Nobody's Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

said Patrick, slamming the truck door. “To your health.”
    “Yours. No sense in getting your granddad out today?”
    You could see the people, the strangely stylized, bent-at-the-waist postures of people socializing on a lawn.
    “All he talks about is the past and the movies. I need to get him back on some middle ground before I can show him. Besides, he doesn’t like anybody.”
    “People go through phases,” said Jack. It was not, perforce, banal. “We’ve all taken a spell or two.”
    Deke Patwell, the editor of the Deadrock
News
, started toward Patrick. Patwell had left graduate school with little but the habit of dressing in the ill-fitting 1950 seer-sucker that characterized his professors; but by the time he established himself in Deadrock, he decided that it was the place where the last stand of just folks would take place. This sort of fanciful descent was a kind of religion and had been something of a vice among the privilegedclasses for centuries, Marie Antoinette being the most famous example. Patwell had as little use for Patrick as he had for the poor and dispossessed. He was a champion of the average and he meant to make it stick. This attitude and Patwell’s capacity for hard work made the
News
successful. It was a legitimate success.
    “How’s Patrick?” he said.
    “Not bad, Deke.”
    “Enjoying the gathering?” Deke was always rakish when he managed to leave his wife at home.
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “Anything newsworthy up your way?”
    “No, it’s been awful quiet.”
    “We thought it best to ignore Mary’s little run-ins.”
    Patrick felt his blood rising. “Like what?”
    “Well, you’ve been away. And like I say, we didn’t see fit to print.” Little homecoming presents. Lawn war.
    “I appreciate it,” said Patrick as best he could, wondering why Patwell was establishing this debt. Maybe just the husbandry of someone who daily had to call in the repayment of small favors.
    “Time for my refill,” said Patwell. “And call me if you get anything up your way.”
    Patrick walked toward the lawn. The lawn was Anna’s idea. Anna was Jack’s wife. Anna did not belong to the dude-ranch-wife set with the shaved back of the neck and boot-cut Levis; there were certain perquisites for having raised children and done well that she regarded as indispensable. One was a lawn; others were New York clothes, a restaurant-size gas stove, a Missouri fox-trotter horse and a German Olympic-grade .22 rifle to shoot gophers with. The first time a luncheon guest shoved a Ferragamo pump into a gopher colony, Anna ordered the rifle. In early summer she sat upstairs beneath the steeply angledroof in her bathrobe, moving the crosshairs over the rolled green expanse, looking for rodents in the optics. Jack learned to use the back door as he came and went to the pens and barn, the report of the small-caliber rifle becoming, year by year, less audible.
    The Bloody Marys were in a huge cut-glass bowl, which rested in a cattle-watering tank filled with ice. No one had fanned out far from this place and Patrick got a quick survey: a few people he already knew, Anna, who just winked, and a handsome young couple he’d never seen. The husband wore a good summer jacket and a pair of boots the height of his knee, outside his pants. An oilman, Patrick thought. Oilmen, whatever else they might wear, needed one outstanding sartorial detail to show that their oil was on ranches. And by God, if there was enough oil, they’d go ahead and put cows on those ranches and wear their boots like that. You wanted to be sure no one thought you were a damn parts salesman.
    Patrick still had his bourbon and had planned a slow approach, but Anna swept him in, introducing him with the “Captain” prefix. Deke Patwell was deftly escorting an inheritrix from Seattle named Penny Asperson and interviewing an orthodontist–land speculator from Missoula via Cleveland named, believe it or not, something-or-other Lawless. All Patrick