Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

Very generously, Catches had had the film developed of the cat stalking moths in Grassrange. In most of them the cat was a light-struck incubus figure, the light something like a separate galaxy, and the moths strangely technological creatures, as aerodynamic and systems-ridden as ICBMs. Patrick thought this was a lovely gift and hoped that the wherewithal had come from the night of Loretta, Deirdre and Tana. The letter said, “What are you doing?”

Patrick decided that in the Castilian walk-up he could go native. He would wear his hair swept back from the forehead and hold his black tobacco cigarette out at the ends of his fingertips. He would bring the pimentos back in the oiled paper, the anchovies and the terribly young lamb. He’d go to the odd mass or two, not in preparation , as he might now in the remorseless West; but in the healthy, ghoulish attendance of Spain, to stare at the wooden blood and pus of the old Stations of the Cross. He could have fun there and not have foreboding. He could have the time of his life making smart salads by the stone sink. It could be tops in mindless. He could duck the English secretaries like the plague, as each had already been hopelessly wounded by her own London travel agent. In any case, his crude post-coital bathrobe slopping about was sure to cause no harm to anyone; and the question of smelly imbroglios starring oil-minded Southwesterners could not happen to him, stainless in Madrid, with day help. The black olives in the salad would have wrinkles like the faces of men who have lived a long time, innocent of violence.

“What have you done!”

“Oh dear.”

“I have narrowly escaped with my life!”

“I see it now. I said the wrong thing.” Patrick was thinking of his conversation with Tio.

“You sure did.”

“Give me the headlines.”

“Well, they rolled in and shot everything that moved. They’re in the living room now, knocking back Turkey and getting too close to Tio for comfort.”

“Wait a minute. What are you talking about?”

“The coyote hunters.”

“Have you talked to Tio?”

“Not yet. But he’s crazy about them. He’s in there yelling First Amendment and States’ Rights. They’re real drunk and it’s getting crude.”

“You haven’t talked to him …”

“I talked to him right up till the coyote hunters and that was all she wrote. He said he might make a trip today in the helicopter. But if he didn’t, I’d of wished he had.”

“Did you know that Tio and I spoke?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’m not sure what was said. But I think we agreed you and I were sleeping together and we wouldn’t talk about it.”

“Do you really think that?” Claire asked in an exhalation of terror.

“I’m afraid I do.”

“I better start running, then. I better clear out.”

She rang off in panic. Had Patrick endangered her? He thought to himself, I’d better not have. That would have been well beyond the jaggedness-of-the-everyday.

Something was making him feel that he had touched something he didn’t completely understand. He had once, washing dishes, reached deep into the suds and been flattened by electrical shock. The root system of the China willow had carried a power line into the septic tank. From Patrick’s point of view, the tree had nearly electrocuted him. It took a plumber and an electrician to explain the occasion. Patrick said, “I was only washing dishes.”

The plumber said, “When lightning flew out your ass.”

Something about Tio was like washing those dishes.

CLAIRE ARRIVED AND SAID THAT THE RANCH WOULDN’T DO. The same applied to hotels, motels, rest stops and locally notorious zones of cohabitation.

“How about a johnboat?”

“No.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Did I do the wrong thing? Can’t you say you want to be with me?”

“I just don’t want to get nailed in the crosswalk.”

They ended up at the line shack on Silver Stake. Patrick rammed and jammed his way in there, missing the vacant shafts, in his truck. Meadowlarks showered out of the buckbrush at the advent of grill and bumper. The combination to the lock, hanging on the warped plank pine door, was that of Marion Easterly: four zeros; easy to remember. The roof was made from sheets of aluminum used in the newsprint process. A practiced eye could invert them to the unweathered, unoxidized side and find the same old crap in aluminum immemorial. Dog eats baby. Indiana woman gives birth to five-pound bass. Silver Stake was on the Heart Bar allotment. The walls were made of the miserable little east-slope logs with their millions of pin knots. It had a patent heater and a pack rat bunk. It was kind of a cowboy joint, hidden upside a terrific wilderness. Patrick missed his Charlie Parker records.

He missed Bud Powell as well, despite recent associations. He did have the following to protect Guinevere from storm and flood: one sledge, two splitting wedges, a double-bitted axe, kitchen matches, Winchester, twenty rounds Remington Core-Lokt 140 grain, Pabst Blue Ribbon (a case), potatoes, onions, stew beef, fifty-pound sack of pinto beans (“I’ve got to stock up for fall roundup! I am not making an an an assumption!”), peppers and pepper derivatives — Frank’s Louisiana hot sauce, ancho peppers, chilipiquines and Tabasco. Blankets: five-line Hudson Bay, two. Artilleryman’s gloves. Harry Truman biography: “When I hear them praying in the amen corner, I head home to lock the smokehouse.” Something like that.

“Why do we have all this stuff?”

“It’s our new life!”

“What!”

Drip-baste cast-iron pot; skillet con giant flapjack flipper; and the requisite lid from an old Maytag washing machine. Soap: laundry, dish and personal. Steel wool. Dry rack, dish set with bluebirds, and percolator.

“It looks like we’re here to stay! And we’re not!”

Patrick gave the lock the full zeros and they were inside. Rat manure and newspaper bits were strewed on the adzed floor timbers. From the window one little turn of Silver Stake Creek turned up to the right and disappeared like a live comma. It was a world that yielded only to a broom, flung-open windows and wood smoke. They threw the flypaper out in the snow with its horrid quarter-pound load of dead flies. Thermal inversion pushed the first smoke down the chimney, and then the flue heated and sucked. There were empty cartridges on the windowsill, a calendar that didn’t work this year and a coyote skull for a soap holder. Next to the sink was a cheap enamel pitcher, in flecked white and gray, for dishwater.

“God, I don’t know,” said Claire. “Are we preparing a moonlit rendezvous?”

“I really don’t know, either. You said you wanted to get out of town.”

“But this has the earmarks of a shack-up. What I had in mind was my life. Saving of same. I wanted to miss the initial flash. Hold me. There. Oh dear, Patrick. What in God’s name did you do?”

Patrick split up the small fatty pine chunks for the woodstove. “I’ve been trying to think why I did that. Honestly, I thought it was what you would have insisted upon. Not a shack-up. I know it’s a shack, but … well.”

“Again.”

“What?”

“Hold me.” He could feel her wary, wild shape through her clothes.

They stood in the cool cabin, the pine beginning to catch and the fog of condensation starting to spread on the cold windows; the awful, clear mountain light diminished and modulated its measuring-stick quality, its cartoon illumination of human events. The cabin filled with golden light, finally; the stove crackled and the cold fall sun hung, suspended and inglorious, in the steamy glass. The minute bough tips of evergreen touched the same glass, casting spidery black shadows in the steam.