Nobody's Angel Read Free Page B

him as Patrick Fitzpatrick of Deadrock, Montana, and the navigator as Del Andrews of Long Beach, California. Great space was given to the model of the aircraft and speculation about a declared salvage value. As so many people have had to wonder, Patrick thought, if my father is dead, how can I be alive? In this way Patrick lost much of his own fear of death. The crash had provoked none of the questions usual to accidental death. There was nothing to identify.
    Patrick’s grandfather walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, stared about at the contents, settled for a handful of radishes and sat down.
    “What’s the cattle market doing?”
    “Haven’t had the radio on,” said Patrick. “Somebody sold a bunch of bred heifers in Billings yesterday for a twenty-seven-hundred-dollar average.”
    “Bred how?”
    “Shoshone or Chandelier Forever, forgot which. You want me to make you some breakfast?”
    “I can rustle.”
    “Here, sit down. What do you want?”
    “Couple of soft-boiled eggs.”
    Patrick started getting them ready. “In Europe there’d be these restaurants that put soft-boiled eggs in little porcelain holders, and they’d cover it with a knitted thing to keep the egg hot.”
    “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. I have no desire to see Europe.”
    Patrick served the eggs and some toast.
    “Down there, there in Oklahoma, they’ve got a toll-free number for the cattle market. I hate having to listen to all this deal on the radio to find what steers brought.”
    “Steers aren’t going to make you anything,” Patrick said. He put some English on that.
    “Feeding out seven months ain’t going to make you anything.”
    “I never said ranching was any good.”
    “Talk like that,” said his grandfather feistily, “and you won’t want to fix nothin.”
    “Well, just let her fall down then,” Patrick said.
    “It ain’t even historical.”
    “That’s right.” Historical? That was a first from the old souse.
    “And where would you be running this remuda of yours?”
    “On the damn forest service.”
    “Try it.”
    “I may.”
    Patrick’s grandfather returned to his eggs, smoldering. Patrick was going to let him make his own tomorrow.
    “You ought to back your horses more if you want them to get their butts down,” said his grandfather.
    “Don’t tell me to back my horses. I get their feet under them by making them want to stop.”
    “They aren’t tanks, Patrick.”
    “I rode some colts you broke twenty years ago. Couldn’t turn them around in a twenty-acre pasture.”
    “Why don’t I just cook my own eggs tomorrow? Seems like a little favor spoils your temperament. I remember some of them colts and they turned on a dime. Why, you bugger, I broke Leafy’s mother!”
    “You cook the eggs.”
    When he was away Patrick’s daydreams fell easily back twenty years to summers riding in the hills, spooking game in the springs and down in the blue, shadowy draws, swimming in the gold dredge, girls present, the cold sky-blue submersion a baptism, the best place for the emerging consciousness of women to grow in suitable containment. Even, suddenly in a West German dance hall, remembering the flood of tears at twelve when he’d killed a spike buck in the same little grove where he and his father always cut their Christmas tree. Before that, hunting coyotes, his grandfather had crawled into a cave near Blacktail and found a ceremonially dressed, mummified Indian warrior on a slab of rock. His grandfather refused to tell anyone where the corpse was, and Patrick wore out two saddle horses looking for it. A friend, Jack Adams, later found it over on Mission Creek. “You do not disturb the Old Ones,” his grandfather had said. Then Jack glommed the mummy, making everyone cross. And Patrick himself, on the North Rosebud, had found the scribblings of the phantom ancient Sheepeaters; he had slept in eagle traps and in the coffin-shaped hole in the rock the Crows had made above