Nobody's Angel (6 page)

“How’s Patrick?” he said.

“Not bad, Deke.”

“Enjoying the gathering?” Deke was always rakish when he managed to leave his wife at home.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Anything newsworthy up your way?”

“No, it’s been awful quiet.”

“We thought it best to ignore Mary’s little run-ins.”

Patrick felt his blood rising. “Like what?”

“Well, you’ve been away. And like I say, we didn’t see fit to print.” Little homecoming presents. Lawn war.

“I appreciate it,” said Patrick as best he could, wondering why Patwell was establishing this debt. Maybe just the husbandry of someone who daily had to call in the repayment of small favors.

“Time for my refill,” said Patwell. “And call me if you get anything up your way.”

Patrick walked toward the lawn. The lawn was Anna’s idea. Anna was Jack’s wife. Anna did not belong to the dude-ranch-wife set with the shaved back of the neck and boot-cut Levis; there were certain perquisites for having raised children and done well that she regarded as indispensable. One was a lawn; others were New York clothes, a restaurant-size gas stove, a Missouri fox-trotter horse and a German Olympic-grade .22 rifle to shoot gophers with. The first time a luncheon guest shoved a Ferragamo pump into a gopher colony, Anna ordered the rifle. In early summer she sat upstairs beneath the steeply angled
roof in her bathrobe, moving the crosshairs over the rolled green expanse, looking for rodents in the optics. Jack learned to use the back door as he came and went to the pens and barn, the report of the small-caliber rifle becoming, year by year, less audible.

The Bloody Marys were in a huge cut-glass bowl, which rested in a cattle-watering tank filled with ice. No one had fanned out far from this place and Patrick got a quick survey: a few people he already knew, Anna, who just winked, and a handsome young couple he’d never seen. The husband wore a good summer jacket and a pair of boots the height of his knee, outside his pants. An oilman, Patrick thought. Oilmen, whatever else they might wear, needed one outstanding sartorial detail to show that their oil was on ranches. And by God, if there was enough oil, they’d go ahead and put cows on those ranches and wear their boots like that. You wanted to be sure no one thought you were a damn parts salesman.

Patrick still had his bourbon and had planned a slow approach, but Anna swept him in, introducing him with the “Captain” prefix. Deke Patwell was deftly escorting an inheritrix from Seattle named Penny Asperson and interviewing an orthodontist–land speculator from Missoula via Cleveland named, believe it or not, something-or-other Lawless. All Patrick could remember was that last name. And there was the couple, sure enough oil: Claire Burnett and her husband, whose real name was John but who was already, in his thirties, called Tio, which is Mexican for uncle and is a rather flattering nickname for one who aspires to be a
patrón.
But Tio was vivid anyway, piercey-bright, oilman feisty, and his wife was a knockout. Patrick knew their name, a little bit, because of horses.

The conversation was lively already. A boy had been shot and killed on a ranch recently for trespassing. Claire
and Tio looked baffled at this bit of local color. Deke Patwell slid comfortably into his local-expert mode and sternly explained that only the ranchers’ reputation for being trigger-happy kept them safe and their way of life intact. Then playfully he tugged at her sleeve and said, “Claire, you do horses so well. Let me and Tio do current events. Later you do house. Anything else is just five-o’clock news.”

“Where is the dead boy’s family?” Claire asked. Tio then scooped down into Bloody Marys. Deke caught his glance and they walked over under the cottonwoods. Claire turned to Patrick. Tio had bought Deke’s views.

“I’m not going to ask you what you think.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“People side up with Tio because they want his business.”

“I don’t want his business.”

“What are you captain of?”

“Tanks.”

“See, they know how shocking their thinking is. They just want it to set them apart. Has nothing to do with that boy— Tanks?”

Patrick tried to decide whether good country living, money, self-esteem or the kind of routine maintenance that begins with pumice-stoning the callouses of one’s feet and ends somewhere between moisture packs and myopic attention to individual split ends produced Claire’s rather beautiful physical effect. Claire said she didn’t know who meant what anymore. Baseball players had Daffy Duck haircuts sticking out from under their billed caps, rock ’n’ roll stars all wore sateen warm-up jackets like the baseball players’, and the President was passing out in a foot race while Russians installed nerve gas around ballistic-missile silos. So who could tell whether or not that little old editor
was copping an attitude or whether Tio was just kicking back into his good-buddy act because he was in someone else’s state?

