Nobody's Angel (22 page)

PATRICK
WAS
BACK
THE
NEXT
DAY
.
HE
WAS
LOSING
IT
.
IT
WAS
late afternoon and their throats ached. He thought that there was fire in the daylight.

“We could fall in love,” said Patrick, sickeningly swept past all reason.

“And then he’ll hire a detective.”

“What?” From the trance.

“Have you been listening?” She flicked a fox-spur from his hair. “We pull this and it’s ‘Katy, Bar the Door.’ ”

“What?” Where was he?

“Put on your boots. If we can keep walking, I won’t feel so nervous. My God, what is this we’re doing?”

Down toward the stream that swept past the fine old house, the heavy-trunked cottonwoods seemed to hold their dismaying branchloads of greenery in the awkward and beautiful whiteness which at a distance gives the valley river bottoms of the West almost their only sentimental quality. The rest consisted of towns with the usual franchise foreshore at either end; or in the case of Deadrock, the whirring elevations of the interstate, quiet only
when the arctic storms of middle winter feathered every concrete radius with snow. Patrick felt drunk. The house hung over him. Claire pulled herself against him in the warm air. He panicked at the driveway. There might have been too many cars. There might have been chartered aircraft or police. There might have been dead people or banshees to militate against this surge that held him in its force.

They were in a bed in a room with a south-facing window that the sun crossed like a bullet. When the horses whinnied to be fed at the end of the day, gathered below the darkening window in a plank corral, Claire’s tears chilled all over Patrick’s face. The old dive-bomber comic they found in the trunk was crumpled under the pillows. A pale star had bravely arisen to follow the sun across the window; brave, thought Patrick, because it privately knew it was two hundred thousand times the size of our solar system, though its millennial flames are the only thing that would stop me now. All it is, is this small evening star. The horses are hungry. We are sore. Saying she loved me made her cry. In the iron-cloistered control station of the fast American tank was the glossy photograph of a German princess’s strangely expressive anus, and beside that the release buttons for the rockets. The whir of treads on deep Teutonic sod brought peculiar memories. Marion Easterly, the mystery heartthrob, the archangelic semaphor known as the Dead Father and now the snowy grid beneath which his sister would lie forever were all contained in that upendable shallow bowl, the rim of which divided past and future. I am finally outside the bowl.

32

PATRICK
DROVE
HOME
IN
THE
NIGHT
.
THE
YARD
LIGHTS
WERE
strong in the blackness of the valley’s gradual elevation southward like the scrambled approach to a bridge. After he had said to Claire, Leave everything and come with me, she had asked, Where? And at first he had been hurt, searching, as men do, for blind love, but then, even to his credit, he did indeed wonder where they could go and it became clear that he still, as of the Army, hadn’t exactly returned to the ranch and they might just as well go there; and that that in turn might give him the handle he had long sought on his situation there, might carry him back to the sense of purpose his great-grandfather had had upon his return from Aguinaldo’s Native Insurrection, the dynamite firecrackers on the Fourth of July and the general feeling of being able to see farther than your nose in front of you. He nearly strangled on his last idea, as though Claire should provide this firelight; he felt ashamed. There was a porcupine waddling across his turn-off; he stopped the truck, stared at its awkward purpose and wondered if the porcupine had anyplace to go. Patrick ached. He thought, literally, that he was aching like a fool. Chest pains. Incapable-of-judgment. The best thing would be for us to move to the ranch together. Nevertheless, he imagined the center of his mind looked like an asshole taped on the dashboard of the tank.

He walked into the dark kitchen and turned the light on over the stove ventilator. He made himself a drink. He didn’t know what time it was and he felt guilt but could
not pin it down. He would rather have felt the guilt than the sadness-for-no-reason. The latter was a ball breaker, whereas guilt was easily anesthetized with not all that much bourbon. Then the phone rang and of course it was Tio.

“Tio, where are you?”

“Cain’t let on, Pat.
Where are you?
”

“Right where you called me. In my kitchen.”

“Well, I was just settin here wonderin if anybody there in Montana had got so eat up with the dumb ass they life was endangered.”

“I can’t see that they could be.”

“How’s my stud colt?”

“He’s rank and squeally. He’s going to make a great gelding.”

