Crazy Blood

Chapter Eighteen

Wylie towed the MPP up the back side of the Sierras in four-wheel low, with slow, agonizing caution — the only way to finally arrive at Solitary.

This side of the mountains faced west and south, getting even more snow than the east side, where the lifts and town were built. Even now in August, the higher westside elevations were still packed with snow. But it was very steep country, heavy with boulders and conifers, slashed by sunlight and shadow, and there was only one primitive two-track road that, if you knew where it ran beneath the snow and you could keep your tires on it, would eventually land you in Solitary.

Adam and Dave McCoy had built the road with their own hands, cutting down the trees and bulldozing the rocks ten yards at a time to create the narrow passage. Used dynamite, too, Adam had told him. It took their “spare” time for the better part of three summers. Adam said that Dave McCoy had more energy than any person he’d ever seen. To young Adam, Dave McCoy had been a hero, a cross between Zeus and Paul Bunyan.

For Wylie’s twelfth birthday, Adam had brought him to Solitary. Very carefully showed him the way in. They had spent three days and nights camping and fishing, birding and reading, glassing for bears, before packing up and skidding their way back down the mountain in first gear. Two flat tires. Over the years, they had camped at Solitary for a few days each October, around Wylie’s birthday, weather permitting, until the war and his travels had taken him away.

Now, as his truck crawled up the mountain, Wylie’s memory arced back to that first camp they’d made at Solitary. His tent had been green and Grandpa’s yellow. He remembered stripping the lime green lichen off the kindling and the reluctant little campfires that took him so long to create. And fishing the creek for brook trout that darted for the banks like golden bullets. They’d hiked into backcountry so remote, it had been seen by a few scant handfuls of human beings. They had seen an eight-point white-tailed buck and a silver-faced black bear his grandfather guessed weighed four hundred pounds. They had dug for hours, hoping to find fossil bones, but found no bones at all. In his memory Wylie was light-headed for three straight days. Not only from the elevation, exertion, and the breath-snatching majesty of the Sierras, but — with his mother having told him about his conception — from realizing that Adam was closer to being his real father than any man could be.

On their last night at Solitary, Adam had told Wylie about his son.

You should know that Richard was a good-hearted man. He was generous. He was funny. He was handsome, and people were drawn to him. He was arrogant and vain, too. He had trouble maturing because I spoiled him, as I spoiled all my sons and daughters. That is my greatest failing. So Richard had little sense of consequence. He did not have the judgment required to be a sound man. He sensed this. To mask it, he tried to be lovable. To be admired. That’s why Cynthia chose him — because she knew what he was inside and how to shape it. But he betrayed her, and that is part of why we’re sitting here tonight, Wylie. Sometimes consequences are good. I won’t dwell on Richard’s flaws. He was a bright and shining star, more bright and shining than he knew. People loved him. Dogs loved him. He brought home a baby raccoon once and kept it in his room, and the creature was tame around him and violent toward everyone else. It acted like Richard was its mother. Richard loved to ski, but he did not love to race. He preferred being graceful to being victorious. He badly wanted to be like me, and to live up to my expectations and please me. I wish that on no son or daughter. When you think of him, know that your father had a good heart. And know that if he had lived, he would have brought his share of wonders into this world. Even beyond Andrea, Robert, Sky, and you. Inside, most everybody in the world is pretty much alike. Those who are different shoulder a load for the rest of us. And that load is not always light.

Now Wylie goosed his truck through a barricade of pine branches so thick he couldn’t see beyond them. He was aware of the MPP fighting along behind. He prayed to God to deliver his trailer from scratches. And to be able to stay on the narrow, occasional path. So far, so good.

Three times he stopped and fired up the chain saw to lop off low-hanging limbs. He stood on the wall of the truck bed, careful of his balance as he swiped the heavy, smoking machine through the trees. The branches dropped and the air filled with the smell of gas exhaust and pine pitch and the sun felt hot and unfiltered on his upraised face.

When his truck trundled over the last, steep outcropping of boulders, he felt the vehicle starting to level. A moment later, he was on his first flat ground — nearly flat ground — in three hours. He could smell the clutch and his temperature gauge was getting up there. He looked out at Solitary, pulled forward a hair more, then cut the engine and stepped out.

The snow on the meadow floor was thin at this elevation. Up-mountain on the run, it got deep fast. Madman Run — Dave McCoy’s and Adam’s name for the slope — rose dramatically before him, still deep enough with snow to ski. Madman began above the timberline, a precipitous but wide run that narrowed to chutes through sudden stands of white-bark pine and mountain hemlock, lodgepole and red fir, then opened into a steep, unobstructed schuss that tailed out and gently flattened into the broad meadow in which Wylie now stood.

He looked down to the little alpine lake that Dave and Adam had named Breakfast Lake, for the many gullible brook trout they had caught there. Breakfast Creek wobbled into the lake, barely visible in the trees. Between the lake and Wylie’s truck, the meadow floor was a mosaic of snow patches and wildflowers, mostly blue lupine and red snow plant, which gave the meadow a patriotic look. The air was sharp and cool.

He leveled and unhitched the MPP, then set up camp. He hoisted his cooler into a tree whose branches were strong enough to support it but not strong enough — hopefully — to support a black bear. He stopped to watch four deer in the cottonwoods lining the creek, looking at him attentively.

When he was done with the cooler, he stood a few yards away from the MPP and tried to fully appreciate it in this context. How could this svelte man-made confection even be in this wild place? It was the equivalent of one of Steen’s perfect pastries, labeled and in its paper cradle, sitting atop Mount Everest. He shook his head at his good fortune, photographed the MPP from several angles, thought of the yawning aloneness and the huge exertion that were to be his for the next three days.

