Crazy Blood

by T. Jefferson Parker

  He waited for a break in his thoughts.

  * * *

  The fire was hard to start, as usual. He set a small circular grill across the rocks and heated a can of stew. He watched the flames cast light and shadows against the MPP and felt his vast aloneness. Solitary was right. He thought of lovely Pilar at Great St. Bernard’s Hospice and mysterious Juncal at Tegernsee and noted those lovers’ great distance from here and now. But really, it was only months.

  He wondered again if he’d done the right thing in coming home. To what avail? He’d regained his family but lost a brother. He’d resumed a pointless lifetime feud. He’d found a possible way to help the people he loved—and realized that he’d been avoiding just that for a number of years now. And maybe, in the same possible way, he could help himself. For the first time in his life, Wylie had a plan that included more than just a short-term future. That night at Jesse’s, around the barbecue, he had described his idea to Jesse as a dream—his first official Wylie as a grown-up Dream—which at the time had struck him as pompous and bourbon-induced.

  But now, bourbonless at ten thousand feet, dream still rang true to him. He felt confident he could win the Mammoth Cup. It would take training and luck. Then, close on the heels of the Mammoth Cup would come the X Games and an even higher level of competition. More training and more luck. But the World Cup tour? The Olympics? He almost scoffed, but he didn’t. Why not the Olympics? Why couldn’t that be his dream? Wylie Welborn, Olympian. Olympic ski-cross medalist Wylie Welborn. Were only certain people allowed to dream that? Which people? So what if he was almost twenty-six? So what if he couldn’t afford to tour?

  After dinner, he burned the paper bowl and towel, stashed the stew can in the cooler, and hoisted the cooler back into the tree. He set more wood on the fire.

  He stepped into the MPP with irrational pride. By the light of an electric lantern, he made up the MPP bed, using Jolene’s mock-Navajo blanket. He climbed in and propped himself up, closed his eyes, and imagined his first run down Madman just a few hours ago. Not bad. It was tentative enough to test the snow and find the hidden patches of ice and to avoid the lower trees and the potentially deadly wells around their bases. But tentative on Madman was still close to breakneck on most any other course.

  His second run was made with heavy legs and a mind dulled by hours in a bumping truck and nearly two more hours of high-elevation climbing. Wylie could tell he was twenty-five and no longer twenty. But maybe he could overcome age with training. And this was the place for it. It always amazed him that he could find conditions like today in any but the driest and warmest of years. Solitary, Madman, and Breakfast Creek—all his. A private paradise to train in, Grandpa’s birthday present. Adam had told him once that he’d brought Sky here for his twelfth birthday, too, but Sky had never, to his knowledge, come back. It takes a certain mind-set, Adam had said.

  Wylie yawned and felt his energy all but gone and the sweet call of sleep. The box in his mind that housed the Taliban sniper from Kandahar had wandered to the edge of its shelf, where Wylie was now surprised to find it tilting in precarious balance. Sometimes his own tiredness allowed the boxes to spill. Sometimes they’d empty in his dreams when he was defenseless, and all he could do was wake up drenched in sweat, repack them, and place the boxes where they belonged, just so.

  He lay in the module and looked up through the portholes at the bright pinpricks of stars and planets and the wide granular dusting of the Milky Way. These seemed indifferent to him, but not wholly different from him. He heard the steady sough of the wind in the trees and was for a long moment unsure where he ended and the world began.

  That night, Wylie dreamed he was in Portillo, Chile, after having driven the MPP all the way there to see April Holly. In the dream, April was beautiful but skeptical of him. He had brought her some board wax you could get only in Mammoth. She made jokes about the trailer. In his dream, the MPP had sat silently, absorbing the jokes, riddled with bugs and dirt from the six-thousand-mile journey from California to Chile.

  When Wylie woke in the early morning, the battery-hogging lantern had all but run down, but the sunlight was waiting just outside the portholes above him.

  Breakfast Creek gurgled in the distance.

