Fade to White

by Wendy Clinch

  They got off the lift, hit the trail, and got down into the trees as fast as they could. It was warmer there and they stopped.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Guy said I should ask Brian about something he’d seen on the coffee table in Stone’s rental. Back when he was looking for him the first time.”

  “He say what it was?”

  “Just something on the coffee table.”

  Chip adjusted his goggles and looked out at the horizon. Mountains all the way to New Hampshire, under a low sky. “Drugs,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Drugs for sure. Oh, yeah. It’s got to be drugs. Coke, I’ll bet.”

  “But why would he want me to ask Brian?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to tell you himself, on account of confidentiality and all. But he wanted to let you know that he knows.”

  Stacey thought for a minute. “So maybe there is something under way. A bust. Like you said.”

  Chip shrugged and took off. She followed him, taking a straighter line, and zoomed past him in about three seconds, no problem.

  THIRTY

  Doc’s, the seedy bar that sat alongside one of Spruce Peak’s remote parking lots, had given up any hint of ski-town sophistication a long time ago. The truth was, it had never had any. A squat pile of crumbling bricks roofed over with tar paper, adorned with a clumsy but alarming two-story likeness of its animated Seven Dwarves namesake done in latex housepaint that had all but faded away with the years, Doc’s had occupied the same little islet of land since long before the first rope tow was ever installed at Spruce Peak. It had begun as a private residence, a bootlegger’s place in the deep woods, and when the bootlegger had passed away his widow had moved upstairs and kept on selling whiskey out of the kitchen. When every other landowner in the region had sold out to the Paxton family and moved south, that cantankerous widow had stayed put.

  Her son, the original Doc, came of age under prohibition and was much benefited by it. To this day he sat in an alcove behind the bar, nursing a cirrhotic liver and inhaling bottled oxygen from a wheeled tank, remembering the old days when the front door had had a little sliding panel in it and a person had needed to know the password if he wanted to get inside. Nowadays, Doc liked to say, any damn idiot could get in. Idiots who didn’t even know that skis came in pairs. Snowboarders. He watched them stream in with their baggy pants and their spiked-up hair, and he cursed them furiously under what little breath he had left.

  Doc Junior, his son and namesake, worked the taps and ignored the old man. Doc Junior was a giant who rubbed against the bar in front and the cash register behind as he squeezed his way from customer to customer. Summer and winter he was forever damp with an oily sweat that soaked his clothes and probably did at least a little to lubricate his passage as he surged from tap to tap like some seagoing beast, ceaselessly weary, out of breath, and overwhelmingly anxious. It was this ongoing anxiety that had made him post a notice in the Ski Patrol shack at the base of the mountain, looking for a skilled professional to oversee Rail Jam Night. (God forbid he should pay for a want ad in the Mountain Times.) It was that posted notice that had caused his path to cross with that of Chip Walsh.

  Rail Jam Night, which took place in the cramped little yard behind the tavern, was a one-ring circus of draft beer, testosterone, and lousy judgment. It consisted of thirty or forty underage college boys with fake IDs, riding their snowboards up and down a couple of homemade ramps just as recklessly as their blood alcohol levels would allow—all of it accompanied by thudding rap music or hip-hop or whatever it was that they called it. Doc Junior didn’t know and didn’t care. Rail Jam Night started as soon as the lifts on the mountain closed, and as a rule it wasn’t over until an ambulance from the Rutland hospital showed up. This is why Doc Junior thought he could use a professional around—somebody who could keep a lid on things, and maybe take some of the liability hit if push came to shove.

  So it was that Chip found himself freezing his butt off on a bar stool below a sizzling arc lamp, his back to a neon sign advertising Jenny Cream Ale, watching as a parade of tipsy college boys got loud and sloppy drunk in the great outdoors. He’d lifeguarded at Rehoboth Beach growing up in Washington, D.C., but it had done nothing to prepare him for this. There were rules on the beach. There were guidelines both posted and customary. Even though somebody out there always had a couple of beers hidden in a cooler, they were always stealthy about drinking them. Everything in moderation.

