Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

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.

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.

“You ought to get out,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t do that kind of thing.”

“You just did.”

“I know. I bet when we’re old it makes us feel lonely and empty.” This could be a long, slow wreck.

They heard Tio call: “Anybody around?”

From the southwest window his distant figure could be seen trudging to the sand pen. Claire said, “I’m going straight down to the house around behind him and get a shirt. If you can think of a good cause for those scratches, you’re welcome to join us.”

“I wish I hadn’t done that,” came Patrick’s contrition.

“It’ll pass. It better. I’m just sick.”

“Where is everybody?” came Tio’s voice. Claire disappeared and Patrick followed her. About halfway down the hill, they heard him call out, “Come on, you guys! I’m getting insecure!” They rushed along in the trees. Claire was giggling.

“This makes me nervous,” said Patrick as he went, realizing how preposterous the situation was.

“You shouldn’t do this to me!” Tio called from afar as Patrick started his truck. Claire looked up toward the springhouse.

“He’s such a little boy,” she said with affection. “Listen,” she added quite suddenly, “won’t you have dinner with us tonight? I insist, and it’s the least you could do.”

Patrick drove off, thinking once again of the little walk-up in Castile, the stone counters scrubbed concave. He wondered why that came to him at these times or during summer war games at seventy miles an hour with the self-leveling cannon, the hurtling countryside on a television monitor. In the Castilian walk-up an unfuckable crone has the say of things and brings vegetables.