Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“I got it.”

Patrick thought he could see him gesture with the whiskey. They were already drunk, and Patrick had it in his mind to get down to a thing or two if he could think just what those things might be. Then it struck him with a shock that it might have been no more than that he was still trying to get close to Mary.

“Let’s get us a couple of horses,” said Catches. “Ground’s all beaten down around here. We’ll get up in those hills. We’ve got one and a half bottles of whiskey to go.”

“Nobody says we have to drink it all.”

“Only that’s what’s going to happen.”

They’d already diverted toward the corral, where the barely shifting shapes of horses moved at their sound. There were stars over the horses’ backs and you couldn’t see where their legs reached the ground. When his mare Leafy turned to him, though, he identified the space between the glints her eyes made; and the sound of her relieved exhalation at recognizing his approaching shape helped Patrick sort the horses.

“Here’s my mare. Why don’t you go in there and grab that claybank? I’m supposed to been riding her more.” Patrick saw Catches’ halter flip up around another horse, a bay.

“I got one I broke.”

The two saddled up in the deeper darkness in front of the saddle shed. Patrick could hear the steady, rapid preparation of Catches, the heavy noise of the saddle slung up on the bay’s withers, the slapping of billets and latigo, then the tight creak when he cinched up. They swung into their saddles and each rigged a bottle against the swells with the saddle strings. Catches still had Mary’s sheet.

“North Fork suit you?”

“That’d be fine,” said Catches.

“What do you carry that little knife around for?”

“You know Indians: homemade tattoos, drinking and knife fighting.”

“That kid Andrew wanted an arrowhead. You might have got him a yard rock and chipped on it a little.”

“I was relaxing at a dinner party,” said Catches. “Life is more than just work.”

Remove the offending silliness, Patrick thought. Make it all fair. But then he felt even sillier. They went through three or four gates before they hit the forest service trail, trickling up through the trees in the starlight while Patrick felt sillier and sillier, looking back every now and again to see the floating white shape of Catches’ hat above the dark form of the moving horse.

“I like this whiskey, David.”

“You bet.”

“I like it in bars as well as out here in the widely promoted high lonesome.”

“Right, Patrick.”

“But in the bars — watch that deadfall — but in the bars, a fellow tends to act up because of the social pressures. After you act up once, you’re expected to act up again. Grown men on crying jags, pistoleros wetting their pants—” An owl fled rapidly up the trail on beating, cushioned wings, and they watched it go. “I would like to build myself a big stroller,” Patrick continued. “Like babies have, y’know, shaped like a doughnut with a sling seat in the middle. Wheels that let you go in any direction. It would have drink holders and cups for poker chips. You could just scoot around and not worry about falling.”

“That’s quite an idea. You ought to write that down. Yeah, I’d get that one on paper.”

The air currents changed and then the smell, cool and balsamic, came from the high draws in the darkness on either side of them. Sometimes when the trees were closed solidly overhead and they moved in absolute blackness, Patrick could tell the direction of the trail only by feeling the mare’s body turning beneath him. When the trees opened once again like a skylight, Patrick stopped and offered Catches the bottle. Each of them took a deep pull, rerigged the bottle to Patrick’s saddle and moved on. Patrick inhaled deeply through his open mouth, carbureting the sourmash and piny air into a powerful essence. A peculiar feeling rose through him, seemingly a glimpse of time’s power: roping, soccer, Germany, the ride on I-90 with Mary, even the fine mare creaking underneath him. Then that evaporated and the Indian floated behind him on the bay.

“We could use a couple of those strollers you mentioned,” said Catches. “Perfect for going down the mountain.”

“One time when Mary and I were small—”

“Look back at those lights.”

“I know. One time when we were small—”

“See how they drop into the groove the trail makes as we go up? There’s only four left. Now three.”

“Then can I tell my story?”

“Okay.”

Patrick kept riding until the last ranch light dropped into the trail.

“We shared the same room, see. And my folks came back back from a party at Carlin Hot Springs. And they were having words. Well, my dad gets out his duck gun and blows away the plumbing under the kitchen sink. They used to just endlessly do stuff like that, you know, really hating each other. And we’d lie in bed thinking, Please don’t get divorced, please please please. That and the atomic bomb were our big scares. So anyway, the water is running everywhere and my grandfather comes in, smacks my father in the face and disarms him. So my mother just shrieks at my grandfather, who’s trying to fix the plumbing. My father keeps saying, ‘Sorry, Pop, sorry.’ And pretty soon my mother comes down to our room and opens the door. The water was right behind her. She turns on the light and sees we’re awake. She’s real drunk, but she gives us this long looking-over. Then she announces, ‘Why don’t you two just get out? Why don’t you just get the hell out and quit causing all this trouble?’—How’s that for a family tale?”

“I thought your dad was supposed to be so terrific.”

“Well, we’re up here on a truth mission, aren’t we? He wasn’t so terrific. But when your father dies he becomes terrific through the magic of death.” Patrick thought, with releasing clarity, Especially when he falls out of the sky in flames. Wow and good-bye.

“Y’know,” Patrick mused, “some things are like a watershed. They mark between the before and the after.”

“Name one.”

“Like the first time … the first time you put your shirttail between the toilet paper and your ass.”

“Aw, for crying out loud.”

Then Patrick thought what he really meant and his throat hardened and ached and it was necessary for some time to ride in silence to combat sorcery and recollection through the metronomic sound of horses.

They dropped down into a swampy spot, the horses drawing their feet heavily from the muck; and as soon as they stepped up the other side, they woke a half-dozen blue grouse, who thundered off and scared the horses into staring and motionless silhouettes. Then once again they were going.

“If it was daylight, we could’ve shot a couple of them to eat at our powwow.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“Nope.”

God Almighty, Patrick was thinking, I am indeed away from the tank and must, as I had said I would, begin anew or at the very least go on to the next thing undaunted by either failure or death, neither of which I have mastered, though I cannot be accused of facing them with fear; but what did you know about them, relieved in fear at the arrival of adrenaline, relieved in death at the arrival of the embalmed dummy, relieved in separation by the dazed and unremitting sense that there had never been connection, not with people and not with places? What had Germany been? Three or four colors, twenty vulvas and strudel? Growing up, as life blind-sided you with its irreversible change, the heart pleaded for rituals that would never come: the West, the white West, a perfectly vacant human backdrop with its celebrated vistas, its remorseless mountains-and-rivers and its mortifying attempts at town building. Patrick longed for a loud New York bar.