Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

Patrick and Mary’s mother, Anita, married Dale in Long Beach and had a son, now eleven, named Andrew. Anita had been in Long Beach to comfort the wife of the copilot, Del Andrews, after the crash. The two widows met Dale in a Polynesian after-hours club and did not speak to each other again after the engagement. Anita, Dale and Andrew were coming on the weekend. It was Friday and Mary had not emerged from her room in days. Dale had connections in Hawaii for winter vacations; but now it was summer, and once Anita got over the matter of Mary’s pregnancy, they could have a super holiday in the mountains.

“If you quit carrying her food to her,” said Patrick’s grandfather from the stove, “she’s gonna have to come out.” The grandfather still made coffee like a camp cook — with eggshells in the grounds and cold water dripping from his fingertips to make it precipitate.

“I don’t believe she will,” said Patrick. He had made a tray for Mary, very domestically, with French toast and orange juice. He really didn’t think she would come out.

Today Mary had armed herself with the New York Times , illuminated from the window facing the juniper-covered slope. The light fell equally upon the nail-head bedspread and the vase of broad orange poppies from around the well pit. The room was carefully and comfortably arranged, a case of battening down the hatches. The family was coming.

Mary stopped the coffee cup at her lips, angled slightly, and said, “I don’t want to deal with them, Patrick.”

“It’s not a matter of dealing. Don’t think like that.” He watched her twist up the corner of the bedspread and watched her eyes. Then the light in the room moved.

On the wall was a painting by Kevin Red Star which except for its hallucinatory colors Patrick would have liked, but which seemed, as furnishing for a troubled girl’s room, to be throwing fat on the fire. More to his liking was the perfect Chatham oil, five inches across, a juniper of shadow on snow and bare ground. The blue paint from the day of the fire was cleaned up and gone.

The truth was that Mary and Patrick thought a lot of themselves at the worst of times, and of each other. This air, despite breakdowns or shooting, earned them the sarcasm of the townies. They each loved the open country where they lived, and big, fast cities. Booster hamlets failed to hold their interest. Town was for supplies.

“I didn’t sleep much,” said Mary. “Perhaps I should avoid the coffee so I can sleep this afternoon. What’s Grandpa up to?”

“He’s writing a letter of complaint to an importer of Japanese horseshoes which includes veiled references to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Yesterday he was bitching about me not making my Easter duty.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d you tell him?”

Mary pressed the tines of her fork into the French toast experimentally. “I said I could buy everything but the Holy Ghost.”

“I’d have guessed the Holy Ghost was the only one of the three you would buy.”

Patrick peered at her, then went down the hall and got an old Bud Powell ten-inch from his endless bebop collection. He came back, played “Someone to Watch over Me,” and the two drifted off for a moment. How could a sick man like Powell bring you such peace, he wondered.

Patrick said, “I wish I could do something that good just once.” Indicating Bud Powell.

“You will, now that you’ve picked another way of expressing yourself than tank driving.”

“I sought to destroy communism.”

“While despos took over America.”

“Despo” was a word Patrick and Mary had — from the song “Desperado”—to describe the hip and washed-up effluvia of the last twenty years. The song itself, which now seemed to belong to the distant past, was the best anthem for a world of people unable to get off various freeways. Mary had invented the subcases: despo-riche and despo-chic.

Mary was getting jittery. Now she would ice the cake. “In bathing suits,” she said, “I prefer D cups, split sizes and matching cover-ups. I love warm-up suits in luscious colors. Even though I’m expecting out of wedlock, I’m heavy into my own brand of glamour. Few days see me without intensive conditioning treatments, Egyptian nonpareil henna, manicures, pedicures and top skin-care products.”

“Are you all right?” asked Patrick.

“I’m in stitches,” said Mary. She began to cry but checked herself and grinned bravely.

When the record finished, Patrick asked if he should turn it over. But she gazed toward him in the concentration of someone trying to overcome stuttering, concentration or paralysis, it was hard to say.

“Try to sleep,” he said. “Please try.”

“ALL I WANT TO KNOW,” SAID HIS MOTHER, “IS WHAT TRIBE?” Her eyes lifted to cut across the original buffalo grounds.

Dale, her husband, took the Igloo cooler out of the back of the station wagon, desperately surveyed the ranchstead with the rectangles of snow-line meadow between the buildings and said:

“High, wide and handsome!” His smile revealed that if no one was buying this, he wasn’t selling it.

But Patrick’s mother in her hearty kilt was steadfast. She locked down on tan, angular calves.

“What tribe?”

“I don’t know. We will have to wait and see.”

Dale said, “Anita, I thought we had an agreement about this.”

And Anita said, “You’re right, of course.” She was still establishing Dale. Dale didn’t care. His original enthusiasm had flown the coop. Now he was with his screwy fucking in-laws.

If it wasn’t my mother, thought Patrick, I’d swear it was Shrew City Sue. It goes without saying that Andrew had a cap gun and that he fired away with it like a rat terrier yapping around the feet of an arguing couple. Patrick thought his mother would club Andrew, but she had turned her attention to unloading the wagon onto the lawn. Dale accompanied everything with a stream of chatter. He sensed his wife’s short fuse. Dale, Patrick thought, was giving it his best. It was kind of not much.

Patrick’s mother and her husband had matching snake boots. Of all the people on the ranch, it never occurred to Patrick that he in his knee-high M. L. Leddy cowboy boots and tank captain’s shirt was the most anomalous. Besides that, he was now sick of America.

“Lordy, lordy,” said his mother, stooping for her camera bag. “I’m going to have to control myself, if only with respect to promises I made to Dale.” She’d build up Dale if it killed her.

“I think you are, Mother. Mary is a little shaky.”

Dale said, “The old days seem never to have died.” He wore a fixed expression memorized from a hairstyle illustration in a barbershop.

Mary’s disease, if that could be said, was, Patrick thought, an insufficient resistance to pain of every kind. When she was a child, the flyswatter could not be used in her presence. Patrick watched tears stream down her face in the supermarket as an elderly couple selected arthritis-strength aspirin with crooked hands. Some of this ought to have been noticed and remembered by his mother.

The grandfather made his greetings somewhat perfunctory. After all, this was only his former daughter-in-law. His son was dead. He didn’t ever pay attention to Dale and he detested little Andrew. He couldn’t really understand what they were doing here. He smiled and said, “It’s a big ranch. We can all damn sure keep out from underfoot if we half try.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Andrew.

“Why don’t you stay out in the bunkhouse?” roared the grandfather, senility kicking in like rocket fuel.

“I think it would be nicer being near the kitchen etcetera,” said Patrick’s mother with a taut smile. It was clear she saw her former father-in-law as someone to be humored.