Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“I’ll pick you up in three hours, ladies,” said Claire.

“Here?”

“No, I’ll drive up.”

They watched the women walking toward the lights until they were absolutely perfect silhouettes, moving like three black flames to the house.

Patrick turned the car around and started downhill. When he had gone far enough, he turned the lights on and glanced over at Claire. Her face was shining with tears. For three hours, they were on their own, the thud of freedom. Patrick thought of, and rejected, numerous simple questions before he spoke. Then he asked, “Why did you marry him?” She turned quickly to look at Patrick.

“Because I loved him,” she said; she was angry.

At the bottom of the hill, you could turn north or south on the pavement, or west toward the Bridger on the county road. “Boy, this is a quiet car,” Patrick said, then stopped to think. He turned left to get closer to his ranch and to calm his nerves. They were nearly to Deadrock, circling slowly above the lights on the interstate, before Claire spoke: “Will we wake anybody up if we go back to your place?”

“No.”

“It will be quiet there?”

“Could be a little too quiet.”

The interstate kept curving into them, fanning the lights of Deadrock farther and farther northward. The trucks eastbound in the night mounted from the valley and rolled with a peculiarly fatal motion until they were out of sight.

They made love in Patrick’s bedroom. They had simply not spoken. There had been a temptation to leave the motor running. Claire’s breath shuddered and she held on to Patrick rather than held him. He was overcome with a blind tenderness. They each smelled like the women in the car. He held her hips and turned his forehead into her fragant neck and felt his own throat ache pointlessly. Suddenly it was out of their control, like a movie film that has come off its sprockets, leaving vivid incomprehensible images. Then stops, awaiting repair.

“Can you breathe?”

“Yes.”

“Like this?”

“Yes, I can breathe fine.”

“Sun’ll be up in three hours.”

“I know it.”

“But you’ll still be driving in the dark.”

There was a very long spell of silence.

“I’ll be driving home from here in the dark.” Then she burst into convulsively merry laughter. “The sun should be up by the time I get back from dropping the ladies— Oh God! ”

Patrick burned, watching her dress. There were things Claire did, not entirely necessary to the simple restoration of her clothes. The braid lay in the channel of her back. She leaned to kiss him good night before she had covered her breasts. Her eyes had now a velocity, an intention and loss of weakness that made him know that although their time was gone, she wanted him again.

“Amo shuffle on home.”

“I think you should.”

“Natty don’t work for no CIA.”

“That’s clear.”

“I have chores.”

“Right …”

“No car pool up that way. Babylon by Cadillac.”

“Seems like a shame.”

“What?”

“Hit and run. Nothing eventual.”

She said, “It’s what we have.”

IN THE THREE HOURS PATRICK SLEPT, A FOOT OF SNOW FELL. It must have fallen on an almost windless night, because where it cleaved at roof’s edge the angle was perfect and vertical. Some of it fell in powdery sheets onto the still-green lilacs. But the world was white as Christmas, and the Absarokas beyond seemed a subtle interstitial variant of that same whiteness, a photograph with two or three planes of focus. The first thing that Patrick heard was a rifle booming into silence; and when he went to the window in his drawers, he could see down into the yard, where his grandfather, head shrouded under an immemorially weathered John B. Stetson hat, was sighting in his old Winchester. He had dragged a table into the yard and was firing toward the elevation of earth beneath the orchard. Patrick took down the binoculars from on top of his dresser to see what he was firing at: an old Hills Brothers can, with the man in the yellow caftan drinking coffee, wedged in the bank. As Patrick watched, the caftan disappeared, round after thundering round, until only the head and fez remained; then in one resonant crack that rolled down the creek bottom, they were gone too. The old man restacked the empties in their box, removed five live rounds, put those in his shirt pocket and stood up on the one good leg and the one slightly crooked, mule-kicked leg that had nearly got him into movies.

By God, thought Patrick, the bastard can still shoot.

Once Patrick got downstairs, he could smell Hoppe’s number 9 powder solvent, one of the most sentimental fragrances in the land. Before he turned the corner into the kitchen, he could make out the muscles in the old man’s forearm as he raced the cleaning rod in and out of the barrel; he stopped and watched the patches accumulate from gray-black to white, heard the minute amphibian sound of the oilcan and the swish of cloth. Then when he heard the rifle stand in the corner with a solid thud, he imagined it would be safe to reveal himself without making any promises about hunting trips.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, Pat.”

“That you shooting?”

“Yes. The old smokepole will still drive a tack.”

“What were you shooting at?”

“I was shooting a little tin. I shot it till I got tired of it. Then I quit.”

“I suppose you want to go hunting.”

“No, I don’t. I want to look at apartments. You take me. I can’t be arguing with landlords. I’m the ramrod of the Heart Bar.”

Arnoldcrest Apartments was built in the twenties and, architecturally, made more than a passing bow to the phantom district known as Constantinople. There was something secretive about its ground plan, a suggestion of courtyards and fountains that never materialized from the beginning, arched entryways and recessed windows — all once the hope of a man dreaming of the deserts of the East, but quite another thing to the widows and pensioners of the Northwest, flattened by snow, fixed incomes and a hundred thousand newspapers. On the other hand, one could hang out an upstairs window, perhaps a little perilous for the octogenarians, and see nine Montana bars. That was not all bad. They could be reached in five minutes at a walk, three at a trot, round-trip times to the contrary notwithstanding.

They walked from the parked truck. Patrick thought, It’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. Why did Constantinople get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’. This is what the yellow man in the fez was trying to tell me: We’ve got everything here but the harem.

Mr. Meacham, the manager, had been in the merchant marine and wore his khakis and T-shirt and crew cut with the same directness of statement — washing versus pressing, cleanness versus grooming — that Patrick imagined had been the measure of the man on the high seas. He had two further thoughts in a row: One, is this how you dress if it is a regular part of your job to take Arnoldcrest clients out the door feet first? Two, is this how you dress to set up a disciplinary contrast with old cowboys and ranchers who do not maintain up-to-date standards of personal hygiene? In other words, does Mr. Meacham batter a door down with his crew cut when he suspects bed wetting? This was a little like packing lunch for Junior’s first school day. Patrick was extremely nervous.

First they explored a one-bedroom. It had plaster walls and milled wainscoting that must have been done on a production line fifty years ago. The sockets were waist-high, and there was an overhead fixture in the livingroom with green glass cherubs. The steam registers bracketed the one decent-sized window, and the window gave onto a view of the Emperial Theater and the Hawk, a little bar that sold cheese and cigars.