The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  All his life, he thought as he and Boomerang stood with their heads together, everyone had wanted him to be somebody else, starting with Dean, who’d wanted a carbon-copy little cowboy and instead got a whimsical, uncoordinated boy who liked to ride but thought cows were smelly and preferred staging musicals in the barn to filling it with cash-crop animals. If Anthony had been gay, at least Dean would have had an explanation for his disappointment—not one he would have liked, but a reason. Even at school Anthony never managed to follow the rules that would allow him one day to Take Over the Ranch, or, if that wasn’t enough, get a Good Job as a suit-and-tie guy, attract a Lovely Wife, have some Beautiful Children whose primary purpose was looking good on a Christmas card, go to Lunch at the Country Club with the guys and stand up for the Prayer, the Pledge, and the Four-Way Test at the weekly Rotary meeting. He’d rather hammer rebar through his foot than do any of it, and as time passed people saw that in him and felt judged in their own lives and disliked him for it.

  He’d wanted out. He’d wanted different. And here he was, back, pinned like a bug on a small-town specimen card with everyone staring at the genetic mutations that made him not like them, in a place where the worst thing you could be was Not Like Them. He’d meant to let the ranch go—needed to—but it was hard out beyond the fences to figure out what the authentic shape of his life should be. He’d expected a job or a role to answer for him the question of who he was, what his place would be under an infinite sky that gave no quarter—but now he saw that it would only have been a means to continue avoiding the question. Life had thrown him back onto fundamentals. What did he owe his family? What did he owe himself? He’d have to come up with answers soon.

  He threw a guilty look at the house as he walked back to the Buick, circled toward the drive, and quietly rolled away.

  Act 3, Scene 4

  It was midafternoon the following Monday and cool inside the sanctum of the theater. Anthony had his knees wedged under the steel desk in the windowless converted closet he called an office as he struggled earnestly with workers’ compensation registration for the camp staff, the top of a pile of paperwork three inches thick. That morning he’d left another message on Hilary’s out-of-range cell phone about the workshop. She was ignoring him again and he wasn’t about to call Chance and ask for her.

  Another anonymous haiku sat at Anthony’s elbow on torn notebook paper, from one of the campers, no doubt. He had a suspect in mind. They were delicate efforts, child’s play with language, but they drew him in. He wanted to know the poet better.

  Solstice night

  A full moon lights the sagebrush

  What silence

  One of the counselors stuck her head in.

  “There’s someone waiting for you out front,” she said and disappeared just as quickly. Campers were assembling in the hall for pickup with a noise like a riot getting started. Anthony was proud of how well the counselors had taken charge of their roles. His supervision was becoming more unnecessary every day. Probably this was more credit to them being ambitious college students than to his management skills, but it was an item in the plus column for the board.

  The visitor must be Hilary, he thought as he extracted himself from the desk. She’d promised another visit—if she’d meant that throwaway line at Chance’s. What a welcome distraction she would be. He could schedule her workshop and find out if she and Chance were getting back together. Anthony hurried to the front doors, eager to offer Hilary his listening ear and soft shoulder.

  Instead it was Jessie who sat alone on the top step facing the street full of parents’ cars, holding something on her lap. Anthony wasn’t exactly sorry to see her, but he had little to say that she’d want to hear. He’d texted Thanks for last night on Saturday afternoon out of simple politeness. She’d answered So much fun! Let’s grab a drink sometime next week. Anthony hadn’t answered. Now here she was, only two days later, tracking him down at work.

  When he opened the door, Jessie turned and he saw a small plant in a plastic pot, tied with a wide purple ribbon around the rim. She smiled and held it out to him.

  “I brought you something,” she said.

  He took it and sniffed as he sat beside her. “You brought me . . . rosemary.” Rosemary was one of his favorite smells, like sage with a personal stylist. “Thank you. Why?”

  “I asked the florist for something to express sympathy. I felt like I was kind of insensitive about your dad and everything the other night. Your mom and your uncle getting married like that. I mean, geez, your head must be spinning.”

