This Is How It Really Sounds (44 page)

And then there was Jimmie, a reckless half-wit who'd already been busted for drunk driving and was the one kid in Jarrod's little gang that Harry had never liked. He was slick even in grade school, always in the middle of the problem and always with a good excuse for why it was someone else's fault. He could ride, though: he'd won a bunch of big-mountain competitions and had been in some movies pulling double corks off sixty-foot cliffs: stuff they hadn't even invented back in Harry's day. He'd shown up on the cover of a magazine last year going huge in Valdez, and that seemed to cement his position as leader of the pack whenever he was in town. With Jimmie there calling the shots any jackass stunt was possible.

“Yeah,” he looked to the side before he spoke, gathered himself. “I wouldn't go out there today. The lee side of the ridges are going to be wind-loaded, and there's still that layer of glazed snow that all this lighter stuff is sitting on. Wait a few days for the snow to consolidate, then hit No Name, or whatever it is.”

“We'll all have avalanche gear.”

“Does that include a backhoe? Because if I was buried under ten feet of snow I'm not sure I'd want to bet my life on how fast Jimmie could dig me out with his little aluminum shovel.”

His son hesitated before trying to negotiate. “How about, we go check it out, and if it's too unstable, we'll come back.”

“After a two-hour climb you're just going to turn around again? I don't give Jimmie credit for that much brains.”

“We're not talking about Jimmie; we're talking about me!”

He backed off. A little too vehement there. A little too Dad. He brightened up. “Why don't you guys ride in-bounds today? The powder's going to be awesome. Or go set up jumps on the backside of the Ridge, like you were talking about.”

“We've been up there a thousand times. Nobody's ever dropped No Name.”

“Yeah, well…” His son was glaring at him. He was nineteen now, barely stopping in at the house to sleep. He didn't have too many direct orders left. He said flatly, “You're not dropping it today.”

Jarrod went back to his board without answering, and his father took that as acquiescence. He was a sensible kid.

The oatmeal was bubbling now, and he went over to the stove and slid it off the burner. “I made a little extra, if you want—”

“I said I'm good!”

“Hey!” He quieted his voice again and said, “You're going skiing. I'm going to swing a hammer all day. On a Saturday.” He mixed in some raisins and walnuts, then added some more butter, just in case. Maybe he'd go up in the afternoon and do a few runs, if he finished up in time. He always told himself that.

He looked at his watch. “Shit! I'm late!” He put on a jacket and a hat and brought the bowl of oatmeal with him. When he stepped out the door, his foot sank into ten inches of new powder. Light snow. God's-grace kind of snow, covering up the dog shit and the litter and making the world fresh and perfect. He stopped there, paralyzed, as an agonizing remorse swept over him. In that moment his whole life felt useless and defeated. He should be up there, where it was white, angelic. Instead, he was going in to work.

He looked up into the woods behind his house. The forest floor was covered under the lumpy cushion of fresh snow, leaving only the dark gray bark of the hemlocks rising out of it in columns. He could imagine coming down the mountain and doing a perfect tree run, cutting into his neighbor's backyard, and then popping off that little roller between the two houses, landing it in the street and spraying a big rooster tail right into the back of his truck. He'd done that before, a long time ago, when it was deep like this. Did it with Guy, flailed through waist-deep snow for an hour and a half just for a one-minute run, and Mother had met them at the door with a cup of cocoa in a blue-enameled tin cup. He remembered the metal hot against his lips. Must have been twelve. Didn't worry about avalanches back then.

He thought of the boy again, then turned back to the house and walked in as far as the entry to the living room, still carrying the bowl of steaming oats. Jarrod had gotten his short board out and was smoothing wax on it with the iron. The big board was leaning against the wall next to the basement door. His son kept smoothing the wax, silently, but Harry felt a wave of gratitude and affection for him. “Thanks, Jarrod. When conditions are better, you want to do that chute, I'll go with you. Maybe I'll do it myself.”