  * * *

  He made three runs that day and three the next. He timed each of the latest runs for the last minutes of light before thorough darkness closed on Solitary. The moon was right. In this final twilight, Wylie’s reflexes had to be quicker, while operating on less information. He finished his last run on the third day in moonlit darkness, planes of silver and black rushing him in rapid overlays, guided half by his senses and half by faith.

  Later, he bathed in Breakfast Creek, then bundled up in Jolene’s blanket in the MPP. He put on Jolene’s wool boot socks, too. He read and wrote by the freshly charged lantern. He drifted off to sleep, still believing that his idea of making the Olympics was not just a foolish indulgence. In the morning, he felt the same way. It was a quiet confidence, no swagger in it, just faith. The same faith that had guided him down the mountain in the near dark.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As promised, Wylie got back to Mammoth Lakes the next day in time for the town council meeting. Steen’s application for a sidewalk vending permit had been contested, which required a public hearing before the council, where all sides could be heard.

  The Town Council met upstairs in the Von’s shopping center, Suite Z. Steen thought it would be a good idea to show pictures of the Little Red Pastry Shed, so he had two foam-backed posters made from Beatrice’s photographs, and borrowed two easels from an artist friend in town. Wylie and Beatrice helped Steen set them up in the space between the town council members and the citizens. Beatrice kept adjusting them for good viewing angles. The photos were good, in Wylie’s opinion, showing the bright colors of the shed and the beautiful blue Mammoth sky. The town hall seats were full when the meeting started at six.

  Wylie and his family sat in the first row.

  He turned and saw Jacobie Bradford III seated near the back, legs crossed and head down, thumbing away at his phone.

  “Corporate swine, back row,” Belle whispered in Wylie’s ear.

  He set his hand on the soft spot behind her knee and squeezed firmly. “Now now.”

  The mayor called the meeting to order and got straight to old business. He recapped the previous month’s discussion of adding three waste-collection bins along Minaret, near the creek. All voted in favor.

  Then they talked about the rash of bicycle thefts in town. Coming on the heels of so much ski and board thievery last season, the stealing of bikes was a real problem. The good news was that two suspects had been sighted by two separate witnesses on different nights, cutting bike locks with bolt cutters, putting bikes in the trunk of a car and then driving off. The perps were described as males, both bearded and wearing ski caps, somewhere between twenty and forty years old. Their car was an older model, and one of the witnesses had photographed the plates with her cell phone and turned the pictures over to the Mammoth PD. Just as with the skis and boards last season, these thieves knew an expensive bike from a cheap one. The mayor’s own son had lost a two-thousand-dollar Cannondale road bike Sunday night, left unlocked and pinched right off his front porch. The council voted unanimously to up the reward to two thousand dollars.

  “Now, on to new business,” said the mayor. He was a restaurant owner and had long been a Mammoth ski team booster. Wylie did wonder if a sidewalk vending permit for food and beverage might go against a restaurateur-mayor’s grain. The mayor summarized the guidelines for sidewalk vending permits, took a long moment to study the posters, then asked Steen for input.

  Steen went to the podium and nodded politely to the council and the full house. He pulled a sheet of paper, folded lengthwise, from his pocket, then began reading. “Thank you, friends and neighbors, for being here tonight. The Little Red Pastry Shed is in keeping with the town of Mammoth Lakes because it is handsome and w
ell made. It will offer top-quality artisanal pastries and gourmet coffees at good value to both locals and guests. The shed provides its own power by generator and solar panels, which you cannot see in the pictures, but they are located…”

  Wylie listened, but his mind was back on Madman, third run of the second day, the most difficult because of the falling darkness. Still, somehow he’d been allowed into that privileged place where his body was working almost on its own and his thoughts were able to skip ahead just enough that nothing on the run could surprise him, nothing could even come at him in any real hurry, although this was his fastest and tightest run of all. The final schuss had left him wired by adrenaline but utterly at peace.

  “… and it is my dream to move the pastry shed from location to location in town as a moveable feast, so that everyone will get a chance to buy our wonderful pastries and coffee.”

