Crazy Blood

Chapter Eleven

Just before midnight, Wylie lay reclined in his boyhood bed, with blankets and a sleeping bag heaped over him to fight the cold, his head against the wall, reading Rexroth.

He wondered why his own attempts at poetry were so consistently bad. His notebook lay on the nightstand beside him, unopened, a pencil still marking where he’d stopped. Did you have to be born with poetry in you? Which made him think of Sky and what he’d said about the blood of his mother being inside him, carrying a malice that today showed in Sky Carson’s pale blue eyes. Sky had gotten to him. Wylie had never seen Sky so completely... decisive. Wylie had never looked directly into Cynthia Carson’s eyes, but he had seen her from a near distance, and studied her through binoculars once — scary — and found pictures of her on the Internet, and, yes, she had that same conviction in her eyes, the same certainty. Everything is about her.

His phone buzzed and he opened Beatrice’s text: “Mountain Hi crazy. Can u come get me?”

The attached video had been shot from the first-floor great room of Mountain High. It was noisy and Bea’s phone camera was aimed unsteadily upward at the second floor, where Sky Carson stood at the railing, wearing only boxers and the shattered ski goggles around his neck. He held a black book in one hand and a phone in the other, which he was using to shoot selfies of his injuries.

When Bea zoomed in, Wylie saw that the scrapes on Sky’s face were a rawer pink now and his right shoulder wore a blue bruise. His left knee had swollen and the first two fingers of his left hand, which held the book, were splinted and taped together — white tape against a black leather Bible.

There were dozens of people in the big living room, all looking up at Sky, most holding phones. Wylie recognized Helixon and Hailee, a bunch of the Mammoth team skiers and boarders, old friends, local souls.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” Sky called out. “Twenty-five years ago, something terrible happened here in Mammoth Lakes. A demon bastard was conceived and later born. He has haunted this town for one quarter of a century. We all know him. We have tried to forgive him. We have tried to forget him. But today the demon attacked me on the mountain during practice on the X Course. Behold.” Sky scanned his phone over his bruised shoulder, then his fattened knee, then aimed it again at his scraped-up face and shattered goggles. The crowd murmured, then stilled. “I was attacked from behind and forced off the course and into the rocks at high velocity. I’m lucky to be standing here before you. And very happy to be. But this attack left me thinking about my responsibility to the mountain and to you people and to myself. How much more of this are we to take? What kind of man am I? When should wrong be battled instead of tolerated? After what happened today, I stayed up there on the mountain, asking Mother Nature, What should I do? I received an answer, and it was loud and clear. Mother Nature has asked me to accept an apology from Wylie Welborn for what he did today. To turn my other, nonbruised and nonabraded cheek. But she also tasked me to tell Wylie that if ever tries to force me — or anyone else — off her mountain ever again, the consequences will be severe. Mother Nature was not specific, but she said the consequences will be severe. This, then, is my line in the snow. Apologize, Wylie Welborn, for what you have done. And for your own safety and well-being, promise never to do it again.”

The crowd murmured again and someone offscreen slurred,”Yeah, man, Sky, break the demon bastard curse...”

Wylie watched as Sky held the Bible to his heart. Sky held the phone out for a macro shot and the crowd went wild.

Wylie threw on a coat and started down the hallway. He knew his light-sleeping mother would ask him where he was going this late, and, in fact, from the darkness of her bedroom, she did.

“Out, Mom.”

“Everything okay?”

“Everything is fine.” Except not, Wylie thought. Except Bea’s not asleep like she’s supposed to be; she’s up at Mountain High, watching Sky Carson make crazy threats.

He got to his truck. Letting himself in, he thought he saw movement at the base of the little hill behind the house, in the trees and patchy snow, about where the toolshed into which he had crashed once stood. He paused. A deer, maybe. Too cold for bears. He saw nothing. If it was anything, it didn’t move again. He slammed the truck door and drove to Mountain High.

Huge Croft, the Mountain High bouncer, opened the door. The music was loud and there were bodies in various motion behind him. “Wylie. Maybe you shouldn’t come in.”

“I’m here to pick up Beatrice.”

