The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  Sarah’s hands wrapped around Neal’s arm as he moved in to prop her up. “Three months I’ve spent struggling by myself! I’m not blaming you, Anthony, but I’ve been driven to distraction since your father passed. You haven’t said how long you’re staying and you’re never around even though you’re back. I can’t handle the place alone.”

  When he took his eyes from his mother’s, Anthony saw every other face on him, and he saw what they saw: the no-good son who’d abandoned his mother as her fragile world was falling down, and his comeuppance as the estranged uncle took over the nephew’s birthright. He shoved his hands in his pockets, where they formed into fists. Chance might be above physical violence, but Anthony would gladly take a swing at Neal.

  “I haven’t said because I don’t know. I came back, like you asked. But it looks like you already decided that’s not good enough.” He tried to keep his voice low, but the noise of the crowd dissipated as every ear cued on his words.

  “You know you’re always welcome at home,” Sarah said, making happy for their audience. “You’ll come for dinner Sunday like always, won’t you? We’ll talk things over then.” She turned into Neal slightly, sheltering from the breeze that trailed hair across her face but also creating a little enclosed unit of two that did not include Anthony.

  Anthony jerked his head back. “I’ll be over tomorrow to ride Boomerang.”

  “He needs riding,” Neal said abruptly. “We can’t hang on to him forever. Costs money to keep a horse.”

  “No, no.” Sarah lifted a hand in protest. “That’s Anthony’s horse. He’ll always be here for you, son, as long as I’m around. But if you could put in a little something for his expenses . . .”

  Anthony turned his head away from the observers. “I always mean to, Mom. You know that. I just never have any spare cash.”

  The open meadow had become a closed box full of too many people. He’d intended to stay for the picnic, sleep over at the ranch, and give Boomerang a good workout in the morning, but it was suddenly more than he could face. He couldn’t pretend any of it was okay, not this insane quickie marriage or Chance looking at him like he was a stranger or Brittany watching him now with that haunted face from the edge of the soccer game—and now he suddenly believed just a little more in that ghost. Dean had been warning him.

  “I . . .” Anthony fumbled for words, some smooth excuse to make his retreat look less like running away, but none came. “I gotta go. I’ll be there tomorrow.” He took a few shuffling half steps and fast-walked uphill to the car, flip-flops slapping loudly, thinking of how things ought to be and how they were and how a man’s whole life could get decided in a room he wasn’t in. It was all he could do not to sprint uphill for the Buick and get out of Denmark as fast as he could. The i brake for banjos bumper sticker was wiped clean and highly visible in the crepuscular light, a target to aim for.

  Naturally, by the time Anthony got to the car Jessie Marx was leaning against the hood in tight jeans and a snug msu billings T-shirt. “Hey there,” she said, as if oblivious to the scene below. “Can I get a ride back into town?”

  “Get in,” he told her.

  The engine started rough. Without so much as a wave to the stunned onlookers, Anthony pulled away too fast, accelerating on the uneven downhill, skidding on loose rock that wouldn’t hold, the only kind of rock he knew how to be.

  Act 3, Scene 1

  His objections to Jessie seemed long ago, linked to a different person. As Anthony drove into Hayden with her beside him, he acknowledged to himself that none of his tactics had succeeded in wiping out her warm memory. He’d liked her earnestly, no tricks, in the season after Hilary left and he wandered like a ghost doomed to minister to Chance’s grief. An emotional involvement can only lead to getting involved . . . emotionally. No less an authority than J. Pierrepont Finch of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He’d tried to stock his mind with masterpieces and in a pinch it retrieved camp.

  There had been a time when Anthony had not had to take advice on major life decisions from Broadway musicals. He’d set out in high school to become a proper Shakespearean. In college he memorized sonnets and struggled to master tongue-twister soliloquies, but in New York his pretensions became a burden he could no longer carry. His synagogue basement Coriolanus was so rigid with stage fright and panicked about remembering lines that before a full house he forgot stage directions and stood dully reciting what should have been a moving declaration from the heart, words he felt all too deeply when he read them to himself:

  Despising,

  For you, the city, thus I turn my back:

  There is a world elsewhere.

