Violation (33 page)

     
Falling

MY BROTHER, BRUCE, STILL CALLS ME
“
SIS
”
AND SOMETIMES
“baby sister,” but we don't see much of each other. For a long time we've been gradually drifting—if not apart, then into an accommodation of being apart.

We are both a bit skittish, abrupt, a little profane. Sometimes our conversations feel like the wrestling matches we used to have—fun, but a little painful. I call him, but he isn't good on the telephone. His voice rises and falls, the phone in his hand half-forgotten as he throws a ball for his dog or tells my nephew to go do his homework. He comes back to me all at once, demanding, “What?” In the photos I've managed to snap over the years, he is almost always frowning at the camera or making a face.

When he has to come to the hated city and renew a few of his many licenses, he stays with me. He limps up the steps and throws open the heavy front door. “Sis!” he shouts, dropping his small suitcase and slapping my shoulder hard.

We open a bottle of wine and he props his tattered right knee on a pillow. Broad and strong and fighting his weight like everyone in our family, he fills a room.

“Totaled the Beemer on Christmas Eve.” He is breezy. “James and me, we spun out on black ice going up the mountain. Thirty-five years I've been driving that road, never hit ice like that. But the Beemer did what it was supposed to—nobody hurt.”

Now wait one damned minute here. That BMW was one of his most prized possessions. He totaled it? With James, my twelve-year-old
nephew? On the
mountain
, in ice? Not to mention that he hasn't had steady work for a couple of years and had to let all the insurance lapse.

“My big regret, I just filled the gas tank. Now
that's
gone.”

We drink for a while.

I ask him about the knee, about the next operation, put off with the insurance.

“I mostly drag my right leg around behind me,” he says.

“Does it hurt when you ski?” I ask, watching him lounge on my couch like a king, head back on a pile of quilted pillows. He glances at me, like it's a stupid question. And of course it is; I can see the scars from across the room.

“It hurts right now, sitting here,” he says.

For a long time, as most people do, I've nurtured a seed of doubt about my place in others' hearts. In all other hearts. Sometimes I find myself being careful around Bruce, afraid to upset him, because I can't take him for granted. His most abbreviated comments echo and sing to me; a single name or phrase evokes a world. But between siblings, there are no vows, no contracts. No promises. It is so goddamned dangerous to love somebody.

Bruce worked more than twenty-five years as a skier of one kind and another. The walls of his house are covered with pictures of him upside down in space, skis akimbo, flipping off lethal cornices over canyons of snow. Bruce can read snow—layer by layer, its crystal language. He knows when a cornice wants to fall, when a side of the mountain is turning to avalanche. He is trained to handle explosives; for years, it was his job to stand at the edge of a crevasse on skis and toss dynamite into a few hanging tons of ice. He is trained in emergency medicine and rope rescue and can fix a ski lift. He's won several gold medals in the Ski Patrol Olympics. For a while, his job title was mountain manager.

Summers were for construction jobs and river trips. He can run whitewater, so there are photos of him in the rapids too, in boats tossed like autumn leaves. He can handle Zodiacs and portage rafts along a cliff. He has a Coast Guard Master Marine license,
so he can run bigger boats in open water. He loves fishing and rivers, but his life was about snow. Then the knee went, and the other knee, and it was the end of all that. He still works a little on ski patrol, keeping his hand in, but the legs aren't up for more than that. Mostly he gets by as a part-time fishing guide in Alaska, scraping through the winters the way he used to scrape through summer.

We drink some more, and he tells me a few stories I've never heard before—harrowing accidents, close calls. Some are old stories, from our stupid kid years. Finally I have enough of listening. I pull up my pants leg and show him a little scar I'd gotten from being banged on some rocks in the surf. He answers with a long jagged line on his calf, and then we are both pulling up our shirtsleeves and yanking down our pants, bending over to point at the marks left behind.

I WAKE UP
in a room blurry with dawn. Strange light. The room is fogged and soft, and I know it is snowing. The whole world is falling in snow, the kind of snow that is without beginning—without end. I barely move, coy under the blankets with all the time in the world. And then I jump out into the cold room and fling up the blinds and holler for my brother.

