This Is How It Really Sounds (47 page)

He could have stayed in Jackson Hole, probably ended up in management and a whole easy life doing exactly what he loved to do. But he'd wanted to go home, where everyone knew him, where he could walk down the street and see friends' kids and friends' parents and know their histories, bad and good: who'd been a bully, who'd been expelled from school for drugs, redeemed cheaters, disgraced politicians, epic tragedies of people lost at sea or fallen through frozen lakes or off mountains. And maybe knowing those things about other people was completely insignificant in the big scheme of things, because they were hardly famous, important people, just people in a small town. But to him it was what made the world deep.

*   *   *

The tracks came out above the tree line and into a scruff of willows whose naked gray branches scratched the unbroken white screen around him. He saw a confusion in the tracks in front of him, and yellow holes where the kids had taken a leak. From the indents he could see that a couple of them had sat down and rested. An empty cigarette pack lay in the snow. Jimmie. From here the incline to the ridge got steeper, and their trail became a zigzagging series of switchbacks. Hard to tell how far ahead they were because the bulge of the ascent hid them from view, but once they topped the ridge, they would have to follow it some ways to get to the chute, and that would be his chance to flag them down, depending on the visibility. The clouds had been raising and lowering like a theatrical curtain all day.

He pushed on a little faster. He was well above the tree line now, and the wind was whipping him harder and piling little deposits of frozen snow onto his sweater. He slipped on his jacket and continued, aware of his own panting as the way got steeper. His downhill ski kept breaking through the track and sliding toward the bottom as he followed their switchbacks. Soft, light snow, not the usual heavy coastal stuff that you could press into a snowball. Powder, avalanche snow. The ridge was definitely getting closer now. A hundred more feet above him, but now it had gotten really steep, the kind of steep where you could take a step and sink right back down to where you started. The snow kept sloughing off below his lower ski, and when he stomped his board, he could see shooting cracks taking off ten feet across the mountain. He was starting to worry that they were too far ahead, started to imagine Jarrod trying to run that chute. He was sweating and his heart was beating fast, but he put it aside and kept trudging upward with a steady, machinelike pace. Twenty more feet, two last switchbacks, and then the trail suddenly straightened out and became a gentle incline. He'd reached the ridge that formed the rim of the Wedding Bowl.

He got a glimpse of them, far ahead, moving, small figures in coats that looked dark gray in the dense, snowy air. He yelled, but they didn't hear him. They disappeared behind a hump in the mountain's contour, heading for the chutes, and he steeled his mind and picked up his pace, his open jacket flapping in the wind, the cold air welcome beneath his arms. He wished for a second he'd brought a flare gun or a whistle. Nearly two and a half hours since he'd left the trailhead, without a rest. His thighs were exhausted, and he felt a blister rising on his heel. Nothing he could do about it now.

The ridge continued upward and became narrower, and the slopes dropped away steeply below him on either side. This was the high world, the rarefied territory that always felt exhilarating and a little frightening. The world of trees was far behind, and the wind moved unbroken across the clean eggshell surface. Below him he could make out the inverted cone of a slide across the bowl, and it looked fresh. Loose, unconsolidated snow that had started as a slough and grown into an avalanche as it made its way down the slope. Far ahead on the ridge he made out his son's group again, clustered next to an outcropping of rock that he knew was the head of the chute they called No Name. He yelled out, and this time they heard him, or they happened to glance over. One of them waved back at him, then, getting closer, he recognized his son's colors: blue jacket, red pants, lifting a wave to him that seemed hesitant, resigned. He cut his pace and kept going. They'd wait for him. He didn't want to arrive so out of breath that he couldn't speak.

He reached them about ten minutes later. The four boys were looking at him: Jimmie, TJ, Brandon, his son. Brandon had roped up to an anchor he'd made by burying his skis in the snow and seemed about to pick his way down to a perch above the chute that would offer a good shot. TJ was ready to belay him. Jimmie was smoking a cigarette, his snowboard still in ski mode. Jarrod had already put his board back together and was ready to ride down. Always that question:
Who goes first?
His son muttered a greeting and looked off to the side. They all knew why he was there.

