Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

Sling the mattress over on the coil springs, to the side upon which no pack rat has trod. Claire made up the bunk with the woolen blanket so that it looked like a Pullman berth on a silver shadow train flying through the Carolinas in last light. Claire was a bow beneath him, thumbs indenting his arms, intense this side of screaming. Then her face tipped to one side. And Patrick stared down at her strong bare body as he entered again and again. He wanted to say that sufficiency rather than salvation was at issue. Then, jetting into her, there swept over him an indifference to their danger. Therefore, he shut the hell up and for the moment was glad to be home.

Blanket over his shoulders, Patrick attended to the interior of the little ship set against the hard evergreens, now throwing the peculiar pulsing light of a pressure lantern through the imperfect windows. He took the claw hammer and, clutching the blanket around himself as though modesty continued to be an issue, battered down the exposed nails that years of frost had heaved up out of the flooring. He put perhaps more effort into this than it entirely required.

“Patrick, Tio was my neighbor in Oklahoma. His mother virtually raised me. We’d hit it pretty good and there wasn’t time for us kids at our house. There wasn’t a thing wrong with him, there really wasn’t. Anyway, I married him. And then after that — and maybe this is where I feel like I broke with something I never should have — after that, I took up with my people’s views. Which is not necessarily bad in and of itself; but the situation was that I had all the leverage and pretty soon we weren’t in high school and we weren’t at A & M and then we weren’t even in Tulsa. And pretty soon it was pretty damned fast and I had broken his heart one too many times. But by the time I was sorry there was something there in him that was gone for good.”

“How had you broken his heart one too many times?”

“That will never be any of your business.”

Patrick thought, You are in your perfect little cabin, which you have seen as a ship on an empty sea; and the light and the air seem to substantiate your happiness as you putter around in your wigwam blanket tapping back nails. And then there is something not unlike the blind flash experienced by those whose homes have suddenly been illuminated by the voluminous and unwelcome light of a flamethrower, or some self-immolating madman who picked your yard, or a bad wire, a meteor, an act of God … gasoline.

Patrick said, “That’s enough for me. I don’t want to hear any more.”

“To start with, Tio was all right. But he’s not all right anymore.”

“What was all right about him? I don’t want to hear this.”

“He had just so much talent but he busted a gut for that. And about the two thousandth storage tank my people tried to shove down his throat, his mind quit that little bit, and in Tio’s mind he was an oilman. Then he had airplanes, stewardesses and guns. He learned to farm things out. He bought everything he wore at Cutter Bill’s in Dallas. He never rode a horse but now he couldn’t miss Ruidoso. He began to speak of his daddy. His daddy was what you’d call an Okie with a capital O, little ole thin-lipped Ford parts manager out at the four corners. Despite his redneck ways, he always wanted Tio to buckle when it came to those tanks, however many fourflushers, missed connections or falsified airline tickets that might have entailed.”

“This has grown too heavy. This is becoming quite brutal. And anyway, all I wanted was your ass.” His throat grabbed.

“C’mere, Mr. Wretch.”

“No, now wait a minute.”

“For what. Give me the blanket, anyway.” She began to sing. It had become obvious that she was, to a highly refined degree, hysterical. “ ‘I’ve been to Redwood, I’ve been to Hollywood—’ ”

“Oh, stop this. Stop!”

But by then she was crying and Patrick could only stand by, stove heat to his back, wrapped in his dopy blanket.

“Please stop.”

So a night passed without much sleep; then just before light a lynx screamed in the rocks and Patrick got up to fire the stove once again, preparing to make breakfast. He stopped to reach under the blanket, which was pulled over Claire’s head, and with the morning hands of a sleepy cook, examined her entire body, just to do that, before she could wake up. He held his hands against his face, then cracked the eggs one by one, watching them drop into the white bowl. He stared at them. The vague anticipatory birds, too small to shoot, the ones that ruin all-nighters, began to make specific announcements from the surrounding brush. When he went out to the creek to fill the percolator, the stony air stung Patrick’s skin. And as soon as the first brown bubble appeared in the glass top, he slipped back under the blanket to rediscover Claire’s expectant and dreaming heat.

Patrick put breakfast on the table. The cabin was warm now. He could think of only one fact: Nobody knows where we are. But we’ve been here overnight and that is a declaration.

“This is extremely wonderful, Patrick.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m worried.”

“I know you must be. But if we could suspend that—”

“Let’s try. We shall see us try.”

They made a decent attempt at making an island of the place, like an English couple eating marmalade in an air raid. Patrick had parked the truck nearly against the cabin in case the lantern inside didn’t work; but when he glanced up and saw the one headlight in the window, it frightened him for an instant. He thought, With all my reputation for independence and for being warlike, it would seem I’m afraid of everything; it was one of the secrets he had that he had never cared to keep. But now he wanted to be courageous, because without it he had no chance of holding Claire. There were so many questions about her existence that would have to have help; and it was Patrick who had brought everything to a head with his codified silences with Tio. Hiding in the woods wasn’t going to do for long. Lastly, he realized it was the headlight of his own truck.

“Let me ask you something,” he said, testing his bravery. “Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go see Tio.”

At this point there were no gestures that could accompany such extreme statements. It just had to be said across the table. Anyway, Patrick was going. He didn’t look sure of himself and Claire seemed too depleted to respond.

PATRICK’S HEART WAS POUNDING WHEN HE CLIMBED FROM the truck. He deliberately walked past the front window so that he could glance inside. The Cadillac was tilted up on the slope to the lawn; and he remembered that that was where he had seen it last — a precise parking habit. But mainly he noticed the huge tire prints of some powerful machine across the new lawn in a big arc that took them out of the place — not down the road but directly out through the sagebrush. Then, he noticed the flies on the window, thousands of them.

He knocked without getting an answer. So he knocked again. He craned to see past the angle of the hallway into the kitchen, but could discern nothing. He tried the door and found it open. He walked in among coatracks festooned with deluxe sporting clothes and was overpowered by some awful smell. He was completely frightened, but he worked his way into the kitchen, calling out Tio’s name ahead of himself through the kitchen and into the living room.

The living room was ruined with broken bottles and glasses, turned-over furniture and, worst of all, the carcasses of coyotes, some skinned so that they looked alive, veined and bug-eyed, in reaching-out postures so distinctive as to suggest they ran even in death. Hides, curled up and stinking, one hanging on the ninth largest whitetail ever killed in Texas, all swam under a mantle of flies. Patrick rolled open the windows and turned the heat off.