Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  Patrick walked in and it was busy. He surveyed the room; no sign of his grandfather. At the bar many aging backs hunched in concealment.

  “Anybody seen the old man?”

  About fifteen nopes.

  Patrick got his whiskey at the bar, sat down in the row of older faces and thought: This is the kind of place that makes you want to grow old, just sit here and eavesdrop.

  Down the bar:

  “I was born in 1904.”

  “Here?”

  “Evidently.”

  Cigarette smoke moved horizontally toward the EXIT-TELEPHONE-REST ROOM sign.

  Every time someone entered, “What d’ya know?” in a hearty voice; and the reply: “Not much.” The “o” in “know” carrying the drawn-out local dipthong.

  Patrick sipped in deep contentment. Underneath the murmur of conversation and easy laughter was the continuous slap of plastic chips from the poker game in the corner.

  An elderly man next to Patrick in a John B. Stetson hat and blue suspenders said, “Colder it gets, the more a guy’ll notice.” He stared fixedly at the commemorative bottles. A pretty girl in a blue sweater dealt poker and in a firm voice repeated the rules. The new players feared her.

  “Fifty cents to a buck on the deal and before the flop. There’s a three-raise limit on each round, no cutting. Twenty bucks to buy in.”

  The old man next to Patrick was adjusting his butt on the stool, improving his angle for a conversation. The bartender shot past to the glass-and-wood cooler that displayed five kinds of beer at knee level. Patrick tried to read the farm-auction poster from twenty feet; thought, Used to could do that.

  A voice from the corner: “Can’t draw no goddamned clubs.”

  The bartender collected more orders—Sunny Brook, Cabin Still, Old Grand Dad, Canadian Mist, another George Dickel for Patrick.

  “Hungry?”

  “No,” said Patrick.

  “We got three kinds of beef jerky—King B, Big Slim and Rawhide Ranch.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Plus beer nuts and smoked almonds.”

  “Who shot that six-pointer?”

  “I did, Pat. Right after Korea.”

  The old man asked the bartender, “What bets’ve I got?”

  “You got the Pirates and the Tigers.”

  “Buck a square?”

  “Yup.”

  “What kind of cigars you got?”

  “Everything from White Owl to R. G. Dun.”

  “Gimme an R. G. Dun.”

  Patrick thought that in a moment the old man would tell him where his grandfather was; he was warming up and didn’t want to be a squealer. Patrick pointed to a bottle of Hiram Walker chocolate-mint liqueur and asked, “Ever try that?”

  “No.”

  The old man knew Patrick knew. He was going to play it silent. Down the bar a heavy woman in her sixties squinted and started describing commemorative bottles in a lungful of Lucky Strike smoke: “Illinois Gladiola Festival, a ‘Ducks Unlimited,’ an Australian koala bear, Indian chief, Abraham Lincoln, the Kentucky Derby, Am Vets, a telephone—”

  “Barkeep, what’s it say on that model train?”

  “ ‘Jupiter.’ Says just ‘Jupiter.’ ”

  “I don’t know what in the hell that means. Why don’t somebody scrape that junk down from offa there?”

  The old man pivoted to Patrick. “Your grandfather is trying out for a movie.”

  “He what?”

  “Read the poster on the inside of the door.”

  CASTING CALL

  for HONDO’S LAST MOVE, a feature film.

  WANTED

  Men, women and children for bit players, extras, et cetera.

  ALSO NOTE

  In order to reflect the hardships endured in the West in the 1880’s, we would especially welcome the physically eccentric, those with permanent physical injuries, such as scars, missing teeth, broken limbs, broken noses, missing limbs, etc.

  CONTACT

  Arnold Duxbury, Casting Coordinator, Room 115–17, Murray Hotel. Interviews commence daily at 10:00 A.M.

  Patrick thought, The old bugger has scars, missing teeth and evidence of a broken nose. That is where we shall find him. One episode too many of Wagon Train, dog-food ads masquerading as life.

  Rooms 115–17 were, respectively, reception, waiting room and Duxbury. There was a considerable lineup of the maimed. The worst was a five-year-old boy whose pet wildcat had recently clawed out his eyeball. He wore an oozing patch and steered his head around, trying to figure out what he was doing there. His mother, a telephone operator who moonlighted at the Tempo Supper Club, respected her son’s injury enough to bark “No cuts!” at Patrick when he tried to move up the line and look for his grandfather. The mother indignantly steered the little boy forward by the arm, and Patrick sheepishly got at the end while the halt, lame and maimed glowered at him, thinking, It’s the bloody tank captain from the Heart Bar Ranch, trying to throw his weight around. But the sound of crutches and labored breathing grew behind him, and soon he stood at the desk of Marion Garland, who said, “What brings you to the geek show?” Streets of Laredo poured from a neighboring room.

