The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

  “You smell drunk. Care to blow for me?” Marx offered.

  Anthony was fairly sure a Breathalyzer wouldn’t weigh in his favor. “No thanks.”

  “I tell you what,” Marx said. “I’ll give Anthony here a ride to a friend’s place where he can dry up, provided the two of you promise to talk this through like adults later on and I won’t get dragged out here again. All right?”

  Anthony scuffed a foot in the dirt and grunted a reluctant noise of assent, then blinked to see that Neal had almost perfectly mirrored him. He marveled that out of nowhere he’d managed to summon up sympathy, even a sense of kinship, for surly old Neal.

  “All right, Fry. Lock your car and hop in,” Marx said. Anthony obeyed, his resistance all played out. As he dropped into the passenger seat and slammed the door, Marx was already pulling onto the road. “Where can I take you?”

  Only one name even crossed his mind. Only one person had never turned him away, no matter how badly he deserved it.

  “Chance Murphy,” he said.

  In the side mirror Neal watched them go, hands at his sides, with an expression that Anthony could almost imagine to be wistful.

  Act 5, Scene 4

  When he swung open the heavy door of Marx’s Suburban, the first thing Anthony saw was Mae at the front door with her favorite stuffed animal, a fluffy bison that fit under her arm. He hopped off the high seat, staggered a few steps before finding his balance, and let the gravity of the slope slam the door. The yard shimmered through suspended dust particles as another call crackled on the radio.

  “Don’t make me come out here again on family business,” Marx shouted out the window as he threw the vehicle into reverse and retreated toward more urgent matters.

  Anthony stood alone, empty-handed and a little queasy, squinting at Mae through a heat that desiccated his lungs with each breath. He’d been tripping on pure adrenaline and a powerful rum-and-sugar buzz. Now all the juice was squeezed out of him as he shuffled limply to the steps.

  “Hi,” Mae said through the screen. “My daddy’s not home.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll just sit here and wait.” Anthony managed the few paces to the deck, grabbed the treated wood for balance, and fell gracelessly to the top step.

  Mae opened the door and came to his side. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you want to hold my bison?”

  He glanced at Mae, a quick up-and-down. His eyes weren’t working right. The light was harsh and the edges blurred and slid. “I’m okay, kid. Don’t worry. I just need a little peace and quiet. You think you can be quiet? Let me go in and take a nap on the couch?”

  “I’ll ask my mom.”

  “Your mom’s here?” Of course she was. He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  “She’s cleaning paintbrushes. We did a project. Hey, Mama!” Mae shouted at a volume that threatened to detonate Anthony’s head and went back inside.

  He rolled his neck—an exaggerated, deep rotation, head dangling—then stared down at his hands, relieved to find them still attached to his arms. Under the bloody towel his right hand throbbed worse than ever. Anthony peeked at the coagulated blood drying along the jagged cut and listened for Hilary. She’d take care of him.

  Hilary’s muffled voice emerged, growing closer as she questioned Mae. The only other sounds were a grackle scolding an intruder in the meadow below and a distant vehicle moving as fast as possible down the county road, probably Marx on the way to the next small-town scuffle. Anthony clutched the deck beneath him and willed his head to clear.

  “What would Anthony be doing—” Hilary was saying when she arrived at the front door in another bright dress and saw him. “You are here! I thought Mae was just telling me stories.”

  “I’m here. I could use a hand up, I think.”

  Hilary stepped out and took a long, anxious gaze around the deserted yard, drive, and hills before she knelt beside him. Anthony pulled himself standing with a heavy arm around her shoulders. She moved away as soon as he was solidly on two feet.

  “What happened to you, baby?” she asked. “You’ve been drinking.”

  “Since you left last night.”

  “I knew I should have stayed. What happened to your hand?” Hilary pulled his hand to her and peeled off the towel, drawing a hiss from Anthony as dried blood detached. “Sorry. Come inside, let’s get this cleaned up.”

  Standing as a sentinel at the door, Mae said, “Shoes off.”

