Free Nobody's Angel by Thomas Mcguane

particulars of the ranch which he had always assumed he would run but which he never had run and which, in fact, no one had ever run, except his grandfather. Patrick’s father had gone off to test airplanes, and the man before his grandfather—an Englishman with the papers of a clergyman too finely scripted to be doubted by the honyockers and illiterate railroaders who settled the town—that Englishman never lifted a fingerexcept in pursuit of Indian women and in operatic attempts at suicide in the six inches of running water from which the place was subsequently irrigated. He did leave, however, large academic oils that he had commissioned as decoration in the dining room, depicting smallpox epidemics among the Assiniboine from the point of view of a Swiss academic painter in his early twenties, eager to get home and tend to the clocks. The paintings showed all Indians in Eastern war bonnets, holding their throats in the paroxysms of dehydration, popularly assumed to be the last stage of that plague. It had never, to Patrick, seemed the right thing for the dining room. At the same time it did not deter anyone from eating. Today Patrick felt a little like the Englishman who had commissioned the paintings.
    But he did have a thought. He went into the pantry, where his grandfather had hung the telephone, and being careful to stay loose, dialed and got Claire.
    “Claire,” he said, “this is Patrick Fitzpatrick.”
    “Well, hey.”
    “Say, I’d just remembered, I never gave Tio an answer about that colt.”
    “Fitzpatrick! That you?” It was Tio.
    “Yes, it is.”
    “You callin regardin that colt?”
    “Yes, I—”
    “You gonna take him?”
    “Yes, I’d like to.”
    “You should, he’s a good colt. Bill us at Tulsa. Honey, you still on?”
    “Sure am. Where’re you?”
    “I’m down to the granary with the accountants. Can you load that horse yourself?”
    “Sure can.”
    “Carry him out to Fitzpatrick. Listen, I gotta go. Bye.” Click.
    Patrick said, “Do you need directions, Claire?” He was happy. Then Tio came back on.
    “You oughta breed ole Cunt to that mare of yours, Fitzpatrick. Think on it.” Click. Pause.
    “Uh, yes, I will need directions.”
    Patrick said, “Let’s just wait a second and see if Tio comes back on.”
    There was a pause, and then Claire said, with a little fear in her voice, “Why?”
    “I hate repeating directions,” said Patrick. His was an odd remark. He had no such attitude. He was starting to make things up. The last Army officer in this area he could think of who did that was General George Armstrong Custer.

13
     
    INTERMITTENTLY BEHIND THE CORRUGATED TRUNKS OF THE cottonwoods Patrick could discern a sedan with an in-line trailer behind it. He was replacing planks on the loading chute, ones that had been knocked loose while he was gone; and he could see down to the road from here, to the sedan, the dust from the trailer and the changing green light on the metal from the canopy of leaves overhead. Cole Younger was the first dog to detect the car turning in, and his bellowing bark set Alba and the hysterical Zip T. Crow into surrounding the outfit. Patrick left the spikes and hammer at the chute and started down the hill. Oncepast the orchard he could hear the horse whinny inside the trailer and he could read the word “Oklahoma” on the plates. Was that Sooner, Hoosier or Show Me? The door of the sedan was open, but glare on the window kept him from seeing. He could make out one dangling boot and nothing else. Claire kicked Zip T. Crow very precisely and without meanness as the dog stole in for a cheap shot.
    The car looked like it could pull the trailer a hundred in a head wind. Patrick had a weakness for gas gobblers; and a rather limited part of him, the part that enjoyed his seventy-mile-an-hour tank, had always wanted to rodeo out of a Cadillac like this one. He took a hard look: oil-money weird, no doubt about that. Like Australians, loud with thin