Bridge To Happiness (12 page)

Blond, tall, aggressive and intelligent, with a deep and distinctive voice, he was also just as often in the entertainment headlines, married and divorced from an ice skater, an actress who starred in a long-running Emmy-winning sit-com, and, most recently divorced from the granddaughter of a United States vice president. He was everything March had thought the first time she’d ever met him. Spider Olsen was a hound. Pure trouble.

“What makes you think we can get Olsen?” Scott asked, laughing slightly at the idea. “No one else has. He’s turned down every endorsement offer for years.”

“He won his medals on
SkiStars
.”

“In the 80’s.”

“He likes Dad,” Phillip said.

“Yeah, right,” Scott said. “He likes the millions a year he thinks we’ll pay him.”

Phil looked at Mike. “I didn’t know you knew him, Dad, until
Keely
introduced him to me. He said he knew you from years back.”

“I know Olsen,” Mike said without emotion.

“All our conversations indicate he’s open to an endorsement for
SkiStar
 . . . especially now that it’s part of Cantrell.”
Keely
set the folder down.

Mike laughed, shaking his head slightly, his hands
steepled
as he rubbed his chin.

As far as March knew, the Mike’s contact with Spider Olsen was limited to his fist to Olsen’s jaw in a bar in Calgary.

No one at the table really needed convincing. An endorsement from Olsen was exactly what
SkiStar
needed. There wasn’t a person there who didn’t understand Olsen’s appeal. Olsen was bigger than life. March had already promised Mike she’d follow his lead on this. Her smart-as-a-whip daughter-in-law understood the power of the carrot she’d just dangled in front of them.

Phillip looked up at his dad every few seconds, tapping his pen on the arm of his chair with his usual energetic lack of patience, waiting for Mike to say something, and Scott was silent and not particularly receptive, even when he glanced at her and gave a slight smile. She knew he was worried about the amount of money a contract with Olsen would cost the company, money that would come directly from Cantrell’s profits, on Scott’s side of the business.

Mike sat back, his decision clearly made. “Okay.” He looked at Phil and
Keely
. “You got it. Let’s start negotiating.”

The odometer had broken at one hundred and eighteen thousand miles, and the front bumper stayed on thanks to an old coat hanger and half a roll of electrical tape. Years of sea and road salt had turned the car’s paint the same dull color of concrete, and the stained interior smelled like dried apple juice, Arrowroot biscuits, and struggle.

Between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, along the snakelike miles of Highway 50, the history of Cantrell Sports Inc. had evolved inside a stinking, broken
Chevelle
Malibu wagon.

In those early years, Mike had made his living from the back of that Chevy station wagon, selling his first snowboards on weekends and holidays in the parking lot below the face of Heavenly Valley, back when there was still a T-bar on the bunny slope and calling his first board
The Cannabis
had helped grab the attention of most skiers.

But now it was a lifetime later, and the rental car he had parked at the Stateline casino valet was a luxury SUV with electronic aroma dispensers, GPS, and satellite radio. Behind the casino, up on the mountain, high-speed quads and a six-
pac
chair carried skiers and boarders to the summit of Heavenly, and board lingo like “smoking a fatty” was no longer a reference to recreational drugs.

From the long windows of a luxury casino penthouse used by ESPN for event after-parties, a majestic view of Heavenly filled an indigo panorama. Dark drifts of plowed snow framed the perimeter of the parking lot, shadowed gondolas dangled from their cables like bats, and steep, pristinely-groomed slopes appeared blue from the February night sky, where every star above the Sierras flickered like distant, approaching headlights and a thin sliver of a winter moon rose above hostile, black diamond trails.

Tonight was a lifetime away from those days of that rusted station wagon, when he had been a young husband and father of two baby boys born fifteen months apart, living with March on little but his pie-in-the-sky dreams, and his absolute belief in the possibility of a new kind of sport.

He remembered one night standing down at the foot of Stateline in the dead of winter, the smelly old Chevy parked somewhere down by the lake, on a Saturday when he hadn’t sold a single board. The streets and sky had been illuminated from the bright lights of the hotel-casinos, Harrah’s, Harvey’s and the old Sahara.

You couldn’t see the stars over Heavenly when you stood in the bold lightshade of the casinos, just stacked floors of lit hotel rooms and the dotted lights of the wide-windowed restaurants topping them. Whenever an electric door opened, the discordant ringing of slot machines would break up any moments of winter silence, just like they still did if you stood there in the winter night air, even with nothing but dreams to bet on. He didn’t gamble his money in those days. His sure thing was an idea, not an endorsement contract with a hotshot skier who lived a life of completely different values.

When he first met with Spider Olsen again, a few months back and after the board’s decision to shoot for the endorsement contract, he and Olsen had laughed about Calgary, where Olsen’s comments about snowboarding and his drunken attention on March made Mike lose his temper and punch his lights out.

They were still two completely different men.

March had asked him once when they were first dating if he believed in destiny and fate. One of the things that separated her from the other girls he had known was the way she asked him questions about things he hadn’t thought of.

Mike understood that a man thought alone, his dreams and plans were often his secret life. Men acted on their ideas. Women talked about them. He’d told her back then he believed every person had some kind of blueprint. But he would never believe his life was completely in someone else’s hands. Somewhere in his bones he knew he had to make his life what it would become.

