Crazy Blood

by T. Jefferson Parker

  I’m surrounded by beauty, he thought.

  They made love again once before sunrise and once after; then Wylie got the fire going for coffee. Later they took the fishing rods and meandered down to Breakfast Creek arm in arm, like adolescents. Wylie rigged a short one-weight fly rod and showed April how to flick out the fly and let the riffle take it along. He used his two-weight with a black ant pattern. The brook trout were famished, as always, and they put back the small ones and in an hour had enough for breakfast.

  * * *

  Before lunch, they made two runs down Madman, then ate and slept like the dead in the MPP, then made another two runs before sunset.

  Near sundown, they sat on rocks at the top of Madman, considering separately the vastness around them, snowshoes strapped to their backs and ready to go. Wylie tried to admit his emotions in small quantities because they were far from normal for him. The setting sun burnished the western face of the mountains above them with a light promising darkness.

  “I’ve never boarded at night without lights,” she said.

  “You know Madman by now. Be the snow.”

  “I’m happy, Wylie. A new kind of happy. All I can think about is this snow, and that I don’t have to compete on it. And that I’ve got this man who is my secret and friend. And this hidden place. I’m not April Holly wearing a medal. Or April Holly for Salonne. I’m April Holly doing what I love to do.”

  “I like that.”

  “Or maybe I’m just April Holly, loved into idiocy by a large bearded love bear.”

  “I like that, too.”

  “Dark enough yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do we have to go back?”

  “We’ve got provisions for four more days.”

  “And guests arriving tomorrow.”

  “You’ll like Adam and Teresa.”

  “I want to put out the No Vacancy sign. Do you have one?”

  “We could carve one up.”

  “God knows what they’ll think of me. But I have one more day of invisibility with my secret mountain man. I’m going to devour it.”

  “Ready? I’ll lead this time.”

  “I want to lead.”

  “Madman is all yours, April.”

  * * *

  The next day—Wylie Welborn’s twenty-sixth birthday—was the best birthday of his life. He and April skied and napped and cooked lunch. They hiked a steep escarpment and sunned themselves on a flat boulder. By the time they came back to the MPP, Adam and Teresa had made camp. They sat under the bear-foiling lodgepole pine, each with a fat book open. It was still warm for fall, but when the sun went down, the temperature fell like a dropped rock.

  That evening, Adam cooked ribs and corn he’d brought up from Bishop, and Teresa made drinks, and Wylie and April built a fire and kept it fed. They ate and talked late around the fire and had birthday cake made by Teresa. At one point, pleasantly drunk and feeling less weighted than he had felt in his adult life, Wylie looked at April. He smiled at her across the rippling flames and she smiled back. He saw otherness and strength and beauty and he marveled that two of the same species could be so different. He felt nothing to hide. He wanted to declare.

  “Wylie,” said Adam. “I saw two of your runs down Madman today. You looked fast and relaxed. If you win the Mammoth Cup, that’s an awfully good beginning and a pass to Aspen for the X Games. I’m offering to send you there, then on to Europe for the FIS World Cup tour if you can make that cut. And, of course, the spring qualifiers back stateside, for Olympic selections. There’s no use getting ahead of ourselves, but I want you to know that money won’t be a problem for any of that. Happy birthday. I’ve made the same offer to Sky, of course. Just so it’s all on the up-and-up.”

  Wylie had to tell himself that he’d heard the words, not dreamed them. Or conjured them in a bourbon haze. He felt April’s hand squeeze his leg. He was aware of Adam and Teresa watching, their eyes four distant orange windows. And he thought, This is what it is to be in love, and to have a living father who is well pleased by you. “Honored, Grandpa.”

  * * *

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Why, again?”

  “To show you the real me.”

  “I hope they’re sharp.”

  “I keep them that way.”

