Big Sky Country

Briony Gylgayton

1.
The sky over Texas was tremendous, so broad as to press in at the edges and curl up on itself. The light it held was at one time a relief after winters in Ithaca and summers in the concrete warren of New York, but over the past year that light had grown tiresome, a lazy, flat beast that sprawled across his landscape.
The anniversary of Joe’s first full year in Lubbock found him barely awake and standing by the open window on the first of June, feeling on his face some tired, humid breeze from far away, barely recognizing in it the flat smell of dust. A melting heat turned over in his gut, and then, the hushing sound of approaching rain. He looked up. At these times, the sky seemed to contract, to shrivel away as clouds smeared their dim ink against the edges of each horizon.
He walked outside the next day and saw himself distorted in the gutters. The water flowed slowly and the ripples exaggerated the wilted roundness of his face, where it was as if the fullness had been long ago drawn out, leaving only sagging shadows. In the transitive mirror of a pothole he became a cameo of dark, thinning hair, and all around him was rain-washed sky. He stepped in the puddle and destroyed the reflection.

The rain had come quickly last night, and had just as quickly snuck away before morning arrived. Hours before, it had fragmented and shivered in the fake light of streetlamps. Now the rain clouds waited behind buildings poised to puncture them open again. Joe, the bottom edges of his trousers dark, walked down the sidewalk, poised to puncture nothing more ambitious than a muffin and a cup of strong coffee.
In conversations of the café’s other customers, he could hear familiar dialogues, dropping like dead flies out of the room’s general buzz. He turned his head at every exchange, rubbing his elbows as he recognized his own words in others’ voices.
“The administration is naked under all that bullshit. You scrape away even a little, and the whole fucking world can see the tumors,” said one woman, wildly gesticulating with a large pastry. As she moved, small flakes of it snowed down onto the table. “For some reason no one wants to pick up the hacksaw and get at them.”
Her business partner laughed into the steam of her drink and said, “Butchering the government and drowning the dismembered torso in a bathtub is no answer.” Like her companion, and Joe, she had a pleasantly bland accent that marked her as an outsider to Lubbock.
Joe’s wrists and ankles were still slightly swollen from the approaching rain, and though the women’s conversation soon altered direction, echoes of it battered against his joints. He twisted his arms firmly against his chest as a child cried and his mother hushed with a soft twang, “I can’t do anything now, wait until we get home.”
Joe placed his order and set a cover over his coffee as soon as it arrived. He left the café, stepped back out into the blank, dirty smell of rain on dust on city, and took a drink. The coffee was too hot, and left his throat sore all the way to work.

Joe had learned to work the crowd, to work the system, and to work both sides of either street. He had done work scientifically, in which his work was equal to the product of the force and the distance through which it produced movement, and in the context of the workplace, in which he worked his fingers to the bone.
Now, as he reached the small high school at which he taught, unlocked his door and wiped his damp shoes on the carpet in his classroom, he thought how it was not working like a charm.
In fact, late in the day as he pointed to the map of the United States and asked his students to repeat, in their smooth drawls, the complexities of a ridiculous government, he realized with mild horror that he might finally be working himself loose.

Students slid into Joe’s classroom like condensation slipping down a glass. Joe stood at the front and looked out at the heavy residue.
“The First Amendment,” he began, “has two conflicting clauses.” Silence, and then he prodded at the thick film that coated the room. “What are they?”
There was a murmur, and a brief silence during which Joe paced the front of the room in measured steps.
Someone quavered, “The Establishment Clause keeps Congress from establishing a national religion.”
Joe paused, and nodded his head toward another student.
“But the Free Exercise Clause says people can practice what they want how they want,” they said, and then Joe took over, still roaming the small, carpeted territory between the students and the wall. As he expounded on the balanced duplicity of the judicial system, he gradually increased his pace, until the final minutes ground down and his whole body was swaying with the momentum of his speech.
Joe always timed his sentences perfectly, though, and the bell at the end of class rose up to meet his final punctuation. After a fragile moment to stretch and shake themselves loose, the students rushed out with the clatter of a storm-drain. Joe stood, rocked gently a few times, and walked to his desk.

