Gretchen shook the door in its frame. “What are you doing in there? Open up!”
He put his hands to his face and watched a smear of blood spread across his cheek in the mirror. Something woke in him at the sight of blood. Anthony looked down at the slice across his hand as Gretchen’s words penetrated.
“Sorry!” he said. “Sorry, I—got excited working all that drama out before I try to sleep. It was a big night. Hang on a minute.” He started picking shards of mirror out of the sink to drop in the trash.
“What was that crash?” Gretchen tried the door again. “Open up, Anthony. I don’t want to keep shouting. The neighbors are going to get us evicted.”
“Sorry.” He opened the door a foot or so and tried to wedge himself between Gretchen and the mess. “It was an accident. I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh my God,” Gretchen said with a low gasp. She pushed the door open. “Oh my God, Anthony, what have you done?”
“It was stupid. I had too much to drink.”
Gretchen wore a plastic cap and gloves—some sort of beauty treatment, Anthony imagined. In her satin bathrobe and knee-length jersey nightshirt she smelled warm and sugary. She grabbed his hands, turned them palm up, and groaned. “What—oh, Anthony. You might need stitches. You’re gonna have to pay for that, you know. They’ll take it out of my security deposit.” She took one of her clean washcloths from the shelf above the toilet and wrapped it around the slash on his right hand.
“It’ll be okay. I’ll fix it.”
“You say that every time. You know how much you’re going to have to fix around here?” She let go of his hand. “Listen, Anthony. I’m sorry, but you need to get help. Join AA or something. This is not working out. You need to find somewhere else to live tomorrow. Our schedules are too different, you drink every drop of booze—I was saving that gin for a party, you know—and you make so much noise when you get in that I lose a couple hours’ sleep every night. I can’t keep doing this.”
Panic struck Anthony. Where else could he go? He’d just torched whatever bridge remained with Neal. Sarah wouldn’t be thrilled to see him, either. Crashing at Chance’s while Hilary was still in residence would be tactless at best. He wasn’t on a footing with the Terrebonnes to surf their couch on anything other than an emergency basis, and that left Jayne and Ed’s guest room—truly a last resort because the first call Jayne would make would be to Sarah. Back to square one. If Gretchen kicked him out, he’d have to face Neal.
In desperation he held up his bleeding hand. “Gretch, look at me. I’m a mess. You can’t kick me out. I’ve got nowhere to go. Do you remember when you moved in here in the snow, like ten degrees out? How I helped all day? Doesn’t that count for something?” She’d more than returned the favor for that long-ago moving day by welcoming him in his messy prodigal return, but it was all he had to hold over her now.
She twisted away with a guilty grimace. “Of course, but that was years ago. You know I feel really bad about your dad. That’s why I let you stay when I’m getting put on report at work for falling asleep at my desk. It’s got to stop! You keep laying this guilt trip on me and I can’t do it anymore. Tomorrow! I want you out tomorrow!”
“Fine!” he shouted. From downstairs, something banged hard several times against the ceiling and a muffled voice shouted for quiet.
With a groan Gretchen headed toward her room. “Just get out before you get me evicted. I mean it, Anthony. Tomorrow.”
Anthony took his time collecting bathroom paraphernalia into a hobo bag made of his lone, frayed beach towel. If she wanted him out, he’d get out now. He’d live in his car. Then she’d be sorry. His breath was coming too fast and he wasn’t walking straight. He braced his hands against the wall, leaving a bloody print, and focused for a few minutes on breathing more slowly. He reeled with the circuits his mind was running, every glancing turn through memories—Neal, Dean, Sarah, Hilary, Chance, and back again—a new source of agitation. Finally, he turned out the lights and padded to his room.
At the bottom of a cardboard box full of trash and mementos, Anthony fumbled left-handed for a faded image in a drugstore frame that he’d hung on to through college, to New York, and back because of the improbably happy scene. In it, his father and Neal were skinny as water birches, still growing into their height, standing on either side of a horse Anthony had only known in stories: Sassafras, the gentle mare that had carried them as boys. They held her halter and showed off matching equestrian ribbons with untroubled grins, brothers united in their triumph.
