Crazy Blood

Chapter Fourteen

Spring came and the racers skied and boarded the corn snow into June. Finally, the corn snow melted to hero snow — the slushy pack in which even beginners can carve deep turns. Eventually, the hero snow gave way to a thin mud-speckled carpet, and the man-made snow was too expensive to earn a profit for the mountain. So Adam Carson closed it. It had been a good year — 584 inches of snow, high visitation to the mountain, and high occupancy in the rental market. Restaurants were full and spending was strong, real estate inching back up for the first time since the Great Recession. No plane crashes, avalanches, ski or boarding fatalities, no tree-well suffocations, deadly fumarole collapses or earthquakes.

Robert’s tragedy at the Mammoth Cup hung over the locals like a fog that wouldn’t break, but the tourists who came and left and paid the bills seemed to have already forgotten. Wylie Welborn’s one-punch knockout of Sky Carson in the bar at Slocum’s was much discussed. Some said Sky had it coming. Some said Wylie was way quick to violence. For the most part, the town seemed empty and abandoned.

But by July, the bikers and climbers and fishermen and runners were back and Mammoth Lakes’ second season was in swing. The sponsored and more prosperous snow racers were headed down to South America or New Zealand to board and ski. The less advantaged headed up to Mount Hood, or stayed in Mammoth to work the restaurants and sporting-goods stores, sometimes taking two or even three jobs at a time to pay rent, and do dry-terrain training. Snow was what they talked about, even though it seemed an eternity away. They rode mountain bikes and took classes at Cerro Coso College and hit the happy hours in the customer-shy bars and restaurants.

Wylie put in eight-hour days at Let It Bean, then went home and split wood, a lot of it. By mid-June, he had half enough for winter, all of it stacked neatly along the east side of the house. His arms, hands, and back became very strong.

He repaired the sagging rear deck and patched the roof with mastic and aluminum as best he could. But he saw that many of the old composition shingles were broken and the tar was dried and cracked everywhere he looked. He got two quotes for a new roof: twelve thousand dollars and fifteen thousand, and both roofers said to replace this thing before winter or it would be a wet one inside. Wylie gave the grim news to Steen, who cheerfully stated that they would find the money, as they always did. Wylie helped Steen finish his pastry cart, putting on two coats of bright red paint and, at Steen’s delighted insistence, stenciling large yellow Scandinavian-styled letters that read THE LITTLE RED PASTRY SHED.

Every other day, Wylie ran distance with Bea and Belle, legs being the foundation of ski racing. Over the years, Wylie had been amused at the way ski and board racers — himself included — treated their legs as if they were special, privileged parts of the body. There were endless miles, ferocious sprints, hours of leg presses, lifts, lunges, and squats. A racer with a few moments of free time did in-place knee bends or one-knee bends. They’d have contests to see who could do most. Then came the stretches, rubdowns, liniment, ice, whirlpools, handfuls of glucosamine and condroitin pills for the knees and ankles, cortisone if it got bad. Wylie didn’t love the running, but he loved being with his sisters — so nice to learn what the young were thinking.

In the long afternoons and evenings, he fished Hot Creek and the Upper Owens and the East Walker up past Bridgeport. Sometimes he drove home, but often he slept out in the vastness of the Sierras, on the ground or in the bed of his truck. By lantern he read and composed poetically intentioned lines that amounted to nothing. He could not sustain a thought on paper. He ate his larger trout and drank bourbon in reasonable amounts.

By the time Jesse Little Chief called to say he had finished the trailer, Wylie had traded twelve pounds of fat for muscle, and the six combined miles he ran down Highway 203 toward Highway 395 and back up again were getting easier.

Now Wylie slowly circled the module, personal, portable, which stood outside Jesse’s shop down in Bishop. The MPP was even more elegant than he had imagined. And so obviously capable.