Later Bruce and I make angels in the dry, sibilant snow. Our padded limbs swish in rhythm, whispering. The shattered sky falls like ash, covering me in tiny scraps of white. I can hear the puffs of impact all around me. It covers me, it covers my brother an arm's length away, a new world covering the broken world, leaving us safe and clean and cold.

We grow up in a small town in a high, dry valley braced by mountains. He is two years older, but we look so much alike that we pass for twins, spend that much time together. Summer is clear and hot, and we live outside as much as in—soaring hours spent in fields and vacant lots, clambering over boulders and climbing into the great cups of maple trees. Winter is clear and cold. We do everything in the snow but ski—skiing is pricey beyond words. So we slide down the hills on battered silver discs and patched-up
inner tubes, shooting recklessly through the trees. We build snow forts and snow caves and snow houses. We stuff snow down our little sister's shirt so she cries and goes home and can't tell Mom we're going into the culvert where we aren't allowed.

Our mother teaches fifth grade at the elementary school and our father teaches industrial arts at the high school. He fixes televisions and radios on the side, in a cluttered shop behind our house, where the tools hang on pegboards in careful wax-pencil outlines. Dad is a volunteer fireman; all the able-bodied men in town are expected to volunteer. He drinks, more and more with each year, but he takes to driving the trucks, training other men. We grow up around policemen and firemen and ranchers—people who can fix things and build things, people who aren't afraid of weather or work. People who run into burning buildings without looking back.

At two, at four, at eight years of age, I stare at the Polaroid camera my mother holds. I look at her as though she is under a microscope. Bruce, beside me, a little taller, grins stiffly. He is the oldest, he is the only boy, so he is getting the lessons I can't have—how to use tools, build things, fix things. My father is an unsparing man, and he teaches with sudden slaps upside the head. Bruce is learning fast.

My grandparents own a small cabin on a big river, and sometimes we go up for days with boxes of groceries and books. We spend our days on the water, with little supervision. I like to swim across the wide, steady river to the sandy shelf under the cliff—swim with the unflagging, graceless stroke of a strong child, the slow current tugging against me, pushing back. I can feel the cold pull of the deeper, darker water beneath. Sometimes Dad drives us a few miles up the river in the back of the pickup and drops us off with our inner tubes to float back.

One day, when Bruce is almost twelve and I am just nine, we keep going past the cabin, around the blind curve of canyon wall where we are not allowed to go. We dip through a few shallow whorls and rocky turns, and then suddenly we're caught in a narrow slot of white water, real rapids. I still remember only froth and foam, the power of it, falling, and then a hazy view back up
a small waterfall we had somehow ridden down. I sit huddled on the rock where Bruce has dropped me after pulling me up from the bottom of the pool by my hair, the way he'd been taught in his junior lifesaving course.

I've lost my shoes. We walk back on the road, its sharp gravel biting my feet. Water runs in trickles down my thighs. We walk through thirsty sunlight, the breathless air suddenly cool under the pines. We walk in silence down the dusty road, carrying our secrets together. Then: “Don't tell Mom,” he says. And I nod. Telling Dad never occurs to either of us.

TELLING THE TRUTH
is a lot like telling lies, in the end. It is all just stories; like snow falling, they cover everything up. Family, for most of us, includes lifelong agreements about what is not said. Certainly the heart of my family is a maze of agreements, the main one being not to speak of things. At ten years, at twelve, at fourteen, I meet the camera with a mocking half smile, with scorn. Bruce gazes toward the horizon like Captain America. The fear of humiliation and the need for self-reliance is strong in us both, driving us differently. He wants to be perfect; he is taking lessons in it. I want the lessons too, but not the grades—not the snicking of the leather belt as our father pulls it off his waist and wraps it twice around his meaty hands.

I discover books and theater and politics and trouble, and he finds football and gymnastics. I can't fight fires or use a table saw, so I do more dangerous things. I ride motorcycles with men I meet in the park. I talk back at the dinner table. Bruce wins his varsity letter, and I start writing manifestos to my English teachers.
Truth
is what I insist on telling. I call it
speaking up
—words flying from my young mouth, flying up, filling the sky.

