Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  His eyes slid around the room, cataloging the glances that registered recognition. Those were the hard-core ski crowd, who might not remember him for the bronze but would have seen his movie, or had him pointed out by those in the know: That’s Julian Moss. Badass motherfucker. One of those guys who skis all over the world. He made a film about it—you can see the clips on YouTube... And man or woman, seeing him, would approve. His Irish grandmother would have said that Julian cut a fine figure in his black turtleneck and peacoat, slim black jeans and boots. A fine figure of a man who took some pride in his appearance.

  Zig handed him a beer and chinked their bottles together.

  “Good times,” he said and disappeared into the crowd.

  Julian glanced around the room. Most of the other men were dressed down, in ratty jeans and sweaters, their hair smashed flat around their skulls, sometimes with the dents of a helmet still pressed in. He found his reflection in the mirror behind the bar and his confidence rose. He looked prosperous, assured, a little older than these twentysomethings maybe, but in an up-the-food-chain sort of way. The peacoat was a good choice.

  He sipped his beer. A big blond kid walked by, circling the edge of the bar crowd as he made his way across the room. His face was vaguely familiar, but Julian couldn’t think where they might have met. Might have been at another party or some skiing event. Clearly the guy was an athlete, maybe even a professional. He had that look about him: deeply settled in his skin, deft and familiar with his body like he’d already put it through some trials and was satisfied with the results.

  As the kid took a seat at one of the semicircular booths, Julian got another look at his face and remembered. They’d shared a lift earlier that day. The guy worked for the forestry service or something and was part of the ski patrol. They’d made small talk until almost the top of the run, when the kid said shyly, “You’re Julian Moss?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Man, I’ve seen your films. Amazing, seriously, I can’t even imagine all the places you’ve been...”

  They talked about skiing until they reached the ramp, where they parted amiably, the kid with his radio in hand, skiing out to meet a snowmobile that was buzzing up the slope, trailing a stretcher.

  Altogether a likable young guy, and as good a place to start as any.

  Julian made his way toward their table. As he’d hoped, Ski Patrol saw him and beckoned him in. Their booth was tight full and littered with empty beer bottles. There was a dark-haired guy with tattoos on his hands, his back turned, talking to someone behind the booth, and a girl sitting next to him who looked up as he approached.

  His heart sank and leaped absurdly. She was smiling right at him.

  “So you’re the wizard,” she said over the din.

  “The what?”

  “Ski god, playboy, Olympic medalist...” She spoke carefully, ticking the description off on her fingers.

  Ski Patrol took over the conversation. “I told her I rode up with you this morning. I might have gotten a little fan-girlie about it.”

  “A little.” The girl rolled her eyes.

  “Playboy is a new one,” Julian said.

  “Retro,” she said.

  She scooted around, pressing up to the tatted kid on her left, to make space for Julian. But there was still not enough room, and he didn’t try to sit down.

  “I’m Rory McFarland,” the blond said. “This is my sister, Celia, and that’s Eric Dillon, and over there is Kate and whoever’s hitting on her at the moment.”

  “Julian Moss,” he said to the girl.

  He carried the conversation easily with Rory, asking about the casualty Rory had gone out to retrieve when they met earlier. But inwardly his heart was light. He kept repeating her name, like a song that had stuck in his head: Celia, Celia, Ceeelia...

  After a few minutes, Rory laid some bills on the table and motioned for Julian to take his seat.

  “Listen, I’m going to leave you for a minute. I ordered some drinks. Keep her glass full, will you? She’s on a roll but broke as hell.”

  Julian slid into the booth. The girl turned halfway in her seat, curling one leg under the other so she could look him in the eye. Her gaze traveled over his face with the unironic absorption of a young child. The crowd around them seemed suddenly too loud, deliberately clumsy, as though the whole room were filled with teenage boys vying for her attention.

  He sipped his beer. He had pretty good horse sense when it came to women. They liked to be noticed, didn’t mind being watched as long as you didn’t come on too strong with it.

  “You don’t remember me,” he said.

  “No,” she said, with a wary lifted inflection like a question.

  He told her in careful detail about the three times he had seen her: what she was wearing during her run, the way her hair looked, billowing out behind her, the way she’d skied beneath him on the lift, the long swimmy strokes of her skis. The sudden burst of anger he’d felt at seeing her splattered with mud. He kept his voice low and self-amused and diffident, watched as her mouth slackened and her eyes went cloudy, drifting over his face.

  “I keep having this déjà vu,” he said. “Have you ever felt that, like you’ve been through it all before?”

  She nodded.

  “I keep thinking I know you already,” he said, which was true, though he only realized the truth of it after the words were out.

  “You don’t,” she said.

  “Maybe not.”

  “And I don’t know you...”

  “You can, if you want to. Ask me a question.”

