The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  The stated purpose of the summer visits was for Paula to reconnect with her Apsáalooke family and culture. Reality was a little more patchwork. Tim Red Deer, Paula’s father, spent his time with a series of women—a harem, the less generous relations called it—scattered across the reservation and beyond. His whereabouts on a given day were uncertain so Paula stayed with the Tall Grasses. Wanda worked for Head Start in Lame Deer and had a long commute. The cousins, seeing the fuss made over Paula every year, retaliated by leaving her alone with an old pickup and a lot of time on her hands.

  Anthony had known who Paula was for years, this foreign presence that dropped annually into the closed system of their lives. She was a few years older and had never taken any notice of him. The year he was fourteen, out of nowhere Anthony got his height and began to fill out through the shoulders. Girls at school noticed him for the first time, and when Paula returned, the thrilling idea formed in his mind that she might do the same. Once school got out, he found excuses to wander the line where the Tall Grasses’ almost two-thousand-acre allotment adjoined the Frys’ long-standing grazing rights on state land up to the rim of Croucher Coulee, hoping for a sighting. He wasn’t stalking her exactly, he told himself, just placing himself strategically.

  Then came the day, ordinary in all other respects, when he was out riding Boomerang, checking fences without great diligence, and from a distance he spotted her by herself just up the road from the Frys’ drive. She had a car jack under the rear right fender of an old GMC pickup he’d seen around the Tall Grass place for years and both hands on the sidewall as she jumped on the lug wrench without effect. Whatever the appropriate thanksgiving offering was, Anthony vowed to the skies to make it as he urged Boomerang forward.

  Paula saw him coming and hopped down to watch his arrival on the far side of the fence.

  “You’re that kid from up the road, aren’t you?” she asked, arm across her forehead to block the sun.

  “Anthony Fry,” he said. “Want me to take a look?”

  “Thanks. I’m not heavy enough to shift these old lug nuts no matter what I do.”

  It was as close to Paula and her perfect, shining braid as he’d ever gotten. The moment paralyzed him for a few seconds before he pulled himself together, asked her to hold Boomerang, and applied himself manfully to getting the spare on her pickup. After he’d smashed a finger getting the flat tire off and fallen flat in the dirt prying the spare from its niche, he discovered that the spare was flat, too.

  “I can give you a ride home on Boomerang,” he said. “He’s not lame, last time I checked.”

  But his joke was. It sailed by without landing. Paula was still looking at the spare with her hand over her mouth as if there were words there she didn’t want to come out. Was she embarrassed to be in this position in front of a white rancher? Had he said something wrong? Would she rather walk than get on a horse with him? Had she swallowed a bug?

  “Okay,” she said at last. She didn’t look at him. He mounted and she let him pull her up behind the saddle. She lacked the inborn horse sense of the Crow kids, he noticed. She rode the mile back to her grandma’s place with both arms slung around him in a nervous grip that clenched every time Boomerang jogged a few steps—not that Anthony minded.

  “How long are you here for this summer?” he asked.

  “Right until school starts. My mom has a book tour, speaking events all over. She wants me here so I’m not watching TV in a hotel the whole time.” Her tone was resentful.

  “What does she do?” he asked, though he knew. They all knew about Paula’s mom.

  “She teaches poetry at UT Austin. She’s a big deal, I guess.” Anthony had heard that Juki Red Deer drew crowds and not just on the reservation. He’d found a video of her online, a real publicity trailer back before YouTube was much of a thing. She drummed out an angry backbeat outcry against colonial oppression—against him, when you got right down to it, the colonizer still in place. He could see how the rhetoric would be hard to resist if you hadn’t grown up cheek by jowl with Indian country.

  “I could take you into town, show you around,” Anthony offered a minute later.

  “I have a boyfriend back home,” Paula said. After that they were quiet.