There were sections to Joe’s life in which clever round stones of inspiration rained down and tumbled into him, sections in which the world was vast and brightly colored.
Once, as a high school student, he watched the news for four full days without sleep, and memorized the major political views of every member of the Senate.
Once, as a pre-law student, he had looked in a puddle and seen the sky reflected out to the very edges of it, huge and blue and close.
Between these times, it was as if his life condensed into squares on ballots. He looked at the options, all lined up in neat rows and all of them branching into different futures. Some of them, he was afraid of not having the courage to pursue. He left them unmarked.
Once, after he passed the bar exam, he had stood outside under the faded denim of the sky, and held one of his old textbooks above his head. He watched the pages as they sliced that softness into irregular, unfinished triangles.
Once, before he accepted the teaching position in Lubbock, he remembered days without sleep and days without rain. He hoped for something less frightening, but then, he’d never yet known days without purpose.

Once, Joe awoke to the expectant smell of rain, the one with so little dust in it as to allow him to believe the wind had brought it from somewhere far beyond Texas. When he returned from teaching the following day, his shoes and thin black socks still wet from the morning, he pressed his lips between his teeth and put his briefcase on the couch.
“I’m looking for a new job,” Joe said to no one, too loudly, trying the words in his mouth. “I’ve found a new job, I have a new job.” He felt them ferment and numb his tongue.
He walked to the bathroom and looked at himself, rubbed the back of his head with his wrist and tried again. “I’m leaving. I’m gone.”
By the next morning, wandering through small rooms in a small house hidden between cotton fields and churches, Joe decided that a year in Lubbock was ten years too many.

2.
Texas was crushed under a sky that curled up at the edges, but sometimes, subtle whispers slipped through. In a month, Joe found a job and fled coastward to the shadows. There, with hills and oak and rich, dark waters, California soothed the sky.
The soft slopes around his new house were thick with grass and trees that Texas never found the space for. Joe didn’t find the chance to walk through it until late August, when it all hung low and dead and rustling. After another day of unpacking boxes, revisiting small pieces of a life still not distant enough, he found a narrow trail, more aimless even than the results of foraging deer. It was late afternoon and everything shone hot, and Joe turned toward the path, looking ahead to where it scrambled wildly, losing itself in the tangles. The dirt was packed down, dry like everything else, and it settled as a fine brown powder on the cuffs of his trousers. It was in the curves between the hills, where sunlight was pressed down and smoothed out, that a small piece of a great dirty weight dropped off the back of his spine.
He returned home after the sun had gone down, and turned the hose on his dusty shoes, readying them for tomorrow.
He went inside, and the house still felt starched and pressed. He moved through it and made wrinkles; he skimmed the pads of his fingers along unpacked cardboard boxes, entered the dark bedroom, and turned on the news. The room was still mostly bare, beige carpets with edges messy from electrical cords, and around him, the upwards stretch of white with its scattered pinpricks left behind by the previous occupant. Coated in thin blue light and reeling politics, Joe undressed, and the dirt that rested in the cuffs of his trousers left smudges on the carpet.

3.
Joe first saw Michael at a café on his way to work. At the time, he was unaware that their classrooms shared both a wall and a door. That they had made it for two weeks without having made contact was a curiosity, but no more so than most curiosities encountered in the convoluted process of constructing friendship.
There in the coffee shop, Joe first saw Michael, and later that day at school, at work, he saw him again, walking in the opposite direction and briefly catching his eye. Forever wary of the education system’s complex politics, Joe retreated to his classroom, only to be ambushed moments later by the previously unheard sound of their shared door opening.
“Joe,” Michael said, “it’s been a while now, and you haven’t introduced yourself.”
There should have been a brief pause on Joe’s part. In Joe’s memory of the moment, there was. In Joe’s memory, he turned to Michael and raised a bewildered eyebrow, moved to silence by intrusion.
In reality, Joe promptly turned and said, “If you already know my name, do I really have to introduce myself?”
In Joe’s memory, Michael paused before smiling, but only in Joe’s memory.

The next day, Joe saw Michael at a café on his way to work and they walked the rest of the way together, driven by a cool, wet wind. Their footsteps flicked up a crackling residue of chaparral, the snap of sticks and small, hard leaves. Across the street, pale yellow hillsides undulated, and there was a low whistle. Joe turned toward the twisting branches of oak trees, thinking the sound to be wind wrapping itself along rough bark. He turned toward Michael, then, to see his pursed lips flip into a smile. Joe grinned broadly.