Patrick said, “I don’t know.”

She said, “What do you mean ‘I don’t know’?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“Let’s go to the house and refill your bourbon. I can see you casting a funny eye at those mixed drinks. Did you train a mare named Leafy?”

They started toward the house.

“Yes, I did.”

“What do you want for her?”

“Well, she’s just my horse.”

“I saw her at Odessa.”

“She was there.”

“Did you ever breed her?”

“No.”

They walked into the cool wood-chambered living room with the buffalo rugs and the Indian blankets and the peyote boxes and the beaded parfleches on the deeply oiled logs.

“
Would
you ever breed her?”

“If she let me know she wanted to have a baby.”

“You ought to breed to our stud. I presume she’s cycling.”

Patrick just didn’t reply. He looked up from his freshly drawn glass of sour mash, a smile on his face that crossed all the silence of immediate conversational aftermath.

He took a long, kindly look at this young woman, thought of their banter, saw in her confidence that she enjoyed it, too, the way grade-schoolers like to slug each other out of sheer attraction. Then he wondered if he would find Tio less estimable the next time he saw him, which would be in a few moments, or if he would gather
that Claire was just in a world of her own, set out upon one of the ineluctable trajectories of conflict that can be blamed upon something long ago, a book, a parent, an aging nun, a baton dropped in front of a sold-out stadium. I don’t know, he thought, and I don’t care. Yes, I care, but I won’t.

“Ever hear the joke about the escaped circus lion down in Texas? He nearly starved to death. Every time he growled at one of those Texans, it scared the shit out of him. And when he jumped on him, it knocked all the hot air out. So there was nothing left to eat.”

She said, “I’m from Oklahoma. My God, is that a joke?”

“Let’s go inside. I could interpret the wall hangings. They’re Northern Cheyenne.”

“Thanks,” she smiled, “but we done had Comanche down at home.” She dropped her chin and examined him.

He thought he could see perhaps the tiniest acquiescence, though not quite anything he could hold her to. He found her engaging and probably as strong as he was, that is to say, not particularly strong or, rather, strong in the wrong ways.

“We’re more fun than the luncheon guests,” said Claire bravely as she went into the hard glare over the lawn, gone in her bounding step toward the people at the tank. It could be said that Patrick’s mild stalling, giving Claire a lead, came from a very slight sly motive in him, one that he recognized and resolved to give a bit of thought to. The stalling left him among the mops in the front hall, hooks holding worn-out hats, irrigating boots, a pair of old dropshank spurs and a twelve-gauge: a basic tool kit.

Then when Patrick stepped onto the lawn, Tio was walking resolutely toward him, long-strided in his tall calfskin boots. What’s this? Well, for one thing, thought
Patrick, it’s the first time I’ve seen eighteen-karat-gold oil-derrick blazer buttons.

“Patrick.”

“Tio.”

“They say you’re a horseman.”

“Something of one,” said Patrick, thinking, Your wife was too friendly. He was a little ahead of himself.

“Do you like good cow ponies?”

“Yes.” Were there people who didn’t?

Tio plunged his hands in his pockets, then leaned the full weight on his straightened arms, tilted slightly forward from the waist, weight in the pockets. Tell you what I’m gonna do. One knee moving rapidly inside its pant leg. “Claire say I got a stud?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Tell you much about the old pony?”

“No—”

“Say he was good?”

“She thought I ought to breed this cutting mare of mine to him.”

“Well, you should, old buddy. This pony’ll cut a cow, now. I mean the whole bottom drops out and he’s lookin
up
at them cattle. He traps his cattle and just showers on them.”

“Well, I’m gonna ride this mare another couple years yet. She’s my number-one deal.”

“
Plus
, this pony comes right from the front of the book. Peppy San out of an own daughter of Gunsmoke. It idn’t any way he can get out of traffic fast enough to keep hisself from being a champion.”

Patrick wasn’t much interested. He said, “Well, when I get something to breed, I’ll take a hard look at him.”

“I want you to breed that old Leafy mare. This stud of
mine is young and he needs mares like that to put them good kind of babies on that ground. You know how long Secretariat’s cannon bone is?”

“Sure don’t.”

