Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

“I didn’t like your comment, buddy.”

“What comment?” Patrick asked.

“ ‘Have another drink, perk you up.’ I don’t like getting a raft of shit like that just because I want to cut loose on the weekend.” When he tried to spit through the wind vane, it came back in on him.

“I probably shouldn’t have said it. It was a joke.”

“It wasn’t funny.” They passed the corrals, scales and loading chutes of the local livestock association. There were a couple of horses and an Australian shepherd in one section, waiting for their owners to come and do something with them. Patrick let a little silence fall.

“You come home,” Deke went on, “just pick up where you left off. Goddamned officer.”

“Well, I wasn’t much of an officer.”

Patrick was mostly successful in shutting Deke out of his mind, like listening to the same day’s news on the radio for the second time. They were driving along the switching yards, and probably because of Deke, he began to think of the old rummies who used to be such a part of a big yard like this. Electric engines, good security lights and cross-referenced welfare lists stole our bums, thought Patrick. When the American West dried up once and for all, those migrant birds, the saints of cheap Tokay, began to look bad to the downtown merchants, to the kayakers and trout fishermen, even to the longhairs with tepee poles on the tops of their Volkswagens, who thought the rummies were like the white men who had corrupted the Indians with whiskey in Bernard De Voto’s Across the Wide Missouri. Anyway, they were gone.

Deke was still maneuvering for an insult; but they were nearly to his house now on Gallatin Street. Deke knew his time was running out, and Patrick was hurrying a little because he had begun to find himself paying a bit of attention, starting with a slurred polemic against his grandfather, which didn’t work because it listed things about the old man Patrick liked. They pulled in front of the brick house as Deke started in on Patrick’s sister again. And for the first time Patrick thought, This is going to be close. Deke Patwell must have thought so too, because he opened his door before announcing the following: “She’s immoral. And I have every reason to believe she uses drugs.” It was quite a delivery.

Patrick kicked him through the open door onto the sidewalk. Deke’s head snapped down on the concrete but recovered, leaving him on all fours, blood in the corner of his mouth and vomit on his period costume. He kept printing the blood on the palm of his hand to be sure he’d been injured. Mrs. Patwell appeared in the door. The tableau was a basic stacked deck illustrating Patrick’s penchant for violence. “You’ll live to regret this,” she said with a compression between her eyes. Two children appeared on the sidewalk, and one of them, unable to make much of these grownups, could think of nothing more salutory than to sail his frisbee over the recumbent form of Deke, yelling, “Catch it, Mr. Patwell! Catch it!” It seemed appropriate to Mrs. Patwell to go after the kids, who scattered into the wilderness of back lots and yard fences. She didn’t have their speed, their quickness. Patrick headed home. He felt quite giddy.

PATRICK WOUND ALONG TO THE EAST OF THE RIVER. IT BURST out blue in segments whenever a hay or grain field dropped away. Also, there were tall mountains and a blue sky. But they only go so far. Patrick would have liked a silent, reverent involving of himself with Claire. In another era he could have been her coachman. “Might I assist, Ma’moiselle?” She can’t help but notice how good he is with the horses. One must put aside one’s silk-bound missal and duck off into this grove of elms. The horses graze; the springs of the little coach can be heard for miles. Screeching like fruit bats.

Patrick approached the ranch as though in an aircraft, sitting well back, making small adjustments of the wheel with outstretched arms as the buildings loomed, moving his head with a level rotary motion. We are making our approach. The stewardesses are seated in the little fold-down chairs. Claire is alone in first class; the surface of her gin and tonic tilts precisely with each directional adjustment. And now we are stopped and the dogs are gathering. Lilacs are reflected in the windows. Grandpa dashes to the truck. Must be with the ground crew, perhaps a baggage handler. That or a fucking woodpecker. Turn off the ignition. Engine diesels and quits. Opposite door flung open by Crew Chief Grandpa. This man is excited.

“ Your sister has gone mad! ”

“What are you talking about?”

“I smelt turpentine,” the old man roared. “I went down to her room and she was painting everything. She was painting curtains! I couldn’t get her to listen to me. She just talked on like I wasn’t there.” Patrick’s heart sank. “When I went back, she was gone.”

“Where is she now?”

“That’s it. I don’t know!”

They were hurrying toward the house.

“Why are we walking this way, then?”

“Well, maybe she’s back in her room. Pat, what the hell’s the matter with her?”

“I really don’t know.” He didn’t, either.

They hurried up the walkway and went in through the kitchen. Patrick could smell the paint and turpentine from here; and as he went down the hallway, it got more intense. He expected for some reason that she would be in her room, and his grandfather, pressing behind him, seemed to agree. Patrick knocked and got no answer. So he opened the door. She wasn’t there. If it wasn’t for the fact that the paint was blue, the room would have looked like the scene of a massacre. A house-painter’s broad brush soaked blue paint into the bedclothes. The upended gallon can directed a slowly moving blue tongue under the dresser. There was no turpentine in sight. The curtains had begun to dry stickily, with a cheap surrealistic effect, around a window full of sky and clouds.

They went back to the kitchen. But by that time the barn was already burning. It was visible from the kitchen, a steady horizontal pall moving downwind from between the logs. Patrick started for the doors. “Call the Fire Department! I’ll run to the barn.”

Patrick sprinted around the bunkhouse to the barn. He climbed the wooden strakes into the haymow. Mary sat under the rafters. The hay was on fire and the wind blew through the separations in the logs, creating innumerable red fingers of fire that worked through the bales, collided and leaped up into longer-burning lines, a secretive, vascular fire.

“We are without tents. We’ll do anything to stay warm. There are tracks in the drifts. We used to have a chairlift to get us down, but my mother interfered with the mechanism and confiscated my lift pass. She put rats in the last empty gondola.”

“I’ll get you down,” said Patrick. “But we must go now. And stop talking like that.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “We must think of the baby.”

The volunteers arrived in a stocky yellow truck, threw the intake hose into the creek and doused the barn inside and out. Steam roared into the sky and cast shadows over the house like storm-driven clouds. The firemen were dressed in yellow slickers and had plexiglass shields in front of their faces. They guided the heavy canvas-covered hose inside their elbows and against their backs, like loafers leaning on a village fence. Only one man aimed the nozzle into the smoke and flames. Patrick thought that he could see in their expressions that this was an unnecessary fire. Perhaps it was his imagination.

Afterward the phone rang; it was Deke Patwell, still somewhat blurred. The phone in Patrick’s hand felt like a blunt instrument.

“Understand you’ve had a barn fire.”