  Not so at Rail Jam Night. Doc had a couple of kegs set up outdoors and he sat alongside them with a cashbox stuffed between his enormous thighs, taking in money and pouring out Long Trail in a pair of more or less coordinated streams. Some of the regulars from town were inside at the bar, coaxing boilermakers out of old Doc himself, who was up on his feet against his better judgment, dragging his oxygen tank like a penance, but everybody else was outdoors. Spilled beer had made the snow into a rusty yellowish slush under the arc lights. College boys tramped through it and slid over it and would soon enough be falling down into it. Chip watched them, wondering how low the thermometer had to sink before beer would freeze. The evening was getting colder and colder and he blew warm air down into his jacket, beginning to think that he might find out before too long.

  Mainly, though, what he was thinking about was whether or not this discomfort and annoyance was worth the fifty bucks in cash that he was getting for it. Doc Junior had offered twenty-five on the sign he’d posted in the Patrol shack but there must not have been any other takers, because Chip had gotten him to double it. Chip felt the weight of that compromise every time he looked in the fat man’s direction.

  The music was terrifically loud, so loud that Chip signaled to Doc Junior and went inside to jam some toilet paper from the hideous men’s room into his ears, then pulled his wool hat down over them and came outside again. He was only away from his post a minute or so, but the fat man gave him a threatening look, as if he meant to dock him a few bucks. Like a guy couldn’t even use the bathroom during his shift. What job in the world held you to that kind of standard? None that he’d ever had. None that he’d ever have again, that was for sure.

  And now the college kids wanted him to judge their antics. That was always a problem at Rail Jam Night. Doc Junior never set up any kind of protocol, so the drunk college kids would always end up fighting it out among themselves. Now a bunch of them began arguing over which one had done a better pop-tart or something, and they took their disagreement to the only credible authority in sight: Chip, the lifeguard. They came at him in a torrent of slurred language that he could barely understand, and not just on account of their blood alcohol level. Boarders had words for every little variation on every little trick: They rode fakie and goofy, they got backside air and Swiss cheese air, they did flips and grabs and seat belts and ho-hos. It was ridiculous. How was Chip supposed to judge anything, when he didn’t know a Rippey flip from a roast beef?

  Still, it was better than having to break up fights. So he said yes, he’d let his opinion be known, as long as everybody promised to abide by it and not give him any crap. Amazingly, they agreed and settled right down, then went back to their fun like a bunch of happy kindergartners. That kind of authority was enough to make Chip, all of twenty-seven, feel old.

  * * *

  The evening wore on and the music got louder and the boarding on display got worse. It was more daring, that was for sure, but it was also a whole lot less controlled. There were more mistakes and more crashes and more face-plants, which must have hurt like anything since the snow on the wooden ramps had been compressed until it was hard as rock. There was blood on the snow here and there, most of it left behind by scraped cheekbones and chins, but nobody much noticed. What everybody did notice was the arrival, a couple of hours into the festivities, of a certain undistinguished kid with a baggy jacket and pants in a kind of urban camo pattern that turned into skulls and crossbones when you looked at it up close, a dinky little bl
ack hat with a Grenade logo on it, and a pair of big Spy goggles levered down over his eyes in spite of the late hour. Everybody in the yard seemed to know him. They welcomed him like a king, with a roar that drowned out the rap music and nearly made Doc Junior drop his cashbox.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The kid’s name was Anthony, apparently pronounced without the H. He had a Long Island accent you could saw wood with, and an attitude to match. Anthony leaned his board against the fence and strode into the crowded yard with both of his fists thrown skyward in what Chip figured were supposed to be devil horns, although the kid had on a pair of big mittens so you couldn’t be sure. He might have been making peace signs. He might have been doing a Richard Nixon impersonation.

  There were three reasons Anthony was a hero. First, he was clearly pretty well zonked on ganja. Second, he usually had plenty to go around. And third, a large percentage of the kids at the Rail Jam had spent a good chunk of the day thinking they’d never see him again. He was Lazarus with a backpack full of weed.