  She blinked up at him. He couldn’t find a trace of makeup on her eyes or lips, which gave her face an almost shocking air of nudity in the flaring light. Her skin was smooth and translucent as a child’s, scattered with tiny round freckles across her nose, which was pierced on one side and adorned with a fine gold hoop. The pace of her conversation was achingly slow. Long pauses followed by an unsatisfying trickle of words, but wielding the sort of pressure a young child will exert—eyes wide, full of trust and with the clear expectation that the other party will find the vocabulary to carry the conversation forward.

  A waitress arrived with two Tanqueray and tonics. Julian left Rory’s money on the table and paid for them himself, took Celia’s empty glass and set it on the tray.

  He turned back to her as the waitress walked away.

  “Ask me a question,” he said.

  Celia leaned on the back of the booth, one hand cupped around the side of her neck. She took a long swallow of her drink.

  “If you were going to build something,” she said, “what would it be?”

  He smiled. He’d once been interviewed by his eight-year-old cousin for her school newspaper; this felt like that.

  “Let’s see,” he said, playing along. “Is money an object, or no?”

  She considered this, her soft little eyebrows drawn to a crease over her nose. Her next words surprised him, a sudden flood of syllables rolling off her tongue as though she was parroting back a line she’d heard elsewhere.

  “That’s a good question. A hypothetical should have parameters, or people start building towers on top of Kilimanjaro for no apparent reason—”

  “It could happen,” the tatted guy said over his shoulder, then turned back to his conversation without missing a beat.

  Celia swirled her drink. “Let’s say you have enough for a big project. But not enough for a tower into space.”

  “Okay,” Julian said. “And can I build it anywhere?”

  “Anywhere.” She gestured with her glass and a drop of gin sloshed over the rim to the table.

  He shuffled through the possibilities. What would charm a girl like this? What was he expected to say? She was watching him, unblinking, as if his answer was the most important thi
ng she’d hear all day.

  He stalled for time.

  “Well, I wouldn’t build the Taj Mahal. It’s been done.”

  “Yes.”

  “And a dead woman wouldn’t appreciate the effort.”

  “True.”

  “I wouldn’t build any sort of monument—”

  “Not even to yourself?”

  A teasing smile crept across her lips. For a moment he wished he’d come straight off the slopes and into this party, hat-head and all. He had never felt more overdressed.

  He plunged ahead as if he hadn’t heard.

  “I wouldn’t build a spaceship,” he said. “Or a museum, or a time machine, or a robot sex doll.”

  Unexpectedly she laughed, a gratifying sunburst lighting up her face. A scratchy answering heat suffused his body. He pulled off his coat and laid it on the seat beside him, pushed his sleeves up over his forearms, wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  She’d be fantastic in bed, this girl, not easy to get but strange and wild and worth the effort once he had her. She’d be into some kinky shit. She might want to be pushed around—he could feel the challenge and the heat of her. He’d been with women like this, who were usually much older and tired of boys and were dying to be with a man who knew what they needed.

  He took a pull of his drink and continued with a teetering confidence.

  “I wouldn’t—would not—dress her up in kneesocks and a pleated plaid skirt, or tie her hair in pigtails, or program her with phrases like, ‘Oh, Daddy, I’ve been a very bad girl,’ or ‘Give it to me, big boy!’ or ‘You can put it anywhere.’”

  He thought he might have gone too far, but Celia dissolved into a silent and breathless hilarity, one hand across her eyes, her cheeks glowing pink in the pulsing light. Her slender shoulders hopped up and down as her breath fanned up at him, sweetly liquored and warm.

  The heaviness in his dick was undeniable, and the night seemed alive with possibility.

  “Well. I’m glad we got that straight.” She wiped her eyes with her knuckles, pressed both palms to her cheeks. “So what would you build?”

  Back to the beginning, but now he had an idea.

  “I’d want something practical,” he said. “Something that would provide for my future. A big casino in Vegas, maybe. My own personal money machine.”

  There was a pause. He sensed that his choice had landed heavily.

  “Oh!” she said. “That’s clever.”

  She may as well have said, “That’s idiotic.” She kept nodding as though she’d forgotten to stop.

  He had the feeling that he’d failed a test he didn’t know he was taking. A strange constriction lodged in his throat. “What would you build?”

  She drained the last of her drink, straightened her shoulders and pushed a stray tendril of hair off her cheek.

  “Nothing,” she said. “There’s enough in the world already.”

  Her tone was offhand, disinterested, but underneath he felt a subtle reproach that annoyed him. A trick question, and he’d walked right into it.

  The music had changed. A driving, sensual groove throbbed in the air.

  “I need to get up and dance or I won’t make it to midnight,” she said.

  Julian brightened. He opened his mouth to say, “Come on, then,” but before he could get the words out, she’d turned from him to link her arm through Eric’s. She said something in his ear that turned the kid’s head on a swivel until they were nose to nose. Then she opened her mouth and kissed him, her slender hand slipping up to curve around his neck.

  Julian looked on from the corner of his eye. A prickly sensation filled his chest, as though his organs had been removed and replaced by an icy liquid.

  Celia turned to him, smiling, distracted, rubbing her thumb across her lips. “Hey, can we scoot past you?”

