Nobody's Angel

by Mcguane, Thomas

  “Can we ride again?”

  “Let’s load up and get the fuck out of here.”

  “This has been so lovely out here. Are we about to be actual?”

  “We’ll quit while we’re ahead. I’ve got things that have to be done.” What if she asked for examples? Change the cat’s whisker on Grandpa’s crystal set? Milk the elk?

  Leafy kept testing the floor of the trailer with her forefoot, then finally loaded up. Delicate as she seemed to Patrick, the trailer set down on its springs. Panniers, lash ropes, spoilable food, all were piled in the truck.

  And now a simple dialogue between the two engine exhausts, G clef by Patrick, revving a bit between ratios as he swung about and headed the rig down the mountain, manifold resonating in the gee-haw of faded romance. One of the West’s last and smallest wagon trains, he thought; an observation that exhilarated by its brief coldness and necessary stupidity. The two vehicles separated and headed into the distance.

  But by the time he reached the ranch, the phone was ringing and she was asking without any introduction, “What can I do? What am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you just don’t do anything you please. Do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  She rung off and left Patrick even less enlightened. He decided that it was partly the phone’s fault; that even notepaper was inadequate to such an enigma. He played bebop and cooked Chinese food. It seemed the only answer. He wouldn’t see love to its senescence without a middle period.

  Then she called again. He was eating a trout, curry and rice invention wrapped in won ton skins and playing the Jazz Messengers so loud he almost didn’t hear the phone ring.

  “Tio’s home. But he’s so demoralized, it’s not like him.”

  “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “I wanted to talk to somebody. He’s a sick dog.”

  “There are bigger things than pairing off,” said Patrick.

  “Like what?”

  “Life and death.”

  “Take the easy ones, cowboy.”

  “Well, I asked you to leave with me.”

  “That’s another one. You’re going downhill. People promise people, Patrick. How is it with you—strand people with all your speeches? Some of us still own up to the ones we made on homecoming day, for crying out loud.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad.”

  “Well, I’m getting off before you ruin my dinner.” And he did.

  Then, to make up for it a little, he took Tio’s stud out to ride in what light was left. His food had begun to digest, and the smell of the horse was obviated by the smell of hoisin sauce and curry. They went up the road, the stud spooking about in the shadows but advancing into new darkness with the pressure on his sides. A partridge dusting in the pale light went off at an angle, and the stud watched bug-eyed, side-passing through the spot in the road just vacated by the bird. My God, what a stupid bastard, thought Patrick. He once had a farrier who claimed that the two most ignorant things a man could do were to refuse to cut a stallion and to turn down a drink of whiskey. Then Tio’s stallion gave out a terrific scream as if to tell any mares in earshot that he feared no bird. As for Patrick, his love of Claire kept him, with some struggle, from acknowledging that the thoroughly faulty Tio was coming to seem human. It wouldn’t do.

  And anyway, it wouldn’t last; that is, it didn’t. Coming back down the road in nearly complete darkness, past one small ranch with its generator thumping in the cow barn, Patrick found it necessary to two-hand the horse once more, like a colt; his muscles felt short and bunched. If he could have gotten his head down, he would have bucked.

  He took the saddle off, hung the bridle and closed the stud up when Tio materialized from the next, empty, stall; he must have been sitting on the feed bunk.

  “How’d my stud go?”

  “He went all right. We didn’t do much.”

  “I’ve got a gun.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “You can’t see it, can you?”

  “No. Are you going to threaten me?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do! Been made to feel pretty poorly about myself and that leads direct to your doorstep.”

  “May I sit down?”

  Tio nodded affirmative, but with a crazy, loose-necked gesture. Patrick sat on the bench next to his forge, hiking up on his hands and swinging back onto it. Unconsciously, he looked about at the things with handles: chisels, screwdrivers, hammers.

  “Are you drunk, Tio?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Except it ain’t right.”

  “I guess not.”

  “We go’ make it right.”

  Patrick sighed. “Okay.” He guessed he wanted it made right; and he could find nothing actual in this suggestion of gunplay. He didn’t think Tio could, either. At the same time, he didn’t want to be some dim, surprised bozo who couldn’t read the cards and got shot.

  “Not like you think.”

  “Why don’t you just get rid of the gun so that we can talk?”

  “There’s no gun.”

  “Why did you say there was?”

  “I thought it would have a different effect.”

  “I can see that,” Patrick replied.

  “Gun’s like a big car. Just something to arrive in. Real anger you do in your shirt-sleeves.”