  Anthony and his crowd hadn’t arrived at the mountain until eleven or so in the morning, although they’d overnighted in Bennington after a fast trip north in somebody’s dad’s BMW. (They would have to drive all the way home with the windows open to get the smell out, but so what?) Sometime shortly after lunch, Anthony had slid under the rope on the Mountain Road trail where it skirted the boundary of the Spruce Peak property, way up at the top of the North Peak, and vanished down into the trees off-piste. The going was steep and the trees were dense and none of his pals had gone with him. They didn’t think they were skilled enough, and they were right. The problem was, Anthony wasn’t skilled enough either.

  He wasn’t at the bottom of the Northside lift when his friends got there. They waited for as long as college boys will, which wasn’t very long, and when he didn’t show up they took another run. He wasn’t there when they got to the bottom a second time, either. Some of them said to hell with him then, and some of them said maybe he’d changed his mind and was going to meet them at the Peak Lift, and some of them said they ought to notify the Ski Patrol, but nobody did anything of the sort. They all just rode the lift again, missing Anthony a little bit and missing his stash a little bit more. There was nothing like smoking weed in the fresh mountain air. Now that was living.

  As the afternoon wore on the word got around the riders on the mountain: Keep an eye peeled for a dude with skull-and-crossbones camo and Spy goggles and one of those cool Burton boards with the half-naked girl on it. He’d gone out of bounds and hadn’t come back. Or maybe he had. Because as the rumor of his disappearance started picking up speed, a counter-rumor of his return got started. Somebody had seen him in the men’s room in the base lodge. Somebody else had seen him toking up behind the Patrol shack at the top of the Peak Lift. He’d hit on somebody’s girlfriend on the Northside lift. Like Bigfoot, Anthony was everywhere and nowhere.

  It was only when he didn’t show up at Doc’s Rail Jam that the truth began to sink in. Then the beer started flowing, which smeared the details of any concern that anybody might have still had. So in the end, when Anthony actually showed up in the flesh, the welcome was huge and sodden and overwhelming.

  A handful of guys lifted him up onto their shoulders and carried him to the center of the yard, where the two ramps came together under the lights. They stumbled some on the ice and the beer slush, but nobody went down. From his kingly perch on their shoulders, Anthony calmed the crowd, threw back his head, and told his story.

  He said that the riding over there was awesome, although not for everybody.

  He confessed to having gotten a little bit turned around when he came to a flat spot, and had to pull his left foot out of the binding and skid along on one leg for a while. He confessed further to having gotten tired from the slog (he blamed it on the altitude, and nobody challenged him on it, even though Spruce Peak had a total vertical drop of just under 2,000 feet, which made it no Everest). He also confessed to having sat down on an exposed ledge after a while and fired up some weed and maybe kind of forgotten which way he was supposed to be going by the time he was through. This produced a great cheer from the crowd.

  Somebody brought him a beer. He drank it fast, sloshing only a little of it on the shoulders of the guys who were keeping him aloft. They cursed and howled and shook their fists but he kept on with his story.

  He said he’d finished his smoke and set off down a little ravine at the end of the flat spot, trying to keep himself oriented toward the front side of the mountain, but what must have happened is that the ravine twisted one way and another until he was facing the back side and didn’t even know it. So down he went. He said he didn’t see any signs of a familiar trail or even so much as a lift pylon, but he wasn’t worried. He traversed a lot, though, trying not to put too much vertical behind him before he ran into the safety of a groomed trail. The longest time went by. Nothing. He tried his cell phone. Nothing. Rather than keep going down he unclipped one boot and skated for a while across the face of the mountain just as straight as he could, looking downward for signs of the familiar. After a while he unclipped the other boot, put the board over his shoulder, and headed up, even though he knew he couldn’t keep climbing in the deep snow for long.

  At the suggestion of such hard labor somebody asked if he could use another beer, and he didn’t deny it. The other guys put him down before it could be delivered, rather than risk being spilled on again.

  Anthony’s salvation arrived just as the beer did. He told about coming to a clearing from where he could see something he’d never noticed from the mountain: the top of a little wobbly metal windmill, maybe a couple hundred yards below where he stood and off to the left. Wind power meant civilization, he figured, so he calculated its location and set out for it. It disappeared as soon as he got back down into the trees but he kept his wits about him and kept going. Soon something materialized out of the woods. Not the windmill—it turned out he’d overshot that—but a cabin. A little house, with a plowed road up to it and everything. A light on in one of the windows and the television going and smoke coming out of the chimney. He was definitely not on the front side anymore—any moron could see that—but he was saved.

