This Is How It Really Sounds (46 page)

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The drive to the trailhead took twenty minutes. The snow was fluttering down and melting on his windshield and his truck moved with a muffled crunching sound over the near-empty parking lot. He recognized Jimmie's parents' car tucked into a berm at the trailhead, alone, and his throat went tight with anger again. Nobody else would be stupid enough to go up on a day like this. There wasn't much snow on the windshield, at least. A good sign.

He took out his skis and snapped his feet into them. He'd taken his
randonnée
bindings, which let him ski up cross-country-style and then lock down, like alpine skis. They'd been the sexy new gear ten years ago, and he'd gotten a set for half price because he was Harry Harrington. They were relics now, but the damn things still worked as well as the day he'd gotten them, and that was good enough. The skis themselves were newer, only three years old, fat Coombas with a flat camber. Good skis that had made him 10 percent better the first time he clicked into them. More agile, better flotation, quicker turning. That was what new gear did. In the old days he'd competed with a set of 210 grand-slalom skis, made for carving hard, icy slopes at high speed, not for executing jump turns in deep powder. Like taking an Indy car to a dirt track. It was a little detail he never bothered mentioning to anyone, because he thought it would sound like boasting, but with these new skis he could actually ski better than he did twenty years ago, when he'd supposedly been in his prime.

The trail was packed with the boys' ski and splitboard tracks, pressed ten inches into the new snow. He was glad it was this deep, because breaking trail would slow them down. With the first few sliding paces, he couldn't keep from smiling. He was free now, whatever the reason. For the next few hours, at least, it didn't matter how far behind his brother-in-law was on the job or what stupid-ass ideas Riley was spouting. Things had gotten real simple all of a sudden. He'd almost forgotten what simple was like.

He pushed off into the forest, going at a fast pace, sliding one foot in front of the other along the track. After fifteen minutes sweat was dripping along his ribs, and he stripped down to a T-shirt and hat to keep from soaking his clothes. He moved through the dark hemlocks, an old-growth area where the standing trees towered overhead in five-foot-thick columns and the fallen ones formed massive barricades across the forest floor. The sky seemed distant, blocked out by the black branches and the pale green lichens that festooned them, and the woods formed a strange symphonic screen of grays and dark green and white. He hadn't been on this trail for fifteen years, and there was little familiar about it anymore, except the quiet. Occasionally a chunk of snow would slough off a branch and thump softly into the ground. A raven would call out in one of their many voices. Alone in that silence, things began to feel magical again. As he pushed his skis forward, one in front of the other, his job and money and everything else became part of a distant place, something flat and gray-colored, like a tiny little island on a map. What was real now was the immaculate purity of this world and the trail in front of him and his son up ahead. It was the only thing he'd done in a long time that felt like it deeply made sense. Not selling screws, or swinging a hammer. This was worth doing, far more worth doing than painting drywall. Put it on the list. Coming home from Europe to be with his dad when he was sick: worth doing. Getting married: worth doing. Dropping out of school to go on tour in 1990: worth doing—he'd kicked ass. That photo shoot, the one on the cover of
Ski
magazine with the caption “The Greatest Extreme Skier on the Planet.” And then that movie part at Squaw Valley.

The surrounding woods seemed to disappear as he stared down at the white trail in front of him.

That hadn't been his fault. They hadn't done anything reckless or crazy. Nobody was hot-dogging. It was a movie shoot, just like other movie shoots. Along with the trip to Hollywood and the ski date with Pete Harrington, it felt like the logical flow among all the cliffs he'd dropped and spines he'd run and the hours he'd spent planting his poles just so and initiating his turns just so: the infinitesimal refinements in technique had enabled him to ski like no one else. It was just another shoot for a low-budget ski movie.

The producer had spotted the run the previous week, but it had been blowing hard the night before and he was worried that maybe parts of it had gotten scoured. Guy'd been along to help, just carry equipment and that sort of thing. They'd been ski-bumming together that winter. They decided that Guy would go down a nearby run with the same aspect and check it out, then radio back up to report on it.