  Insensitive or not, in truth she had given him exactly what he needed, but Anthony wasn’t about to say that. “Nothing to apologize for. Rosemary for remembrance, that’s right.” Hamlet again. “I’ll try to keep it alive.” He rested it on the step between them as he sat, a barrier shrub.

  “So that was all. I had to come into town to pick up stuff for the vet’s office and I thought you could use some moral support.” Jessie looked him in the eye with a flirtatious squint, half leaned in as if to kiss him, then seemed to lose her nerve. She withdrew and started playing with grass in the crack between the steps.

  “That was really sweet of you.” Anthony leaned and kissed her cheek in a light platonic brush-off, but she turned her head to match his lips with hers. Their eyes met: resistance and demand. Sweet women are really very angry people, Wasserstein remarked in his head. They’re trapped by their own repressed hostility. Anthony had never done well at resisting angry women. Things went so much better when you let them have their way.

  “You gonna be at the music festival this weekend?” she asked.

  “I think North Park is a venue, so I’m pretty much going whether I want to or not.” In general it was a perk to live across the street from the park, but this weekend it would be like living backstage at a full-volume concert.

  “Cool. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  “Sounds good.”

  With a swish of her bob, Jessie was on her feet and on her way. She waved and turned before he could respond, as if their interaction had embarrassed her somehow. He watched her hips sway in easy rhythm into the parking lot then held the rosemary close to his nose, thinking how pleasant and at the same time how inadequate it was to be wanted when he would only ever want something else.

  Anthony rose and stood over the trash bin for a few contemplative seconds. Did he have the gene for nurturance, to care for something or someone over time, offer it space and nourishment? There was much about himself he’d never thought to ask. He’d been too busy letting everyone know what he wasn’t to get familiar with what he was.

  His phone announced a text from Chance. Can you come by after work? Give Brittany a ride to play with Mae? At first Anthony was excited at the invitation, inconvenient as it was on a Monday afternoon. He realized a second later that Chance wouldn’t invite him like that. Their easy camaraderie was gone. The tacked-on excuse about giving Brittany a ride betrayed Chance’s discomfort at facing the conversation he and Anthony hadn’t had yet—maybe not as feverish as Anthony’s anxiety, but real. No, this was Sarah talking through her ever-obliging nephew, wanting Anthony to come see her after his run-in with Neal. He should have known he’d pay for slipping away like that.

  With the rosemary tucked against his chest Anthony hurried inside for the clipboard to check out campers crowding at the doors. He was standing in front of the desk, looking around helplessly for a place to let the plant die in peace, when Brittany stuck her head in.

  “Are you giving me a ride?” she asked, phone in hand.

  “Sure,” he answered. “I need to ride my horse so I can drop you at the Murphys’.”

  “Great!” She had another book in the other hand. The kid was going to get through their entire library of plays by the end of camp at this rate. Anthony wondered where he could get more—and where she’d keep getting more after camp was over. He shifted to get a look at the cover. A Doll’s House. A contribution from one of hi
s mischievous board members, no doubt, nothing childlike about it. How old could Brittany be, thirteen at most?

  A counselor shouted for him and Anthony hurried to the front steps with the clipboard to match kids with parents or load them onto the bus. When they were gone—a remarkably fast dispersion every day—he stood staring up the street without seeing. He had to pull himself forcibly from reflecting on the words he’d exchanged with Neal last weekend to understand what Brittany had just said.

  “Are you ready?” she repeated, tugging at her camp shirt. The silk-screened logo was crooked, so that she looked a little off-balance at all times. The same grocery store tote she carried every day hung from her fingertips, its logo slowly bleaching off with washing. Anthony had watched her at lunch, how she hid things in the tote that she didn’t want other kids to see—leftovers in used sour cream containers and baggies with water marks from being washed every night—but aggressively bartered homemade cookies and sweet berry breads for bags of chips and packaged treats. Brittany caught his glance and hid the bag behind her. A Doll’s House was under her arm with a bookmark sticking out. She was more than halfway through it.

