Crazy Blood (7 page)

Jesse turned the steaks and looked down at his watch. “Your sister told Jolene you're going to stay in Mammoth awhile. Going to win that Mammoth Cup thing again.”

“I've committed to it.”

“Why? You already won it once.”

The breeze changed direction and Wylie stepped away from the roiling smoke. “To honor Robert and shut Sky up.”

“And winning this race would do that?”

“I hope so.”

“Robert's not going to get better?”

“He'll never wake up. He could live for years, though. It's just tubes, nutrition, and antibiotics.”

“Shit, Wylie. I hardly knew him, but Robert was cool. He was a good guy. I saw that. Nothing like the rest of them.”

“No one like him, Jesse.” Wylie squinted and wiped his eyes with his jacket sleeve. Smoke and grief. It angered him that when he thought of Robert, he saw him paralyzed in a bed rather than flying down a mountain with sweet, beautiful speed. “Jess, there's another reason I want to win that race. I've been seeing a lot. And thinking a lot. I want something better for my family than them working their asses off year after year for less and less. It's worse now. Remember, back in the old days, when we were the only show in town? No more. Now Gargantua is in, and they're trying to run us out of business. It's working. They're price-cutting for market share, sponsoring the Mammoth ski team
and
the Mammoth Cup next year. All so Gargantua Coffee can rake in the tourists and run us out of town.”

“Way of the white man.”

“No shit. But here's the deal—if I can win the cup, then crank at the X Games, I'd have a shot to make the FIS World Cup circuit. And if I do well
there,
I just might make the Olympic team. And if I make the U.S. team and do well in Seoul? Well, then my family is set for life. That would be a dream come true. I've never actually had a specific, gonna-do-this kind of dream. Now I do. But
dream
sounds pompous and bourbony. I don't know. I'm thinking out loud.”

Jesse nodded and stared down at the meat. “You a good-enough skier to do all that?”

“I don't know. That's a whole other question.”

“That you can't answer until you try.”

Wylie threw back the bourbon, set the shot glass on the barbecue deck and took up his beer. “Expensive to compete up at that level. Not sure exactly how to finance all that. But I'll tell you one thing, Jesse. I still love the speed. It's still in me. I'm happy flying downhill like there's a demon on my ass.”

“That's what you looked like when you won the Mammoth Cup last time. I remember thinking, He's not chasing something. Something's chasing him.”

*   *   *

They ate with the girls in the small dining room, with the TV propped up on the kitchen counter and a football game on. Jolene and Tonya tried hard to be adults—having set a nice table with somewhat matching flatware, quality paper napkins, and glasses of water with lemon twists floating on the ice. Jolene glanced at Wylie often and stopped talking a good full second before Wylie began a sentence.

Wylie felt the alcohol swirling through him. It loosened his memories and helped give voice to a story of what had happened while he was staying at the Great St. Bernard Hospice in Switzerland. Wylie confirmed that, yes, this was the place known for breeding the hearty rescue dogs. He gave in to the excitement of telling it, gesturing and raising his voice, which he rarely did. Waving his arms and using a thick German accent, he impersonated the panicked hospitality director, then dramatized their mad, half-blitzed scramble to get on their boots and skis and jackets to go attempt a rescue. He dramatized the rather dicey flashlight-illuminated extraction of three Swedish cross-country skiers who had fallen into a crevasse not five hundred yards from the hospice brewery. They had been on an after-dinner jaunt. Wylie revealed that the big rescue dogs did not carry casks of brandy on their collars, and that they had romped through the snow, barking uselessly while the men and women pulled the skiers up using ropes and a lot of muscle. Wylie capped off his tale by quoting each Swede after being snatched away from certain death:

“‘
Tack!'

“
‘
Tack!'

“
‘
Tack!'”

*   *   *

Much later, Wylie closed the door of the spare bedroom, stripped to his underwear, and climbed into the cold bed. Glancing through the parted curtain, he could see the western sky, black and dotted with stars that fell, then rose in unison, again and again, his vertical hold fully shot.

