Nobody's Angel (32 page)

“Come here to me.” She shoved the door closed behind him.

“Claire!”

“Shush!” She seized him hard, and by the time he kissed her throat, it was wet with tears.

He whispered, “What’s going on?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Is that true?” Patrick asked emphatically. They each seemed to him terrifyingly unconnected.

“That’s true. Don’t worry about Tio until you go and fetch him.” She pulled—or, rather, twisted—him down onto the divan; and she was barefoot.

She said “Baby” and lifted to slide her yellow dress under her arms. Patrick thought, This is as good a place to die as any. He was not so far gone as not to note that the West’s last stands were less and less appropriate to epic poetry and murals.

“Should I call you baby too?”

“I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t calling you baby. That’s not what it meant.” She was naked now and Patrick awaited a bullet.

“I’ve got to hear what you meant.”

“Last chance.”

“Last chance … Am I going to get killed at this?”

“I don’t see how.
I’m
not going to kill you.”

Drawing this particular blank, Patrick, in mortal confusion, made love to Claire, who seemed, spasmodic and weeping, finally more martyred than loved. Patrick heard himself a mile off and incoherent.

Then acknowledgment of everything external moving in upon his consciousness appeared as an ice age. He wasn’t a captain or a cowboy. He thought for a moment, literally thought, about what he had set out for; and he knew one thing: he was superfluous.

“Why,” he asked, “have we been put up with?”

“By whom?”

“By your husband.”

“Ask him. I’m through. But you could ask.”

“I
will.
”

“Do.”

Tio was dead, exhaust piped into the bubble until the smothered engine quit and Tio went on to the next thing. He hung forward in his harness as though starting the international freestyle; it looked like a long swim indeed. Around his dead face earphones whispered news of a world cracking; but Tio was spared. Lust and boredom provided no such indemnity. It made thrill-killers of nice people.

“Do you think we can fly this thing?”

“Oh, Patrick.”

“Are you shattered?”

“Not really.”

“Did you love him?”

“Sure.”

“I wonder what happened.”

“No, you ont.”

“I think I really do.”

“We fucked him to death.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“And you thought he was a bad man. You thought if you pushed him hard enough, he’d put you out of your misery, like your sister did for herself. But he wasn’t a bad man.”

“I mean, is it the main thing to be put out of your misery?”

“Are you miserable?” Claire asked.

“Are you?”

“No. I’m in mourning. I wanted to celebrate it with you before you got miserable again. That part of you deserves to live. The rest should be in there with Tio. You might enjoy him like this.” She laughed a high, uncontrolled laugh, one that masked not tears but something wild and
unreachable. Patrick felt, as he looked into the bubble, that he looked through the bars of a prison; and that in some terrifying way, the voice of Claire was the bright music of the jailer’s keys fading in the corridor.

“Would you like to go back in?”

“I really don’t think so.”

“Scared.”

“Yes.”

“All you know is what
I
knew when we went inside before.”

“I realize that.”

“No guts, no glory,” she said.

“I’m not going in with you.”

Claire stretched her arms over the plexiglass and stared inside. “I guess if I’ve done nothing else, I showed one of you how to carry the weight and not go to pieces. I didn’t go to pieces. He did and you’re about to. I’ve got this feeling I don’t want to lose that. The love was real in each case.”

You could see the house in its own lights. It looked like an ad for a paint that was weatherproof and that banished evil. It looked flat.

“Is the love gone?” he asked.

“What if it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s nothing you can do anything with. It makes you go around proving you’re not rotten or spoiled by sin— Look at him.”

“I thought love was all that mattered.”

“Well, it’s very nice. Taxes awful high in that neighborhood. You know what I set out to do? In my little quiet way? I set out to have been around.”

“Get it done?”

“Well, I’ve been around.”

“You learn anything that could help us? See, I’m real in love with you and I’m sort of stuck.”

Claire never seemed morbid, cynical or flippant. Patrick could not see how she had been made into this. Her rakish femininity had first drawn him to her; but now her absolute female power, which men fear will finally be turned upon them, was at hand. He was sure she hadn’t wished this or wanted to be competed for. But the two of them had made a major purchase on a long-term plan. She at least acknowledged the cost, while Patrick compressed it to a dead husband. She wasn’t being cold; she intended to pay.

“I think you should go in with me.”

“Why?”

“For a couple of reasons.”

“What are they?”

“One is it will never happen again. We have to give him that.”

“And the other?”

“You’ll have a real good time.”

Patrick went. She made it seem easy.

Had the love been real? Patrick thought so. He never specifically changed his opinion. Too, he gave Leafy to Claire. He must have meant something by that. In life, he later thought, shoot anything that moves. Otherwise, discouragement sets in. Tio at least had gotten the latest weather.

Patrick’s grandfather shot the best elk of his life. Patrick packed it out for him and arranged for it to be mounted
and hung in the Hawk Bar, the place the old man could see from the window of his apartment.

Patrick and Claire corresponded for some time after he went back into the Army and she returned to her childhood place at Talalah. Once she sent a picture of herself, but he didn’t like keeping it around. After that, the correspondence trailed off.

Anyway, his share of the lease money from the ranch allowed him to buy an old second-story flat in Madrid. He spent all his leave time there. Deke Patwell had it from someone who knew someone who knew someone that he had a woman in Madrid, an American named Marion Easterly; and that when she was with him, he was a bit of a blackout drinker. There were some people in Deadrock who had liked Patrick; and a few of them thought, At least he’s not alone.

In any case, he never came home again.