  “Do you like it?” he asked. “That play?” I have other duties just as sacred.

  Brittany looked at the book. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I like the people. I don’t know if I agree with what they do. But when they talk, I feel what they feel. I don’t know how he does it. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “Spoken like a playwright,” Anthony said. He wondered if next year they might include a writing component, bring in some professionals to workshop the kids the way they’d done with choreography and lighting. Then he checked himself—he had no business thinking about next year when he didn’t know what his plans were for next month. He left the clipboard on the box office counter, locked the double doors, and waved Brittany to follow him toward where he’d parked, beyond the metered blocks, closer to his place.

  “Do you write, Brittany? Poetry or anything?” The morning’s haiku was in his pocket. She’d told him she wrote poems and now they were appearing like the fall of cherry blossoms, but could he draw her to talk about them? Did he have the skill?

  Brittany blushed and tugged at her ponytail. “Just poems. And my journal.”

  “Are there any you’d share with me? Poems, I mean. I’d love to have more original work for the camper showcase.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Then a beat later, “Do you? Write, I mean.”

  “Nothing I’d show anyone. Just stuff to keep myself from going crazy.”

  “Like what?”

  “Scripts, mostly. Dialogue.” He tried to wave her off by pointing out a familiar landmark. “Looks like they’re doing some reno on the old leather warehouse up there.”

  “Can I see?” Brittany wasn’t looking where he was pointing. “Your writing, I mean.”

  Anthony considered. Something had been cooking in the seamier precincts of his brain after he’d dismissed the idea when first it bubbled up. It wouldn’t take much at all to put thoughts to paper, find a couple of the older boys to run the lines. He only needed a little prompt to set it in motion and here was one, perfect in its tidy quid pro quo.

  “Tell you what. You read one of your poems for the camper showcase and I’ll stage a scene I wrote. Deal?”

  Slowly but definitively, Brittany nodded. “Okay. I’ve got something.”

  They turned the corner in a companionable atmosphere broken by the rumble of a diesel engine on the tracks behind them. Anthony’s phone buzzed with a couple of worried texts from the board treasurer about the June electrical bill. What did they expect from him? He was training kids on theater lights and running a couple of big air conditioners to prevent heatstroke. It was their building. They ought to know what it cost to run it.

  Will try to keep it under control, he tapped out. Great news! Artist Hilary Booker in town, plans to do a workshop with the kids! That ought to distract them.

  The euphoric reply pinged back as a whistle tooted and Anthony turned to see a long coal train groan into view. It bore the logo of Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, boxcars wobbling and rumbling under black bread loaves of coal, the exposed flesh of the Powder River Basin. The innards of his family’s land could be riding away like that one day soon, a commodity like anything else, not part of their flesh after all. Would it be so bad? The money was good, but his gut twinged when he thought about it. Anthony sighed and turned back to Brittany.

  “How are things at home? You guys ever put a bathroom in that old place?”

  Her laugh was still a little girl’s, wide open. “No. Alma and Grandma both sneak me over to their friends’ houses to take showers. They don’t want the other one to know they can’t stand taking baths in the pantry.”

  He laughed, too. “And you don’t say anything?”

  She shook her head and grinned. “It’s fun watching them mess with each other. And I get more showers.”

  “So you and Alma are getting along?” Anthony watched for the real reaction on her face that would precede the words. Alma’s tight organization must be like military school to a kid who’d grown up with Vicky Terrebonne for a mother. He wondered if that was all smooth or if a little resentment had crept in at the loss of independence on both sides. But Brittany only looked thoughtful.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, she’s really different from Mom, but some of it’s in good ways.”

  “What do you see that’s different?”

  “Well, like she has men for friends. Chance and Mae come for dinner but that’s it. Mom would’ve moved in with him by now. Alma wants to take care of herself.” She shrugged and Anthony wondered which seed would take root in her—the diligence and rectitude of Alma’s life, or the hands-off-the-wheel carnival ride of Vicky’s.

