Nobody's Angel (9 page)

“Tomorrow can we have chili?”

“No, you’re having a can of tuna and your own can opener, you goddamned sonofabitch.”

“I like water-packed tuna, but no oil for me, please.”

“Eat what I made you.”

Mary stared into her plate, held each piece up as though trying to see through it, then returned it to her plate. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water and was gone a little too long. Patrick returned to his own meal: She ought to be darling when she gets back.

“Used to be a real stockman’s country,” said his grandfather, eating quite rapidly once he forgot the chili and tuna fish. “No one retained mineral rights in a ranch trade. No farm machinery.” Mary came back. “Strange people here and there. One man with a saddled horse tied under his bedroom window at all times. Southern man with his boys chained up at night. Irrigator from Norway hiding in a car body from the hailstones. Me and old what’s-his-name buying hootch out back at the dances. Pretty schoolteacher used to ski to them dances, packing her gown. This Virginian used to do the nicest kind of logwork’d get tanked up and fight with a knife. Old Warren Butterfield killed him and buried him past the Devil’s Slide, only not too many people known that at that time and Warren’s at the rest home, fairly harmless I’d say. Virginian needed it, anyhow. I could show you the spot. Shot him with a deer rifle. Virginian couldn’t remember pulling the knife out on Warren at the dance. Warren told me that couple days later and he went up to shoot him, that Virginian couldn’t figure for the life of him why. It gave Warren second thoughts, but he let him have it. Everybody was pleased, big old violent cracker with protruding ears, ruining the dances. Nicest kind of logwork, though, used a froe, chopped at them timbers between his feet, looked like they’d been through the planer down to the mill. After that, everybody went to frame. No more Virginian.”

Mary said, “Kill, shoot, whack, stab, chop.”

“Well, that’s how it was.”

Mary looked up past Patrick and said, “Who are you?” Patrick stared at her an instant and turned. It was Tio, standing in the doorway. He suspended his Stetson straw horizontal to his stomach.

“Knocked, guess nobody heard me. I see you, Pat?”

“Surely,” said Patrick, getting up and leaving his napkin and following Tio outside.

“I’ll be listening to murder stories,” Mary said. Tio looked back, made a grimacing, uncomprehending smile, which she received blankly. “How y’all?” Tio tried.

“Say, thanks for dinner,” bayed the grandfather. “And don’t forget: Water-packed, or
n-o
spells no!”

Outside, Tio asked, “You cook, Pat?”

“Yeah, sure do. I like it a lot.”

“Make chili?”

“Yup. My grandfather just requested it.”

“Like a tejano or this northern stew-type deal?”

“Tejano.”

“I make Pedernales chili à la L.B.J. Crazy bout L.B.J. Eat that chili in homage, old buddy. Y’all through eatin, weren’t you?”

“We were, actually.”

“What’n the hell was that?”

“Chinese food.”

“Old boys have got more oil than anybody thinks.”

“Who’s this?”

“Chinese. We sit here?”

“Sure, this’d be fine.” They sat on the wood rack where water had once sluiced to cool milkcans not that long ago, before the supermarket. Patrick could see the big anthracite Cadillac nosed up to the straw stack.

“It’s a hell of a picturesque deal out here,” said Tio, looking all around. “Has to be an escape. About a month
of this, though, I’d start missing my wells and my travel agent, in that order. Getting to where I can’t hardly stand a vacation. The same time I’m looking to farm everything out. Supposed to be delegating. But delegating for what? Got everything a guy’d ever need. We knocked off work and redid an old sugar refinery down in the islands, then moved to Saint-Barts. Every time we went down to dinner, we’d be lined up behind these Kuwait sand niggers waying three different currencies at the waiter. Me, I took the old lady and went back to Tulsa, got her a little hidey-hole and a bunch of charge accounts, and threw her to fortune. I’m not saying I farmed
that
out. But I figured this: If nature’s going to run its course, an intelligent man best stand back from his television set. Well, nothing happened. By the time I got a hundred million in help on a little offshore daydream of mine, she’d bought maybe two dresses and was back breaking colts like somebody supposed to call you sir. Still now, Pat, my conscience is a-nagging at me all the while. Hell, look at you. ‘What’s the point of all this falderal,’ ole Pat is asking hisself.”

