Thomas Mcguane: Nobody's Angel

“Who’s the father?”

“Not telling.” Drawing a lower eyelid down with her forefinger: Share God’s joke on us.

“Okay.”

“Do you have any babies in Germany?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Little visits you might have made?”

“Who said I made little visits? I was busy in the tank. You need a shower.”

“Boy, do I.”

“I should warn you, Mary.”

“What?”

“ Mother’s visit coming up soon.”

“Whew.”

“So …”

“I don’t know. Tough it out, I guess.”

“Are you stable?” Patrick inquired.

“Terribly. I wouldn’t have given them my name otherwise. I let them circulate my fingerprints while I caught up on some reading.” She patted her satchel of books.

Patrick glanced over at Mary, glimpsed the eczema-like condition that left her hands cracked and red from the nervous attacks. They fluttered under his gaze.

“How’s Grandpa?” she asked.

“Just a little bit remote. You catch him at the right time and he pours it all out. Otherwise, he’s kind of floating around.” He was slipping toward Mary.

“That’s because he’s old,” said Mary. “And because he knows he’s going to die soon.”

Patrick could supply no refutation: He was in midair; he had no family and he wasn’t in love. He did try to make his sigh as significant as possible. Mary arched her brows.

“What have you been doing for a living?”

“Let’s not go into that,” said Mary.

“Where have you been?”

“I was in Belle Fourche, then Denver. I was in Texas for about a month. I was in Grassrange and Moccasin for quite a while, but I will not talk about that.”

“What’d you think of the Texans?”

“They’re like Australians. They’re great, actually, as long as they don’t talk about Texas. Can we fix up my room like it was?”

“It hasn’t changed.”

“Is the blue reading lamp still there?”

“Yup.”

“Bulb work?”

“At last examination.”

“Any rules?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said Patrick. “We do not allow Negro field chants after three in the morning.”

“There’s always something,” said Mary as they turned up the road that carried them to the ranch and the hills. The wild roses shelved green in the bends, and the demarcation of light and shadow on the dust seemed artificial. Patrick looked over at Mary. She was staring up the road toward the ranch and her eyes were not right. He had certainly made his little joke knowing that she would not look right when he turned, in the hopes of deflecting that moment. Patrick didn’t know what he saw in her face — it was pale — but forced to name it, he would have called it terror. Well, fuck it: Basically the whole thing was terrifying.

“I could use your help in gentling some of the yearlings,” he said, but he got no reply. The air rushed in the wind vanes.

“Mary, remember the jet that crashed last winter up in the Absarokas?”

“Yes …” She stared at the ranch yard as Patrick glided toward the turnaround at the barn.

“Well, I found it with my binoculars. I could see a wing sticking out of the snow, just the tip. It’s behind Monitor Peak. I went up there.”

She coddled her satchel. “One book I wouldn’t take to a desert island is a family album.”

“Now, what’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

Mary turned and looked full at him. “It means,” she said, “that Daddy’s not in that plane.”

ON SUNDAY, PATRICK WAS INVITED TO THE Z6 FOR LUNCHEON, and for some reason he went. This required a long drive nearly to McRae, where, past the West Stoney River, the Z6 road angled into sweeping foothills. The hills were dry and blue-green with sagebrush, here and there illuminated by small bands of liquid-moving antelope as easy-traveling as sun through windy clouds. The land here seemed the result of an immense and all-eradicating flood, which left rims and ridges as evidence of ancient cresting seas.

The Z6 was what remained of an old English-based land-and-cattle company, the kind that once flourished on the northern grassland, with headquarters in London and Edinburgh; but it had shrunk to the absentee ownership of American cousins, a few of whom contrived to audit its profits and losses from New York City. In July and August the American cousins bought Stetsons and headed west, clogging first-class on a big jet. One cousin, though, Jack Adams, nearing sixty, had been on the ranch most of his life. A good operator, he was a rowdy frequenter of the Montana Club in Helena and a high-speed evader of radar traps. A lot of the people came because of him; but in general they were just day drinkers gathered on a hard green lawn under the inhuman blue sky. Things would grow less intelligent as the day wore on.

Jack came out to meet Patrick as he pulled his truck alongside the cars in a small turnaround facing the lawn and the fine old log buildings, which looked low, solid, somehow refined with their cedar roofs and wood smelling of linseed oil. Patrick admired him because Jack was a cowboy and a gentleman, and so he was pleased that Jack came out carrying him a glass of bourbon, knowing it was Patrick’s favorite drink, but knowing also that Patrick, like himself, would drink anything and that, strictly speaking, neither of them drank for fun.

“I hoped you’d come,” said Jack. “Anna’s made a few gallons of real good Marys, full of nutrition. I thought a little of this with water would help graduate you into nutrition.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Patrick, slamming the truck door. “To your health.”

“Yours. No sense in getting your granddad out today?”

You could see the people, the strangely stylized, bent-at-the-waist postures of people socializing on a lawn.

“All he talks about is the past and the movies. I need to get him back on some middle ground before I can show him. Besides, he doesn’t like anybody.”

“People go through phases,” said Jack. It was not, perforce, banal. “We’ve all taken a spell or two.”

Deke Patwell, the editor of the Deadrock News , started toward Patrick. Patwell had left graduate school with little but the habit of dressing in the ill-fitting 1950 seer-sucker that characterized his professors; but by the time he established himself in Deadrock, he decided that it was the place where the last stand of just folks would take place. This sort of fanciful descent was a kind of religion and had been something of a vice among the privileged classes for centuries, Marie Antoinette being the most famous example. Patwell had as little use for Patrick as he had for the poor and dispossessed. He was a champion of the average and he meant to make it stick. This attitude and Patwell’s capacity for hard work made the News successful. It was a legitimate success.

“How’s Patrick?” he said.

“Not bad, Deke.”

“Enjoying the gathering?” Deke was always rakish when he managed to leave his wife at home.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Anything newsworthy up your way?”

“No, it’s been awful quiet.”

“We thought it best to ignore Mary’s little run-ins.”

Patrick felt his blood rising. “Like what?”

“Well, you’ve been away. And like I say, we didn’t see fit to print.” Little homecoming presents. Lawn war.

“I appreciate it,” said Patrick as best he could, wondering why Patwell was establishing this debt. Maybe just the husbandry of someone who daily had to call in the repayment of small favors.

“Time for my refill,” said Patwell. “And call me if you get anything up your way.”

Patrick walked toward the lawn. The lawn was Anna’s idea. Anna was Jack’s wife. Anna did not belong to the dude-ranch-wife set with the shaved back of the neck and boot-cut Levis; there were certain perquisites for having raised children and done well that she regarded as indispensable. One was a lawn; others were New York clothes, a restaurant-size gas stove, a Missouri fox-trotter horse and a German Olympic-grade.22 rifle to shoot gophers with. The first time a luncheon guest shoved a Ferragamo pump into a gopher colony, Anna ordered the rifle. In early summer she sat upstairs beneath the steeply angled roof in her bathrobe, moving the crosshairs over the rolled green expanse, looking for rodents in the optics. Jack learned to use the back door as he came and went to the pens and barn, the report of the small-caliber rifle becoming, year by year, less audible.