Right after graduation, Bruce leaves on a gymnastics scholarship to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, eight thousand feet high in the Rockies. He shaves his head, learns to handle a rifle, marches for hours. He goes skiing for the first time. He never takes a lesson—just pushes off and flies.

While Bruce spit-polishes his shoes, his very short romance with the military already over, I am getting kicked out of English class. When I am sixteen I quit high school before they can fire me, and somehow talk myself into early admission at the college one state border and a world away from home. After a year, Bruce quits the academy and joins me. There is a little of Captain Kirk now, a nerd with cool depths. He lets his hair grow and falls in with a gang of ski bums who cut classes and head up the mountain whenever they can cadge enough gas money together. My father tears the Air Force Academy bumper sticker off his truck and won't speak to him.

When I leave college to test my ideas about truth and beauty in a commune, Bruce finds his way to the Rockies and begins to study snow in earnest. Each morning, he wakes up to the cold, bright Colorado sky, and skis straight from his apartment steps to the slopes. He skis his last run to the door of the restaurant where he washes dishes and chops vegetables each evening. Late at night, he skis home, under sulfurous streetlights. In the cones of light, snowflakes swirl, blinking in and out like shadows, extinguished when they touch the earth.

THE WRITER PETER
Stark describes how winter saved him: how, at a time when his life was out of control, he was able to use its canvas to “spread out the chaos that was once my life and assemble something that I hope approaches grace.” We learn to walk by falling; we learn to relax into gravity until we dance with it. Skiing is just another way to fall, and dance. In the inhuman snows of the high mountains, there is not much more one can do; surrender is your only choice.

A few years ago, Bruce came to the city to receive an award for some outrageously complicated rescue involving ropes and winches and a whole night in the snow, and we went to a banquet room and ate bad chicken at big round tables with police and firemen and people who run toward what most people flee.

I'm comfortable underwater, in hospitals, in strange cities where I don't speak the language. But I can barely swing a hammer.
I don't like being cold, and I'm scared of heights. People like my brother, my father, the men and women who speak this language of physical skill and risk sometimes seem like creatures from another time, made for battle and repair. Listening to their laconic, tech-laden slang, I can be stung by remorse, by that old, familiar wish—that I had become someone else. That I had done things differently all along.

There is something painfully obvious about it all, this overcompensation, this hoarding of skill. We've both done it; we've collected our gold stars, become experts in our fields, worked as professional helpers—that group a therapist might say has issues. Some lessons I never seem to learn. I sent a copy of each of my books to my father. He never mentioned them, and when I finally asked, he told me he didn't have time to read.

One day, Bruce takes me up to the top of his mountain. He leads me away from the lift and the runs, to a line of closure ropes at the top of the steepest bowl. He skis without poles, moves like a dancer. Directly below us is a glaciated cirque, a smooth plane dropping far away, an ocean of white.

“No way!” I say—almost shouting.

Bruce laughs, then gets a look at my face and stops smiling. “If you start to slide, turn your feet downhill,” he says. “Dig your elbows in and keep your head down.” Then he grins and throws his arms wide, taking in the slope, the trees, the whole damned mountain. “Hey, Sis! You just have to ask yourself—what could
possibly
go wrong?”

OUR MOTHER IS
dead for many years when Dad dies, a few days before Christmas in the middle of a snowstorm. The day of his funeral is calm and clear, and many of the town's firemen come in dress uniform. One stands in each corner of the room during the service, holding bells, and at the end, they ring the signal for firemen returning to the station. Then the big red ladder truck leads the hearse to the cemetery.

We are left with four houses, two workshops, a garage, and
the debris of many whiskey-laden years. Three of the houses are rentals in various states of repair, and the house where we were raised is reduced to narrow pathways through mazes of piled-up newspapers, books, clothes, laundry, and box after unlabeled box. Our sister lives in town and is the executor of the estate; she finds missing stock certificates, lost photographs, and a few hefty, long-expired checks in the detritus. But months later, Bruce and I decide it's really our turn, and make a date to tackle the garage, the final piece.