“Well, Fitzpatrick, I’m down here shootin quail and thinkin about things. We got good dogs and a bunch of Mexicans to shag dead birds. It’s the life, but they practically raise snakes and you can’t get through that blackjack and cat’s-claw with a horse. So you’re down among them. You’re down among the snakes, Fitzpatrick. You follow me?”

“Yes, I do.” Patrick tilted his glass until he no longer saw movement among the ice cubes. He was getting nervous.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be leavin Claire to fend like that. Most generally a man’s a fool to leave one that Cadillacky to its own devices.”

“How did you get down there, anyway, Tio?”

“In a Bell helicopter with full avionics and a walnut interior. Had to fly around all them bullshit mountains up there to get to a place fit for human habitation. I knew that colt was dumber than Fido’s Ass, but I want you to turn him back to me double tough. I expect that. And if
Claire’s lonely, call her and give her that Dial-a-Better-Day exchange in Deadrock; I’ll be back when I get back.”

“Okay.”

“Fitzpatrick, life is a shit sandwich and I take a bite every day. You do too. But if you had to eat it in one swallow, you’d choke on it and die a very unpleasant death.” He rang off and that was that.

Patrick stood still and then trickled whiskey down the inside of his glass like a chemist in a high school play performing an experiment; and in fact the glazed look on his face did seem very much like bad acting.
“ ‘Okay,’ ”
he said aloud. “Why did I say okay? That Oklahoman shit-heel suggested that I give Claire the Dial-a-Better-Day number. And I said okay!” But he looked up Dial-a-Prayer in the directory and made the call. With God, it turned out, every loss is a gain. Hello. Thank you for calling Dial-a-Better-Day. Disruption and sadness will be banished. I wonder if they’re thinking about that sadness stalking me, that evil ferret sadness that ingests five times its weight each day. Hearts will be healed and God will lift us up. Garlands instead of ashes. Sixty-first chapter of Isaiah. God will see you in the next reel. He is Our Projectionist. I will wring His Little Neck if I get another instance of sadness-for-no-reason.

“Darling?”

“Yes.”

“It’s me.”

“I know it is. Oh God.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m in bed. I’m here, scared of the dark.”

“Should I come over?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Guess what.”

“What?”

“Guess.”

“Tio called,” said Claire. Panic was in her voice.

“How did you know?”

“It was easy. Where is he?”

“He wouldn’t say. He was quail hunting. All he’d say was that life was a shit sandwich and we had to take a bite every day.”

“He was being very intimate with you. Normally he saves the sandwich speech until much deeper into the situation.”

“What do you mean by that?” Patrick demanded, thinking this had happened before.

“I mean like in an oil deal or something. By the time they’ve cased the well, fractured and done their logging—y’know, kind of late in the game—he tells some new-corner in the business up north here in the Overthrust or something that life is a shit sandwich etcetera. Just when the guy is hanging on by his teeth. So he is either being intimate with you or he thinks you’re hanging on by your teeth.”

“I think I’m following.”

“Did he menace you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“How not sure?”

“Well, he said that if you had to eat the sandwich in one bite, you’d choke to death.”

“He was menacing you.”

33

PATRICK
LAY
IN
BED
AND
STARED
AROUND
AT
THE
FURNISHINGS
of his room. There was only one lamp and, overhead, a moth-filled milk-glass ceiling fixture that gave off an awful light. The bedside lamp was a real must. How many things, he wondered, shall we call real musts? What about ball bearings? A real must in defending one’s self against the natives was a handful of stout ball bearings. The 2nd Division went up against Villa with only their uniforms and their ball bearings; without a belief in The Maker, a real must, all there would have been to show would have been the ball bearings, while Villa took his false gods to Deauville for the races. Jesus Christ, he thought, let us turn our thoughts to Claire; the mind is no boomerang. Throw it far enough and it won’t come back.

Did Tio in fact smell a rat, or only a quail? Was Patrick the Montana version of the Tulsa hidey-hole, where ole Shit proved bulletproof? He felt ashamed of having had this thought. Shamed and chilled. Himself as part of a test of sexual allegiance. Maybe he meant to out-Tio Tio, to get just hopelessly Western about this situation, this fix, to see who, just
who
, was the standup gunslinger of the two. It is typical of me, he thought, to foresee a major showdown well before an acquaintanceship has been struck between the principals. Am I not rude? I am.