That dismal night long ago when he was standing on the California and Nevada state line might have been the first time he really understood he could chisel his life out of the great unknown because he had her at his back.

One of the things he remembered being aware of in the days when he was struggling and things were not good was that life carried with it a subdued sense of lost time. The job at
Spreckles
had been gone, with no regrets. He had a family, but March stood by his side. She had always been there, something that allowed him to take risks because he wouldn’t want to die and be in that last instant of life and regret something he’d never done.

So he didn’t carry the kind of regrets he figured Olsen carried, if the man actually had any kind of a moral compass. Now, tonight, looking down from the ESPN party inside a high-priced Stateline casino, Mike felt disconnected from those years of history which seemed as if they had happened to some other man.

The noise level in the too-slick, too-crowded, too-warm suite grew higher and irritating from the strident sound of young women laughing too loud, while others danced alone, provocatively, to lure the attention of downhill racers, celebrities, and Spider Olsen, who was one of those men who held some strange kind of magnetism for immature and needy young women.

Olsen, barely dwarfed by a towering marble fireplace, stood across the room surrounded by women half his age. Mike spotted a redhead in her early twenties, close to his own daughter Molly’s age, and he had the fatherly urge to tell her to run home and stay far away from Olsen.

As ideal as the man was for a
SkiStar
endorsement, he was close to fifty years old and the human equivalent of a tomcat. Spider Olsen was the kind of man who was hard on women.

But Mike’s business was boards and skis, not Olsen’s love life. Inside his briefcase was what he came for: his signed endorsement contract. For the next three years, Olsen and
SkiStar
were one. Those freezing hours of standing on the street below with his empty pockets were another lifetime ago.

Mike turned away from the window wondering what he was still doing there. He’d made his necessary appearance.

Earlier, after the race Olsen commentated, Mike had left the mountain, packed up his stuff and locked up the Tahoe house. Now he had a plane to catch. He wanted to get home tonight. Standing at the window, a looking glass into the world of his past, had merely killed time inside a room he didn’t want to be in.

A quick glance at his watch and he waded through a
Heffneresque
crowd of ski groupies, uncomfortable when he was followed by too many, too-young and too-hungry female looks.

“Mike.” Olsen shook his hand.

“I need to get the airport.”

“My offer still stands. Wait until tomorrow and the network jet will take you back in the morning. It’s still early.”

Mike shook his head. “Mickey has a game tomorrow. I promised March I’d be home yesterday. I’m already pushing it.” Olsen gave him a look they both understood, so Mike clapped Spider on the shoulder. “With the right woman, marriage works.” Leaning closer, he added, “But I can guarantee the right woman is not in this room.”

“You’re probably right.” Olsen laughed. “But there’s more fun here than in any of my marriages, so I’ll suffer through.”

Twenty minutes later, Mike drove down the steep hairpin turns of Kingsbury Grade, a shortcut that would put him in the flatlands of Gardnerville and take at least twenty minutes off his trip to the Reno airport. He sailed around one turn and the car went suddenly dead. No power. No lights. Zilch.

With no control and tight steering, he struggled to pull hard into a turnout and set the parking gear, then turned the key. Nothing happened, so he popped the hood. But even the engine compartment light was out.

He reached inside and hit the GPS call button on the headliner console and waited. No ring, no answer, no monotone voice wanting to give him movie times and make dinner reservations. He swore under his breath—it was cold as death outside—and shrugged into his jacket, leaned against the car and pulled out his cell, waiting impatiently for a signal. The words ‘no service’ lit his blue screen.

With so little moon, the road was pitch black; overhead, just an unending bowl of night sky and the saw-like shadow of Ponderosa pines backed by crests of the snow-covered Sierra Mountains. From the valley below, small lights flickered from an occasional farm, a cold, long walk that could easily make him miss his plane.

For a day that had started out as the answer to
SkiStar’s
problems, things were going into the toilet fast. Twenty two degrees had been the last outside temperature reading on the dead SUV. To make the plane, he didn’t have time to screw around, so he grabbed his bag from the backseat and started walking down the mountain, checking his cell every few minutes for a signal.

Behind him, distant music and the growl of a big block engine sounded from up the road, so he turned just as the gleam of headlights came at him from around a sharp turn. He stepped into the road and headlights and waved his arms. A three quarter ton truck swerved and barreled past, country music blaring from inside the closed crew cab.

“Don’t stop, asshole,” Mike muttered. “I’m freezing my ass off here.”

Ahead a red flash of brake lights suddenly illuminated the road, and he ran toward the truck as the tinted, driver-side window hummed down.

The man inside wore an expensive Stetson low on his head. In the reflection of dashboard lights, he looked all clean-cut cowboy in that Tim McGraw way, and a little older than their oldest son, Scott, late thirties maybe. As the driver reached to turn down the radio, Mike spotted the dark silhouette of a guitar case on the passenger seat, hay on the floorboard, and a tattered leather briefcase with white sheets of music stuffed inside.

“I broke down a mile or so back,” Mike told him. “I’m trying to catch a flight out of Reno.”