Nobody's Angel Page 3

  They taught him to play soccer. Once again he was in short pants. For a long time he could see his knees in the corners of his eyes when he ran. It made him miss the ball. It was one of the troublesome ways he couldn’t escape his own mind. Later, it got worse.

  7

  EVIDENTLY SOMEONE PASSING THROUGH GRASSRANGE HAD given Mary a ride as far as Roundup, then dropped her with a social worker there. The conditions that moved this person to, in effect, turn Mary in were ones that produced concern and not fear: Mary wasn’t making sense. The tough district court judge at Roundup had Mary hauled to Warm Springs, which is Montana’s state mental institution. She had been detained. But the primary problem was that no one could identify her and Mary wasn’t helping. She said that something was always happening to her, but she would tell no one what it was.

  Patrick was her custodian once she relinquished her name. He took her home, cruising the interstate in his truck on the intermittently cloudy day. He looked over his sunglasses; he was trying to seem old.

  “What’d you read?”

  “Two books, over and over.”

  “What books were they?”

  “Books of poetry, Patrick. I read the poems of Saint Theresa of Avila and the poems of Saint John of the Cross. That car has Ohio plates. How many Ohio songs can you name?”

  “You make any friends?”

  “One trouble with loony bins is you make friends and then you make enemies, and there are these referee-doctors who don’t seem to be able to stop this seesaw deal between the two. All they do is keep the patients from savaging each other.” She leaned to see herself in the rear-view.

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

  “Evidently I can’t see life’s purpose.”

  “What do you mean ‘evidently’?”

  “I mean that that’s what they told me. I didn’t come up with the idea myself.”

  “I don’t ever think about life’s purpose,” said Patrick, lying in his teeth.

  “Lucky you,” she said. “We got enough gas?”

  “We do, and there’s more where that came from.”

  Mary was, Patrick thought, such a pretty girl. And she didn’t have the neurasthenic glaze that produced what passed for looks among people who would rather raise orchids. Mary had a strong, clear face, a cascade of oaken hair and a lean, athletic figure. But she also had, Patrick thought, a bad attitude. Certainly no bell-jar lady, though.

  It made him worry. He was open-minded and interested in other tastes than his own, normally. But, for instance, being Mary’s older brother produced, just now, the following question: Who is Saint John of the Cross? I thought Jesus was the one with the cross. It was as if the cross was a party favor, a prize for the most serious face.

  “Want to stop at Three Forks and get plastered?” Mary inquired. Her hands made laughing shapes in the air, foretelling gala Three Forks. A saloon conjunction of the Missouri headwaters.

  “It isn’t the day for that.”

  “There’s another one with Ohio plates.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Our home state is being deluged by those of Ohio.”

  “It’s fair.”

  When the universal shitstorm seemed to mount its darkest clouds, Patrick always said that it was fair. Mary fell silent. Her trouble was she thought it wasn’t fair. They’d had words about this before. Mary had said his calling everything fair made him more fatal than any Hindu. People like him, she accused, refused smallpox vaccine. Who did he think he was with this fairness? The truth was nothing was fair. That’s where I’ve got you, said Patrick.

  But Mary’s travails had today deprived her of fight. She fixed a stony look upon I-90. She didn’t think any of the signs were funny and she stopped counting Ohio plates. Patrick began to worry. He could hear her breathing.

  When they spiraled down the Deadrock off-ramp, Mary said, “The other thing is, I’m in a family way.” The blackbirds shot across the lumberyard, and they both decided that watching them veer between the sawdust stacks was quite the best thing to do.

  They passed the smoking waste-burner and log reserves of Big Sky Lumber in silence; and similarly Madison Travertine, where water-cooled saws made weird pink marble slabs out of million-year-old hot-spring mineral accumulations. They crossed Carson’s Bridge over the big river while Patrick considered his next question and the mysterious sign painted on the rocks under the high falcon nests:

  PLEASE STOP IT

  Nobody knew what the sign meant. In place of direct attention, Patrick accumulated roadside information: ROCK SHOP—AGATES, TERRI’S BEAUTY SHOP, YUMMEE FREEZE, HEREFORDS: MONTANA’S GREATEST TREASURE, U-NAME IT WE’LL FIND IT, a white barn in the turn with a basketball net, a rough-breaks sign, white crosses in Dead Man’s Curve, and the broad, good pastures, defined in the earth slits of flood irrigation. A farmer with a shovel watched the passing water.

  “Who’s the father?”

  “Not telling.” Drawing a lower eyelid down with her forefinger: Share God’s joke on us.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have any babies in Germany?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Little visits you might have made?”

