The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  Farrell scowled and pushed off into an uncut powder chute, down through the pallor, the crystals writhing about his neck, chin, lips, cheeks, over his goggles and hat. He was buried. Even submerged, gravity and acceleration kept him moving, slicing through the trough. Deep under his feet, something—a twig, the tip of a rock—grabbed at his ski and he adjusted, mindful of pitching too far forward and somersaulting over and over again; alert to the awful popping noises that could come: an ankle, a lower leg or cartilage. Or worse, the nose dive in four feet of loose snow, trapped upside down, mouth and nose stuffed and blocked. A slow, breathless collapse.

  His speed allowed him to plow forward, and as he entered the fall line—the steepest, most elegant and most dangerous drop down any mountain run—he began to float. In deep powder turns, gravity granted him freedom. For a brief instant in the middle of each arc he hung weightless, like an arctic hunting bird which at the top of its climb spreads its feathers into a killing dive.

  By 11 A.M., the storm had intensified, driving those not truly committed into the lodges. Farrell was solo on almost every ride up. A gust of wind grated at the side of his face, triggering the memory of his wife Lena walking alone to their old apartment in Chicago. She had tucked her chin inside the collar of her coat on the way from the hospital where she had been a nurse in a birthing ward. It was the first time in months that he’d allowed himself a clear vision of her and he began to shake, wishing she could be there to hold him. The ache at the back of his head grew stronger.

  Something truly wild was necessary to erase these thoughts, to return him to the sterile, aimless state he’d achieved for a few hours almost every day since he’d returned to Alta. He edged his skis out across the High Traverse, a narrow path above Alta’s high chutes. A steep run broke away to his left—the top a series of rocks called the Stone Crusher—and he swung into it, no braking, plummeting out into space.

  Big plunges like that steal the breath. In the split second before liftoff, the competing fears of height and flight meet. With nothing but white below and white falling around, Farrell sailed through an illusory world of blank ceilings and walls and floors; here was the shifting rush of the billowing snowy pack, an opaque mirror to the pelting sky; here were the fir trees that swung their limbs in delayed time to the wind; here, at his nose, was the balsam fragrance of the trees and the sweet rot of his own sweat. Here, too, was the aluminum tinge of heartburn on the back of his tongue. Then impact and panic as he pitched down the hill, too acute, adjusting his stance just in time to burrow into three feet of fresh snow on the fall line.

  Chapter 2

  BY THE TIME FARRELL reached the bottom, the sun had broken through the clouds. He felt strong enough to walk away from the hill, but was forced to admit that the day’s troubling events demanded alcohol; without it, he might not make it until sleep could bath him in black.

  At a lodge down the road from the ski area, he snuck into a downstairs bathroom and changed into a bathing suit. Posing as a guest, he bought two beers and two nip bottles of Jack Daniel’s, hot-footed across the icy path to the huge outdoor hot tub, waded through the fourteen guests already soaking, and sank into a dream torpor in the far corner.

  While he drank and let the hot water knead his tired muscles, Farrell stared up at the rear of the three-story lodge and admired the bulging structure of glass and wood. It was here that Farrell had first come fifteen years before as a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts. He and a friend worked a deal on their spring break to wash dishes in the lodge kitchen in exchange for room and board. They had stayed nine days, during which thirteen feet of snow fell. He smiled as he recalled run after run through bleached silk on an all but abandoned mountain.

  He had graduated a year early with a degree in economics and, despite his parents’ protests, had come directly to the canyon and applied for a job with the ski patrol. Portsteiner had been skeptical of an Eastern boy on a radical Western slope until he’d seen Farrell ski. Farrell thought of the long hours of training Portsteiner had put him through, teaching him how a snow-covered mountain is like a giant hibernating bear: under layers left by fat storms, the body of the snow pack grumbles and turns. Every once in a while, when the pressure gets too great, the bear wakes from its sleep and shakes and roars its hunger.

  “Collins? C’est your name, Nate Collins?”