Jesse had alternated bands of maple and teak, light and dark, and finished the entire module in a heavy spar varnish that captured the hot June sun. The oversized double doors to starboard were graceful and, when latched open, welcomed the world. There were real nautical portholes up on the roof for stargazing and ventilation. Jesse had gotten the portholes from a marine-salvage place in Morro Bay, and worked the brass into a potent shine. The birch interior, simple and beautiful, shortened Wylie’s breath.

“I’m speechless. And I’ve got the next two grand, Jesse — I’ve been living at Let it Bean. Eight hours a day, seven days a week for three months.”

“You need a Mexican.”

“I am a Mexican.” He thought of the agreed-upon fourteen-thousand-dollar roof job looming over the Welborn-Mikkelsen household. And the new lease on the Let It Bean space, which would surely be more money. And the heating bills to come in the fall, and the newly expensive health insurance. Good time to buy a custom-made trailer, he thought. Even the ten-thousand-dollar prize money for winning the Mammoth Cup wouldn’t even cover the roof, let alone the roof and the MPP. But how could he have known back in January that the whole damned roof was shot? “I’ll have enough by winter to pay it off.”

“No worries, Wylie.”

“You sure?”

Jesse gave him a look.

“I owe you more than I owe you, Jess.”

A screen door wheezed open and slapped shut. Jolene hopped from deck to yard and picked her way barefoot across the dirt toward them, keeping to the cool of the shop shadow. She had a blanket over her shoulders and carried a large pasteboard box in both hands, the lid sections flapping. Her black hair shined. Above the box, her eyes were fixed on Wylie, and below the box, her legs were dark and trim. She arrived with an appraising look, then set the box on the front fork of the trailer chassis, which rested on a jack.

“Hi, Jo.”

“Oh, it’s you. Hello, Wylie. Here’s some stuff you’ll need.” She slung the blanket and handed it to him and waited for him to do something with it. Wylie raised his arms and let it unfold. It was a Navajo-style print, acrylic, likely from the Paiute Palace gift shop up the road. “Fake Indian junk, but it will help keep you warm in this wigwam.”

“I like it.”

“You’re welcome.”

Wylie folded the blanket once over and set it inside the MPP. Jolene eyed him narrowly, reached into the box, and lifted out a battered and well-seasoned iron skillet, which she set on the blanket. In the skillet were paper dispensers of salt and pepper and a new Mag flashlight. Next from the box she brought two pairs of extra-heavy wool boot socks, a pair in each hand, wiggling them at him as if trying to interest an infant or a dog. She set them on the blanket. Then a handsome leather-bound journal with a jumping trout tooled into the cover, then the collected love poems of Kahlil Gibran, followed by a bottle of the bourbon he liked, and, last, an economy-size bottle of shampoo/body wash for men.

“I don’t know what to say.”

She stepped forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Stuff you’ll need.”

“This is really something, Jo.”

“It’s the next best thing to having me in there.”

“Stop tormenting him, Jolene,” said Jesse.

“Payback,” she said. She squinted at Wylie once more, then strode through the shadows and back into the house.

Towing the MPP back up to Mammoth that evening, Wylie could barely keep his eyes off it in the rearview. The sun glanced off the varnish, and the alternating slats of hardwood made him think of the breadboard he’d made his mom in wood shop, grade seven at Mammoth Middle School, those beautiful runners like you’d see on vintage surf- and skateboards. That breadboard was still on the kitchen counter, he’d noted. He was happy with the substantial weight of the MPP, and wood was unbeatable for warmth retention and beauty. He pulled over at Tom’s Place just to get out and walk around it again and see how totally sweet it was, hitched to his truck, waiting for him, for life, for adventure. He got a rag from the toolbox and wiped off the bugs that had met their Maker on the rounded edge of the bow.

Can’t rub too hard or I might scratch the finish.

There.

He felt triumphant, idling at the first traffic signal in town. A guy in the crosswalk looked at the MPP and Wylie nodded coolly. He made the turn onto Old Mammoth Road, drove slowly through town, and pulled into one of the Mammoth Cycle parking spaces in the crowded Von’s shopping center. Wylie was dying to show off the MPP, and his high-school buddy Chris, the bike maniac, was the nearest pal he could think of. Wylie found him in the service area with a bike up on the stand. Chris followed him out to the parking lot, flipping a box wrench end by end in one grease-blackened hand.

