Crazy Blood

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Well, he’d have to run some numbers. Look at the way it just … sits there.”

  Wylie kept staring at his trailer, not quite able to believe it was his. He was aware of someone coming across the parking lot behind him, more than one person, by the sound of things, although he was paying little attention. He turned and saw April Holly and a woman who had to be her mother, and a very large man, even larger than the bouncer Croft. They carried shopping bags from the market. April, in the lead, stopped at the trailer, set her bags on the asphalt, and studied it. There was a long moment of silence.

  “Does it have a name?” April asked.

  Wylie turned to her. “Module, personal, portable.”

  “So it’s, like, military?”

  “There could be a military application, someday,” he said.

  “You’re Wylie Welborn.”

  “Welcome to Mammoth Lakes, April.”

  April introduced him to her mother, Helene, and her bodyguard, Logan. They set down their bags and shook his hand. Helene had a deeply tanned, dour face. Her handshake was strong and brief, Logan’s lingering softly with either gentleness or threat. The big man had a wide downward mouth and ears that tapered sharply. April’s voice was soft and whispery, like a breeze in leaves, which made Wylie lean in closer to hear.

  “I heard you joined the army,” she said.

  “I’m a United States Marine.”

  “And now you’re back into ski-cross racing?”

  “It will keep me out of trouble.”

  “Of what kind?”

  “Those days are gone.”

  She looked at him frankly. She had a round, pretty face and looked smaller and older in person than on TV or magazine covers. Blue eyes and a sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. Button nose, more freckles. Her hair was blond and curly and difficult to manage, according to shampoo commercials that Wylie had seen, and it now sprung up unmanaged from a pink bandanna.

  He watched April considering the MPP. Helene checked her cell phone and Logan stared off toward the cop station. “I get claustrophobic,” April said.

  “Me, too. But check this out.” Wylie swung out the elegant double doors, stepped inside, opened the portholes, and stepped back out. He fastened each door open against the MPP with the latches that Jesse had built in. He gestured at the trailer with both hands, like a salesman, to point out the surprisingly spacious interior of the module: the small table that would fold out to fit with the padded benches to form a bed, the two-burner stove, the yacht-size sink and john behind the sliding shoji screen. Jesse’s birch caught the sunlight as if to banish claustrophobia.

  April stepped in. “It’s bigger than I thought.”

  She stood framed in the doorway, looking down at Jolene’s box of presents on the table, then turned back at Wylie. “Hard liquor and poetry?”

  “In moderation.”

  She looked down on him from her elevation just inside the trailer. “My people have prohibitions on almost everything, even moderation. Probably poetry, too, though I haven’t been tempted by that yet. I don’t think I’m smart enough to understand a whole poem. But can you recommend one poetic, dangerous, life-changing word that I should know?”

  “Module.”

  She gave him a half smile. “You love this thing, don’t you?”

  “You can sit.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, stepping back out. “But it sure smells good. Is it new?”

  “Brand-new. A friend made it.”

  “It looks too shiny and perfect to leave outside.”

  “I agree, but it’s made to be used. Very strong. There’s insulation between the inside and outside walls. And real salvage portholes.”

  “For stargazing.”

  “And ventilation in summer.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “But no place for your skis and gear.”

  “This was my idea!” Wylie hustled around to the stern and unfastened two heavy stainless-steel latches. He pulled a substantial brass handle then stepped aside to let a long, heavy drawer roll out to its full length of eight feet. It glided with audible heft upon its bearings, burped a waft of redwood-scented air, then stopped. When he looked at her, April Holly had one hand over her mouth but couldn’t staunch her laughter.

  “Oh, that’s just so funny!”

  “How can a drawer be funny?”

  “You are!”

  “I…”

  “Done yet, honey?” asked Helene.

  “Oh, that made my day,” said April. She gathered her bags, still laughing. “So nice to meet you, Wylie.”

  Wylie nodded compliantly. “Same here.”

  “Love the module! See ya on the mountain.”

