This Is How It Really Sounds

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  He brushed the snow off the windshield and the hood with wide, sweeping strokes. The flecks of white floated slowly away in the still air. He’d always said he’d never go to work on a Saturday if there was fresh powder. That in itself was a fallback from when he used to say he’d never go to work on a powder day, period. Punk kid talk. Now here he was. Put in five days at the hardware store, and now this. His brother-in-law was behind on the project, and he wanted to help out, and he damn sure needed the extra money after that stock-market mess. His father had been a partner in the hardware store, had taught him enough about the business to give a sense of inevitability to his life, no matter how long he tried to duck it on the meager circuit that had existed for extreme skiers back then.

  Not that there had been anything glamorous about it. He remembered the hotel rooms with cheap wood paneling, the beater cars and the sponsors who were always nickel-and-diming him about gas receipts and bar tabs. In a great year, he earned five thousand dollars and spent the other six months working construction or fishing out of Bristol Bay. Not too much glory, either: nobody was famous except for the little cloud of notoriety that hovered among a small circle of skiers at each mountain, something you saw in the eyes of people helping with the event or sitting around a wooden table in some tavern at the end of the day. That was the nature of being the best in a sport nobody cared about, but it never occurred to him that he was missing anything. Other people had jobs, while he was paid to live in a world of pure motion that came rushing up in front of him and dropped away behind in a single, continual moment. A single moment that became a single day, that became a single winter of snow and velocity and fire. But now, years later, that moment was gone.

  He wished his wife were around. She’d settle him down with something like, That’s what puts food on the table! Or, Don’t worry, honey, there’ll be more snow tomorrow. But she wouldn’t be home from the hospital for another hour. They were making her work half shifts on Saturdays, which they both hated, but with the staff cutbacks she had to fill in until they could get things back on course. Wasn’t supposed to be like that. She was supposed to have seniority. But nobody had seniority under the new ownership, and all hands were on deck.

  At forty-four, she was still a good-looking woman. A little more curvy, a little more weight settled down to her butt, but still a desirable woman, by any standards. At his age, he could appreciate someone more rounded. When he was young, he’d been looking for the hard bodies, the muscular women with no fat, and she’d been one of those. Straight blond hair, moved up from Colorado. Typical kind of Swedish blonde, right out of a magazine. But educated. Graduated college. Her father was an architect in Denver and didn’t hide the fact that he thought she was marrying down. He could still remember meeting her at the Alaskan, when she’d been sitting around a table with a couple of her friends and a couple of his, and Dave had shouted, “Wreckage!” as he walked up to the table, then congratulated him on his win at Valdez. The kind of introduction a buddy gives you when he wants to make you look good. “Wreckage” was playing everywhere back then, when he was twenty-five. For a while he’d had that as a nickname, because his given name was Peter and because he skied so fast and wrecked so hard, on those rare occasions when he wrecked.

  “What did you win?” she asked him when he sat down. Not much, he told her, because it wasn’t much. Four hundred bucks and a beer mug. A couple of free rides in a helicopter. That was the prize for being the best in those days. That, and having a good opening line in the bars.

  “I mean, what did you win at?”

  He’d shrugged. “Put fifty guys up on a mountain and see who takes the most outrageous line down, give him marks for style, and if you’re just a little crazier than the rest and all your arms and legs still work at the bottom, you win four hundred bucks and a beer mug.”

  But actually, the secret prize was much more than that. The secret prize was, you got the girl. The secret prize was, you could do it, and very few others could. The secret prize was something you couldn’t explain. Glory, maybe. Not fame, because fame required a lot of people knowing, and they could know something silly or shallow; just the fact of a million people knowing it made it fame. But glory was what a few others knew or just you knew—that you had done something extraordinary and courageous and that fear hadn’t stopped you. It was true. It was real.

  So he’d gotten the girl. Charmed her, wowed her, bedded her, married her. Sat with her through two labors right in his own house, in the same bedroom where his father had been born. Fought about how to raise the kids: her always too soft, him too strict, but so far they’d turned out pretty good. Great kids that would be great people when they grew up. Yeah, that was the real prize, he guessed.

  A song came on the radio, and the familiar voice turned the prize into vapor and whisked it away. Some song about Shanghai. It was a voice he associated with his “spin through Hollywood.” He always called it that because naming it seemed to pin the whole thing in place and make it less painful. Back when he’d been competing, Pete Harrington had the life every young man wished he could live: with rock star money and rock star girls, while all he had was rocks and snow and the occasional girl. He’d met him that time at the end of all that talk about liquor endorsements and stunt-double roles, and for a few days it had looked like Pete Harrington was going to usher him into a bigger, shinier life. Then there was the accident, and his life had shrunk back down to something small and usual. What it was now.

  He turned off the radio.

  The snow was falling all around him. He was working today because his wife wasn’t making the money she used to at the hospital. The city had sold it off to some big company, and if you didn’t want to work on their terms they could darn sure find somebody from down south who would. That, and the fact that he’d lost most of their retirement chasing hot stock tips from the “pros” on Wall Street.

