Crazy Blood

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Wylie stopped and looked back at his accuser. Instead of the Bible and phone, Sky now brandished only a black semiautomatic handgun. It looked to Wylie like his own service M9.

  When Sky aimed the gun at them, Wylie got between Bea and Sky and pushed her hard toward the door. There was a second when Beatrice’s hand fumbled off the knob and he nearly knocked her over. He looked back at the gun in Sky’s hand, pointed straight at them. Suddenly, a string of water glittered from the barrel into the air, began to fall, then broke into diamonds that rained down toward him.

  “Do not become a victim of your past!” Sky called down to Wylie. “I am serious, and so is Mother Nature.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sky helped his mother get Robert over on one side and hold him there so she could bathe him. It defied physics, how heavy an unconscious 180-pound body could be. The late-afternoon light came hard through the bedroom window of Cynthia’s condo, through which Sky could see the peaks of the Sherwins white and jagged to the east. In the meadow out front, Mammoth Creek zigged and zagged, frozen at the edges.

  As he leaned in to get a better grip on his brother’s hip, Sky thought again about the night before at Helixon’s. He had given Wylie a chance to apologize, but of course the bastard had refused. Turned it against him somehow. Which was unfortunate, because Wylie was the danger here, the threat. The asked-for apology was self-defense, Sky thought. How had it gotten turned around?

  After all, Wylie had the proven record of violence—a lifetime of scuffles and outright fights right here in Mammoth—often involving a Carson, usually Sky himself. A locally famous sixth-grade battle had landed them both in the hospital with bruised faces and broken bones in all four of their hands. They made a truce and posed for pictures with four black eyes and all four of their casts. The truce had lasted about two months. Now, thought Sky, Wylie is also a veteran of true war. God only knows what he did over there, what deadly things he learned, what impulses he had been encouraged to set loose.

  So he had asked for an apology and Wylie had turned it around on him. Again. Wylie had always been good at that—being the aggressor but somehow rarely getting caught at it. A provocateur, a subversive. For example: Who was there to see the shove yesterday on the X Course? Really, no one but himself. Again, Sky pictured going off the course at sixty miles an hour, breaking up on those boulders and trees like some kind of doll, never to ski again. Like Robert.

  Snow was falling. He held his brother while his mother bathed his flank. Sky stared out that window rather than look at Robert. He just couldn’t look at Robbie for more than maybe one painful second at a time. His mother swabbed away with a sponge and disinfectant soap, her yellow-gray hair pulled into a tight ponytail, humming to herself. “I have a copy of the latest Woolly for you,” she said.

  “Terrific. I liked the last astrology forecast.”

  “I invent the predictions, based on my experiences with people and their birth dates.”

  “Isn’t that what all astrologists do?”

  “It’s not a hard science. But my readers love it.”

  “The stolen skis and boards story was good, too.”

  “Brave of the thief to just walk off the mountain with them.”

  “He knows the good stuff, I guess.”

  “Sky?” Cynthia gave him her chill blue stare. “That was quite a stunt you pulled last night up at Mountain High.”

  “Well, I was drunk, but I meant it.”

  “Do the injuries hurt?”

  “Substantially.”

  “You took a bad fall on the X Course, Sky.”

  “No, Mom—Wylie shoved me off the X Course. Big difference.”

  “You know, I’ve investigated a little, and there’s a split decision on that.”

  No surprise to Sky. His mother was a bold snoop. It amazed him that townspeople would actually talk to her, but they did. She was certainly direct and clear when asking questions. He knew that behind her back they made fun of her, and he’d heard plenty of jokes about her murderous actions of twenty-five years ago. Lizzie Carson took a gun … He’d actually cracked a few jokes about her himself, thinking that this was a fatherless son’s right.