  With that negligible encouragement he showed up for the rest of the summer at the dirt-court pickup basketball games at the Tall Grasses’ because he knew she’d be there. The Tall Grasses were a big basketball family, especially Paula’s crazy-talented young cousin Jenna who was just a kid back then. Anthony and Paula sat on the stoop and he let her draw designs on his hands in Sharpie that got him in trouble when Dean saw them. He got himself invited to parties where she would be just to listen to her talk, even when he didn’t agree with or understand half of what she said. She didn’t sound like anyone he’d ever met in eastern Montana. The buzzwords of her mother’s postmodern academic lingo—a foreign language Anthony was determined to learn—fell from Paula’s lips like clicking poker chips, piling up power.

  “That’s your constructivist bias,” she told him once.

  “Could be,” he answered amiably with no idea what she meant. He’d listened from a discreet distance as she explained—still spitting mad from being called a clueless rich girl—to a group of young men several years older than she was how tribal policies they’d pushed for were “reinscribing patterns of cultural destruction.” That led to an argument that lasted half the night.

  Her patter found a more receptive audience among white boys from the summer math class she was taking at MSU Billings, some of whom even came to check out the rez and take pictures like disaster tourists. Anthony observed the way they’d sigh at the tragedy of it all and encourage Paula to have a few beers and relax. She wouldn’t date them, but she would consent to lecture them. By the time he’d hung around her a few months, Anthony knew just how the gospel according to Paula would end, how the audience would react. She trimmed her wordy presentation like a preacher in training until she hit the thundering summit with a natural’s perfect timing.

  “The only thing I can do in the face of so much injustice,” Paula told her blue-eyed, all-male audience outside the rodeo as one of them passed her his last cigarette, “is save myself.” Then she’d flip her braid, smile a Cleveland Indians grin over an ironic cleveland indians T-shirt, and let some lucky guy lead her off for a good meal at the Indian taco stand—but never more, for she insisted that they respect her. To his knowledge, Anthony was the only one who ever got past that barrier—albeit not very far past it. To his abiding disappointment she wouldn’t unwind the braid, and she wouldn’t take off those tight Texas jeans.

  “I’m working on faithfulness,” she’d say with wounded eyes in the GMC after giving him a ride home, as if Anthony sliding his hand up under her shirt was an entirely unrelated matter. Or “I can never be a mother. I can’t perpetuate this genocidal system on the flesh of an innocent child.”

  Paula was maddening, but she could also be sweet to him, sweeter than anyone else. “You have a beautiful voice,” she’d say when he started singing along with the radio. She turned it off. “You should be onstage. Sing to me.”

  “What should I sing?” He was bashful. Paula was the first person ever to ask him to sing and she had a great voice. She sang those Buffy Sainte-Marie protest songs and knew every word. The only songs he knew the words to were the country-western melodies his dad had sung, “Old Shep” and “Lovesick Blues” and other wailing old white boy tunes he was embarrassed to remember.

  “Whatever you want.”

  He sang what he knew. She loved it and he lived on that for years. Anthony had carried her pure delight in his singing all the way to Broadway, where it was crushed and carried out in thirty-second audition intervals. Next!

  By the end of that summer he realized that whatever he was—too young, too white, too goofy, too inexperienced, too tainted by his colonizer culture—it was nothing that interested Paula as much as fill-ups for the GMC and a ready source of f
ood when her dad forgot to leave money. She tried out new lines on him for what he began to think of as her stump speech. He didn’t mind. He liked the sound of her voice, even when she was telling him what kind of birth control she used with the boyfriend, whom she described as Diné and very traditional, although he worked at a Banana Republic in Austin.

  There was only that summer. Paula’s postgraduation plans didn’t include wasting time on Montana’s dusty back roads. She never picked up on Anthony’s repeated suggestions that they write, stay in touch. He’d looked for her on social media but she had only a few dated profiles. She didn’t want to be found.

  Now, back in the Buick that had waited faithfully, Anthony sat still on the hill above his mother’s house and searched for the will to face his family. Paula, he thought, was the story of his life in one summer. In spite of his high and earnest hopes, he’d never been the right man. There was no way he could have configured himself to suit her, but he’d taken away all the wrong lessons and repeated the pattern enough times to conclude that he was doomed to be the outcast everywhere.