Jarrod didn't answer, and Harry started again, “Hey, I said when conditions are better—”

His son cut him off. “I got it, Dad. Go eat your oatmeal.”

He clenched his jaw and went out again. Across the street, his pickup was softened by a thick cake of snow. He'd grown up in this house, knew every board and shingle on this street the way he knew every pillow and turn on his favorite runs. The Caspersons had lived in that green house back when it had been white, then the Sundquists, who had the palsied kid, then the Heberts and that young couple who he never got to know. Now it was Rajiv and his family. He could do that with every house on Kennedy Street, like he was lazing down a not-particularly-difficult line whose gullies and drops descended through the last forty years. He was a local, not just to the town or this neighborhood, but to this southern block of Kennedy Street.

He brushed the snow off the windshield and the hood with wide, sweeping strokes. The flecks of white floated slowly away in the still air. He'd always said he'd never go to work on a Saturday if there was fresh powder. That in itself was a fallback from when he used to say he'd never go to work on a powder day, period. Punk kid talk. Now here he was. Put in five days at the hardware store, and now this. His brother-in-law was behind on the project, and he wanted to help out, and he damn sure needed the extra money after that stock-market mess. His father had been a partner in the hardware store, had taught him enough about the business to give a sense of inevitability to his life, no matter how long he tried to duck it on the meager circuit that had existed for extreme skiers back then.

Not that there had been anything glamorous about it. He remembered the hotel rooms with cheap wood paneling, the beater cars and the sponsors who were always nickel-and-diming him about gas receipts and bar tabs. In a great year, he earned five thousand dollars and spent the other six months working construction or fishing out of Bristol Bay. Not too much glory, either: nobody was famous except for the little cloud of notoriety that hovered among a small circle of skiers at each mountain, something you saw in the eyes of people helping with the event or sitting around a wooden table in some tavern at the end of the day. That was the nature of being the best in a sport nobody cared about, but it never occurred to him that he was missing anything. Other people had jobs, while he was paid to live in a world of pure motion that came rushing up in front of him and dropped away behind in a single, continual moment. A single moment that became a single day, that became a single winter of snow and velocity and fire. But now, years later, that moment was gone.

He wished his wife were around. She'd settle him down with something like,
That's what puts food on the table!
Or,
Don't worry, honey, there'll be more snow tomorrow.
But she wouldn't be home from the hospital for another hour. They were making her work half shifts on Saturdays, which they both hated, but with the staff cutbacks she had to fill in until they could get things back on course. Wasn't supposed to be like that. She was supposed to have seniority. But nobody had seniority under the new ownership, and all hands were on deck.

At forty-four, she was still a good-looking woman. A little more curvy, a little more weight settled down to her butt, but still a desirable woman, by any standards. At his age, he could appreciate someone more rounded. When he was young, he'd been looking for the hard bodies, the muscular women with no fat, and she'd been one of those. Straight blond hair, moved up from Colorado. Typical kind of Swedish blonde, right out of a magazine. But educated. Graduated college. Her father was an architect in Denver and didn't hide the fact that he thought she was marrying down. He could still remember meeting her at the Alaskan, when she'd been sitting around a table with a couple of her friends and a couple of his, and Dave had shouted, “Wreckage!” as he walked up to the table, then congratulated him on his win at Valdez. The kind of introduction a buddy gives you when he wants to make you look good. “Wreckage” was playing everywhere back then, when he was twenty-five. For a while he'd had that as a nickname, because his given name was Peter and because he skied so fast and wrecked so hard, on those rare occasions when he wrecked.

“What did you win?” she asked him when he sat down. Not much, he told her, because it wasn't much. Four hundred bucks and a beer mug. A couple of free rides in a helicopter. That was the prize for being the best in those days. That, and having a good opening line in the bars.

“I mean, what did you win
at
?”

He'd shrugged. “Put fifty guys up on a mountain and see who takes the most outrageous line down, give him marks for style, and if you're just a little crazier than the rest and all your arms and legs still work at the bottom, you win four hundred bucks and a beer mug.”

