Read Online Nobody's Angel by Thomas Mcguane - Free Book Online Page B

kitchen had, and said, “What’s for dinner?” Patrick thought, Is this our religion? He remembered a clever young tank-gunner with a year at the university who pasted the picture of a new swami above his observation port every month. He wanted war with Communism, then exciting visits to ashrams. He wanted to find himself, but first he wanted to smash Communism. He thought swamis stood for that. His name was Walt. He had records by Carlos Santana but called him by his assumed name, Devadip or something. Walt loved Santana Devadip-or-something for inventing swami rock ’n’ roll. He wanted to go to Santana’s hometown, but he had heard San Francisco was now commanded by fairies and therefore he thought the nextthing was to smash Communism, then go on a swami tour of the Orient. Walt had luxurious sideburns that looked suspiciously as if they’d been permanented. He liked Germany but he wanted to raid the East. Sometimes when Walt’s ambition had been fortified by mystery substances, especially the one he called “mother’s little helper”—by all accounts something invented to keep advance-reconnaissance rangers awake for three days at a time—sometimes then Walt asked Patrick to hack a left into what he called Prime-time red, cross the border, head downtown and shell the home of the East German mayor. On such occasions Patrick referred to the gently fatal attitudes of his heroes of the Orient, urging Walt to cool his heels, at least until mother’s little helper wore off. It was ’76, the bicentennial. The East Germans had won forty-seven medals in the Olympics and Walt didn’t like it, was real bummed out, said “Fuck it” all the time.
    But that was long ago and far away, as so much eventually was. Patrick was still midway in the accumulation of his scrapbook, and paramount in that was what he thought of as a less lonely life. For now, bereft of his German girl friends and base-employed bachelorettes, the cowboy captain felt stranded on the beautiful ranch he would someday own, land, homestead, water rights, cattle and burden. He had no idea what he would do with it.
    This had not entirely been necessary. There had been nice girls, beautiful girls, German dynamos with degrees who desired to be cowgirls when the captain returned, girls who could do English in the inflection of Tek-Ziz, New York or the late President Kennedy. It had been a long go on the line of the Soviet bloc and it had included paternity suits, arrangements and affection. He had tried Spain on leave, but the Spanish girls wouldn’t go to the beach and the English secretaries on holiday behaved likebeagles in heat at a guard-dog show in Munich. He began using an electric razor. He began not to care. He began not to brush between meals. He began to brood about the high lonesome and the girls at the gold dredge and their desire to be barrel racers and then make little babies. By now they’d had bunches of them and the babies were all in 4H. He read Thucydides and asked about soldiers’ homecomings. He heard Marvin Gaye sing the national anthem at the heavyweight championship fight, and that was that. He quit the Army. He had never fired a shot, but he was going home to Montana to pick up where he left off—which was a blurred edge; blurred because of boarding school, the death of his father, the disappearance—intermittent—of his sister and the remarriage of his mother to a glowing, highly focused businessman from California who owned a lighting-design center in Santa Barbara and was a world-class racquetball player.
    Now, home for a time and with no good reason to support his feeling, what had seemed the last prospect in his vague search for a reason to come home and
stay
turned out to be a subliminal inclination toward another man’s wife; which was plainly unrequited if not without charm, and pointless.
    Can’t help that, thought Patrick. He turned his thoughts to what could be helped, most of which consisted in learning the