Thomas Mcguane: Nobody's Angel

The horses, maybe twenty head, were all in a pod on the far side of the corral, shaded by cottonwoods. Wild rose bushes grew right to the poles, and the sides of the corral were like a tall hedge, illuminated by the pale-pink blossoms. The claybank mare was in the center of the band, nearer the side of the corral, really; and as Patrick closed the gate to walk toward the horses, the mare, butt toward him, shifted her head slightly for better rear-angle vision — out of a very real sense that it was she who was going up to the pasture with Patrick and not the other roughly nineteen. She looked like a shoplifter.

In this bunch there were no kickers, and so Patrick murmured his way gently through the big bodies, feeling their heat and watching the quizzical movement of the claybank mare’s head and ears. Some of the horses kept sleeping, the good old saddle horses, lower lips trembling in massive dreams, one or another rear foot tipped up, weight transferred from muscle to ligament in that horse magic of standing sleep; one or two craning, ignorant yearlings, and Patrick’s hand touched the mare’s flank, which twitched involuntarily, as though he’d shuffled across a carpet and given her a flicker of static electricity. He said softly, “Hey, now,” as he moved toward her head. “Care to go with me to Spain? Little walk-up deal with a cool stone kitchen?” And he had her haltered, turned around and headed for the gate, the mare flopping her feet along, knowing she was going to school.

Patrick brushed her thoroughly, watching the early light go through her coat. Claybank and grulla were his preferred colors; claybank, just like it sounded, a blur away from a copper dun, or a copper dun that had been rolling in alkali dust, then run for a mile until the color started through once more. Grulla was Spanish for blue heron. Grullas had better feet than claybanks and were said to stand the sun well. This far north it didn’t matter. Patrick irrationally believed that anything dun, claybank or buckskin had more cow sense.

He saddled the mare with two Mexican blankets. You had to kind of rub the blankets up onto her or she’d try to pull the hitching rack out of the ground. She was young. And when he pitched the saddle up on her, he held the cinch, girth and billets so that nothing would slap and start her pulling back. Today he tried her in a grazing bit to get her nose out a little; he had been riding her on a higher-ported bit, and she was collecting her head too much, tucking it up like some fool show horse from California. Patrick liked them with their faces out, looking around, their feet under them, not like something in front of the supermarket that takes quarters.

This mare was searching for a reason to be a bronc, as perhaps they all were; so Patrick walked her in a figure eight to untrack her, stood in one stirrup for a moment, then crawled on. By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

Then a half mile in deep grass and early light, time for a smart young horse to have a look around, scare up some meadowlarks, salivate on the copper mouthpiece, get a little ornery bow in her back and get rid of it. Patrick changed his weight from stirrup to stirrup, felt her compensate, then stopped her. She fidgeted a moment, waited, then let the tension go out of her muscles. He moved her out again to the right. All she gave him was her head; so he stopped her, drew her nose each way nearly to his boot, then made a serpentine track across the pasture, trying to get a gradual curve throughout her body in each of her turns. The rowels on his spurs were loose enough that they chinked with her gaits. Patrick used spurs like a pointing finger, pressing movement into a shape, never striking or gouging. And horseback, unlike any other area of his life, he never lost his temper, which, in horsemen, is the final mark of the amateur.

Patrick broke the mare out into a long trot, dropping her back each time she tried to move into a lope. She made one long buck out of irritation, then leveled off like a pacer eating up ground and slowly rotating the cascading hills, to Patrick’s happy observation. I love this scene. It has no booze or women in it, he rejoiced.

He set the mare down twice, liked her stops, then blew her out for half a mile, the new fence going past his eyes like a filament of mercury, and let her jog home while he told her continuously how wonderful she was, what a lovely person she was becoming.

Black coffee and a morning breeze through the paper. Martinsdale Hutterites had recalled three hundred contaminated chickens. Cowboys for Christ was having a benefit. Billings fireman captured with three pounds of methamphetamines. Poplar man shot to death in Wolf Point; Bureau of Indian Affairs investigator and tribal police arrested two men as yet unnamed. Half million in felonious cattle defaults. Formerly known as bum deals, thought Patrick. A new treatment center for compulsive gamblers. Lives shattered by slot machines. Wanted or for sale: TV stand, green-broke horse, ladies’ western suits, four-drawer blond dresser, harvest-gold gas range, three box-trained kittens, nonleak laundry tubs, top dollar for deer and elk hides, Brown Swiss, presently milking, Phoenix or Yuma to share gas. When Patrick’s father went down testing an airplane, fast enough that its exterior skin glowed at night from the friction of the air, the hurtling pulp which had been his father and the navigator and which had passed through the intricate molecular confusion of an exploding aircraft at its contact with eastern Oregon, the paper identified him as Patrick Fitzpatrick of Deadrock, Montana, and the navigator as Del Andrews of Long Beach, California. Great space was given to the model of the aircraft and speculation about a declared salvage value. As so many people have had to wonder, Patrick thought, if my father is dead, how can I be alive? In this way Patrick lost much of his own fear of death. The crash had provoked none of the questions usual to accidental death. There was nothing to identify.

Patrick’s grandfather walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, stared about at the contents, settled for a handful of radishes and sat down.

“What’s the cattle market doing?”

“Haven’t had the radio on,” said Patrick. “Somebody sold a bunch of bred heifers in Billings yesterday for a twenty-seven-hundred-dollar average.”

“Bred how?”

“Shoshone or Chandelier Forever, forgot which. You want me to make you some breakfast?”

“I can rustle.”

“Here, sit down. What do you want?”

“Couple of soft-boiled eggs.”

Patrick started getting them ready. “In Europe there’d be these restaurants that put soft-boiled eggs in little porcelain holders, and they’d cover it with a knitted thing to keep the egg hot.”

“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. I have no desire to see Europe.”

Patrick served the eggs and some toast.

“Down there, there in Oklahoma, they’ve got a toll-free number for the cattle market. I hate having to listen to all this deal on the radio to find what steers brought.”

“Steers aren’t going to make you anything,” Patrick said. He put some English on that.

“Feeding out seven months ain’t going to make you anything.”

“I never said ranching was any good.”

“Talk like that,” said his grandfather feistily, “and you won’t want to fix nothin.”

“Well, just let her fall down then,” Patrick said.

“It ain’t even historical.”

“That’s right.” Historical? That was a first from the old souse.

“And where would you be running this remuda of yours?”

“On the damn forest service.”

“Try it.”

“I may.”

Patrick’s grandfather returned to his eggs, smoldering. Patrick was going to let him make his own tomorrow.