  It still hurt him to remember those days. He’d thought he was so smart, and everybody else was so ordinary. Getting up at 4 A.M. for market opening back in New York, like he knew what he was doing. A couple of wins, then the first losses, then more losses. Always some new “disrupting” product or business model that was going to get all their savings back for him. And none of them did. Finally having to tell his wife. It was the only time he’d ever made her cry.

  According to Riley, the electrician, it had all been rigged from the get-go. The whole thing had been planned out by ZOG—Zionist-occupied government. ZOG was the culprit. All those guys on Wall Street were Jews, and the bankers and the head of the Federal Reserve. Of course, Riley was full of shit about a hundred other things; no reason why he’d start getting it right on this one.

  He needed a new drill bit, so he drove the four blocks to the hardware store. He got out of his truck and stood for a moment in the parking lot, looking up at Mount Juneau, whose two-thousand-foot cliffs rose behind the town. When he’d left the house, it had been visible, but now the thick snow clouds had come in and spirited it away within a white fog, like a magician’s silk curtain.

  Arnie saw him pull up and met him at the door. Arnie was his dad’s old partner and owned half the business. At the age of eighty-nine Arnie still liked to come in and putter around, and Harry could understand that. Harry felt good in the old store; it was a place that implied that everything could be repaired. Whether it was marine epoxy or a timberlock-beam screw, somehow there was a way to put together anything that got broken, refurbish things that were worn out, and even if they didn’t look shiny and new, they would still work.

  Arnie was a little guy, partial to Pendleton wool shirts in red and black plaid, with the traces of a Norwegian accent from his Petersburg parents. He was a Viking skier of the old school, and even now you could see him up on the mountain on the best days in spring, slowly and carefully making his way down the groomed runs, stiff, a little bit hunched, but still skiing. He never wore a helmet. He’d survived Monte Cassino and the Battle of the Bulge, he said. He didn’t
think he had a hell of a lot left to fear from winter.

  “Harry! Didn’t expect to see you today! I thought for sure you’d be up skiing.”

  The remark went through him like a dagger. “I’m helping Jim out. He’s behind on a job.”

  The old man looked up at what could be seen of the mountains. “Must be some job.”

  “I want to kill myself.”

  Arnie smiled. “Come on in, you poor bastard. Have a cup of courtesy coffee and a cookie.”

  He followed Arnie in through the front door. He needed a nine-sixteenths router bit, which Arnie got for him as he filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee and picked up one of the stale vanilla-crème cookies in the basket. There was a magazine on the counter and it was open to a perfume ad where a woman was sitting in what must have been some sort of fancy limousine, dressed in an evening dress that some guy’s hand had hiked up to her thigh. She looked Chinese or Japanese.

  Arnie had come shuffling back to the desk with the bit. “What do you think about that?” Arnie said.

  He compared her in his mind to his wife. He spoke with a little more finality than he actually felt. “Think I’ll stick with the one I’ve got. This one doesn’t look like she’s carried a lot of firewood.”

  “I don’t think she’s the firewood-carrying model.”

  Harry looked away from it and turned to the door again, lifting the light grabby walls of the Styrofoam cup to his lips. It was really dumping out there. Visibility would be low, but with all this snow, you could just ski by Braille, feeling your way down the slope, moving through the white above and the white below until you got to the trees. He was itching to try out those new reverse-camber fatties Rossignol had sent him. He still had a couple of fans there, older guys, who kept him on the free-skis list. Younger guys not too much, except occasionally he’d get some sort of e-mail from some kid who’d seen a clip somewhere or somebody wanting to interview him about the early days. Every once in a while he’d hear about them using an old clip of him in some sort of retrospective, calling him one of the legends of the sport, stuff like that. Not that any of that mattered: it was a Saturday, there was a foot of the kind of powder that refined your life to something simple and perfect again, and he was down here working. He looked out the glass door toward the mountains, thinking about it.

  “Would it really kill you to take the day off?” the old man said behind him, also looking at the snow. “Call in sick.”

  “Jim needs the help,” he said. He didn’t want to say, And we need the money.

  Arnie wrote the drill bit’s code number on a clipboard and put the piece into a little paper bag. Harry remained standing at the counter, miserable, looking for the right words. “These perfect days,” he finally said. “They just destroy me. They come and they go, and I always feel like I’ve got to grab onto them … And I never can.”

  The old man nodded gently. “I’ll let you in on a little secret: there’s a never-ending supply of perfection out there.”

  * * *

  A couple of the guys were already waiting for him, warming their hands with steaming paper cups. One of them said something about skiing, and Harry forced a mute smile. They were working on a duplex built in the eighties. It was a rot job, his least favorite kind. Nothing constructive about a rot job. You followed it through the walls, cutting and replacing, and when you finally finished, it looked exactly the same as when you started. On top of that, the client usually complained about the cost, because they hadn’t expected it to go so far. Like the whole country: who’d have thought the rot went so deep? Wall Street criminals sucking the life out of the place, politicians on the take, corporations running everything. It looked the same on the outside now, but after the collapse it never would be the same again. The curtain had been pulled away and people had seen how things really worked, and instead of revolting, they’d just shrugged and gone on like before. Him included. Said, Okay, pick this carcass clean.