But actually, the secret prize was much more than that. The secret prize was, you got the girl. The secret prize was, you could do it, and very few others could. The secret prize was something you couldn't explain. Glory, maybe. Not fame, because fame required a lot of people knowing, and they could know something silly or shallow; just the fact of a million people knowing it made it fame. But glory was what a few others knew or just you knew—that you had done something extraordinary and courageous and that fear hadn't stopped you. It was true. It was real.

So he'd gotten the girl. Charmed her, wowed her, bedded her, married her. Sat with her through two labors right in his own house, in the same bedroom where his father had been born. Fought about how to raise the kids: her always too soft, him too strict, but so far they'd turned out pretty good. Great kids that would be great people when they grew up. Yeah, that was the real prize, he guessed.

A song came on the radio, and the familiar voice turned the prize into vapor and whisked it away. Some song about Shanghai. It was a voice he associated with his “spin through Hollywood.” He always called it that because naming it seemed to pin the whole thing in place and make it less painful. Back when he'd been competing, Pete Harrington had the life every young man wished he could live: with rock star money and rock star girls, while all he had was rocks and snow and the occasional girl. He'd met him that time at the end of all that talk about liquor endorsements and stunt-double roles, and for a few days it had looked like Pete Harrington was going to usher him into a bigger, shinier life. Then there was the accident, and his life had shrunk back down to something small and usual. What it was now.

He turned off the radio.

The snow was falling all around him. He was working today because his wife wasn't making the money she used to at the hospital. The city had sold it off to some big company, and if you didn't want to work on their terms they could darn sure find somebody from down south who would. That, and the fact that he'd lost most of their retirement chasing hot stock tips from the “pros” on Wall Street.

It still hurt him to remember those days. He'd thought he was so smart, and everybody else was so ordinary. Getting up at 4
A.M.
for market opening back in New York, like he knew what he was doing. A couple of wins, then the first losses, then more losses. Always some new “disrupting” product or business model that was going to get all their savings back for him. And none of them did. Finally having to tell his wife. It was the only time he'd ever made her cry.

According to Riley, the electrician, it had all been rigged from the get-go. The whole thing had been planned out by ZOG—Zionist-occupied government. ZOG was the culprit. All those guys on Wall Street were Jews, and the bankers and the head of the Federal Reserve. Of course, Riley was full of shit about a hundred other things; no reason why he'd start getting it right on this one.

He needed a new drill bit, so he drove the four blocks to the hardware store. He got out of his truck and stood for a moment in the parking lot, looking up at Mount Juneau, whose two-thousand-foot cliffs rose behind the town. When he'd left the house, it had been visible, but now the thick snow clouds had come in and spirited it away within a white fog, like a magician's silk curtain.

Arnie saw him pull up and met him at the door. Arnie was his dad's old partner and owned half the business. At the age of eighty-nine Arnie still liked to come in and putter around, and Harry could understand that. Harry felt good in the old store; it was a place that implied that everything could be repaired. Whether it was marine epoxy or a timberlock-beam screw, somehow there was a way to put together anything that got broken, refurbish things that were worn out, and even if they didn't look shiny and new, they would still work.

Arnie was a little guy, partial to Pendleton wool shirts in red and black plaid, with the traces of a Norwegian accent from his Petersburg parents. He was a Viking skier of the old school, and even now you could see him up on the mountain on the best days in spring, slowly and carefully making his way down the groomed runs, stiff, a little bit hunched, but still skiing. He never wore a helmet. He'd survived Monte Cassino and the Battle of the Bulge, he said. He didn't think he had a hell of a lot left to fear from winter.

“Harry! Didn't expect to see you today! I thought for sure you'd be up skiing.”

The remark went through him like a dagger. “I'm helping Jim out. He's behind on a job.”

The old man looked up at what could be seen of the mountains. “Must be some job.”