Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“Sure. Can we go to the movies?”

“I’m pretty tired, Grampa.”

“Or there’s one with Greer Garson on TV. It’s about a factory, I think.”

“Maybe that would be better. Besides it’ll be late once these dishes are cleaned up.”

“I’ll help.”

“Okay.”

“Tomorrow can we look at apartments?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t remember which rifle this went to,” said his grandfather in disgust, placing the cartridge next to the Jell-O. “I think it was that one that the horse fell with coming out of Falls Creek with Arnie.”

“I didn’t know Arnie, Gramp.” Patrick was sick of these unreferenced tours of memory. Fucking Arnie, anyway.

“He was the scissorbill from up around Plentywood. I don’t know. Anyway, I know it’s gone.”

“You want a drink?”

“No. That was a funny-looking machine, that helicopter. Shame Mary couldn’t have seen it. I didn’t have my hat and my hair was blowing all over. I got dirt in my nose. It went straight up and I lost it in the sun. It was exactly like the movies. Maybe it was full of prisoners and there’s this guy who didn’t shave, with a tommy gun.”

Patrick was getting depressed as he cooked. Tio, he guessed, was home. He literally pined for Claire and there wasn’t anything he could think to do about it. And there was something about his grandfather’s running on, which didn’t usually bother him, that was getting at his nerves. Still, he could fall back on the day’s work, a new regime toward bringing the ranch back to order. There was some warm memory tugging at him that he couldn’t quite isolate; and as he cooked, he searched his mind for it, feeling that it would cheer him up. Then it came: It was the velvet hydraulic rush of his tank over Germany, the orderly positions of the crew, and being the captain.

“Fitzpatrick.”

“Hey, Tio.”

“Awfully sorry about your sister.”

“Thanks for saying so.”

“And remember, it was her right to do that. She’s the only one to know if it was a good idea. It can be just the thing; I’m persuaded of that.”

“Okay.”

“Say, how much do you want for your ranch?”

“It’s not for sale, Tio.”

“I just went down and dumped that Cat-Track joint that was such a thorn in our sides, that quicksand trap on the north Canadian, and the money’s burning a hole in my pocket.”

“This is my grandfather’s and my home.”

“Well, move ass to town. I want to spend this dinero. The old man tell you I came and looked at the place?”

“Were you in a helicopter?”

“That was me. That you come out in the yard at suppertime?”

“Yup.”

“I thought so. Say, are you sleeping with my wife?”

Not a word in reply.

“Leafy, am I not thoughtless? I am. Left you in a cold corral with no kisses. Here is a kiss. What a beautiful horse you are.” Leafy exhaled and changed weight on her feet. It seemed so extraordinary to Patrick that this watermarked mare with eyes like tide pools could also be twelve hundred pounds of orchestral muscle, could trust and work for you, could ride the continually moving hands of the mortal clock with you, could take you in the hills, help you win a rodeo or work cattle, could send you gliding with new tallness on a part of the earth that was worth all the trouble. “What do you know of trouble, Leafy? Or do you take the position that it is my department?”

Onward to the restoration of order: mucking stalls, wheelbarrowing the manure across the road onto the rich pile that would be so useful to a determined gardener with a nice ass. Then he went up on the metal roof of the granary before it got too hot and tarred over the nail holes as he had to each year. He had put the roof on and had nailed in the troughs of the corrugation instead of the lands, as one is supposed to, and so it had to be tarred yearly. He was determined to ride Leafy today because he thought he glimpsed sadness-for-no-reason in her eyes. When Leafy was born, her mother dropped her in the last piece of snow in a spring pasture. Patrick found the foal, a clear, veinous membrane around her shoulders, shivering in the snow, her seashell hooves just beginning to harden in the air. He put an arm under her butt and one under her neck and lifted her out onto the warming prairie grass while the mother nickered in concern. Then he drew the membrane down off her body and let the mare lick her dry. The watermarks in her coat were like leaves and Patrick named her while the mare contracted and drove out the afterbirth; Patrick lifted the placenta, shaped like the bottom of a pair of long underwear with one short leg, and scrutinized it for completeness; a missing piece retained in the mare could be fatal. Leafy wobbled to her feet after pitching over a few times and stood, straight-legged, springy-pasterned, with her exaggerated encapsulated knees. Patrick put iodine on her navel stump, which made her leap. The mother stood and Leafy ducked under to nurse. The mare kept lifting a rear leg from the pain of new milk; then the two, big and little shadows, glided away to their life together. Patrick went off through the orchard; and by the time he had started down the hill to the house, he could hear the birds arguing in the afterbirth. In his mind he had marked the foal for himself.

“At least can we look for apartments tomorrow?”

“I promise. I’m just tired, Grampa. Besides, you want to see them in the light.”

“They have lights, Pat. They have electricity, for crying out loud. They’re about two blocks from the movies.”

“Still, you want the outside to be nice. You want to look around.”

“If I was worried how they looked on the outside, I’d stay on the ranch.”

“I don’t know what this bee in your bonnet is, anyway. Why aren’t you staying on the ranch?”

“Because I see things I can’t do anymore, and in an apartment I won’t. I won’t have to watch you do things worse than I did them. I’ll be protected from such a sight.” Patrick was angered this time by his grandfather. But even irritated, he dreaded seeing the apartments.

THE LIGHTS WHEELED AGAINST THE HOUSE AND STOPPED. Then Patrick could see only the darkness. But when the car door opened after quite a long moment and its interior lights went on, he saw that it was Claire. He raced down the stairs to the front door. He turned on the hall light and stepped outside. When she got to the door, Patrick felt the ardent flush of blood through his chest.

He said, “I had a sore knee,” then held her and kissed her. She seemed limp or exhausted.

“You what?”

“I wanted to tell you yesterday I had a sore knee. You weren’t here. It’s not sore anymore, but I wanted to be a baby about it.”

Claire followed Patrick through the doorway, past ten year’s history of overshoes, overshoes with lost buckles, overshoes covered with the manure of cattle long since vanished through takeout windows, and overshoes of drunks who failed to return. They sat in the kitchen and Patrick found her request for whiskey an inspiration; so now the cheerful label of George Dickel’s bourbon was between them, and if it had not been for Claire’s strangely stricken look, all would have been not just happy but beyond belief. It was the middle of the night and they were alone together on Patrick’s ranch. He knew there was something going on; but he was determined to turn things into his first impression no matter what.

“He’s home.”

“I know. I talked to him.”

“Well, I don’t know what his problem is.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s just kind of raging around. He sent his pilot into town. First he was going to sleep in the helicopter. I kept saying what’s the matter, and he says it’s boring. I’m bored. I said I was sorry. When he goes down there and they get on those phones, a lot of them start using pills and they get very cross. But this time I don’t know. He used to be so sweet. I think he must know something. Then he came inside and said we were going to forget it; but first he just wanted to know what in the hell I had achieved in his absence. I said nothing and he said he didn’t think so. Well, we even got over that , which maybe was too bad”—she refilled her drink one-handed, leaning on the other, the pale thick braid coming over her shoulder across her pretty breasts—“because when we went upstairs, he grew extremely nasty with me.”