Bridge To Happiness (31 page)

He said he learned that hard lesson a long time ago, and he sounded honest about it. He told me who his son’s mother was, a name instantly recognizable because she was supermodel who graced the covers of top magazines for fifteen years and was the famous face of a high end cosmetic campaign.

“I saw her once when we were in Aspen,” I told him. “She’s lovely. Didn’t she marry some British rocker?”

He nodded, laughing. “I have access to good concert tickets for life.”

“Why do you not hit me as the rock concert type?”

“You got me,” he said with that honeyed accent. “I’m a country boy all the way.”

The chairlift was still stalled and we had been dangling there for a long time while the temperature was dropping. Ahead of us, the top of the mountain was covered in a misty white cloud, and the snow had been falling more heavily for the last few minutes. I shook some of it off me and tapped my foot against my board to knock off the accumulating snow.

A shiver ran through me and I wrapped my arms around myself and rubbed my hands together. “I’m beginning to think those last few runs I wanted to take were not such a good idea.”

“Are you cold?” he asked. “Here.” He wrapped his cashmere scarf around me and moved closer, his arm pulling me against his shoulder. I didn’t know whether the instant warmth I felt was from his body or from my embarrassment, but I was less cold, and my flush faded.

He smelled like cinnamon and man. Other than Mike, I hadn’t been close enough to a man to notice a scent for longer than I could remember; it felt strange and provocative at the same time, and I was somewhat uncomfortable with my reaction.

“Better?” he asked me, and I was again aware of the timbre and lilt of that voice, the warmth of him next to me, and the awkwardness I felt or maybe thought I should feel. I wasn’t certain how I was reacting. But I was reacting on some elemental, butterflies-in-the-stomach level.

I looked everywhere but at him. “I wonder how long they’re going to leave us here.”

“I read somewhere once about a ski area on the East Coast where the lift operators went home and left two people on a chair all night.”

“Nice.” I punched his arm. “How very comforting. Luckily I know someone in operations and the ski patrol here checks every chair and gondola on this mountain before they close it down.”

He laughed, and we sat there huddled together in silence, the snow falling now in white sheets and the mountain trail only visible for about fifty feet.

I spotted a skier in a red patrol jacket burst out of the snow cloud and stop below us. “The lift’s broken.” He called up to us. “We’re doing
evacs
.” He then spoke into a radio for a minute.

“Great,” I said looking down. “An
evac
. All these years riding and I’ve never been
evac’ed
. Lucky us, we’re at the lift’s highest point.”

“I was
evac’ed
once years back. They threw a tennis ball with some twine over the cable—”

“Twine? I don’t think so. I weigh more than that.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about. And let me finish . . . ” he said and I could hear the smile in his voice. “They used the twine to pull a heavy duty rope over the cable with a t-bar seat attached to it. We crawled on and they lowered us down. A piece of cake.”

My ego kicked in and I had the horrid thought that it might take a team of men to lower me down. I could hear Phillip now. Remember when they had to use half the ski patrol to lower Mom from that broken down chair lift? I’d be the butt of his joking for a good month, butt being the most telling word.

I looked down toward the ground again.

“Aunt March? Is that you?”

“Jared?” Rob’s son was one of the ski patrol. He was actually my second cousin once removed, only by marriage. But family is family, and age and Cantrell custom dictated we were Uncle Mike and Aunt March since the time our kids could speak, and we had all spent so much time and endless vacations together over the years. “It’s me.”

“Want me to radio Dad?”

“God, no! I’m fine. Just get me out of this chair. It’s cold up here.” Within minutes the patrol was ready for me, so I kicked off my board.

“Look,” my Southern friend said to me with the easy confidence you’d expect from a cowboy. “It’s not going to be so bad.”

Before me was a cable with a strapped seat like on a children’s swing. I lifted the bar and immediately felt his arm around me.

“I’ve got you.” His mouth was next to my ear and his breath was warm.

I grabbed the rope and crawled into the seat and buckled up. As they lowered me to the trail, I waved up at him and realized he had told me about his son and about some of his life, but he hadn’t told me his name.

They lowered me down rather smoothly considering. I was very thankful for both men standing below me as I stepped on solid ground and gave Jared a hug. “Thank you. I don’t want to do that again for a while.”

“How long were you up there?”

I checked my watch. “Over an hour.” I watched as they sent the rope seat back up.

“You need to sign a release,” Jared told me. “Laurie has it over there.”

I wanted to talk to my cowboy friend, but I went over to the girl holding a clipboard, signed the release and she handed me a free pass.

By the time I returned, he was picking up his board. I held out the pass. “We have season passes. You want this?”

He looked at me and flicked his season pass clipped to the pocket of his jacket.

“Maybe for a friend,” I said.

He took it. “Thanks.”

“Can I buy you a drink? To thank you,” I added, lamely.”

He checked his watch and dropped his board on the snow. “I’ve got to be somewhere. New Years Eve,” he said, stepping into his bindings. “If I take you up on that drink I’m gonna be late.”

