The jacket should have been the first sign.
It was fifty-one degrees when we left the apartment, which Bridger acknowledged by saying "yeah, it's a little crisp" while putting on a light linen blazer he absolutely cannot button. Not a fleece. Not a hoodie. A blazer that belonged to his roommate's older brother and has never once been described as warm. He wore it with the confidence of a man who had already decided the day would go a certain way and was dressing for that version of the day rather than the current meteorological one.
The current meteorological one was overcast and cold and smelled like rain that had recently reconsidered.
Bridger had spent the previous evening reading about Billings Pride — events all week, parade Saturday at noon, festival afterward under Skypoint — and somewhere in that reading he had developed a theory. I know this because he explained it to me over cereal with the focused energy of someone who has just solved a thing. The theory was that Skypoint was not, as I understood it, a literal physical landmark downtown. It was, he believed, a coordination platform. App-based. Possibly crowd-sourced. "Like a civic Eventbrite but for flow," he said, and I nodded, because I have learned that nodding is faster than engaging.
He believed he could work with it. Specifically, he believed he could, through strategic positioning and confident body language, insert himself into whatever the Skypoint system was routing, and thereby become a kind of unofficial ambassador-slash-flow-optimizer for downtown Billings during Pride week.
"I just want to help people find stuff," he said.
"You don't know where anything is," I said.
"That's the beauty of it," he said.
By eleven o'clock Bridger had confidently directed a couple with a stroller toward "the main gathering point, which should be just up here on the left," which was a parking structure. He had told a woman with a small rainbow flag that the festival was "basically already set up, you can probably just go," which, it being Wednesday, it was not. He had stopped two teenagers to tell them they were "going the right way," based on nothing, and they had thanked him genuinely, which he took as confirmation of his entire thesis.
The sky was starting to open up by then — that specific Billings trick where the gray just lifts and suddenly it's a completely different afternoon, warm and wide and full of actual summer. Bridger took his blazer off, looked at it, and put it back on. He had committed to the blazer. The blazer was load-bearing at this point.
At one point a woman asked him if he knew where she could get lunch, and he said "there's a new place, Surf Sport, they're doing a mid-June opening, you might be right on time," which was a thing he had read in a local newsletter at some point and was now deploying as hyperlocal insider knowledge. She thanked him. He turned to me with an expression I can only describe as vindicated.
"See," he said.
"She's going to show up and it might not be open yet," I said.
"Or it will be," he said. "That's the whole thing. You have to trust the system."
Bridger does not know what system. There is no system. He is a man in a borrowed blazer on a warming Thursday, orbiting a landmark he has not yet correctly identified, telling strangers things that are approximately true with the delivery of someone who has been thoroughly briefed.
We found Skypoint eventually. It is, in fact, a physical structure. A tower. Downtown. It has been there. It does not have an app.
Bridger stood in front of it for a long moment, and I watched him do the thing where he silently recategorizes a piece of evidence so that it still supports the original conclusion. Then he nodded once, satisfied.
"Okay," he said. "So the tower is the interface."
The afternoon light was coming in sideways by then, that late-day gold that makes everything in Montana look like a postcard someone sent you from a version of a place that might be better than the real one. Bridger looked genuinely happy. He had helped people, more or less. He had a blazer. He had a theory.
I held his hand and did not say anything else about the parking structure.