When his hands were empty of rocks, Anthony pulled the crumpled sheet with Neal’s statement out of his pocket. We were coming back up out of the coulee, it said, hoping to flush out birds. It was the beginning of spring turkey season and they would have been looking for that mean old gang of turkeys that wandered out here—the Frys had eaten many of them over the years. Borderline edible, in Anthony’s estimation, but the hunt was enjoyable. Dean and Neal might have stalked the shrubs along the creek bed first, then gone back for the horses to climb to higher ground.
We thought we saw something up on the ridge, so I started up. I heard Ponch startle and Dean cried out, and when I turned back, he’d fallen. Ponch took off and ran past me all the way to the barn. I went down to try to help, but Dean’s neck had snapped in the fall and he rolled to the bottom of the slope. By the time I got to him, there was nothing I could do, so I rode home to call for help.
Ahead Anthony spotted a place where a smoother trail opened up. As he walked closer it revealed a path right to the coulee floor. The trails were easier to see from below. Anthony sat, peering down to be sure that the footing was stable, then slid into the wide divot. When he stood and looked around, he found the ground hard packed, not too steep, and wide enough for horses. The location and angle felt right, from both the dreams and the photos. As he descended, sliding a little on slick-soled boots, Anthony stopped short where a cluster of well-established wild plum bushes lay broken at the base. Dean could have fallen here and crushed them on his rough ride down.
To the side of the trail just beyond the damaged bushes was a tangle of logs and branches where earth had subsided under short, gnarled pine trees that clung to the rim of the coulee with roots curling into air. The horses would have had to pass close by, brushed by the pine needles, poked by branches. Ponch was supposed to have run past Neal, but the trail was too narrow for one horse to pass another. Too narrow now, Anthony corrected himself. The coulee reconfigured itself in every hard rain. Even the log pile could be new since Dean’s fall. Like most ways down, the trail was mostly hidden by the steepness of the slope from anyone up top. Neal couldn’t have been all the way up, since he said he saw the fall and came straight down. Or did he? Anthony checked the statement again. Neal didn’t say he saw the fall, he said he heard it.
When Anthony looked back up the path, the perspective staggered him back a few feet. It was exactly as in his nightmares, a broad view unrepresented in Marx’s forensic photos. He wasn’t interested in the possibility of ghosts or visions, but there it was. He’d dreamed Dean’s fall in more expansive Technicolor detail than the police photos, before seeing them—except for one detail. The bright seam of coal was missing. Thinking back to the police photos, Anthony realized that they’d showed the same bland striations of limestone, shale, and sandstone that he saw now. If the coal seam had been there when Dean died, it couldn’t have disappeared in only a few months.
If Anthony had fooled himself in that—imagining the coal seam when the coal lease was so much on his mind—how much else might be imagination? He reached for the bourbon and drained half of what was left before taking a step downhill. It was high time to complete his amateur investigation and get out of here. Anthony jogged, slid, and hopped to the coulee floor, found that rains had erased all tracks but deer and birds, and washed his face in the creek. He started up as fast as he’d come down, thinking of Boomerang alone up top, but as he came even with the logjam, something out of place caught his eye and halted him in spite of his hurry. From a few steps away Anthony squatted to peer under the pile—and froze. There in the shadow of the brush not ten feet from him was the unmistakable diamond pattern of a rattlesnake, thick around as his wrist.
Anthony held his breath and backed away one foot at a time. The snake did not move. He kept watching as he retreated uphill out of striking distance, but the snake held still. Now that he felt a little safer he swore and blew out his breath.
He stopped and listened again for the telltale slither of that big snake belly on dirt, but the only noise was wind. It was possible—just possible—that the snake was dead, or that he’d been fooled by nothing more than a shed skin, but he wasn’t sticking around to find out. This was not the rattler that had bitten him as a child, but it didn’t matter to his thudding pulse. Anthony scooted to the rim, hauled himself over in a sudden, soaking flop sweat, and bent with hands on knees until his heart and breath began to work properly and the urge to vomit passed.
Across the plain, the benches to the west caught the low-angled light in a flat beige shimmer, and as Anthony watched, a silhouetted figure gained the top of the ridge. It was just as Brittany had described, the horse and rider, his father’s shape—the hat, the blockish shoulders—the high-cantled saddle and a horse with Ponch’s sleek outline but a color Anthony couldn’t make out with light angled into his eyes. Anthony looked down, rubbed his eyes, and looked back up at the ridge just in time to see the horse swish its unghostly tail and head down the far side. It couldn’t—couldn’t—be Dean and Ponch, yet his mind had not a single plausible alternative at the ready.
“I’ll be damned,” Anthony said. His relief at the certainty he’d felt ten minutes earlier drifted off on the wind with Boomerang’s welcoming nicker. In his days hanging around Paula, Anthony had heard tribal elders speak of spirit places, where the other side was only thinly separated from the living. As much blood as had been shed on this land and for it, it couldn’t help but be haunted.