Jimmie said, “Hey, Mr. Harrington!”

He didn't answer immediately, just skied the last fifty feet in silence until he was five feet away from Jimmie. They were all looking at him.

He didn't raise his voice. He wanted to be angry, but the truth was that he was glad to be on top of the mountain. Winter was all around him.

“Hi, Jimmie. How's the tour going?”

“Great. Just great.”

“Good.” He didn't say anything. No one else did either. “You trying to kill these guys?”

They all stiffened, and nobody answered. “Brandon? TJ?” He could see their faces become wary and defensive, and he went on. “Did it occur to you that this whole mountain is ready to pop?”

“We wanted to hit this chute while it's full,” Jimmie offered weakly.

“Oh, it's full all right!” No one answered. “Jarrod?”

His son looked at him and then glanced away, and Harry could sense how embarrassed he was. He couldn't help feeling bad for him. Even Jimmie, the idiot, looked uncomfortable, because he'd been caught doing something stupid yet again, and not by some remote authority figure but by his friend's dad, who he'd known since nursery school, and what made it worse was that he'd been around enough to hear the old stories, so it wasn't just any dad. Harry looked past them to the edge of the chute, and slid over to it. He looked down it, remembered it again, from this angle. A lot more snow than the last time he'd stood here with Guy for a half hour. Not quite as deep or tight as back then, but the same run. Steep and wide for fifteen feet, narrowing into a chute the width of a doorway that went nearly straight down for another twenty feet, then bore right and turned into a cliff that you had to drop with rock walls at your elbows. That got you halfway in.

As he looked down, he heard Jimmie's voice behind him. “Nobody's ever dropped this one.”

He answered without turning around. “I know. You can't really see it all from any angle unless you rappel down into it.” They didn't answer him. “But it's pretty much a straight shot down a very narrow chute. Once you're in, you're in. You can't slow down and you can't change your mind. Your slough's getting funneled right behind you, and if you don't outrun it, you're screwed. You've got a little turn; then you've immediately got to drop a cliff, more like a really small mine shaft, maybe ten to twenty feet of drop with about a foot and a half to spare on either side of your body, and if you line it up wrong, you're going to go banging between those rock walls like a pinball. If you do make it through there, you've got ten feet to recover and launch that last drop that's visible from the bottom.”

“That one's about forty feet,” TJ said.

“Depending on conditions. With all the snow we've had this year, my guess is it's only twenty-five to thirty.”

Jimmie spoke. “How do you know all this, Mr. Harrington? Did you scout it?”

“If you're going to Seattle and the wind is coming from the south, the plane banks around right over the Wedding Bowl. If you sit on the left side, you get about a ten-second look right into the chute at low altitude. But you've got to be watching for it.”

They were kids, so it didn't occur to them to wonder why he'd be watching for it, year after year. “But I didn't tell you the last part.”

“What's that?”

“Play it out all the way: you go down the entry, you cut that little turn and line it up just right and clear the elevator shaft, you get your second takeoff right and land the second drop, and just when you're thinking how awesome you are—surprise, surprise—the whole damned bowl cuts loose on top of you, and then you're tomahawking down with a couple of megatons of snow on your ass.”

The exchange died out and they were silent for a moment. The cloud level was above the mountains, so there was a slice of empty gray sky sandwiched between the jagged horizon and the pearly layer of white clouds. He could hear the gentle sizzling of the falling snow around them.

“The only safe way out of here today is back down the ridge, and that's how we're going out.” He waited, but no one challenged him. He pulled his beacon out of his pack and strapped it onto his body, turning on the
SEND
signal. “You guys got me?”

They each looked at their beacons.

“
Got you.” “Got you, Mr. Harrington.” “Four meters: got you.”

