Читать книгу The Luckiest Scar on Earth - Ana Maria Spagna - Страница 10

CHAPTER FOUR

I stepped out of the apartment and stood shivering in my orange Broncos sweatshirt, thinking about how snow here in the Cascades always felt heavy in a knock-the-wind-out-of-you way. Not blowy and light. Not one bit like Colorado. Not like it should be.

Larry pulled up in his battered pickup with a snowmobile trailer hitched up and ready to go. Who knew he owned a snowmobile?

“I called the avalanche hotline,” he said. “Conditions are stable.”

That didn’t exactly set my mind at ease.

I climbed into the cab where Larry already had KZZR blaring. There were callers wanting to sell a set of used snow tires or a load of firewood or a beater car. The cell phone dealer hogged ten minutes of free advertising as we drove out of town. We went the same direction as always, toward Goat Peak, toward Timberbowl, but earlier, so early you couldn’t tell if the sky was gray with clouds, or just in-between night and day. The road, too, looked gray. Slick ice or bare pavement? Take your best guess. Larry drove slow and careful, but things still felt somehow dangerous.

From a distance, you could see the grooming machines creeping down the runs at Timberbowl, headlights aglow, the drivers done with work for the night and going home to sleep all day. Soon Subarus would line the highway, skis on their roof racks, heading up for the day. For now: stillness. Like the calm before the storm or the minutes before the buzzer goes off in a race or those last few days of eighth grade in Denver before my life got spun three-sixty to land me here on an icy two-lane road with Larry Potts at the steering wheel. Without so much as a drop of cocoa.

“Don’t you want coffee? Shouldn’t we stop?”

One last mini-mart sat at the base of the mountain. It sold chili in cans and hand warmers, a few windshield wiper blades, and plenty of hot drinks.

“Jonesing already, Charlotte? It’s not even 7 a.m.”

“Could be,” I said. “Could be.”

He sighed and turned on his blinker to signal the turn into the store. Just as he did, we heard the DJ introduce Jake, Timberbowl’s manager. We’d once seen him in the lodge wearing an overstuffed lime-green coat with six gold chains around his neck.

Larry pulled into the parking lot, but he left the truck idling and turned up the volume.

Before he let Jake speak, the DJ re-explained the development plan: the airstrip, the golf course, the eight hundred condos.

“First off, these are cabins,” Jake interrupted. “Not condos. Everyone knows around here ‘condos’ is a bad word. This development will bring jobs to the area.”

“What about those folks who lost their jobs this morning for signing a petition opposing the project?” the DJ asked.

I turned toward Larry. His expression steady, stable you might say, unreadable, eyes fixed straight ahead at the bright storefront window. His scar throbbed a light rosy pink.

“Hold on now. Hold on. Those were part-time seasonal employees. They know that when the snow doesn’t come, skiers don’t come out to the hill, and they will be laid off.”

“So you’re saying it had nothing to do with the petition?”

“An unfortunate lack of work.”

Jake was lying. Anyone could tell.

“Nothing at all?” the DJ insisted.

“Nothing.”

“But I understand that only those workers who signed the petition…”

“Listen,” Jake interrupted again, bold as a Texan on skis. “When you get in a spitting match with your boss, you gotta expect to lose.”

The scar moved right past red to bright maroon.

“You can’t take a man who wears gold chains that seriously, Larry,” I said. “You just can’t.”

“You got that backwards, Charlotte,” he said. “You can’t not take him seriously.”

He clicked off the radio, got out of the truck, and slammed the door. I didn’t figure it made sense to follow him, so I sat by myself and waited. When he got back with my large cocoa, the scar had faded back to near white.

We drove up past the glut of big yellow machines at the turnoff, and he didn’t say a thing as we continued up the winding switchbacks on the backside of Goat Peak. We pulled up to a locked metal highway gate, and he showed me how to unload the snowmobile from the trailer. From where we stood, through breaks in the trees, we could finally see the tops of the mountains, hundreds of them, a three-sixty view, like a jaw full of broken teeth.

Larry gazed around at the scenery, and something about the woozy lovesick look on his face made my stomach hurt.

“Do you think this place will ever really change?” he asked.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen Vail? Breckenridge? The only question is the same as for ice sculptures or cancer patients: how long has it got?”

“You could at least support me on this, Charlotte.”