When he thought of Guy he always imagined him skiing. Guy was fine-boned and on the short side, with sandy hair and a reedy voice, an amazing skier who could ski anything but wasn't interested in competing. Harry had always reckoned Guy a better skier than he was, but different. Guy was all about the pure line, the graceful line over cliffs and through trees, swooping and flying, like he was signing his name in cursive. He made it all look easy and beautiful, and Harry loved following him because his descents were always filled with unexpected detours and cuts that surprised him in a joyful way. It had been Guy's idea, when they were kids, to come down through the woods and hit that kicker right into the street in front of his house. When they started going into the backcountry, Guy was always the organizer, and the one who brought the first-aid kit, while he himself was always the one who broke the silence when they were standing at the top of an unknown run and someone asked, “Who's going first?”

But this time, Guy was going first. The run started in a wide field of snow at about a thirty-five-degree slope, which descended two hundred yards and then steepened into a series of rocky chutes with cliff drop-offs at the end of them. The landing zones were good, so he wasn't worried about the cliffs. They dug a snow pit to check the snow stability, and it looked okay, so Guy took off with a couple of brief, happy turns. Harry watched him go dancing down the slope, and then, sickeningly, the whole thing released.

It was a slab avalanche nearly three feet deep, with a crack that started just below Guy's feet and then worked its way in seconds across the entire slope. Guy heard the booming sound, because he glanced up, and when he saw it cutting loose behind him he tried to go diagonally to get out of its path. He'd done that before: they both had, but this time the whole slope disintegrated around him, liquefying into a white river that sucked him in and bore him down toward the chutes below. He saw Guy on his back, struggling to keep his head up, and then some of the bigger slabs obscured him. Slabs like refrigerators, like queen-sized beds, frozen to the hardness of concrete. He watched it with a sick feeling of helplessness, pushing his feelings aside and tracking Guy's fall line all the way into a gully that filled up and then partially emptied again. He heard the fellow next to him say something, but he just kept his eyes on where Guy had last been, and the area below it.

It was the only time in his life that he panicked. When the snow stopped moving, he didn't even turn on his beacon. “I saw where he went. I'm going down.” He made a turn or two and then came to the crown, a three-foot drop onto the bed of the avalanche, and, without thinking, he popped over it. It was pure ice.

He turned sideways and jammed his ski edges into the surface, but he had too much speed and couldn't get any purchase. He hit a knob of rock and went tumbling over it onto the slick incline, landing on his back and sliding headfirst downhill at forty miles an hour, his poles clattering uselessly beside him. These were the days before helmets, and he sensed his head aiming straight for the icy boulders. He jammed the handle of one ski pole into the ice, and it created enough friction that his body spun around until he was sliding feetfirst. That saved his life. Seconds later, he slammed into the back end of the debris, and he felt his leg fold up and shatter beneath him.

So, no, he didn't make it to his appointment with Pete Harrington that afternoon. He was so doped up for the next two days that the meeting only existed as a sort of vague obligation, drowned in a haze of opiates into which floated doctors, nurses, his parents' faces, a few friends, and the softly lapping tide of grief and guilt about Guy. He was out for the rest of the season, and the next year he started taking seconds and thirds in the competitions, and he knew it was over. It wasn't that he'd lost any strength or skill, it was that every line he chose was the wrong line. The harder ones he skied too fearfully; the safer ones he skied too hard. It was over. All of it.

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He'd been on the trail for about forty minutes now without a rest. Not in the same shape he used to be, but Jarrod's life was on the line, and he knew if he kept up this pace, he'd catch them. He could read that from the trampled places where they'd stopped to rest. Jimmie liked his cigarettes, which meant five or ten minutes each break, and with a little luck they'd smoke some weed, which would slow them down even more. Once they got to the chute they'd have to take the skins off their boards and transition their gear, and Jimmy would light up another cigarette. They'd look at the view for a while and try to scout the chute. If they were smart and brought rope, one of them might rappel down and look at it, but that would have been Lucas, and Lucas was back in town. So two rests and the gear change and he'd have them. There was nothing to worry about except the rhythm of his poles and ski tips swinging back and forth in front of him.