  Anthony stopped and blinked at his feet. “What?”

  “We all take off our shoes at the door.” Mae pointed to her own tiny black boots on the mat beside the door, next to Hilary’s sandals and an unfamiliar pair of women’s boots with insets and scrollwork. “Mama says.”

  “Oh.” Anthony braced himself against the doorframe and struggled as the plastic sandal straps tangled in his toes.

  “You’re the only person other than me I’ve seen wear sandals out here,” Hilary said. “People keep telling me I’m going to get bitten by a snake. Chance bought me these pretty boots when I was here before, but they make my feet sweat.”

  “My mom says horses sweat, men perspire, and women glisten,” Anthony said as he half stepped, half stumbled into the room. “Although I’ve seen her glisten pretty hard. The first rule of country living is always have appropriate footwear, but it never did me any good. I still got bitten.”

  “Not reassuring,” Hilary said. Mae busied herself emptying blocks from a tub beside the recliner while Hilary helped Anthony to the kitchen. She looked no less drawn than she had last night at the theater. Montana was working its reductive curse on her. Still, she was plenty assertive as she forced his hand under cold running water and ordered him to stay there while she went for the first aid kit. Anthony dragged the stool from the end of the counter and sat obediently, hand extended in the soothing stream.

  Chance’s first aid kit was no palm-size backpacker version but a briefcase-scale clinic in a box. As Hilary’s dexterous hands applied antiseptic creams, bandages, and tape to his gash, Anthony watched her face, angled away from him.

  “What’d you think of the show?” he asked, needing to hear her praise again.

  Hilary shook her head and snapped off a length of tape with surgical scissors. Through his fog he saw how anxious it made her to be in the house alone with him, even with Mae playing on the carpet. She was afraid of the scene should Chance walk in, and when he imagined that, Anthony realized he was afraid, too. He’d been walking around terrified of things Chance might do or say but hadn’t yet, in the space between a suspended friendship and one that was truly over. It wouldn’t be dramatic—nothing so violent and purifying as a knockout punch, he believed now—but suddenly it would be there, the end, in some laconic but unmistakable word or gesture. Anthony couldn’t bear the prospect.

  “I’m so proud of you,” Hilary said with the gentle expression she saved for vulnerable artistic effort, like a mother encouraging a child trying to ride a bike for the first time and falling every few feet.

  Anthony strained his equilibrium to lean forward on the stool. “That makes one person.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You don’t get it, do you? What you did? You wrote a play, Anthony. You got pushed to the wall and you pushed back by writing a play.”

  “It was crap.”

  “It was good. You had everyone in that theater holding their breath.” Hilary paused in securing the tape and looked toward the deck, nervous. “Chance will be back soon. I think I’ll take Mae down the hill and let you two talk. Jayne’s been after us to come make cookies.” She let go of Anthony’s hand, tossed supplies back into the medical kit, and hurried to usher Mae outside without bothering to clean up the blocks. At the door she stopped and looked back. “Stop for a minute and look at the gifts you have, not the ones you wish you had.”

  They were down the front steps and gone as Anthony processed her words. He had boxes full of notebooks, years of scribblings where he’d tried to sort out his disorderly life by p
utting words in the mouths of characters he could control. It didn’t make him a writer, much less a playwright. Last night had been a fluke, a flailing punch that accidentally landed. Unless—unless it wasn’t. A new light cracked in his mind, and he saw a future he hadn’t imagined before this moment. It was distant and soft edged and very brightly lit. Stage lit. He could hardly see it, but now he knew it was there. He shut his eyes and let himself drift out over it like a raptor taking wing on a thermal—or Peter Pan on a wire.

  He was almost asleep, slumped over the counter, when Chance banged in the screen door. He halted at the sight of Anthony, whose eyes popped open.

  “What brings you here?” Chance asked. Not hostile, not welcoming, like Anthony was a piece of furniture unexpectedly delivered that must be dealt with. “Where are the girls?”