How relieved Dean must have been when Neal wanted to go riding with him, Anthony thought. It would have been the first conciliatory gesture on either side in many years. He pictured the crisp day in early spring, full of all the hope of the season. They’d gone to a place where they’d played as boys, up the coulee, where the haze of memory would lower Dean’s guard. It was the perfect trap.
Anthony lay on his side in the narrow room on the hard futon and cradled his throbbing hand. The smiles in the photo were barely visible in the penumbra of the streetlight outside as he fell into a thrashing sleep and met his father’s ghost again.
Act 5, Scene 3
By dawn Anthony was forcing plastic bags of his few possessions into the trunk and through the back windows like a latter-day Joad. There was no point in trying to sleep. He needed to face Neal, have it out with him and Sarah, but his mind threw up one minor obstacle after another. He only had a quarter tank of gas, enough to get to the ranch but not to come back. His cash was spent on last night’s binge, and the last paycheck wasn’t due for another week. He had paperwork to finish at the theater that would take at least a few hours. All his clothes were dirty. The apartment needed a new mirror and a bracket for the shower door. If he got them before Gretchen got up, she might even forgive him—but he had no money and his credit card was maxed out. Anthony’s mind scribbled circles and walked him around them fruitlessly until all he could do was sit down on the curb and stare.
He hung around the neighborhood half the morning in a cloud of indecision, sucking on a red Gatorade half full of rum and laughing too hard at kids’ games in the park until their parents packed up and left. The sun was casting pretty shadows through the locust trees before he ground his failing starter enough to turn over the engine and put the Buick on the old highway, not the interstate. The wind blew hard, buzzing the screen behind the grille that kept mice out of the engine compartment. Anthony liked the old road better, the way it wound through pine-dotted buttes and sprawling wheat fields, past the derelict homesteads of families whose names he knew. The Cotters. The Kifers. He was still woozy so he drove below the speed limit, mostly on his side of the line.
When Anthony finally pulled up at the Fry mailbox, the gate was shut. How odd, he thought—they nearly always left the gate open. Neal must be moving livestock. He left the car running and got out. Where the latch should have opened easily under his hand, a thick chain looped from gate to post. Anthony pulled it up until he saw a new, heavy padlock. He yanked a few times, expecting the lock to fall open in his hand, but it was snapped shut against him, no key in sight. The son of a bitch had locked him out.
Shaking lightly, right hand still aching and not quite his own, Anthony stared down the drive in the direction of the house. After everything that had happened, it was still his home, the place his father had left him. He’d have the full 51 percent controlling interest after Sarah’s life estate ended. When he left for New York, he’d believed himself done with this place, but there was no such thing. All summer it had been working at him in the whispers of wind in grass, faces of neighbors, Dwight Maclean’s wordlessness, the nudge of Boomerang’s nose against his neck, the subtle speech of the creek as it wound by the house, even Chance’s unwillingness to turn on him. Anthony hadn’t been listening—had closed his mind deliberately—but they’d found a way past his defenses. Now here he was at the gate, ready to reclaim his birthright no matter what the cost, only to find himself
shut out. How had it come to this?
He grabbed the gate and shouted, the inarticulate cry rousing birds and ground animals into flight for a hundred feet around, but the house was a quarter mile away. Anthony climbed onto the lowest rung of the gate using a fist to grip instead of his wounded palm, then hitched up to the second bar before remembering his feet. Like a moron he was wearing flip-flops again, because they irritated Neal. He jumped down and shook the gate, solid on its posts and hinges. Up and down the fence line the steel posts were vertical and the wire tight for miles, as Dean had left them.
“Burn in hell, Neal!” Anthony shouted up the drive as the red-winged blackbirds came to rest on wires and hillocks. The wind took his words away as quickly as they’d come. As he squinted into long, white fingers of light broken by the fence, something came running toward him through the unmowed grass on the far side. At first the sun saturated his vision and left him unable to identify anything but a large, fast-moving creature, too big to be a deer. Out here, at that speed, it couldn’t be anything but—
“Ponch!” Anthony shouted as the horse broke free of the sun’s blinding corona and filled his senses, blowing and prancing. Anthony shaded his eyes to take in the sight. Ponch glowed rosier than ever, from the white blaze on his nose to his red mane, shoulders, and tail and bright speckled haunches. He was magnificent.
