Tahoe Avalanche

by Todd Borg

  I walked past an outdoor sitting area where an older couple was sitting, their coats bundled up against the cold breeze. Indoors were two other couples standing in front of a gas fireplace. Each person held a large glass with an inch of red wine. They were swirling the wine, sniffing it, sipping it, chewing it, and moving their mouths like chipmunks with tooth problems. They frowned and pursed their lips then raised their eyebrows and finally, after swallowing, they smiled and looked very pleased.

  The young woman behind the wine bar set down the bottle and turned to me. “We’re tasting several pinots, sir. Would you care to join us?” She gave me a seductive grin.

  “No thanks, I’m here to see Ada. Is she in?”

  “She’s not in. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Any idea when she’ll be back?”

  “Three weeks from tomorrow.”

  “How about her parents? Are they in?”

  “No, they’re all in France, investigating some new varietals. Perhaps I could help you?”

  “Did they leave just recently? Wasn’t Ada here just last week?”

  “They just left last night. The red-eye from San Francisco nonstop to Paris.”

  “Have you spoken recently to Ada’s friends Lori Simon and Paul Riceman?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know who they are.” She frowned at me. “Your business is...”

  “I’m just a friend of the family,” I said.

  I thanked her and left.

  I drove out and stopped at the gate. There was a plastic shopping bag in my door pocket. I used it to scoop a good bit of dirt out of the vineyard, then drove home.

  I stopped at Street’s, spent an hour telling her about my day, then took Spot and headed up our steep road through light snow.

  I let Spot out, and he sniffed the driveway as if we’d had a visitor, which, in the winter, meant coyotes more often than people. Then I saw the book delivery at my door, next to the woodpile.

  I’d ordered two out-of-print art books from one of the online companies. According to the description, they were in good shape and had nice color plates of a broad selection of Chinese landscapes spanning the Sung Dynasty.

  But as I approached I was disappointed to see that the tape on the box had not sealed well. Blowing snow could have gotten in and damaged the books.

  Then again...

  I grabbed Spot and slammed him down as the world exploded.

  FORTY-NINE

  Split logs from the woodpile exploded our way. One hit my left arm. A sharp shard of wood split off from the log and pierced jacket and shirt sleeve and my biceps muscle. The sharp end of the spear stuck out five inches on the right side of my arm, and the thick end stuck out three inches on the left side.

  The pain was that of a hot poker fresh out of the fire. I gritted my teeth to stifle a roar of pain and anger. I wanted that wood shard out in the next half second. But the visible portions of the wood were covered with fresh splinters on the left and bloody, broken splinters on the right. If I attempted to yank it out, it would rip more flesh and leave more wood behind. I needed a pain killer now and surgery very soon. Fortunately, the spear didn’t appear to have struck the Brachial artery, which is a quick way to bleed out and die.

  I pushed myself up off of Spot to see if he was okay. He cowered by the cabin wall, holding his head low, shaking it to try to get the pain out of his ears. The rhinestone stud sparkled. Seeing him like that, I had the desire for vengeance, and I wished I could find the bomber and send Spot to take him down.

  Holding my arm out so that the rough wood spear wouldn’t bump anything, I turned and saw that my front door was blown in, shattered in two with one piece hanging crookedly from a single hinge. The living room window was also broken. A few shards lined the edges, with the main portion gone. Snow continued to swirl around, now blowing into my cabin as well.

  With my right arm, I coaxed Spot into the house. Wind whipped through the missing door and window, depositing a dusting of snow on every surface. The living room floor was covered in broken glass.

  As before, I dialed Diamond.

  “Bomb number two took out my door and window and put a spear of wood through my arm,” I said when he answered.

  Diamond spoke, but my ears were still deafened.

  “Can’t hear you,” I said.

  “On my way,” he shouted.

  It was like the first time, but with twice as many deputies combing the area, studying tracks, bagging evidence. Street came and nearly fainted when she saw me. She wanted to come with me to the hospital. I comforted her and told her it would be best if she stayed with Spot. Diamond said he’d see what he could do about boarding up the window and door of my cabin, then told one of the deputies to drive me to the hospital.

  Doc Lee wasn’t on in the ER. I got a new doctor named Lily DuPree who looked like a fifteen-year-old cheerleader, but acted professional if nervous. She kept glancing at the stitches in my face as she and a nurse cut off my jacket and shirt.

  “You should go to Reno for this,” she said when she saw the spear up close, the bloody wood bulging the skin and flesh. “There could be vascular and nerve damage in addition to the muscle damage. We can have a chopper here in a few minutes.”

  “Dr. DuPree, I’m sure you are up to the challenge. It’s just a flesh wound. No major arteries or veins.”

  She shook her head. “In all those years at medical school, we never went over large wood-shard penetrations.”

  “Doctor, I’ve been shot twice, stabbed once, and one time I was cut up by a man with a reciprocating saw. This is wood sliver. A little bigger than normal, but that’s how you learn, right? If you like, we can call Doc Lee. He will tell you to give me a local anesthetic, get out the utility knife, horse needle, sixty pound test line, and then cut this thing out and sew me up. He will also tell you not to waste time being too careful. It’ll just be one more set of scars out of many, and I’ve got a bomber to catch.”

