Nobody's Angel (2 page)

THE
YARD
LIGHT
ERECT
UPON
ITS
WOOD
STANCHION
THREW
down a yellow faltering glow infinitely chromatic falling through the China willow to the ground pounded up against the house by the unrepentantly useless horses. Patrick Fitzpatrick glided under the low branches on his mare as the band circled into the corral for salt and grain and water and the morning’s inspection for cracked hooves, lameness, splints, bowed tendons, lice, warbles, wire cuts, ulcerated eyes, wolf teeth, spavin, gravel, founder and worms.

Near the light’s edge the dogs watched him pass: Cole Younger, yellow, on his back, all four legs dangling, let his eyelids fall open upside down; Alba, black, in the sub-shadow of mountain ash, ready to run; Zip T. Crow, brindle, jaw alight on parallel front legs, considered starting a stampede with his hyena voice. Thinking finally of the consequences, he fell to dreaming as the last horse, a yearling running at an angle, jog-trotted into the corral to
drink in the creek alongside the other shadowy horses deployed as regularly as a picket line. Zip T. Crow slunk over behind some relic of a walking cultivator and dropped into its confused shadows like a shy insurrectionist. This was the day to ride up to the airplane.

3

IN
VERY
EARLY
SPRING
BEFORE
THE
CREEKS
FLOODED
,
BEFORE
the first bridges washed away and the big river turned dark, before the snow was gone from the rugged shadows and the drowned livestock tumbled up in the brushy banks, Patrick found the airplane with his binoculars—a single ripped glimmer of fuselage visible a matter of hours before the next flurry concealed it for another month but not before Patrick had memorized the deep-blue ultramontane declivity at the top of the fearsome mountain and begun speculating if in May he could get a horse through the last ten thousand yards of deadfall and look into the pilot’s eyes. Patrick was the son of a dead pilot.

Then in May Patrick walked up the endless sloping nose and saw the pilot quite clearly. He climbed past him to the copilot’s seat and found fractured portions of granite, parts of the mountain that had poured like grapeshot through the fuselage clear into the tail section, leaving the copilot in innumerable pieces, those pieces gusseted in olive nylon, and the skin of the aircraft blood-sprayed as in a cult massacre. Farther aft in the tapering shape where the beating spring sun shone on the skin of the plane and where viscera trailed off in straps, fastening and instruments, it stank. Arms raised in uniform, the pilot
seemed the image of a man in receipt of a fatal sacrament. The oxygen hose was torn away, and beyond the nautiloid effigy, Patrick could see his mare grazing on the alpine slope. Unable to differentiate flesh and electronics, he was avoiding the long-held notion that his father had died like a comet, igniting in the atmosphere, an archangelic semaphore more dignified than death itself. For Patrick, a year had begun. The inside of the plane showed him that life doesn’t just always drag on.

4

PATRICK
LEFT
THE
SIDEWALK
THROUGH
THE
DOOR
BETWEEN
the two angled windows. It was cold, but when he hung his coat inside and glanced onto the street, it looked like summer. Purest optics. There was a stock truck parked at the hotel with two saddled horses in back facing opposite directions. Many saddle horses spend the day parked in front of a bar, heads hung in sleep. Can’t get good help anymore, Patrick thought. Even if you could, who wants to tell people what to do?

Two steps up at the poker table was an old man with a diamond willow cane pushing chips onto the green felt. There was a belton setter at his feet, two strangers and a girl dealing cards. Not strangers, but he couldn’t remember their names.

“Afternoon, Patrick,” said the old man, whose name was Carson. That was his first name.

One stranger said, “Hello, Captain”—Patrick had been in the Army—and the other said, “How’s the man?” Classmates with forgotten faces. But Patrick was rather graceful
under these conditions, and by the time he’d gone through the room, the setter was asleep again, the players were smiling and the girl dealing was reading his name off the back of his belt.

The bar was nearly empty, populated solely by that handful of citizens who can drink in the face of sun blazing through the windows. Patrick ordered his whiskey, knocked it back and reconnoitered. Whiskey, he thought, head upstairs and do some good.

He called, “Thanks so much!” to the bar girl, put down his money and left. It was hard to leave a place where God was at bay.