  “Who said I made little visits? I was busy in the tank. You need a shower.”

  “Boy, do I.”

  “I should warn you, Mary.”

  “What?”

  “Mother’s visit coming up soon.”

  “Whew.”

  “So …”

  “I don’t know. Tough it out, I guess.”

  “Are you stable?” Patrick inquired.

  “Terribly. I wouldn’t have given them my name otherwise. I let them circulate my fingerprints while I caught up on some reading.” She patted her satchel of books.

  Patrick glanced over at Mary, glimpsed the eczema-like condition that left her hands cracked and red from the nervous attacks. They fluttered under his gaze.

  “How’s Grandpa?” she asked.

  “Just a little bit remote. You catch him at the right time and he pours it all out. Otherwise, he’s kind of floating around.” He was slipping toward Mary.

  “That’s because he’s old,” said Mary. “And because he knows he’s going to die soon.”

  Patrick could supply no refutation: He was in midair; he had no family and he wasn’t in love. He did try to make his sigh as significant as possible. Mary arched her brows.

  “What have you been doing for a living?”

  “Let’s not go into that,” said Mary.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I was in Belle Fourche, then Denver. I was in Texas for about a month. I was in Grassrange and Moccasin for quite a while, but I will not talk about that.”

  “What’d you think of the Texans?”

  “They’re like Australians. They’re great, actually, as long as they don’t talk about Texas. Can we fix up my room like it was?”

  “It hasn’t changed.”

  “Is the blue reading lamp still there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Bulb work?”

  “At last examination.”

  “Any rules?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” said Patrick. “We do not allow Negro field chants after three in the morning.”

  “There’s always something,” said Mary as they turned up the road that carried them to the ranch and the hills. The wild roses shelved green in the bends, and the demarcation of light and shadow on the dust seemed artificial. Patrick looked over at Mary. She was staring up the road toward the ranch and her eyes were not right. He had certainly made his little joke knowing that she would not look right when he turned, in the hopes of deflecting that moment. Patrick didn’t know what he saw in her face—it was pale—but forced to name it, he would have called it terror. Well, fuck it: Basically the whole thing was terrifying.

  “I could use your help in gentling some of the yearlings,” he said, but he got no reply. The air rushed in the wind vane
s.

  “Mary, remember the jet that crashed last winter up in the Absarokas?”

  “Yes …” She stared at the ranch yard as Patrick glided toward the turnaround at the barn.

  “Well, I found it with my binoculars. I could see a wing sticking out of the snow, just the tip. It’s behind Monitor Peak. I went up there.”

  She coddled her satchel. “One book I wouldn’t take to a desert island is a family album.”

  “Now, what’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  Mary turned and looked full at him. “It means,” she said, “that Daddy’s not in that plane.”

  8

  ON SUNDAY, PATRICK WAS INVITED TO THE Z6 FOR LUNCHEON, and for some reason he went. This required a long drive nearly to McRae, where, past the West Stoney River, the Z6 road angled into sweeping foothills. The hills were dry and blue-green with sagebrush, here and there illuminated by small bands of liquid-moving antelope as easy-traveling as sun through windy clouds. The land here seemed the result of an immense and all-eradicating flood, which left rims and ridges as evidence of ancient cresting seas.

  The Z6 was what remained of an old English-based land-and-cattle company, the kind that once flourished on the northern grassland, with headquarters in London and Edinburgh; but it had shrunk to the absentee ownership of American cousins, a few of whom contrived to audit its profits and losses from New York City. In July and August the American cousins bought Stetsons and headed west, clogging first-class on a big jet. One cousin, though, Jack Adams, nearing sixty, had been on the ranch most of his life. A good operator, he was a rowdy frequenter of the Montana Club in Helena and a high-speed evader of radar traps. A lot of the people came because of him; but in general they were just day drinkers gathered on a hard green lawn under the inhuman blue sky. Things would grow less intelligent as the day wore on.

  Jack came out to meet Patrick as he pulled his truck alongside the cars in a small turnaround facing the lawn and the fine old log buildings, which looked low, solid, somehow refined with their cedar roofs and wood smelling of linseed oil. Patrick admired him because Jack was a cowboy and a gentleman, and so he was pleased that Jack came out carrying him a glass of bourbon, knowing it was Patrick’s favorite drink, but knowing also that Patrick, like himself, would drink anything and that, strictly speaking, neither of them drank for fun.

  “I hoped you’d come,” said Jack. “Anna’s made a few gallons of real good Marys, full of nutrition. I thought a little of this with water would help graduate you into nutrition.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Patrick, slamming the truck door. “To your health.”