  DuPree looked pasty, and then a flush rose in both of her cheeks. “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you want to do it? Here?” I lay down on one of the examination tables, crossed my ankles and angled my arm across my chest so the wooden spear was front and center.

  Diamond’s deputy drove me home three hours later. I was stiff and sore, and my numb, bandaged arm hung in its sling like a dead weight at my side. DuPree sent me home with a bottle of pills. She assured me that it would feel like I had fire in my arm for the next few days. She also said that she was certain there were many more tiny slivers left in the muscle, but that they would soften, and, after many months or even years, dissolve.

  Street and Diamond had cleaned up the broken glass. Diamond had found a piece of plywood under my deck and fashioned a crude door. Street had found plastic, and they had staple-gunned two layers of it over the missing window. They’d kept the woodstove hot. The layer of snow that had covered everything had turned to dew, which was gradually drying. It took some convincing to get Street and Diamond to go home to sleep.

  Spot and I were left to get warm in front of the woodstove. I put on an Edward Elgar disk and listened to the evocative music over the whistle of the wind outside the plastic and blankets.

  Using my right arm exclusively, I roasted hotdogs in the woodstove, two for each of us. Spot likes them the same as I do, with a slice of cheddar and lots of ketchup on whole wheat buns.

  We spent a long time in front of the fire, Spot curled into an arc around the side of the stove, his rear legs hanging off the big rug so he could be in position to rest his head on my foot. I drank most of a bottle of my best Stag’s Leap cab to celebrate our survival of the bomb and then finished off the rest of it to mourn the loss of my new used art books. The shipping box had looked big enough that the bomber may have been able to add a couple of three-by-eight charges to it, leaving the books inside. Or maybe he took the books with him. Either way, they were gone.

  I didn’t get to bed until three in the morning, but
the raging fire inside my arm prevented sleep. I lay there, sleepless, trying unravel the threads that connected all the young people who died.

  Eventually, I got up, made a pot of coffee, and was opening my East Asian art book on the dinette table when the phone rang.

  I looked at the clock. 5:00 a.m.

  “Hello?”

  “Owen? Bill. Is this okay? You sound awake. Tell me I didn’t jerk you out of bed. I hoped you would be an early riser.”

  “I was up. What do you want, Bill?”

  “I don’t know. I had a bad dream. Real bad. I don’t know who else to call. I don’t have any friends.”

  “It’s okay. What’s bothering you, Bill?”

  “I don’t know. When I was young I was working toward something. Build my business. Make some money. It’s a creative thing. You start with nothing but your ambition, and you make something. You’ve done that. You know how it works.” Bill’s words sounded steady, but I could sense him shaking with fear.

  “You should feel good about what you’ve made, Bill.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t care about it anymore. In the beginning, when I played chess, I always constructed a fortress around the king. My favorite pieces were the knights and the bishops. The goal was to fight the fiercest war and be victorious. Now all I care about is the pawns. But I still keep losing them. Once they’re gone, you can’t get them back. That’s what my dream was about. I lost my last pawn. I woke up with my heart on triple speed. I couldn’t breathe. I’m still soaked with sweat.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was starting to realize that the reason Bill was so wired and tense was that he cared about every little thing more than most people cared about any big thing. He was a big rough-looking guy on the outside, but inside he was as fragile and sensitive as a flower. He was desperately trying to make up for his tragic mistake in the past. But no matter how much effort he put into making the world better and more comfortable, it was always going to be very hard being Bill Esteban.

  “Could you give me some advice?” he said.

  “I’m just an ex-cop, Bill. I don’t have many answers.”

  “But you know stuff different than what I know. I’m wondering what you do when you have questions, when you – I don’t know – when you have doubts.”

  “Bill, I’m out of my league, here. I don’t have advice for anyone else. I just know what helps me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I look in my art books. Sometimes I don’t see anything that helps. Sometimes I do.”

  “I don’t get it,” Bill said. “You look at pictures?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I try to imagine how the artist figured out the painting.”

  “What does that mean, figure out a painting? Don’t they just look at something and paint it? Like a nude model or a still life?”

  “I think so. But they still have to figure out their composition and their palette and the values and the line quality. And content.”

  “What’s content?”

  “I’m not sure. The part that isn’t just the paint on the canvas. What the painting means. Its point. Its usefulness.”

  “Does art help with loneliness?”

  “I think art helps with everything.”

  After Bill hung up, I flipped through the reproductions in my book, stopping at an 11th Century painting by Kuo Hsi. It showed gnarled trees on imposing mountains both near and far. There were waterfalls and lakes and distant valleys and bluffs and cliffs and temples on the cliffs. The composition was as complex as a puzzle, and the connecting points and pathways were all obscured in mist. I stared at the painting like an explorer who glimpsed the fantastic landscape during a brief break in the clouds. And now, with only a few clues, I was trying to navigate without a map. I knew the trail was out there, but it was lost in the mist.

