Nobody's Angel (23 page)

He hadn’t been rude yet, but he would have to cut back on his drinking or it was going to all burst forth in a clenched and dangerous teetering toward love, requited
or otherwise. This was the sort of isolated dam break that Patrick was susceptible to. When he could identify it, he thought it was ridiculous. He didn’t see anything now at all and he was therefore wide open to any repetitious mistake, precisely at a time in his life when he could least stand repetition. But then, where was the repetition; and couldn’t this just be a fear, as guilt is a fear, of something that didn’t exist?

He drifted away. One of the first lines he ever learned from a song was, “I got a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill.” He was hitchhiking from Two Dot and he heard it in the back seat of a hot-rod Ford. He had never seen a two-dollar bill. Up front an older boy necked with his girl. Patrick could smell something … well, something. He had not imagined that there would be anything to smell. He tried not to stare or draw breath through his nose. Breath through his nose, he knew, would be a mortal sin. He looked instead at the sagebrush flats and streaks of water running from spring-flooded culverts in the creek bottoms.

“How far you going?”

“What?” Seal off that nose, she’s wriggling.

“Where you getting off at?”

“Deadrock.”

“We ain’t going to Deadrock. I’m shutting down this side of Harlowton— You ever seen a rubber?”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t. He was mouth-breathing and gaping into the sagebrush.

“Ever seen one like this?” It was a Ted Williams brand and it had the ball player on the label, ready to pound one out of Fenway Park.

“No, I sure haven’t.”

“Came out of a machine,” said the girl. “In Great Falls
because of the air base. It’s a year and a half old. It’s give out and it’s still in the wrapper. That’s about how I was raised, buddy.”

“Up around them bases,” said the driver, “a rubber don’t have a long life to look forward to.”

“It does in Harlowton,” said the girl doggedly.

“I ought to rape your ass!”

“You and what army?”

The driver went into the hot-rod slump, left hand fingering the wind vane, upper body wedged between the wheel and the door. It worked; she crawled on over and Patrick craned at the landscape, wondering if this was going to end up in confession, then finally filling his lungs with the immemorial musk that fogged the interior of that hot-rod Ford, thinking: Purgatory at the very least.

He would have to go back to that, just to find one level of the power Claire had come to have for him. At the very minimum she was the lost ghost of the gold dredge.

34

TODAY
WAS
GOING
TO
REQUIRE
A
DEPARTURE
,
A
MIGHTY
DEPARTURE
, from the recent pattern of thinking, drinking, funeral attending, cooking, baby-sitting his grandfather, caning editors and tampering with love. Because the ranch was falling apart. It was somehow terrific to rediscover that the ranch was not a dead, immutable thing. He could see from the upper road where one headgate had washed out, and there was a great mean scar where the water had gouged at the pretty hillside, and the topsoil from that particular part of the ranch was now in the
Yellowstone River on its way to North Dakota. That had to be fixed. There were four places where the wire was down on the west-division fence; that would have to be pulled up and restapled. Things were a mess and he was getting excited. He was going to need his fence stretcher and fencing gloves and it was still going to be tops in mindless. But if he had any luck at all, this was going to last for years. It was like the heart trouble he wished for and never got.

He started hurting about halfway through the day. He hauled salt and mineral blocks, ponying a second horse up to the forest line. Then gathered thirty black yearlings from the brush along the creek where the flies had driven them from their feed. He gathered them into one end of the corral and he penned them off with a steel panel. He hung the heavy spray canister from a canvas strap over the sore muscles of his shoulders and waded among the fly-swarming backs, pumping with one hand and directing the nozzled wand with the other. When he was nearly done, one white-eyed steer flicked out a rear hoof and kneecapped Patrick, and he had to go sit down until the pain subsided and the knee swelled up tight within his jeans. He sat on the dirt of the corral, the canister still in place, tapped one dirty boot with the spray wand, looked through the steel panel at the milling steers as they felt the flies’ liftoff; like them, he rolled fool eyes to heaven and thought: Claire, my knee hurts.

He hung the sprayer on a corral post and rode back down to the ranch. He was so tired that when he unsaddled the horse, he just drop-kicked the saddle out of his way and threw the bridle in a heap. He grained the horse and kept her down for the next day and went inside.

Then, while he was making dinner for his grandfather, who was sorting a shoe box of assorted cartridges, he noticed through the kitchen window that everything was covered with a thin layer of dust.

“Did the wind blow real hard here today?”

“No.”

“How come everything is covered with dust?”

“A helicopter landed in the yard.”

“What?”

“Helicopter.”

“Who was in it?”

“Nobody got out. Here’s an old Army Springfield round.”

“How long did it stay there?”

“Oh, bout an hour. Made quite a racket. They never shut that big propeller off. I really didn’t want to walk near it.” Tio had made an aerial visit under power and Patrick had missed it: a lost effect, like rabbits jumping from a top hat in an empty room.

Patrick had given up on his cooking since his grandfather had gone off his specialties. So now he made dopy chicken casseroles or things he could cook all day in a crock; and today he had prepared, of all things, a big bowl of red Jell-O to set beside the aerosol can of Reddi-Wip; and it was in its tremulous surface that he first detected the return of the helicopter, a faint sound, a drumming, like one’s pulse; then rapidly magnifying as it moved toward them. Its horizontal motion could be felt to stop, and high above the house the waves of sound centered.