4.
Joe had lived in New York, with a spindling skyline and purple sky, thin streets of his childhood, and summers later on. He had run on small legs between stunted bushes and garbage bags, and years later, strode across pavement that was hot even in the shadows.
Joe had lived in Ithaca, had strode with pen in hand to live his small, scholarly life beneath the sky’s broad brushstrokes. Joe had lived in that minor pocket of the globe, and seen that globe as masses of green and brown. Later, after years of school, of law, of politics, lines had swaddled the world. He retreated from them, deep into the blank center of the map, and ended up among cotton fields and churches. Joe lived, and the potent logic of law and politics lived with him; with him lived the borders between countries, and always a different sky over each.
Joe had lived below skylines. He’d lived below skies, and had seen the way the unified light had fragmented from the lines that every country swaddled itself in. Joe lived, and with him lived unchecked ballots and the knowledge that of all the futures that branched from them, Joe had selected the one that left New York, Ithaca, and Lubbock all entirely unaltered by his presence.

5.
Time passed. Fall fell into winter, and with it fell rain. Under their umbrellas, Michael and Joe walked each morning to their classrooms, Michael in his shining rain boots and Joe in sneakers, and they walked each afternoon to the café. Upon arriving to school with leaking noses, Michael would rapidly open and close his umbrella, spraying rainwater all across the floor before finally closing it and hanging it on the handle of their shared door, and Joe would place his own open umbrella by his desk to dry.
In the faded drizzle of one afternoon, Michael’s arms were heavy with schoolwork he hadn’t yet found the time to correct, and his umbrella hung from his wrist, closed and useless.
“You’ll owe me,” Joe said, opening his own and holding it over the both of them, sacrificing half of his own protection against the broken open sky.
Below the rain’s dense grey cover, the two of them tended to speak words that never meant much.
“I hate those things,” said Joe, gesturing to the small landslides on the hills, where the mud rolled down over itself in thick globules, pressed through the fence and spread out across the street.
“Oh, they’re not so bad,” and Michael kicked the dirt.

Inside, their conversations often tripped over themselves, a stream of comfortable banter that lasted throughout the day, interrupting each other’s classes to toss easy insults into the room. Sometimes they slowed, but even in their moments of reflection, they never talked about Joe’s sharp dreams of influence and importance. There was danger there, while there was none in their easy speech that glided like light on the very surface of rippling water. Umbrellas in one hand, they drank their coffee and discussed subjects that, unlike the dreams, weren’t so close to either of them.
They didn’t talk about the deep places inside themselves, not because putting words to the great sadness there might shatter the comfortable liminal space, but because it was so easy to sit and spin soft simple threads until Joe left to wander home and stand by the window until late in the night, the news program he’d left on leaking under the door like blood through a bandage.

6.
“The First Amendment,” he began, “has two conflicting clauses.”
There was the rustle of papers and snap of opening binder rings, followed by a silence in which everyone attempted to be the least conspicuous. Joe paced slowly back and forth, and the students watched him as they would a trapped animal.
“What are they?” he said, and they started, and stilled. Joe tried the question again, but in the silence, it dissolved into stutters. He crossed his arms tightly against his chest.
A grown man’s voice wailed a wretched laugh from an imperceptible location. Michael’s arms dropped to his sides and he turned his head. A stuttered giggling pulsated through the room.
Joe twisted his head back around in time to see Michael as he leapt out from behind Joe’s desk and fled into his own classroom. Joe should have ignored it, but he immediately followed, trying the handle and finding it locked.
Michael’s laughter leaked through the door and Joe’s smile battered against his lips until they loosened and spread. He turned, and though some sentences began with the irregular drum roll of a stutter, he continued the lesson.
As Joe’s students filtered out, Michael ran back in, their shared door swinging wildly in his wake. “What,” Joe asked, “was that?”
Michael raised one shoulder, his grin the only visible part of his face. “You only live once,” he said, failing to sound ironic.
“Or repeatedly, or continuously, or eternally, or something,” Joe said, succeeding.

7.
When Joe talked about the flat brown land still lying inside him, it had been with tired horror, letting it out just enough to tint the edges of his anecdotes, but not enough so it broke entirely free of its rib cage. Now, when Michael’s simple laughter corresponded with Joe’s own, the sound was like the hiss of steam escaping.
Inside Joe, sharp shards of dusty wood were snapping. Joe told his stories about Texas, and Michael sat across from him, hand on his chin and nodding easily. In that space, Joe talked about the decision he’d made upon going to Texas, the branching futures and the unmarked ballots, and Michael sat across from him, hand on his chin and nodding easily. Inside Joe, the futures once carefully brushed aside began to float back.