“You read my mind.” Patrick thought, I must have a stupid, vacant face for people to run on at me like this. I must have big jug-handle ears.

“Well, the point is, good buddy, I took my chances. And there wasn’t any chances. Old Shit is bulletproof. You could drop her anywhere and she’d land on her feet.
Plunk.
She could run a ranch while Tio saw to his oil and radio stations and stayed out on that road to where
his
nature could take its little course. If you had enough Catholic churches up in this country, I could put her on a few sections with half a dozen top kind of wetbacks. They’re like Brahman cattle—it takes quite a little to hold them, and it’s them churches that’ll do it. And really, a guy’d rather leave his wife with them than white trash.
See, a Mexican will know where he idn’t posed to mess, where your white trash might have him some delusions of grandeur. Some of them been President.”

“Are you telling me she’s not going back to Tulsa with you?” Patrick needed a translator.

“I’m just saying I’m gonna be traveling all summer. Look, we don’t have children. We can’t have them. At first, I took it like a man. I said it’s all my fault. I’ve got an undiagnosed situation with my nerves that could be passed on. I was set to send her to California to one of these Nobel prize–winner sperm banks. Then we found it was her. Some kind of lady’s plumbing problem that’s to where you can’t just go on in and fix it. Then my doctor at home told me the nerves was nothing to worry about. It was iron-poor, tired blood.”

“I don’t quite see what this has to—”

“Lookit here. I’m not saying Tio’s going to do no replacing. But here’s this fortune settin in Tulsa getting bigger daily. Where’s Tio’s son and heir? How’s this dynasty supposed to happen? Well, maybe it doesn’t happen. But a realistic Tio is a Tio who keeps his buns in circulation in case something magic comes out of the woodwork; and you can’t be haulin your old lady on trips like that. She don’t haul good to start with.”

Patrick thought hard to understand why this warranted calling him away from dinner. “Did you want me to help out in some way?”

“Truthfully, she’s gonna have to have someone around. You’ve both got interests in common with these fool nags. Plus I’ll back every horse prospect y’all might unearth. But I just want you to be kind of a big brother to the little gal. Old Jack Adams tells me you’re solider than a pre-Roosevelt dollar and you’d be the guy, especially if you
watched your drinking. She’s gonna need company and it’s almost never gonna be me.”

“How in the world could you ever arrange a thing like that?” Patrick used the word “arrange” on purpose.

“I just did! Trust Tio’s fine Italian hand. Movin people from one place to another has always been my best lick.”

Patrick hoped that it would work. He badly wanted just to be around Claire. But he said, “I’m already somebody’s brother. And I’ve never really understood the job.”

“You can take the weight, Pat. You’ve got fabulous shoulders. Big old, strong old … 
tank captain
!”

“Well, she’s a fine lady. If she wants anything at all, she’s sure welcome to come by.” Patrick reflected that he had to be at the dentist by nine.

“Any horses you particularly like I could pick up for you?”

“No thanks.”

“One thing I guess I better say. Big thing from my point of view, and hell, I’m a hunch player or half them wells’d still be just a star in Daddy’s eye. Big thing is, I know you’re cowboy enough to keep it in your pants.” Tio raised his hands against any further words. “That says it all.”

12

NEWS
OF
A
FAMILY
VISIT
TO
THE
RANCH
—
PATRICK
AND
Mary’s mother, her second husband and their son, Andrew—was sending Mary into one unearthly disjuncture, cycles of recollection, some assertions of a nonexistent past; and producing, for Patrick, the question, How in the
world will she raise this child? He was now quite frightened; and his love for her prevented him from considering anything that would actually be a solution to her troubles. He kept on with his patchwork of concern, trying to stay available when she seemed to be slipping. His grandfather had been terrified by the barn fire, as Patrick had. And the lingering picture of the smug volunteers troubled Patrick, as though, for him, it was they who had set the fire. But then, that was a little simple, too.