  “I’m looking for my grandfather—”

  “What’s your grandfather’s name?”

  “Frank Fitzpatrick.”

  “Francis X?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s with Mr. Duxbury now.”

  “I’ll just go in and get him.”

  “That’s not our procedure—”

  “It is now.”

  Patrick walked past her into Arnold Duxbury’s office. Duxbury was a youthful forty. Every single thing he had on was denim, including his boots, which Patrick did not think was possible; treated rubber, perhaps.

  Francis X. Fitzpatrick was showing a mule kick by taking off his pants. Duxbury explained that that would be unnecessary, as we were dealing with family entertainment. The crooked upper thigh was the old man’s trump card and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Finally Duxbury said, “Hey, relax, you’re in the movie.” The old man shot his sleeves confidently.

  “On the basis of what?” he demanded.

  “The nose and your age.”

  “Well, write my name down.”

  “I already did.”

  “I’ll see you on the set,” said the old man, fastening his trousers. “Y’know what I mean? You better spelt my name correct.”

  “Come on, Grandpa,” said Patrick. “I need you at the place. You mind?”

  Duxbury and Garland signed up eighty-seven permanently injured Americans for Hondo’s Last Move and returned to Los Angeles. The film was already in trouble; the distributor was thinking of pulling out to do something more in the Space line, as Westerns were beginning to show signs of what he called in a Variety interview “metal fatigue.”

  Nobody ever saw Duxbury and Garland again. As it turned out, Patrick’s grandfather would never quite get over it. His heart was on a movie poster, however close to the bottom. There were still small wings on his shoes.

  6

  PATRICK GAVE HIS GRANDFATHER A GOOD LEAD, THEN GOT IN the Ford and started home. The yellow truck shot along the river road against the amphitheater in the Absaroka range between Case Creek and Sheep Creek. A summer storm hung in the deepest pass above the truck, and lightning volleyed in silence. Patrick glanced at his knuckles, looked up, dodged a pothole, admired a hawk circling in a thermal against the limited storm now evaporating like steam on glass. The truck sucked down into the creek bottom. The storm dematerialized and left the hawk in empty blue.

  Patrick stopped at the calving shed a mile below the house and played Ornette Coleman on the machine, wondered why Ornette always had a white bass player and why he made you think so hard. Patrick decided that because Ornette was such a thorough master of bebop, he knew a white man could be expected to play melodic bass and not worry too much about time. Was Ornette as clever as the Yardbird? Why was there not a statue of Charlie Parke
r in Washington? When Patrick thought of Ornette Coleman running an elevator in Los Angeles with a roomful of scores and his mother sending him food from Texas, he developed grave doubts about the District of Columbia.

  Patrick daydreamed on with unimpeded high energy. Lenin’s girl friend Inessa Armand died in 1920 of typhus in the North Caucasus. Patrick read that in a Mexican comic book while preparing for flight to Castile. He read that in the vague interior light of a high-speed American tank in Germany. He was a security measure. He liked whiskey. Most of the other security measures preferred pharmaceuticals. With their dilated pupils and langorous movements, they were there to help save the West from the East, should the occasion arise. Patrick felt they had already gone East. But then, he was a captain, and being an officer had slowly sunk against the grain until finally, strangely, he was actually an Army captain, if you could see around the matter of the Mexican comic books.

  I will work the claybank mare. She has taken to running through the bridle. She does not fall off to the right as well as she does to the left. I want her to drag, lock down and turn around when she needs to. We are not trying to make trail horses. We are not leading a string of dudes to a photo view of Scissorbill Peak.

  Next to the barn a cat ran through three shadows without touching the sunlight, then emerged triumphant in the glare, mouse crosswise in its hard domestic mouth. After a motionless instant the cat started toward the green lawn and the house, where, in front of the sink, it would leave the minute head and vermiculate insides of the mouse.

  The horses, maybe twenty head, were all in a pod on the far side of the corral, shaded by cottonwoods. Wild rose bushes grew right to the poles, and the sides of the corral were like a tall hedge, illuminated by the pale-pink blossoms. The claybank mare was in the center of the band, nearer the side of the corral, really; and as Patrick closed the gate to walk toward the horses, the mare, butt toward him, shifted her head slightly for better rear-angle vision—out of a very real sense that it was she who was going up to the pasture with Patrick and not the other roughly nineteen. She looked like a shoplifter.

