Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

The lamb had been defatted the way they did in France. Patrick could see Tio’s shadow when he came to the top of the stairs to look down to the first floor. That kind of came in intervals while Patrick went through a lot of Bordeaux. Then the shadow of Tio stopped coming and producing its simple effect. So Patrick went to the living room, where he penetrated Claire with a peculiar vengeance, noting, only at the clutching, compressive end, the ninth largest whitetail deer ever killed in Texas.

“What’d I do with my hat?” asked Patrick. “I’ve got the whirlies.” Claire sat up, a broad snail’s track on her thigh, and in her molten eyes was something Patrick had never seen before because it had never existed before, not exactly.

Patrick managed to get dressed, walking back and forth across the front of the stairs, feeling a sick and depressed giddiness, not even rememberable from the Army years, of having threaded a miserable, shivering, narrow trail to wrath and humiliation, for which he knew hell fire in one of its uncountable manifestations would someday be handed on as silver a platter as the one that held Tio’s dinner. A headache set in behind his temples and he was rather in love and in a bad mood. Claire stopped him in the yard, where he walked in his socks, carrying his tall boots, staring in a dumb, fixated way at his drunken target.

Claire’s small, strong hand turned him around blank by the shirt, and he looked once more into the pained eyes, forcing his own off as one awaiting a lecture. “Cruelty is something I hadn’t seen in you before.”

“I saw it in you. I thought I was treating you for it. I thought I was the doctor.” Patrick’s anger, partial product of his damages and certainly of his drinking and his indirection, formed thickly in this inconsiderate remark.

“No, I’m the doctor,” Claire said. “And Tio is the patient. And you are a cruel outsider.”

She walked back inside and Patrick knew which of them had lost and what had been lost. As he drove off he saw all the upstairs lights clicking on in series and he was in genuine retreat.

HIS EYES WERE SWOLLEN SHUT FROM THE BUTTS OF THE CUES when the chief of police shoved him into the drunk tank. “I don’t know which one of you snakes bit the other first. It’s all cowboys and Indians to me. But you’re in my house now. And you’re for sure snake bit.”

“Yeah, right,” said Patrick.

“ ‘ Yeah, right ,’ ” laughed the policeman. “Shit, you can’t even talk! Look at it this way: This is probably the only bunk in town where they won’t keep beatin on you. You’ll get breakfast and we’ll see you on home.”

“I’m sorry,” said Patrick, angling for the narrow bunk catercorner to one other amorphous form, foreshadowing, Patrick thought, his future. “Nothing to read. Someday I’ll be a dead bum.”

“I’ll tell you what: You just as well throw in with me, mean as you are.”

“Am I mean?”

“You’re plumb mean.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Patrick said in simpleminded drunkenness. “Oh, I wish you couldn’t say that about me.”

“Well, I can!” said the chief of police brightly.

And the lights dropped to minimum observation, just enough to get a vomiter’s tongue cleared or keep some whitecross detox bozo from beating his head on the fixed steel table where, it was intended, one would eat, play cards and be polite about the finger paints. As Patrick fell off to sleep, he felt that it was a good jail, one where they preferred your being a civilian to your being a jailbird, suicide or rising crime star.

Patrick didn’t know whether he was dreaming — he didn’t think he was — when he heard the chief’s voice, coming in through the alpha waves and alcohol, say, “The lady left your bail.”

As for now, his belongings, his keys and directions to his truck were what he most required.

The note from Claire read:

Patrick,

Tio flew to Tulsa early this A.M.

Stop/call for details as needed.

Claire.

Oh shit oh god oh now what. Can this be more sadness-for-no-reason? Pig’s conduct is what I’ll stand accused of, you can bet your hat on that. And my feeling is that the chaps who have made such a stretch of bad road out of my body with their cues are, at any other time or place, universally considered good fellows who never reverse their cues to beat on a human and who, all agreed, had been driven to the limits of their patience and who, moreover, when the jury returned, were universally acquitted and not a little applauded by all familiar with the particulars of the case. Except that Patrick couldn’t remember anything about it. Therefore he would join the cheering throng in its endorsement of each lump’s administering; for though he was the recipient, democracy did call for backing one’s fellows, even on limited information.

GRANDPA WAS DISCOVERED KNEELING ABOVE THE KITCHEN sink, killing yellow wasps against the window with the rolled Sunday Deadrock News. This seemed a little tough in one of our older cowboys, thought Patrick; this could be sadness-for-no-reason, although well short of harbinger-of-doom. There were dirty dishes containing glazed remains. Patrick’s thought — that he’d only been gone a day — had a minute hysterical edge. What would he find with a week’s absence? It seemed his grandfather had become unnaturally dependent upon him since his return. Before that, he could help, hire help, ask for help or do without. But now, silhouetted behind stacks of dirty dishes, he crawled after wasps, backlit brilliant yellow on the glass, and swung at them so hard he was in danger of losing balance and rolling to the floor.

“Did you get that editor?”

“No.”

“Over to some woman’s.”

“Exactly.”

“See you had a night in the hoosegow.”

Patrick stopped. “Where are you getting this?”

Grandpa slung his legs down and unrolled the wasps’-guts-encrusted News. There Patrick reviewed a photograph of himself being removed from the Northbranch Saloon by the police. A lucky motorist from Ohio got the photo credit. The small crowd did not look friendly and the police looked like heroes. There was only a caption, no text; it read:

WAITING FOR RAIN

It’s fair, thought Patrick.

“Well,” he said to his grandfather. “Let’s tidy this joint up.” His heart soared with the thought of stupid little projects.

Deep in the grain bin the mice swam fat and single-minded while Patrick’s coffee can sliced around them to fill the black rubber buckets. The young horses turned at the pitch of tin against oats and moved to the feed bunk, first in disarray and then in single file; and then snaking out at each other, rearranging the lineup as the yellow granules poured from the bucket.

The laminations of heat-and-serve yielded to the hot suds rising about Patrick’s reddening forearms. He looked at the pleasant inflammation and thought: It proves I’m Irish. Then, with the bucket and brush, he could better see the undersides of the table as well as scrub the floor.

Here’s something new: He’s wetting the bed. And where does that lead? Is it a little thing, as incontinence? Or is it a nightmare with the impact of a cannon, rending and overwhelming, that would soak the tunic of the bravest grenadier? We will not soon have the answer to this. As of the here and now, we have a bed that needs changing.

At the very moment the Whirlpool goes from rinse to spin, it bucks like a Red Desert Mustang and would continue to do so if Patrick didn’t heave a great rock on top of its lid, a rock that, as an interjection to its cycling chaos, restores order to as well as performs the last cleansing extraction of Grandpa’s socks, underdrawers, shirts and jeans. This recalcitrant jiggling is, Patrick’s old enough now to know, the deterioration of bearings and the prelude to a complete collapse — not necessarily an explosion of Grandpa’s soiled linens around the laundry room, but certainly, in a year of poor cattle prices, a duskier and less fragrant general patina to this two-man operation. So Patrick views the rock as a good rock, keen stripes of marble and gneiss, a rock for all seasons.