When Patrick first returned to the ranch, he didn’t quite know what he was doing there. Yet he couldn’t look back on his years in the service as a period in which things had made much sense. His tank-driving lay somewhere between an update on a family tradition and the dark side of the moon of a highly camouflaged scholarship program. Still, he blamed himself because he had let things drift, and he now occasionally noticed that not only was he not in his teens, he was actually at an age when a certain number of people died of heart attacks. Heart attacks! He knew he was under stress but he didn’t know stress of what. Maybe it was just the jaggedness-of-the-everyday. He thought of the term “stress-related” and he wondered if that was why he behaved sometimes in ways he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t, for example, like drinking as much as he did; yet he liked and approved of
some
drinking and the occasional comet binge with all bets off. But lately he was waking up in the dark with his heart pummeling its way through his chest and a strange coldness going through his body, waking nightmares in the dark; and he didn’t know where it was coming from. He tried the trick of counting blessings like sheep, but the personal components would not cohere. He loved his sister and grandfather
and horses; he loved the place. But he couldn’t help thinking that it was edges and no middle. And as soon as he’d had that thought, he began to doubt it, too. He worked hard for the conclusions, then evaporated them with doubt. Worst of them all, though, was the one he called sadness-for-no-reason.

He had come home hoping to learn something from his grandfather. But the old man was still too cowboy to play to nostalgia for anyone; though as a boy he had night-hawked on the biggest of the northern ranches, had seen gunfighters in their dotage, had run this ranch like an old-time cowman’s outfit, building a handsome herd of cattle, raised his own bulls and abjured farm machinery. Still, he got closer to the past in recollection: “It’s not like it used to be. They’ve interfered with the moon and changed our weather. That’s why the summer clouds sail too high to rain on our old pastures. The goddamned sonic booms have loosened all the boards in the houses, and that’s why we have all those flies. Didn’t used to have those. Things up there affect us. Like when you have an eclipse and the chickens fall asleep. Something happens inside and we don’t know what it is. And the ground water is going in the wrong direction … twisting, turning sonofabitch. I had a surefire witch out here try to douse me a well for a stock tank. He said, ‘I can’t help you, Fitzpatrick, the inside of the world is different.’ Used to be I’d have that water witch out and the bark would peel off that stick and that old willow butt would jump and buck with him and hell, we’d go fifty feet and have more gallons a minute than a guy could count.” Ground water danced in his eyes.

“I thought it always changed.”

“Go up on Antelope some night and look down at the yard lights. Used to be coming off any these mountains it was dark. Just throw the reins away and let the horse take
you home. When that sheepherder went crazy in 1921, Albert Johanson, who was sheriff, went up to Hell Roaring and shot him between the eyes and left him. I packed in there and took the stove and tent down for Albert and then I had to put this dead Basque on a mule and pack him out. Well, it got dark. I come clean out at the west fork of Mile Creek and I could see maybe one light on the flat. But I didn’t know whether I had that stiff or not till I got to Wellington’s ranch and we got a lantern. I had the herder but my hitch had slipped. I had him face down on a little Spanish kind of a mule with a cross mark on his back, but the hitch slipping turned his face up, rope laid acrosst his gums like he’s snarling. Old boy killed a young rancher’s wife with a sickle, rancher name of Schumbert, down to Deer Creek now, older feller now. He finds this herder trying to pour cement over his wife in the cellar. Her head’s set over next to the scuttle where the sickle took it off. He’s so stunned the Basque taps him and he’s out. He wakes up and his man is gone to the hills and his wife is waist-deep in soft concrete with her head setting on a small deal of firewood scantlings. Schumbert goes to town, notifies Albert, calls the funeral home and puts hisself into the hospital. Directly Albert goes to tracking and finds the herder’s camp, just a wall-side tent and a barrel-headed horse with his front legs coming out the same hole, and old Albert, he hallos the camp. Directly here comes our Basque, packing a thirty-thirty with a peep sight, and cuts down on Albert and Albert puts him away. Then me, I’m Albert’s friend. Albert has had enough for one day: He don’t want to pack that camp to the valley. So I’m Albert’s next victim. I hated packing that stiff because he scared the mule and all I had was a basket hitch with nothing really to lash to. When I got to Wellington’s
I was surprised we still had our man, and I guarantee you this: We had that mule broke to pack
any
thing. That was one mule you could call on.
God
, what a good mule.” The mule had replaced the ground water and sleeping chickens in the grandfather’s eyes.