Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“Not a damn thing wrong with the bunkhouse,” his grandfather barked. Dale started off with the bags straight for the main house, right in the middle of the conversation. Andrew was galloping, and Patrick helped with a great sagging valise that felt like it had a thick dead midget inside. They fanned out toward the house, resisting a very insistent silence. Patrick walked behind his grandfather and watched his rolling gait. Dale and his mother were in his periphery. It was a movie with the sound track gone. Andrew now bore a wretched face; his fake gun dangled at his side. For him, the West stank.

They were winding down to seeing Mary. There was the luggage, the general greeting, the formal exclamations about returning to the ranch, and then it would be faced. They rushed into the kitchen. Patrick’s mother tried the cupboards; Andrew asked where he could find an arrowhead fast. Down the wooden hallway, bebop poured from Mary’s room.

“Make your own,” said the grandfather.

“I can’t make an arrowhead,” wailed Andrew. “I’m no Indian!”

When Patrick said, “Let’s go say hello to Mary,” a kind of familial smile not unlike saying “Cheese” befell the little group. They followed Patrick through the narrow hall toward a drum solo coming from the farthest door.

They lost the grandfather right away. Then Dale detained Andrew. Patrick and his mother arrived as the applause began at the end of the drum solo, recorded live at the Blue Note, and the room was empty. The sheet on the bed was drawn taut, and Mary had outlined herself in ink, life-size, carefully sketching even the fingers. Across the abdomen she had traced the shape of an infant; and she was gone. Patrick went to the window; he could see across the meadow to the forest. She was either in the forest or at the spring.

“Orphanages,” said Patrick’s mother, “were made for good and sufficient reasons.” Dale ducked his head in shame.

Then Patrick had a thought that dazed him and he panicked. He ran to the corral and caught his mare, but twisted the cinch and had to start over. Leafy felt his bad nerves and kept side-passing away from Patrick until he got a foot in the stirrup and swung up on her. She started running before Patrick could touch her with his feet, carrying him into the cold wind from the trees. Thus the ground, the sky, the vaulting motion of the horse against a static earth, seemed like life itself. The ground resisted the speed that Patrick desired, like history.

ONCE PAST THE COAT HOOKS, THE PLAN OF THE FUNERAL home is clear. This place can handle the lapsed of all religions. There is a corridor on the left with perhaps three rooms leading off perpendicularly. In every one of these rooms is someone dead. Over the door of each room is the last name of the goner: Symanski, Westcroft, Fitzpatrick. Just at the point of division between this set of rooms and the large room to the right, where services are held, is a small stand holding a kind of guest register; it has an attached light. A discreet brown cord trickles over to the wall outlet. The owner stands behind the guest book and flags the dalliers by the coatrack; he is dressed somberly, but not grimly. His is the air of riding out a good franchise. Here and there are his assistants, that odd breed of Recent Graduates in smart suits and razor-cut hair who have decided to spend the rest of their working lives driving hearses and standing in attendance at funerals with their hands just so.

Patrick, the blood rising in his head, circled past the casket with the other mourners; he took one look at the barbaric effigy constructed from his deceased sister and decided: I have no attitude toward this. He was still far from knowing what had happened to him.

They sat in the front row: Patrick, his mother, Dale, his grandfather and little Andrew. Little Andrew had wanted to touch the body. He got a good snatching for that. The grandfather gaped around and smiled at his contemporaries, all of whom, Patrick felt sure, were thinking: Odd for a person so young to go when it’s usually one of us. Patrick wondered if these old people didn’t feel a little edge, thinking time was not so reliable a force against the living that it could be utterly counted on. There was always mishap, the unexpected; and in this case, the perils of one’s own hand. Few had the nerve for that and, all in all, went uncounted, as they were easily dismissed as mental cases. The old people gazed around: this was just social. Of course, there was death. The middle-aged worked on the theater of doom, many of them with dramaturgical mugs that wouldn’t pass muster at the local playhouse. The very young craned around like the very old; and all were surrounded by the funeral house staff, including the altogether depressing Recent Graduates. Patrick was getting angry. Mary was gone and this bit of drill seemed superfluous. Moreover, the audience included a substantial group of townies eager to see the family on its knees, which Patrick could have stood for, except that there was no family anymore. The mother was divorced and gone, Patrick was in disgrace, his father long dead, his sister was ridiculed before she died; and his grandfather despised everyone. Patrick was growing more incensed by the second.

The Ford dealer bowed his way down the aisle, holding a narrow-brimmed and piquant fedora, obsequious before a couple of hundred prospects. His wife stared into infinity, her cylindrical hat indicating a level stance in the face of mortality. A tiny wino brakeman slipped in because he’d seen the gathering. The preacher materialized in the wings, counted the house and withdrew to await the swelling crowd. Deke Patwell was on hand to report the loss. A lip reader from the stationery store sat front and center with her own missal. The song “Chapel in the Moonlight” came dimly from invisible speakers. There were five Indians with hard Cheyenne features, two of whom were young enough to be suspects as Mary’s paramour. Andrew had a cast-metal articulated earth-mover, which he rolled quietly back and forth between his feet. His mother moved her shoe to block its progress and Andrew looked up at her with no expression whatsoever.

Scattered around the audience were people never before seen in town, friends of Mary’s from all over the Rockies. They were uniform in age but staying well away from each other.

The minister began to move under the arcade of flowers past the casket toward the Recent Graduates pushing the lectern at him from the opposite direction. “Chapel in the Moonlight” diminished and disappeared. Patrick’s mother drew back the silk string from her missal and raised the face of one who, as the mother of a suicide, had nowhere to hang her next glance. Dale seemed to be saying, This is how it is.

The minister gazed for a long time at his own little volume; and when the moment came at which its pages could best be heard, he turned it open, gazed, then abruptly closed it again: he would speak from the heart. That was a good one, and everybody looked at him, even the Recent Graduates, sharpening expressions in anticipation of something daring.

“Young Mary Fitzpatrick,” he crooned, “was a free and delightful spirit …” He paused. Perhaps he never should have paused, or paused so long, because the fury Patrick had feared arose in him and he spoke.

“ Shut up ,” said Patrick in a clear voice. “ We knew her. ” The quiet was like undertow.

The minister’s head fell with patience. Patrick arose. His mother’s face turned in horror. Nearly half of the audience got up and started to the rear. The editor-in-chief gazed back at Patrick, then led the group out. Aaron Clark, the prosecutor, stayed close alongside the editor. Dale, after a moment’s reflection, left with them. Patrick’s grandfather pulled Andrew onto his knee. The Indians milled and went, leaving one frightened young man in a Levi jacket and carrying a broad-brimmed uncreased straw. That’s our man, thought Patrick, but I won’t talk to him. It’s all disgrace. Patrick walked up to the minister and demanded to know where he had gotten the business about the free and delightful spirit. “You never met her. That was an unhappy girl and she isn’t going anywhere. She’s just dead.” What remained of the audience stirred at this ghastly speech.