Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“When they reached the slope where the ranges divided, it looked like an enormous open lawn in the dark. There were the shapes of animals out on this expanse, deer or elk, and those shapes drifted away as Patrick and David picketed their horses, then sat facing the slope that elevated darkly to sky. Stars disappeared as the black shapes of clouds cruised the bright space. And for a while, all you could hear was the drinking.

“Had this cat living in the trailer at Grassrange,” said David. “Could walk upside down on the acoustic tile all the way to the overhead light and kill moths and eat them and, y’know, like let the wings stick out of the corners of his mouth up there next to the light.”

“Think the glare would get to him.”

“He wouldn’t even take his shot. Just hang there alongside the bulb and prettyquick a moth would fly into his mouth. Fat sonofabitch and I never seen him mousing during moth season. Then in the winter he’d move out of the trailer into this Amoco barrel used to be a dog’s house there at Grassrange and hunt mice. He snagged one bat at the light in two summers; otherwise, it was all moths. He had to get down on the floor and fight that bat, though.”

“What did Mary do while you were there?”

“She’d just be reading, mostly; cooking. Then people’d bring her young colts to halter-break and gentle. She had chickens. She took a lot of pictures of that cat on the ceiling, but we never had the money to get them developed. I could drop the film by, if you’re interested. I mean, if you felt like getting them developed. Mary was afraid the light bulb would overexpose the film and we’d’ve spent our money on nothing at all. Really, we didn’t have no money.” Catches started crying.

“Jesus Christ, David.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on now.”

“I just don’t know.”

“Sit up there, old buddy. I can’t stand it. Come on, now, you’re gonna get me going.”

“Well, what’s the fucking use?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the use?”

“There isn’t any use. I thought Indians knew that.”

“Somebody steered you wrong, Fitzpatrick.”

“Well, you better figure it out. There seems to be signs everywhere that there’s no use.”

“Spoiled my fucking hat tipping over on it.”

“See?”

“I don’t take it as a sign.”

“It’s a sign that there’s no use. Well, let’s take aholt here. Let’s show them different,” said Patrick. It was about as strong as he ever got. All he wanted to do was shriek, Demons! Zombies! The dead!

The Indian was trying to restore the crease in his hat. “My chapeau,” he said and laughed. “You should have written her more.”

“I know,” said Patrick.

“Drift in bad here in the winter?”

“Oh, yeah. We had some cattle trapped in the Moccasin draw one time and the bears raided into them, got ’em all. Bears just padded over that snow and started killing cows. Quite a wreck in there when it thawed. Looked like a Charlie Russell painting of the ’86 blizzard, these half-gnawed skeletons up against the rocks …”

“Hunh.”

“I have to throw up,” said Patrick.

“If you’re loud about it, crawl off away from the horses. I don’t want to walk home.”

Patrick got off a way, his hands deep in the lichen, and let it pour everywhere.

Catches continued in a louder voice: “My dad was a great one for throwing up on his horse and going on a blind-ass bronc ride into the cattle.”

By the time Patrick found his way back, navigating by the white hat and the shapes of the horses when he couldn’t find the hat, Catches was getting pretty choky. “See, she was what I had and she left me about thirteen different times and all this was, was the last time. And that’s it. That’s all she wrote. But she was crazy and I’m not. And sorta like you said, I won’t be getting her back. All I’m going to say is this, and it might be the thing we fight over: She was more to me than she was to you.” Catches got out his knife. High above them, a heavy moon turned the scree brilliant as miles of quartz, and every so often something would come loose and roll, making a noise light, dry and clear as a single piece of bone.

“Do you deny what I said?” asked Catches.

Patrick followed the serration of forest, divided at the pass, and the vertical curve to the south of unearthly luminous granite.

“I don’t deny it,” said Patrick, absolutely letting something break in the name of some small, even miserable decency, something in its way perfect and unmissed by David Catches, who said, “Thank you.”

The rest was the ride home.

BOTH PATRICK’S DESIRE FOR PRIVACY AND HIS MISTAKES IN human judgment sprang from the same vague feeling that things were very sad. This feeling had predated the death of his sister by some time. Still, he had not always felt this way. Now he did seem to always feel this way. And so he tried to stay on the ranch or make some blind attempt to get rid of the feeling that everything was sad-for-no-reason. The latter seemed to fail with absolute regularity; whereas staying on the ranch and working would just do. And he still thought Claire could change it all. Sometimes he felt that she had to. It made him uncomfortable.

Patrick got up suddenly, feeling he wasn’t reacting appropriately to anything, that he wasn’t doing any good. He heard the spring creak on the kitchen door and wondered who had come in. He shot the front of his shirt into his trousers with his hands, wobbled his head about and acted in general like someone trying to renew his concentration. This was getting to be a quieter house and the steps in the hallway, now plainly his grandfather’s, were clear; but Patrick thought they were slow, and when the door opened, revealing Patrick standing in no particular place in the room and his grandfather exactly in the doorway with a newspaper, Patrick knew there was something not right. “Have you read this?” his grandfather asked, revealing little in his face to give away what was to be seen. Patrick started to read, then sat down. The newspaper had reported the funeral on the first page in unbelievable detail, including Patrick’s rash remarks. The tone was unmistakably satirical and in the patented style of Deke Patwell. Basically it took the position that Patrick and Mary, long a local variety act, had pressed on amusingly after death.

“What did we do to them?” asked his grandfather. “I don’t know.”

“Patwell wrote that.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Where’re you going, Pat?”

“To see Patwell.”

“I think you better. I think this has to be fixed.”

Strangely enough, nearly his first thought was, If they send me to jail, I’ll never see Claire again. And finally, the almost infernal concentration of anger, the numb and almost stupid feeling in the front of the brain. His grandfather came down the front hall and gave Patrick a revolver.

“I don’t want that,” Patrick said.

“You ought to take something.”

“I’m taking me, Grandpa.”

“I think you ought to shoot the sonofabitch until you get tired of it.”

“Well, I’m going to go down there and that’s about all I know about it.”

Patrick left the house and went to the barn and got an English blackthorn cane that had an ingenious ruler which slid out to measure the height of horses in hands.

The appointment desk lay in the eyeline of Patwell’s open door, so that Patwell, sighting over the blue-washed Deadrock crone at the phone bank, could see Patrick had arrived. There were about ten reporters and secretaries in a large blond room without a view and a wilderness of baked-enamel office equipment in soothing gray. Patrick stared back at the faces and was refueled in his anger to know that these were the typists and copy editors and that they possessed a little glee that didn’t belong to them.