Nobody's Angel by Thomas Mcguane

your face, Pat? Get scratched tryin to get you a little?”
    “Had a colt run through the bridle in some brush.”
    “Didn’t know a colt had a hand on him like that.”
    “It was the brush that did it.”
    “Boy, amo tell you what, you couldn’t carve a more perfecter piece of brush for that job, now, could you?”
    “Say, after all this wine, I’m finally seeing what you’re getting at: I try to rape some girl and she claws me. I guess I had a better day than I thought.”
    “Aw, good buddy.” Real disappointment, moral disappointment, floods Tio’s face: A man don’t talk like that in company. In the flashing silence Patrick gave himself the liberty of remembering Claire beneath him, one thin arm reaching into the cool quiet, the aerial motion and breath. They ate quietly for a long time. Then he saw Tio’s studying eyes deep against his own; they were, somehow, certainly not normal.
    Claire got up. “I don’t like to eat when it’s like that.”
    “Food not right?” Tio asked. “Anybody says I can’t cook is dumber than Ned in the First Reader.”
    “I’m going to sit in the living room.”
    “What about you, Pat?”
    “I’m going to finish this good dinner.”
    “I’m heading for bed. I’ve got some studying up to do. Then me and about five of my best old buddies around the country are going to hang all over our WATS lines and make a couple of bucks.”
    “Well, good night, I guess.”
    “Good night. Don’t get scratched.”
    “I got my colts rode earlier. What a day.”
    The lamb had been defatted the way they did in France. Patrick could see Tio’s shadow when he came to the top of the stairs to look down to the first floor. That kind of came in intervals while Patrick went through a lot of Bordeaux. Then the shadow of Tio stopped coming and producing its simple effect. So Patrick went to the living room, where he penetrated Claire with a peculiar vengeance, noting, only at the clutching, compressive end, the ninth largest whitetail deer ever killed in Texas.
    “What’d I do with my hat?” asked Patrick. “I’ve got the whirlies.” Claire sat up, a broad snail’s track on her thigh, and in her molten eyes was something Patrick had never seen before because it had never existed before, not exactly.
    Patrick managed to get dressed, walking back and forth across the front of the stairs, feeling a sick and depressed giddiness, not even rememberable from the Army years, of having threaded a miserable, shivering, narrow trail to wrath and humiliation, for which he knew hell fire in one of its uncountable manifestations would someday be handed on as silver a platter as the one that held Tio’sdinner. A headache set in behind his temples and he was rather in love and in a bad mood. Claire stopped him in the yard, where he walked in his socks, carrying his tall boots, staring in a dumb, fixated way at his drunken target.
    Claire’s small, strong hand turned him around blank by the shirt, and he looked once more into the pained eyes, forcing his own off as one awaiting a lecture. “Cruelty is something I hadn’t seen in you before.”
    “I saw it in you. I thought I was treating you for it. I thought I was the doctor.” Patrick’s anger, partial product of his damages and certainly of his drinking and his indirection, formed thickly in this inconsiderate remark.
    “No, I’m the doctor,” Claire said. “And Tio is the patient. And you are a cruel outsider.”
    She walked back inside and Patrick knew which of them had lost and what had been lost. As he drove off he saw all the upstairs lights clicking on in series and he was in genuine retreat.

18
     
    HIS EYES WERE SWOLLEN SHUT FROM THE BUTTS OF THE CUES when the chief of police shoved him into the drunk tank. “I don’t know which one of you snakes bit the other first. It’s all cowboys and Indians to me. But you’re in my house now. And you’re for sure snake bit.”
    “Yeah, right,” said Patrick.
    “ ‘
Yeah,