  Act 3, Scene 3

  No one emerged as Anthony saddled Boomerang fast, grateful for the respite from confrontation. As quick as he could go, Anthony was up and they were jogging along the path toward the butte, too slow one minute and too fast the next as Boomerang shook out the skittishness of being left on his own too long. Anthony stretched and yawned as he watched for movement across the morning shadows striating the land. Trees threw long silhouettes while small birds and animals dove and ran in and out of shelter in peripheral streaks of pattern and color.

  He couldn’t feel the joy this scene should give him. If he’d been more like the man Dean had raised him to be, Sarah wouldn’t have had to turn to Neal. She’d have had a son holding things together. As he had so often, Anthony longed sincerely to be a different sort of person, the one they all wanted him to be. He tried to feel how that would be, how he could do it, but it was like folding himself into the origami imitation of something else—a crane or a boat, a thing he fundamentally was not—and still made of the same material, he fooled no one.

  Even for Chance it hadn’t come easy. Look at the mess with Hilary, the child gone six months a year, the daily heartbreak of it. Chance had always been much better at playing the rancher role, but who knew what unruly parts of himself he was forcing down to keep it going? Who knew if he lay awake at night thinking of what might have been in California and wondering if his days were already decided for him, no veering and no shirking, just a march to his allotted six-foot plot? The thought made Anthony’s breath come short.

  The sun was higher when he unbuckled Boomerang’s halter and turned him out to pasture brushed and handsome. The saddle on Anthony’s shoulder was a welcome weight, a task he’d gotten right. He was feeling like a new man when he entered the barn and spotted Neal at the far end, bent over the engine of the red ATV, checking fluids, and just like that the healing effect of the ride was gone. Neal glanced up, then back to the oily rag in his hand.

  “Your mom’s in the house.”

  “I came to ride.” Anthony stayed near the door and eyed the tack. Dean’s saddle was there, oiled and ready as if his father had only taken a long walk. He wondered why. As long as Anthony had known him, Neal had only rarely gotten on a horse. People said that he and Dean had grown up on horseback and barely came down to sleep, but Anthony had never seen any sign of that in the Neal he knew. This man preferred machines, no fuzzy interfaces that required nuance and gentleness.

  “Say . . . has anyone been exercising Ponch?”

  “Ponch?” Neal stood straight. “After what happened to your dad? I plan to sell him as soon as your mom calms down about it. She doesn’t like getting rid of animals. Gets attached.”

  “Oh.” He didn’t like to agree with Neal, but he was right. Ponch needed to go, as much as Anthony would miss the impressive sight of him.

  “Gonna get rid of that horse of yours, too, if you don’t start paying for his keep and riding him more often. He needs exercise. It ain’t free to keep a horse, you know, and your mom’s the one who winds up feeding and watering him. I ain’t doing it.”

  It was just like Neal to go straight for hostility, ignoring Anthony’s small gesture of agreement about Ponch, without passing through any intermediate conversation about the prior evening’s announcement. The man had no setting for civil human interaction. Anthony had the fuck you all ready on his tongue, but Neal might be capable of selling Boomerang just to spite him. There must be a way to confront him in front of everyone—and a dark bubble rose in Anthony’s mind like gas from a swamp. He had the campers’ dramatic showcase coming up next month. He could put on anything he wanted and invite everyone he knew. Wouldn’t that be a hoot, to show up old Neal in front of everyone. Anthony let the bubble rise, burst, and dissipate through him, soothed by the passing internal chuckle.

  “I’ll bring a bag of feed next time I come,” he said, nice and even, rejecting the bait now that he saw a more appealing opportunity. He stepped up to Dean’s saddle and closed his hands around the finely tooled skirt, his father’s presence deep in the leather.

  From the other end of the barn came a sudden shuffle. “Leave that alone!” Neal’s voice reverberated in the metal echo chamber.

  Anthony looked around in surprise. “Why? It’s Dad’s.”

  “It’s your mother’s. All his personal effects went to her. Don’t be getting ideas about taking it off to pawn.”

  Anthony huffed and wagged his head. He’d take leftovers, sure, but he was no thief. “You’ve got a lot of nerve telling me not to sell things while you talk about selling off the mineral rights. Dad would’ve driven you off for good before he’d let you do that.”