  Wylie and Chris watched them cross the lot toward a black Escalade with her image on the side. While Logan held open the front passenger door for Helene, April glanced back at Wylie and Chris, waved, then climbed in the back.

  “She’s hard to figure,” said Chris. “She seems halfway with it, then pretty random. And then cool and then only about herself. Did you know she gets two million a year for her headgear sponsor? The shampoo? Just that one little space on her helmet?”

  “She liked the MPP.”

  “She didn’t stay long.”

  “Not with her mom standing there.”

  “She’s engaged. Did you see that ring?”

  Wylie said nothing, rubbed his thumb over a tiny bubble in the finish.

  “I sold her ten bikes yesterday. One-fifth of my stock. There’re six people total on her racing team, counting the mom and her. But that Logan guy is too big for a bike. So April bought herself and the rest of them road bikes for asphalt and hard-tail twenty-nines for the bike paths. Pretty good ones. Thirteen thousand bucks. And another thousand for helmets and shoes and bibs and oh, man, every bike gadget you can think of. Most money I ever made in a day, by far. Maybe enough to buy one of these trailers from Jesse.”

  Wylie was again lost in meditation on the module. He heard the Escalade pulling away but couldn’t look.

  “April rented one of those big houses in Starwood,” said Chris. “Six flat-screens and three hot tubs is what I heard.”

  “How many miles you think these tires will go?”

  * * *

  Later that night, Wylie retired from the Welborn-Mikkelsen house and got everything set up for his first night in the MPP. Beatrice and Belle helped him convert the benches and table into the bed, the thick pads making a firm mattress for his summer-weight sleeping bag. The battery-powered lantern gave off a good clean light. He read and made notes and sipped a short bourbon.

  Later, Beatrice came back to hang for a while, talk about things. She lay down beside him in opposition, head-to-toe, using both packs of thick boot socks for a pillow. She told him she was thinking about maybe not spending so much time up at Helixon’s—it was kind of a weird scene, with lots of pressure on girls to get high on drugs and go down on guys. And more. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to do all that just to be popular. Wylie disliked the idea of his sister’s having sex with someone he didn’t approve of, which was just about everyone.

  “Not a good reason,” he said. “Popularity.”

  “You’re a guy. Doesn’t that like betray the guy code or something?”

  “I kind of liked being unpopular,” he said. “It was a form of privacy.”

  “I don’t have that strength of character, Wyles.”

  “If you said you did, you would.”

  “That’s like something Dad would say. Like positive but totally not verifiable.” Bea ran her finger down the birch paneling of the wall, then picked a strand of her long blond hair and looked at it. “There’s one guy at Mountain High I wouldn’t mind talking more to. Kind of shy. He hasn’t said one thing to me about either drugs or sex. And he’s the most perfect dancer ever.”

  “Sounds like a start, Bea.”

  “It’s cool. I can be in the same room with him and not have him all over me.”

  “You’
re the boss, Bea. Don’t forget that.”

  “Okay. I won’t. Wylie? I hope you’re not disappointed, but I’m not much interested in competitive boarding anymore.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “I hope I’m not letting you down.”

  “There’s a lot more than competition, Bea.”

  “I just don’t have the nerves. I get so damned scared before every event. Now Robert. Jeez, Wylie. I’m so afraid of that being me. If it can happen to Sarah Burke…”

  “Ride your board for fun, Bea. That’s the beginning and end of it.”

  No sooner had Beatrice left than Belle showed up, and Wylie got an earful of what fifteen-year-olds were up to these days, not all of it comforting, either. He figured he must be getting old. Belle had a weak spot for getting high, and she admitted it and told Wylie she was fighting off the urge most of the time. But it was hard. Wylie set his glass on the other side of the bed, where she wouldn’t be looking right at it, though he couldn’t keep the smell from her. Can you keep anything from someone who really wants it?