“No wonder people come to see you, buddy,” Anthony said. The horse jogged to a spot near the gate and waited, twitching his tail, hyperalert as the man on the other side took a few uncertain steps his way. After that day out at the coulee, Anthony had begun to think of the horse as an apparition, an unworldly thing accompanying Dean in his nightmares, but now Ponch was all sweaty horseflesh, nothing ethereal about him, looking haughty in that particular equine way as he began to trot back and forth, stepping high, showing off for Anthony. He was proud, Anthony thought, and rightfully so. Dean had always had an eye.
An idea sprang to Anthony’s mind. He went back to the car, leaned in, and laid on the horn. Ponch reared up with a loud cry and launched himself toward the house at a gallop, tail streaming behind him, a warning flare aimed straight at the barn. Several minutes later, Anthony saw another cloud at the line where the drive dropped, and a few minutes after that Dean’s pickup, now Neal’s, rumbled into view.
Neal stopped a few dozen feet from the gate. He sat watching Anthony without leaving the pickup, a study in reluctance. Anthony crossed his arms and stared back. Finally Neal seemed to set himself and got out to walk toward the gate. Anthony’s pulse pounded in his neck. He was angry at Neal as much for his calm as for anything, acting like this was nothing.
“Why is the gate locked?” he demanded. “How dare you try to keep me out? Who the hell do you think you are?”
Neal kept advancing, heel toe, measured, quiet. He stopped a few feet from the gate, out of Anthony’s reach. “I’m looking after your mother. You need to go home and sober up. You’ve done enough.”
“Apparently not, if I’m locked out of my own place.”
Neal’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “You should have seen how she looked at me, after that scene of yours. Not a word the whole way home. Slept on the couch and left me breakfast on the table while she went out walking.”
“I’m glad to hear you got a taste of what you deserve.” Anthony kicked the gate so that the chain rattled and succeeded in stubbing his toe hard. He bit back the yelp. “You did this to her, not me. Unlock this gate! You have no right!”
Neal shook his head. “I called the sheriff before I came up here. Don’t make him drag you out of here. Save a little dignity. He was out on another call, he’s close by.”
“You called the sheriff on me? To get me off my land?” Anthony glanced up and down the road. There was no sign of a vehicle approaching.
“That’s right. We’re all going. Your mother and I signed the lease with Harmony this afternoon. It’s over. Go home and sober up.”
Anthony shut his eyes. It was over. He didn’t have to look to be sure that Neal’s lips had deformed into a sneer.
“You . . . you got Mom to sign?” His throat closed. He had to gasp for the next breath.
“She’s a good Christian woman. She knows that her husband is head of the household, and she’s well aware you’ll never be any help to her.”
Still the road was empty. Anthony was starting to wish that Sheriff Marx would hurry up because the only thing that occurred to him was to climb the fence and throttle Neal with his one good hand. “This is not over. Grandpa wrote you out years ago because he saw what a crazy mean son of a bitch you are.”
Neal shifted his jaw from side to side. He rasped a little laugh. “You think it was tough being Dean’s son? You should try being his brother, or Lewis Fry’s son. Nothing I did was ever good enough for those two. They made up their minds about me by the time I was eight years old.”
The wistful shift in Neal’s voice suddenly caused Anthony’s curiosity to well up bigger than his anger. “Dad never told me what happened when you were eight. I heard something about hurting animals.”
“Yeah.” Neal stared at the ground, taking his time. At last, with a cough and a growl, he began to speak in monotone, staring off at the western bowl of sky where the sun had dropped halfway from its zenith to float like a white spot bleached on a blue curtain. “It was my eighth birthday that spring. Mom and Dad weren’t much for presents, but I lived up to a deal to exercise the horses every day through the winter. I asked for a real magnifying glass, the big metal-rimmed kind with a case. I saw one on TV and I wanted it in the worst way, to see bugs and frogs and stuff.