  In the dimmed lantern light inside the MPP, Wylie leaned forward toward the mirror. He raised the utility shears and went to work on his beard. It took several minutes of cutting, the fat clumps of whiskers landing audibly on the open sheet of newspaper he had pressed into the small sink. Behind him, reflected in the mirror, April watched him in attentive silence. Two inches dwindled to one inch, then an uneven scape of angled tufts and divots. The face beneath was pale and smooth. He used one of her pink disposable razors to take the whiskers down to the skin—three slow passes through thick shampoo lather to accomplish this. He rinsed and dried, pulled the rubber band from his ponytail, and turned to her.

  April ran a hand down one cheek, frowning. “I liked it better before.”

  He smiled.

  “I’m kidding. You look so young. You’re a beautiful man. Sorry, but I’m not going to be able to keep these hands off you.” She pulled him back into the bed and they brought the sleeping bag over them. “I gotta tell you, Wylie. When Adam said he’d sponsor you on the World Cup tour, I got goose bumps up and down my back. Because you’re good enough. You’re good enough to do that.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I’ve been watching you up there on Madman, boy. I’ve seen a lot of skiers, and you got it. I can see that you’ve got it.”

  * * *

  Two days later, Wylie steered the truck up Minaret toward Starwood. He felt fully triumphant but tried not to show it. April had her hand on his knee and he felt her grip tighten when she saw the uplink news vans parked outside the gate, the Mammoth Lakes police cruiser, and a smattering of vans and SUVs with radio or TV logos emblazoned on their flanks. There were a few loitering locals and some kids on bikes.

  “Mom ratted me out,” she said.

  “She’ll be happy to have you back.”

  “She’ll be furious. If you don’t want to get into all this, you can drop me here and just keep going.”

  “I’m all in.”

  “Brace yourself. Please don’t do anything like to Jacobie or Sky. Just…”

  “I understand.”

  She pulled off her beanie, leaned out the window, and looked at herself in the side-view mirror as she shook out her hair. “What they want from me is Little April Sunshine. And they’re going to get her.”

  He pulled past the gathered vehicles and bystanders and up to the gate. April told him what numbers to punch as a posse of photographers and videographers hustled around to April’s side of the truck, firing away. She shook her curls again. Wylie could hear the clatter of the motor drives and he watched as one of the women barged in and pointed a large mike toward April. “Monika Silver from ESPN—are you okay, April?”

  “Hi, Monika. Just terrific! I’ve been camping in the mountains with some friends. I can’t tell you how great it was to get away. I boarded down a beautiful run and washed my hair in a creek. Salonne shampoo works beautifully in Sierra creek water, I can tell you that.”

  “April! Newell Yost with City Cable—why didn’t you tell anyone where you were going? Your mother filed a missing-person report.”

  “You know, I just forgot! And the phones don’t work up there. And … I’m so embarrassed to have caused all this trouble. Can you let us through?”

  Wylie saw that the gate had rolled open. A Mammoth Lakes cop rapped on his window and Wylie rolled it down. “Welborn?”

  “Sir.”

  “Everything all right?”

  Some of the reporters had come to Wylie’s side of the truck now, squeezing around the cop to shoot. “Yes. Just camping, sir, and she forgot to tell her mom.”

  “Helene wa
s worried. She’ll be happy to see April alive and well. You? Not so sure.”

  “I’m prepared.”

  “For what?”

  “To behave myself.”

  “Wylie, we can go now.”

  They wound through the pretty neighborhood to April’s rented house and parked in the drive. April took a deep breath but said nothing. They got out and Wylie saw the worry on April’s face as Helene and Logan came through the front door. Helene was in the lead, arms swinging wide as she advanced on Wylie. “Get off my property, you bastard. Now.”

  “I’m going to help April unload first, ma’am.”

  “She does mean now,” said Logan.

  Wylie said nothing, but Helene got so tight to his face that he could smell the coffee on her breath. “I forbid you to see her again.”

  “You can’t, Mom. I’m twenty-one. I like him.”

  “We were just camping with friends,” said Wylie, stepping back as Logan came closer.

  “Get back in the truck,” Logan said softly.

  Helene whirled on the big man. “Can’t you do more than that? Can’t you do anything but cook and cash your paycheck?”

