This Is How It Really Sounds (45 page)

“I want to kill myself.”

Arnie smiled. “Come on in, you poor bastard. Have a cup of courtesy coffee and a cookie.”

He followed Arnie in through the front door. He needed a nine-sixteenths router bit, which Arnie got for him as he filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee and picked up one of the stale vanilla-crème cookies in the basket. There was a magazine on the counter and it was open to a perfume ad where a woman was sitting in what must have been some sort of fancy limousine, dressed in an evening dress that some guy's hand had hiked up to her thigh. She looked Chinese or Japanese.

Arnie had come shuffling back to the desk with the bit. “What do you think about that?” Arnie said.

He compared her in his mind to his wife. He spoke with a little more finality than he actually felt. “Think I'll stick with the one I've got. This one doesn't look like she's carried a lot of firewood.”

“I don't think she's the firewood-carrying model.”

Harry looked away from it and turned to the door again, lifting the light grabby walls of the Styrofoam cup to his lips. It was really dumping out there. Visibility would be low, but with all this snow, you could just ski by Braille, feeling your way down the slope, moving through the white above and the white below until you got to the trees. He was itching to try out those new reverse-camber fatties Rossignol had sent him. He still had a couple of fans there, older guys, who kept him on the free-skis list. Younger guys not too much, except occasionally he'd get some sort of e-mail from some kid who'd seen a clip somewhere or somebody wanting to interview him about the early days. Every once in a while he'd hear about them using an old clip of him in some sort of retrospective, calling him one of the legends of the sport, stuff like that. Not that any of that mattered: it was a Saturday, there was a foot of the kind of powder that refined your life to something simple and perfect again, and he was down here working. He looked out the glass door toward the mountains, thinking about it.

“Would it really kill you to take the day off?” the old man said behind him, also looking at the snow. “Call in sick.”

“Jim needs the help,” he said. He didn't want to say,
And we need the money.

Arnie wrote the drill bit's code number on a clipboard and put the piece into a little paper bag. Harry remained standing at the counter, miserable, looking for the right words. “These perfect days,” he finally said. “They just destroy me. They come and they go, and I always feel like I've got to grab onto them … And I never can.”

The old man nodded gently. “I'll let you in on a little secret: there's a never-ending supply of perfection out there.”

*   *   *

A couple of the guys were already waiting for him, warming their hands with steaming paper cups. One of them said something about skiing, and Harry forced a mute smile. They were working on a duplex built in the eighties. It was a rot job, his least favorite kind. Nothing constructive about a rot job. You followed it through the walls, cutting and replacing, and when you finally finished, it looked exactly the same as when you started. On top of that, the client usually complained about the cost, because they hadn't expected it to go so far. Like the whole country: who'd have thought the rot went so deep? Wall Street criminals sucking the life out of the place, politicians on the take, corporations running everything. It looked the same on the outside now, but after the collapse it never would be the same again. The curtain had been pulled away and people had seen how things really worked, and instead of revolting, they'd just shrugged and gone on like before. Him included. Said,
Okay, pick this carcass clean.

The guys had the usual garbage on the radio: someone going off about illegal immigrants. Mexicans swarming over the border like rats. Matteo could hear it plain as day, but he didn't say anything, because this was what the crew always listened to. A stealth invasion of the United States. Everybody would have to learn Spanish or be arrested by the government. Harry looked over at Matteo, who was holding a piece of drywall with one hand and screwing it with the other. There was something inward and tense about him. Harry got up and changed the station.

“Hear about what happened with your cousin?”

Riley'd come in from the other room and was standing over him in his black horn-rim glasses, his little eyes swimming crazily behind the thick lenses.

“What cousin are you talking about?”

“Pete Harrington! Of the DreamKrushers! He hammered one of those Wall Street banksters. Just walked up to him on the street, and”—he pantomimed an overhand right—“BOOM! Right in the nose! Dropped him like the sack of shit he is!”

“Really?”

“Yeah! Check this out!” He pulled out his cell phone and began to look for the video.