“Okay, “I said brightly and held out my hand. “Thanks.”

He took my hand and held it for longer than normal. “Any other time I would have taken that drink in a heartbeat,” he said and winked at me. He lowered his goggles and took off down the run.

After a second or two I called out, “Wait!”

He skidded to a stop at the berm of the run and looked back up at me, not lifting his goggles.

“I don’t know your name.”

“Rio,” he said, and waved before he took off down the run, his voice echoing back to me with that Texas lilt. “Rio Paxton.”

I watched him disappear around a curve and just stood there frozen like an idiot, board tucked under my arm, my hand on his scarf still around my neck. Rio Paxton. No wonder he looked familiar.

Rio Paxton wrote his first number one country hit at age seventeen. At eighteen, he was performing on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. When he was twenty, the Country Music Association gave five different country star performers, duos, and groups coveted awards for recording the songs Rio Paxton wrote. Just in time to celebrate his twenty third birthday, he wrapped up an extended tour of the US and most of Europe, playing to packed venues and sell-out shows.

Stardom reached out and locked him in vertiginous arms, and after a few more riotous years passed by in a blur, the booze, the drugs and women all caught up with him—along with a few nights in jail after public brawls and some talk of tax problems. His career was badly damaged from the influence of a trail of
wanna-bes
and bootlickers around him only for the prestige and free drugs, using him to create their own identities, until his reputation had crumbled into nothing but dust as fine as the dry red clay of West Texas.

Rio Paxton had been too young to see it all coming, too green to read insincerity in the bright lights, star shine and hypnotic lures of fame, and the demands of a wolverine industry that devoured the naïve and sucked the talent from the pith of their bones, leaving behind scorched and hollow human beings.

Before he was close to thirty, he was already washed up—a fallen star that burned out fast, barely a man—just that same thirteen year old kid from West Texas, who picked up an old guitar one lonely day and discovered he loved to sing.

His downfall had been public enough for me to remember it even now with some sense of pity and waste, like standing there and watching a tornado rip through a town. A disaster was happening and there was nothing you could do to stop it.

The charming innocence he had when he first hit it big disappeared painfully fast. Once his songs had crossed over into pop music and were played on all the radio stations, he won Grammys and American Music Awards along with his string of CMA awards.

Mike and I had seen Rio perform at one of the old casinos show rooms at the peak of his popularity, and I remembered him walking on stage with a guitar strapped over his shoulder, dressed in cowboy boots and tight jeans, a simple plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a black hat low over his eyes as if he had something to hide.

But unlike so many other singers, the hat didn’t stay hiding his eyes from the audience. For the first few songs, before he was joined by his band, he sat on a wooden stool in the center of the stage, one boot heel caught on the rung and he pushed the hat back, exposed to everyone in that crowded room.

On stage he had been a humble young man with a voice like melted butter and brown sugar, who talked to the audience between songs and could make you cry when he sang about Texas or his mother.

But that had been a lifetime ago.

Later that night, as I sat with my family taking up three tables in the casino lounge, waiting for the ten o’clock show, Rio Paxton and what I knew of his history was on my mind. I honestly hadn’t known he was playing at the casino tonight. The idea for us to hit a show belonged to my sons, after we all had a late dinner at
Ciera
, and like a lamb to slaughter I followed them to another casino, and the room behind the lounge bar, where to my surprise a big sign out front of velvet ropes showed Rio’s picture and listed the special show times for New Year’s Eve. There had been an early show, and then a three hour break, so I understood then why he’d left the mountain.

A cocktail waitress placed our drinks in front of us just as the house lights dimmed and the stage lights grew brighter. One set of red curtains opened to reveal a single wooden stool, and he walked on stage, guitar slung on a shoulder, wearing boots and dark jeans, shirtsleeves rolled up, an older more weathered version of the man I had seen perform that night so many years back.

Maybe it was the board clothes that made me not recognize him. No cowboy hat or jeans, but then my first thought when he spoke to me was that he should have been dressed the way he was.

Maybe it was senility. But he sang in those rich caramel tones I remembered, a song about bright city lights and a young cowboy. That song had shot to number one, broken chart records, and made Rio Paxton a name everyone recognized.

As he sang, his gaze scanned across the audience before he looked back down at his guitar resting on a bent knee, then hit another verse and raised his eyes to look in our direction. I knew the moment he saw me because his gaze didn’t move on. I smiled. He didn’t.

My heart jumped to my throat. Oh . . . no . . . .what if he thought I was stalking him? I wasn’t quite old enough to be his mother, but I was an older woman who he had happen-chanced to sit with on a chair lift, a whack job who tried to set him up with her daughter and didn’t have the good sense or memory to recognize who he was.

I felt like I was getting into a bad place mentally, so I sipped my drink and tried to listen to the music and let go of my feelings and my thoughts and concerns about how I had looked to him. He was merely someone who had been kind to me, but who I didn’t know. A sweet man. Frankly, I was really getting too old to care about what people thought of me.