He walked all the way to the foot of Main, straight toward the mountain range, crossed the little bridge over the clear overflow ditch and went into a prefabricated home without knocking. The windows were covered with shades, and once his eyes accustomed themselves to the poor light, he could see the prostitutes on the couch watching an intelligent interview show, the kind in which Mr. Interlocutor is plainly on amphetamines, while his subjects move in grotesque slow motion. They were dealing with the fetus’s right to life. On the panel were four abortionists, five anti-abortionists and a livid nun with the temper of an aging welterweight.

“Hello, girls.”

“Hello, Patrick.”

“No game on?”

“College basketball. We’re watching this fetus deal.”

“Anybody make a profit?”

“Loretta did.”

Loretta, a vital brunette with tangled hair and a strong, clean body, beamed. She said, “Trout fishermen. Doctors, I think. One had a penlight. He said he always checked for lesions. I said clap. He said among other things. I said
four- to ten-day incubation. He says which book are you reading. I said I don’t read books, I watch TV. So he gets in there with this penlight. I could’ve swatted him.”

“Free checkup,” said Patrick. “Look at the good side of things.”

“Who’s winning?” Loretta asked. She came from Deadrock, looked like a nice farm girl.

Deirdre, from Great Falls, always literal, said, “The fetus.” This nun was packing the mail.

Patrick asked if they were betting. They said no. He said that as he was a Catholic, he would kick in the set if the fetus lost.

“There’s a Catholic,” said Tana as the camera isolated the apoplectic nun shouting the word “
Sacred!
”

“I’ve seen better ones,” said Patrick.

“Well, there’s one, is all,” she said doggedly.

Andrea, the young, bright blond, was from the High Line. She said, “I was with this rancher on his place. He wanted to go again. All the lights went out. I said that’s Rural Electrification for you. He said that’s Montana Power. I said well, I can’t see nothin. He said it’s hydroelectric. It comes off the grid, out of Columbia Falls. So I said what’s the deal? Do we go again? He said not if I can’t see. And just then, like God was on my side, the power came back on and I doubled down for fifty bucks. Thank you, Montana Power! Thank you, Columbia Falls!”

“Jesus,” Patrick said. “That nun is going to blow her stack.” He was staring at the screen.

“She’s no help to the fetus team,” said Loretta. The moderator kept saying, “
Sister! Sister!
” but nothing could slow her tirade, which continued to feature the word “
Sacred!
” repeated at very high volume.

“I’m glad I don’t have any money on this one,” said Patrick. Andrea got up and went to the kitchen to make
iced tea. Loretta, from Deadrock, had gone to grammar school with Patrick, had been a medical secretary, then been not quite happy with that and tried prostitution, a respected job in Montana because of its long utility during the settlement of that region. Loretta’s rural good looks made her prosper, particularly among visiting sportsmen.

Deirdre, from Great Falls, said, “That nun could use some eye shadow.” Deirdre was best with closing-time stumblebums. Patrick asked Loretta if he could have a word with her privately.

The two went into the kitchen as Patrick fought back a little tingle. Loretta hiked herself up on the counter and Patrick sat in a ladder-back chair. There were coffee cans on a low shelf, each labeled with one of the girls’ names; and in front of every can was a kitchen timer. The cans held each night’s earnings and the clocks foiled dawdling or inappropriate enthusiasm.

“Loretta,” said Patrick. “You’re prettier than you were at homecoming.” Only an officer. She’d actually gone downhill.

“I’ve got a better life now. When did you get back?”

“Not too long ago. In the winter.”

“You home to stay?”

“Trying to be. It’ll depend on what I can get going. We’re still running pairs and I’ve got a few outside horses to break, if I can remember how. I guess my grandfather has just had to pick up whoever he could. So a lot of things have kind of gone downhill.”

“He had that one Indian for quite a while. Supposed to have been a good hand.”

“What Indian?”

“He was, you know, a friend of Mary’s, the way I had it.” Mary was Patrick’s sister.

“Well, Mary is why I’m here.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble. I just can’t find her. I mean, I thought you might know.”

“She got out of this work a long time ago, Pat. The Indian is the best way to find her I know. He was supposed to be real different. Used to shark pool at the Corral, just take everybody’s money and never say a word. You know, an
Indian.
”

“Well, I’m not going to go hunt her down or anything. But if you see her, tell her I’m home.”

“I sure will.”

“Boy, you look good, Loretta.”