Patrick walked out the front door and could see the great insect shape high above the ranch. It made him nervous. The moment he stepped into the yard, the helicopter began to move toward the mountains, disappearing
finally through a narrow pass. Patrick went back inside and thumbed open
The Joy of Cooking.

“I wish that movie hadn’t gone away,” said his grandfather. “Maybe there was movie people in that helicopter.”

“I doubt it.”

“They could have been scouting locations.”

“I suppose.”

“Everybody loves a Western.”

“How do you know it was a Western?”

“
Hondo’s Last Move
? What else could it be?”

“The word around here was it was about a child molester named Hondo.”

“I didn’t know that. God, I didn’t know
that.
”

“Can you eat chicken and dumplings again?”

“Sure. Can we go to the movies?”

“I’m pretty tired, Grampa.”

“Or there’s one with Greer Garson on TV. It’s about a factory, I think.”

“Maybe that would be better. Besides it’ll be late once these dishes are cleaned up.”

“I’ll help.”

“Okay.”

“Tomorrow can we look at apartments?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t remember which rifle this went to,” said his grandfather in disgust, placing the cartridge next to the Jell-O. “I think it was that one that the horse fell with coming out of Falls Creek with Arnie.”

“I didn’t know Arnie, Gramp.” Patrick was sick of these unreferenced tours of memory. Fucking Arnie, anyway.

“He was the scissorbill from up around Plentywood. I don’t know. Anyway, I know it’s gone.”

“You want a drink?”

“No. That was a funny-looking machine, that helicopter. Shame Mary couldn’t have seen it. I didn’t have my hat and my hair was blowing all over. I got dirt in my nose. It went straight up and I lost it in the sun. It was exactly like the movies. Maybe it was full of prisoners and there’s this guy who didn’t shave, with a tommy gun.”

Patrick was getting depressed as he cooked. Tio, he guessed, was home. He literally pined for Claire and there wasn’t anything he could think to do about it. And there was something about his grandfather’s running on, which didn’t usually bother him, that was getting at his nerves. Still, he could fall back on the day’s work, a new regime toward bringing the ranch back to order. There was some warm memory tugging at him that he couldn’t quite isolate; and as he cooked, he searched his mind for it, feeling that it would cheer him up. Then it came: It was the velvet hydraulic rush of his tank over Germany, the orderly positions of the crew, and being the captain.

“Fitzpatrick.”

“Hey, Tio.”

“Awfully sorry about your sister.”

“Thanks for saying so.”

“And remember, it was her right to do that. She’s the only one to know if it was a good idea. It can be just the thing; I’m persuaded of that.”

“Okay.”

“Say, how much do you want for your ranch?”

“It’s not for sale, Tio.”

“I just went down and dumped that Cat-Track joint that was such a thorn in our sides, that quicksand trap on the north Canadian, and the money’s burning a
hole
in my pocket.”

“This is my grandfather’s and my home.”

“Well, move ass to town. I want to spend this
dinero.
The old man tell you I came and looked at the place?”

“Were you in a helicopter?”

“That was me. That you come out in the yard at suppertime?”

“Yup.”

“I thought so. Say, are you sleeping with my wife?”

Not a word in reply.

“Leafy, am I not thoughtless? I am. Left you in a cold corral with no kisses. Here is a kiss. What a beautiful horse you are.” Leafy exhaled and changed weight on her feet. It seemed so extraordinary to Patrick that this watermarked mare with eyes like tide pools could also be twelve hundred pounds of orchestral muscle, could trust and work for you, could ride the continually moving hands of the mortal clock with you, could take you in the hills, help you win a rodeo or work cattle, could send you gliding with new tallness on a part of the earth that was worth all the trouble. “What do you know of trouble, Leafy? Or do you take the position that it is my department?”

Onward to the restoration of order: mucking stalls, wheelbarrowing the manure across the road onto the rich pile that would be so useful to a determined gardener with a nice ass. Then he went up on the metal roof of the granary before it got too hot and tarred over the nail holes as he had to each year. He had put the roof on and had nailed in the troughs of the corrugation instead of the lands, as one is supposed to, and so it had to be tarred yearly. He was determined to ride Leafy today because he thought he glimpsed sadness-for-no-reason in her eyes.
When Leafy was born, her mother dropped her in the last piece of snow in a spring pasture. Patrick found the foal, a clear, veinous membrane around her shoulders, shivering in the snow, her seashell hooves just beginning to harden in the air. He put an arm under her butt and one under her neck and lifted her out onto the warming prairie grass while the mother nickered in concern. Then he drew the membrane down off her body and let the mare lick her dry. The watermarks in her coat were like leaves and Patrick named her while the mare contracted and drove out the afterbirth; Patrick lifted the placenta, shaped like the bottom of a pair of long underwear with one short leg, and scrutinized it for completeness; a missing piece retained in the mare could be fatal. Leafy wobbled to her feet after pitching over a few times and stood, straight-legged, springy-pasterned, with her exaggerated encapsulated knees. Patrick put iodine on her navel stump, which made her leap. The mother stood and Leafy ducked under to nurse. The mare kept lifting a rear leg from the pain of new milk; then the two, big and little shadows, glided away to their life together. Patrick went off through the orchard; and by the time he had started down the hill to the house, he could hear the birds arguing in the afterbirth. In his mind he had marked the foal for himself.