The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  “I owe you an apology, too, Hilary. I didn’t understand what was happening to you at the time. It’s since been explained to me. I took advantage and I’m sorry.”

  “Took advantage?” Hilary looked and sounded baffled. “It was my idea, if you recall. It was a crazy bad idea, but you saved my life. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

  “The girls I roomed with in New York all but drew me a diagram of what a rapist I am. If I had a do-over, I’d do different.” Still he’d had an inner certainty, even while accepting the nonnegotiable verdict handed down by a couple of NYU drama and women’s studies graduates, that if he’d been using Hilary, she’d been using him just as much.

  The cozy space had grown suffocating. He had to get out. The hope she’d fired in him a few minutes ago had already burned through its fuel, leaving him flatter and darker than before. Hilary was a painter, after all, not an alchemist. As he opened the door she lifted her chin with a willful flourish and smiled with the same light she’d had when she first arrived in Montana over four years ago, so certain that she could make everything all right by merely wanting it that way.

  “I’m sure it will be okay,” she said and swept out with a light kiss on his cheek. “I knew he’d forgive you. You’re like brothers. It was my fault anyway. I told him it was my fault. You were what, twenty-two?” She didn’t wait for an answer but headed for the front doors while Anthony hung back.

  Once she’d gone he muttered to the wall, “If you really believe he’ll forgive me, Hil, you don’t understand the first goddamn thing about brothers.”

  Act 2, Scene 2

  Down the street from the sheriff’s office in Hayden, Anthony sat in the car on a Friday afternoon reading a copy of Arcadia from the Town Hall Theater’s bookshelves. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. He repeated the line to himself as proof that there was still reason to look ahead into the unknowable future. More than a week had passed since Hilary’s visit without a word from her or Chance. Anthony had given up on genuine sleep and started sitting up at night with plays. His mind could trip through the dialogue like water on a wheel, falling ever forward in a soothing rhythm without having to land.

  The lines about sex being much nicer than love made him think of the encounter with Jessie Marx a few weeks earlier and the invitation he’d refused. Since then she hadn’t pushed, just dropped a text here and there. She’d mentioned getting a drink tonight and he hadn’t answered yet. Jessie brought out every wary instinct in him. Her charms were just one more attraction in the all-inclusive package deal Montana wanted to sell him, the all-you-can-eat buffet of home on the range and dysfunctional family that came at the price of his soul—and her sales pitch was better than Sarah’s. He wondered, just for a moment, if all these things had been decided already and he was only walking through the set, observing the drama in motion, awaiting his cue. What ending could there be but what Lewis and Dean had devised for him?

  The play hung from his fingers as his mind wandered. He stuck a gas receipt at the end of scene 4, tossed the book on the seat, and launched himself into the street, a little lost without the habitual obligations that had brought him to Hayden in the past: no errands to run at the hardware store, no high school game to attend. The camp kids had a guest lecturer this afternoon, a dance professor from the college who would help them perfect their choreography for the end-of-camp showcase, part of the pitch he’d given the board to introduce the kids to professionals and give them some real role models. Hilary hadn’t responded to his mild, friendly requests to set a date for her workshop. He didn’t dare tell the board until she’d committed, as much as he needed good news for them after a wave of rejections for larger grants to keep programming going through the winter. Her generous whims could be fleeting.

  In hopes of settling at least the nightmares about Dean, Anthony had come to Hayden with the half-formed intent of talking to Sheriff Marx. He didn’t like or trust the man after that night under the grandstand, but he had to believe that Marx knew his job, had made his investigation. He’d let Dean lie. Who was Anthony to question his competence? But at this point doing nothing was the least tolerable option.

  Anthony’s steps grew slower as he climbed the wide cement staircase. A middle-aged woman in civilian clothes came out just then, saw Anthony in an attitude of approach, and automatically held the door. Out of knee-jerk politeness, he stepped up and took it with a thank-you. Then momentum had him inside, the young man in a deputy’s uniform behind bulletproof glass asked, “Can I help you?” and soon Anthony was following down a corridor lined with plaques and photographs, linoleum underfoot, fluorescents above.