The trail was starting to climb toward the tree line, and the trees had gotten smaller and sparser. So little color in these woods that even the slightest shade of other things replaced color: the ptarmigan tracks coming out of a clump of alder looked faintly gray against the unbroken snow, and the small, deep postholes of a deer wandering around searching for forage were a pale blue-white, but in the narrow range of shades in the forest, his eyes tuned in to them as if they were the yellows and reds of a painting. Even though he was only in a T-shirt, he felt completely comfortable, as if he were skiing through an endless room in an endless house, winter's house, which he hadn't visited in so very long, but which was familiar and welcoming.

The snow was beautiful today. He could pick it up in his hand and blow on it, and it would scatter like sparks. Without effort, he was skiing it already, here among the dark trees, on a steep slope, floating downward through the endless white field below him, dreamlike and timeless. It was infinity compressed into a few moments. No past or future, no worries, only life stripped down to a perfect black-and-white abstraction of itself, crystalline and undying.

In snow like this, anyone could drop that other chute. No Name, or whatever they called it. That winter when he'd thought about doing it, there hadn't been so much snow, and that had been one of the things that held him back. With less snow, the chutes were deeper and narrower, the drops were longer. Now, though, with three feet of fresh on top of everything else, it almost seemed like a shame to go all the way out there and not do it. Unfinished business from twenty years ago, and maybe, in some way, it had taken Jimmie and Jarrod to get him out there and finish it.

He could see it now. Jimmie saying,
Dream on, old man!
in that punk voice of his. Whenever Jarrod got in trouble, Jimmie was always close by, but he could never pry them apart, and the more famous Jimmie got, the more his son looked up to him. That's why the boy had come out here today, even though he'd told him not to. He ought to just wrap his pole around Jimmie's head. Jimmie could ride, though. He'd seen the videos, and it wasn't an accident that his sponsors flew him all over the world. He chose the most difficult lines, with the most exposure, and he made them work in a way that was thrilling, like cutting down a two-foot-wide spine with eighty-foot cliffs on either side, then cutting back to safety at the last possible moment. He did runs that didn't allow for a mistake, and one of these days he was going to make that mistake. Jarrod was more artistic, slow, and almost poetic. He chose less risky lines and pulled the appropriate trick out of each feature. A soaring backflip off a wind-lip, or grinding sideways along a tree overhanging a cliff, then launching off it and spinning a 360 before he hit the ground. It was sheer, frightening boldness versus style, and even though Jarrod had placed well in a couple of competitions, Jimmie was the one with the big life, while Jarrod lived at home. He didn't want to move down to Tahoe, like Jimmie and some of the other kids had, to get into the bigger arena. Jarrod was a hometown kid. He loved his friends and he loved his town, and even if part of him would never stop wanting to be on the cover of a magazine, he was a local. He had his private glory. Except when Jimmie came home to visit. Jimmie riled him up. Jimmie could get him killed.

Harry was angry again, and that made him pick up the pace. The tracks were winding upward at a steeper rate now, and as the trees thinned out, the wind was starting to go through his T-shirt. His bare forearms had gotten numb from the wind and the snowflakes, and he stopped and pulled out a fleece sweatshirt from the top of his pack. How long had it been since he was alone in the woods on skis? He'd used to do it often, climb up somewhere high and then rip it, alone. Something forbidden in every list of safety rules. Now it was all about safety and avalanches and obligations to his wife and children. Go to work on Saturday, pay the bills, fill the truck, cut the wood, surf the Net, go to bed, eat a bowl of oatmeal.

He probably should have stayed in Jackson Hole. He'd been at the top. Ranked number 1 for four years running, although probably fewer than two thousand people in the world knew that. That's what the sport was like back then. But the owner of the resort at Jackson Hole was one of those two thousand, and he'd seen him ski. He offered him sponsorship and the kind of cushy job any skier would want. As a sponsor, he'd be wearing their bib at all the comps and they'd pay his expenses. When he wasn't competing, he'd guide the VIPs around the area. Basically, show rich people the mountain, give them some skiing tips, tell them some stories, take them to all the hidden bowls and glades that only the locals knew how to get to. He'd done it part of one winter, host to Denver dentists and Wall Street stockbrokers, even a couple of celebrities.