“Holy crap, dude.”

“Don’t touch it with greasy hands.”

“Jesse Little Chief made this?”

“Every inch of it.”

“I want one.”

“Everyone will.”

“How much?”

“Well, he’d have to run some numbers. Look at the way it just... sits there.”

Wylie kept staring at his trailer, not quite able to believe it was his. He was aware of someone coming across the parking lot behind him, more than one person, by the sound of things, although he was paying little attention. He turned and saw April Holly and a woman who had to be her mother, and a very large man, even larger than the bouncer Croft. They carried shopping bags from the market. April, in the lead, stopped at the trailer, set her bags on the asphalt, and studied it. There was a long moment of silence.

“Does it have a name?” April asked.

Wylie turned to her. “Module, personal, portable.”

“So it’s, like, military?”

“There could be a military application, someday,” he said.

“You’re Wylie Welborn.”

“Welcome to Mammoth Lakes, April.”

April introduced him to her mother, Helene, and her bodyguard, Logan. They set down their bags and shook his hand. Helene had a deeply tanned, dour face. Her handshake was strong and brief, Logan’s lingering softly with either gentleness or threat. The big man had a wide downward mouth and ears that tapered sharply. April’s voice was soft and whispery, like a breeze in leaves, which made Wylie lean in closer to hear.

“I heard you joined the army,” she said.

“I’m a United States Marine.”

“And now you’re back into ski-cross racing?”

“It will keep me out of trouble.”

“Of what kind?”

“Those days are gone.”

She looked at him frankly. She had a round, pretty face and looked smaller and older in person than on TV or magazine covers. Blue eyes and a sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. Button nose, more freckles. Her hair was blond and curly and difficult to manage, according to shampoo commercials that Wylie had seen, and it now sprung up unmanaged from a pink bandanna.

He watched April considering the MPP. Helene checked her cell phone and Logan stared off toward the cop station. “I get claustrophobic,” April said.

“Me, too. But check this out.” Wylie swung out the elegant double doors, stepped inside, opened the portholes, and stepped back out. He fastened each door open against the MPP with the latches that Jesse had built in. He gestured at the trailer with both hands, like a salesman, to point out the surprisingly spacious interior of the module: the small table that would fold out to fit with the padded benches to form a bed, the two-burner stove, the yacht-size sink and john behind the sliding shoji screen. Jesse’s birch caught the sunlight as if to banish claustrophobia.

April stepped in. “It’s bigger than I thought.”

She stood framed in the doorway, looking down at Jolene’s box of presents on the table, then turned back at Wylie. “Hard liquor and poetry?”

“In moderation.”

She looked down on him from her elevation just inside the trailer. “My people have prohibitions on almost everything, even moderation. Probably poetry, too, though I haven’t been tempted by that yet. I don’t think I’m smart enough to understand a whole poem. But can you recommend one poetic, dangerous, life-changing word that I should know?”

“Module.”

She gave him a half smile. “You love this thing, don’t you?”

“You can sit.”

“No, thank you,” she said, stepping back out. “But it sure smells good. Is it new?”

“Brand-new. A friend made it.”

“It looks too shiny and perfect to leave outside.”

“I agree, but it’s made to be used. Very strong. There’s insulation between the inside and outside walls. And real salvage portholes.”

“For stargazing.”

“And ventilation in summer.”

She looked at him skeptically. “But no place for your skis and gear.”

“This was my idea!” Wylie hustled around to the stern and unfastened two heavy stainless-steel latches. He pulled a substantial brass handle then stepped aside to let a long, heavy drawer roll out to its full length of eight feet. It glided with audible heft upon its bearings, burped a waft of redwood-scented air, then stopped. When he looked at her, April Holly had one hand over her mouth but couldn’t staunch her laughter.

“Oh, that’s just so funny!”