Support him? Until now, until these last few short piddling weeks, when had he ever supported me? Supported us?

I stood with my arms crossed while snow fell like soggy milk-sopped flecks of cereal. Larry started the snowmobile and exhaust fumes billowed around us.

“The snow’s getting wetter,” I said. I had to yell to be heard over the idling machine. “Can we get to it already?”

I climbed on behind him. My long legs straddled the machine easily, but there was no place to hold on except to Larry’s waist. I tried to grip the sides of the seat, but soon gave up and wrapped my arms tight around that old smelly canvas coat of his. I hung on, and we headed for higher ground.

There were a thousand different choices on the maze of logging roads that crisscrossed Goat Peak, but Larry knew them like the back of his hand. We raced past old clear-cuts and through thick replanted stands of Douglas fir—doghair, Larry called them—and higher and higher, to a place where only a few larches remained, wind-twisted and needle-bare.

Larry left the key in the ignition.

“For real?”

“Come on. Who’s going to steal it? Who would bother? Anyway, if they manage to hike all the way up here without a snowmobile of their own, they’re welcome to it.”

He had a point.

We strapped our snowboards onto our packs and buckled snowshoes onto our boots. I began to stomp a trail up an unplowed logging road.

“Not so fast. First we practice our avalanche skills.”

“I thought you said conditions were stable.”

“Right. It’s only when things warm up fast that we have to worry,” he explained. “But we need to be prepared in case.”

He handed me a beacon to wear around my neck with dials on top for transmit and for receive.

“Now if you were to get buried in an avalanche, this would send a signal to my beacon, and I would know where to dig.”

He seemed awfully casual about the whole business. If I were to get buried. Ho hum.

“Dig? Dig how?”

He pulled two small shovels from his pack, and showed me how to slide them together, the handle into the shovel part. They looked big enough to be a pain to carry in a backpack, but not nearly big enough to unbury a person from under an avalanche. I hid behind a tree, and he tracked me with his beacon. Then he hid, and I tracked him. We shoveled a pit, and he pointed out layers in the sides of the pit. If you could punch into a section of snow with your fist, he said, or with four fingers or even three, it was likely too soft, with potential to slide, especially with a harder layer underneath. He spent time probing with his fingers, then with a pencil, and made me take a turn. About the time I started to get seriously cold, he decided we were safe. Or safe enough.

He handed me a shovel to carry and set off ahead of me, breaking trail in the deep snow. I followed, stepping into the tracks he left. The snow at this elevation was a little drier than down below, but heavy still. So much snow piled on the tree limbs overhead that when it shed, the resulting bomb could knock you out cold. Beneath the limbs, deep pits formed several feet deep and often icy. Tree wells, Larry called them. In the Cascades, I’d read, backcountry injuries in tree wells were second only to those caused by avalanches.

“I can take a turn at that,” I said after a while.

I tromped past him and took the lead. Not as easy as he made it seem. I raised my knee high to free the snowshoe from the glop—more mashed potatoes than powder—then lunged forward, one slow step at a time, while Larry followed behind me. When we finally came to the top of a tree-free hillside, he stopped. My legs ached. I slipped off my pack and swigged some water. This was a whole lot more work than riding a chairlift.

“What now?” I asked.

He swept his arm toward the slope below us.

“All yours,” he said.

Normally I’d launch without a thought. This was not tricky terrain. No track like a trough to trip on. Not a soul had touched the snow, smooth as shaving cream, between me and a clump of larches below. But that was the problem. Anything could hide under the surface, stumps or rocks or even a small creek. How would I know?

Only one way to find out.

I stepped into my bindings and dropped, snow shushing beneath me and cold air rushing against my cheeks, my eyes watering, going fast, then faster, leading with my hips, shoulders parallel with the board, to make one turn then another. No feeling like it in the world. No feeling except this one: braking hard at the bottom and turning to see Larry following close—looking like a hippie, beard whipping, and whooping like a cowboy—counting his turns aloud as he went: “Seventeen! Eighteen! Nineteen! Yippee!”

He fell hard at the bottom.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Never better,” he said.

We spent the rest of the afternoon snowshoeing up slow and riding down. “Yo-yoing,” Larry called it. I’d go first, make regular S-turn tracks, and Larry would follow trying to make an eight out of each of them. “Eight-ing,” he called it.

“Charlotte, there’s no other way to put it: you kick ass!” Larry hollered once as I set off down the hill.

