Nobody's Angel (16 page)

Patrick spent the remainder of the day fixing fences at the head of the big coulee, where the ranch adjoined the forest service. In the deep shadows under the trees, small arcs of snow had persisted into the early summer. The mountains, explained his grandfather, were U.S. territory, and below them were all the people he would see in hell. There was some theater in this remark. But the old man loved his coulee. In years past they had dragged big kettles behind draft horses to make a course for match racing on Sundays, when the dirt savages were at church. You couldn’t see the race, which was illegal, until you got to the rim of the coulee.

Patrick and Mary’s mother, Anita, married Dale in Long Beach and had a son, now eleven, named Andrew. Anita had been in Long Beach to comfort the wife of the copilot, Del Andrews, after the crash. The two widows met Dale in a Polynesian after-hours club and did not speak to each other again after the engagement. Anita, Dale and Andrew were coming on the weekend. It was Friday and Mary had not emerged from her room in days. Dale had connections in Hawaii for winter vacations; but now it was summer, and once Anita got over the matter of Mary’s pregnancy, they could have a super holiday in the mountains.

“If you quit carrying her food to her,” said Patrick’s grandfather from the stove, “she’s gonna have to come out.” The grandfather still made coffee like a camp cook—
with eggshells in the grounds and cold water dripping from his fingertips to make it precipitate.

“I don’t believe she will,” said Patrick. He had made a tray for Mary, very domestically, with French toast and orange juice. He really didn’t think she would come out.

Today Mary had armed herself with the New York
Times
, illuminated from the window facing the juniper-covered slope. The light fell equally upon the nail-head bedspread and the vase of broad orange poppies from around the well pit. The room was carefully and comfortably arranged, a case of battening down the hatches. The family was coming.

Mary stopped the coffee cup at her lips, angled slightly, and said, “I don’t want to deal with them, Patrick.”

“It’s not a matter of dealing. Don’t think like that.” He watched her twist up the corner of the bedspread and watched her eyes. Then the light in the room moved.

On the wall was a painting by Kevin Red Star which except for its hallucinatory colors Patrick would have liked, but which seemed, as furnishing for a troubled girl’s room, to be throwing fat on the fire. More to his liking was the perfect Chatham oil, five inches across, a juniper of shadow on snow and bare ground. The blue paint from the day of the fire was cleaned up and gone.

The truth was that Mary and Patrick thought a lot of themselves at the worst of times, and of each other. This air, despite breakdowns or shooting, earned them the sarcasm of the townies. They each loved the open country where they lived, and big, fast cities. Booster hamlets failed to hold their interest. Town was for supplies.

“I didn’t sleep much,” said Mary. “Perhaps I should avoid the coffee so I can sleep this afternoon. What’s Grandpa up to?”

“He’s writing a letter of complaint to an importer of Japanese horseshoes which includes veiled references to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Yesterday he was bitching about me not making my Easter duty.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d you tell him?”

Mary pressed the tines of her fork into the French toast experimentally. “I said I could buy everything but the Holy Ghost.”

“I’d have guessed the Holy Ghost was the only one of the three you
would
buy.”

Patrick peered at her, then went down the hall and got an old Bud Powell ten-inch from his endless bebop collection. He came back, played “Someone to Watch over Me,” and the two drifted off for a moment. How could a sick man like Powell bring you such peace, he wondered.

Patrick said, “I wish I could do something that good just once.” Indicating Bud Powell.

“You will, now that you’ve picked another way of expressing yourself than tank driving.”

“I sought to destroy communism.”

“While despos took over America.”

“Despo” was a word Patrick and Mary had—from the song “Desperado”—to describe the hip and washed-up effluvia of the last twenty years. The song itself, which now seemed to belong to the distant past, was the best anthem for a world of people unable to get off various freeways. Mary had invented the subcases:
despo-riche
and
despo-chic.

Mary was getting jittery. Now she would ice the cake. “In bathing suits,” she said, “I prefer D cups, split sizes and matching cover-ups. I love warm-up suits in luscious colors. Even though I’m expecting out of wedlock, I’m heavy into my own brand of glamour. Few days see me
without intensive conditioning treatments, Egyptian nonpareil henna, manicures, pedicures and top skin-care products.”

“Are you all right?” asked Patrick.

“I’m in stitches,” said Mary. She began to cry but checked herself and grinned bravely.

When the record finished, Patrick asked if he should turn it over. But she gazed toward him in the concentration of someone trying to overcome stuttering, concentration or paralysis, it was hard to say.

“Try to sleep,” he said. “Please try.”

23

“
ALL
I
WANT
TO
KNOW
,”
SAID
HIS
MOTHER
, “
IS
WHAT
TRIBE
?” Her eyes lifted to cut across the original buffalo grounds.