  Before Anthony could say anything, they came even with several campers walking home. Anthony shifted to the traffic side as they all crossed the wide, one-way lanes of First Avenue past a row of rumbling full-size pickups with massive grille guards and towing mirrors that dwarfed the children. The kids looked fragile to Anthony by comparison, like a stiff wind would send them tumbleweeding down the street. He sped up to herd them to the safety of the sidewalk. Such protective instincts, he thought, smiling at himself. Where had all that come from?

  “Hey, kids. Have fun today?”

  They nodded. “We got to try on costumes!” a blond boy volunteered. Sam, Anthony remembered, the son of a doctor and an accountant, highly verbal and pushy but also friendly and enthusiastic. He was Brittany’s age but unmarked by any sorrow in a way that made him seem much younger.

  A girl with a princess backpack and pink sparkly shoes turned to Brittany. “Is he your dad or what?” This was Carlie, a few years younger and the daughter of two moms, a physical trainer and a coach for several sports at the college. Their gender-neutral household had produced a child obsessed with all things princessy. Carlie’s and Sam’s pickup permission forms spelled out careful instructions allowing them to walk north by a designated route to the clinic where each had a parent working. Anthony appreciated the deliberate effort not to helicopter, in contrast to parents who bundled kids out of and into full-size SUVs under careful watch as if the mean streets of downtown Billings might attack.

  Brittany looked to Anthony before answering, as if he might want to take this one. When he didn’t, she said, “He’s my uncle.”

  Uncle: there was a word to parse in this place. He wasn’t her kin in any blood-relation sense, but their people had come from the same little patch of dirt for generations. He was tied into her history and felt responsible for her in a way he couldn’t have explained—in English anyway. In a Crow or Cheyenne way of thinking, he would be her clan uncle. It was a good explanation, deep and broad with a sideways kind of truth.

  Sam and Carlie waved and headed up the sidewalk.

  The Buick’s remote fob had stopped working so Anthony unlocked the car with the key. He wanted
to ask more about Alma and Chance, maybe get solid enough information to warn Hilary about inevitabilities she’d rather not face, but Brittany had made her declaration about their platonic relationship so straightforwardly that he didn’t want to suggest otherwise. He’d bet money that Alma was protecting her from a possible breakup, keeping life stable for a kid who needed that. Anthony marveled at what a child could absorb as he started the engine, pushed in the lighter, and pawed through the console for the nearly empty pack of Marlboro reds he’d stashed. They were expensive so he allowed himself one each day, as a reward for not screwing up camp too badly. It would be better, he supposed, to restrain himself with a camper in the car, but he was beyond pretending he was that together. He needed the smoke.

  No problem, he’d told the board of directors when they interviewed him by phone back in March, right after Dean died and he’d papered Billings with applications. He hadn’t yet made the final decision to go back, but when this job turned up, he’d wanted it like he hadn’t wanted anything in quite a while. This is what I do, he’d told them, the full P. T. Barnum shine-on. It’ll be fantastic! And it had been, back when he’d worked for the children’s theater in college, before he was getting through quite so much booze every week. With his former teacher praising a creative spirit he’d forgotten he had, the board bought right in.

  Now it felt more like an open question. Is there a problem? Is this what I do? Will it be fantastic? He’d been here only a few months, but the pressure was rising. The paperwork never seemed to let up: workers’ comp, unemployment insurance, financial statements, grant proposals. The board dropped it all in his lap like he could do the administrative job with one hand and run the camp with the other, but he knew nothing about running a nonprofit. The board chair had promised not to micromanage but she was texting at least twice a day as parents began to call. There were kids with allergies he’d forgotten to ask about, complicated pickup instructions he hadn’t figured out how to track, lost props and books as no one supervised the checkout procedures, statistics to keep for funders, and the requirement that no adult ever be alone with a child, so that he was down two staffers every time a kid scraped a knee. For the sake of those kids taking the scholarships, riding the bus, and the shiny kids, too, with all their undimmed joy, he hoped it would be as great as he’d painted it. Underneath, though, Anthony was starting to have a runaway feeling like the reins were slipping away.