  “How many times have you done business from the shed without a permit?” asked the mayor.

  “On July the fourth and three times after. For a total of four days.”

  “Is it profitable?”

  “Not greatly, but yes. In those four days of operation, we made approximately four hundred dollars. This is revenue enough to cover our rent at Let It Bean for five days.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Of course, we have the cost of time and materials to build the shed. And we do need a new roof at home, which will be very expensive.”

  Wylie flinched at Steen’s admission of family financial troubles.

  “Why did you proceed without a permit?” asked another councilperson. He was a real estate agent, whom Wylie recognized from his picture in the local listings, but he’d never met the man. Wylie realized now that the photo was probably two decades old. His nameplate read HOWARD DEETZ.

  Steen nodded contritely. “I … didn’t know if the shed would earn us even one dollar. And the application is expensive. For us.”

  The councilpersons shrugged, traded glances back and forth, and sat back in odd unison. “Open to public input now,” said the mayor. “The mike is open.”

  Steen headed for his seat and Jacobie made his way to the podium. Wylie saw that Jacobie was not dressed for Gargantua Coffee, but for fly-fishing. The cleats of his wading boots clicked on the floor. Wylie had heard from a friend at the Troutfitter that Jacobie had paid in advance for one hundred half days of guided fishing over the rest of the summer and fall. At full retail, the bill would come to approximately $25,000, not including tips. Jacobie’s face was absurdly tan and his long-billed cap sat at a cheerful uplifted angle. His caped, vented, multipocketed shirt was a pumpkin color, and his sleeves were rolled and buttoned up.

  Jacobie introduced himself and stated his position as the Gargantua Coffee regional manager. He said he’d grown up in the Bay Area but loved the Eastern Sierra and aspired to own property here so he could visit often. In fact, he was now actively looking for a home to purchase. He joked about how the locals had kept fly-fishing a secret from him for so long, and said he was making up for lost time. He stated that he actually felt like a local when his road bike had been stolen the previous week. He had ridden it to work at Gargantua, locked it up behind the shop, and when he’d come out ten hours later, the bike was gone. He made a show of looking at the pictures of the Little Red Pastry Shed, then cleared his throat.

  “I contested Mr. Mikkelsen’s permit application because my company’s toughest competition in Mammoth Lakes is his very wonderful Let It Bean. I make no secret of this. From our point of view, this Little Red Pastry Shed is an extension of the Let It Bean place of business. Now, as you all know, according to Mammoth Lakes code, sidewalk vending is restricted to special city-sanctioned events. No full-time permit exists. With good reason. Mammoth Lakes is the jewel of the Sierras because it has strict but fair codes with regard to nonadjacent sidewalk and out-of-doors vending that does not coincide with city-approved events. That’s a mouthful. But it’s really pretty simple. No such permit exists. And we want Let It Bean to play by the same rules we do.”

  Belle stood before Wylie could stop her. “You hypocrite! You’ve been trying to run us out of business for almost a year now! Now you won’t even let us fight back!”

  The mayor fumbled around for his gavel and finally gave it a good three raps on the tabletop. “You are out of order, Belle.”

  “Damn right I am.” She dropped back into her chair and sat glaring at Jacobie.

  He looked at her with his eyebrows raised and his hands open. “There’s no such permit. You don’t expect the town council to invent one for you. Do you?”

  “Give them some kind of permit!” someone called from the back.

  “There’s no permit to give!” someone else replied.

  The mayor slapped his gavel and ordered the citizens to come to the podium or be quiet. “Jacobie? Is that all?” Jacobie thanked the council and started back to his seat. The mayor solicited comments from the council, but all declined, apparently having decided. There was a brief off-mike exchange, and the nodding of heads. Howard moved to take a vote and someone seconded. Four no votes were cast against the mayor’s aye, and the matter was settled. “Sorry, Steen,” he said. “Too bad. Okay, we’ve got Mammoth Park dog-waste stations to talk about now.”

