Nobody's Angel
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
In McGuane's first novel set in his famed American West, Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict. His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick himself is spiraling out of control, into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane's Montana. Nowhere has McGuane mapped that territory more precisely—or with such tenderhearted lunacy—than in Nobody's Angel, a novel that places him in a genre of his own.
Thomas McGuane
Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club and The Bushwhacked Piano. He has also written several works of nonfiction that stem from his passion for sport and the outdoors, including An Outside Chance,The Longest Silence, and Some Horses. He lives in Montana.
Read more from Thomas Mc Guane
Ninety-Two in the Shade Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDriving on the Rim: A novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sporting Club Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crow Fair: Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNothing but Blue Skies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Skin a Cat Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Cadence of Grass: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGallatin Canyon: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A River Never Sleeps Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Keep the Change Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPanama Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bushwhacked Piano Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlood Knots: A Memoir of Fathers, Friendship, and Fishing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Something to Be Desired Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Trout and Salmon of North America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pointer and His Predecessors: An Illustrated History of the Pointing Dog from the Earliest Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Refugee Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCloser to the Ground: An Outdoor Family's Year on the Water, In the Woods and at the Table Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to Nobody's Angel
Related ebooks
The Yukon Trail: A Tale of the North Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America's Premier Racing Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lure: Stillwaters Runs Deep: Book, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHunter's Moon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oh, You Tex! Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPay the Piper: A Novel Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Darkest Glare: A True Story of Murder, Blackmail, and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alaskan Laundry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Old Pines and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRavenwood Mysteries: Books 1-3: Ravenwood Mysteries Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStand Up and Die Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPlague Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Mirage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Night is Never Black: A Lucky Dey Thriller: Lucky Dey Thriller, #5 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLonesome Dove: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sea of Bones Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJacko: The Great Intruder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Talisman: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5TUNDRA: Short Fiction 2000-2022 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsImperial Entanglements Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThese Violent Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWalter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crow 4: The Black Trail Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Well Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Breath of Prairie and other stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Big Dry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSix Cut Kill Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Perpetual Arrivals Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Bad Lands: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Western Fiction For You
The Sisters Brothers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dragon Teeth: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Country for Old Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A River Runs through It and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shane Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Thief of Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dancing at Midnight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Homesman: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Son Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Old Women, [Anniversary Edition]: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bearskin: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dead Man's Walk: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anything for Billy: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Man from Battle Flat: A Western Trio Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Outlander: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Knotted: Trails of Sin, #1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Night Always Comes: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Riders of the Purple Sage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSin Killer: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 1 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Way Station Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Log of a Cowboy: Illustrated Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEpitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Cowboys Ain’t Gone: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBannon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5California Gold: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Outlaw: A Novel of Robin Hood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Valentine: A Thriller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Nobody's Angel
36 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5McGuane's books remind me of Hemingway, if Hemingway wrote primarily about Cowboys, men have trouble growing old,much less growing up, and Montana. For me at least his books remain readable in the 21st century unlike much of Hemingway.
Book preview
Nobody's Angel - Thomas McGuane
1
YOU WOULD HAVE TO CARE ABOUT THE COUNTRY. NOBODY had been here long enough and the Indians had been very thoroughly kicked out. It would take a shovel to find they’d ever been here. In the grasslands that looked so whorled, so cowlicked from overhead, were the ranches. And some of these ranches were run by men who thought like farmers and who usually had wives twice their size. The others were run by men who thought like cowboys and whose wives, more often than not, were their own size or smaller, sometimes quite tiny. The farmer-operators were good mechanics and packed the protein off the land. The cowboys had maybe a truck and some saddle horses; and statistics indicate that they had an unhealthy dependence on whiskey. They were not necessarily violent nor necessarily uneducated. Their women didn’t talk in the tiny baby voices of the farmer-operator wives nor in the beautician rasp of the town wives. The cowboys might have gotten here last week or just after the Civil War, and they seemed to believe in what they were doing; though they were often very lazy white men.
The town in the middle of this place was called Deadrock, a modest place of ten thousand souls, originally named for an unresolved battle between the Army and the Assiniboin—Deadlock—but renamed Deadrock out of some sad and irresolute boosterism meant to cure an early-day depression. To many people Deadrock was exactly the right name; and in any case it stuck. It was soon to be a major postcard.
Patrick Fitzpatrick lived on a ranch thirty-one miles outside of town. He was a forth-generation cowboy outsider, an educated man, a whiskey addict and until recently a professional soldier. He was thirty-six years old. He was in good shape; needed some crown work but that was about it.
2
THE YARD LIGHT ERECT UPON ITS WOOD STANCHION THREW down a yellow faltering glow infinitely chromatic falling through the China willow to the ground pounded up against the house by the unrepentantly useless horses. Patrick Fitzpatrick glided under the low branches on his mare as the band circled into the corral for salt and grain and water and the morning’s inspection for cracked hooves, lameness, splints, bowed tendons, lice, warbles, wire cuts, ulcerated eyes, wolf teeth, spavin, gravel, founder and worms.