  Farrell opened his eyes, tense and alert. Few people knew even his assumed name. The loud, raucous voice, which sounded like someone gargling with tiny glass marbles, belonged to a woman in her late twenties with shiny shoulder-length hair the color of a raven’s wing. She waded through the Jacuzzi toward him with her hand extended. Her face was striking, yet not what you’d call soft or beautiful. It was more exotic, composed of acute planes and a Roman nose that punctuated her high, angular cheekbones. Her hazel eyes were set off against a skin so white, it seemed translucent. She was small, about five-four, with a firm body that seemed ready to explode from the purple one-piece bathing suit she wore. Behind her stood a lithe man, well defined, about thirty. He had weird blue eyes, one of which did not seem to track correctly. Page.

  But everyone in the Jacuzzi was focused on the woman. She plowed toward him through the water with such purpose, Farrell decided it would be better to talk than ignore her. “Inez, I gather …”

  “Already, you hear of me …” she gushed in a thick accent. She grabbed his hand with the tips of her fingers and the ball of her thumb and shook it like a bell. “Inez Didier. I am the director of films.”

  Before Farrell could respond, Inez reached out and plucked his black mirrored sunglasses from his face. “Je m’excuse,” she said. “I like to know the person I talk to.”

  Farrell shook his head, dizzy from the energy that surrounded the woman. He reached for the glasses. She threw them in the snow behind her and laughed.

  “Vraiment, I like to see how the people make reaction to the unexpected,” Inez said. “Your face expression was without price!”

  She turned. “Excuse me. I do not wish to be rude. Matthew Page.”

  “We met today,” Farrell said. “I think I left him in difficult circumstances.”

  Inez squeezed in next to Farrell. Page submerged across from them.

  “He tells me this,” Inez said. She smiled. “And the one who dreams always of Jamaica, too. It is the truth, you know, we spy on you these past days now.”

  Farrell swallowed hard at the thought. “And what sort of dossier have you developed, Mata Hari?”

  Inez giggled and squeezed Farrell’s knee under the water. He jumped slightly.

  “Very impressive, in a dur, oh, rough fashion, the ski technique I mean,” she said. “Page says you ski in the trees, break the branches, and turn, as if …”

  She turned to stare at Farrell, tugged at her plump lower lip, and said in a puzzled voice: “As if you hate them?”

  She squeezed his knee again. “You have this quality: cowboy I think you call it.”

  “We all have our own style,” Farrell said.

  “We do, Collins,” she said, pronouncing it “Cawleens.” “And I find yours terribly …”

  “Saddle sore?” Farrell said.

  Page snorted. Inez waved her fingers in front of her face, confused, then continued on as if he hadn’t replied. “If you miss the turn in the manner in which you ski, you break something.”

  Who was this woman? Farrell asked himself. Her pushiness played on him. “I know my boundaries,” he said finally. “Learned them the hard way.”

  “Bad fall?” asked Page.

  “Something like that,” Farrell said.

  Inez turned to face Farrell and he felt her thigh brush against his. “But you like to test them, these boundaries, no?”

  “Isn’t everyone interested in that fence in the dark?” Farrell replied. Under the water his toes prickled with interest. “It’s only by climbing it enough times that we figure out where the posts and rails are.”

  Inez dropped her head
to the right and opened her eyes wide, then clucked. “No, we see what is the climber of the fence. More than physical limits—that is what interest me, Collins.”

  “Nate,” Farrell said, surprised that he was warming to her.

  “Nate,” Inez said. She grinned wildly at him. “I tell you the truth, such a subject is the obsession for me.”

  “Lot of danger freaks up here,” he said, looking toward the mountains. “They’ll show you where to go.”

  “Moi, I like to watch, not to do it,” said Inez. “Divers of cliffs, the race car men, the parachutiste, these types. They leave me … to gasp.”

  She hoisted herself up and sat on the edge of the pool, her legs lightly touching Farrell’s shoulders. “But is it not so that they are castouts in America? You worship, how would you say, the heroes that are collectif? No, this is not right. My English is terrible. Help me out, Page.”

  “Team players,” Farrell said.

  “Exactement!” she cried, and she slapped her thigh. “Team players.”

