Nobody's Angel (15 page)

BY
FRIDAY
,
PATRICK
THOUGHT
HE’D
MENDED
ENOUGH
TO
RIDE
Tio and Claire’s stud. He had him in an open box stall with an automatic waterer and a runway. The horse had
been on a full ration of grain all week with very little exercise. Patrick expected him to be hot. This young stallion spent most of his day looking out on the pasture in hopes of finding something to fight. When any other horse came into view, he’d swing his butt around against the planks and let out a blood-curdling, warlike squeal. So Patrick went into his stall cautiously. The stud pinned his ears at Patrick, bowed his neck and got ready for trouble. Patrick made a low, angry sound in his throat and the horse’s ears went up. Patrick haltered him, took him out to the hitching rack and saddled him. He was a well-put-up horse but he looked even better under saddle. His neck came out at a good angle; he was deep in the heart girth and in the hip. Patrick bridled him with a Sweetwater bit, put on his spurs and led the horse away from the rack, got on and took a deep seat.

He rode up to a round wooden pen sixty feet across. Inside it, a dozen yearling cattle dozed in a little cluster. When Patrick rode in and closed the gate, the yearlings stood up, all Herefords, about five hundred pounds each. The stud was kind of coarse-handling, no better than cowboy broke. He smiled to think it was Claire who put this using-horse handle on him. But Patrick cut himself a cow and drove it out around the herd. The yearling feinted once and ran across the pen. The stud tried to run around his corner instead of setting down on his hocks and turning through himself. So Patrick just stopped, turned him correctly and still had time to send him off inside the cow. He set him down again in correct position. The stud reached around, tried to bite Patrick’s foot and lost the cow he was supposed to be watching. Patrick didn’t think he liked this horse. Nevertheless, he galloped him hard to get the nonsense out of his mind. That took two hours. This time the stud, having soaked through two
saddle blankets, paid attention to his job. Patrick worked him very quietly, never got him out of a trot, but did things slow and correct.

In a sidehill above the house was a root cellar made of stone and with a log-and-sod roof. A horse fell through into the cellar one winter and Patrick built another roof, dragging cottonwood logs into place with the Ford gas tractor. He used it as a wine cellar and sometimes as a place to put vegetables if someone maintained the garden that year. In Germany he had raised tomatoes in nail kegs, and the big, powerful red tomatoes sunning on his balcony often touched his lady friends, who found the plants too piquant for words in a NATO tank captain. “You grew these?” “Yes, I did.” “How
sweet.
You
are
sweet.” At that point Patrick would know this was no dry run; post-coital depression was already in sight, no bigger than a man’s hand on the horizon. Once Patrick picked up the nail kegs to make room for the lady, now keen to sunbathe, and midway through the effort, his face in tomatoes and vines, he said, “I’m homesick, homesick, homesick. I’m just homesick. Montana has a short growing season, but I’m homesick, just homesick …” After he’d done this for a while, the lady sought her dress and departed. “I don’t want to see you again,” she said. “Ever.”

“It’s fair.”

Anyway, Mary headed for the root cellar to avoid a conversation, just at the moment, with the grandfather. When Patrick found her, she was moving down the rack, giving each bottle a half-turn to distribute the sediment, an almost aqueous shadow play on the ceiling, the sun reflecting on the orchard grass that grew to the cellar door. A narrow foot trail wound down the hill to the house.

“Grandpa isn’t drinking that stuff, is he?”

“Once in a while. I’ve been cooking for him. He’ll drink a little then. He seems to be taking the cure.”

“Let’s have a bottle of champagne.”

“Very well.”

Patrick found a bottle of Piper Heidsieck and uncorked it. They sat on crates in the half-light and passed it back and forth. It was nearly empty before either spoke. Mary sighed continually. Patrick felt that junkie light go up his insides.

“I’m sick of going around with my nerves shot.”

“I get mad.”

“Well, I get the creeps. I get bats in the belfry.”

More silence. Patrick examined the sod and rafters. He decided he’d done a good job.

“Why did Grandpa try out for a movie?” Mary asked.

“He wants to be better known, I guess.”

Mary said, “That’s more nails on the blackboard.”

“I myself would like to be extremely famous, larger than life, with souvenir plaster busts of me available at checkout counters.”

“I’d like to be ravishing. I’d like to put on the dog.” Her hands were shaking.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Whew … uhm … whew.”

“What?”

“… speechless …”

“Here. Don’t try. Have some more of this.” She took the champagne. “Horse fell through. Up there. Didn’t find him for two days. He ate a hundred pounds of potatoes.” Mary’s breathing was short and irregular. “He didn’t want to leave. Then he heard the irrigating water and gave in. Didn’t I build a good roof?” Mary nodded rapidly. “Anything I can do?” She shook her head. “Be better if
I leave you alone?” She nodded her head, tried to smile. Patrick left. He wanted to be quiet going down the hill. God Almighty, he thought, she is a sick dog.

22

PATRICK’S
GRANDFATHER
SEEMED
TO
BE
RETURNING
FROM
A
long trip. One imagined his hands filled with canceled tickets. It had rained a week and now the sun was out.

“Just take and put the mares with colts on the south side. Everybody else above the barn. The open mares will fight across the wire.”

“I did that,” said Patrick to his grandfather.