  In this bunch there were no kickers, and so Patrick murmured his way gently through the big bodies, feeling their heat and watching the quizzical movement of the claybank mare’s head and ears. Some of the horses kept sleeping, the good old saddle horses, lower lips trembling in massive dreams, one or another rear foot tipped up, weight transferred from muscle to ligament in that horse magic of standing sleep; one or two craning, ignorant yearlings, and Patrick’s hand touched the mare’s flank, which twitched involuntarily, as though he’d shuffled across a carpet and given her a flicker of static electricity. He said softly, “Hey, now,” as he moved toward her head. “Care to go with me to Spain? Little walk-up deal with a cool stone kitchen?” And he had her haltered, turned around and headed for the gate, the mare flopping her feet along, knowing she was going to school.

  Patrick brushed her thoroughly, watching the early light go through her coat. Claybank and grulla were his preferred colors; claybank, just like it sounded, a blur away from a copper dun, or a copper dun that had been rolling in alkali dust, then run for a mile until the color started through once more. Grulla was Spanish for blue heron. Grullas had better feet than claybanks and were said to stand the sun well. This far north it didn’t matter. Patrick irrationally believed that anything dun, claybank or buckskin had more cow sense.

  He saddled the mare with two Mexican blankets. You had to kind of rub the blankets up onto her or she’d try to pull the hitching rack out of the ground. She was young. And when he pitched the saddle up on her, he held the cinch, girth and billets so that nothing would slap and start her pulling back. Today he tried her in a grazing bit to get her nose out a little; he had been riding her on a higher-ported bit, and she was collecting her head too much, tucking it up like some fool show horse from California. Patrick liked them with their faces out, looking around, their feet under them, not like something in front of the supermarket that takes quarters.

  This mare was searching for a reason to be a bronc, as perhaps they all were; so Patrick walked her in a figure eight to untrack her, stood in one stirrup for a moment, then crawled on. By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

  Then a half mile in deep grass and early light, time for a smart young horse to have a look around, scare up some meadowlarks, salivate on the copper mouthpiece, get a little ornery bow in her back and get rid of it. Patrick changed his weight from stirrup to stirrup, felt her compensate, then stopped her. She fidgeted a moment, waited, then let the tension go out of her muscles. He moved her out again to the right. All she gave him was her head; so he stopped her, drew her nose each way nearly to his boot, then made a serpentine track across the pasture, trying to get a gradual curve throughout her body in each of her turns. The rowels on his spurs were loose enough that they chinked with her gaits. Patrick used spurs like a pointing finger, pressing movement into a shape, never striking or gouging. And horseback, unlike any other area of his life, he never lost his temper, which, in horsemen, is the final mark of the amateur.

  Patrick broke the mare out into a long trot, dropping her back each time she tried to move into a lope. She made one long buck out of irritation, then leveled off like a pacer eating up ground and slowly rotating the cascading hills, to Patrick’s happy observation. I love this scene. It has no booze or women in it, he rejoiced.

  He set the mare down twice, liked her stops, then blew her out for half a mile, the new fence going past his eyes like a filament of mercury, and let her jog home while he told her continuously how wonderful she was, what a lovely person she was becoming.

  Black coffee and a morning breeze through the paper. Martinsdale Hutterites had recalled three hundred contaminated chickens. Cowboys for Christ was having a benefit. Billings fireman captured with three pounds of methamphetamines. Poplar man shot to death in Wolf Point; Bureau of Indian Affairs investigator and tribal police arrested two men as yet unnamed. Half million in felonious cattle defaults. Formerly known as bum deals, thought Patrick. A new treatment center for compulsive gamblers. Lives shattered by slot machines. Wanted or for sale: TV stand, green-broke horse, ladies’ western suits, four-drawer blond dresser, harvest-gold gas range, three box-trained kittens, nonleak laundry tubs, top dollar for deer and elk hides, Brown Swiss, presently milking, Phoenix or Yuma to share gas. When Patrick’s father went down testing an airplane, fast enough that its exterior skin glowed at night from the friction of the air, the hurtling pulp which had been his father and the navigator and which had passed through the intricate molecular confusion of an exploding aircraft at its contact with eastern Oregon, the paper identified him as Patrick Fitzpatrick of Deadrock, Montana, and the navigator as Del Andrews of Long Beach, California. Great space was given to the model of the aircraft and speculation about a declared salvage value. As so many people have had to wonder, Patrick thought, if my father is dead, how can I be alive? In this way Patrick lost much of his own fear of death. The crash had provoked none of the questions usual to accidental death. There was nothing to identify.