  The guys had the usual garbage on the radio: someone going off about illegal immigrants. Mexicans swarming over the border like rats. Matteo could hear it plain as day, but he didn’t say anything, because this was what the crew always listened to. A stealth invasion of the United States. Everybody would have to learn Spanish or be arrested by the government. Harry looked over at Matteo, who was holding a piece of drywall with one hand and screwing it with the other. There was something inward and tense about him. Harry got up and changed the station.

  “Hear about what happened with your cousin?”

  Riley’d come in from the other room and was standing over him in his black horn-rim glasses, his little eyes swimming crazily behind the thick lenses.

  “What cousin are you talking about?”

  “Pete Harrington! Of the DreamKrushers! He hammered one of those Wall Street banksters. Just walked up to him on the street, and”—he pantomimed an overhand right—“BOOM! Right in the nose! Dropped him like the sack of shit he is!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah! Check this out!” He pulled out his cell phone and began to look for the video.

  Harry was still hoping to get a couple of hours of skiing in, if they could at least finish the drywall. “Maybe now’s not the best time, Riley.”

  Riley ignored him, staring at his phone. “Get this: the bankster is also named Peter Harrington. He was that guy a few years ago, remember? Stole a shit-load of our money in some Wall Street rip-off.”

  “What sort of rip-off?”

  Riley looked confused. “You know—Wall Street!”

  Harry didn’t respond, which didn’t keep Riley from rolling right along. “So this guy’s living in a twenty-million-dollar mansion in Shanghai. On our money! We bail ’em out; they go to Shanghai on our dime and live it up. And who do you think pulled the strings on that bailout? Huh?” Riley leaned down to him and said softly, “ZOG,” then nodded his head secretively, knowingly. “Zionist-occupied goddamn government.” The video had finally come up. “Check this out.”

  On the tiny screen of Riley’s phone, Harry saw a blond-haired man walking down the street, shot from behind. The camera moved around him, and it was undeniably Pete Harrington, the same Pete Harrington he’d met years ago naked in a hot tub. He looked older now, the cheeks were softer, a bit less square and handsome, but definitely that same famous face. He watched him walk up to a slightly chunky man with a large forehead who held his hand out eagerly and said, “I really like your music!” Someone started a table saw in the other room, so he couldn’t hear what the musician said in return, but the next event was unmistakable. Pete Harrington stepped forward and punched the man squarely in the nose, and the man staggered back and fell onto his butt, blood streaming down his face. On a human level, he felt sorry for the victim, who looked miserable on the ground. Riley was shouting over the undulating scream of the saw, “… bankster! Living in a twenty-million…”

  Harry took the phone in his hands and played it again. This time, the banker’s face looked craven and greedy, the embodiment of all the faceless financial scammers who had somehow taken his retirement savings and were gnawing away at the hospital and his insurance and the country itself.

  He was sick of it all of a sudden. Sick of Riley’s idiot conspiracy theories, sick of the conspiracies he knew existed but that he’d never discover. In Shanghai some guy with his name was living it up in a twenty-million-dollar mansion, and he was working on a Saturday when everywhere else but this rot-filled building was purified and sanctified with deep and perfect snow.

  “I left something in my truck,” he said, and he pushed the door open and stepped outside. He didn’t really need anything in his truck; it was just that his sense of anguish was too great to be contained in the raw space of the rehab. He looked up at Mount Juneau, its frozen waterfalls bounding down along the rock surface. Higher up, it went white and blended in with the sky. Why couldn’t he be up there? He heard a familiar voice say hello to him. He turned to see a medium-sized kid with brown hair and a hood
ed cotton sweatshirt that said ALASKA HELI-SKIING on it. It was Lucas. The responsible one.

  “Lucas! What are you doing here? I thought you went with Jarrod and those guys.”

  Lucas glanced sideways. “No. They’re going all the way up to the Wedding Bowl. I have to be at work at three.”

  “The Wedding Bowl? I told him not to go there!”

  “So did I. It’s gotta be loaded.”

  Harry swore quietly. Fucking Jimmie! He wanted to kick the crap out of him. “When did they leave?”

  “About a half hour ago, I think.”

  “Jimmie talk him into this?”

  Lucas was silent for a second, then offered, “Jimmie’s kind of an idiot.”

  “Who else is with them?”

  “I think TJ and Brandon went. There’s a chute they want to drop out there.” He shrugged. “I told them not to.”

  “I know that chute.” He nodded. “Thanks, Lucas.”

  He took out his phone and dialed his son, but no one picked up. He was ducking him, or else they’d already headed out. In that case, there would be no reception until his son reached the top of the ridge. Harry Harrington stood there for a half minute looking up at the white streaks of avalanche chutes that had cut their way through the black-green apron of forest. He thought of the people he knew that had been killed in avalanches. Guy, down in Tahoe. Had his skull and spine crushed in a slab avalanche. Rick’d had it even worse down at Mount Baker. He’d been buried seven feet deep and suffocated while they were digging him out. Both of them young, both incredible skiers. It wasn’t the mediocre skiers who died in the mountains. It was the ones that had to be there, that had to take a bold line.