  “Yours. No sense in getting your granddad out today?”

  You could see the people, the strangely stylized, bent-at-the-waist postures of people socializing on a lawn.

  “All he talks about is the past and the movies. I need to get him back on some middle ground before I can show him. Besides, he doesn’t like anybody.”

  “People go through phases,” said Jack. It was not, perforce, banal. “We’ve all taken a spell or two.”

  Deke Patwell, the editor of the Deadrock News, started toward Patrick. Patwell had left graduate school with little but the habit of dressing in the ill-fitting 1950 seer-sucker that characterized his professors; but by the time he established himself in Deadrock, he decided that it was the place where the last stand of just folks would take place. This sort of fanciful descent was a kind of religion and had been something of a vice among the privileged classes for centuries, Marie Antoinette being the most famous example. Patwell had as little use for Patrick as he had for the poor and dispossessed. He was a champion of the average and he meant to make it stick. This attitude and Patwell’s capacity for hard work made the News successful. It was a legitimate success.

  “How’s Patrick?” he said.

  “Not bad, Deke.”

  “Enjoying the gathering?” Deke was always rakish when he managed to leave his wife at home.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Anything newsworthy up your way?”

  “No, it’s been awful quiet.”

  “We thought it best to ignore Mary’s little run-ins.”

  Patrick felt his blood rising. “Like what?”

  “Well, you’ve been away. And like I say, we didn’t see fit to print.” Little homecoming presents. Lawn war.

  “I appreciate it,” said Patrick as best he could, wondering why Patwell was establishing this debt. Maybe just the husbandry of someone who daily had to call in the repayment of small favors.

  “Time for my refill,” said Patwell. “And call me if you get anything up your way.”

  Patrick walked toward the lawn. The lawn was Anna’s idea. Anna was Jack’s wife. Anna did not belong to the dude-ranch-wife set with the shaved back of the neck and boot-cut Levis; there were certain perquisites for having raised children and done well that she regarded as indispensable. One was a lawn; others were New York clothes, a restaurant-size gas stove, a Missouri fox-trotter horse and a German Olympic-grade .22 rifle to shoot gophers with. The first time a luncheon guest shoved a Ferragamo pump into a gopher colony, Anna ordered the rifle. In early summer she sat upstairs beneath the steeply angled roof in her bathrobe, moving the crosshairs over the rolled green expanse, looking for rodents in the optics. Jack learned to use the back door as he came and went to the pens and barn, the report of the small-caliber rifle becoming, year by year, less audible.

  The Bloody Marys were in a huge cut-glass bowl, which rested in a cattle-watering tank filled with ice. No one had fanned out far from this place and Patrick got a quick survey: a few people he already knew, Anna, who just winked, and a handsome young couple he’d never seen. The husband wore a good summer jacket and a pair of boots the height of his knee, outside his pants. An oilman, Patrick thought. Oilmen, whatever else they might wear, needed one outstanding sartorial detail to show that their oil was on ranches. And by God, if there was enough oil, they’d go ahead and put cows on those ranches and wear their boots like that. You wanted to be sure no one thought you were a damn parts salesman.

  Patrick still had his bourbon and had planned a slow approach, but Anna swept him in, introducing him with the “Captain” prefix. Deke Patwell was deftly escorting an inheritrix from Seattle named Penny Asperson and interviewing an orthodontist–land speculator from Missoula via Cleveland named, believe it or not, something-or-other Lawless. All Patrick could remember was that last name. And there was the couple, sure enough oil: Claire Burnett and her husband, whose real name was John but who was already, in his thirties, called Tio, which is Mexican for uncle and is a rather flattering nickname for one who aspires to be a patrón. But Tio was vivid anyway, piercey-bright, oilman feisty, and his wife was a knockout. Patrick knew their name, a little bit, because of horses.

  The conversation was lively already. A boy had been shot and killed on a ranch recently for trespassing. Claire and Tio looked baffled at this bit of local color. Deke Patwell slid comfortably into his local-expert mode and sternly explained that only the ranchers’ reputation for being trigger-happy kept them safe and their way of life intact. Then playfully he tugged at her sleeve and said, “Claire, you do horses so well. Let me and Tio do current events. Later you do house. Anything else is just five-o’clock news.”

  “Where is the dead boy’s family?” Claire asked. Tio then scooped down into Bloody Marys. Deke caught his glance and they walked over under the cottonwoods. Claire turned to Patrick. Tio had bought Deke’s views.

  “I’m not going to ask you what you think.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “People side up with Tio because they want his business.”

  “I don’t want his business.”