It was early afternoon by the time he was ready to set off for Madman. Enough time for two runs, he thought. He strapped on his snowshoes and started up the edge of the run, where the snow was shallow and he could sidestep confidently without sinking. He stopped and rested on his poles. The incline was steep, and the way was long. You asked for this, he thought. Within minutes he was breathing hard, but he timed his breath to his movement to make a rhythm, stuck to it, made some progress. He stopped and looked up again, panting now, not believing how far he had to go.

Forty minutes later, he was above the timberline, at the top of Madman, lungs dry, heart beating hard. He stepped up to the very edge of the cornice, snowshoes strapped fast to his back, ski tips in the air. He sipped from the nozzle of the hydration pack. Down-mountain the breeze in the pines made a long, distant rustle. He felt the familiar brew of fear and exhilaration jostling around inside like two ski crossers dueling for the best line, the brew more potent after Wylie’s five-year absence.

He waited for a break in his thoughts.

The fire was hard to start, as usual. He set a small circular grill across the rocks and heated a can of stew. He watched the flames cast light and shadows against the MPP and felt his vast aloneness. Solitary was right. He thought of lovely Pilar at Great St. Bernard’s Hospice and mysterious Juncal at Tegernsee and noted those lovers’ great distance from here and now. But really, it was only months.

He wondered again if he’d done the right thing in coming home. To what avail? He’d regained his family but lost a brother. He’d resumed a pointless lifetime feud. He’d found a possible way to help the people he loved — and realized that he’d been avoiding just that for a number of years now. And maybe, in the same possible way, he could help himself. For the first time in his life, Wylie had a plan that included more than just a short-term future. That night at Jesse’s, around the barbecue, he had described his idea to Jesse as a dream — his first official Wylie as a grown-up Dream — which at the time had struck him as pompous and bourbon-induced.

But now, bourbonless at ten thousand feet, dream still rang true to him. He felt confident he could win the Mammoth Cup. It would take training and luck. Then, close on the heels of the Mammoth Cup would come the X Games and an even higher level of competition. More training and more luck. But the World Cup tour? The Olympics? He almost scoffed, but he didn’t. Why not the Olympics? Why couldn’t that be his dream? Wylie Welborn, Olympian. Olympic ski-cross medalist Wylie Welborn. Were only certain people allowed to dream that? Which people? So what if he was almost twenty-six? So what if he couldn’t afford to tour?

After dinner, he burned the paper bowl and towel, stashed the stew can in the cooler, and hoisted the cooler back into the tree. He set more wood on the fire.

He stepped into the MPP with irrational pride. By the light of an electric lantern, he made up the MPP bed, using Jolene’s mock-Navajo blanket. He climbed in and propped himself up, closed his eyes, and imagined his first run down Madman just a few hours ago. Not bad. It was tentative enough to test the snow and find the hidden patches of ice and to avoid the lower trees and the potentially deadly wells around their bases. But tentative on Madman was still close to breakneck on most any other course.

His second run was made with heavy legs and a mind dulled by hours in a bumping truck and nearly two more hours of high-elevation climbing. Wylie could tell he was twenty-five and no longer twenty. But maybe he could overcome age with training. And this was the place for it. It always amazed him that he could find conditions like today in any but the driest and warmest of years. Solitary, Madman, and Breakfast Creek — all his. A private paradise to train in, Grandpa’s birthday present. Adam had told him once that he’d brought Sky here for his twelfth birthday, too, but Sky had never, to his knowledge, come back. It takes a certain mind-set, Adam had said.

Wylie yawned and felt his energy all but gone and the sweet call of sleep. The box in his mind that housed the Taliban sniper from Kandahar had wandered to the edge of its shelf, where Wylie was now surprised to find it tilting in precarious balance. Sometimes his own tiredness allowed the boxes to spill. Sometimes they’d empty in his dreams when he was defenseless, and all he could do was wake up drenched in sweat, repack them, and place the boxes where they belonged, just so.

He lay in the module and looked up through the portholes at the bright pinpricks of stars and planets and the wide granular dusting of the Milky Way. These seemed indifferent to him, but not wholly different from him. He heard the steady sough of the wind in the trees and was for a long moment unsure where he ended and the world began.

That night, Wylie dreamed he was in Portillo, Chile, after having driven the MPP all the way there to see April Holly. In the dream, April was beautiful but skeptical of him. He had brought her some board wax you could get only in Mammoth. She made jokes about the trailer. In his dream, the MPP had sat silently, absorbing the jokes, riddled with bugs and dirt from the six-thousand-mile journey from California to Chile.

When Wylie woke in the early morning, the battery-hogging lantern had all but run down, but the sunlight was waiting just outside the portholes above him.

Breakfast Creek gurgled in the distance.

He made three runs that day and three the next. He timed each of the latest runs for the last minutes of light before thorough darkness closed on Solitary. The moon was right. In this final twilight, Wylie’s reflexes had to be quicker, while operating on less information. He finished his last run on the third day in moonlit darkness, planes of silver and black rushing him in rapid overlays, guided half by his senses and half by faith.

Later, he bathed in Breakfast Creek, then bundled up in Jolene’s blanket in the MPP. He put on Jolene’s wool boot socks, too. He read and wrote by the freshly charged lantern. He drifted off to sleep, still believing that his idea of making the Olympics was not just a foolish indulgence. In the morning, he felt the same way. It was a quiet confidence, no swagger in it, just faith. The same faith that had guided him down the mountain in the near dark.