Crazy Blood

Chapter Ten

Wylie dressed out with the Mammoth freeski team at the Main Lodge HQ, then caught the shuttle back to chair 24, which took him up the mountain to the X Course. Daniel, whose plaster arm cast Wylie had signed days before, sat beside him, steam wavering from the hole in his ski mask and forming clouds on his goggles.

“It’s cool you get to try out,” said Daniel.

“I haven’t run the X Course in five years.”

“But you skied all over the world after the war.”

“Pretty much so.”

“I saw you win the cup. My dad still talks about it. He’s a cop. He thinks it’s awesome I got to meet and ride up with you the other day.”

The morning was cold and bright and the pure white Sierra peaks towered around them, dotted with rocks and trees. An hour ago, Wylie had left work at Let It Bean feeling guilty, but now even his family seemed a distant responsibility and his spirit felt lighter as the chair drew him up the mountain. At the dismount, the chair leveled off and Wylie and Daniel glided onto the snow side by side.

“Go forth and shredify,” said Wylie.

“You, too.”

Positioning himself in the X Course starting gate, Wylie’s usual prerun yawns vanished, replaced by an odd adrenaline-fueled calm that he got only when racing, and, later, while on patrols in Kandahar. Now he heard the breeze in the trees and the distant creak of the chairlift and he was aware of the other skiers watching in silence. The thought crossed his mind how very small this X Course was within the context of Mammoth Mountain. Really, the X Course was just a little slash on a big map. So was the mountain itself. They had once seemed big to him. Five years, he thought. So we meet again.

He inhaled, ooo-rahed as of old, then launched off the half-pipe start and into the air. He landed balanced and shot the bowl, tucked for speed, and claimed his line against imagined enemies. He felt his heavier weight and took the first bank with some reserve, carving it mid-level, neither high nor low, weight mostly on the outside ski, poles touching down lightly, legs synchronous yet independent. The steep schuss into the first jump, Launch Pad, happened faster than his brain could fully comprehend. He launched into the jump and pressed it hard — weight forward and ski tips jammed down to keep the air from getting under and flipping him. He landed well, tucking into the long straightaway, then off the ramp at Goofball, landing well again, then carving hard through panel two into Dire Straights. He tried for the old velocity, but he couldn’t quite find it, or be found. He tucked, jonesing for blankness of mind and shedding of thought, but all he felt was old, fat, and overpresent. He could hear the heave of his breath — a long time since he’d felt winded on the X Course.

He handled Conundrum well, pressing the jump hard again, soaring high and landing smoothly, hounded by the shadows of the ski lift stanchions and unstoppable images of Robert. Then through Shooters, a series of narrow rock and tree-lined chutes that opened to a long final straightaway and the finish. He tucked through the sprint, legs quivering as he braked and curved to a stop on the out-run. He glided to the orange mesh fence and draped himself over it, panting.

“One minute ten seconds,” said Brandon Shavers, looking at his wristwatch, the walkie-talkie still held to his ear.

“Not bad,” said Wylie.

“My guys average six seconds less. That’s six long seconds, Welborn.”

“I can be six seconds better in a month.”

“I’m going to send you down against Sky.”

“Anytime.”

“How about right now? Get back up to the start. Maybe you’ll wake up a little with some competition.”

Sky Carson was already at the X Course start area, limbering up away from the rest of the team, which had gathered to watch. As Wylie slid to a stop two lanes across from him, Sky stopped mid-stretch. “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars I win,” he said, then cranked over at the waist and looked through his legs back at Wylie. “Payable tonight at Mountain High.”

“I don’t have a thousand dollars.”

“And apparently no confidence, either.” Sky smiled, completed his stretch, then turned to his teammates. “Friends, simpletons, countrymen — who is going to win this here shoot-out?”

“Kick his ass, Wylie!”

“Kick his ass, Sky!”

The team jostled along the orange security mesh, hooting and pushing one another for the best spectator positions, well back of Wylie and Sky.

On the count, Wylie launched with a grunt and found himself trailing Sky Carson’s piercing war whoop before they had even come to the first bank. His legs still felt heavy from his first run and now he had Sky’s snow and ice to eat. His jump at Launch Pad was weak and he tried to carve the first gate high, but the slush slurped his speed, and coming into the first good straightaway, Sky Carson had ten feet on him.

With only two skiers on the course, Wylie used the open snow to get uphill of Sky and away from his glittering exhaust. Harder work, but it paid off. He made up distance on the straight and more on the second jump, Goofball, coming high and tight into the next bank. Suddenly, Sky skittered and checked, and Wylie came nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with him. Wylie dogged him through the next gate, tight through the panels, and onto Dire Straights, where he locked in close like truckers do, drafting the soft air behind Sky, hounding him, close enough to hear the rasp of Sky’s skis as well as his own. Sky trailed a pole in warning.