One thing I’d learned about Larry: he could almost always make me laugh.

We stopped for lunch and stomped a place in the snow to sit. I punched down to my knee, and I could feel water seeping through the torn seams on my boots. Larry sank deeper yet, but didn’t seem to mind. He passed me a sandwich and we tore in, too hungry to waste energy on conversation. On the trees around us snow stuck to strands of lichen hanging from the bark on one side, the side that faced the wind, in white splotches like rows of tiny Santa beards. I reached down for my water bottle and noticed the tracks of small animals like stamped marks in the snow.

“What are those?” I asked. “Squirrels? Rabbits?”

“Weasels,” Larry said. “See the distance?” He splayed his hand wide, thumb hovering over the back tracks, pinky over the front. “That’s a long leap.”

A bald eagle soared overhead, chirping excitedly like a child, like a much smaller bird. I leaned my head back to watch it soar. Everything out here seemed surprising. I could feel that presence, that something rising up in me.

Larry dragged one finger down his forehead. By now, I knew what that signal meant.

“Lucky? Why?”

“Just because. It’s a good day,” he said. “A very good day.”

I glanced over at him once more and felt the way I’d felt the first day I’d met him, like seeing myself in the mirror. One thing I could say for sure: Larry felt the same way in the mountains that I did.

We packed up the lunch trash, not one bite of food left, and got back to yo-yoing.

Right before dusk, we climbed up to a knifelike ridge over an untracked bowl. Larry stepped out onto the edge of the slope and beckoned to me with his “Get obsessed” glove.

“Come on,” he hollered.

I watched him standing there, ice crystals in his beard, one giant boot in his binding, and I didn’t know for sure if the ground beneath him was solid or not. Suppose it was a cornice. What would happen if it broke off and slid? His avalanche beacon might send a signal to mine, but how would I ever dig him out? How could I do that myself? And who could I call for help? Larry hated cell phones on principle. My mom made me carry mine, but I’d tried and there was no reception past where we parked the pickup, way down at the highway gate.

“Come on,” he cried again.

He leaned out so far that I thought for sure he planned to drop over the edge.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “No way.”

He leaned out farther, gazing at the milkiness below, shrugged, and turned back toward me. We slid down the same snow-covered road we’d tromped up.

The best part about going down was that the snowshoes could stay firmly strapped on our backs while we glided around one switchback and the next. Easy as cruising down a green beginner run at Timberbowl only better because no one else was on it. No one else was anywhere around. Not for miles. That thought scared me, but didn’t seem to faze Larry a bit.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“It was great,” I said. And it was. Better than great. Maybe the best day I’d ever had snowboarding in my life, but something felt off.

“We can do this every weekend,” he said.

Sure, we could. But I’d never get in shape for nationals that way. We spent way too much time going up, not enough going down.

“I can’t miss practice. You know that,” I said.

He was the one, after all, who talked me into racing again.

“Think of what good shape you’d be in.”

“That’s for sure,” I said. I tried to be upbeat, but I started to worry. Why was Larry suddenly so hot for the backcountry? Did he have another reason to avoid Timberbowl? I could’ve asked right then. I should’ve asked right then.

I didn’t ask.

On the way home, the radio news began to explain the Evergreen controversy all over again, and Larry switched it off.

“Choose a tape,” he said.

I flipped through the shoebox of his homemade cassettes, found a couple of chainsaw files and used batteries, and tried to read the handwriting on the labels: Country Joe and the Fish, Yes, Little Feat. Those bands were older than he was.

“You’re a relic in your own time,” I said.

“That I am,” he said.

Before I could make a choice, we pulled up at Mom’s apartment, and I stood to get out.

“Charlotte,” he said, his voice all mumbly and gruff. “I have to tell you something.”

He really didn’t.

“You signed, didn’t you?” I stood beside the passenger door and straightened to my full height—five ten and change—the way I sometimes did to intimidate other racers, so he could not see my face.

He leaned across the bench seat to try to make eye contact.

“Don’t be mad. You’re mad at me, aren’t you, Charlotte?”

I stood watching snowflakes stick to my sweatshirt sleeves like gobs of spit and melt into dark orange polka dots, then I looked down at Larry with his scar throbbing ruby red in the streetlight glow. I shook my head slowly and slammed the truck door hard.

So much for trust.