The door opened and Jolene, backlit by the hall light, stood in the doorway. She was motionless for a moment, then leaned against the door frame, pulled her blouse over her head, shook back her heavy black hair, and looked at Wylie. Her eyes were more stars, falling and rising. “You were showing off for me,” she said. “My turn now.”

Wylie saw the shiny plank of her hair and the curves and points of her breasts washed in the weak light from above. “You're beautiful, but I can't.”

“Can't let me get in beside you on a winter night?”

“Can't be responsible for you.”

“Then be irresponsible for me.”

“Twenty-five and sixteen don't add up right.”

“Yeah, with all those blondes falling over you up on the mountain.”

“Nothing to do with blondes.”

“Or maybe you'd rather go up to Reno for the professionals. With Jesse.”

“You're beautiful, Jo. It's not that.”

“Can I sleep on the floor?”

“Jo.”

“I am not a child.”

Wylie saw pinpoints of light in her eyes. She tossed back her hair again and it settled forward. “I do admit I was showing off for you,” he said. “I wanted to feel like a big, important man. But I'd already made up my mind not to do this.”

“Why not?”

“Then I would have to deny and ignore you, Jolene. I don't want to do that.”

“When would you deny and ignore me?”

“Sooner than later.”

“Why?”

“To keep us free. Which is how we belong.”

“You're denying and ignoring me right now, Wylie.”

“Maybe you'll thank me someday.”

“Big doubts on that one.”

“I'll see you in the morning.”

Jolene stood still for a long beat, then waved her blouse at him. She yanked the door shut with a slam that shook the thin modular walls.

Just before dawn, Wylie stepped over her as she lay curled in a sleeping bag outside his door. She giggled. At the end of the hallway, he stopped and looked back at her.

“Have a good day, Wylie.”

“You, too, Jo.”

“Hi to Beatrice and Belle.”

“I'll tell them.”

“You'll get what you deserve, Wylie. Because you're good. I heard you and Jesse out at the barbecue. You'll win that race. And so far as the war goes, Jess told me what happened. I know it was his idea and he started it and lost his courage. So you finished it. For him. And it was a mess and it disgusted both of you. But I'd have done it, too, if the son of a bitch had killed one of my guys. I don't think what you two did was too wrong. You just got carried away. It happens.”

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wylie Welborn is back. I saw him yesterday when I walked past Let It Bean. I was wearing my winter “snow bark” hunter's camo, so he probably didn't even notice me with all the snow on the ground. There he was, as if five years hadn't gone by, behind that counter like he always was, waiting on customers. He fought in Afghanistan, they say. He ski-bummed around the world after that, they say. They also say he's making a run for the Mammoth Cup next winter. They say it's a personal challenge to Sky, thrown down by Wylie in Robert's hospital room in San Francisco. Sky has posts about Wylie all over his social networks. Insults mostly. Wylie Welborn is back and their bad blood has stirred.

But I've learned to regard all information with skepticism, especially whatever comes out of the Welborn clan. I've never spoken to Wylie and have no plans to. I stare hard at him whenever we're in close proximity. Everybody runs into everybody else in a small town like Mammoth Lakes, whether they want to or not. But he's never had the courage to look back. Not once. I'd be afraid of me, too. But from a distance I do like to observe him, the way an epidemiologist might enjoy observing a virus, or a herpetologist a large python.

His mother, Kathleen, on the other hand, I've looked at directly many times. She'll look right back at you, that one. She did a lot of that from the witness stand, all sworn in and somber and ready to give the world her version of what happened to poor Richard Carson. At the time of his shooting, Kathleen was eighteen—another wannabe racer from San Diego, fast down the mountain and fast on her way to being a party girl, too. Those types all got drawn here to Mammoth back then. Or to Squaw or Aspen or Park City or Sun Valley or Jackson. Still do. By the time the trial got going, she was nineteen and her baby had been born. What a difference that year made in her. From snow whore to Madonna with child, in a heartbeat. I will admit that she was an attractive girl back then, and spirited, but without sound judgment. Easy to see what Richard saw in her. But Richard was without sound judgment, too. Thus, all that followed and is still following and will likely follow for many years to come.

