Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“Okay, let’s buck up here now.”

“Very well,” she said.

“Are we at the crossroads?”

“I have no idea.”

“Can one have fun at the crossroads?”

“I have had no reports as to that,” she said.

“For instance, having disguised myself as a nurse, shall I pull Tio’s various life-support connections?”

“There are none.”

“But if there were.”

“There aren’t.”

“Ball breaker.”

“Now, now.”

Of course, they were trying to work themselves into a reckless state of mind, a form of play in the face of grave consequences familiar to the bandits and thrill-killers of history. This time it wasn’t working. It was undemonstrated that Claire lacked love for Tio. It was not clear that Patrick had a plan. Most of all, everything with respect of the heart’s grave and eternal sweep seemed at odds with the constant machine-gunning of the age.

“I do love you,” she said so fatally as to put it beside desolations he had already come to know, ones which played human hope against arithmetic and impossibility. Meanwhile it seemed that not only was Patrick drunk but he was about to break down. Who wanted to go dancing and put up with this?

“I know what you’re thinking. But you’re going to have to pull yourself together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cheer up.” It was the only thing she could have said to return Patrick to the ground and make him stop circulating with ghosts and faulty desire. A car crashed outside and there was a long jingle of glass, a stuck horn.

“They’re playing our song,” said a revitalized Patrick, sweeping Claire to the floor for a turn.

AT CLOSING TIME SHE WANTED TO BE TAKEN HOME; AND IT was clear she meant to be dropped off, that Patrick was to go to his own place. He said that he didn’t understand. They were both slightly drunk. Couples swarmed past, carrying plastic to-go cups. One bartender had moved next to the door opposite the bouncer, who was sitting on a Naugahyde-and-steel kitchen chair. His thighs pressed together all the way to his knees, and he reviewed departing customers as though they were only going on parole.

Patrick started the engine. “What is this?”

“What is what?”

“Just dropping you off?”

“Time to think. I mean that, Patrick.”

“You mean as if there were an answer.”

“That’s just what I mean.”

“Well, you’ll have to outgrow that,” said Patrick. He meant nothing enigmatic by his remark, and in fact the notion hung over the entire ride to Claire’s ranch, suggesting there was something to it. Therefore — though it had been a superb evening, given the time and place, most of the immediate gloom kept at bay — Claire went straight to the house. Patrick wheeled the truck’s lights against the scattered buildings and suppressed an urge to go back into town and look for some kind of trouble. He was beyond that; he headed home to the Heart Bar Ranch — that is, his inheritance with its increasingly vacant buildings and rooms.

By nine in the morning he had reduced the broader effects of his hangover by ruthless scrubbing in the shower, harsh versions of the remaining ablutions, clean clothes and coffee with his grandfather.

“I forgot to send in the meter reading. So they came out and did it and charged us.” His grandfather delicately tested the layer of cream on his coffee with the tip of his spoon; then he gave it a stroke and it all twirled to color. He sipped. “One guy to drive the truck. One guy to read the meter and write it down. There’ll be a third person to bill us for the extra, which is five dollars. The electric company is gonna be fifty bucks in the hole.”

“Everything else all right?”

“Seems so. I’ve been out on Truman. Everybody looks sound. One yearling pulling up a back leg. I don’t see a stifle there or anything to be concerned about, though.

I’ve paid no attention to the irrigated ground. I shut off the wheel line and the hell with it. Seems like Truman’s gaits have improved. That old dogtrot’s practically a rack now. Wish I could take him to town.”

An hour later, ignoring official visiting hours, he was sitting next to Tio’s bed. Tio said, “This is just foolish.”

“Maybe not.”

“You reach a certain age, I think, when you haven’t got your house in order and you start seeking out bad situations.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?” Patrick asked.

“I see you as some character who joins the Foreign Legion hoping to be killed by Arabs because his dog has died. And if everything goes well and they put a bullet in him way out there on the desert, the dog is still the only one to feel sorry for.”

Patrick was silenced, not simply by the creeping appropriateness of the speech, but by the glimpse of that in Tio which had drawn Claire: the character, the oil-field voodoo.

“Who do we feel sorry for in your life?” Patrick asked.

“Always been hard to say. I had begun, once I began, to figure out who’d had who. Got close, I mean extra close, when — snap — I started my rigor mortis routine. Never been much in the long run. Casts its little old shadow on things. Course, from a cold-ass business point of view, a guy doesn’t want to weigh in as a nut. But some things can’t be helped. And if I could help this, then what could I do? Kill you? Kill her? Kill myself? God works in mysterious ways, I’m a bald-ass liar if he don’t. Nothing more ruinous to my expectations in life than waving a pistol around or farming out crimes that point an accusing finger at me. Slow grind don’t set you in your place, then I’m a nigger aviator. Just remember this, Fitzpatrick: I’ve got a gadget-filled mind. And I’ve got a gadget for every situation.”

A brilliant light — brilliant suggesting something momentary, as a flare — fell upon Patrick, who staggered very slightly and acknowledged acquaintances with a quick sideways tip of the head, a gesture he had not formerly used in America. At Front Street in the clangor of the shunting yard, he grinned to himself and thought: Rue Northern Pacific … Calle Caboose. Perhaps this is the caboose. The noose of the caboose. The last car before the vanishing rails, a view entirely different from that from the engine.

Everything from finding the truck to returning to Silver Stake seemed to happen at half speed. Why in a movie camera did you have to run the film through at high speed to produce slow motion? Why couldn’t things happen “in a wink” as they did in the books he read as a boy? The desire to use up the road in a wink is the way the highspeed camera of the drunk’s brain produces accidents, the mad wish for change.

In the last mile before camp, perhaps some admission was at hand, no sheepish acquiescence to the occasion, but an actual acknowledgment of all the signs and semaphors and general messages from headquarters that the very thing he had begun to hang his fatigued hopes upon was out of the question.

He opened his jackknife to cut the black twine on the baled prairie hay. He separated that into flakes and fed them into the small corral so that the horses could eat well away from one another. He knocked the grain pannier to scatter possible mice and brought Leafy a bucket of oats. He sat down rather heavily before her and held the bucket. She exhaled across his head and face questioningly before dropping her muzzle into the grain. She ate with the regularity of a horse who will be fed again; and when Patrick held his hands around the strangely delicate pasterns, feeling the heat that arose from the coronal bands of hoof, she stopped, pricked her ears forward, stared with the black and endless eyes that had made him cut her out from the other foals numerous springs ago and went back to eating. Patrick had imagined she was worried about him, that he was somebody. Then the patterned movement, observed from this crazy angle of legs — hoofs all as different as seashells — and the disappearance of everything into the dark: the orderly rotation of big animals according to their decorum from feed to water to standing sleep, a movement throughout the night that never disturbed Patrick, sleeping face down in the mountain corral.