  FIFTY

  I didn’t leave the next morning until the carpenter and the glass shop guys were there to make repairs. Spot and I drove to Street’s. I brought the bag of dirt from Ada’s family’s vineyard. I handed it to her when she got in the Jeep. “Thank you! Some girls have to settle for roses. But I’m special. I get dirt.”

  We dropped the dirt at her lab, and went across Kingsbury Grade to the Red Hut where we met Mariposa Pearl and Packer Mills for breakfast.

  I explained about the bombs and my wounds and then told Mare about Paul Riceman over our coffee. She was horrified. Packer still played it so cool that I couldn’t read him. It could have been macho posturing. Or maybe he just didn’t have much empathy for other people.

  “What exactly is our objective?” Packer asked.

  “We ski into the Granite Chief Wilderness and try to locate Claude Sisuug’s cabin,” I said. “I’ve got questions for him. If he’s not there, we leave him a note. Because you are the only one of us who heard Sisuug describe his cabin and its location, I’m hopeful that you will help us find it.”

  “But I haven’t been there and don’t know where it is.”

  “Nevertheless, aspects of the terrain will make more sense to you than to us. The rest of us will be guessing, while you will filter what you see through Sisuug’s words. For you, it will be a visceral thing, raw and authentic.”

  “Yeah, I get it. Do the rest of you have an assignment while I search for a beat experience up on the mountain?”

  “Mariposa is our backcountry guide.”

  She raised her index finger. “I should point out that while I’ve hiked that country in the summer, I haven’t skied it.”

  “But you are one with topo maps and piles of snow.”

  “Ah.”

  Street said, “And I’m along for?”

  “Never know when a search party needs a bug expert.”

  “Of course.”

  Caltrans had again shut the Emerald Bay Highway because of the ongoing snowfall, so we drove up the East Shore and back down to Tahoe City. Street and Spot were with me in the Jeep. Mare and Packer were in his pickup.

  In places, the clouds seemed to rest heavily on the surface of the lake as if they’d already struggled to rise 6200 feet above the Central Valley, and they weren’t willing to go any higher. In other places, there were holes up to the sky, and the sun pierced through here and there creating intense pools of ultramarine blue dappling the huge expanse of gray water. The weather report was predicting that a powerful storm would hit the following day, but for now we were just supposed to have periodic snow showers.

  In Tahoe City we headed out 89, down the Truckee River to Squaw Valley. Despite the constant freeze/thaw cycles that compress the snowpack, snow covered the valley floor five feet deep. The rail fences poked out in places but mostly created long white bulges that stretched into the distance.

  We parked in the big lot. Using my right arm, I grabbed Spot’s mule pack, which I’d stuffed with dog food, water canteen and a bowl. I put it over his back, clicking the snaplock straps around his chest. The rest of us put on our backpacks and carried our ski gear over our shoulders. It was a long hike up to the far side of the village.

  Like a rock star stopping to sign autographs, Spot had to pause to let fans give him a pet and ogle his size and ask if he was carrying brandy in his pack.

  Once we’d passed the pedestrian village, Mare stopped, opened her pack and handed out transceivers. “These are borrowed. My job security depends on bringing them back in working order.” We put the harnesses on and adjusted them. Mare went through the lesson in how to use the transceivers. She then checked her topo map, divining from the topo lines secrets the rest of us would miss. She put the map back in her pocket.

  “No compass?” I said.

  She shook her head. “I brought one, but I don’t need it as long as I have visibility. Unlike when you’re on the prairie, the topo lines make a three-dimensional picture of the mountains. Unless it is real foggy, I can just match up the map with the landscape. No need to wrestle with the compass
. The mineral deposits in these mountains give you local variations on your compass readings, anyway. And that is in addition to magnetic declination. A compass in the Northern Sierra points about fifteen degrees east of true north. But you all probably know that.”

  “We all know that, right?” I said to the rest of the group.

  “Of course,” we all said, nodding at Mare. It occurred to me that Street probably knew about magnetic declination for the entire country, but she didn’t say it.

  Mare set off, and the rest of us trailed out behind her. Street and I skied, with me using only my right pole, while Packer wore snowshoes for the uphill trek and carried his snowboard for rides down.

  Mare followed Squaw Creek for an hour and then angled off to the north. The trail went through a winter paradise, up a short rise to a shelf, and then it began to climb. Mare skied straight up. In the places where her skis didn’t provide enough grip on the loose snow, she made up for it by propelling herself with her poles, her powerful shoulders and arms working like pistons.

  None of us except Spot were in shape like Mare. But it was easy for Packer on his snowshoes, and Street and I had the benefit of following their fresh-broken trail.

  In an hour we’d climbed to a ridge with sweeping views south to many of Squaw Valley’s ski runs and chairlifts. To the west was the broad ridge that comprised the Pacific Crest Trail. In the distance to the southeast was the Tahoe Basin. We could see two bits of gray water peeking out from a roiling mass of clouds that spilled over the Sierra Crest and down into the basin.

  Mare stopped and got out her map as the rest of us caught up. We gathered around her on the ridgetop. Despite the heavy swirl of clouds that alternately covered the mountains and then filled the valleys, it was very bright on the high-altitude snow, and we all wore dark sunglasses.