  He told how he whooped and shot down the rest of the way, zooming under low-hanging tree limbs and jumping over big holes in the snow that would have eaten a lesser man alive—most of the people in the crowd laughed at this, knowing Anthony’s abilities—and he told of how he flew over the bank that the snowplow had built up and sailed out over the lane, then skimmed the top of the bank on the opposite side and pulled a one-eighty with a Miller flip and landed practically on the guy’s doorstep.

  The applause in the yard behind Doc’s was deafening.

  Anthony told how the old guy in the cabin sure took his own sweet time coming to the door. The television was on inside like he said and the volume was cranked all the way up and he figured maybe whoever was in there couldn’t hear him over the noise of it. So he knocked louder. There was a button for a bell but it didn’t make any sound that he could hear so he just kept hammering on the door. He hollered a couple of times, too. Hello, like you’ll say. Anybody home? like you’ll say, even though you know somebody’s home on account of the television’s on.

  When nobody came he thought about giving up and walking down the plowed road to the bottom of the mountain and just getting it over with, but he didn’t because who knew where he’d end up? Some back road somewhere on the far side of the mountain, ten or fifteen miles away from civilization. No cars on it and no chance of thumbing a ride anywhere. He sure as hell wasn’t climbing back up to the peak and trying again. Not with this television on right here and the smoke coming out of the chimney. Not with civilization right at his fingertips.

  He told of how he kicked at the door a couple of times and how that knocked the snow off his boots in clumps. He described, complete with elaborate body language, how he nearly lost his footing a couple of times on the slick
floorboards, and how the old guy finally got off his ass and turned down the television and came creeping over to the door. He took his own sweet time and came slow, and he acted all suspicious when he got there. There was a curtain over the glass and he slid it open just the slightest bit like whoever was knocking was some kind of burglar or serial killer or whatever. Like it was the secret police come to haul him away. Like it was a freaking grizzly bear on the loose. Did they have grizzly bears around here? Anthony guessed they did. No wonder the old guy was spooked. He didn’t get a lot of visitors up there, that was for sure.

  The crowd at Rail Jam Night was starting to lose interest on account of the long subplot about the old guy, and a couple of boarders had begun climbing the backside of the ramps to get on with their runs, so Anthony cut to the good part. How the old dude let him in and smelled grass on him and asked if he had any to spare. Anthony said sure he did, sure as hell he had some, but he wasn’t giving it away. He’d swap some, though, for a ride back to town. That’s what he’d do. No prob with that. At which the dude bounced his old head up and down and said sure, sure, he could arrange a ride. There was a snowmobile in the shed out back and they’d take that. Now where was the reefer? That’s what he called it. Reefer.

  Anthony’s cell phone didn’t work in the cabin and the old guy didn’t want him using the phone for whatever reason so he didn’t call anybody to let them know he was safe. Plus there was the reefer, which was distracting, and a little something else that the old guy had tucked away somewhere. Anthony didn’t want to say exactly what that little something else was, but he sniffed and ran his mitten across his upper lip enough to give people the idea. It was either that or his nose was running thanks to the cold, but it was probably what everybody figured it was.

  Anyhow they blew away most of the afternoon watching television and eventually they went out the back door, fired up the snowmobile, and took it down the mountain to the main road. There were tracks in the fields parallel to the road and they stayed in those. The old guy had a big heavy jacket with a hood snugged tight around his face and Anthony pulled his goggles down because the cold wind made his eyes water. They didn’t go all the way to the mountain base but they got close enough. The old dude left him in the field across from the parking lot at Judge Roy Beans. He wouldn’t go any closer. It was like he was a vampire or something. The old guy said he was in a hurry to get home before the light died and he’d have trouble finding his way. He was fumbling with the switch for the headlight on the snowmobile while Anthony got off and freed up his board, and before Anthony got a chance to thank him for the lift, he got it working and roared off. Anthony had to walk all the way back up here and boy oh boy he’d worked up a thirst. He sure could use another beer if nobody minded—and nobody did.