tek-Ziz, New York or the late President Kennedy. It had been a long go on the line of the Soviet bloc and it had included paternity suits, arrangements and affection. He had tried Spain on leave, but the Spanish girls wouldn’t go to the beach and the English secretaries on holiday behaved like
beagles in heat at a guard-dog show in Munich. He began using an electric razor. He began not to care. He began not to brush between meals. He began to brood about the high lonesome and the girls at the gold dredge and their desire to be barrel racers and then make little babies. By now they’d had bunches of them and the babies were all in 4H. He read Thucydides and asked about soldiers’ homecomings. He heard Marvin Gaye sing the national anthem at the heavyweight championship fight, and that was that. He quit the Army. He had never fired a shot, but he was going home to Montana to pick up where he left off—which was a blurred edge; blurred because of boarding school, the death of his father, the disappearance—intermittent—of his sister and the remarriage of his mother to a glowing, highly focused businessman from California who owned a lighting-design center in Santa Barbara and was a world-class racquetball player.

Now, home for a time and with no good reason to support his feeling, what had seemed the last prospect in his vague search for a reason to come home and
stay
turned out to be a subliminal inclination toward another man’s wife; which was plainly unrequited if not without charm, and pointless.

Can’t help that, thought Patrick. He turned his thoughts to what could be helped, most of which consisted in learning the particulars of the ranch which he had always assumed he would run but which he never had run and which, in fact, no one had ever run, except his grandfather. Patrick’s father had gone off to test airplanes, and the man before his grandfather—an Englishman with the papers of a clergyman too finely scripted to be doubted by the honyockers and illiterate railroaders who settled the town—that Englishman never lifted a finger
except in pursuit of Indian women and in operatic attempts at suicide in the six inches of running water from which the place was subsequently irrigated. He did leave, however, large academic oils that he had commissioned as decoration in the dining room, depicting smallpox epidemics among the Assiniboine from the point of view of a Swiss academic painter in his early twenties, eager to get home and tend to the clocks. The paintings showed all Indians in Eastern war bonnets, holding their throats in the paroxysms of dehydration, popularly assumed to be the last stage of that plague. It had never, to Patrick, seemed the right thing for the dining room. At the same time it did not deter anyone from eating. Today Patrick felt a little like the Englishman who had commissioned the paintings.

But he did have a thought. He went into the pantry, where his grandfather had hung the telephone, and being careful to stay loose, dialed and got Claire.

“Claire,” he said, “this is Patrick Fitzpatrick.”

“Well, hey.”

“Say, I’d just remembered, I never gave Tio an answer about that colt.”

“Fitzpatrick! That you?” It was Tio.

“Yes, it is.”

“You callin regardin that colt?”

“Yes, I—”

“You gonna take him?”

“Yes, I’d like to.”

“You should, he’s a good colt. Bill us at Tulsa. Honey, you still on?”

“Sure am. Where’re you?”

“I’m down to the granary with the accountants. Can you load that horse yourself?”

“Sure can.”

“Carry him out to Fitzpatrick. Listen, I gotta go. Bye.” Click.

Patrick said, “Do you need directions, Claire?” He was happy. Then Tio came back on.

“You oughta breed ole Cunt to that mare of yours, Fitzpatrick. Think on it.” Click. Pause.

“Uh, yes, I will need directions.”

Patrick said, “Let’s just wait a second and see if Tio comes back on.”

There was a pause, and then Claire said, with a little fear in her voice, “Why?”

“I hate repeating directions,” said Patrick. His was an odd remark. He had no such attitude. He was starting to make things up. The last Army officer in this area he could think of who did that was General George Armstrong Custer.

13

INTERMITTENTLY
BEHIND
THE
CORRUGATED
TRUNKS
OF
THE
cottonwoods Patrick could discern a sedan with an in-line trailer behind it. He was replacing planks on the loading chute, ones that had been knocked loose while he was gone; and he could see down to the road from here, to the sedan, the dust from the trailer and the changing green light on the metal from the canopy of leaves overhead. Cole Younger was the first dog to detect the car turning in, and his bellowing bark set Alba and the hysterical Zip T. Crow into surrounding the outfit. Patrick left the spikes and hammer at the chute and started down the hill. Once
past the orchard he could hear the horse whinny inside the trailer and he could read the word “Oklahoma” on the plates. Was that Sooner, Hoosier or Show Me? The door of the sedan was open, but glare on the window kept him from seeing. He could make out one dangling boot and nothing else. Claire kicked Zip T. Crow very precisely and without meanness as the dog stole in for a cheap shot.

The car looked like it could pull the trailer a hundred in a head wind. Patrick had a weakness for gas gobblers; and a rather limited part of him, the part that enjoyed his seventy-mile-an-hour tank, had always wanted to rodeo out of a Cadillac like this one. He took a hard look: oil-money weird, no doubt about that. Like Australians, loud with thin lips, hideous Protestant backgrounds, unnatural drive to honky-tonk as a specific against bad early religion and an evil landscape: bracing himself against Claire.

She got out wearing knee-high boots, washed-out Wranglers, a hot-pink shirt and a good Ryon’s Panama straw. Long oak-blond hair disappearing between the shoulder blades in an endless braid.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you, Claire?” The dumb grin forms. No drool in the mouth corners yet.

“Just right,” she said. “And you, Patrick?” There was sweetness in her inquiry. Claire just kind of stood there and let the sun hit her, only her thumbs outside her pants.

“What do we have in the back?” asked Patrick.

“Got Tio’s horse.”

“Aged horse?”

“Four.”

“Is he broke to ride?”

“He is,” she said, “but he’s rank.”

“What’s he do good?”

“Turn around,” she said. “He’s real supple.”

“What’s he do bad?”

“Bite you. Fall on you. Pack his head in your lap. Never has bucked. But it’s in him.”

“How do you like him shod?”

“Just double-ought plates. Had little trailers in the back. We skipped that. He’ll run and slide. He’s still in a snaffle bit. You do as you like. But don’t thump on him. He can get right ugly.”

“Why didn’t you take the horse to one of the guys around Tulsa?”

“We’re gonna be here most years. We wanted to be able to see how the horse was going. Plus Tio wanted someone who was staying home with his horses.” The advent of the husband into the conversation dropped like an ice cube on a sunbather’s back. Could Claire have known the extent to which the horse was part of the arranging?

“How come you call him American Express?”

“Tio billed him out as ranch supplies. We named him after the card.”

“Right …”

“Tio would give you what you wanted for your mare. You could go on and bill the accountants in Tulsa.”

“She’s just not for sale. But I appreciate it.”