  In a flash, Sky was back in the women’s facility in Chowchilla, sitting in the hot waiting room, age four, Robert and sister Andrea on either side of him, Grandpa Adam and Sandrine there, all of them waiting for one of the stoic guards to lead them back to the visitation center. Sky saw again the tableau that played out over the thirteen years of his mother’s incarceration: Mom sitting blue-clad and ankle-shackled to a big round steel loop bolted to the floor, sitting straight up in the immovable steel chair, her straight yellow hair pulled away from her pale face. Even as a four-year old Sky sensed that his mother’s composure was requiring every drop of her self-control. Her strength was intimidating and inspiring. Sky had understood that his mother, Cynthia Carson, was a woman who had crossed a great divide. She was feared and lethal. A woman good to her word. A woman who stood and delivered.

  “You can investigate all you want, Mom,” said Sky. “But Wylie Welborn shoved me just past Conundrum. Where this happened…” He glanced at Robert, all he could endure.

  “Oh, I believe he’s capable of that, son.” She looked up at him. “But what if it was your nerves kicking in?”

  “It was a shove, Mom.”

  “Your father never had the nerve for winning.”

  “Not again, Mom. Please, not all that again.”

  “He almost had the nerve.”

  “That’s not what G-pa says. G-pa says Dad did have the nerve but—”

  “Of course, nerve is what separates racers at the highest levels, don’t you think? My God, your father had everything else a racer could want.”

  Sky dared another glance at Robert. He looked peaceful and utterly relaxed, and Sky wondered if there was any awareness in him at all. He had seen a news report recently about these newfangled scans that could show brain activity not detectable before. Although the doctors were quick to say that this didn’t necessarily mean the patients could improve.

  “Robert had nerve,” she said. “And he had good racing judgment, too. That’s why this is a tragedy, not just an accident.” Cynthia rinsed and squeezed the sponge, then patted Robert’s temple with it. “I advise you against threats of any kind, Sky.”

  “Too late. I asked for the apology and promised punishment if he does anything like that again. I’ve stated my terms.”

  “You could forgive him.”

  “Why should I forgive Wylie for running me off the course? That is not right.”

  “My whole life, I’ve tried to explain to you the importance of consequence.”

  The Queen of Consequence, he thought: a lifetime of damnation in exchange for one squeeze of a trigger. Well, five squeezes. Sky had often wondered what his life would have been like if his father had shot his mother, rather than the other way around. But really, what was the point of that? “You’ve explained that to me maybe a billion times, Mom.”

  Sky looked out at the Sherwins. A snowplow clanked up Minaret toward the mountain. The top of the mountain was locked behind a white wall, which meant snow was falling there. In his mind Sky again replayed his race against Wylie the previous day, scrolled forward to Wylie ramming him on that high-speed, precarious turn. Wylie threw his shoulder, for sure. Why else would he have gone off-course? Nerves? No. There had been no pressure. It wasn’t even a real race.

  “More important, if you’re going to beat Wylie in the cup, you’ll have to train much harder, Sky. Off-season, too. And cut the drinking way back. Of course that was—”

  “One of my father’s weaknesses.”

  “Yes, it was. Of my three children, though, you are the one who is the finest natural skier—”

  “Though I lack discipline and nerve.”

  “You’re a better skier than Wylie Welborn, but—”

  “He’s a better racer.”

  “When you train harder, and lear
n to control your nerves, you’ll be ready to beat him. For instance, you know you should be in Europe now, on the World Cup circuit, like you were last year and the year before that.”

  “Robert needs me here,” he said absently.

  “And you need to commit, Sky.”

  “You’ve told me that a billion times, too.”

  “Because you’ve never committed to anything that isn’t easy. The way you race. The way you drink and show off. The way you pledge yourself to people, then discard them. Especially women. You do what’s—”

  “Easy. I only do what’s easy.”

  “Very much like—”

  “My father.”

  “And yet the seeds of championship are in you. I was the hardest-working woman in my racing days. My body was very strong and sound. My commitment was never questioned. On your father’s side is God-given talent. No one had greater nerve and commitment than your grandfather Adam. And of course a perfect body. You have that body, too.”

  He felt his blood heating up, that first tremble and bubble. “I can’t be like them, Mom.”