  Anthony shook himself out of the place of peace and possibility and focused on the worn and resigned version of Chance who faced him. He forced himself off the stool and walked over to his cousin.

  “They went down to make cookies with your mom. We need to talk about this.”

  Chance blinked at him. Anthony was well aware that Chance could go a whole lifetime not talking about practically anything, especially something that cut close and hard. Anthony was the one with the need. Chance made a sudden move in his direction that made Anthony recoil until he realized it was an involuntary thrash, an arm twisted in blind frustration, not threatening. Their eyes met, Anthony’s guilty and fearful, Chance’s full of pain and anger, and Chance shook his head from side to side in a big, defeated arc, then addressed the lamp beside the recliner like Anthony wasn’t there.

  “I taught you to drive. I—” Chance’s voice broke but he fought to finish his thought. “I called Hilary a liar when she told me. I said it couldn’t be true.”

  “That’s why you never said anything? You didn’t believe her?” Anthony dug his hands deep in his pockets and lowered his head.

  “I didn’t want to. She says things just to get at me sometimes. But then things got better between us and she apologized for a lot of it and there it was. She never took it back.” Chance coughed hard. “I couldn’t think of any way to ask you a thing like that.” He moved away and rested his weight on the back of one of the table chairs, heavy, like his own mass was too much. “I’ve asked myself many times why you’d do that to me. And why you’d do it to her. The state she was in? She hardly knew where she was she was so far gone.”

  Anthony felt something shift in his chest. His throat closed, and there was the abattoir stench from the night before. The revolting thought came to him that the evil that had come between them wasn’t from some external source. It wasn’t Hilary any more than it was the devil or the deep blue sea. Anthony had carried it with him—in his envy of Chance, his wish to be what he was, have what he had—and Anthony was responsible for exorcising it.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I told her I’m sorry.” With Chance he certainly wouldn’t get into the mutuality of the thing. Whatever Hilary had said would stand as the truth for her.

  Chance shifted and finally looked Anthony in the eye with a face he hadn’t seen even in the depths of the case of rye. That had been sorrow, regret, despair—this was fury tightly held, but fury all the same. “Then leaving your mom to get by on her own like that. I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.” Chance’s words came out in a snarl.

  Anthony straightened his shoulders a little. “It must be nice to be Chance Murphy and have it all come so easy that you can judge like that. I’m not like you. I can’t just come back here and become my dad. People will never accept me.”

  “Accept you? What do you want, a parade in your honor? I’m the freak who moved to California and married a black woman. The geezers still can’t wrap their heads around that. This isn’t seventh grade, Anthony. Do your duty as you see it and shut up about it. That’s all anyone can expect.”

  Your duty as you see it. It was the sort of speech Chance had given Anthony when he was in seventh grade and sending away for brochures from boarding schools his parents couldn’t afford. Not exactly cowboy up, but stop letting other people tell you how to feel about your life. If only he could have learned the lesson then, so much would have been easier.

  Anthony stood holding the door handle, balanced between the man ready to flee and a different, better man who’d find the strength to stay and begin in whatever lame way presented itself to heal the damage he’d done. Through several long breaths he wondered which of those men he might be until he realized that the only way to find out was to pretend to be one of them. Slowly, he released the handle and blew out the breath he’d held.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. What my duty is,” Anthony said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “More secrets are about the last thing I want to hear from you.”

  “No, not like that. It’s about Neal and Harmony. We need to talk to the neighbors. Warn them.”

  The transformation in Chance at the thought of his neighbors in danger was like an old man growing young again. The heaviness lifted. He rubbed his face and shook himself and stood taller, and Anthony stood straighter in response, mirroring Chance the way he used to. The fog of anger and guilt that had hung between them all these weeks couldn’t be cast aside that easily, but like a heavy curtain rent down the middle, suddenly it wasn’t a barrier.

  “The neighbors?” Chance asked, full of new energy now, the horrors lifted from his face to Anthony’s great relief. “Tell me.”