  Patrick’s grandfather walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, stared about at the contents, settled for a handful of radishes and sat down.

  “What’s the cattle market doing?”

  “Haven’t had the radio on,” said Patrick. “Somebody sold a bunch of bred heifers in Billings yesterday for a twenty-seven-hundred-dollar average.”

  “Bred how?”

  “Shoshone or Chandelier Forever, forgot which. You want me to make you some breakfast?”

  “I can rustle.”

  “Here, sit down. What do you want?”

  “Couple of soft-boiled eggs.”

  Patrick started getting them ready. “In Europe there’d be these restaurants that put soft-boiled eggs in little porcelain holders, and they’d cover it with a knitted thing to keep the egg hot.”

  �
�That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. I have no desire to see Europe.”

  Patrick served the eggs and some toast.

  “Down there, there in Oklahoma, they’ve got a toll-free number for the cattle market. I hate having to listen to all this deal on the radio to find what steers brought.”

  “Steers aren’t going to make you anything,” Patrick said. He put some English on that.

  “Feeding out seven months ain’t going to make you anything.”

  “I never said ranching was any good.”

  “Talk like that,” said his grandfather feistily, “and you won’t want to fix nothin.”

  “Well, just let her fall down then,” Patrick said.

  “It ain’t even historical.”

  “That’s right.” Historical? That was a first from the old souse.

  “And where would you be running this remuda of yours?”

  “On the damn forest service.”

  “Try it.”

  “I may.”

  Patrick’s grandfather returned to his eggs, smoldering. Patrick was going to let him make his own tomorrow.

  “You ought to back your horses more if you want them to get their butts down,” said his grandfather.

  “Don’t tell me to back my horses. I get their feet under them by making them want to stop.”

  “They aren’t tanks, Patrick.”

  “I rode some colts you broke twenty years ago. Couldn’t turn them around in a twenty-acre pasture.”

  “Why don’t I just cook my own eggs tomorrow? Seems like a little favor spoils your temperament. I remember some of them colts and they turned on a dime. Why, you bugger, I broke Leafy’s mother!”

  “You cook the eggs.”

  When he was away Patrick’s daydreams fell easily back twenty years to summers riding in the hills, spooking game in the springs and down in the blue, shadowy draws, swimming in the gold dredge, girls present, the cold sky-blue submersion a baptism, the best place for the emerging consciousness of women to grow in suitable containment. Even, suddenly in a West German dance hall, remembering the flood of tears at twelve when he’d killed a spike buck in the same little grove where he and his father always cut their Christmas tree. Before that, hunting coyotes, his grandfather had crawled into a cave near Blacktail and found a ceremonially dressed, mummified Indian warrior on a slab of rock. His grandfather refused to tell anyone where the corpse was, and Patrick wore out two saddle horses looking for it. A friend, Jack Adams, later found it over on Mission Creek. “You do not disturb the Old Ones,” his grandfather had said. Then Jack glommed the mummy, making everyone cross. And Patrick himself, on the North Rosebud, had found the scribblings of the phantom ancient Sheepeaters; he had slept in eagle traps and in the coffin-shaped hole in the rock the Crows had made above Massacre Creek. He had seen the skeleton of a Cheyenne girl dressed in an Army coat, disinterred when the railroad bed was widened. Her family had put silver thimbles on every finger to prove to somebody’s god that she was a useful girl who could sew. After his father went to work for Boeing and split up with his mother, Patrick lived with his grandfather and ate so much poached game that the smell of beef nauseated him. He lost the tips of three fingers in his lariat heeling calves in the spring and never went to the movies except to meet girls. He could shoe horses, beat a hunting knife out of an old file, throw a diamond hitch, fix windmills, listen for broken gate valves in the well; and masquerade enough in town to occasionally get his ashes hauled, though he still preferred the sinewy barrel-racers he first met at the gold dredge whose teasing country-ruthless sensuality was somehow smokier than the ten-speeders just learning to roll a number. At sixteen he was jailed twelve times in a row for disorderly conduct; and his father, in the year that he died—a circumstance that left Patrick permanently dented with guilt—borrowed against his share of the ranch and sent Patrick to a preparatory school in the East which thought that a rebellious young cowboy would be a colorful enough addition to a student body that included a Siamese prince with a Corvette, a West German, five Venezuelans and one Negro that they would overlook his poor grades and boisterous history with the law.