“That’s the boy,” said the old man, and closed the door; then, through the door: “You better look for your sister.” Patrick was tall and the old man was short and looked a bit like a stage paddy, an impression quickly dispelled by his largely humorless nature.

Through the kitchen window Patrick could see his mare sidestep into the shade. The old Connolly saddle looked erect and burnished on her chestnut back. She tipped one foot and started to sleep.

“Mary’s all right,” he said, and went outside and mounted the horse with an air of purpose that was at odds with his complete lack of intentions. The mare, Leafy, was chestnut with the delicate subcoloring that is like watermarks. She had an intelligent narrow face and the lightest rein imaginable. Patrick thought a great deal of her. So she had not been ridden while he was away in the Army. A captain of tanks on the East German line in 1977 who comes from Montana has unusual opportunities to
remember his home, and apart from the buffalo jump, where ravens still hung as though in memory, Leafy was the finest thing on the place. Downhill on a cold morning, she would buck. Like most good horses, Leafy kept her distance.

When Patrick got to the spring, its headgate deploying cold water on the lower pastures, he found Mary reading in the sun. The glare of light from the surface of the pool shimmered on the page of her book, and she chose not to look as Patrick rode up behind, leaned over and guessed she was reading one of the poet-morbids of France again, enhancing her despair like a sore tooth. Over her shoulder, on the surface of the pool, he could see Leafy’s reflection and his own shimmer against the clouds.

Mary said, “Patrick, when Grandpa slapped the senator, was it something he said to Mother?”

Patrick said, “What brought this up?”

“I’ve been reading about mortal offenses.”

“Grandpa slapped the senator for saying something about the Army, and the senator put Grandpa out of the cattle business.”

“That hardly seems like a mortal offense.”

“It does to an Army man.”

“How do you feel?”

“Better by the minute.”

“Do you miss your tank?”

“I miss loose German women.”

Patrick got down and sat by the spring, holding Leafy’s reins. He glanced at the book—De Laclos,
Liaisons Dangereuses.
I could very well figure out who these corrupt French bastards are, he thought, but it plays into the hands of trouble.

Patrick pulled some wild watercress and ate the peppery wet leaves, covertly looking up at Mary with her
pretty, shadowed forehead. Cold water ran on his wrists.

“What are we to do, what are we to do?” He smiled.

“I don’t know, I don’t,” she said. “We get the family this month. That will be a trial by fire, me with child and you without tank.”

“I shall fortify myself with whiskey.”

“The last time you did that, you went to jail. Furthermore, I don’t believe your version of Grandpa slapping the senator. The Army never meant anything to him.”

“Actually, I don’t know why he slapped the senator.”

“He slapped the senator,” said Mary, “because the senator disparaged the Army. You just said so.”

“And you said the Army never meant anything to him.”

“That’s right, I did.” She looked off.

Perhaps, thought Patrick, being a captain of tanks for the Americans facing, across the wire, the captains of tanks of the Soviets has not entirely eradicated my own touchiness as to such disparagements. Although now I’m in a tougher world.

Patrick rode away. Mary turned anew to the French, and the trees at the spring made one image on the water and a shadow on the bottom. It was a beautiful place, where the Crow had buried their dead in the trees, a spring that had mirrored carrion birds, northern lights and the rotation of the solar system. It was an excellent cold spring and Patrick liked everything about it. Ophelia would have sunk in it like a stone.

When he was young, and one of the things he was managing now was the idea that he was not young, but when he was very young, a child, he and Mary picked through the new grass in the spring of the year, when you could see straight to the ground, for the beads that remained from the tree burials. Their grandmother, who was still alive then and who remembered that the “old ones,” as
she also called the Indians, had at the end died largely of smallpox, made the children throw the beads away because she was superstitious, superstitious enough to throw her uncle’s buffalo rifle into the river on the occasion of the United States’ entry into World War Two. The family had had this absurd relationship to America’s affairs of war, and the Army had been a handy place of education since the Civil War. The great-grandfather went there from Ohio, and from a gaited-horse farm now owned by a brewery, only to die driving mules that pulled a Parrott gun into position during the bombardment of Little Round Top. It is said that the mules were the part he resented. Later, with the 1st Montana Volunteers, he helped suppress Aguinaldo’s native insurrection.

Apart from his death, there was the tradition of rather perfunctory military service, then, starting at Miles City in 1884, cattle ranching, horse ranching and a reputation of recurring mental illness, persistent enough that it tended to be assigned from one generation to the next. Mary seemed to have been assigned this time. The luckier ones got off with backaches, facial tics and alcoholism.

The family had now lived in this part of Montana for a very long time, and they still did not fit or even want to fit or, in the words of Patrick’s grandfather, “talk to just anybody.” They would bear forever the air of being able to pick up and go, of having no roots other than the entanglement between themselves; and it is fair to say that they were very thorough snobs with no hope of reform. They had no one to turn to besides themselves, despite that they didn’t get along very well with one another and had scattered all over the country where they meant nothing to their neighbors in the cities and suburbs. Only Patrick and Mary with her hoarding mind and their insufferable grandfather were left to show what there had been; and
when they were gone, everyone would say in some fashion or another that they had never been there anyway, that they didn’t fit. As for Patrick, numerous things were said about him but almost nothing to his face, and that was the only deal he cared to make.