  To steady himself he breathed in the emotional distance from Dean’s death that he’d cultivated in the months since Sarah bought him a ticket to come home for the funeral and he’d simply laid it aside. No, he’d said to himself as he tossed junk mail in the recycling bin, I don’t think I will. It was an act of rare and pure defiance and he’d stuck to it longer than previous rebellions. Even the embarrassing, out-of-control cry he’d had when he finally visited the cemetery was now a source of calm. Those tears were shed. They wouldn’t come again, not if he could help it—certainly not in front of Elmo Marx, who would simply confirm Anthony’s intellectual understanding that nothing had happened but a tragic accident.

  The deputy gestured toward a door and there at a desk too big for the space was Marx, reading the Billings Gazette and sipping take-out coffee from somewhere fancier than the break-room urn.

  “Anthony.” Marx rose from the high-backed CEO chair and offered his hand. “Good to see you. How are things out at your place?”

  “Just fine, Sheriff.”

  “Aw, call me Elmo. My name’s not Sheriff.”

  Anthony nodded, tried to smile, and wished he were a better actor. “Right. Elmo.”

  Marx pointed to a chair in front of the desk that made any visitor a good six inches lower than he was. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

  Anthony squinted through the horizontal blinds at a few pickups rolling down the street. Marx had a catbird seat here. You could hardly come or go in Hayden without passing his post.

  “I need to know what you can tell me about my dad’s death,” he said. “Now that I’m back I’m having kind of a hard time accepting it. I thought if you could explain a little more about the investigation, I might be able to . . . reach some closure.” Reach some closure? He mocked himself for the words as soon as they were out. He sounded like his New York roommate Alisyn-with-a-Y-from-New-Jersey and her constant therapy-speak. Couldn’t he even pretend he was from around here?

  Marx leaned back and checked out the traffic. “Our investigations aren’t normally a matter of public record,” he said. “We don’t want to go around accusing people unless we have solid facts. You understand. The coroner ruled it an accidental death.”

  “Of course. But now that the case is closed, I thought you might be able to share the basic facts with a family member. Just for peace of mind.”

  Marx stroked his close-shaven chin and let his eyes linger on Anthony’s finger-combed hair and two-day growth of beard. “I suppose I could do that, seeing as it’s Dean’s son asking. It’s been several months. I’ll have to pull up the file.” He moved closer to the desk and began to click his mouse. “I would have briefed you at the time, but I heard you didn’t make it back.”

  Of course Marx had heard about him skipping the funeral. None of his business, but it was a small town. Right this minute, seeing his car parked outside, Jessie’s friends were probably discussing him in the salon.

  “Here’s the final investigator’s report.” Marx turned the monitor ninety degrees so that Anthony could lean in and follow the scroll of documents and images. “They were on leased tribal land when it happened, but we retained jurisdiction because it was nontribal members involved. The feds took a look-in, too, didn’t see much to interest them. Our deputies photog
raphed the scene, but there was no evidence to speak of to collect. There wasn’t much out there, just the mess of footprints you’d expect after emergency services came and went. Here you go.” A small printer on a shelf behind Marx rolled out a few pages that he stapled and handed over.

  Anthony skimmed through a half dozen short paragraphs, a typed and signed statement from Neal, and full-page color images of Dean lying on his back, neck twisted badly, beside a thick pattern of horse and human footprints at the bottom of a steep rise. It was Croucher Coulee all right, the same as Sarah had told him and he’d seen in his dream, a rugged cut that ran for miles along the path of wandering Croucher Creek where he’d played as a kid. “These prints are what, paramedics?”

  “Neal called them first and they beat us by a good fifteen minutes, came up that old track along the bottom with John Lowry’s ATV. Trampled it good.”

  “And the only investigation was at the site of the accident?”