Near the light’s edge the dogs watched him pass: Cole Younger, yellow, on his back, all four legs dangling, let his eyelids fall open upside down; Alba, black, in the sub-shadow of mountain ash, ready to run; Zip T. Crow, brindle, jaw alight on parallel front legs, considered starting a stampede with his hyena voice. Thinking finally of the consequences, he fell to dreaming as the last horse, a yearling running at an angle, jog-trotted into the corral to drink in the creek alongside the other shadowy horses deployed as regularly as a picket line. Zip T. Crow slunk over behind some relic of a walking cultivator and dropped into its confused shadows like a shy insurrectionist. This was the day to ride up to the airplane.
3
IN VERY EARLY SPRING BEFORE THE CREEKS FLOODED, BEFORE the first bridges washed away and the big river turned dark, before the snow was gone from the rugged shadows and the drowned livestock tumbled up in the brushy banks, Patrick found the airplane with his binoculars—a single ripped glimmer of fuselage visible a matter of hours before the next flurry concealed it for another month but not before Patrick had memorized the deep-blue ultramontane declivity at the top of the fearsome mountain and begun speculating if in May he could get a horse through the last ten thousand yards of deadfall and look into the pilot’s eyes. Patrick was the son of a dead pilot.
Then in May Patrick walked up the endless sloping nose and saw the pilot quite clearly. He climbed past him to the copilot’s seat and found fractured portions of granite, parts of the mountain that had poured like grapeshot through the fuselage clear into the tail section, leaving the copilot in innumerable pieces, those pieces gusseted in olive nylon, and the skin of the aircraft blood-sprayed as in a cult massacre. Farther aft in the tapering shape where the beating spring sun shone on the skin of the plane and where viscera trailed off in straps, fastening and instruments, it stank. Arms raised in uniform, the pilot seemed the image of a man in receipt of a fatal sacrament. The oxygen hose was torn away, and beyond the nautiloid effigy, Patrick could see his mare grazing on the alpine slope. Unable to differentiate flesh and electronics, he was avoiding the long-held notion that his father had died like a comet, igniting in the atmosphere, an archangelic semaphore more dignified than death itself. For Patrick, a year had begun. The inside of the plane showed him that life doesn’t just always drag on.
4
PATRICK LEFT THE SIDEWALK THROUGH THE DOOR BETWEEN the two angled windows. It was cold, but when he hung his coat inside and glanced onto the street, it looked like summer. Purest optics. There was a stock truck parked at the hotel with two saddled horses in back facing opposite directions. Many saddle horses spend the day parked in front of a bar, heads hung in sleep. Can’t get good help anymore, Patrick thought. Even if you could, who wants to tell people what to do?
Two steps up at the poker table was an old man with a diamond willow cane pushing chips onto the green felt. There was a belton setter at his feet, two strangers and a girl dealing cards. Not strangers, but he couldn’t remember their names.
Afternoon, Patrick,
said the old man, whose name was Carson. That was his first name.
One stranger said, Hello, Captain
—Patrick had been in the Army—and the other said, How’s the man?
Classmates with forgotten faces. But Patrick was rather graceful under these conditions, and by the time he’d gone through the room, the setter was asleep again, the players were smiling and the girl dealing was reading his name off the back of his belt.
The bar was nearly empty, populated solely by that handful of citizens who can drink in the face of sun blazing through the windows. Patrick ordered his whiskey, knocked it back and reconnoitered. Whiskey, he thought, head upstairs and do some good.
He called, Thanks so much!
to the bar girl, put down his money and left. It was hard to leave a place where God was at bay.
He walked all the way to the foot of Main, straight toward the mountain range, crossed the little bridge over the clear overflow ditch and went into a prefabricated home without knocking. The windows were covered with shades, and once his eyes accustomed themselves to the poor light, he could see the prostitutes on the couch watching an intelligent interview show, the kind in which Mr. Interlocutor is plainly on amphetamines, while his subjects move in grotesque slow motion. They were dealing with the fetus’s right to life. On the panel were four abortionists, five anti-abortionists and a livid nun with the temper of an aging welterweight.
Hello, girls.
Hello, Patrick.
No game on?
College basketball. We’re watching this fetus deal.
Anybody make a profit?
Loretta did.
Loretta, a vital brunette with tangled hair and a strong, clean body, beamed. She said, Trout fishermen. Doctors, I think. One had a penlight. He said he always checked for lesions. I said clap. He said among other things. I said four- to ten-day incubation. He says which book are you reading. I said I don’t read books, I watch TV. So he gets in there with this penlight. I could’ve swatted him.