  There had been hopes during rehearsals of finding another, larger venue, but the volunteer director simply stopped showing up after the opening night debacle. Anthony accepted now that he would never own those garlanded phrases. He was no Shakespearean hero but a peasant with a mediocre headshot and a future waiting tables.

  In the desperate search for work, he’d started auditioning for musicals. His brain gave in readily to glib comebacks and snappy choruses. They played in his head round the clock and came out as he wiped down tables until he forced himself to stop humming at all so that his coworkers wouldn’t catch him in the middle of an embarrassing chorus from Annie. Yet in spite of knowing the tunes and the steps, he failed the auditions. He couldn’t move fast enough for chorus lines, and the narrow range of his thin alto made directors grimace. Worse, he could muster no real passion for this showy side of theater he’d always looked down on as selling out. The punishment for his fickleness and snobbery was a brainful of lines and songs he’d never wanted to learn, trolling his daily life.

  Five minutes past the Hayden city limits sign, Anthony and Jessie stepped onto the cement slab behind a tiny bungalow a few blocks from Main Street. He dusted off plastic chairs as she lugged a twelve-pack of beer out the back door and settled it between them. The air was sweet, dry, and full of the openness of the butte country, even in town. Anthony twisted his neck to take in the tiny house as he scooted his chair closer to the beer and Jessie. “Sorry I couldn’t get together before now. Camp’s taking every waking minute. This is your place?”

  With satisfaction she surveyed the whitewashed fence that framed the tiny square yard, hands on hips. “Sort of. Grandma died last year and Dad’s letting me use it until they can fix it up to sell. I make sure the pipes don’t freeze, mow the lawn, that sort of thing. Helps me save money so I can buy a little land of my own one day. I’d like to live out in the country, keep some animals. Rainier?” She offered the first one and sat beside him.

  He gave a wicked little cackle as he cracked the beer and handed it to her. “Vitamin R. Look at you being a hipster.”

  “Oh, ha ha,” she said. “I was working for a vet in the Heights for a while and this was the closing-time beer of choice. You’re not the only one who can go all urban.”

  “To you and your piece of land!” Anthony lifted his can to toast her and let the beer slide down. Jessie had been talking about buying land for as long as he’d known her, but he suspected that it was actually the last thing on her mind. This little speech of hers was a rancher mating call. She’d endure the isolation, hard work, dirt, and precarious finances in exchange for the land, the more the better. “Good luck,” he added. “You’re on your way to a life of pride and poverty.”

  Jessie laughed and drank. “That’s what my mom says. I told her ranching’s the worst life I can think of, except compared to everything else. I’ve been waiting to hear your stories from New York. I don’t know how you could stand it out there with all those people crammed together. I’d go crazy for sure.”

  Anthony felt less resistant to her than he had before, when New York was still a gauzy dream on the horizon and Montana couldn’t hold him. “I did go crazy. That was part of the fun.” He drained his can. “It was okay. Different lifestyle. They’re all convinced they’re so badass. I’d like to see how long any of the
m would last winter camping in the Bighorns.”

  “Ha. Not through the first night, I bet.”

  “Anyway. You get used to it, but it changes your perspective. I went out there thinking if I never touched another stinking, stupid cow in my life, it’d be too soon.”

  “And now?” She turned to him with heightened focus.

  “‘Life in a box is better than no life at all. I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking—well, at least I’m not dead!’” He recited the Stoppard line and watched her for any sign of recognition. Once in a while a Montana schoolteacher would get a wild hair and teach her class something unexpected—but Jessie only blinked with limpid bovine eyes.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Something someone told me once.”

  She relaxed into her chair with a satisfied little smile, as if she’d read what she wanted into his cryptic answer. “I was afraid you’d never come back. Your mom needs you.”

  “My mom needs horse tranquilizers, that’s what she needs. She’s always got our lives decided for us.”