“Nine inches. So’s this colt’s. That’s what makes an athlete. That’n a good mind. This colt’s got one of them, too. His name is American Express, but I call him Cunt because that’s all he has on his mind. He’s a stud horse, old Cunt is. But I’m like that. You were always lookin for a smoke, I’d call you Smoke.”

“What d’you call Claire?”

“Claire sixty percent of the time, and Shit when she don’t get it correct, which is right at forty.”

Patrick thought, I wonder if they’ll ever teach him English. Maybe he doesn’t want to learn. Maybe you can’t be an old buddy and speak English. Patrick would rather hear a cat climbing a blackboard. And he didn’t like what Tio called his wife forty percent of the time. In fact, he just didn’t like Southwesterners. It wasn’t even cow country to Patrick. It was yearling country. There were no cowboys down there significantly. There were yearling boys and people who fixed windmills. After that, you put in dry wall on the fourteenth story of a condo in Midland, where some cattleman did it all on a piece of paper with a solid-gold ball-point pen and a WATS line: a downtown rancher, calling everything big he had little and old, and calling his wife shit; the first part of the West with gangrene. Dance the Cotton-Eyed Joe and sell it to the movies.

Here came Jack Adams with another bourbon; probably spotted that look in Patrick’s eye and sought to throw fat on the fire. People often have this kind of fun with problem drinkers. But Patrick was determined to be somebody’s angel, and they wouldn’t catch him out today. Instead
he started back to the company, excusing himself. Made a nice glide of it.

Deke Patwell and Penny Asperson were passing a pair of binoculars back and forth, trying to find the property lines a thousand yards uphill. “Not strong enough,” said Deke, putting the glasses away. “We’d have to walk up there, and we know how we feel about that.” His mouth made a sharp downward curve.

Anna said, “We use the National Forest anyway. So I don’t know what that property line’s supposed to mean.” She gave the Bloody Marys a thoughtful stir.

“You will when the niggers start backpacking,” said Deke Patwell. “Oh God, that’s me being ironic.”

“Anna’s the lucky type,” Patrick said. “She’ll get O. J. Simpson and an American Express card.”

Claire said, “You sprinkle this much?”

“After July,” Anna said. “It’s a luxury but we’ve got a good well. If it was Jack, we’d be waist-deep in sage and camass and just general prairie, and the ticks would be walking over us looking for a good home.”

The buildings, which made something of a compound of the lawn, moved their long shadows, lengthening toward the blue sublight of the spruce trees; but the real advent of midafternoon was signaled when Deke Patwell passed out. Everyone gathered around him as his tall form lay crumpled in his oddly collegiate lawn-party clothes. He was only out for a moment, which was too bad, because he had grown strident with his drunkenness, especially as to his social theories. He had been drawing a bright picture of Jew-boy legions storming the capitol at Helena when his eyes went off at an angle and he buckled.

Then he was trying to get up. He rolled mute, imploring
eyes at the people surrounding him, threw up and inhaled half of it. It was like watching him drown. Jack bent over, stuck a hand in his mouth and said, “I’d say the Hebrews got the capitol dome.”

Anna said to Jack firmly, “Go inside and warsh your hands.” Deke let go another volley and said he didn’t feel so good.

Minor retribution crept into Patrick’s mind. He said, “Maybe a drink would perk you up.” Deke cast a vengeful glance up to him, said he would remember that, then tipped over onto one shoulder on the lawn and gave up. His plaid summer jacket was rolled around his shoulder blades, and a slab of prematurely marbled flesh stood out over his tooled belt.

Patrick ambled toward the little creek that bordered one side of the lawn. Perfect wild chokecherries made a topiary line against the running water, which held small wild trout, long used to the lawn parties. But then Penny Asperson followed him, and when he looked back, he caught Claire’s observation of the pursuit. In his irritation he thought Penny was thundering toward him. There were yellow grosbeaks crawling on the chokecherry branches, more like little mammals than birds.

“Bloody Deke,” said Penny. “If he’d had the gumption, we’d be up at the boundary. He’d be sober and the air would be full of smoldering glances.” Penny’s broad sides heaved with laughter. “
Now
look. And he smells.” Patrick wished to speak to her of carbohydrates and chewing each bite twenty-seven times. But she was, after all, a jolly girl.