  “But you can excel. I’ll help in any way I can. And Robert can help, too. He’s still here, in body and spirit, aren’t you, Robbie? Robbie is in the prison of his body, but he can emanate blessings and advice, though he cannot speak outright. You have roughly one year until the race, Sky. But very much to do if you want to win it.”

  “I’m going to win the damned race and I’m not going to let Wylie run people off the mountain. If those are the first real commitments I actually stick to, fine. I admit my mistakes. I’m twenty-five years old.”

  “Old enough to grow up.”

  “I’m growing up, Mom. I’m growing up.”

  She hummed softly, dabbing the sponge on Robert’s chin, as if he’d spilled a little formula on it. Sky glanced at the feeding tube that entered his brother through a round patch of gauze on his lower flank. It almost nauseated him. Made his blood feel sick. He looked at the little bank of monitors on the rolling table near the bed, the drip trolley backed into the corner for now. This is what Robert’s commitment got him, thought Sky. Robert’s reward. A hospital with no cute nurses. The only thing he hated more than hospitals were prisons.

  Cynthia carried the buckets of bathing and rinse water into the bathroom. Still humming, then not. “Did you hear about April Holly coming to Mammoth?” she called out.

  “Chip, chip,” he muttered.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, Mom. Great.”

  “Maybe our little town can learn from her,” she half-yelled from the bathroom.

  “Learn what? How to be a self-obsessed Olympic celebrity?”

  “You know what I heard from Brandon? April is engaged to be married to her longtime boy, but her camp thought she was falling in with the wrong kind of people in Aspen. So they brought her here.”

  Sky found this to be very funny. “Wait ‘til she gets a load of me,” he said to Robert, smiling slightly.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing, Mom!” Sky summoned all of the determination that he so obviously lacked, according to his mother, and brushed a hand through his brother’s freshly washed hair. Even unconscious, Robert struck Sky as truly good and deserving of his deepest love. Deserving of a lot more than that, thought Sky. But what else could he give Robbie now but love? He reached out and lifted Robert’s left eyelid and looked into the clear blue emptiness. “I’ll win that race, Robert,” he said. “Mark. My. Words.”

  * * *

  As usual this time of evening, Sky hit Slocum’s restaurant for happy hour and ran into his group in the bar. The team skiers and boarders had claimed their high, round bar tables in the middle of the room. Thanks to them, the decibel level was very high. Johnny Teller and Greg Bretz and Tyler Wallasch were there, and so were Kelly Clark and Arielle Gold, which turned up the star power to eleven on a scale of ten. Local snowboard contenders Johnny Maines and Suzanna Scott were arguing loudly but with good humor. Sky joined the boisterous table talk. There was no better antidote than this to his mother and her dire pronouncements. Sky loved this part of being a racer, being in a room where every person knew who you were and what you’d accomplished and they just wanted to watch you being cool. And see exactly how you did it.

  To his left, someone said, “Sage has got his whole routine so cold, every detail, man, right down to the way he holds the edge on his method, or the angle of his head on the back-side launch. It’s, like, choreography.” Sky immediately countered that Sage’s whole style was “tweaked out because he has no idea what he’s going to do next. It isn’t planned out at all, dude—and that’s why he looks like he just fell out of bed. And that’s what makes him great.” Sky knew little about board slopestyle—Sage Kotzenburg’s gold medal Sochi event—but he couldn’t pass up the chance to pontificate in front of an audience. He observed himself performing the Sky Carson act, pleased that he was so good at it.

  Tourists and locals manned the booths along the walls, looking up with curiosity at Sky and his young comrades enthroned on their higher pedestal tables. Sky knew that this audience was here because he and his friends were champions, or soon to be—the best athletes you would see up on this mountain, or anywhere really. Some would become Olympians. He and his peers pretty much ignored these onlookers because they were not ski or board professionals and did not take the risks of professionals, because, in fact, most of them skied and boarded badly, and looked fucking idiotic skiing and boarding badly in the expensive snow fashions they wore so they would look like professionals. Sky knew this was just his pride, but pride was all you had unless you went Olympic and podiumed; then you had fortune, too, so much fortune that it boggled the mind.