  “Yeah,” Jessie said. Then hesitantly, as if afraid to upset him, “And now she’s got Neal. Nobody saw that coming.”

  Anthony crumpled his empty with both hands. “He looked so goddamn smug I had to get out of there before I had my hands around his throat.” He reached for another. If vodka made him wild and wine made him morose, beer made him nostalgic for a past he wished were his. Would it really be so bad to be the man Jessie and Dean wanted? His life so far might be nothing but a delusion he could grow out of.

  Jessie squeezed his hand. “You missed home,” she said. “I hear it in your voice.”

  “Home. Like a cage I was born in. But I’ll be damned if I let Neal do whatever he wants.”

  She lowered her beer midswig. “What does he want?”

  The glow escaping the door backlit Jessie as flatteringly as any stagehand could. The purple evening and the beer softened the edges around Anthony. He shifted toward her. “I don’t know. Whatever Dad had.”

  “Where does that leave you?” Jessie twisted so that her chair creaked, moving closer, like a careful fly-fisher approaching the shadows where trout lurked. The twilight was warm and quiet, with a light pizzicato accompaniment of the shrieks of children playing street hockey.

  “Up shit creek as usual?”

  Jessie put a caressing hand on the back of his neck. “I was real sorry to hear about your dad,” she said. “I tried to call you a bunch of times, but you never picked up.”

  “I remember.” Delete, delete, delete. Back then with half a continent between them, he’d been sure that seeing Jessie again was a bad idea, but now the beer was kicking in. “He could be a real son of a bitch, but he took care of things. It’s just a matter of time before Mom and Neal and I screw it up.”

  Jessie’s warm chuckle rolled over Anthony. Her hand was doing something marvelous to the taut muscles of his shoulders. “You don’t give yourself enough credit. You’re Lewis Fry’s grandson.”

  She’d gotten squared away on the genetics since he saw her last. They all thought the same way. He was the product of a successful line and so he’d win the Derby. Anthony tapped his can against the chair and wiggled his backside where it fit too snugly between the rigid plastic arms.

  “I can’t sit still here,” he said. He got up and pivoted to look for the first planets and stars as they winked into a sky ribboned with long blue-black clouds. Venus. Polaris. Orion. Old companions. He lifted his can again. The beer was liquefied youth: summer, high school, late nights on dirt roads. He found himself at the end of the third and tossed the empty with solid aim at the only tree in the backyard—a diseased old elm, if he wasn’t mistaken. In New York someone would be on him for littering or disrespecting the tree, but Jessie watched with mild amusement.

  Anthony opened another for each of them, although Jessie wasn’t working as fast as he was. “Did your dad ever talk about my dad? What happened, I mean?”

  She swallowed and considered. Someone in the neighborhood was barbecuing pork and Jessie turned her head toward the distracting smell. “Didn’t your uncle tell you about it?” she asked. “He was there, right?”

  Anthony leaned over her chair to take a long, intoxicating look at the place where her shirt met the satin edge of her bra. “Neal and I don’t talk, not like that. Especially not about anything to do with Dad. I thought you might have heard, that’s all. It’s not like him to fall off a horse.”

  Jessie smiled at Anthony’s appreciation and arched her back. When he lifted his eyebrows in expectation, looking for an answer, she made a little face and stuck out her lips as if to say she didn’t know anything and was surprised to be asked.

  “Dad doesn’t like to talk about his cases. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a long investigation. There wasn’t anything to go on. No real crime scene, no evidence. Besides, Neal told them what happened.” She rested her hands on Anthony’s hips. “Just a sad accident.”

  He straightened to bolt the rest of his beer and played with the pop-top. “Ponch is a handful, that’s for sure. Mom freaked out when Dad drove down to Louisiana last summer to pick him up. I heard they could hardly trailer him. Nobody else would ride him, but that’s Dad for you. Had to have him.” And how they’d all worshipped Pontchartrain, people from miles around had come to see the gorgeous red roan Appaloosa. Sarah had e-mailed photos and videos and insisted that Anthony go to the library to check his account. The color seemed impossible, a trick of light, but the way Sarah told it Ponch was the sum of all desire in the county that summer, rosy as sunrise and just as untouchable. Even Dean couldn’t get on him for weeks. In the video, neighbors stood on the fence and watched Dean work him, Ponch venturing close one minute and the next bolting to gallop the fence, tail high, a caged wild thing.

