Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Whew … uhm … whew.”

“What?”

“… speechless …”

“Here. Don’t try. Have some more of this.” She took the champagne. “Horse fell through. Up there. Didn’t find him for two days. He ate a hundred pounds of potatoes.” Mary’s breathing was short and irregular. “He didn’t want to leave. Then he heard the irrigating water and gave in. Didn’t I build a good roof?” Mary nodded rapidly. “Anything I can do?” She shook her head. “Be better if I leave you alone?” She nodded her head, tried to smile. Patrick left. He wanted to be quiet going down the hill. God Almighty, he thought, she is a sick dog.

PATRICK’S GRANDFATHER SEEMED TO BE RETURNING FROM A long trip. One imagined his hands filled with canceled tickets. It had rained a week and now the sun was out.

“Just take and put the mares with colts on the south side. Everybody else above the barn. The open mares will fight across the wire.”

“I did that,” said Patrick to his grandfather.

“That’s the boy,” said the old man, and closed the door; then, through the door: “You better look for your sister.” Patrick was tall and the old man was short and looked a bit like a stage paddy, an impression quickly dispelled by his largely humorless nature.

Through the kitchen window Patrick could see his mare sidestep into the shade. The old Connolly saddle looked erect and burnished on her chestnut back. She tipped one foot and started to sleep.

“Mary’s all right,” he said, and went outside and mounted the horse with an air of purpose that was at odds with his complete lack of intentions. The mare, Leafy, was chestnut with the delicate subcoloring that is like watermarks. She had an intelligent narrow face and the lightest rein imaginable. Patrick thought a great deal of her. So she had not been ridden while he was away in the Army. A captain of tanks on the East German line in 1977 who comes from Montana has unusual opportunities to remember his home, and apart from the buffalo jump, where ravens still hung as though in memory, Leafy was the finest thing on the place. Downhill on a cold morning, she would buck. Like most good horses, Leafy kept her distance.

When Patrick got to the spring, its headgate deploying cold water on the lower pastures, he found Mary reading in the sun. The glare of light from the surface of the pool shimmered on the page of her book, and she chose not to look as Patrick rode up behind, leaned over and guessed she was reading one of the poet-morbids of France again, enhancing her despair like a sore tooth. Over her shoulder, on the surface of the pool, he could see Leafy’s reflection and his own shimmer against the clouds.

Mary said, “Patrick, when Grandpa slapped the senator, was it something he said to Mother?”

Patrick said, “What brought this up?”

“I’ve been reading about mortal offenses.”

“Grandpa slapped the senator for saying something about the Army, and the senator put Grandpa out of the cattle business.”

“That hardly seems like a mortal offense.”

“It does to an Army man.”

“How do you feel?”

“Better by the minute.”

“Do you miss your tank?”

“I miss loose German women.”

Patrick got down and sat by the spring, holding Leafy’s reins. He glanced at the book — De Laclos, Liaisons Dangereuses. I could very well figure out who these corrupt French bastards are, he thought, but it plays into the hands of trouble.

Patrick pulled some wild watercress and ate the peppery wet leaves, covertly looking up at Mary with her pretty, shadowed forehead. Cold water ran on his wrists.

“What are we to do, what are we to do?” He smiled.

“I don’t know, I don’t,” she said. “We get the family this month. That will be a trial by fire, me with child and you without tank.”

“I shall fortify myself with whiskey.”

“The last time you did that, you went to jail. Furthermore, I don’t believe your version of Grandpa slapping the senator. The Army never meant anything to him.”

“Actually, I don’t know why he slapped the senator.”

“He slapped the senator,” said Mary, “because the senator disparaged the Army. You just said so.”

“And you said the Army never meant anything to him.”

“That’s right, I did.” She looked off.

Perhaps, thought Patrick, being a captain of tanks for the Americans facing, across the wire, the captains of tanks of the Soviets has not entirely eradicated my own touchiness as to such disparagements. Although now I’m in a tougher world.

Patrick rode away. Mary turned anew to the French, and the trees at the spring made one image on the water and a shadow on the bottom. It was a beautiful place, where the Crow had buried their dead in the trees, a spring that had mirrored carrion birds, northern lights and the rotation of the solar system. It was an excellent cold spring and Patrick liked everything about it. Ophelia would have sunk in it like a stone.

When he was young, and one of the things he was managing now was the idea that he was not young, but when he was very young, a child, he and Mary picked through the new grass in the spring of the year, when you could see straight to the ground, for the beads that remained from the tree burials. Their grandmother, who was still alive then and who remembered that the “old ones,” as she also called the Indians, had at the end died largely of smallpox, made the children throw the beads away because she was superstitious, superstitious enough to throw her uncle’s buffalo rifle into the river on the occasion of the United States’ entry into World War Two. The family had had this absurd relationship to America’s affairs of war, and the Army had been a handy place of education since the Civil War. The great-grandfather went there from Ohio, and from a gaited-horse farm now owned by a brewery, only to die driving mules that pulled a Parrott gun into position during the bombardment of Little Round Top. It is said that the mules were the part he resented. Later, with the 1st Montana Volunteers, he helped suppress Aguinaldo’s native insurrection.

Apart from his death, there was the tradition of rather perfunctory military service, then, starting at Miles City in 1884, cattle ranching, horse ranching and a reputation of recurring mental illness, persistent enough that it tended to be assigned from one generation to the next. Mary seemed to have been assigned this time. The luckier ones got off with backaches, facial tics and alcoholism.

The family had now lived in this part of Montana for a very long time, and they still did not fit or even want to fit or, in the words of Patrick’s grandfather, “talk to just anybody.” They would bear forever the air of being able to pick up and go, of having no roots other than the entanglement between themselves; and it is fair to say that they were very thorough snobs with no hope of reform. They had no one to turn to besides themselves, despite that they didn’t get along very well with one another and had scattered all over the country where they meant nothing to their neighbors in the cities and suburbs. Only Patrick and Mary with her hoarding mind and their insufferable grandfather were left to show what there had been; and when they were gone, everyone would say in some fashion or another that they had never been there anyway, that they didn’t fit. As for Patrick, numerous things were said about him but almost nothing to his face, and that was the only deal he cared to make.

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.