Anthony stood with his comfortingly real, warm horse for a few minutes, breathing in the smell of Boomerang’s grassy breath, mouthing the bitter aftertaste of his own fear, looking back down the coulee, thinking about the snake and the root medicine deep underground, poisons and venoms loose on and under the earth, the seasonal traditions his family had observed all his life, and secrets of his own land known by no other person alive. He held up his hand against the blinding sunset and took one last long look toward the benches, now empty and still as they’d been for ten thousand years.
In the narrow glimpse Anthony had of the coulee floor as he turned his head from the light, out of earshot, a coyote—the legendary trickster, due for a cameo about now—walked to the water and drank. Anthony felt as if he’d stepped through a veil into a world he’d heard about but never given full credit. He might have stumbled into Sheila and Wanda Tall Grass’s world, where portents and curses held power. And what would they tell him? That a spirit showing itself was serious business and he’d better listen up.
The only things Anthony knew to be real were Boomerang and the bourbon, but he knew what he had to do. He’d known it before he came here and Dean was making sure.
“You win, Dad.” He toasted the empty ridge and drank the bottle dry.
Act 5, Scene 1
As the first audience members filed in for the camper showcase two weeks later, Anthony thumbed another text to Hilary. Hope you’re coming. Saved seats. He’d been leaving messages for days asking her to call or come by without a reply. The possibility of a workshop had diminished and disappeared. Hilary probably wasn’t getting the texts out on the ranch and Anthony couldn’t bring himself to call Chance’s landline and ask for her, but he kept sending missives into the void to simulate communication. He could tell the board he’d tried and tried.
The theater was overchilled and painted matte black, a high-ceilinged cube that loomed above the players and the audience, returning sound in odd reverberations. From the hall Anthony could hear the recycled wooden stadium seats creaking or dropping open with startling bangs as an audience not quite big enough to fill the space found places. He was checking props organized by number, trying to calm his nerves about the performance, when Hilary grabbed him by an elbow and pulled him behind a stage-left curtain.
“You made it!” Anthony couldn’t hide his delight, but Hilary wasn’t smiling. Her face had tightened since he saw her last, the studied ease of California wearing off. He wondered if she was taking her meds.
“
What were all the messages about?” she asked, nose inches from his. “They all hit my phone the minute reception came back on the way into town. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I just needed to talk. It’s all gotten complicated with Neal and Mom. I think I’m going to have to move back to the ranch when camp’s done.”
Her fingers flew to her lips. “Oh, Anthony. Oh, no, you can’t. That’s what I had to get you away from. Remember our deal?”
He remembered negotiating her out of suicide with whatever promises it took. “I remember. I tried it your way but it didn’t work out.”
“It wasn’t my way. It was making a life for yourself. You have to try other things. Writing. Directing. There’s more than one life in the theater and it’s where you belong. You can’t give up.” She was growing frantic.
Anthony put up a hand. “It’s okay, we can talk later. I need to make sure the kids are organized. Can we get together this weekend?”
Hilary’s face made a visible gearshift from worry for him to renewed focus on her own absorbing projects, like a scene change onstage. “I’d like to but I’m so busy right now. I’m redecorating Mae’s room and I feel like I need to stay close to the house. I think Chance is . . .”—she slipped into a whisper—“I think there’s someone else.”
“Alma?” He was surprised she’d needed this long to figure it out.
Hilary went wide-eyed. “You knew? Who else knows? Are people laughing at me?” She clutched his wrist.
Anthony looked at Hilary with compassion. As resolute as he was to stay out of this drama, he knew it would be no easier for Hilary to become a Montana ranch woman than it would be for Alma to become a San Francisco artist. Their essential elements were different and no chemistry—romantic or otherwise—could change that fact. For as much as Anthony had endeavored to change his own destiny, he knew a lost cause when he saw one. Hilary had told him the story of her talented white mama from Mississippi who’d sidelined a promising artistic career to nurture the genius of a black man at a time when both of them faced crushing obstacles. As a couple, they’d faced even more. Munro Booker had triumphed over all of it, so that Hilary felt not just the need to equal or eclipse her father, but the duty to redeem her mother’s sacrifice. She could never be the woman behind the man. Obscurity wasn’t in her DNA.
“Nobody’s laughing. I’m half guessing. But he does talk about her. Brittany talks about them all spending time together. I know it’s hard, but she might be what he needs.”
“And I’m not?” The words came out shrill. “When we’re good, we’re so good. You think he gets from her what he gets from me? She’s so . . . so—”
Anthony didn’t have time for this, but he couldn’t leave Hilary this way. “She’s one of them. That’s what it comes down to. She left and so did he, but they came back and stayed because deep down that’s what they are. You and I are different animals. No matter what color brown they paint me, I’ll always be a zebra.”
“That!” Hilary poked him hard in the chest. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get you to admit! You don’t belong here. Stop acting like you can just stop being what you are and be what they want instead. That’s as crazy as I ever was.”
He shook his head and brought his palms together in a prayerful pose. “You don’t get it, Hilary. You don’t know what’s at stake with the ranch.”
Movement in the audience caught Hilary’s eye. “She’s here tonight,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. He recognized the high-wire tension in her voice from the last time they’d walked this road.