  Marx had one eye that focused harder and sharper than the other. It fixed on Anthony as the printer hummed again. “Not much else to do, was there? We had an eyewitness, the man’s own brother, saying the horse spooked and threw him.”

  The man’s own brother indeed. “‘To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand,’” Anthony said under his breath. Hamlet was taking over his brain lately, a virus released on his hard drive, driving his mind down the easy track of a story it knew.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.” He spoke more sharply than intended.

  Marx eyed him. “No reason to get snippy. That horse is well known to be temperamental, and nobody but Fry could ever ride him. Not exactly murder in the Rue Morgue.”

  “But Dad was an expert rider. He wouldn’t get thrown easy.” Marx wouldn’t tolerate much prodding, Anthony was sure of that. He shifted to the front of his chair, expecting to be dismissed any minute. No matter. The papers in his hand were what he’d come for.

  Marx cleared his throat with an energetic, phlegmy hack. “I don’t care how good a horseman you are, you get bucked off hard and I guarantee your neck can snap as quick as anybody’s. I’ve seen it happen.” He shoved another stack of photos across the desk.

  Anthony startled when his eyes fell on the first image, looking up the steep side of the coulee. It wasn’t a random angle but the very scene from his dream. The light was different, but there was no mistaking the trail and the brush that his mind had shown him as his father went tumbling, tumbling down. The vertebrae in his neck went tight.

  “And the saddle? The horse?” he asked. “Did anybody examine them? Whose footprints are these coming down?”

  Marx turned back to the computer, clicking again. “I’ve got a few photos here. Neal had already unsaddled the horse, but there was nothing suspicious, nothing wrong with the saddle or the horse. We even did tox screens on both the deceased and the horse. They finally came back just a few weeks ago. All negative. I think you’ll find we do our jobs pretty well around here.” He turned back to Anthony, a little challenge behind his eyes now.

  “I don’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

  Marx pushed a few last papers across the desk. “I’ll tell you what’s really bothering you,” he said as Anthony studied the saddle and the lab results. He raised a bushy eyebrow over the sharp eye.

  The skin on Anthony’s scalp crawled upward. Could Marx tell what he was thinking, his crazy suspicions? “What’s that?”

  “You went off and left your dad to run that place by hisself, and then left your mom on her own when he died, but you never thought Neal’d take over. Now you’re wishing you’d come back and staked your claim.”

  Their eyes locked. Marx had a one-track mind where land was concerned. Anthony wondered what lost inheritance had embittered him. Still, there might be truth in Marx’s words. What Anthony felt about Dean and Neal and his own meandering path was all wound up together like the ball of rubber bands in Marx’s little tray. Anthony couldn’t think straight about one thing without getting all knotted up in the others.

  Marx was looking at him with the creepy wandering eye now. Anthony wondered if Marx still thought he was the catch of the county, or if by now he was advising Jessie to set her sights on some other landed oddball. To hide any reaction that might have escaped onto his face Anthony coughed into his elbow, stacked the printed pages, and stood. Without consciously deciding to, he tore Neal’s statement out of the stapled stack, folded it in half, then again and again, and stuffed the rectangle into his pocket. It was silly but he felt safer with a potential talisman against the nightmares.

  “One more question, Elmo, if you don’t mind,” he said. “Was there a postmortem?”

  The corners of Marx’s mouth turned down. He rotated the monitor to its original position to signal the end of their interview. “No postmortem. No reason for it.”

  Act 2, Scene 3

  The Buick bucked uphill toward Chance’s house a half hour later, navigating at walking speed around large cavities in the unpaved drive, winding through sage as the undercarriage clanked against rocks. Jayne had invited him to the picnic, but Chance was the one Anthony needed to see.

  “All right if I stop by your place and say hello first?” he’d asked Chance by phone before leaving Billings. He didn’t want a door slammed in his face in front of half the county.