Dale, her husband, took the Igloo cooler out of the back of the station wagon, desperately surveyed the ranchstead with the rectangles of snow-line meadow between the buildings and said:

“High, wide and handsome!” His smile revealed that if no one was buying this, he wasn’t selling it.

But Patrick’s mother in her hearty kilt was steadfast. She locked down on tan, angular calves.

“What tribe?”

“I don’t know. We will have to wait and see.”

Dale said, “Anita, I thought we had an agreement about this.”

And Anita said, “You’re right, of course.” She was still establishing Dale. Dale didn’t care. His original enthusiasm
had flown the coop. Now he was with his screwy fucking in-laws.

If it wasn’t my mother, thought Patrick, I’d swear it was Shrew City Sue. It goes without saying that Andrew had a cap gun and that he fired away with it like a rat terrier yapping around the feet of an arguing couple. Patrick thought his mother would club Andrew, but she had turned her attention to unloading the wagon onto the lawn. Dale accompanied everything with a stream of chatter. He sensed his wife’s short fuse. Dale, Patrick thought, was giving it his best. It was kind of not much.

Patrick’s mother and her husband had matching snake boots. Of all the people on the ranch, it never occurred to Patrick that he in his knee-high M. L. Leddy cowboy boots and tank captain’s shirt was the most anomalous. Besides that, he was now sick of America.

“Lordy, lordy,” said his mother, stooping for her camera bag. “I’m going to have to control myself, if only with respect to promises I made to Dale.” She’d build up Dale if it killed her.

“I think you are, Mother. Mary is a little shaky.”

Dale said, “The old days seem never to have died.” He wore a fixed expression memorized from a hairstyle illustration in a barbershop.

Mary’s disease, if that could be said, was, Patrick thought, an insufficient resistance to pain of every kind. When she was a child, the flyswatter could not be used in her presence. Patrick watched tears stream down her face in the supermarket as an elderly couple selected arthritis-strength aspirin with crooked hands. Some of this ought to have been noticed and remembered by his mother.

The grandfather made his greetings somewhat perfunctory. After all, this was only his former daughter-in-law.
His son was dead. He didn’t ever pay attention to Dale and he detested little Andrew. He couldn’t really understand what they were doing here. He smiled and said, “It’s a big ranch. We can all damn sure keep out from underfoot if we half try.”

“What’s
that
mean?” asked Andrew.

“Why don’t you stay out in the bunkhouse?” roared the grandfather, senility kicking in like rocket fuel.

“I think it would be nicer being near the kitchen etcetera,” said Patrick’s mother with a taut smile. It was clear she saw her former father-in-law as someone to be humored.

“Not a damn thing wrong with the bunkhouse,” his grandfather barked. Dale started off with the bags straight for the main house, right in the middle of the conversation. Andrew was galloping, and Patrick helped with a great sagging valise that felt like it had a thick dead midget inside. They fanned out toward the house, resisting a very insistent silence. Patrick walked behind his grandfather and watched his rolling gait. Dale and his mother were in his periphery. It was a movie with the sound track gone. Andrew now bore a wretched face; his fake gun dangled at his side. For him, the West stank.

They were winding down to seeing Mary. There was the luggage, the general greeting, the formal exclamations about returning to the ranch, and then it would be faced. They rushed into the kitchen. Patrick’s mother tried the cupboards; Andrew asked where he could find an arrowhead fast. Down the wooden hallway, bebop poured from Mary’s room.

“Make your own,” said the grandfather.

“I can’t make an arrowhead,” wailed Andrew. “I’m no Indian!”

When Patrick said, “Let’s go say hello to Mary,” a kind
of familial smile not unlike saying “Cheese” befell the little group. They followed Patrick through the narrow hall toward a drum solo coming from the farthest door.

They lost the grandfather right away. Then Dale detained Andrew. Patrick and his mother arrived as the applause began at the end of the drum solo, recorded live at the Blue Note, and the room was empty. The sheet on the bed was drawn taut, and Mary had outlined herself in ink, life-size, carefully sketching even the fingers. Across the abdomen she had traced the shape of an infant; and she was gone. Patrick went to the window; he could see across the meadow to the forest. She was either in the forest or at the spring.

“Orphanages,” said Patrick’s mother, “were made for good and sufficient reasons.” Dale ducked his head in shame.

Then Patrick had a thought that dazed him and he panicked. He ran to the corral and caught his mare, but twisted the cinch and had to start over. Leafy felt his bad nerves and kept side-passing away from Patrick until he got a foot in the stirrup and swung up on her. She started running before Patrick could touch her with his feet, carrying him into the cold wind from the trees. Thus the ground, the sky, the vaulting motion of the horse against a static earth, seemed like life itself. The ground resisted the speed that Patrick desired, like history.

24