  Neal slammed the hinged panel on the ATV and tossed the rag on the seat. He came across the barn to point at Anthony with a greasy finger. “Who are you to talk about how we run the place? It’s not like you’re around holding up your end. Your mother listens to me now. She sees she can’t count on you.”

  “It’s still part mine.” Anthony wrapped his arms around himself, cool from the morning air and now permeated with the chill of being around Neal. “Just because I went away doesn’t mean I don’t care. I came back.”

  Neal looked exasperated. “Mining’s good business. Dean was just being obstinate. He wouldn’t let me tell him the time of day.”

  “Reclamation,” Anthony said and spat in the dust. “Some of those big mines down in Wyoming, I hear they subsided hundreds of feet. Is that what we’ll get back? A big hole?”

  “Sure, it’ll look different. Softer grades, easier to manage livestock on, maybe we can even plow areas we can’t now, get some more productivity. Buy more land.” Some of the challenge had seeped out of Neal’s voice, replaced by the salesman’s tone Rick Burlington used. “There’s a hell of a lot of upside, for all of us.”

  Anthony glanced back at his father’s saddle. It was like having Dean upright and angry behind him, glowering at this conversation, on Anthony’s side for once. At that moment, even after all that had passed between him and Dean and all that hadn’t, Anthony felt his lack like a missing organ. Anthony had counted on his father all his life, from the time he was a little boy scared of the big horses and Dean had walked him everywhere on Boomerang’s predecessor, Miss Myrtle, until he was more comfortable on the horse than off her. Anthony had never reckoned on surviving without his father so soon. Despite Dean’s faults and their mutual shortcomings, it felt good to stand with him. There might have come a day when Anthony would have been ready to stand alone, but for now he longed for the great certainty of Dean, who wasn’t always right, but was always sure. “Dad would never have gone along with it.”

  Neal glared, and Anthony almost laughed. Neal couldn’t help it that he looked the part of the resentful little brother, but his life might have been easier if his face hadn’t narrowed so naturally into a distrustful, ferretish squint. His eyes spoke of all the things A
nthony knew by instinct to be true about his uncle, his essential meanness, his selfishness, and the bitter spirit he carried toward Anthony just for being Dean’s son. Neal had the face he deserved.

  “Well, it’s just a shame he ain’t around anymore to tell us all how high to jump,” Neal said, mocking. “Go inside before you leave. Your mom’ll be upset if you don’t stop in.” He stalked out and headed for the house.

  Anthony stood alone, consumed with loss. His instinct was to argue with everything Neal said, but as the words sank in, he found to his dismay that he could see Neal’s side. What were they all hanging on so hard for? The ranch was nothing but constant struggle. Was it so wrong to accept a deal that might free them from the lifelong ruts of debt and drought, fire, and flood? Anthony leaned against the steel wall, sapped, one shoulder slumped against Dean’s saddle. What could he do to change this course Neal was set on? Did he have enough strength of his own to defy Neal and stand up under the full weight of the place? He thought back to his botched Coriolanus, the tremors he’d felt facing the audience, and the disgust he’d felt then at his own weakness.

  You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate

  As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize

  As the dead carcasses of unburied men

  That do corrupt my air, I banish you;

  And here remain with your uncertainty!

  He was exactly what Coriolanus condemned: worthless for his uncertainty. Anthony felt for the nearest shelf for support and got the tack back in its cubbies and onto its hooks through sheer long habit, paying no attention. He shuffled out toward Boomerang to seek the horse’s evergreen affection while Ponch trotted a diagonal across the pasture, tossing his head. Anthony shuffled and reshuffled the options in his mind, but the only way he could think of to stop Harmony from mining was to wrestle control back from Neal and make a life here. If he did that, Sarah would stand with him—but he’d have to stick. There’d be no wandering away this time. The prospect gave Anthony a gut-rolled feeling like eating one of those deathburgers from the fast-food joints along the interstate. He let the feeling take him as he stood and breathed and tried to amass the certainty this future would require.