  Julian got up and they shifted to the end of the booth. Rory had come back to the table, but Celia linked her arm through his, leaning her cheek against his shoulder as she tugged him along.

  As they started toward the dance floor, she seemed to remember Julian.

  “A money machine,” she said. “Really smart of you...”

  Her words were swallowed up in a swell of music, and she was gone, weaving through the crowd with both young men in tow.

  They formed a tight triangle and began to dance. Celia raised her arms, swaying her hips as she turned, glancing at Eric over her shoulder as her hair spun out around her. Through the crowd Julian tried to figure out what she was wearing. It must have been a long skirt and some kind of sweater, but the way the clothes hung down her slim body made it seem as though she were draped in a collection of pale scarves and long strands of beads. She seemed excessively covered up compared with the other women on the dance floor, with an unsettling disregard for her own beauty.

  Or...maybe not beauty. On closer analysis, was this girl even pretty? The question teased at Julian as he watched her. What did she look like, really? Straight on, her face had a doll-like fragility, the wide eyes and lips symmetrical and perfectly balanced. But her gapped and crooked front teeth, combined with the high Slavic line of her cheekbones, conspired at times to render her so flawed she could almost be called ugly. The effect was perplexing, mesmerizing, like turning a kaleidoscope. You got a different pattern every time.

  He turned away, aggravated.

  At the other side of the booth, Kate’s admirer had wandered off. Julian sat next to her and hooked his thumb toward Celia.

  “She couldn’t decide what to wear?”

  “Bohemian,” Kate said. “It only works if you’re twenty years old and shaped like a coatrack. Put that outfit on a middle-aged fat lady and you’d expect to find her selling turquoise out of a pawnshop in Sedona.”

  “Meow,” he said, and she laughed.

  “I know, I know...”

  This girl was a different type altogether: crudely put together, tending toward stocky, with thick shoulders and short strong fingers. But a smart girl who knew how to make herself look good. Even at this hour, her lipstick and eyebrows were perfectly drawn, dark hair shining, and she smelled delicious. He noted with amusement the trace of glitter over the tops of her breasts. A young one.

  He ordered drinks.

  “You live up here?” he said.

  “Since I was a kid. We all went to school together.” She nodded around the empty table.

  “So what do you do?”

  “Not a damn thing,” she said. “My parents own this hotel.”

  It should have been an obnoxious, braggy remark, but Kate wrinkled her nose and laughed a little as she said it, as though she knew what it sounded like and she was in on the joke.

  “Lucky you,” Julian said. “And what about your friends, what are they into?”

  “They’re the competition, renovating one of the historic hotels on the Ridge. It’s the crooked little place at the far end of town. Have you seen it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then you haven’t. You’d remember if you had.”

  The light faded to black and a strobe came on, throwing the dancers into stop-action relief. Celia’s arms trailed up toward the ceiling as Eric ran his hands down her body, around her ass, disappearing beneath her shirt and out again under cover of the flickering light. It was hard to be certain, but Julian thought Eric was watching Celia’s brother the whole time, as if he had something to prove, or was showing off in some way by running his hands over the guy’s kid sister. If so, the challenge went uncontested.

  “You’re the Olympian Rory was talking about,” Kate said.

  “Probably.”

  “You don’t look like a skier.”

  “No? What do skiers look like?”

  She waggled her head. “You know...a l
ittle banged up.”

  “Oh, I’m plenty banged up, believe me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Knee, back, shoulder, plenty of broken bones. The usual.”

  “You look tidy, though. Sharp.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “Depends on what you like.”

  Their drinks arrived. She tossed back the shot, not as careful of her lipstick as he would have expected, and crossed her eyes at him as she slammed down the glass. Julian was charmed.

  “What do you like?” he said. “You like these boys with the chapped lips and helmet hair?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Those are the boys who are trying to look the part. They love the helmet head, they love the peeling nose, makes them feel like they’ve accomplished something. But you put them on a mountain and they’re flailing—they’ve got no groove at all. They’re just trying to identify. Probably grew up playing video games and next week they’ll be back home in Montecito, working the checkout counter at Target.”

  An appreciative smile curved one side of her lips. She tipped up her bottle of beer, swallowed, set it down again. “Whatever you say. I’m going to the little girl’s room.”

  But this time Julian knew he was not being dismissed. She got up from the table and began to pick her way through the crowd. She knew he was watching; there was a self-conscious sway to her hips. A cute girl, expensive and easy. No strange angles, no mystery to work out. Tight jeans and a low-cut sweater, that red doll’s mouth and confident dose of perfume. His kind of girl.

  Just before she rounded the corner, she looked back and caught his eye. She raised an eyebrow and disappeared through the door to the ladies’ room.

  Julian drained his glass, picked up her unfinished beer and followed her, waiting outside the ladies’ room and a little to the side.

  When she came out, her eyes went straight for the table he had just vacated. It was filled now with strangers, no sign of Celia or the others. Kate stood on tiptoe, searching the crowd. Her shoulders slumped in disappointment at seeing everybody gone.