I remember Kathleen sitting there in Mono County Superior Courtroom 1, Bridgeport, California, the cliché
of a rosy glow on her, holding that bastard son of hers, rocking him like the gold medal–winning mother she thought she was, tears handy, looking down at me as if I'd robbed her of something that was hers, which I had not. Richard was never not mine. I felt contempt for her. After all, I had problems of my own. Such as the fact I'd lost the love of my life. Don't forget that, lady. In spite of his nonterrific judgment, Richard was more than a onetime inseminator to me. I adored him. There was even a tiny bit of worship in it. I had borne his children. Bore the last one—Sky, with whom I was pregnant on the night of the shooting—in a county jail hospital, where they flubbed the epidural. And let's not forget that I was the one she was helping send to prison. I was the one who wouldn't get to hug my own babies for thirteen years, unless you count hellos and good-byes on weekends and holidays at the Central California Women's Facility down in Chowchilla. You can bet I counted them. They were all I had.

Sounds preposterous, but what I missed most during those years was pushing my children around in strollers. So frustrating to have two children of stroller age and not be able to go outdoors and push them. When I first knew I was going to be a mother, I saw myself rolling the little one around Mammoth Lakes in a snuggly protective shelter, getting him/her outside into the beauty of the world instead of being trapped inside all day, looking up at what—mobiles or the ceiling or at me bending down to make funny noises at him/her? I knew it would bring both me and the baby great pleasure. I got to show Andrea the great outdoors. Then in an eye blink, Robert was three and Sky was an infant, but there were no strollers or sons or daughters in my loud, clanking, institutional world. You cannot imagine how long one day can be in prison. By the time I got out, my children were too big for strollers.

Adam brought Robbie here yesterday, as he said he would. Robbie looks better than he did over in San Francisco. More relaxed. What I see when I look at Robbie is the best of my children, broken by the life he chose to live. Literally, broken. Adam and Brandon and Mike Cook and Hailee Patterson got the hospital bed in here, and the paramedics did all the hookups, and the nurse gave us each printouts of how to care for Robbie, all the dos and don'ts. Like a new exotic pet. A creature from Borneo. It's going to be a full-time job. That's good. Idle hands and all that. I gave them all the latest issue of
The Woolly.

I couldn't wait for them all to leave so I could sit here by his bed and look at Robbie and remember. He was three when they threw me in the hole. I lost thirteen years with my children and I know there is no way to get those years back. What a terrible thought, me outliving Robbie. Maybe he will just … continue to live. Quite a few brain-damaged people do just that. My first goal toward his complete rehabilitation is to get him to move one of his eyelids in response to simple questions. One movement for yes, two movements for no. That is where we will begin.

I am more than pleased to have him here right now. He's not going anywhere and neither am I. Neither are Andrea or Sky. Finally.

 

CHAPTER NINE

Adam sat before the enormous fireplace in his great room, looking southeast down Mammoth Mountain. Looking through the wall of glass, he saw snow dropping off the branches in slow diagonals. Past the trees lay the steep flank of mountain and below the mountain sat the town. Smoke rose from chimneys almost too small to see. Gondolas and lifts climbed and descended. Toy skiers and boarders zigzagged down. Adam's house was perched on recessed caissons sunk into the steep rock, which allowed it to hover out from the mountain like a satellite in space. Some people coming into his home for the first time felt unanchored and afloat. He had actually had guests collapse to their knees with confusion and vertigo upon walking in. The two-track dirt road leading up to it was impassable for six months of the year—sometimes longer—leaving two gleaming silver funicular cars for transportation.

Adam considered the newly expanded Mammoth Racing Committee, seated around the sprawling redwood burl coffee table: Jacobie Bradford III, the regional manager of Gargantua Coffee; Diane Dimeo of Vault Sports; Claude Favier of Chamonix Racing; and Adam's own grandson-in-law, Brandon Shavers, married to Cynthia's daughter, Andrea. Brandon coached the Mammoth freeski team.