Nobody's Angel (14 page)

HIS
EYES
WERE
SWOLLEN
SHUT
FROM
THE
BUTTS
OF
THE
CUES
when the chief of police shoved him into the drunk tank. “I don’t know which one of you snakes bit the other first. It’s all cowboys and Indians to me. But you’re in my house now. And you’re for sure snake bit.”

“Yeah, right,” said Patrick.

“ ‘
Yeah, right
,’ ” laughed the policeman. “Shit, you can’t even talk! Look at it this way: This is probably the only bunk in town where they won’t keep beatin on you. You’ll get breakfast and we’ll see you on home.”

“I’m sorry,” said Patrick, angling for the narrow bunk catercorner to one other amorphous form, foreshadowing, Patrick thought, his future. “Nothing to read. Someday I’ll be a dead bum.”

“I’ll tell you what: You just as well throw in with me, mean as you are.”

“Am I mean?”

“You’re plumb mean.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Patrick said in simpleminded drunkenness. “Oh, I wish you couldn’t say that about me.”

“Well, I can!” said the chief of police brightly.

And the lights dropped to minimum observation, just enough to get a vomiter’s tongue cleared or keep some whitecross detox bozo from beating his head on the fixed steel table where, it was intended, one would eat, play cards and be polite about the finger paints. As Patrick fell off to sleep, he felt that it was a good jail, one where they preferred your being a civilian to your being a jailbird, suicide or rising crime star.

Patrick didn’t know whether he was dreaming—he didn’t think he was—when he heard the chief’s voice, coming in through the alpha waves and alcohol, say, “The lady left your bail.”

As for now, his belongings, his keys and directions to his truck were what he most required.

The note from Claire read:

Oh shit oh god oh now what. Can this be more sadness-for-no-reason? Pig’s conduct is what I’ll stand accused of,
you can bet your hat on that. And my feeling is that the chaps who have made such a stretch of bad road out of my body with their cues are, at any other time or place, universally considered good fellows who never reverse their cues to beat on a human and who, all agreed, had been driven to the limits of their patience and who, moreover, when the jury returned, were universally acquitted and not a little applauded by all familiar with the particulars of the case. Except that Patrick couldn’t remember anything about it. Therefore he would join the cheering throng in its endorsement of each lump’s administering; for though he was the recipient, democracy did call for backing one’s fellows, even on limited information.

19

GRANDPA
WAS
DISCOVERED
KNEELING
ABOVE
THE
KITCHEN
sink, killing yellow wasps against the window with the rolled Sunday Deadrock
News.
This seemed a little tough in one of our older cowboys, thought Patrick; this could be sadness-for-no-reason, although well short of harbinger-of-doom. There were dirty dishes containing glazed remains. Patrick’s thought—that he’d only been gone a day—had a minute hysterical edge. What would he find with a week’s absence? It seemed his grandfather had become unnaturally dependent upon him since his return. Before that, he could help, hire help, ask for help or do without. But now, silhouetted behind stacks of dirty dishes, he crawled after wasps, backlit brilliant yellow on the glass, and swung at them so hard he was in danger of losing balance and rolling to the floor.

“Did you get that editor?”

“No.”

“Over to some woman’s.”

“Exactly.”

“See you had a night in the hoosegow.”

Patrick stopped. “Where are you getting this?”

Grandpa slung his legs down and unrolled the wasps’-guts-encrusted
News.
There Patrick reviewed a photograph of himself being removed from the Northbranch Saloon by the police. A lucky motorist from Ohio got the photo credit. The small crowd did not look friendly and the police looked like heroes. There was only a caption, no text; it read:

W
AITING
FOR
R
AIN

It’s fair, thought Patrick.

“Well,” he said to his grandfather. “Let’s tidy this joint up.” His heart soared with the thought of stupid little projects.

Deep in the grain bin the mice swam fat and single-minded while Patrick’s coffee can sliced around them to fill the black rubber buckets. The young horses turned at the pitch of tin against oats and moved to the feed bunk, first in disarray and then in single file; and then snaking out at each other, rearranging the lineup as the yellow granules poured from the bucket.