  “Do the dogs need permits to use our sidewalks?” Steen shouted out. Wylie saw by his smile that he was trying to be funny, but the councilpersons and mayor shot him looks as he stood there red-faced. Wylie helped him collect the exhibits.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Adam and freeski team coach Brandon Shavers stood at the head of the Mammoth X Course. The August morning was warm for the Eastern Sierra, and a wildfire burning to the northwest had spread a blanket of gray-white smoke over the mountains.

  Adam looked at his watch. “Mike Cook is never late,” he said.

  “Actually, I told Mike ten o’clock,” said Brandon.

  “But you told me nine,” said Adam.

  “I wanted to go over a few things. This Gargantua Cup is keeping me up nights.”

  The X Course was snowless and the boulders stood exposed. Adam picked his way down the course for a look from the first jump. So easy to picture this run in its full bloom of snow, and to see himself not sidestepping down the rocks as a rickety octogenarian, but carving youthfully through the turns, throwing rooster tails of snow behind him. At eighty-seven years old, he wasn’t quite up to the X Course, though the gentler Mammoth Mountain runs were still heaven on Earth for him. What really made him aware of his age wasn’t his skiing, but how damned slow he had become at the mundane daily tasks: getting his socks on, tying shoes. He could go crazy, waiting for old Adam Carson to get out of his way.

  Beyond the physical, Adam was also now suffering what all serious skiers and boarders suffer in late summer—the dread that it wouldn’t snow again until almost next year. Adam and people like him talked snow and thought snow and dreamed snow. Their bodies craved it. The young people called this “fiending,” and Adam kind of liked that word. Plus, in Adam’s case, since his livelihood was snow, he felt a businessman’s practical fear that another terrible warm winter was surely coming. Adam had lived the Sierra snow for most of his life and he saw that the snow came later and left earlier now, that the averages were down and the ski seasons were shorter, and he believed that only a fool could deny that the world was heating up.

  Brandon caught up with him, breathing a little quickly. “Grandpa, what I’m hoping to do is reconfigure this course for the best Mammoth Cup ever.”

  “You can’t. You’re not the course setter.”

  “Well, yes, I know that. But Mike is open to reason, and I’d like to talk to you about some changes.”

  “Fire away, Brandon.”

  Adam looked at this grandson-in-law, then back to the course, and in a heartbeat he was back in the United States Army recruiting center in San Francisco seventy years ago, just turned seventeen, thinking about signing up for the war. A sergeant who looked a lot like Bran
don looked now—upright, blockish, and somehow untrustworthy—said he would do his best to get Adam into some action in the Pacific. The Japs were on the run. Adam expressed interest in the European theater, because of the mountains and the snow. The recruiter had said that of course, with the German surrender, Europe was slowing down but that he’d see what he could do. It was August 3, 1945, a Friday.

  The following Monday, Adam was on foot in the weirdly cold city, headed back to the recruiter to sign up after a weekend of soul-searching, when he heard that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He signed up anyway. Very difficult, saying good-bye to Sandrine. Aside from Sandrine, Adam had no direction in life except to go down mountains of snow on heavy wooden skis, faster than anyone else, but there was no place to sign up for that.

  “I’d just like to tighten up this course a little,” said Brandon. “I love Dire Straights and Shooters and the schuss to the finish. I love Goofball and Conundrum—you know how many magazine shots we get taken on those? But what I’d like to do is add two new gates. And maybe consider flattening out Dire Straights a little.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to slow the whole course down, just a hair. Grandpa, the USSA and boarding brass are all leaning this way for the other courses, mostly for safety. I mean, what happened to Robert was just a terrible accident. And, you know … Nick Zoricic dying at the World Cup finals. There’s going to be backlash, and I want to be ahead of it. I honestly think a more technical course would be safer and help the Mammoth team.”

  “Specifically, Sky.”

  “Well, him for sure—and Scotty and Trevor, and for certain Maria and Becky. Pretty much all of them.”

  “But not Wylie Welborn,” said Adam.

  “No. Not him. He’s more of a straightforward downhill racer.”

  “Whereas ski cross is supposed to be a combination of downhill and slalom.”