“Hilary. I know he loved you once.” Anthony couldn’t see her eyes well in the filtered light of the wings. They’d fixed on something behind him. He wanted to shake her. “Can’t that be enough, that happy memory? Sometimes we love the wrong people.” That much he’d learned from Stoppard: It is a defect of God’s humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Hilary hesitated, watching what he could only assume was Alma finding a seat. “He loved me, didn’t he?” Her eyes flickered back to Anthony. The past tense relieved him.
“And I loved you. And he loved her. We get the timing wrong. We get the person wrong. We screw it all up.” He tried to press the words into her ears with his insistent voice, but she’d stopped listening.
“Then he can love me again,” she said. “He made vows to me.” Hilary started to slip sideways toward the stage door, but Anthony caught her arm.
“I’d have made vows to you. Sometimes it doesn’t matter who we want. Sometimes they don’t want us.” He thought of Ophelia and the distracted prince of Denmark who couldn’t see the love before his eyes. People smashed themselves to pieces all the time on the thing they couldn’t have. Anthony grabbed her by both arms. “We’re broken compasses,” he said. “We never point north. Let it go.”
Hilary pulled away but looked back in the light from the hall. He saw a face on her that he remembered all too well—the woman who knew the power of her name and personality to command a room, capable of genius, but also consumed by selfishness, a legacy, and an illness she couldn’t control. What a noble mind is here o’erthrown. It would be uglier this time, he thought, with more collateral damage. Anthony shut his eyes as she walked away.
Wandering into the hall, checklist dangling forgotten from his fingers, Anthony promised himself that he’d do something about all this as soon as the showcase was over. When he looked back up the hall, the Terrebonnes and Murphys were entering the theater together at Maddie’s deliberate pace. Drawn irresistibly, Anthony went to the door to watch Chance lead Maddie by the arm to a section in the middle, a few rows from the front, and settle her where Alma had saved seats. Maddie smiled as Chance and Alma flanked her. It was all decided, Anthony saw. Only Hilary, who came around to take the seat on Chance’s far side and pat his hand possessively, did not see, because she was accustomed to creating the world as she wished it to be. There was too much diva in her for the prosaic reality of a failed marriage. Anthony would have stayed there staring for any length of time but for the young actor who tugged at his sleeve. “When should we go in to set up our props?” he asked. “Can we do it behind the curtain while the musical number is onstage?”
Anthony’s attention swept back to the unfinished checklist. Several minutes later, families in their seats, he rushed around the lip of the stage, whispering at the ushers and waving signals to the fumbling lighting crew—more campers practicing new skills, bobbing up and down like prairie dogs in their little booth above the seating. Anthony looked back at the doors to be sure they had shut, just in time to watch Neal and Sarah shuffle into front-row seats he’d personally reserved with hand-lettered signs. The empty seat beside Neal’s bore Rick Burlington’s name, but Anthony had never expected him to show. Neal tucked Sarah’s bag under her feet and rested his heavy, possessive arm on her seat back. Now that Anthony saw them in the audience his confidence wobbled about what he’d prepared, but all was ready. The thing was as good as done.
The stage lay empty and dark before a black curtain. Anthony climbed up with a ukulele and the spotlight meandered for a second then found him. He silenced the crowd with a few strumming chords before beginning a slow cover of the first verse of “Home on the Range.” He let the last note resonate, threw his arms wide, and boomed:
“Welcome to Town Hall Theater’s summer camper showcase!” The crowd answered with warm applause and he took a little bow. “I’m delighted to bring you the fruits of our labors these last few months.” His biggest cattle-herder voice projected to the last row.
“This year’s camp is an experiment in bringing together a diverse group of kids to explore experiences and dreams through theater. Our theme is family and as we all know, family can be a joy, and it can be complicated. I think you’ll be as thrilled as I am to see what the kids have been doing. Tonight we’ll have original poetry and drama, dance routines with original choreography, and songs you know and love. We’re so gratefu
l to all the sponsors, volunteers, friends, and families who made the camp possible this year. Your support of live theater in Billings is a wonderful thing for these kids, and we hope that tonight will be a wonderful thing for you. Now, to begin our showcase, we have Brittany Terrebonne, a seventh grader at Hayden Middle School this fall, reading her own original poem, ‘Betrayal.’”
Brittany entered from stage right and took the center of the spotlight empty-handed. Anthony saluted her and retreated into the wings. She’d written about a dream she’d had about her mother, she said, but she hadn’t shown him the poem. Anthony watched with his back against the sidewall, ready to open the hall door for the next act, as Brittany took several long breaths and stared into the light for so long that he began to fear she’d frozen. Just as he took a step toward her, she began abruptly, in a voice that started small and instantly hushed the murmurs in the audience.
In the dream I went down to the river
Where her face was white and frozen under ice
The last of the yellow leaves trapped there too
The prettiest picture of death you ever saw.
Snow creaked under my boots
The snowy owl called my name
My scream was a distant echo and
In spite of all I should feel
Under a sky that moved and breathed
And spoke the mind of God
The shortness of becoming and being and going
The Weight of an Infinite Sky Page 17
