The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  Just like that, her trap snapped around his ankle. She’d always been better at these games than Sarah. Anthony had to give credit, Jayne knew her mark—although it alarmed him that she understood how important Hilary was. Surely Jayne couldn’t know what Hilary had been to him. He’d done his best to disguise his feelings for Chance’s wife—now ex-wife, but that didn’t change how off-limits she’d been back then. Anthony coughed and tried to smooth his discomfort into a simple throat clearing.

  “Hilary’s coming out?”

  “She gets here next week and stays through July. It’ll be so good for Mae to have both her parents here. They’re doing this six-month split until Mae starts school, but Hilary decided to spend the summer here. Isn’t that nice?” Jayne’s voice was strained but held a cheerful note at the prospect of her former daughter-in-law parachuting in for a long stay in the closed world of the Little m ranch headquarters. Anthony knew exactly what had played out. Hilary had announced and the Murphys had accommodated. Nothing had changed in that relationship.

  He focused on delivering an equally pleasant and bland reply. Nothing to see here, move along. Four years ago, Hilary had stayed in Montana just long enough to give Jayne and Ed a grandchild and fall apart. Anthony got to know her the autumn she was pregnant as she painted a mural on the back of the Murphys’ old barn, up on a ladder with a long brush. He went on supply runs and she taught him technique.

  “You shouldn’t be up there,” Chance would say as her belly got bigger and the weather began to turn, but she’d smile down at Anthony as if the two of them shared a secret, the artists versus the engineer. Anthony put all the value in the world into those complicit glances that affirmed him as the creative person he longed to be. He used the flimsiest excuses to stop by the Murphys’ and help her, bring her things.

  “I don’t know what we’d do without you,” he remembered Chance saying more than once as he hurried off on the sort of chores Anthony would be doing if he were home more. Anthony felt useful for a change, in spite of the lectures Dean gave him when he came home late after blowing off another afternoon’s work. Instead of drifting through the minimum-wage jobs he’d held in college or mindlessly following Dean’s orders, he was assisting an artist. It was a closer fit than anything he’d done since graduating and leaving Missoula two years earlier. Sarah’s nagging flowed over him without effect. He let days and weeks slide by into winter and never noticed the time.

  “Anthony?” Jayne prompted from the phone he’d forgotten. He wasn’t sure where he’d left the conversation and the Buick had drifted onto the centerline.

  “Sure. That sounds nice. Say hi to Ed for me.” As he signed off with Jayne, Anthony slowed at the Hayden Cenex to fill his tank for the drive back to Billings. Though he wanted to, he couldn’t buy booze here. News would get back to Sarah or Jayne before he made it to Billings.

  Jessica Marx, the sheriff’s daughter, was crossing the parking lot with a case of beer under one arm and a family-size bag of chips. Sunday night supper. Anthony saw her the moment his front wheels angled toward the gas station, an instant after he was irretrievably committed to the turn. For a split second he thought about bouncing over the curb and heading for the next exit, but he’d been hard enough on the Buick for one day and he needed gas. He pulled forward to a pump but in his indecision left the engine on.

  Anthony and Jessie had dated the summer before he left, while he seemed not to care if he lived or died and wore his plans for New York like a dangerously strong aphrodisiac. Women who’d never glanced at him suddenly smelled something on his skin that they needed to get close to. Jessie had laughed at his college stories about long hours building sets for the Missoula Children’s Theatre on a nearly nonexistent budget, exchanged gropes with him through a few sweaty rodeo dances, and took him home afterward. It was fun, but her hours as a vet tech with a large-animal practice in Hayden and his delivery job in Billings made finding time together difficult—that was what he’d told her. In fact, she was a distraction to keep him from spending all his spare time drafting, revising, and deleting e-mails to Hilary, sick with longing even as Chance sat through the darkest hours of the breakup with a baby on his hands.

  Jessie spotted the Buick the moment it left the street and responded with a tilt of her chin like she saw a challenge. She watched Anthony’s progress to the pump, left her groceries on her hood, and walked toward him with a roll to her hips. The sight of her profile in the rearview mirror reminded him of the real reason he’d stopped seeing her, the night a local band played a late-summer show at the fairgrounds. Jessie had scored a pair of tickets from her high school buddy, the drummer.