“Sky’s been extra weird tonight, so maybe just ignore him.”

Wylie nodded and pushed past Croft and into the living room. The number of party people here this late surprised him. Many of them stood mute, staring at him as he scanned the room for his sister. He felt slandered and foolish and mad. He marched into the big kitchen, where the revelers fell silent and avoided eye contact with him. The counters were cluttered with liquor and wine bottles, both empty and full; platters of artful sushi and sashimi; dirty dishes. A guy burped and a girl laughed with exaggerated volume.

He checked the dark theater, where viewers sat beneath a dizzying big-screen Shaun White, tearing up his first Olympic Games. Wylie flipped on the lights and got cussed, turned off the lights and checked the library across the hall, where he interrupted a spirited argument about ski waxes while a pretty girl stood facing a wall of books, laughing.

“She’s upstairs,” said Croft from the doorway. “Not the third floor — don’t worry. Just the second. Third’s, like, forbidden and by invitation only.”

“Yeah, Croft, you told me.” Wylie took the stairs two at a time, feeling eyes on his back. He found Beatrice in one of the guest rooms, part of a circle of girls sitting cross-legged on a big bed. The smell of cannabis was strong and a haze of pale blue smoke hung in the ceiling beams. She looked up at Wylie. Her face was tear-streaked and her pale hair hung down limply. Two girls, sitting on either side of her, both had an arm around her. On her lap she held an overlarge schooner, the last inch of a lime green concoction slanting toward its mouth. “Thanks for comin’, Wyles. I’m wrecked and I don’t wanna hafta face Sky on the way out. Can you believe that shit?”

“Let’s go.”

“These are my best friends. I made them.”

Wylie looked at each girl in the circle, not a one of them over eighteen, it looked, all with the glazed inward air of the stoned. “Ladies.”

“Sky’s just a random asshole,” said one.

“Like, if we could just sell him to another mountain. He could be their mascot.”

A pause, then giggles.

“In my opinion,” said a freckled redhead, “you are not a bastard demon at all, Wylie. That’s a, like, completely fictitional nontruth.”

“Why, thank you. Bea? Let’s hit it.”

“Sky was, like, so bizarre tonight,” said another. “When I got here earlier, I went into a bathroom without knocking? Sky was in there by the sink with a gun in his hand. Gave me this freak smile like he’s trying to charm me.”

“A gun,” said Wylie.

“Don’t ask me what kind or any of that. Medium-size and black.”

“What was he doing with it?”

“I don’t know, Wylie — holding it?”

Giggles.

“Let’s go get more grasshoppers, girls,” someone said.

“Beatrice?” Wylie asked. “Ready?”

She held out her hand. “So ready.”

Bart Helixon marched into the room, apologizing to Wylie, looking up at the ceiling through the window attached to his glasses as if puzzled. “This is best,” he said. “You should go. You’re welcome here, you’re always welcome here, but tonight... well. Don’t believe a word of what Sky said. Anything for attention. He’s drunk and God knows what else. He’ll probably forget about it by morning.”

“He can’t forget it now,” said Beatrice. “It’s been posted all over the world.”

Helixon clapped a hand on Wylie’s shoulder and leaned in close. His eye roamed weirdly behind the lens of his optical computer display. “And don’t let him under your skin, because that’s what he wants. He’s just plain out of line with that kind of threat.”

Wylie and Beatrice made it downstairs and almost to the foyer before Wylie heard Sky Carson yelling out behind him, his words booming from the second-story landing through the great room below. “I will accept that apology, Wylie!”

Wylie stopped and looked back at his accuser. Instead of the Bible and phone, Sky now brandished only a black semiautomatic handgun. It looked to Wylie like his own service M9.

When Sky aimed the gun at them, Wylie got between Bea and Sky and pushed her hard toward the door. There was a second when Beatrice’s hand fumbled off the knob and he nearly knocked her over. He looked back at the gun in Sky’s hand, pointed straight at them. Suddenly, a string of water glittered from the barrel into the air, began to fall, then broke into diamonds that rained down toward him.

“Do not become a victim of your past!” Sky called down to Wylie. “I am serious, and so is Mother Nature.”