Nobody's Angel Read Online Free PDF

could remember was that last name. And there was the couple, sure enough oil: Claire Burnett and her husband, whose real name was John but who was already, in his thirties, called Tio, which is Mexican for uncle and is a rather flattering nickname for one who aspires to be a
patrón.
But Tio was vivid anyway, piercey-bright, oilman feisty, and his wife was a knockout. Patrick knew their name, a little bit, because of horses.
    The conversation was lively already. A boy had been shot and killed on a ranch recently for trespassing. Claireand Tio looked baffled at this bit of local color. Deke Patwell slid comfortably into his local-expert mode and sternly explained that only the ranchers’ reputation for being trigger-happy kept them safe and their way of life intact. Then playfully he tugged at her sleeve and said, “Claire, you do horses so well. Let me and Tio do current events. Later you do house. Anything else is just five-o’clock news.”
    “Where is the dead boy’s family?” Claire asked. Tio then scooped down into Bloody Marys. Deke caught his glance and they walked over under the cottonwoods. Claire turned to Patrick. Tio had bought Deke’s views.
    “I’m not going to ask you what you think.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “People side up with Tio because they want his business.”
    “I don’t want his business.”
    “What are you captain of?”
    “Tanks.”
    “See, they know how shocking their thinking is. They just want it to set them apart. Has nothing to do with that boy— Tanks?”
    Patrick tried to decide whether good country living, money, self-esteem or the kind of routine maintenance that begins with pumice-stoning the callouses of one’s feet and ends somewhere between moisture packs and myopic attention to individual split ends produced Claire’s rather beautiful physical effect. Claire said she didn’t know who meant what anymore. Baseball players had Daffy Duck haircuts sticking out from under their billed caps, rock ’n’ roll stars all wore sateen warm-up jackets like the baseball players’, and the President was passing out in a foot race while Russians installed nerve gas around ballistic-missile silos. So who could tell whether or not that little old editorwas copping an attitude or whether Tio was just kicking back into his good-buddy act because he was in someone else’s state?
    Patrick said, “I don’t know.”
    She said, “What do you mean ‘I don’t know’?”
    “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
    “Let’s go to the house and refill your bourbon. I can see you casting a funny eye at those mixed drinks. Did you train a mare named Leafy?”
    They started toward the house.
    “Yes, I did.”
    “What do you want for her?”
    “Well, she’s just my horse.”
    “I saw her at Odessa.”
    “She was there.”
    “Did you ever breed her?”
    “No.”
    They walked into the cool wood-chambered living room with the buffalo rugs and the Indian blankets and the peyote boxes and the beaded parfleches on the deeply oiled logs.
    “
Would
you ever breed her?”
    “If she let me know she wanted to have a baby.”
    “You ought to breed to our stud. I presume she’s cycling.”
    Patrick just didn’t reply. He looked up from his freshly drawn glass of sour mash, a smile on his face that crossed all the silence of immediate conversational aftermath.
    He took a long, kindly look at this young woman, thought of their banter, saw in her confidence that she enjoyed it, too, the way grade-schoolers like to slug each other out of sheer attraction. Then he wondered if he would find Tio less estimable the next time he saw him, which would be in a few moments, or if he would gatherthat Claire was just in a world of her own, set out upon one of the ineluctable trajectories of conflict that can be blamed upon something long ago, a book, a parent, an aging nun, a baton dropped in front of a sold-out stadium. I don’t know, he thought, and I don’t care. Yes, I care, but I won’t.
    “Ever