  “Be right back,” she’d told him and wandered off to the restroom. He sat alone for a while, cringing at feedback from the lousy sound system and an off-key cover of “Luckenbach, Texas.” When she didn’t come back after ten minutes, he left the stands, hit the head, and distanced himself from the lead singer’s twangy wail by wandering the dark maze of posts supporting the stands. The only people passing were headed for the exits.

  Hearing Jessie’s voice, Anthony followed it through weak rectangles of light cast through the bleachers, dodging old popcorn bags and paper cups set loose from resting places by a low sunset breeze. Another, deeper voice followed her familiar sound, scolding her like a child who’d let a line drive fly by in easy reach. Anthony froze, hidden from the speakers by the night and the posts between them.

  “Man like that? You know who he is, don’t you?”

  Anthony identified the baritone as Sheriff Elmo Marx.

  “Not really,” Jessie answered in a sullen, adolescent tone. “I mean, I know they’ve been ranching around here a long time, but I never paid much attention to who owns what. As long as he’s got land and cattle, right?”

  A foot scuffed the ground, and the baritone dropped in volume. “Christ, Jessie, you’ve got to start paying attention if you don’t want to wind up married to some pissant little dirt farmer. If you’d ever come around the house anymore, I’d have told you. His dad’s Dean Fry—that big place out beyond the Terrebonnes’. Must be thirty thousand acres with the leases and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Terrebonnes sell out soon. It could all be yours.”

  Anthony peeked around the nearest post and saw the shadowy figures of Elmo and Jessie leaning on the cement block ticket stand. Elmo drained the can in his hand, poked Jessie in the arm, and concluded, “You hear me, girl? Thirty thousand acres and not bad-looking. He’s the catch of the county. Don’t be an idiot.”

  Anthony knew the lines to this song. He might be land rich and cash poor, but around here nobody had any money and land was all that mattered. Anthony waited only long enough to hear Jessie’s “All right, Dad,” before backing away to sneak his car out the far side of the grounds. He’d left town a week later without bothering to say good-bye.

  This was the first time he’d seen her since. Like many things he didn’t want to remember or acknowledge, Anthony had put that night in a place in his mind where it hadn’t come to consciousness in many months. Along with it he’d tried to forget her gentleness when he was so lost, how she listened and held his head against a comforting bosom while he drunkenly recounted his litany of bad decisions. He told himself it must have been an act, but he missed her.

  Jessie strolled to his door and bent over to give him a look straight down the low neckline of her tank top. Her dark blond hair was clipped close to her jawline in a cut that said another one of her friends was working on a cosmetology license. It suited her baby-round cheeks, Anthony thought. She was pretty, in a way that would pass fast when her face lost its youthful fluidity and she put on permanent baby weight. He knew her mother, a woman whose family albums must tell a story of a passage from girl straight to matron without any respite in graceful, active maturity. He could name any number of local women whose lives had taken or would take the same path—a brief moment of promise, then marriage, babies, weight gain, dead-end jobs, and a grinding push towa
rd a retirement plagued by health problems. Whatever his history with Jessie, he hoped for better for her.

  Anthony retrieved a cigarette from the console and tried unsuccessfully to fire up a lighter low on butane. He wanted to look cool and nonchalant in front of Jessie but succeeded only in burning his fingernail and filling the car with the acrid smell.

  Jessie said in her drawn-out way of speaking, “You want to blow us all to Roundup or what?”

  “What?” Anthony looked back down at the lighter and cigarette in his hands. “Oh shit, what was I thinking?”

  She smirked. “How about I pump your gas, for public safety reasons?”

  Anthony nodded, turned the car off, and fished in his right front pocket for his last working credit card. “Yeah. Sure, thanks.” For a moment he wondered if he should get the gas himself, but he’d tried chivalry on her a few times—holding doors, letting her go first—and she didn’t seem to understand. It was like her to pump his gas and enjoy it. She was the kind of girl who’d love ranch life.

  Jessie went through the motions efficiently—she probably noticed his underinflated tires, too—and was back at his window in a few minutes. “Want to come by my new place for a beer? You look like you could use it,” she said.