“They warned me up and down about starting fires, but that just made me think about it. As soon as I could get out of the house, I went behind the barn and tried lighting straw, then ants. The barn cat had a new litter of tabby kittens and they thought it was a game to jump at the flame and run away. My favorite was Tigger. He followed me everywhere.
“Well, Tigger started to bat flaming ants around in the dirt. I lit a bunch of little things that only burned a few seconds. Ma was getting supper, and Dad and Dean were out chasing after a bull that kept beating the fences. I got this idea that I could light a little pile of wood shavings scattered in the yard. I thought they’d go right out. I knew better than to play with fire—I did. But I was eight.
“The fire started faster than I expected. Tigger got too close and lit his tail. I tried to grab him but he scratched me and drew blood and ran straight into the barn. I ran after him and he jumped on a stall door, then into the bedding for the bottle calf. I jumped in, too, but he was moving like the devil was after him. He jumped back out—already turning black, aw, Jesus—and made for the hay bales at the back where the cats nested.
“The only way to stop him before he got to the hay and lit up the place was to jump right on him with both boots, so that’s what I did. I was standing there bawling for my dead kitty when I heard the calf. I turned around and his stall was on fire. Ma came sprinting into the barn and Dad was there a second later. I got to the stall and tried to open the door but Dad threw me off so hard I flew ten feet. Dean carried out the calf all burned, and Dad took off his belt and gave me the whipping of my life.
“I tried to tell him it was an accident, but he smashed the magnifying glass. I sat with the calf and watched it die. Nobody wanted to hear what happened. It was still my birthday but they wouldn’t talk to me. They wouldn’t forgive me that day or any other.”
Neal hunched over and twisted his chin away from Anthony as he told the story. When it was over, Neal stayed that way, as if waiting for the crack of Lewis’s belt, all the pain just as fresh as when he was eight years old. Now cracks a noble heart, Anthony thought, but Neal’s heart had long since cracked, and what nobility was in it had tumbled out to be crushed underfoot.
“I had no idea,” Anthony said. There was little grace in the words, but he got them out. Bygones couldn’t be bygones, not if the ranch was signed away, but his anger was m
uddled with heartbreak at the ugly waste of it all. Somewhere buried in Neal was a different man, one Anthony would’ve liked to know. Before him was the defeated husk that Anthony had never tried to understand.
Suddenly all the years of animosity seemed an empty stage on which a different life should have played out, had the family allowed it. Anthony shivered down his spine—the goose on the grave of what he, too, might have been had only a few moments gone differently, had Dean believed in him. Had Lewis forgiven Neal. Were people born with darkness in them, or did they receive it from others like a diabolical assignment that changed their fate? Anthony felt ashamed of himself for accepting the quick condemnation Dean had handed out—for not seeing Neal better.
Dean Fry had done his damnedest to bring up a son in his own image, and Anthony saw now that he had no real notion of himself independent of the man. He had existed only in opposition—like Neal. They’d both defined themselves by dead men, and that must change if they were to go on living.
From the distant spot where the road crossed the ridge, the sheriff’s Suburban cruised into sight trailing a roiling brown plume. Both men shifted to watch its approach. Marx slowed the vehicle and pulled off the road a few feet shy of the Frys’ turnoff. He sat for a minute or two, making notes on the laptop mounted to the dash, then stepped out with a grunt, adjusted his sheriff’s star where it hung from the pocket of his blue plaid shirt, and put on his cowboy hat. Neal and Anthony stood like stone monuments as Marx walked up, taking in the locked gate.
“The sheriff’s office isn’t much help in resolving family squabbles, although we sure do get our share,” Marx said. “Now, Neal, you know he’s got a right to be here.”
Neal’s voice was less belligerent than before, but still he said, “He’s drunk. We’ve been through enough with him.”
“You drive out here drunk?” Marx asked Anthony.
Anthony couldn’t afford another drunk-driving conviction. He’d made too many promises to the theater board to get them to overlook the old ones. He glanced at the car, then side-eyed at Neal. “No. I’ve been out here awhile. I drank something I brought with me. I’m not drunk, though.”
The Weight of an Infinite Sky Page 19