Harry was still hoping to get a couple of hours of skiing in, if they could at least finish the drywall. “Maybe now's not the best time, Riley.”

Riley ignored him, staring at his phone. “Get this: the bankster is also named Peter Harrington. He was that guy a few years ago, remember? Stole a shit-load of our money in some Wall Street rip-off.”

“What sort of rip-off?”

Riley looked confused. “You know—Wall Street!”

Harry didn't respond, which didn't keep Riley from rolling right along. “So this guy's living in a twenty-million-dollar mansion in Shanghai. On
our money
! We bail 'em out; they go to Shanghai on our dime and live it up. And who do you think pulled the strings on that bailout? Huh?” Riley leaned down to him and said softly, “ZOG,” then nodded his head secretively, knowingly. “Zionist-occupied goddamn government.” The video had finally come up. “Check this out.”

On the tiny screen of Riley's phone, Harry saw a blond-haired man walking down the street, shot from behind. The camera moved around him, and it was undeniably Pete Harrington, the same Pete Harrington he'd met years ago naked in a hot tub. He looked older now, the cheeks were softer, a bit less square and handsome, but definitely that same famous face. He watched him walk up to a slightly chunky man with a large forehead who held his hand out eagerly and said, “I really like your music!” Someone started a table saw in the other room, so he couldn't hear what the musician said in return, but the next event was unmistakable. Pete Harrington stepped forward and punched the man squarely in the nose, and the man staggered back and fell onto his butt, blood streaming down his face. On a human level, he felt sorry for the victim, who looked miserable on the ground. Riley was shouting over the undulating scream of the saw, “… bankster! Living in a twenty-million…”

Harry took the phone in his hands and played it again. This time, the banker's face looked craven and greedy, the embodiment of all the faceless financial scammers who had somehow taken his retirement savings and were gnawing away at the hospital and his insurance and the country itself.

He was sick of it all of a sudden. Sick of Riley's idiot conspiracy theories, sick of the conspiracies he knew existed but that he'd never discover. In Shanghai some guy with his name was living it up in a twenty-million-dollar mansion, and he was working on a Saturday when everywhere else but this rot-filled building was purified and sanctified with deep and perfect snow.

“I left something in my truck,” he said, and he pushed the door open and stepped outside. He didn't really need anything in his truck; it was just that his sense of anguish was too great to be contained in the raw space of the rehab. He looked up at Mount Juneau, its frozen waterfalls bounding down along the rock surface. Higher up, it went white and blended in with the sky. Why couldn't he be up there? He heard a familiar voice say hello to him. He turned to see a medium-sized kid with brown hair and a hooded cotton sweatshirt that said
ALASKA HELI-SKIING
on it. It was Lucas. The responsible one.

“Lucas! What are you doing here? I thought you went with Jarrod and those guys.”

Lucas glanced sideways. “No. They're going all the way up to the Wedding Bowl. I have to be at work at three.”

“The Wedding Bowl? I told him not to go there!”

“So did I. It's gotta be loaded.”

Harry swore quietly.
Fucking Jimmie!
He wanted to kick the crap out of him. “When did they leave?”

“About a half hour ago, I think.”

“Jimmie talk him into this?”

Lucas was silent for a second, then offered, “Jimmie's kind of an idiot.”

“Who else is with them?”

“I think TJ and Brandon went. There's a chute they want to drop out there.” He shrugged. “I told them not to.”

“I know that chute.” He nodded. “Thanks, Lucas.”

He took out his phone and dialed his son, but no one picked up. He was ducking him, or else they'd already headed out. In that case, there would be no reception until his son reached the top of the ridge. Harry Harrington stood there for a half minute looking up at the white streaks of avalanche chutes that had cut their way through the black-green apron of forest. He thought of the people he knew that had been killed in avalanches. Guy, down in Tahoe. Had his skull and spine crushed in a slab avalanche. Rick'd had it even worse down at Mount Baker. He'd been buried seven feet deep and suffocated while they were digging him out. Both of them young, both incredible skiers. It wasn't the mediocre skiers who died in the mountains. It was the ones that had to be there, that had to take a bold line.