  Anthony hesitated. It would be easy to say yes, but she was the bait on a dangerous hook. Tennessee Williams knew: All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be. He turned the key. “Love to, but I gotta be up early tomorrow. Rain check?”

  “Sure.”

  He was rolling before the word was out of her mouth. He didn’t need a drink quite that badly. Not yet.

  Act 1, Scene 3

  Anthony’s roommate, Gretchen, was halfway through her protein drink when he walked in the next morning. Her bright blue pantsuit had fit loosely for job interviews at the end of college, he recalled, but now she was squeezed into it, damp hair down her back, and glaring at him like he’d let out a loud fart as soon as he opened the door. He hadn’t—but he was wearing yesterday’s clothes and had walked the streets the rest of the night after the bars closed, sipping from a flask and worrying about the first day of his theater camp. The homeless who circulated between the Crisis Center and the gas station that sold booze in single servings were getting to know him.

  Gretchen bolted the rest of her shake and went to the sink to wash the glass. “Next time you want to go on an all-night bender,” she said over her shoulder, “just don’t come back here at all.”

  “Sorry, Gretch, it—” he began, but she shoved him aside, leaving the kitchen, and he stumbled hard against the counter. To him she was a Wendy Wasserstein character—one of those smart, opinionated women who never pulled a punch. They lived on the same dorm corridor and later shared a house, but she’d gone the management training route at the telecom—high stress and long hours, rigid expectations. In college he’d amused her. Now his lifestyle offended her as she folded into a new pack that went to networking cocktail hours and chased bonuses.

  From the front door she hissed, “If you only plan to shower here, the Y would be cheaper.”

  Anthony was touched that she cared—less of him around was less noise and mess. The door slammed before he could form an excuse or a better apology. He put down a few glasses of water and at last fell asleep fully clothed on Gretchen’s couch—more comfortable than the futon—only to wake with a start ten minutes after he should have been at work. He went to his room for the proverbial cleanest dirty shirt and sprinted for the theater to find the board chair, a redheaded banker named Sharon, on the front steps watching for him with a clipboard and a phone that kept rattling message alerts.

  “I just called your mom’s house to see if there’d been an accident. Are you all right?” she said, worried rather than angry so far.

  “No, no, I’m fine!” He shook her hand and smoothed his hair. “Slept through my alarm, if you can believe it. First-day nerves. How’d—” The anxious thought struck him that Sarah might be in communication with the theater board. “How’d you get my mom’s number?”

  “It was your emergency contact.” She waved a file folder. “Let’s get inside. The staff meeting’s already started and I need to get over to my office.”

  “Oh. Right.” The early-morning meeting on the first day was his idea. Anthony cursed himself silently for it—he should’ve known he’d blow that—and jogged up the steps to hold the door.

  Campers were arriving as the meeting broke up. Anthony spotted neighbors from the ranch, Alma and Brittany Terrebonne, pushing through the front doors.

  “Hey there!” Anthony said as he sidewinded through the press of kids to greet them. “How’ve you been, Alma? And you’re Brittany, right?”

  Alma gave a friendly handshake, but Brittany only nodded and shrank behind her aunt. It was brave for her to be here at all, Anthony thought. Her mother’s death was big enough news to make the Gazette headlines he followed from New York. Vicky had died from exposure over the winter—a quintessentially Montanan way to go and more than likely drug related. The address and contacts from camp registration told him that Brittany was living with family out on their antiquated homestead near the Frys’. Lots of quiet and solitude certainly, but Anthony wondered if that was the best thing for a bereaved child. New York’s energy had been a balm to him the last few months as Dean’s death sank in.

  Anthony’s guesses were confirmed now that Alma was here to turn in all the forms herself with a firm hand on his elbow and an intensity that could produce a diamond out of pure carbon. Her relationship with Chance, whatever its true nature, had triggered wild speculation in Hayden. If Alma’s manner had been more casual, the line of her haircut not so razor sharp, Anthony might have teased her about his cousin. She led him into a quiet corner as Brittany stepped up to the check-in table to claim her T-shirt.