It was late in winter when Joe leaned his cheek against his front room’s window and decided to run away. New York’s splintered sky had led to whispers in his bones, and they echoed there next to memories of Ithaca’s sky, a soft color that was not a color at all. Lubbock had made his choice for him, but now, even having made his own decision and having crossed the whole map of the United States, his joints still swelled at the approach of rain and at the knowledge of what little impact he’d ever made.
The pile of his student’s ungraded essays sat abandoned on the couch behind Joe. The high wooden beams of courtrooms arced across his skull, and the muscular language of his old dissertations hooked claws into his memory.
Lines swam through him; even the narrowest of veins flushed as the beautifully flawed logic of politics reeled by. The window was cold against the surge of blood below skin, and Joe pulled back. The ground outside was wet, and light spilled out to leave bright smears in it. Some, though, caught on the glass and reflected Joe back at himself, standing there in an empty room.
Joe turned around, and in the dark mirror of the window, his reflection walked away.

The next day, as Michael and Joe braved a spitting sky under their separate umbrellas, Joe’s resolution to run, to run anywhere but where he’d been, weighed in his stomach, the full meal of a final decision. They walked in step, not as soldiers with left moving with left but as reflections of each other, Michael’s right foot moving as if tied to Joe’s left.
“I hate those things,” Joe said, gesturing to the wide arc of water that scudded across the road, slick and cool as glass.
“Oh, they’re not so bad,” Michael said, before stepping in it and destroying the reflection.
The day passed slowly, and as Joe spoke and gestured and ran his finger along the maps, the intensity of his desire to run flooded his stomach and turned like bad meat.

8.
Joe felt the hot and clammy skin of his hand sliding about on old bones, and he felt it close around cool metal. He pushed the door open and the room was grey, long blinds tapping against the windows and letting in slants of afternoon light. It cut the room into two distinct spaces, the half-light spliced awkwardly into shadows, strange angles as the two climbed together over the desks and chairs.
The room appeared empty until Michael turned his head and his face flashed out from the corner in which he sat. His skin, caught in that late light, trapped Joe. There were lines there, imperfect darts of dark. There was roughness in the curves, there were unexpected hollows, and there was in every crease a sagging shadow.
Joe stepped out from the doorway, and Michael’s face softened into a smile that spread like milk through weak and bitter tea. Behind the flat fronts of Joe’s ribs a heartbeat grew in intensity, and though he walked no faster, each meeting of foot and floor was progressively heavier. Still, he walked, through tidy horizontal strips that bent and swayed as the blinds clattered together.
Joe reached Michael’s desk, and Michael stood, his smile having drifted down into a smaller, stiffer expression. The enormous Texas sky came between them then. It shook free of splintering wood and rose up, and it was clogged with lines, paths Joe never took but always remembered.
“I have to go,” he said, and it was not so much the push of sound into silence that was jarring, but that the words had come from such an unfamiliar place, the very bottom of untouched dreams and the secrets that couched them.
Michael reached up and placed his hand on Joe’s arm, who started, and stilled.
“You just got here,” Michael said, and then he squeezed, roughly, fingertips into skin, palm hot and clammy.
Joe said, “This isn’t where I should be.”
In Joe’s memory, he said, “I’ve never changed anything, I’ve seen how flawed the world is and I say how nothing in it changes. This isn’t where I should be, I have to go.”
In Joe’s memory, Michael looked at him, looked straight into him and the look wrapped around him like wind along branches and said, slowly, “But then, nothing changes.”
In reality, Michael said nothing, only kept his hand on Joe’s arm until such time passed that their blood matched up, rhythm for rhythm. Then, Michael withdrew, turned his head away, and said, “But you just got here.”
Michael sat down with his back to the windows. Between shadowed lines, the sky sent its thin winter light to press onto his back. The curve of his neck held the light, both it and the lines beside it, solid and whole.
In reality, Joe said, “Yes,” and he remembered it.

In the day, when the sticky sugar grime of his students spread itself through the classroom and oozed silence, and the edges of maps fluttered against the wall, Joe stuttered. When the horizons that otherwise lay flat inside him began to rise up, Joe stuttered and glanced at the door that connected and separated two lives. Then he turned around, and continued the lesson.
“The First Amendment,” he said, “has two conflicting clauses. That is how it functions.”