Free checkup,
said Patrick. Look at the good side of things.
Who’s winning?
Loretta asked. She came from Deadrock, looked like a nice farm girl.
Deirdre, from Great Falls, always literal, said, The fetus.
This nun was packing the mail.
Patrick asked if they were betting. They said no. He said that as he was a Catholic, he would kick in the set if the fetus lost.
There’s a Catholic,
said Tana as the camera isolated the apoplectic nun shouting the word "Sacred!"
I’ve seen better ones,
said Patrick.
Well, there’s one, is all,
she said doggedly.
Andrea, the young, bright blond, was from the High Line. She said, I was with this rancher on his place. He wanted to go again. All the lights went out. I said that’s Rural Electrification for you. He said that’s Montana Power. I said well, I can’t see nothin. He said it’s hydroelectric. It comes off the grid, out of Columbia Falls. So I said what’s the deal? Do we go again? He said not if I can’t see. And just then, like God was on my side, the power came back on and I doubled down for fifty bucks. Thank you, Montana Power! Thank you, Columbia Falls!
Jesus,
Patrick said. That nun is going to blow her stack.
He was staring at the screen.
She’s no help to the fetus team,
said Loretta. The moderator kept saying, "Sister! Sister! but nothing could slow her tirade, which continued to feature the word
Sacred!" repeated at very high volume.
I’m glad I don’t have any money on this one,
said Patrick. Andrea got up and went to the kitchen to make iced tea. Loretta, from Deadrock, had gone to grammar school with Patrick, had been a medical secretary, then been not quite happy with that and tried prostitution, a respected job in Montana because of its long utility during the settlement of that region. Loretta’s rural good looks made her prosper, particularly among visiting sportsmen.
Deirdre, from Great Falls, said, That nun could use some eye shadow.
Deirdre was best with closing-time stumblebums. Patrick asked Loretta if he could have a word with her privately.
The two went into the kitchen as Patrick fought back a little tingle. Loretta hiked herself up on the counter and Patrick sat in a ladder-back chair. There were coffee cans on a low shelf, each labeled with one of the girls’ names; and in front of every can was a kitchen timer. The cans held each night’s earnings and the clocks foiled dawdling or inappropriate enthusiasm.
Loretta,
said Patrick. You’re prettier than you were at homecoming.
Only an officer. She’d actually gone downhill.
I’ve got a better life now. When did you get back?
Not too long ago. In the winter.
You home to stay?
Trying to be. It’ll depend on what I can get going. We’re still running pairs and I’ve got a few outside horses to break, if I can remember how. I guess my grandfather has just had to pick up whoever he could. So a lot of things have kind of gone downhill.
He had that one Indian for quite a while. Supposed to have been a good hand.
What Indian?
He was, you know, a friend of Mary’s, the way I had it.
Mary was Patrick’s sister.
Well, Mary is why I’m here.
What’s the trouble?
No trouble. I just can’t find her. I mean, I thought you might know.
"She got out of this work a long time ago, Pat. The Indian is the best way to find her I know. He was supposed to be real different. Used to shark pool at the Corral, just take everybody’s money and never say a word. You know, an Indian."
Well, I’m not going to go hunt her down or anything. But if you see her, tell her I’m home.
I sure will.
Boy, you look good, Loretta.
More!
She put on her It Girl
smile and spun on her toes.
Patrick walked over to the can labeled Loretta,
wound the clock in front of it and turned it loose real slow.
Gives me a vicarious thrill,
he said. She waved as he went out the door into the sunlight that bounced from the high walls of granite around the town.
5
PATRICK WAS TICKING OFF OBLIGATIONS. HE WALKED BACK outside under the heartless blue sky. He was searching for his grandfather, who had left the ranch early that morning. Patrick feared a binge. But as he had just left the Army and was not yet used to being home, he was rather like someone out of stir, trying to establish a pattern in a new world. For example, this morning after feeding the horses, he had thought very seriously about moving to Madrid. He had learned Spanish at the Monterey language school, but the Army made him a tank captain in Germany. Nonetheless, he often daydreamed of an ancient walk-up in Castile with a stone kitchen, a cook he could afford and a stream of interesting characters who could understand that what had begun as scholarship had precipitated him into cold-war mongery, not a desire to drive a bulletproof dump truck on the East German line. Patrick had read widely, could break horses and did not, as yet, live in Spain. In any case, he would never reveal his love for the tank. He was tall, single, had lost his father and looked after a grandfather who now drank too much. Patrick drank a little too much. His father had been a test pilot for Boeing. His mother remarried in California. Lately, Patrick was having trouble answering letters, especially the prying ones from the family about the finances of the ranch, which were precarious; and with each arrival of the mail it had become a real Mexican standoff between hiring a secretary and embarking for Castile.
