Read Online Nobody's Angel by Thomas Mcguane - Free Book Online Page 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’sI 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.
    Patrick saw this man, his grandfather, with no pity for himself and less for others, touching the kitchen match to a cold kerosene mantle—ignition and the wavering light on the dead man—thinking then as he would now that it was a matter of available light, a matter of seeing what one had achieved, whether one had successfully descended the mountain from Hell Roaring without losing the load, and at the same time imagining that he was illustrating a story about how there were now too many lights on the valley floor and that it was better when you had to hang the lantern in front of the spooking mule to catch the grimace of face distorted by a single lash rope crossing the mouth of a murderer and looping around the girth of a mule whose scarred flanks were decorated with stripes of blood like war paint. Had this all really disappeared?
    As then, when he felt the old man’s past, or when he went among the ancient cottonwoods that once held the shrouded burials of the Crow, Patrick felt that in fact there had been a past, and though he was not a man with connections or immediate family, he was part of something in the course of what was to come. None of which meant he’d failed at ambition, but only that its base was so broad he could not discover its high final curves, the ones that propelled him into the present, or glory, or death.
    “How’d they get the wife’s body out of the concrete?”
    “Hadn’t set yet.”
    “What’d they do with the head?”
    “Propped it where it was supposed to go once they had the box. Who cares.”
    “What happened to the husband?”
    “He wrote away for another one.”
    “Another what?”
    “Another wife.”
    “What do you think happens when someone dies?”
    “They can’t do nothin anymore. Most religious sum-buck walkin couldn’t persuade me that they can do much. Don’t add up. God created an impossible situation.”
    Patrick thought that this was a dignified appraisal, no Ahab railing against mortality, but simply the observed, which in the end was harsh enough: that for one who could stand it, those who sought to strike the sun for an offense seemed like cheap grandstanders; and they were certainly in no shortage.
    Now his grandfather took down his daily missal from above Patrick’s shelf of cookbooks and pint-size bottle of sour mash, a bottle old-timers called a mickey. He sat down in the one comfortable ladder-back the