  Patrick got up, uncomfortable, pulled the lamp on over the forge, took the bench brush and tried to be busy, for Tio seemed to bear real forward motion, anger, humiliation, whatever. It was hard to say.

  “Usually I get a nap,” said Tio.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “A nap. I missed mine today.”

  “Right …?”

  Tio looked dead. “So I’m shot. I gotta go home. I gotta sleep. The restoration process. Let’s pick up where we left off. I’m suckin wind. A big nap will solve that.”

  “Well, as you wish.”

  “This is me,” said Tio. There when they drove the golden spike, his arms held wide. “Hand in hand with nature. The big snooze.”

  Patrick discovered where Tio had parked when the Cadillac pulled out, lights high, from between the oldest cottonwoods. He hung his chaps under the yellow bug light and considered: He missed his nap?

  The other thing is, I’ve got to get this bad-minded horse back to his owner. Every time I ride that bastard, I feel like a monkey fucking a football. That’s not a good feeling. And you don’t want to get caught at that.

  At evening he was heading for Tio’s ranch with the stud behind in the trailer. By the time he went under the big hanging gate, he could see Tio’s helicopter, and by the time he got as far as the house, he could see Tio inside the helicopter behind its tinted bubble. Patrick felt nervous about this; but he didn’t want the horse around, he didn’t want the business connection, and he didn’t want the excuse for Tio’s visits. Anyway, Tio didn’t bother to look up. Patrick could see vaguely that he had the headset on—probably getting a weather report on the VHF.

  So he unloaded the horse and led him carefully, thinking at first, This is this canner’s last chance to get me; recalling Mary’s view that the horse was an instrument of the devil. Leading the horse was like flying a kite: He was just a bad-hearted, bad-minded, uncoordinated canner. And the devil had better instruments.

  He put the horse up and stepped out of the stable, a kind of West Coast shack with doors on runners and air-conditioning. Claire was on the porch of the house in her yellow dust-bowl dress, one hand dug into her thick hair.

  “Come up here, Patrick!”

  “I’ve returned your horse!” he called.

  “I see that!”

  When he got to the porch, Claire was shaking and her eyes were drawn inward as though to lengthen their focus to eternity.<
br />
  “He wasn’t any good, really.”

  “I couldn’t get him to do anything. As you can imagine, it’s best I return him.”

  She stared at Patrick and laughed, either ironically or bitterly—stopping him. Certainly nothing was funny at all.

  “Can you come in?”

  “This is getting crazy. I don’t understand. I never have understood.”

  “Just come in.”

  Patrick was lost—lost passing into the house, then lost in its rooms, whose opaque human shadows stood source-less and eerie as the shadows birds cast by starlight. He sensed Claire in her cotton dress no more than he sensed Tio getting his weather forecasts a hundred feet away in an aluminum-and-plexiglass capsule as hermetic and sacrosanct as the Oval Office, Lincoln’s tomb, the seal on bonded liquor, virginity.

  “Come here to me.” She shoved the door closed behind him.

  “Claire!”

  “Shush!” She seized him hard, and by the time he kissed her throat, it was wet with tears.

  He whispered, “What’s going on?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Is that true?” Patrick asked emphatically. They each seemed to him terrifyingly unconnected.

  “That’s true. Don’t worry about Tio until you go and fetch him.” She pulled—or, rather, twisted—him down onto the divan; and she was barefoot.

  She said “Baby” and lifted to slide her yellow dress under her arms. Patrick thought, This is as good a place to die as any. He was not so far gone as not to note that the West’s last stands were less and less appropriate to epic poetry and murals.

  “Should I call you baby too?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t calling you baby. That’s not what it meant.” She was naked now and Patrick awaited a bullet.

  “I’ve got to hear what you meant.”

  “Last chance.”

  “Last chance … Am I going to get killed at this?”

  “I don’t see how. I’m not going to kill you.”

  Drawing this particular blank, Patrick, in mortal confusion, made love to Claire, who seemed, spasmodic and weeping, finally more martyred than loved. Patrick heard himself a mile off and incoherent.

  Then acknowledgment of everything external moving in upon his consciousness appeared as an ice age. He wasn’t a captain or a cowboy. He thought for a moment, literally thought, about what he had set out for; and he knew one thing: he was superfluous.

  “Why,” he asked, “have we been put up with?”

  “By whom?”

  “By your husband.”

  “Ask him. I’m through. But you could ask.”

  “I will.”

  “Do.”

