Nobody's Angel Read Online Free

Massacre Creek. He had seen the skeleton of a Cheyenne girl dressed in an Army coat, disinterred when the railroad bed was widened. Her family had put silver thimbles on every finger to prove to somebody’s god that she was a useful girl who could sew. After his father went to work for Boeing and split up with hismother, Patrick lived with his grandfather and ate so much poached game that the smell of beef nauseated him. He lost the tips of three fingers in his lariat heeling calves in the spring and never went to the movies except to meet girls. He could shoe horses, beat a hunting knife out of an old file, throw a diamond hitch, fix windmills, listen for broken gate valves in the well; and masquerade enough in town to occasionally get his ashes hauled, though he still preferred the sinewy barrel-racers he first met at the gold dredge whose teasing country-ruthless sensuality was somehow smokier than the ten-speeders just learning to roll a number. At sixteen he was jailed twelve times in a row for disorderly conduct; and his father, in the year that he died—a circumstance that left Patrick permanently dented with guilt—borrowed against his share of the ranch and sent Patrick to a preparatory school in the East which thought that a rebellious young cowboy would be a colorful enough addition to a student body that included a Siamese prince with a Corvette, a West German, five Venezuelans and one Negro that they would overlook his poor grades and boisterous history with the law.
    They taught him to play soccer. Once again he was in short pants. For a long time he could see his knees in the corners of his eyes when he ran. It made him miss the ball. It was one of the troublesome ways he couldn’t escape his own mind. Later, it got worse.

7
     
    EVIDENTLY SOMEONE PASSING THROUGH GRASSRANGE HAD given Mary a ride as far as Roundup, then dropped her with a social worker there. The conditions that moved thisperson to, in effect, turn Mary in were ones that produced concern and not fear: Mary wasn’t making sense. The tough district court judge at Roundup had Mary hauled to Warm Springs, which is Montana’s state mental institution. She had been detained. But the primary problem was that no one could identify her and Mary wasn’t helping. She said that something was always happening to her, but she would tell no one what it was.
    Patrick was her custodian once she relinquished her name. He took her home, cruising the interstate in his truck on the intermittently cloudy day. He looked over his sunglasses; he was trying to seem old.
    “What’d you read?”
    “Two books, over and over.”
    “What books were they?”
    “Books of poetry, Patrick. I read the poems of Saint Theresa of Avila and the poems of Saint John of the Cross. That car has Ohio plates. How many Ohio songs can you name?”
    “You make any friends?”
    “One trouble with loony bins is you make friends and then you make enemies, and there are these referee-doctors who don’t seem to be able to stop this seesaw deal between the two. All they do is keep the patients from savaging each other.” She leaned to see herself in the rear-view.
    “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
    “Evidently I can’t see life’s purpose.”
    “What do you mean ‘evidently’?”
    “I mean that that’s what they told me. I didn’t come up with the idea myself.”
    “I don’t ever think about life’s purpose,” said Patrick, lying in his teeth.
    “Lucky you,” she said. “We got enough gas?”
    “We do, and there’s more where that came from.”
    Mary was, Patrick thought, such a pretty girl. And she didn’t have the neurasthenic glaze that produced what passed for looks among people who would rather raise orchids. Mary had a strong, clear face, a cascade of oaken hair and a lean, athletic figure. But she also had, Patrick thought, a bad attitude. Certainly no bell-jar lady, though.
    It made him worry. He was open-minded and interested in other tastes