Nobody's Angel (12 page)

“Buddy,” said the owner, “I feel real bad. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

“I’d like some money,” said Patrick.

“You what?”

“Money.”

“How much money?”

“Enough for one Rainier beer in a can. And you buy it. With money.”

The owner returned Dirk to the all-terrain vehicle. His wife waited, not wanting to go in there alone. The husband headed into the store, and Patrick gestured to her with the rest of his six-pack. He made her a toothy grin. “Want a beer, cutie?”

No reply.

In a few minutes, the Rainier appeared in Patrick’s vision. He took it without looking up. “That fucker needs a sled.”

“He’s got one,” the owner shot back.

“I mean your wife.”

No fist swung down to replace the Rainier in his vision. All Patrick had to watch was the slow rotation of a bright pair of hiking boots; there was the sound of cleated rubber on blacktop, the door, the V-8 inhalation and departure. The high lonesome will never be the same for them, thought Patrick, however Dirk might feel. The sky will seem little.

I’ve been through quite an experience, perhaps the number-one Man-Versus-Animal deal for many years here in the Rockies. But I better get myself under control before it’s lights out. God has made greater things to test us than ill-tempered sled dogs; God has made us each other.

15

WHEN
PATRICK
WAS
FIFTEEN
AND
IN
NEED
OF
REASONS
TO
stay in town late, he invented a girl friend, whom he named Marion Easterly. Claire reminded Patrick of Marion. Marion was beautiful in mind and in spirit. He pretended to be hopelessly in love with Marion, so that when he rolled in at two in the morning, he would claim that he and Marion had been discussing how it was to be young and had merely lost track of time. His parents, vaguely susceptible to the idea of romance in others, bought the Marion Easterly story for a year. Patrick had typically been up to no good in some roadhouse. He created a family for Marion: sturdy railroaders with three handsome daughters. Marion was the youngest, a chaste and lively brunette with a yen for tennis and old-fashioned novels about small-town boys in knickerbockers. When Patrick got locked up, Marion was never around. So gradually his parents began to view her as a good influence on their son. If he would just spend time with Marion Easterly, the disorderly-conduct business would fade, boarding school would seem less obligatory and Patrick would grow up and become … a professional.

In July, Patrick roped at the Wilsall rodeo, then joined the rioters in front of the bars. He’d tied his calf under eleven and was considered quite a kid, one who deserved many free drinks right out on the sidewalk. Patrick and his friends sat on the hoods of their cars until the sun collapsed in the Bridger range. By three in the morning he was back at the ranch, careening around the kitchen, trying
to make a little snack. He banged into a cabinet, showering crystal onto the slate floor. A pyramid of flatware skated into fragments. He dropped the idea of the snack.

Patrick’s mother and father popped into the kitchen in electric concern. Patrick reeled through the fragments in his cowboy boots, crushing glass and china noisily. He looked at them, his mind racing.

“Marion is dead,” he blurted. “A diesel. She was going out for eggs.” His parents were absolutely silent.

“I just don’t give a shit anymore,” Patrick added.

“You can’t use that language in this house,” his mother said; but his father intervened on the basis of the death of a boy’s first love. Patrick waltzed to his room and passed out.

After ten hours of sleep ruined by guilt, booze and the presence of all his rodeo-dirtied clothes, Patrick awoke with a start and was filled by a sudden and unidentified fear. He cupped a hand over his face to test his breath, then smeared his teeth with a dab of toothpaste. He ran to the kitchen to clean up his mess; but he was too late. He really was.

His mother and father were waiting for him. The kitchen was immaculate. His father wore a suit and tie, his mother a subdued blue dress. It seemed very still.

“Pat,” said his father, “we want to meet Marion’s folks. We wanted to help with the preparations.”

Patrick’s mother had thin trickles of tears glistening on her cheeks. But they fell from eyes that were wrong.

“We can’t find Easterly in the book.”

“They don’t have a phone.”

“Could we just drive by?”

“I don’t think they could handle it, Dad. I mean, this soon.”

The ringing slap sharpened Patrick’s sense of the moment. “
You were blotto at Wilsall
,” his mother said. “
Marion Easterly doesn’t exist!
”

“Kind of embarrassing, Pat,” said his father. “We went to the hospital, the morgue, the police. The police in particular had a good laugh at our expense, though the others certainly enjoyed themselves too. I’m afraid you’re kind of a no-good. I’m afraid we’re sending you away to school.”