  Tio was dead, exhaust piped into the bubble until the smothered engine quit and Tio went on to the next thing. He hung forward in his harness as though starting the international freestyle; it looked like a long swim indeed. Around his dead face earphones whispered news of a world cracking; but Tio was spared. Lust and boredom provided no such indemnity. It made thrill-killers of nice people.

  “Do you think we can fly this thing?”

  “Oh, Patrick.”

  “Are you shattered?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Sure.”

  “I wonder what happened.”

  “No, you ont.”

  “I think I really do.”

  “We fucked him to death.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “And you thought he was a bad man. You thought if you pushed him hard enough, he’d put you out of your misery, like your sister did for herself. But he wasn’t a bad man.”

  “I mean, is it the main thing to be put out of your misery?”

  “Are you miserable?” Claire asked.

  “Are you?”

  “No. I’m in mourning. I wanted to celebrate it with you before you got miserable again. That part of you deserves to live. The rest should be in there with Tio. You might enjoy him like this.” She laughed a high, uncontrolled laugh, one that masked not tears but something wild and unreachable. Patrick felt, as he looked into the bubble, that he looked through the bars of a prison; and that in some terrifying way, the voice of Claire was the bright music of the jailer’s keys fading in the corridor.

  “Would you like to go back in?”

  “I really don’t think so.”

  “Scared.”

  “Yes.”

  “All you know is what I knew when we went inside before.”

  “I realize that.”

  “No guts, no glory,” she said.

  “I’m not going in with you.”

  Claire stretched her arms over the plexiglass and stared inside. “I guess if I’ve done nothing else, I showed one of you how to carry the weight and not go to pieces. I didn’t go to pieces. He did and you’re about to. I’ve got this feeling I don’t want to lose that. The love was real in each case.”

  You could see the house in its own lights. It looked like an ad for a paint that was weatherproof and that banished evil. It looked flat.

  “Is the love gone?” he asked.

  “What if it is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s nothing you can do anything with. It makes you go around proving you’re not rotten or spoiled by sin— Look at him.”

  “I thought love was all that mattered.”

  “Well, it’s very nice. Taxes awful high in that neighborhood. You know what I set out to do? In my little quiet way? I set out to have been around.”

  “Get it done?”

  “Well, I’ve been around.”

  “You learn anything that could help us? See, I’m real in love with you and I’m sort of stuck.”

  Claire never seemed morbid, cynical or flippant. Patrick could not see how she had been made into this. Her rakish femininity had first drawn him to her; but now her absolute female power, which men fear will finally be turned upon them, was at hand. He was sure she hadn’t wished this or wanted to be competed for. But the two of them had made a major purchase on a long-term plan. She at least acknowledged the cost, while Patrick compressed it to a dead husband. She wasn’t being cold; she intended to pay.

  “I think you should go in with me.”

  “Why?”

  “For a couple of reasons.”

  “What are they?”

  “One is it will never happen again. We have to give him that.”

  “And the other?”

  “You’ll have a real good time.”

  Patrick went. She made it seem easy.

  Had the love been real? Patrick thought so. He never specifically changed his opinion. Too, he gave Leafy to Claire. He must have meant something by that. In life, he later thought, shoot anything that moves. Otherwise, discouragement sets in. Tio at least had gotten the latest weather.

  Patrick’s grandfather shot the best elk of his life. Patrick packed it out for him and arranged for it to be mounted and hung in the Hawk Bar, the place the old man could see from the window of his apartment.

  Patrick and Claire corresponded for some time after he went back into the Army and she returned to her childhood place at Talalah. Once she sent a picture of herself, but he didn’t like keeping it around. After that, the correspondence trailed off.

  Anyway, his share of the lease money from the ranch allowed him to buy an old second-story flat in Madrid. He spent all his leave time there. Deke Patwell had it from someone who knew someone who knew someone that he had a woman in Madrid, an American named Marion Easterly; and that when she was with him, he was a bit of a blackout drinker. There were some people in Deadrock who had liked Patrick; and a few of them thought, At least he’s not alone.

  In any case, he never came home again.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club; The Bushwhacked Piano, which won the Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Insti
tute of Arts and Letters; Ninety-Two in the Shade, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Panama; Nobody’s Angel; Something to Be Desired; Keep the Change; Nothing But Blue Skies, To Skin a Cat, a collection of short stories; and An Outside Chance, a collection of essays on sport. His books have been published in ten languages. He was born in Michigan and educated at Michigan State University, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale School of Drama and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. An ardent conservationist, he is a director of American Rivers and of the Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute. He lives with his family in McLeod, Montana.

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