  “And Europeans?” asked Page, whose gaze had not once left Farrell.

  “Almost all love the teams for football, er, soccer,” she said. “But they adore the individual. Anyway, my spies, they watch you these past days and they see you ski like you want to slap the mountain’s face. Mais, we never hear of you.”

  Farrell shrugged and drank from his beer can.

  “After college I spent two or three years patrolling,” he said. “I had a bad turn of events. Didn’t want to leave Utah, but decided it had run its course. I’d have to make some money. Did that. Now I’m retired in a way. Relearning how to make turns right. As you said, they’re still pretty rough.”

  “And, I am sorry to ask … the scars?”

  Farrell unconsciously ran his fingers across the pink ridges about his eyes and nose. “An auto accident last spring. Made me rethink my priorities.”

  “What business are you in?” Page asked. Farrell noticed for the first time that Page had one of those rich baritone voices that reverberate and make strangers want to eavesdrop.

  “Financial black magic,” Farrell said. “Sleight of hand. First you saw it, then you didn’t.”

  Inez tugged at her lower lip and crinkled her nose.

  “Tax attorney?” Page asked.

  “You guessed,” Farrell lied, and he rose to leave. “I’ve been too long in this soup. Time for a sauna.”

  He reached for Page’s hand and held his gaze too long. Page averted his one good eye and Farrell felt his hand go limp.

  “We have the proposition for you,” Inez said.

  “So your spies have told me,” Farrell said. He started to wade away. Two sharp fingernails inserted down the back of his bathing suit stopped him cold in his tracks.

  “But you do not hear it from me,” Inez said firmly.

  The other people in the tub fell silent. Farrell turned and stared at her. “No, I haven’t had that pleasure.”

  “Meet me for a drink, alors,” Inez said, returning his glare with such a blank expression that he almost shivered.

  “Upstairs,” he said. “An hour.”

  Dried, dressed in his trustfunder’s duds, Farrell took the far bar stool next to the window under the stuffed head of a mule deer with only one antler. From this position he had an unobstructed view of the room. It was a habit Gabriel force-fed him. At first, he had considered the practice overkill, but since sprinting from the safe house, he now followed it passionately. He studied the glass behind him and decided that the bowed windows would create enough distortion in a rifle scope to throw any shot at least two feet off line. Then he thought, Is a gunshot Gabriel’s style? Gabriel, lover of fine-cut clothes, speaker of five languages, consummate entrepreneur and liar. Probably not. Though Gabriel stayed far from the nitty-gritty of production, he had kept a close watch on cash flow. Gabriel would want a more intimate final audit of their affairs.

  Farrell ordered a ginger-ale setup and a shot of George Dickel from his bottle. The bar was as a bar should be: lots of dark wood and a rich red carpet and enough memorabilia hung about the room to chart the eyes during a steady course of drunkenness. Over the great stone fireplace lorded the ponderous stuffed head of a bison. Farrell took the drink down in two gulps and was ordering another when he saw Portsteiner come through the door. Portsteiner had looked fine the last time he’d seen his old boss just a week ago. Today he looked like hell; the normally visible lines about his brown eyes were deeper and set off like fissures. Portsteiner stood six feet tall in his stocking feet, but seemed taller owing to the curly shock of salt-and-pepper hair that burst off his forehead. He had the sort of facial construction—protruding eyebrows, deeply etched skin—that’s tritely referred to as craggy. Farrell liked to think of it as a mountain face. Although part of him was glad to see Portsteiner enter the bar, another hated it. Years ago Porsteiner had accorded himself the role of surrogate father, and Farrell, ever the rebellious child, had fought it with the chattering force of a dull ski on an icy slope.

  Portsteiner grunted and slammed a thick hand on the bar and ordered a beer.

  “You look well, Frank,” Farrell said.

  “Crap,” Portsteiner said. “I look like slush and you know it.”

  It was typical Portsteiner speak and largely what set the older man apart. Portsteiner worshipped the alpine researcher E. R. LaChapelle with a Maoist fervor; he carried the second edition of LaChapelle’s The ABC of Avalanche Safety everywhere he went, winter or summer, and quoted from the red book’s dry prose to everyone who had ever worked for him. Portsteiner analyzed almost every facet of life through the snow metaphor.