Angled on the corner of Big Horn and Main was the Part-Time Bar, where Patrick went to have a George Dickel and water as a way of staking the place out for his grandfather. The Part-Time was an old-timers’ favorite. The homemade soup there took a little of the edge off the binges and sustained anyone hungry in search of company. This hunger struck at all hours.
Patrick walked in and it was busy. He surveyed the room; no sign of his grandfather. At the bar many aging backs hunched in concealment.
Anybody seen the old man?
About fifteen nopes.
Patrick got his whiskey at the bar, sat down in the row of older faces and thought: This is the kind of place that makes you want to grow old, just sit here and eavesdrop.
Down the bar:
I was born in 1904.
Here?
Evidently.
Cigarette smoke moved horizontally toward the EXIT-TELEPHONE-REST ROOM sign.
Every time someone entered, What d’ya know?
in a hearty voice; and the reply: Not much.
The o
in know
carrying the drawn-out local dipthong.
Patrick sipped in deep contentment. Underneath the murmur of conversation and easy laughter was the continuous slap of plastic chips from the poker game in the corner.
An elderly man next to Patrick in a John B. Stetson hat and blue suspenders said, Colder it gets, the more a guy’ll notice.
He stared fixedly at the commemorative bottles. A pretty girl in a blue sweater dealt poker and in a firm voice repeated the rules. The new players feared her.
Fifty cents to a buck on the deal and before the flop. There’s a three-raise limit on each round, no cutting. Twenty bucks to buy in.
The old man next to Patrick was adjusting his butt on the stool, improving his angle for a conversation. The bartender shot past to the glass-and-wood cooler that displayed five kinds of beer at knee level. Patrick tried to read the farm-auction poster from twenty feet; thought, Used to could do that.
A voice from the corner: Can’t draw no goddamned clubs.
The bartender collected more orders—Sunny Brook, Cabin Still, Old Grand Dad, Canadian Mist, another George Dickel for Patrick.
Hungry?
No,
said Patrick.
We got three kinds of beef jerky—King B, Big Slim and Rawhide Ranch.
I don’t think so.
Plus beer nuts and smoked almonds.
Who shot that six-pointer?
I did, Pat. Right after Korea.
The old man asked the bartender, What bets’ve I got?
You got the Pirates and the Tigers.
Buck a square?
Yup.
What kind of cigars you got?
Everything from White Owl to R. G. Dun.
Gimme an R. G. Dun.
Patrick thought that in a moment the old man would tell him where his grandfather was; he was warming up and didn’t want to be a squealer. Patrick pointed to a bottle of Hiram Walker chocolate-mint liqueur and asked, Ever try that?
No.
The old man knew Patrick knew. He was going to play it silent. Down the bar a heavy woman in her sixties squinted and started describing commemorative bottles in a lungful of Lucky Strike smoke: Illinois Gladiola Festival, a ‘Ducks Unlimited,’ an Australian koala bear, Indian chief, Abraham Lincoln, the Kentucky Derby, Am Vets, a telephone—
Barkeep, what’s it say on that model train?
‘Jupiter.’ Says just ‘Jupiter.’
I don’t know what in the hell that means. Why don’t somebody scrape that junk down from offa there?
The old man pivoted to Patrick. Your grandfather is trying out for a movie.
He what?
Read the poster on the inside of the door.
CASTING CALL
for HONDO’S LAST MOVE, a feature film.
WANTED
Men, women and children for bit players, extras, et cetera.
ALSO NOTE
In order to reflect the hardships endured in the West in the 1880’s, we would especially welcome the physically eccentric, those with permanent physical injuries, such as scars, missing teeth, broken limbs, broken noses, missing limbs, etc.
CONTACT
Arnold Duxbury, Casting Coordinator, Room 115–17, Murray Hotel. Interviews commence daily at 10:00 A.M.
Patrick thought, The old bugger has scars, missing teeth and evidence of a broken nose. That is where we shall find him. One episode too many of Wagon Train, dog-food ads masquerading as life.
Rooms 115–17 were, respectively, reception, waiting room and Duxbury. There was a considerable lineup of the maimed. The worst was a five-year-old boy whose pet wildcat had recently clawed out his eyeball. He wore an oozing patch and steered his head around, trying to figure out what he was doing there. His mother, a telephone operator who moonlighted at the Tempo Supper Club, respected her son’s injury enough to bark "No cuts!" at Patrick when he tried to move up the line and look for his grandfather. The mother indignantly steered the little boy forward by the arm, and Patrick sheepishly got at the end while the halt, lame and maimed glowered at him, thinking, It’s the bloody tank captain from the Heart Bar Ranch, trying to throw his weight around. But the sound of crutches and labored breathing grew behind him, and soon he stood at the desk