“How can a drawer be funny?”

“You are!”

“I...”

“Done yet, honey?” asked Helene.

“Oh, that made my day,” said April. She gathered her bags, still laughing. “So nice to meet you, Wylie.”

Wylie nodded compliantly. “Same here.”

“Love the module! See ya on the mountain.”

Wylie and Chris watched them cross the lot toward a black Escalade with her image on the side. While Logan held open the front passenger door for Helene, April glanced back at Wylie and Chris, waved, then climbed in the back.

“She’s hard to figure,” said Chris. “She seems halfway with it, then pretty random. And then cool and then only about herself. Did you know she gets two million a year for her headgear sponsor? The shampoo? Just that one little space on her helmet?”

“She liked the MPP.”

“She didn’t stay long.”

“Not with her mom standing there.”

“She’s engaged. Did you see that ring?”

Wylie said nothing, rubbed his thumb over a tiny bubble in the finish.

“I sold her ten bikes yesterday. One-fifth of my stock. There’re six people total on her racing team, counting the mom and her. But that Logan guy is too big for a bike. So April bought herself and the rest of them road bikes for asphalt and hard-tail twenty-nines for the bike paths. Pretty good ones. Thirteen thousand bucks. And another thousand for helmets and shoes and bibs and oh, man, every bike gadget you can think of. Most money I ever made in a day, by far. Maybe enough to buy one of these trailers from Jesse.”

Wylie was again lost in meditation on the module. He heard the Escalade pulling away but couldn’t look.

“April rented one of those big houses in Starwood,” said Chris. “Six flat-screens and three hot tubs is what I heard.”

“How many miles you think these tires will go?”

Later that night, Wylie retired from the Welborn-Mikkelsen house and got everything set up for his first night in the MPP. Beatrice and Belle helped him convert the benches and table into the bed, the thick pads making a firm mattress for his summer-weight sleeping bag. The battery-powered lantern gave off a good clean light. He read and made notes and sipped a short bourbon.

Later, Beatrice came back to hang for a while, talk about things. She lay down beside him in opposition, head-to-toe, using both packs of thick boot socks for a pillow. She told him she was thinking about maybe not spending so much time up at Helixon’s — it was kind of a weird scene, with lots of pressure on girls to get high on drugs and go down on guys. And more. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to do all that just to be popular. Wylie disliked the idea of his sister’s having sex with someone he didn’t approve of, which was just about everyone.

“Not a good reason,” he said. “Popularity.”

“You’re a guy. Doesn’t that like betray the guy code or something?”

“I kind of liked being unpopular,” he said. “It was a form of privacy.”

“I don’t have that strength of character, Wyles.”

“If you said you did, you would.”

“That’s like something Dad would say. Like positive but totally not verifiable.” Bea ran her finger down the birch paneling of the wall, then picked a strand of her long blond hair and looked at it. “There’s one guy at Mountain High I wouldn’t mind talking more to. Kind of shy. He hasn’t said one thing to me about either drugs or sex. And he’s the most perfect dancer ever.”

“Sounds like a start, Bea.”

“It’s cool. I can be in the same room with him and not have him all over me.”

“You’re the boss, Bea. Don’t forget that.”

“Okay. I won’t. Wylie? I hope you’re not disappointed, but I’m not much interested in competitive boarding anymore.”

“I gathered that.”

“I hope I’m not letting you down.”

“There’s a lot more than competition, Bea.”

“I just don’t have the nerves. I get so damned scared before every event. Now Robert. Jeez, Wylie. I’m so afraid of that being me. If it can happen to Sarah Burke...”

“Ride your board for fun, Bea. That’s the beginning and end of it.”

No sooner had Beatrice left than Belle showed up, and Wylie got an earful of what fifteen-year-olds were up to these days, not all of it comforting, either. He figured he must be getting old. Belle had a weak spot for getting high, and she admitted it and told Wylie she was fighting off the urge most of the time. But it was hard. Wylie set his glass on the other side of the bed, where she wouldn’t be looking right at it, though he couldn’t keep the smell from her. Can you keep anything from someone who really wants it?