  Belle didn’t seem to notice. She was talking fast about her ski-cross possibilities for next year as a sixteen-year-old, her good chances at making the team and maybe even a shot at the Mammoth Cup, and wouldn’t that be the coolest to both podium in their events, both be top of the box with gold? Wylie had to agree. Belle had always been fearless and direct on the course, a lot like Wylie. With hard training and good luck, she could be a contender in the under-eighteen category. The u-eighteens were stacked with talent, so Belle had lots of competition.

  She went quiet then, and Wylie caught her looking at him while pretending not to. After a moment, she gave up the pretense and speared him with her serious gaze. She had fierce concentration when she needed it. “Tell me about the war, Wylie.”

  “Not now. Some other time.”

  “When?”

  “Later.”

  “You were a medic, right?”

  “Unofficial. The medics were corpsman and I was a grunt. But I helped out some brothers when they couldn’t help themselves. I seemed to have some knack for that.”

  She looked at him, half innocence and half suspicion. She had her mother’s dark hair and eyes. “Were you on the battlefield?”

  “Yes, a lot, Belle.”

  “Did you see people die?”

  “I saw that, too.”

  “Did you kill?”

  “No,” he said, lying. In Wylie’s opinion, this particular truth would be of no help to Belle as yet in her life. And no help to himself to confess. He felt the boxes containing his troubling memories jostling around, way up on the shelves of his mind. “No. I helped some wounded men survive. Nothing really dramatic, though.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s hard to think back, because you kind of have to live things again,” he said.

  “It’s been two whole years.”

  “I’ll tell you a battlefield story some other time, Belle.”

  “Maybe just a short one now? A really small one?”

  Wylie sighed and shook his head. “We got lit up on a trail and there was nothing to hide behind. Which is why they hit us there. Some of it was mortar fire, and that comes from above and drops down on you and the shells explode in big rings of shrapnel. I hit the dirt and crawled like a bug to the nearest cover. It was a little pile of rocks maybe the size of a suitcase turned over on its side. I got myself up against it the best I could and buried my face in the sand and held my helmet on hard as I could. The shells kept landing and I was waiting to not be here anymore, and then they stopped. It was quiet for a minute, which seemed like an hour. I felt someone touch my shoulder, and when I cranked up my face from the dirt, no one was there.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could they have gotten away that fast?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where was Jesse Little Chief?”

  “A hundred feet behind me, half-dug into a low spot.”

  “Just your imagination?”

  “Sometimes I think so.”

  Belle gave him an appraising look. “I’d like another story sometime.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m holding you to that.”

  Then Beatrice was back and they lounged around in the MPP with the double doors open to the cool summer air and the fragrance of conifers all around. It was well after midnight when Wylie shooed both girls back to the house and stretched out and read through some things he’d written, shaking his head at the nonpoeticalness of them. Maybe there should always be something in your life you want but can’t have, he thought. And I shall never write a good poem. He looked for a long time at the stars aglitter through the portholes. One of Wylie’s mental boxes—the one containing the Taliban fighter—began to slide from its place on one of the high, orderly shelves in Wylie’s mind. So he reached up and caught a bottom corner and pushed it back into place.

  He went outside to view the MPP again in its entirety. Deep in the dark trees he saw movement, then none. He thought of the old toolshed he’d crashed into. And how the hill had seemed so high and steep to him at age five.

  He went back inside and fell asleep. But that Talib sniper came back to life again in his dreams, shooting at him and the rest of his fire team through a murder hole in a mud-brick compound wall. And damned if Sergeant Madigan didn’t come back, too, just in time for the sniper’s bullet to go through his neck one more time. And damned if Jesse wasn’t there, the knife in his hand at a weird angle to the dead Talib’s head. And damned if Wylie didn’t take the knife and finish what Jesse had begun, in that moment conceiving the notion of mental boxes that could be locked and stored away forever, their secrets hidden, their devils screaming away unheard.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  By the dawn’s early light, Wylie let himself and the girls into Let It Bean. It was the Fourth of July. Even in summer the mountain cast its cold shadow on the town, and Wylie saw his breath in the air as he stepped into the still-unwarmed bakery. It smelled as it always did: of roasted coffee, warm cream, baked spices and yeast and flour mixed into a sweet, invisible, almost narcotic cloud. He flicked on the lights and set the thermostat and stepped into the walk-in refrigerator for a supplies check.