  “So it’s not so surprising Ponch threw him,” Jessie said.

  Anthony shrugged. “Nobody was surprised. When Mom called to tell me, the first thing I said was ‘That crazy pink horse finally got him.’” He remembered the bitter sleet of the March night when he huddled outside the back door of the restaurant next to a stinking Dumpster because he wasn’t allowed to take calls on the clock, one finger in his ear to drown out the street noise. Sarah was nearly impossible to understand through wheezing sobs, but then the words came clear. Ponch. Dad. Goddamnit, he’d said over and over, beating a fist on his leg. Shoot him. Just shoot that goddamn horse. He knew she wouldn’t. Montanans would rather shoot themselves than their horses, and often did.

  Jessie pushed up to stand close to him. “I’m so sorry. I cried and cried when I heard. Come here, babe.” She put her hands between his shoulder blades and tipped his upper body against her. He gave in and folded around her warmth. Jessie had been bullied in high school, Anthony remembered. She’d been overweight and tried to compensate by making too much of her father’s job, as if the stature of the sheriff’s office might rub off. Instead, it made her father’s disappointment in her all the more cutting. In her baby-powder-scented embrace, Anthony’s mind wandered to the blown sports tryouts at a school so small there usually weren’t tryouts and indifferent grades that had distanced him and surely Jessie, too, from the fathers they’d trotted after like puppies. Their common lack of paternal approval was a bond he’d forgotten, and Jessie had always been kind.

  The hug developed smoothly into the kiss, the hand up the shirt, the four-footed crab crawl toward the back door. As Jessie moved a hand up and down his back, Anthony focused on the cool relief of beer on his tongue, down his throat, until the fifth beer was gone, and she was on his tongue instead. He could leave, get a good night’s sleep for a change, and tackle the mountain of challenges metastasizing at the theater or he could settle into Jessie’s downy comfort. She’d never lost a chubby vulnerability of rounded edges, soft like a woman should be, everything he’d been instructed from childhood to want. What was wrong with detouring there awhile? He looked up at the big
sky that was supposed to hold a rancher’s universe and saw only blankness. The pathetic truth was that right now blankness was all he wanted.

  Act 3, Scene 2

  No stranger to the cheap-beer-and-sexual-regret hangover, Anthony slipped out the next morning without waking Jessie. Without much conscious guidance, the Buick found the section line shortcut to the ranch. He let himself in, shut the gate, and got as far as a spot just after the big rise in the long drive where it was possible to stop without being seen from the house or the road. He’d paused here facing the opposite direction on the day he left to take a bus headed east and at other fraught moments throughout his adolescence when he’d needed to gather himself between home and the world beyond.

  Now, as if reading a code written for him alone on the gravel, Anthony remembered being a rising sophomore in high school, with a desperate crush on Paula (pronounced pow-la, of course) Red Deer. This was where he’d wait after chores, letting Boomerang graze, or fish his cigarettes from their hiding place under a bracket in the trunk lid and hope in vain to catch sight of Paula coming home from her daily trip to the free Wi-Fi at Hayden Library. The way he’d felt about her put to shame the desultory flirtation with Jessie. Paula was half Pima but her mother sent her north to spend the summer with her father near Crow Agency, arriving each June like visiting royalty for the welcome feast put on by her grandmother, Wanda Tall Grass. The whole neighborhood had to see Wanda’s precious girl another year taller and prettier, browned by the Texas sun and proud of her deep mahogany. Paula was technically only a step-granddaughter by a marriage that hadn’t lasted, but Wanda had adored her the moment she first saw her as a double-braided three-year-old Crow Fair princess. Adoption was an old tradition with the tribe, but the way Wanda spoiled Paula rankled children and grandchildren who felt entitled to at least the same status.