Across the channel the trees were crusted all the way to the waterline. The parked cars were a couple of feet deep, disappearing into their winter burial. He thought of Jarrod up there, following Jimmie up to the ridge, then dropping onto that slope. He could call his wife, but he already knew what he had to do. He walked back into the building. The radio was back to that station, and the commentator was going off about gun rights and the government. Riley was cleaning out the hose to the sprayer, and he tapped him on the shoulder. “Something came up. I've got to go. If the boss man comes around, tell him it's an emergency.”

Riley grinned at him. “Don't bullshit me. You're going skiing! I know you too well.”

“Just tell him I had an emergency.” He picked up his thermos and his tool belt and left. Riley'd finally gotten something right.

He climbed into his truck and started home through the narrow streets, block by block, hurrying to each stop sign and then slowing down a bit before rolling through. That idiot Jimmie! Always the troublemaker: getting them busted for pot so Jarrod lost his scholarship, and the time they'd broken the windows in another kid's car, supposedly a joke gone bad. He was reckless, which meant he could ride a little bit faster, go just a little bigger, and that kept his place as king shit of their little tribe. And when he got his stupid ass killed all his friends would sit around and drink beers and talk about how damn brave he was.

His wife was sitting at the kitchen table with her glasses on. He noticed again that she had a little rectangle of gray hair at the top of her scalp. She was trying to save money by spacing out her visits to the hairdresser.

“Hey!” she began pleasantly. “This is a nice surprise!” She noticed something right away. “What are you doing home?”

He glanced over at where his son's shorter, in-bounds board was resting. “Jarrod went up to the Wedding Bowl with Jimmie and his friends.“

“Isn't that dangerous right now?”

He changed his demeanor. He didn't want to worry her. “It's not supersafe. I'm going to catch up with them and tell them to call it off.”

“I thought you were working today.”

“Not anymore.”

He could see her getting alarmed. “Did you try to call him?”

They had a brief, sharp conversation about cell-phone reception and Jimmie and the fact that he'd told Jarrod not to go up there. Then he said, “I've got to get going.”

“Shouldn't we call the state troopers or something? They could send a helicopter.”

“They won't be flying in this weather.” And even if they were, he thought, he'd be looking at a $2,100 bill. “I can catch them. They're only about fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of me, and they won't be in a hurry.”

“I'll go with you.”

Not just talking: she was faster than him on cross-country skis. “No use both of us going. I'll catch them.”

She seemed about to argue with him some more; then she must have seen something in his face. “I'll pack you a sandwich and water while you get your stuff together.”

He went down to the basement, where an orderly assortment of his entire outdoor life hung on the walls, lit by a single fluorescent bulb. One side of the basement had a chunk of gray bedrock sticking up out of the mountain through the floor, right next to the washer and dryer and the big basin sink. Nearly every other space was filled with tools or outdoor gear. Skis of every sort and length were fixed neatly to the walls, along with a coil of climbing rope, ice axes, crampons, snowshoes, fishing rods, yellow rubber rain gear, dark green rubber rain gear, breathable nylon rain gear, rubber boots, chest waders, flotation suits, insulated coveralls, and a small outboard motor. He picked out his backcountry skis and collapsible poles, then fished the climbing skins out of a nylon bag, testing the adhesive with his finger. Not much stickiness left, so he fixed them to his skis with loops of gray duct tape. He put new batteries in his avalanche beacon and packed his probe and shovel into a knapsack, along with a headlamp and a lighter. He hadn't used any of it for a couple of years. No need for a helmet: he wouldn't be on anything steep. His wife had made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and filled a bottle with water. He put everything into the pack and told her the route he was taking to the Wedding Bowl. “I'll call you when I get up to the ridge.” When he walked out the door, a little rush of excitement came over him. He'd shaken loose now. Everything had changed.