The laminations of heat-and-serve yielded to the hot suds rising about Patrick’s reddening forearms. He looked at the pleasant inflammation and thought: It proves I’m Irish. Then, with the bucket and brush, he could better see the undersides of the table as well as scrub the floor.

Here’s something new: He’s wetting the bed. And where does that lead? Is it a little thing, as incontinence? Or is it a nightmare with the impact of a cannon, rending and overwhelming, that would soak the tunic of the bravest grenadier? We will not soon have the answer to this. As of the here and now, we have a bed that needs changing.

At the very moment the Whirlpool goes from rinse to spin, it bucks like a Red Desert Mustang and would continue to do so if Patrick didn’t heave a great rock on top of its lid, a rock that, as an interjection to its cycling chaos, restores order to as well as performs the last cleansing extraction of Grandpa’s socks, underdrawers, shirts and jeans. This recalcitrant jiggling is, Patrick’s old enough now to know, the deterioration of bearings and the prelude to a complete collapse—not necessarily an explosion of Grandpa’s soiled linens around the laundry room, but certainly, in a year of poor cattle prices, a duskier and less fragrant general patina to this two-man operation. So Patrick views the rock as a good rock, keen stripes of marble and gneiss, a rock for all seasons.

“I have no idea what he saw. But it’s sure enough undignified.”

“Let me put it another way: Why did he go to Tulsa?”

“What he said was, his quail lease had come up for renewal and his father is sick, which I know is true.”

“Your note said to stop by for the details.”

“I guess I just wanted you to stop by!”

“Of course I
would.
And I owe you for bail.”

“Anyway, what is this?”

“Damned if I know.”

“It’s sort of got this painful side to it.”

“I know.”

“Maybe nothin but ole remorse.”

“Yeah, ole
re
morse.”

“At least you’re—whatchasay?—‘unencumbered.’ ”

“I decided to marry my grandfather yesterday morning. As I am doing all that a wife could do for him, there’s but little sense in our not making it legal. So don’t go calling me unencumbered.”

All of this was said, and nothing more, through the screen door of a porch, silhouettes freckled by afternoon light; they barely moved.

20

HEADING
HOME
,
PATRICK
NEARLY
HAD
TO
GO
THROUGH
DEADROCK
or around it; and despite that he wanted to avoid stopping in a place renowned for its money-grubbing, bad-tempered inhabitants, a place whose principal virtue was its declining population, he needed an economy-size box of soap powder for the floors. So he went through Deadrock. He pulled off into a grocery store where he and its only other customer, Deke Patwell, ran into each other in aisle three.

“I see I’m in the papers.”

“Yup. Real nice type of fellow heading for Yellowstone. Little Kodak is all it took.”

“You write the caption?”

“Sure did.”

“Very imaginative.”

“Thank you. How’s the head?”

“Not at all good, Deke. You know those pool cues.”

“Only by reputation. They say one end is much worse than the other.”

“Thicker.”

“That’s it, thicker.”

Patrick pulled down a large box of soap.

“Floors?” asked Patwell. Patrick studied the contents.

“Exactly.”

“Comet’s a mile better.”

Patrick got a can of Comet.

“And you’ll want a little protection for the knees,” Patwell said, and went to the cash register with his impregnated dish pads.

Patrick followed him. “I’d use rubber gloves with those hands of yours, Deke. Dish pads are full of irritating metal stuff.”

“God, I wouldn’t think of forgetting the gloves. My hands just aren’t tough enough with the job I’ve got.”

Outside:

“That been a good truck, Patrick?”

“Fair. Had the heads off first ten thousand miles.”

“Tell me about it. This thing’s been a vale of tears. I’m going Jap.”

Waves. Bye-byes. Patrick noticed, though, from two blocks away, Patwell giving him the finger. He considered it extremely childish.

21