  The girls worked by rote, too: Beatrice to the grinders and Belle to the steamers, then teaming up to make the breakfast burritos and get them into the electric warmer.

  As always, all hands gathered side by side at the racks to appraise the pastries that Steen and Kathleen had created the night before. They were competitive about their baking—Kathleen self-taught; Steen formally trained in his native Denmark. Besides the usual staples, they found peach preserve/whipped peanut butter croissants; whiskey/apricot and Brie Danish; and a dozen dark chocolate/Tabasco-raspberry scones. Kathleen and Steen had arranged and labeled them.

  “Mom thought up the peanut butter ones; you know that,” said Bea. “And Dad the spicy raspberry.”

  “Maybe we could just split one of the croissants?” asked Belle. “I mean, three ways?”

  Wylie ate his third in one bite, poured a double shot of espresso, just said no to the cream. He went to the front of the shop, which was just now growing light with the sunrise. The windows were festooned with posters for local events, the newspaper racks ready to be filled, the furniture straightened up by Kathleen and Steen the night before.

  He turned on the baseboard heaters, lights and lamps, and suddenly he was twelve years old, doing this exact thing on his first official morning shift thirteen years ago, thinking that he would spend many hours of his life in Let It Bean. It was exciting to be part of the family business, though he had to get up awfully darned early. He was a quiet boy, serious, tall for his age and slightly rounded by the endless pastries that a two-baker family produced. He looked at his reflection in the window, watched it morph from a twelve-year-old to a twenty-five-year-old.

  “Here we go again,” said Beatrice, se
tting out the cup lids and napkins and insulators. “I hope it’s a good day. I’m afraid what Gargantua is gonna pull on us next.”

  “Fear not,” said Wylie. He wadded up some newspaper and set it in the fireplace, covered it with kindling, and made a tepee of logs on top. The cold newsprint resisted the match; then a good orange flame climbed up.

  He knew that today would be busy in town and they should be able to sell coffee and pastries as fast as they could serve them. In a little over an hour, Kathleen would be here for the seven o’clock bulge. It would take all four of them to service their customers, if today went the way Fourths always did. Biggest day of summer, easy.

  But Gargantua Coffee had launched their “Gargantua Froth of July Blowout,” which was half off all purchases, with Gargantua paying the sales tax, too. Swag giveaways, drawings for snowboards, skis, mountain bikes, apparel. Portion of Proceeds Benefits Mammoth Ski Team! They’d taken out ads in both local papers, and Wylie had seen the Mammoth cable channel and the Weather Channel running more ads for the Froth Blowout.

  Not only that, he thought, looking out the window, but every streetlight stanchion in town was draped with banners, many of them featuring the Gargantua gorilla logo, writ large. What had riled Wylie the most was the cute yellow Piper Cub that had towed a Gargantua Froth of July Blowout sky banner back and forth over the mountain for the last three days running. Wylie had watched it, fairly sure he could shoot it down with his M16, so plump and slow and incredibly annoying it was.

  “We took out ads in the Mammoth Times and The Sheet,” said Bea. “They were only six-by-six. I designed them.”

  “I saw them, Bea. I liked the way the steam became the words.”

  “Gargantua is gonna kill us.”

  “We’re going to do what we do,” said Wylie.

  “Another of your random optimisms,” Bea said. “Like Dad would come up with.”

  “I hope he slams a homer out there today.”

  This would be Steen’s first day with the Little Red Pastry Shed, which he had gotten permission to set up in the Mammoth Sports parking lot. The lot was where all the store’s bikes were racked for rental and sale, and plenty of tourists were sure to come by. Steen was expecting substantial sales, which would cover the time and material for the cart, and pave the way for profit.