“It’s fair,” said Patrick.

“I’m afraid I don’t care if it is or not,” said his father. No unscheduled landings for that test pilot.

16

THIS
WAS
DARING
BUT
IT
HAD
REQUIRED
TWO
BAR
STOPS
:
THE
front door flickered open.

“Tio, where’s your wife?”

“Pat, d’you just walk in?”

“I drove from my place and walked the last forty feet.”

“God, what an awful joke. This your first time up here?” The effect of Patrick’s joke still hung on Tio’s face.

“Yes. A beautiful spot.”

“It’s all lost on me.”

That seemed a strange piece of candor to Patrick. The ranch was beautiful, a close dirt road lying in a cottonwood creek that arose to find old stone buildings, then meadows that spread above the ranch to adjoining cirques at the edge of the wilderness. It had the quality of enamel, detailed in hard, knowledgeable strokes, a deliberate landscape by an artist no one ever met.

Somehow the handsome oilman seemed harried,
stranded on this picture-book ranch in his bush jacket and as anxious to be back among his oil-and-gas leases as Patrick had been for the loud bar.

“Claire is gypping horses in the round pen. Just go back the way you came and around the old homesteader house. You’ll see it in the trees.”

“I guess if I’m going to be looking after her, I’d better get the hang of it.”

“That’s it, good buddy. I’d fall down dead with my hand raised if I told you I couldn’t get off of this vacation fast enough. You two go out and play. You can take her anywhere. She’s more adaptable than a cat. All I do is dream of crude.”

“You sure know your own mind,” Patrick said, fishing for sense in Tio’s remarks.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Anything else?”

“Not really.”

Claire appears to him as follows: at center in a circular wooden pen a hundred feet in diameter. Deep in river sand, it seems a soft, brown lens in the surrounding trees. Claire directs a two-year-old blood-bay filly in an extended trot around herself, the filly’s head stretched high and forward, the flared and precise nostrils drinking wind on this delightful, balsamic and breezy flat.

It was on enough of an elevation that you could see the valley road mirroring the river bottom, the switchbacks to the wilderness, the flatiron clouds, the forest service corrals and the glittering infusion of sun-born seeds moving with the brilliant wind. But you couldn’t see the house, and from the glade of young aspen, you couldn’t see anything.

“Hello, Patrick.”

“Hi, Claire.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. Drank a bit too much, I’m afraid.”

“You like this filly?”

“Sure. Isn’t she deep through the heart?”

“I think she’s great.”

“Go for a walk with me.”

“You rather ride?”

“I’m too dumb today to get a foot in the stirrup.”

Claire left the longeing whip in the sand, and the filly swung gracefully forward, ears set, watching Claire leave the pen.

“Where are we going?”

“Where does this path go?”

“An old springhouse at the top of these aspens.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“Why?”

“I want to talk,” said Patrick, “and it’s easier if you keep moving, and to keep moving you need to be going somewhere.”

The smallest aspens jumped up along the path with their flat leaves moving in a plane to each touch of breeze. When Claire went ahead, Patrick stared at the small of her back, where the tied-up cotton shirt left a band of brown skin.

The springhouse, now in complete disrepair, had been used to cool milk. A jet of water appeared from the ground and flowed into the dark interior of the house, gliding disparate over cold stones and out of the house again. Inside, the cold stones chilled the air and seemed to cast a dark glaze on the wood floor and sides. There was one old tree shading the house and minute canyon wrens
crawled in its branches. But the wet stones were what you sensed even looking outside.

When they went inside, Patrick tried to seize Claire. Then he sat down on the plank bench, and over the water and the round river rocks their breathing was heard, as well as the catches in their breath. Patrick stared at his open hands. Claire gazed at him, not in offense or terror but in some absolute revelation. She now wore nothing but her denim pants; the shirt was in the dark stream that brightened the stones. And Patrick’s face was clawed in five bright stripes. She finished undressing and made love to Patrick while his attempts to remember what it was he was doing, to determine what this meant, seemed to knock like pebbles dropped down a well, long lost from sight. He was gone into something blinding and it wasn’t exactly love. Patrick supported himself on his arms, and splinters of the old floor ran into the tension of his hands. In a moment they were both shuddering and it was as if the four old windows above had lost the transparency, then regained it. And details returned: the mountain range of river stones against the wall, the electrical cord approaching from the ceiling, old saw marks and hammer indentations around the nail heads and, finally, the beautiful woman’s tears running onto the coarse planks.