Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“Not like you think.”

“Why don’t you just get rid of the gun so that we can talk?”

“There’s no gun.”

“Why did you say there was?”

“I thought it would have a different effect.”

“I can see that,” Patrick replied.

“Gun’s like a big car. Just something to arrive in. Real anger you do in your shirt-sleeves.”

Patrick got up, uncomfortable, pulled the lamp on over the forge, took the bench brush and tried to be busy, for Tio seemed to bear real forward motion, anger, humiliation, whatever. It was hard to say.

“Usually I get a nap,” said Tio.

“I don’t follow.”

“A nap. I missed mine today.”

“Right …?”

Tio looked dead. “So I’m shot. I gotta go home. I gotta sleep. The restoration process. Let’s pick up where we left off. I’m suckin wind. A big nap will solve that.”

“Well, as you wish.”

“This is me,” said Tio. There when they drove the golden spike, his arms held wide. “Hand in hand with nature. The big snooze.”

Patrick discovered where Tio had parked when the Cadillac pulled out, lights high, from between the oldest cottonwoods. He hung his chaps under the yellow bug light and considered: He missed his nap?

The other thing is, I’ve got to get this bad-minded horse back to his owner. Every time I ride that bastard, I feel like a monkey fucking a football. That’s not a good feeling. And you don’t want to get caught at that.

At evening he was heading for Tio’s ranch with the stud behind in the trailer. By the time he went under the big hanging gate, he could see Tio’s helicopter, and by the time he got as far as the house, he could see Tio inside the helicopter behind its tinted bubble. Patrick felt nervous about this; but he didn’t want the horse around, he didn’t want the business connection, and he didn’t want the excuse for Tio’s visits. Anyway, Tio didn’t bother to look up. Patrick could see vaguely that he had the headset on — probably getting a weather report on the VHF.

So he unloaded the horse and led him carefully, thinking at first, This is this canner’s last chance to get me; recalling Mary’s view that the horse was an instrument of the devil. Leading the horse was like flying a kite: He was just a bad-hearted, bad-minded, uncoordinated canner. And the devil had better instruments.

He put the horse up and stepped out of the stable, a kind of West Coast shack with doors on runners and air-conditioning. Claire was on the porch of the house in her yellow dust-bowl dress, one hand dug into her thick hair.

“Come up here, Patrick!”

“I’ve returned your horse!” he called.

“I see that!”

When he got to the porch, Claire was shaking and her eyes were drawn inward as though to lengthen their focus to eternity.

“He wasn’t any good, really.”

“I couldn’t get him to do anything. As you can imagine, it’s best I return him.”

She stared at Patrick and laughed, either ironically or bitterly — stopping him. Certainly nothing was funny at all.

“Can you come in?”

“This is getting crazy. I don’t understand. I never have understood.”

“Just come in.”

Patrick was lost — lost passing into the house, then lost in its rooms, whose opaque human shadows stood source-less and eerie as the shadows birds cast by starlight. He sensed Claire in her cotton dress no more than he sensed Tio getting his weather forecasts a hundred feet away in an aluminum-and-plexiglass capsule as hermetic and sacrosanct as the Oval Office, Lincoln’s tomb, the seal on bonded liquor, virginity.

“Come here to me.” She shoved the door closed behind him.

“Claire!”

“Shush!” She seized him hard, and by the time he kissed her throat, it was wet with tears.

He whispered, “What’s going on?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Is that true?” Patrick asked emphatically. They each seemed to him terrifyingly unconnected.

“That’s true. Don’t worry about Tio until you go and fetch him.” She pulled — or, rather, twisted — him down onto the divan; and she was barefoot.

She said “Baby” and lifted to slide her yellow dress under her arms. Patrick thought, This is as good a place to die as any. He was not so far gone as not to note that the West’s last stands were less and less appropriate to epic poetry and murals.

“Should I call you baby too?”

“I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t calling you baby. That’s not what it meant.” She was naked now and Patrick awaited a bullet.

“I’ve got to hear what you meant.”

“Last chance.”

“Last chance … Am I going to get killed at this?”

“I don’t see how. I’m not going to kill you.”

Drawing this particular blank, Patrick, in mortal confusion, made love to Claire, who seemed, spasmodic and weeping, finally more martyred than loved. Patrick heard himself a mile off and incoherent.

Then acknowledgment of everything external moving in upon his consciousness appeared as an ice age. He wasn’t a captain or a cowboy. He thought for a moment, literally thought, about what he had set out for; and he knew one thing: he was superfluous.

“Why,” he asked, “have we been put up with?”

“By whom?”

“By your husband.”

“Ask him. I’m through. But you could ask.”

“I will. ”

“Do.”

Tio was dead, exhaust piped into the bubble until the smothered engine quit and Tio went on to the next thing. He hung forward in his harness as though starting the international freestyle; it looked like a long swim indeed. Around his dead face earphones whispered news of a world cracking; but Tio was spared. Lust and boredom provided no such indemnity. It made thrill-killers of nice people.

“Do you think we can fly this thing?”

“Oh, Patrick.”

“Are you shattered?”

“Not really.”

“Did you love him?”

“Sure.”

“I wonder what happened.”

“No, you ont.”

“I think I really do.”

“We fucked him to death.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“And you thought he was a bad man. You thought if you pushed him hard enough, he’d put you out of your misery, like your sister did for herself. But he wasn’t a bad man.”

“I mean, is it the main thing to be put out of your misery?”

“Are you miserable?” Claire asked.

“Are you?”

“No. I’m in mourning. I wanted to celebrate it with you before you got miserable again. That part of you deserves to live. The rest should be in there with Tio. You might enjoy him like this.” She laughed a high, uncontrolled laugh, one that masked not tears but something wild and unreachable. Patrick felt, as he looked into the bubble, that he looked through the bars of a prison; and that in some terrifying way, the voice of Claire was the bright music of the jailer’s keys fading in the corridor.

“Would you like to go back in?”

“I really don’t think so.”

“Scared.”

“Yes.”

“All you know is what I knew when we went inside before.”

“I realize that.”

“No guts, no glory,” she said.

“I’m not going in with you.”

Claire stretched her arms over the plexiglass and stared inside. “I guess if I’ve done nothing else, I showed one of you how to carry the weight and not go to pieces. I didn’t go to pieces. He did and you’re about to. I’ve got this feeling I don’t want to lose that. The love was real in each case.”

You could see the house in its own lights. It looked like an ad for a paint that was weatherproof and that banished evil. It looked flat.

“Is the love gone?” he asked.

“What if it is?”