This Is How It Really Sounds (49 page)

He hesitated as he tried to get to the heart of it. “Some things aren't worth doing. They look shiny and they impress people, but they're stupid. That chute's one of them. You want to do something? Get big air. Fly. Rip some five-thousand-foot line and make it look pretty. Go do something”—he looked for the right word, the unlikely word—“beautiful.”

None of the boys answered. They stood in the silence, and the word hung there awkwardly, holding them.

“So what are you going to call it?” Jimmie finally said.

He'd forgotten about naming rights. He looked toward the chute, but it had disappeared now in a bundle of mist, so he could only imagine it back there, a lightning-shaped fissure of black stone pointing at the sky. “I'm not going to call it anything,” he said. “It just is.”

Behind them, the clouds were starting to lose their light. “We'd better get going,” he said, and without another word they pointed their boards back over their tracks and glided down the ridge and into the secret, quiet forest.

*   *   *

Peter Harrington had been lucky to land, they told him. Most of the other flights had cancelled without ever leaving Seattle, and a couple had left Seattle only to bounce back and forth between Anchorage and Sitka without ever getting into Juneau. The snow was heavy and all the small-plane traffic between Haines and Juneau was grounded, something he'd never counted on as a possibility. There were no roads in this part of Alaska, and the next ferry north was in two days. It suited him.

He was going to a small town north of Juneau called Haines, the seat of a famous heli-skiing operation, where skiers were dropped at the top of big mountains and navigated their way down endless runs of spines and glaciers. The real reason he'd chosen Haines was that he couldn't admit to himself that he'd gone all the way to Alaska with the vague idea of skiing with someone he'd spent twenty minutes with two years ago. Now, if he found him at his hardware store, he could say,
I was going up to Haines to do some heli-skiing. I thought I'd stop by
. His name was Harry. That was all he knew about him. He might not see him at all. Now that he was here, it wasn't that important. When he left Juneau, he would go on to Haines, and then maybe he would leave Haines and go on to Anchorage, then farther north, or farther west, to a succession of places that got smaller and more lost until the whole idea of Peter Harrington disappeared. When he reached the end, he'd go visit his son.

His intention of kicking around tiny towns in Alaska in winter was aimless and weird, but Camille had encouraged him, for reasons that were intuitive to the point of nonsense and that he couldn't resist. On the night before he left, they slept together, which left him more confused about her than ever. He knew he didn't really live in Shanghai anymore. He didn't feel he lived anywhere.

For some reason, as he dropped down into the dark, hostile landscape of Alaska, he sensed he'd come to the right place. The taxi driver took him to a hotel owned by the local Native corporation, and he checked in beneath the gaze of wooden masks and strangely shaped blankets woven into eyes and beaks. For a moment the girl at the front desk seemed to recognize him, and he thought she was going to say something to him, but she finally dismissed it, or decided to keep it to herself. The snow was still falling outside, and he left his things in his room and went out to look around. Maybe tomorrow he'd ask where the hardware store was, but it didn't seem that important anymore.

The town was a warren of narrow one-way streets climbing upward toward the soaring two-thousand-foot cliffs that boxed it in on the land side. The low wooden buildings that lined the sidewalk retained the resonance of the gold rush that had put the town on the map. Christmas lights were still sprinkled in most of the windows, and on the wooden awnings and on the light posts. He passed Juneau Drug and the Ben Franklin five-and-dime, the kind his mother would have shopped at fifty years ago, passed the florist and the bookstore and several modest law offices near the small stately capitol building. Behind the town, he'd read, were miles and miles of ice fields, so the tiny city was closed off from the rest of the world.

It was incredibly beautiful here. The vertical faces of the mountains were covered with frozen waterfalls that dropped a thousand feet, and above them his eye instinctively followed the steep, rounded fields of snow until they disappeared into the white fog. He had coffee at a café and watched the people come in and greet each other, flecks of snow on their shoulders and their hats. He had a second coffee at another place and did the same thing. The citizens dressed simply, in nylon rain jackets and rubber boots, but interspersed with them were the suits and ties of the lawyers and lobbyists who were working the little capitol a few blocks away. Even the politicians looked small-town, like they'd stepped out of an old movie. He imagined people's errands and jobs, their cars parked along the snowy street, and the homes they would return to. The children and the dinner pots, the dogs in their favorite spots, the wet boots, the damp coats hung up by the door. All those half-imagined worlds.

*   *   *

By three thirty in the afternoon, the sky was dim already. He walked a few short blocks to the sea and wandered into a restaurant that had giant windows facing down the channel. Mountain after mountain sprang out of the black water, and he stared at the hypnotic view. He ordered a cup of coffee and a BLT. A couple of older men were sitting at a booth with a pot of coffee between them, talking something over in serious tones, and he could tell from their expressions that if he lived there and knew the people it would be of the utmost importance. Something about an avalanche blocking the road to somewhere and how you'd have to be crazy … It was good talk. Meaningful talk. He'd arrived at this strangely perfect place that filled him with a sense of well-being for no reason he could understand. A waitress with a pierced nose poured his coffee into a thick white mug with two green pinstripes and said the sandwich would be out in a minute.

Shanghai felt irretrievably far away now. It was as if he wasn't that person anymore, that financier. He was just a person in a small town in the distant north surrounded by mountains and snow, and nobody knew his name. What he'd regarded as his greatest accomplishment now felt petty and vague, not something he could measure his life with, or anyone else's. It seemed a bit silly, when you got right down to it. A fool's errand he'd sent himself on, thinking it was some sort of quest. The mountain was massive, the mountain was mist. But at the bottom of the mountain was the town, and in the town were a thousand other lives, ten thousand, each of them alive and ever changing. Ten thousand far-off countries, ten thousand daydreams. Ten thousand mysterious journeys.