Belle didn’t seem to notice. She was talking fast about her ski-cross possibilities for next year as a sixteen-year-old, her good chances at making the team and maybe even a shot at the Mammoth Cup, and wouldn’t that be the coolest to both podium in their events, both be top of the box with gold? Wylie had to agree. Belle had always been fearless and direct on the course, a lot like Wylie. With hard training and good luck, she could be a contender in the under-eighteen category. The u-eighteens were stacked with talent, so Belle had lots of competition.

She went quiet then, and Wylie caught her looking at him while pretending not to. After a moment, she gave up the pretense and speared him with her serious gaze. She had fierce concentration when she needed it. “Tell me about the war, Wylie.”

“Not now. Some other time.”

“When?”

“Later.”

“You were a medic, right?”

“Unofficial. The medics were corpsman and I was a grunt. But I helped out some brothers when they couldn’t help themselves. I seemed to have some knack for that.”

She looked at him, half innocence and half suspicion. She had her mother’s dark hair and eyes. “Were you on the battlefield?”

“Yes, a lot, Belle.”

“Did you see people die?”

“I saw that, too.”

“Did you kill?”

“No,” he said, lying. In Wylie’s opinion, this particular truth would be of no help to Belle as yet in her life. And no help to himself to confess. He felt the boxes containing his troubling memories jostling around, way up on the shelves of his mind. “No. I helped some wounded men survive. Nothing really dramatic, though.”

“Oh.”

“It’s hard to think back, because you kind of have to live things again,” he said.

“It’s been two whole years.”

“I’ll tell you a battlefield story some other time, Belle.”

“Maybe just a short one now? A really small one?”

Wylie sighed and shook his head. “We got lit up on a trail and there was nothing to hide behind. Which is why they hit us there. Some of it was mortar fire, and that comes from above and drops down on you and the shells explode in big rings of shrapnel. I hit the dirt and crawled like a bug to the nearest cover. It was a little pile of rocks maybe the size of a suitcase turned over on its side. I got myself up against it the best I could and buried my face in the sand and held my helmet on hard as I could. The shells kept landing and I was waiting to not be here anymore, and then they stopped. It was quiet for a minute, which seemed like an hour. I felt someone touch my shoulder, and when I cranked up my face from the dirt, no one was there.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could they have gotten away that fast?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where was Jesse Little Chief?”

“A hundred feet behind me, half-dug into a low spot.”

“Just your imagination?”

“Sometimes I think so.”

Belle gave him an appraising look. “I’d like another story sometime.”

“Okay.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

Then Beatrice was back and they lounged around in the MPP with the double doors open to the cool summer air and the fragrance of conifers all around. It was well after midnight when Wylie shooed both girls back to the house and stretched out and read through some things he’d written, shaking his head at the nonpoeticalness of them. Maybe there should always be something in your life you want but can’t have, he thought. And I shall never write a good poem. He looked for a long time at the stars aglitter through the portholes. One of Wylie’s mental boxes — the one containing the Taliban fighter — began to slide from its place on one of the high, orderly shelves in Wylie’s mind. So he reached up and caught a bottom corner and pushed it back into place.

He went outside to view the MPP again in its entirety. Deep in the dark trees he saw movement, then none. He thought of the old toolshed he’d crashed into. And how the hill had seemed so high and steep to him at age five.

He went back inside and fell asleep. But that Talib sniper came back to life again in his dreams, shooting at him and the rest of his fire team through a murder hole in a mud-brick compound wall. And damned if Sergeant Madigan didn’t come back, too, just in time for the sniper’s bullet to go through his neck one more time. And damned if Jesse wasn’t there, the knife in his hand at a weird angle to the dead Talib’s head. And damned if Wylie didn’t take the knife and finish what Jesse had begun, in that moment conceiving the notion of mental boxes that could be locked and stored away forever, their secrets hidden, their devils screaming away unheard.