  Act 5, Scene 5

  They came after supper that night, pickup by pickup, to Ed and Jayne’s place, lining up all the way out the drive to the road, answering calls from Anthony. They came, to his astonishment, because he was Anthony Fry and he’d asked. The living room and kitchen filled up as Jayne handed out coffee, Hilary chased Mae, and Chance stood out front greeting the neighbors and inviting them inside.

  The oldest of the elders took the circle of couch and chairs, a ring of white heads like a council fire, as Anthony set out more chairs. The rest examined one another with sidelong glances, edging up to a friend here and there to ask after a relation or retell a joke that the hearer might have forgotten by now. Anthony smelled wind and space on them, connected to their bodies in quantities that barely fit the modest room. They created distance between one another, spreading out along the walls, hanging in the doorways, repelled by proximity. He understood that need, had felt it keenly in the city, but he’d never before associated it with the people he came from. He hadn’t known that it was born in him.

  There was Joe Duffy, huffing and sweaty, fresh from a roofing job, equipment still on his trailer up the road. Dwight and Edith Maclean. Vince Wiley, leaning on his walker as he targeted the last chair, a teenage granddaughter at his elbow playing a game on her phone with one hand and steadying him with the other. Reddy Pallante sported a new beaded hatband and shifted from one foot to the other near the front door that stood open to show shadows creeping across the yard. Renata and Bernie Byer. Jenna Tall Grass, wearing a Hayden basketball team jersey and jeans with the sort of genuine rips barbed wire could inflict. Jessie Marx, looking at once bashful and less childlike than Anthony had ever seen her, stood in a corner, arms crossed, serious.

  “My dad is going to have a fit when he finds out I’m mixed up with the mine opposition,” she’d told Anthony on the phone, “but I’m there.” She hadn’t lingered at his side once she arrived but went in to talk to the neighbors about their animals. Anthony was surprised, impressed.

  The Terrebonnes were last to arrive. Brittany came poking her head around corners, a book under her arm, looking for Mae, who’d come in for a snack. They were back outside in a minute with a soccer ball. Alma and Maddie entered just behind Brittany and a chair opened up for Maddie while Alma stood against the wall with a face to launch battleships.

  When everyone was there, Chance came in and Ed stood at his shoulder like they did this every day.

  “Dad,” Cha
nce said, with the slightest nod possible.

  “Son,” Ed replied.

  With the presence of the Murphy men, the reliable foundation stones of the neighborhood, the gathering felt complete to Anthony. He took his place next to Chance. Curly Harper, a Crow tribal member known to everyone in the room since childhood, made his round of greetings. In his fifties, Curly was a great buffalo of a man with skin the color of stained maple and heavy-lidded eyes. The intimidating size of him required a three-legged cane. He made his way to Jenna, who’d saved the sturdiest folding chair for him.

  Chance said in Anthony’s ear: “How’d you get Curly to show up? He’s like the unofficial tribal chairman.”

  “Beats me,” Anthony said. “That was all Jenna.”

  “She wouldn’t have done it for me.”

  Reddy took a step forward and put her hands on her hips. “This about the mine, then?” she asked Anthony, loud enough that even old Vince didn’t have to ask her to say it twice.

  “It’s about the mine,” Anthony affirmed. “All of you know Chance and Alma have been asking questions this spring, trying to find out what Harmony’s up to. They’ve got most of the leases they need to mine across the valley. The last big missing piece is our place.” As short nods of affirmation went around, Anthony took a deep breath. “I talked to my uncle Neal earlier today. He says he and Mom signed. They’re going ahead.”

  Glances passed around the room, a few sharp inhalations. Edith Maclean made a startled movement and grasped her husband’s arm. “Why—is that why they were out on our land today? They’ve been moving in big equipment and talking about a clear-cut, but to get to us they have to come across that narrow strip the Frys held on to as an access. If the Frys have signed . . . all our timber, those beautiful stands along the creek. We have the cattle and horses all up near the house for safekeeping. Are they really coming through?” Her wide eyes appealed to the room.