  “She’s adjusting all right, but she’s had a hard time this past year,” Alma said. She was in a weird hybrid lawyer-rancher outfit of pearls and a sweater twinset with jeans and scuffed boots, like she’d changed her mind about her identity halfway through getting dressed. It was the pearls, Anthony decided, that intimidated him. “Would you keep an eye on her? Call me if anything’s not going well? Here’s my card.”

  He reassured Alma and she moved off as quickly as she’d come, no doubt holding to some schedule unimaginable to Anthony. Unlike the other campers in shorts and T-shirts, Brittany wore an old-fashioned but well-ironed yellow sundress and a pair of heel-worn plain black ropers. Anthony remembered Alma and Vicky from summers they’d spent at the Terrebonne place, how different they’d been, one fluid as water, the other determined as a bison bull at a fence line, like nothing that could have emerged from the same gene pool except for how much they looked alike. Hindsight probably deceived him, but he felt as if he’d known even then that Vicky would have a short season.

  The memories he connected to her were dark, but Brittany made a lovely picture, loose brown hair and eyes gone violet like her mother’s in the morning sun, an icon of sunny childhood in spite of the loss she’d suffered so recently. Her presence was a good omen. He’d wanted to bring something valuable to kids who didn’t have much and here they were, crowding like lambs, full of all the spirit he needed to meet this challenge. His well of optimism had nothing but a little rank mud at the bottom lately, but Anthony felt a trickle of possibility. After his bumpy arrival, the day went more smoothly as the plans kicked in. Counselors led exercises, and the first guest professional began the rhythm class. Sharon stopped texting. Anthony stood in the hall and took the first easy breath all day as the sounds of the camp hummed independent of him. This might actually work, he thought. He knocked a wood molding and hurried to his office to process late registrations.

  Late in the morning, campers strolled toward the courthouse lawn for their picnic, dodging sun one awning to the next in upstream migration, darting shadows in matching T-shirts, insulated lunch bags slung over their shoulders. Anthony let his stride fall in with
Brittany’s where she dawdled at the rear of the shoal. Instead of the bag the other kids seemed to have bought in bulk, she clutched one that he recognized as the reusable tote they sold for a dollar at the Hayden grocery. A few girls called from up the block for her to join them, but Brittany shook her head and looked back toward him. As he got closer, Anthony saw something wary and adult playing on her face at the sight of him.

  “How’s it going so far?” he asked, a new apprehension seizing him. The campers had been completely theoretical until today. Brittany’s strained expression made him understand quite suddenly how much he wanted this to work—for this camp to be the thing kids needed, especially the ones busing in from places where there was so little room for deviation from the general way that you told yourself you didn’t feel things, that your emotions were mistaken. He’d needed room to deviate and only rarely found it.

  “Oh, fine. Good,” Brittany said, but she pulled her bag closer. “Iwanttotellyousomething, MisterFry,” she announced with the words all rushed together. Her pace slowed further so that they dropped behind the group.

  “What is it?” Anthony reached out a hand to touch Brittany’s shoulder, then remembered the severe lecture the entire staff had received from the board about the importance of never touching any camper except in an emergency—and filling out forms in triplicate in that case. He let his hand drop, but Brittany spoke so softly that he had to lean in to hear her.

  “I saw your dad and Ponch while I was out riding one morning last week,” she said, eyes hard on him for any reaction. “Up on the ridge between your place and ours.”

  Anthony inhaled deep. “My dad?” he asked, more curious than shocked. It was such an extraordinary thing to say that he couldn’t take it seriously. “You saw my dad?”

  “Yes,” Brittany answered with a reluctant nod. She glanced fast and nervous at the crowd retreating up the street, a few counselors now looking back at them, but held her creeping pace and kept talking. “They had the sun behind them, but he had on that old crumpled hat he always wore and I could see the high cantle on his saddle. I remember it because we went over to your place once to see him ride Ponch. He sat there for a while—I don’t know if he saw us—and then he turned and rode down the far side of the ridge. Alma thought I shouldn’t tell you”—a little pause, perhaps the vivid memory of whatever Aunt Alma had said—“but I thought maybe you’d seen him, too.”