  “Sure, come on up,” Chance said with no warmth in his voice but no overt hostility, either. It wouldn’t be a fun conversation, but Anthony had to try to restore the friendship. He needed Chance’s humor and wisdom and endless tolerance more than ever. Camp was eating him alive and Marx’s words hadn’t helped the way Anthony had hoped. The photos of Croucher Coulee made his dreamscape more rather than less real. The instant he tried to sleep it would be back, he was certain, this time to work at him with the image of Dean’s twisted body and the sound of Neal’s voice reciting his indifferent, robotic testimony.

  The sight of the Murphys’ horses reminded Anthony that he hadn’t been out to ride Boomerang or help Sarah since last weekend. He’d do better, he promised himself. He’d spend some nights out there, even if it meant putting up with Neal. Camp would be over soon.

  He’d dressed carefully for the meeting with Marx, arming himself with all his rings. Little wonder he’d gotten such skunk eye. One ring was a skull with a snake coiling out of the mouth, Death Eater–style—a little joke with himself, a bit of bravado. Another held a big black stone in an old-fashioned setting with long prongs curlicued along the edges—a gift from Paula, a girl he’d had a crush on three summers running, back when he was too young to understand futility. The third was the Masonic ring, the one item of real value Dean had passed to him, intentionally or not. Anthony didn’t exactly want it but he knew he’d never sell it.

  A blue square marked the back of his right hand, a stamp from a bar he’d just discovered in downtown Billings with two-for-one drink specials every night at happy hour. He spit and rubbed it on his jeans until it came clean. The assembled elders would have enough to grill him about without evidence that he’d been spending weeknights drinking. As the crowning show of defiance he wore new stars-and-stripes flip-flops snagged at the dollar store—the most inappropriate footwear he could come up with for a visit to the ranch.

  The angle of the drive flattened onto the small oval graded for the house and the Buick wheezed in relief. On the deck Hilary and Chance watched the gathering crowd side by side. Hilary wore a bright red halter sundress with an uneven hem and cowboy boots with one of those stylishly crumpled cowboy hats he’d seen at booths at the fair, dressed up with chicken feathers dyed turquoise. She waved. Chance had the brim of his rural electric cooperative cap pulled low for shade, arms folded, a brooding hilltop saint as wiry as when he was a kid, the same man Anthony remembered except that now there was no easy smile for his cousin. Three years ago Anthony would have tried to crack the stoic stockman armor and let in the light on the mischievous boy within. Now he was afraid to sp
eak at all. He turned off the car, mustered his courage, and shouted through the open window, “A Keep Out sign would be more effective than that driveway, but not much.”

  Hilary was already down the steps, moving past the car with a breezy greeting. “Hi there! I’ll leave you guys to talk. I’ll stop by the theater and say hi when I’m in town next week.”

  Anthony wondered if Chance knew she’d already been there. With a weak wave to Hilary’s back he turned his attention to Chance, whose eyes stayed fixed on the meadow. A cannonade of small artillery was just subsiding to the north, where a brigade of neighbors had emptied their weapons into aluminum cans arranged along the rock face. At one end of the firing squad Ed’s brother, Rupert, over seventy by now, was giving a marksmanship demonstration to a crowd of awestruck, mostly male tweens, using an old bolt-action Winchester. Having hunted with him, Anthony understood what an iceberg tip of Rupert’s skills they were seeing. With a moving target, Rupert was capable of raising that old rifle and taking out two deer with one bullet without any visible pause to aim. It made him an unpopular hunting partner: someone had to stick his prized tag on that second kill without ever firing a shot.

  Closer to the house than the shooting, the picnic was a blur of waving tablecloths and unmatched lawn chairs occupied by graying friends and family. Jayne gestured broadly for them to come down when she caught her nephew’s eye. Anthony raised a hand in salute but ignored the invitation.

  Chance returned his mother’s wave and loosened slightly, the drop of a shoulder. “I knew you’d get her up here. You always were stubborner than a mule. Have to be to keep that thing running.”