  He drank two neat Stolichnayas. He couldn’t be in that room with Robert and not feel disheartened. It took his spirit away. He wasn’t sure that what had happened to Robert had really sunk in yet. It didn’t have the finality of death. To grieve seemed disloyal. So Sky could not say good-bye to him. Was there really anything at all going on inside him? Or was Robert just a crude exhibit of what he had once been?

  And two hours with his mother was punitive beyond words. She knew exactly where his psychological scabs were and she picked at them, over and over and over.

  Ignoring his tablemates now—as a way to draw more attention to himself—Sky pulled The Woolly from his pocket, looked at the front-page headlines and amateurish pictures. His mother’s head shot was on the front page, bottom right, as always, like a Realtor’s, a picture taken thirty-five-plus years ago, when Cynthia was in her skiing prime. She was broad-faced and handsome and big-haired in the style of the day. She had been the number-five American woman on the FIS downhill circuit that year, as she had told him many, many times. He folded the paper once, Cynthia face-in, and set it between his stool and his butt cheek.

  The thing that was really eating him, though, besides Robert and his mother, was the previous night at Mountain High. Why had so many people thought he was being funny? He was challenging Wylie, berating him, not joking with him. He hadn’t meant it as even partially funny. An apology was the right thing for him to demand. He would stand by that. No choice now, since the entire world had seen him throw down the gauntlet.

  Sky still had that blood-sick feeling he’d gotten looking at Robert and listening to his mother. He watched the parade of vehicles coming down Main, their headlights moving slowly, dull slush spraying off the tires.

  Luckily, Megan, the waitress, was cute as ever, and she had pulled herself away from Johnny Maines to deliver Stoli number three to Sky. He pointed to his abraded cheek. “How is it healing up, dear?”

  She swung away the bar tray and leaned in for a closer look. Lovely dark brown eyes and hair. Shampoo like apples. “Kind of nasty,” she said.

  “Do you know any good remedies?”

  “I always prescribe vitamin A ointment and TLC.”

  “Ready for that TLC when you are!” He gave her a smile. “I’ll han
g here until you’re off tonight; then we can hit Mountain High.”

  “Maybe. I saw your selfie from there last night.”

  “And how did you like it?”

  “You got pretty banged up on the X Course. I think Wylie should apologize. But the rest of it, it’s all a joke, right? About punishing him? Just, like, comedy?”

  “I meant it, Megan.” Christ. He watched Megan size him up, likely trying to factor his mother’s past violence into his own future capabilities: What if he really is like her? He never got tired of people wondering that, never got tired of wondering it himself. Sky Carson heartily disliked Sky Carson but thought he made for an interesting study.

  “You’re going to punish him if he runs you off the course again? Is that right?”

  “Runs anyone off the course.”

  “But it’s so not you to do something like that.”

  “I’ve been underestimated in the past.”

  “Put this on the tab?”

  “Getting really sick of it.”

  “Of Stoli?”

  “Cripes, Megan. Just put it on the tab.”

  Sky felt a sudden drop in cabin pressure. Without turning, he sensed a large party coming from outside into the vestibule behind him, where the hostesses waited. He saw the tourists’ heads swivel in unison in that direction, and Megan’s gaze, then those of his tablemates. When he turned, he saw three men—a guy even bigger than Croft, and a snowboard pro he recognized from last year’s X Games in Aspen, and a fitness trainer named Andy he’d drunk under the table right here at Slocum’s one night years ago. Behind them was a stocky, severely handsome middle-aged woman. And next to her stood gold-medal celebrity and snowboard genius April Holly.

  Sky had never seen her in person. She was shorter than he would have guessed, and looked lighter. She had a thatch of blond curls held back in a black band, with her shampoo sponsor’s logo up front, where no one could miss it. She wore striped lounge pants and a too-big, out-of-fashion peace sign–emblazoned flannel hoodie that looked like it came from a Mammoth thrift store two years ago. And she had the famously pretty face with the famously upbeat expression that looked, like, completely plastered on. She and her team stood in the vestibule while the hostess collected menus off the rack.