When he clipped out of his skis he sank thigh-deep into the snow. It was light, cloudlike, with large flakes that lay on top of each other like confetti. Champagne snow, like they hardly ever got up here. He pulled off his skins and rolled them up inside his pack, then locked the bindings down. He put on his goggles. He grabbed his poles again, but he didn't put his hands through the straps. Nobody noticed that. They were busy arranging their gear for the return—putting on extra layers and zipping up packs. Except for Jimmie. He was still sitting on his snowboard smoking his cigarette. “Jimmie? You coming with us?”

He didn't answer, but he threw away the cigarette and slowly took his feet. He started clipping together the snowboard for the ride down.

He'd done it. He'd dragged his ass up here, caught up with them, and kept his son from doing something that had a very good chance of killing him. It was worth doing. His wife would be happy. He'd fulfilled all his obligations.

Harry turned downslope and looked at the chute they called No Name. The wide funnel that was its entry was perfect and untracked, as it always had been, and maybe always would be. He remembered it from twenty-odd years ago. Guy was there—Guy had tried to talk him out of it, at first, but finally stood back and let him decide on his own. Why had he wanted to do it? There were only a dozen people who even knew that chute existed. No film crew, no judges, no videos on the Internet.

Different now. More snow, and he'd seen it from the air. He'd seen bits and pieces from different angles and he had a special talent for reassembling all those views and having a pretty good idea of how it would look as you were going down it, even for the first time. If you didn't have that talent, you weren't going to win every competition in the world for four years running.

He heard Jarrod's voice behind him. “Dad?”

His son trudged the last few steps through the thigh-deep snow and stood beside him. “Don't even think about it.”

Harry turned to him. He could see his concern through the mask of teenage apathy that had cloaked him for the last few years.

“No. I was just thinking that with all this snow, it probably wouldn't be that big a deal. I've done harder. And with these new fat skis…”

He looked out at the vast, open bowl of falling snow below him, then straight down the chute. It was like staring into the gullet of a beast. Things could go wrong, but that was true on any difficult run, and he'd spent years carefully erasing all the things that could go wrong from his mind. Straight, turn, line it up, drop it, then drop it again. That was all. Take away the exposure, and it wasn't that big a deal. You just had to be all the way in it, not second-guess yourself. Not even for a fraction of a second.

He looked out at the horizon again. The snow was picking up, and it had gotten blurry again. The slope below was tensed as tight as a drum. Jarrod's voice was more insistent. He could hear the fear in it. “Dad,
no
.”

“I don't really think it's that hard.”

“I know. But what about avalanches? You said it's dangerous. That's why you came out here, isn't it?”

Harry felt far away from the voice. “Is that why I came out here?”

They heard a soft, deep
whoof,
then a low rumble, like a jet flying down below them. They all listened to it as it echoed around the bowl and reached a crescendo before dying out. “One just let go,” his son said. “You hear that?”

“I heard it,” TJ said.

“Dad…”

Harry didn't answer. He was still looking down the chute. A fifteen-second run, at most. More like ten. He'd be out before he knew what had happened. And the snow below would be so deep and soft that the landing wouldn't feel like a landing at all, just a miraculous transition between the air and the earth.

“You know something? I might have spoken too soon. If you hit this chute, and then land that last drop really as soft as you can, keep a nice, straight line, and don't turn out of it at all, and then, if it lets go, you just cut over to the left, below that cliff. You'd probably be okay.”

“Dad!” his son said again. He turned to face him. “You don't even have a helmet.”

Now, even Jimmie sounded worried. “Yeah, Mr. Harrington. We know you can drop this. Let's come back and do it when we've got better conditions.”

Sure. You could always say things like that. Other people always did. But he knew that if he left now he'd never come back. It was too far. He had too many things to do. He'd gotten too sensible. He edged a little closer to the dropoff, swiveling his skis around so that the tips of them sank into the slope above the chute. Through the snow-softened air he could see the faint dark outlines of the other chutes, and the blackened smudge of the trees far below him. For a moment he thought he could sense the whole slope, straining with the tonnage of the new snow, ready to release. But that was all responsible stuff.