It was night now, at 4:30. He decided, without really thinking about it, to simply walk up. He followed Seward Street to Fifth, then walked along it toward the mountain. He heard the rubbery whine of tires spinning against the snow, the beeping of the snowplow as it backed up and then scraped forward. As he approached the mountain, it got steeper, and the street ended at a stairway that went much higher, overhung by a single streetlight and the snowy branches of trees. He paused at the bottom of it and looked upward, but he couldn't see beyond the light. He looked backward, and up again, then set his foot on the first metal tread and began to climb. After seven or eight flights he reached another street.

It was a tiny neighborhood tucked away in a cleft in the mountain. All around it crouched the forest. The houses here were small and old and wooden, and some of them had stacks of logs split and piled beneath their eaves or their porches. The street was closed to traffic in the winter, and the children had turned it into a sledding hill. There were a half dozen of them, boys and girls, hurling themselves facedown onto slabs of slippery foam or plastic saucers. They had made a jump and were endlessly refining it with a shovel, building it up and patting it down, all with tremendous energy and purpose. He watched them run and slide, and though they were sliding at a modest speed, he knew that to them, with their noses just above the snow, it felt fast, as fast as a sports car or a ski run, as fast as a private jet. He listened to their boasts and their happy squeals, and he had the sense again of a life that had eluded him. The smell of wood smoke, the idea that in each of these houses was a mother or father cooking dinner, a warm stove, the ties to friends who had seen each other fail and succeed, where success didn't mean amassing eight hundred million dollars but buying a house, cooking a turkey that didn't dry out, building a deck, seeing your letter to the editor in the morning paper with your own name in black print. The air was dark blue here, the lights in the windows buttery and rich. In one of these houses there was probably a wife who suited him: Someone intelligent. Someone nice. He'd walk in and she'd be at the stove in an apron—no! She'd be sitting reading a magazine with a sweater on that had a few wood chips clinging to it from the firewood she'd just chopped. A wife eagerly waiting for him, filled with news of the day and waiting to hear his own report.

He could make out some skis leaning up against someone's porch railing, beside a snowboard and a sled. He walked toward the house. Some of the children were watching him: they said
Hi, Mr. Harrington,
and he said hello to them.

He walked up the wooden stairs of the porch and knocked on the door, not even knowing what he would say, and he heard the footsteps crossing the floor toward him, saw the light go on in the hallway and a woman approaching through the tiny glass window at eye level. She opened the door and smiled at him. She was just as he'd pictured her: blond, in a white sweater with reindeer across her breasts, almost stocky, but in a pleasing way, her face open and luminous as she saw him. “Thank God you're back! I've been worried about you! Why didn't you answer your phone?” She collapsed into him and he held her, feeling her breasts against his chest, but even more, her warmth, her relief, the knowledge that she belonged to him and he belonged to her.

He came into the room. Everything was exactly where it should be. The couch, the pillows on the couch, the wood piled up in the wrought-iron cradle by the stove. The goldfish, her African violet, the painting by his sister-in-law, the cooling rack covered with warm cookies. This was it. This was the life, just as he'd imagined it.

“What happened? Is everything okay?”

He looked into her beautiful face as he put his hands on her hips. “Everything turned out okay.”

“Tell me what happened! Did you get to them before they tried to do that chute?”

“Oh, I made sure they didn't do anything stupid. You can bet on that.”

She hugged him, smiling. “You're my hero!”

“Yeah … Well … You'd better wait till you hear the whole story.” He'd tell her later, but for now, he just wanted to quietly, secretly rejoice in being alive, in front of the fire. “Where's Lizbeth?”

“She had a late rehearsal. She's on her way now. What about Jarrod? You told him I'm expecting him, didn't you?”

“He'll be home soon,” he answered. “He had to pick up something from TJ's.”

His wife went out to the porch to get more wood and he shuffled over to the stovetop. She'd made chicken and dumplings; he could smell it. The cast-iron Dutch oven was sitting on the stove with a towel wrapped around the lid. It was bubbling over and a tiny stream of liquid was going into the burner, hissing. He looked inside, saw the dumplings had risen. He turned the dial to
OFF
.

Yeah, there was going to be a conversation tonight, but right now he was going to sit back down in front of this fire. In about ten minutes, or maybe at dinner, he was going to tell his wife what happened and he'd do his best to make it sound like no big deal, but she'd see through it and it was going to be sharp. His daughter would be upset, and Jarrod probably wouldn't say much of anything, because they'd already said it all on the mountain.

In a minute he'd get up and take an aspirin for his shoulder, but that would be a long minute from now, in which he'd pull open the door of the stove and the orange heat would well up over his wrists and his face. There'd be a brightening of the embers, a pop from the fresh log, a tiny spark flying out, and he'd close the door and sit back, thinking of that chute, how it had almost killed him in his stupidity and his longing, but also recalling the entire run in all its minuteness, from the deep, soft powder at the top to that long, quiet drop at the end and how the whole thing had just been perfect, like now, sitting here, still alive, warm, aching, valued: perfect. He knew, as he never had, that he was going to get old, he was going to ski slower, that all the things that happened to other people were going to happen to him. But it was okay. That was a long time from now. More moments than he could ever count. It was like that song, he thought. He didn't know the name. The one about the man who climbs the mountain and comes home and sits in front of his stove. He comes home and he thinks of all the faraway places he'll never go and the fortunes he'll never have, then he thinks about the perfect snow falling outside his window and the perfect snow falling on the ridge. That man and his wife and his children and the fire. That song. This is how it really sounds.

 

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