Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

Patrick turned to go and spotted the Indian. He changed his mind about talking to him. They looked at each other hard and Patrick asked him to wait outside. Patrick watched him turn slowly and go into the blind light at the door, affixing the straw hat as he did so, causing a sudden deep shadow to reveal his face as he stared back in the glare, his expression very much that of something cornered and awaiting necessity, grave and shy at once.

“Have you had enough?” He saw his mother. He was blank. “Have you had enough, I said! I said —”

“I heard what you said.” She was right into his face. He gazed off at the casket and thought about that Indian in the sidewalk glare, the angular, expressionless face lit by the dark under his straw hat. “You said nothing.”

Between the pews Patrick’s grandfather led Andrew to the rear. The old man looked upon Patrick with a sadness he’d never allowed to be seen before. Patrick couldn’t understand the expression at all, not at this time.

“Take it easy, Pat,” he said. “I’ll bring little Andrew here. It’s just best for you to go on out of here. Andrew wants an arrowhead. So I’ll try to find him one. And then they’re going to bury her, see. And what I’m saying is it’s just best if you go on out of here, Pat.”

“Did you happen to notice the newspaper editor?” His mother inquired. She walked off, leaving no time for a reply, though in an instant of stunned, relieving giddiness, which shot through his grief like a tiny spark, he almost told her that he read only the sports page. Then he thought of his grandfather and walked toward the light. He knew and felt the people’s close watch on him. He had always understood that to observe the burying of other people’s dead was one of the few things that made their lives palatable.

But best of all the agony of those who remained. Aha! There had not been a good death like this one in Patrick’s family for some time. His father’s death in the desert of the Great Basin had seemed remote. There had been a dry spell. But Patrick knew, too, that he had not learned; his grandfather had walked out and given them nothing. There was nothing in the old cowboy’s face, his straight-backed walk toward the door, to give them anything. And Patrick had raved. He had raved for nothing. So this was a good one. This was one of the best ones they had ever seen.

THE INDIAN WAS ON THE SIDEWALK, CARS DISAPPEARING fast around him. He dropped his face slightly at Patrick’s appearance in the door and then looked once behind him. Patrick saw something guarded and ready in his stance, the clear, round, pale brim intersecting his delicately modeled forehead.

“Do you need to see me?” Patrick asked.

“If there is something between us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is that Indian talk?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“David Catches.”

“Well, they’re going to bury my sister. Will you be going?”

“You’ll make another speech. I don’t want to hear that kind of thing.”

“Then why don’t you come to the house tonight?”

David Catches followed a police cruiser with his eyes as it rounded the corner and vanished at low speed.

“What time?”

“Before the sun goes down and we lose our light. That way we won’t be stuck inside. Do you know the way out there? Do you know how to get to our place?”

“Of course. I helped your grandfather.”

“I guess I knew that.”

“You were in the Army. At that time your grandfather didn’t take care of himself. I didn’t have any rattles. I had a Goldenrod fence stretcher and a slick-fork saddle. Mary brought me there to make him an Indian. I punched cows and peeled broncs for a couple of years. But I saw a way to get out one night and I was gone. I got away just before I learned to think like him.”

An old man walked by, leading matched springers. He walked his dogs according to the National Bureau of Standards, so that people could set their watches by him. In Deadrock there were children who thought one told time by dogs.

“When did all this occur?”

“We went to Grassrange and I worked for an Indian who ranched on Flatwillow Creek. A guy sent me some horses to break, from over at Sumatra. Mary came with me! We had a trailer house down in the trees. We had a good dog and four good saddle horses. We were happy. Then something must have gone wrong. Anyway, Mary was gone, one day just gone.”

“She turned up in Roundup.”

“I don’t know.”

“Then on down to Warm Springs. Hey, I’m giving you the details.”

“I just don’t know.”

A silence fell over them, an unresisted silence like a trance. Then David Catches said, “You’ve got to go now. I will see you tonight.” To Patrick it seemed a moment later that the silence resumed. Except that this time an arrangement with straps and pulleys lowered Mary into the earth between panels of artificial turf that covered the scars that the machinery had left making the hole. Only the family was there, and since Patrick was responsible for the absence of the priest, it was felt he should say something by way of a benediction. He said, “I’ll never see her again.”

It required three cars to carry the family. The cars were parked down on a blacktop crescent below the mausoleum. You could see the foothills from here and a few farm buildings along the base of the escarpment, like curious physical interjections in the landscape. Patrick viewed this all helplessly as Mary’s habitat, knowing that on this broad hill, picked for its view, gale-driven snow stretched immense drifts toward the west, over everything, over stones and monuments, and that there was nothing that could be done for that. On the upper end of his own ranch, a miner had, years ago, filled coffee cans with cement and pressed marbles into its surface, picking out the name of his three dead children. So anyway, except that there was nothing new in this, it was the one thing that was always new.

IT WAS PITCH DARK. “I AM MARION EASTERLY,” SAID THE voice. “You never let me exist. I am not allowed to let you rest. But one night at the proper phase of the moon, a neither-here-nor-there phase of the famous moon, I will arise in the face of our mother and our father and I will be real and you will not have been sent away to school and the proper apologies will be made and you still will have won the roping drunk at the Wilsall rodeo; and all, all will be acceptable.” Patrick turned on the bedside lamp and there was Mary, grinning and buttoned up in a navy peacoat. “Take away the offending years,” she said, “for they have ruined us with crumminess and predictability.”

“Go to bed,” Patrick said to Mary. “Anyone can see you’ve gotten yourself altered.”

Dale turned around in his front seat to look straight at Patrick. The driver, never seen before, presented himself as a concerned friend of the cemetery franchise. He offered to drive and they let him. The other cars were driven by concerned friends of the cemetery as well.

Dale said, “That was quite a deal you put on, Pat.”

“How long did it take you to pump yourself up to say that, Dale?”

“No time at all.” By his own scale, Dale was dauntless.

“Well, if my grandfather would have the courtesy to die, it might mean something to you, even as a lease deal. Why don’t we pull the other car over and find out just how long Grandpa is going to pull this business of not dying?”

“Stop this,” said his mother. Patrick’s batty conduct made her practical.

“Driver, detain that car.”

The driver said, “This isn’t a patrol car.”

“I say stop that car. Remove the offending mystery.”