Thomas Mcguane: Nobody's Angel

“You ought to back your horses more if you want them to get their butts down,” said his grandfather.

“Don’t tell me to back my horses. I get their feet under them by making them want to stop.”

“They aren’t tanks, Patrick.”

“I rode some colts you broke twenty years ago. Couldn’t turn them around in a twenty-acre pasture.”

“Why don’t I just cook my own eggs tomorrow? Seems like a little favor spoils your temperament. I remember some of them colts and they turned on a dime. Why, you bugger, I broke Leafy’s mother!”

“You cook the eggs.”

When he was away Patrick’s daydreams fell easily back twenty years to summers riding in the hills, spooking game in the springs and down in the blue, shadowy draws, swimming in the gold dredge, girls present, the cold sky-blue submersion a baptism, the best place for the emerging consciousness of women to grow in suitable containment. Even, suddenly in a West German dance hall, remembering the flood of tears at twelve when he’d killed a spike buck in the same little grove where he and his father always cut their Christmas tree. Before that, hunting coyotes, his grandfather had crawled into a cave near Blacktail and found a ceremonially dressed, mummified Indian warrior on a slab of rock. His grandfather refused to tell anyone where the corpse was, and Patrick wore out two saddle horses looking for it. A friend, Jack Adams, later found it over on Mission Creek. “You do not disturb the Old Ones,” his grandfather had said. Then Jack glommed the mummy, making everyone cross. And Patrick himself, on the North Rosebud, had found the scribblings of the phantom ancient Sheepeaters; he had slept in eagle traps and in the coffin-shaped hole in the rock the Crows had made above Massacre Creek. He had seen the skeleton of a Cheyenne girl dressed in an Army coat, disinterred when the railroad bed was widened. Her family had put silver thimbles on every finger to prove to somebody’s god that she was a useful girl who could sew. After his father went to work for Boeing and split up with his mother, Patrick lived with his grandfather and ate so much poached game that the smell of beef nauseated him. He lost the tips of three fingers in his lariat heeling calves in the spring and never went to the movies except to meet girls. He could shoe horses, beat a hunting knife out of an old file, throw a diamond hitch, fix windmills, listen for broken gate valves in the well; and masquerade enough in town to occasionally get his ashes hauled, though he still preferred the sinewy barrel-racers he first met at the gold dredge whose teasing country-ruthless sensuality was somehow smokier than the ten-speeders just learning to roll a number. At sixteen he was jailed twelve times in a row for disorderly conduct; and his father, in the year that he died — a circumstance that left Patrick permanently dented with guilt — borrowed against his share of the ranch and sent Patrick to a preparatory school in the East which thought that a rebellious young cowboy would be a colorful enough addition to a student body that included a Siamese prince with a Corvette, a West German, five Venezuelans and one Negro that they would overlook his poor grades and boisterous history with the law.

They taught him to play soccer. Once again he was in short pants. For a long time he could see his knees in the corners of his eyes when he ran. It made him miss the ball. It was one of the troublesome ways he couldn’t escape his own mind. Later, it got worse.

EVIDENTLY SOMEONE PASSING THROUGH GRASSRANGE HAD given Mary a ride as far as Roundup, then dropped her with a social worker there. The conditions that moved this person to, in effect, turn Mary in were ones that produced concern and not fear: Mary wasn’t making sense. The tough district court judge at Roundup had Mary hauled to Warm Springs, which is Montana’s state mental institution. She had been detained. But the primary problem was that no one could identify her and Mary wasn’t helping. She said that something was always happening to her, but she would tell no one what it was.

Patrick was her custodian once she relinquished her name. He took her home, cruising the interstate in his truck on the intermittently cloudy day. He looked over his sunglasses; he was trying to seem old.

“What’d you read?”

“Two books, over and over.”

“What books were they?”

“Books of poetry, Patrick. I read the poems of Saint Theresa of Avila and the poems of Saint John of the Cross. That car has Ohio plates. How many Ohio songs can you name?”

“You make any friends?”

“One trouble with loony bins is you make friends and then you make enemies, and there are these referee-doctors who don’t seem to be able to stop this seesaw deal between the two. All they do is keep the patients from savaging each other.” She leaned to see herself in the rear-view.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

“Evidently I can’t see life’s purpose.”

“What do you mean ‘evidently’?”

“I mean that that’s what they told me. I didn’t come up with the idea myself.”

“I don’t ever think about life’s purpose,” said Patrick, lying in his teeth.

“Lucky you,” she said. “We got enough gas?”

“We do, and there’s more where that came from.”

Mary was, Patrick thought, such a pretty girl. And she didn’t have the neurasthenic glaze that produced what passed for looks among people who would rather raise orchids. Mary had a strong, clear face, a cascade of oaken hair and a lean, athletic figure. But she also had, Patrick thought, a bad attitude. Certainly no bell-jar lady, though.

It made him worry. He was open-minded and interested in other tastes than his own, normally. But, for instance, being Mary’s older brother produced, just now, the following question: Who is Saint John of the Cross? I thought Jesus was the one with the cross. It was as if the cross was a party favor, a prize for the most serious face.

“Want to stop at Three Forks and get plastered?” Mary inquired. Her hands made laughing shapes in the air, foretelling gala Three Forks. A saloon conjunction of the Missouri headwaters.

“It isn’t the day for that.”

“There’s another one with Ohio plates.”

“I don’t care.”

“Our home state is being deluged by those of Ohio.”

“It’s fair.”

When the universal shitstorm seemed to mount its darkest clouds, Patrick always said that it was fair. Mary fell silent. Her trouble was she thought it wasn’t fair. They’d had words about this before. Mary had said his calling everything fair made him more fatal than any Hindu. People like him, she accused, refused smallpox vaccine. Who did he think he was with this fairness? The truth was nothing was fair. That’s where I’ve got you, said Patrick.

But Mary’s travails had today deprived her of fight. She fixed a stony look upon I-90. She didn’t think any of the signs were funny and she stopped counting Ohio plates. Patrick began to worry. He could hear her breathing.

When they spiraled down the Deadrock off-ramp, Mary said, “The other thing is, I’m in a family way.” The blackbirds shot across the lumberyard, and they both decided that watching them veer between the sawdust stacks was quite the best thing to do.

They passed the smoking waste-burner and log reserves of Big Sky Lumber in silence; and similarly Madison Travertine, where water-cooled saws made weird pink marble slabs out of million-year-old hot-spring mineral accumulations. They crossed Carson’s Bridge over the big river while Patrick considered his next question and the mysterious sign painted on the rocks under the high falcon nests:

PLEASE STOP IT

Nobody knew what the sign meant. In place of direct attention, Patrick accumulated roadside information: ROCK SHOP — AGATES, TERRI’S BEAUTY SHOP, YUMMEE FREEZE, HEREFORDS: MONTANA’S GREATEST TREASURE, U-NAME IT WE’LL FIND IT, a white barn in the turn with a basketball net, a rough-breaks sign, white crosses in Dead Man’s Curve, and the broad, good pastures, defined in the earth slits of flood irrigation. A farmer with a shovel watched the passing water.