Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

This had not entirely been necessary. There had been nice girls, beautiful girls, German dynamos with degrees who desired to be cowgirls when the captain returned, girls who could do English in the inflection of Tek-Ziz, New York or the late President Kennedy. It had been a long go on the line of the Soviet bloc and it had included paternity suits, arrangements and affection. He had tried Spain on leave, but the Spanish girls wouldn’t go to the beach and the English secretaries on holiday behaved like beagles in heat at a guard-dog show in Munich. He began using an electric razor. He began not to care. He began not to brush between meals. He began to brood about the high lonesome and the girls at the gold dredge and their desire to be barrel racers and then make little babies. By now they’d had bunches of them and the babies were all in 4H. He read Thucydides and asked about soldiers’ homecomings. He heard Marvin Gaye sing the national anthem at the heavyweight championship fight, and that was that. He quit the Army. He had never fired a shot, but he was going home to Montana to pick up where he left off — which was a blurred edge; blurred because of boarding school, the death of his father, the disappearance — intermittent — of his sister and the remarriage of his mother to a glowing, highly focused businessman from California who owned a lighting-design center in Santa Barbara and was a world-class racquetball player.

Now, home for a time and with no good reason to support his feeling, what had seemed the last prospect in his vague search for a reason to come home and stay turned out to be a subliminal inclination toward another man’s wife; which was plainly unrequited if not without charm, and pointless.

Can’t help that, thought Patrick. He turned his thoughts to what could be helped, most of which consisted in learning the particulars of the ranch which he had always assumed he would run but which he never had run and which, in fact, no one had ever run, except his grandfather. Patrick’s father had gone off to test airplanes, and the man before his grandfather — an Englishman with the papers of a clergyman too finely scripted to be doubted by the honyockers and illiterate railroaders who settled the town — that Englishman never lifted a finger except in pursuit of Indian women and in operatic attempts at suicide in the six inches of running water from which the place was subsequently irrigated. He did leave, however, large academic oils that he had commissioned as decoration in the dining room, depicting smallpox epidemics among the Assiniboine from the point of view of a Swiss academic painter in his early twenties, eager to get home and tend to the clocks. The paintings showed all Indians in Eastern war bonnets, holding their throats in the paroxysms of dehydration, popularly assumed to be the last stage of that plague. It had never, to Patrick, seemed the right thing for the dining room. At the same time it did not deter anyone from eating. Today Patrick felt a little like the Englishman who had commissioned the paintings.

But he did have a thought. He went into the pantry, where his grandfather had hung the telephone, and being careful to stay loose, dialed and got Claire.

“Claire,” he said, “this is Patrick Fitzpatrick.”

“Well, hey.”

“Say, I’d just remembered, I never gave Tio an answer about that colt.”

“Fitzpatrick! That you?” It was Tio.

“Yes, it is.”

“You callin regardin that colt?”

“Yes, I—”

“You gonna take him?”

“Yes, I’d like to.”

“You should, he’s a good colt. Bill us at Tulsa. Honey, you still on?”

“Sure am. Where’re you?”

“I’m down to the granary with the accountants. Can you load that horse yourself?”

“Sure can.”

“Carry him out to Fitzpatrick. Listen, I gotta go. Bye.” Click.

Patrick said, “Do you need directions, Claire?” He was happy. Then Tio came back on.

“You oughta breed ole Cunt to that mare of yours, Fitzpatrick. Think on it.” Click. Pause.

“Uh, yes, I will need directions.”

Patrick said, “Let’s just wait a second and see if Tio comes back on.”

There was a pause, and then Claire said, with a little fear in her voice, “Why?”

“I hate repeating directions,” said Patrick. His was an odd remark. He had no such attitude. He was starting to make things up. The last Army officer in this area he could think of who did that was General George Armstrong Custer.

INTERMITTENTLY BEHIND THE CORRUGATED TRUNKS OF THE cottonwoods Patrick could discern a sedan with an in-line trailer behind it. He was replacing planks on the loading chute, ones that had been knocked loose while he was gone; and he could see down to the road from here, to the sedan, the dust from the trailer and the changing green light on the metal from the canopy of leaves overhead. Cole Younger was the first dog to detect the car turning in, and his bellowing bark set Alba and the hysterical Zip T. Crow into surrounding the outfit. Patrick left the spikes and hammer at the chute and started down the hill. Once past the orchard he could hear the horse whinny inside the trailer and he could read the word “Oklahoma” on the plates. Was that Sooner, Hoosier or Show Me? The door of the sedan was open, but glare on the window kept him from seeing. He could make out one dangling boot and nothing else. Claire kicked Zip T. Crow very precisely and without meanness as the dog stole in for a cheap shot.

The car looked like it could pull the trailer a hundred in a head wind. Patrick had a weakness for gas gobblers; and a rather limited part of him, the part that enjoyed his seventy-mile-an-hour tank, had always wanted to rodeo out of a Cadillac like this one. He took a hard look: oil-money weird, no doubt about that. Like Australians, loud with thin lips, hideous Protestant backgrounds, unnatural drive to honky-tonk as a specific against bad early religion and an evil landscape: bracing himself against Claire.

She got out wearing knee-high boots, washed-out Wranglers, a hot-pink shirt and a good Ryon’s Panama straw. Long oak-blond hair disappearing between the shoulder blades in an endless braid.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you, Claire?” The dumb grin forms. No drool in the mouth corners yet.

“Just right,” she said. “And you, Patrick?” There was sweetness in her inquiry. Claire just kind of stood there and let the sun hit her, only her thumbs outside her pants.

“What do we have in the back?” asked Patrick.

“Got Tio’s horse.”

“Aged horse?”

“Four.”

“Is he broke to ride?”

“He is,” she said, “but he’s rank.”

“What’s he do good?”

“Turn around,” she said. “He’s real supple.”

“What’s he do bad?”

“Bite you. Fall on you. Pack his head in your lap. Never has bucked. But it’s in him.”

“How do you like him shod?”

“Just double-ought plates. Had little trailers in the back. We skipped that. He’ll run and slide. He’s still in a snaffle bit. You do as you like. But don’t thump on him. He can get right ugly.”

“Why didn’t you take the horse to one of the guys around Tulsa?”

“We’re gonna be here most years. We wanted to be able to see how the horse was going. Plus Tio wanted someone who was staying home with his horses.” The advent of the husband into the conversation dropped like an ice cube on a sunbather’s back. Could Claire have known the extent to which the horse was part of the arranging?

“How come you call him American Express?”

“Tio billed him out as ranch supplies. We named him after the card.”

“Right …”

“Tio would give you what you wanted for your mare. You could go on and bill the accountants in Tulsa.”