  Logan dropped into a wrestler’s crouch, arms outstretched, fingers prodding the air slowly, tarantulalike. Even with Logan crouching, Wylie had to look up at him. Logan ambled forward Weirdly. Wylie heard April scream “No!” and somehow the sound of her voice became a breath-robbing clinch and takedown that left his arms splayed helplessly, his shoulders crushed to the concrete, his body twisted and writhing, and his neck feeling like it could snap anytime now.

  “Don’t kill him,” said Helene. “Just make sure he doesn’t come back.”

  “Let him go! Stop!”

  Wylie couldn’t draw breath and he knew to tap out. He sent the signal to his hands and it seemed to take a full second for them to respond. But he found nothing solid to tap out on, so his palms just waved aimlessly in the air.…

  He woke to the sight of his hiking boots. There they were, one canted to the right and the other to the left, way, way down at the ends of his legs. The edge of his vision was dark, like binoculars poorly adjusted. He could feel his back and shoulders and head propped against something rough and hard. Through the dark perimeter of his eyesight, a face came at him, distorted as through a peephole or upon a Christmas tree bulb. A pretty woman. Behind her hovered two more figures, these unfocused also. Their voices came to him more clearly than their faces.

  “Logan, call the paramedics. Now. I don’t want a lawsuit on my hands.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Holly.”

  “Wylie? Wylie? Can you see me?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The first snow of the season fell overnight in early November, lowering a thin white blanket over the town. That morning, Wylie sat in his truck outside Cynthia Carson’s home, looking up at the mountain and watching the snowflakes still wafting down from above. His truck engine was running and he had the heater cranked up. Yesterday’s text from Cynthia Carson was more an order than an invitation: “Be at my home at 8:00 A.M. Wednesday—C. Carson.”

  He looked again at Cynthia’s front door. He had rarely felt such dread. He had never actually spoken to her before. Never really looked her in the eye. Soon, he would have to do both. Sipping the last of his coffee, Wylie remembered first hearing the whispered gossip about Sky Carson’s mom shooting his dad before Sky was born. She was in prison. One of the other kindergarteners had a folded newspaper picture of her walking into court. Sky was suddenly different to him, but how? Was this the reason why Sky was either funny or sad? No kid talked about any of it when he was around, that was for sure. As a kindergartener, Wylie had thought a lot about all this. Wished it hadn’t happened. Wished they could all wake up from it, like from a bad dream. He’d lost his own father to a bad illness, so he understood growing up without a true dad around.

  Wylie drained the coffee, dropped the container into the holder, and suddenly it was fifteen years ago, his eleventh birthday, and he and his mother were walking along Mammoth Creek. It was a beautiful October day. Atop a lookout point with a breath-stealing view of the White Mountains across the valley, Kathleen told Wylie that she wanted to set a few things straight. “I think you’re old enough now,” she said. “I don’t want you hearing half-truths. I hope you don’t judge me too harshly.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Mom.”

  In fact, whatever she says is okay with me, he’d thought. He’d heard some very strange rumors. Maybe she could clear things up.

  “When I was seventeen and just out of high school in San Diego, I moved here to Mammoth Lakes to become a pro skier. I was brave and naïve and I had some talent. I worked three jobs to pay rent and to buy my ski passes. I made the team. And … about a year later, Wylie, I became pregnant with you.”

  “This was when Dad was alive.”

  Kathleen took his face in her hands and looked tearfully into his eyes. He had never seen such an emotion from her and he was afraid. “Wylie? Your father was Richard Carson. He was my coach.”

  He felt light-headed and took a knee. He had no idea what to say or do. Sky’s long-dead dad? How did that happen? Kathleen had continued talking, though her voice sounded far away. She said that when she got pregnant, Richard had been married to Cynthia Carson. Cynthia had then killed Richard in anger, so, yes, some of those rumors Wylie might have been hearing were, in fact, true.