  “Life’s just one big shit storm that dumps on you every two or three days,” Portsteiner liked to say. “But if you’re careful, you won’t get too cold or damp or washed away in a slide.”

  Portsteiner also used a rather imprecise way of categorizing the people he met based on the tenets of LaChapelle’s snow crystal chart. People with sharp wits, he called “needles.” Those with no common sense were “capped columns.” Arrogant men and women, he dubbed “sleet”: icy shell, all wet on the inside.

  Even after all these years, Farrell knew that Portsteiner had never quite figured him out. When he first met Portsteiner, the old man had slid him into the “stellar crystal” file, for as Portsteiner had later admitted one night halfway through a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Farrell was one of the few natural skiers he’d ever seen.

  That all changed when Farrell took a week off one February three years after he arrived in the canyon. He was gone three months without a word to anyone. When Farrell got back, the hill was melted, down to mud. He packed his things and told Portsteiner he was quitting and heading for Africa. That day Portsteiner filed him away as a “spatial dendrite,” a strange mix of feathery crystals; he never knew what Farrell would do next.

  This past December, almost twelve years to the day after he’d left Utah for Africa, Farrell had slipped into Portsteiner’s office with a new hairline, thinner cheeks, the roadwork of pink scars, and a pair of eyebrows that Portsteiner said made him look “like a candidate for the Politburo.” Farrell told him that after Africa he’d landed a job with a bank in Chicago working in Latin America as part of their lending operation.

  “Makes a shitload of sense to me,” Portsteiner said. “Now I know why banks are so mucked up.”

  Try as Farrell might, he couldn’t bring himself to tell Portsteiner what had happened, about Lena, about the Mexicans. When the old man fished around, Farrell told him cryptically that he’d been forced into a dark room a few years back and had bumped into all the furniture, even though he knew the entire layout of his house. At one point in his blind grope, he’d found a little hallway with a single light bulb and he’d run down it. Soon there were other people chasing him and he’d had to jump out a window and flee. And here he was.

  Portsteiner had drawn his tongue along the inside of his lower lip and tugged on his earlobe, a sure sign of disco
mfort and disgust. Right then Farrell understood that he’d been further downgraded in the Portsteiner filing system. Farrell was an “irregular particle” if there ever was one.

  Even so, Farrell could tell Portsteiner still liked him. He brought Farrell to his house and fed him from time to time, drank with him once a week, and skied with him when he could. For that Farrell was more than grateful. Over the past six weeks, when the headaches and the tightness in his chest became intolerable, he looked forward to talking to the old skier. As long as the dialogue did not become too personal, Portsteiner’s voice calmed him.

  Now Portsteiner’s short, stubby fingers drummed on the varnished bar. “Bad?” Farrell asked.

  “Depends on your interpretation,” Portsteiner said. His face softened.

  Farrell sat silent; he’d found over the years that putting one’s head over an emotional cliff can be a sickening experience. Portsteiner was having trouble even approaching the rim.

  “Remember a guy named Timmons?” Portsteiner said finally.

  “Saw him this morning,” Farrell said. “Don’t think he knew who I was.”

  Portsteiner squinted at Farrell. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Better he doesn’t know.”

  “You’re some kind of asshole, Jack,” Portsteiner said. “There’s a walnut on the back of his neck that a month ago was a cashew. He’s got six months.”

  Invisible fingertips brushed the hairs on the back of Farrell’s neck and he shivered. He struggled with a surge of guilt for not having stayed with Timmons that morning. He noted how few were the experiences he’d had with the dying: on a road north into the Sahara, he’d once come upon the crash of a truck carrying sheep and nomads toward the Algerian border. Farrell had run through the heat, trying to sort the man from the lamb, the crying from the weeping. There was the piercing smell of gunpowder in the living room the day he’d returned to his parents’ house so many years before. There was the stubborn ticking of a china clock on a mantelpiece and the dreadful robin’s egg blue of a baby’s arm. Now Timmons.