Dire Straights was Wylie’s wheelhouse. Sky knew it, defending expertly, stuck close to his fall line, using his light quickness to deny Wylie the pass, keeping his pole points high and threatening. He took the next bank low and fast. Wylie cut above him, a shorter line through the apex but harder to make. Held it. Coming out, Sky again dodged into his path, backslapping his pole against Wylie’s helmet. Wylie’s ears rang and he crouched deeper and came even. There were no more than six feet between them. Ahead lay Traffic Jam, a tight series of turns whose entrance offered hardly enough room for two friendly adjacent skiers. But the leader coming out of it would carry real advantage into Conundrum — the last jump before Shooters, then the final long schuss to the finish line. A high outcropping of jack pine and reddish boulders marked the beginning of Traffic Jam, where the side-by-side racers could collide if neither man gave.

Instead, they sped like demons. Sky swept higher with his pole and Wylie heard the crack of it on his helmet again. They blasted into Traffic Jam dead even. This race was Wylie’s to win now; he knew it was all right here, the moment he could take the lead. He dug deeply once, hunched his shoulders, and brushed past Sky into the valley and the lead.

Cut off from his line at fifty miles an hour, Sky crossed uphill behind Wylie, over the backs of his skis, hoping to overtake or trip him. Wylie hogged his line, blocking, his legs burning and losing strength. Behind him, Sky’s skis clattered noisily over his own, and the strange drag made it feel as if he was braking. Then the clacking ruckus behind him gave way to a short, sharp yelp. Coming out of the turn, he checked and glanced back at Sky, who was badly off-course and careening through trees and boulders, still upright, slaloming precariously between the big rocks as if on fast-forward. Near the beginning of the Conundrum ramp, Wylie swept to a stop and looked down. Sky lay planted in the snow between two large rocks, arms and legs akimbo, not moving.

Already some of freeskiers behind them were hooting and yelling and picking their way down into the gorge where Sky lay. Wylie saw Brandon sidestepping his way up from the finish area. Wylie took a deep breath and slid off the course and down into the ravine.

By the time Wylie got to him, Sky was up and leaning against a boulder, rubbing his left shoulder, watching his teammates working their ways toward him. Wylie saw them hustling down through the trees and snow. One of them had Sky’s skis, another his helmet.

“You all right?”

Wylie studied him; Sky studied him back. His cheeks and forehead were scraped and his blond hair was matted with blood and pink runoff. “You shouldn’t have knocked me off the course,” Sky said calmly.

“I didn’t. You lost your nerve.”

“That’s not what happened.”

Wylie looked up the ravine at his teammates picking their way toward them, their voices caroming down the rocks. He pulled his goggles down to his throat. He was still breathing hard and he could feel dull pain where Sky had poked him with the pole.

“Wylie, you disrespect me. That makes me angry. It’s a difficult emotion to deny. Ask my mother.”

“This can’t be about her.”

“Everything is about her. Her blood is in me, is it not?”

Wylie considered his half brother. Sky had one face he gave to the world — cool guy, wiseass, extreme athlete, and champion. And another that Wylie had only seen when they were in private or nearly so, a darker thing, but with something vulnerable and hapless in it, too. Sky wore it now.

“What Kathleen did to my mother and what you just did to me are enormously disrespectful. This is a Welborn characteristic — disrespect.”

“That’s just nonsense, Sky.”

“Then make our bad history good. Say you respect me.”

Wylie did not. He heard voices closer now, heard the crunch of coach Brandon’s skis climbing up the grade from the finish.

“Then at least apologize for running me off the course.”

“I barely brushed you. Sky, did you hit your head after the helmet came off?”

“No — I did not hit my fucking head after my helmet came off. You should not have run me off the course.”

“You should not have stabbed me or whacked my head.”

“What do you propose to do about it?”

Wylie considered. “Forgive, I guess.”

“But you ran me off the mountain and I don’t forgive you.” Sky’s blue eyes were decisive and nonnegotiable.

The skiers converged variously and Coach Brandon huffed up the last few yards, breathing hard. “Carson? You okay?”

“Great, actually!” Sky held up his goggles, one lens thoroughly smashed in the wipeout. “Though I’d like to state for the record that one Wylie Welborn cracked my goggles with his pole, like viciously. I assume there are witnesses.”

“I saw him do it,” said Platt. “Right before gate three.”

“No!” said Daniel. “Sky poled Wylie. I saw him.”

“Wylie knocked him off the course!” said Kosnovska. “I watched it happen!”

“Sky stabbed him, just like Danny says!” countered a junior whose name slipped Wylie’s now-agitated mind.

“Maybe I’ll kick both of you half-assed brothers off my team,” said Brandon. “You’re supposed to be leaders. Look at you.”

“Chip,” said Sky. “Chip, chip.” He pulled the ruined goggles over his head and let them dangle at his throat. He pushed off the boulder and stood uncertainly, shaking his left hand as if his fingers had cramped. He stared at Wylie for a short moment, and Wylie saw the contempt melt into a smile as Sky turned to his teammates. “Any of you hair balls going to Mountain High tonight?” he asked. “Drinks on me!”