  By then Kathleen was crying and trying to blot up the tears with a pink-and-white paisley bandanna that flapped in the dry alpine breeze. “You were my baby, Wylie. My baby, and Richard’s.…”

  Suddenly, he had felt something heavy unfurling inside him, like a thick curtain trying to separate the complexities of what his mother was saying from the simple truth he had always known, that his father—William, a good man—had loved Wylie but died of natural causes just two years after Wylie had been born. Yes. Truth. And that Kathleen had married Steen years later, with Beatrice and Belle coming along soon after. Yes. Truth again. Then Wylie was aware of his mother kneeling beside him, and of her arms strong around him, her voice cracking, and her tears smelling somehow tropical.

  “But I saw pictures of Dad. You showed me.”

  “The man in the picture was an old friend. He was not your father. His name was not William. I lied to you. And I’m so very sorry, Wylie.”

  Wylie had stood and walked away from her, back down the dirt road toward Mammoth Park, slowly, his ears roaring and his vision shrunken and blurred around its edges. He could hear her footsteps behind him, keeping pace but not coming fast enough to catch him. He wanted badly to be going fast down a snow-covered mountain, so incredibly fast that it would tear all the bad things away and leave only the good and the happy and the true. He ran for home as if he were running for his life.

  Two years later, Cynthia Carson was back in Mammoth Lakes. She was shorter and thicker than Wylie had expected. Her hair was white and her face was pale and her eyes were the blue of lake ice. When small-town coincidence brought them into proximity, she would stop what she was doing and stare at him and say nothing, as if daring him to look back. He couldn’t, because he was terrified. Did she hate him? Why? How was it his fault that she had killed his father? Shouldn’t he hate her? Did she still have the gun? Wylie, age thirteen, was overmatched.

  * * *

  Now as the first snow of the season came down, he looked again at Cynthia Carson’s front door. It opened and a white swatch of human face appeared. He checked his watch. Crap. Let’s do this. He turned off the engine of the truck and got out.

  She watched him approach, but when he made it to the door, she made no effort to open it farther. He stood before her. He watched her lake-ice eyes roam him, summoned his will not to look away. “With your face clean-shaven, you look more like a Carson,” she said.

  “If you say so.”

  “Finally you’ve looked me directly in the eye.”

  “You used to terrify me.”

  “Now?”<
br />
  “A little less.”

  “Close the door behind you.”

  He followed her through a short foyer and into the living room. The town house was warm inside and smelled of coffee. The walls were crowded with ski posters, their frames aligned to form perfectly symmetrical rows both up, down, and across. There was a faux-leather couch faded by sunlight, and a recliner with a bear and pinecone blanket draped neatly over the back. A card table and one folding chair were set up near the woodstove. A red laptop computer, closed, sat centered on the table, along with a printer, a yellow legal pad open to a clean page, a stapler, and a Mammoth Woolly coffee mug stuffed with pens and pencils. Wylie’s guts were in a sore twist. He wondered if Cynthia was crazy enough to shoot him dead, too.

  “Do you read The Woolly?”

  “Now and then.”

  “I’ll give you the latest edition.”

  “Why did you call me here?”

  “I want you to see Robert. Come.”

  Robert’s room was dimly lit. When Cynthia turned the rheostat, Wylie saw the hospital bed and Robert’s sheeted body propped upright at the waist. His still-handsome face reclined in pillows.

  “You may have heard about his progress,” she said.

  Wylie looked from Robert to Cynthia. “Really?”

  “He can move both eyelids in response to questions. One blink means yes and two mean no. It can be either eyelid. He’s equally fluent with both. His respiration rate also changes in response to my questions, as if he’s trying to answer. Right now, he’s either asleep or opinionless. Robbie? Wylie Welborn is here. I’ll bet you never thought you’d see the day I’d let him into our home. Are you awake, Robbie?”

  Wylie stepped closer to Robert, touched his half brother’s forehead. Robert’s skin felt thin and cool and there was no movement of his eyelids. “Hello, Robert. It’s Wylie. I’m in your home, all right. I’m not really sure why. But I’m standing here with you.”