The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  A grin spread across his face. He said, Lena, I’d call you a sundae. Which, in spite of myself, I kind of liked. He rode all the way home on the L with me, walked me to my door, and didn’t even try to get in the apartment. When he kissed me goodnight, I thought: Jack Farrell has potential.

  Farrell closed the diary. The fine hair on the back of his neck tingled until it stood on end. He had been in love after that night. In a small church ceremony the March after they met, with just his mother and Lena’s parents in attendance, he married her. Lena was pregnant almost immediately. For the first time in his life, Farrell was pleasantly at anchor.

  The little girl with the blond hair waved again. “Hi ya, mister,” she said in a squeeky voice. “Why ya eyes red?”

  She held her arms out to Farrell as if she wanted to be picked up. Without thinking, Farrell reached for her, but her mother twisted in her seat, saw Farrell’s face, and pulled the girl back and turned her around in the seat. For a split second, Farrell saw his daughter Jenny lying facedown in her cradle and all the false calm he’d built for himself since fleeing San Diego begin to crack. It widened as the hundreds of voices on the stage under the organ—sopranos followed by altos and tenors and basses—raised in hymn.

  Farrell swallowed. He gripped the front of the bench in front of him. The little girl shifted in her seat to place her hand on his. He pulled his hand away, thinking of all the things he had used in the past three months to ease the knots and keep his memories boxed away—the open road, the broad alpine vistas, and the falling snow. He stood. The choir conductor, a balding man sitting on a black stool, raised his hands. The voice of the choir soared. The little girl laid her head on her mother’s lap, sucked at her thumb. She gazed at Farrell.

  Farrell stepped drunkenly into the aisle. He walked a chalkline to the back of the hall through the doors and out into the rain. He bent over, hands on his knees for almost five minutes, willing himself not to vomit. The tempo of rain increased, the freezing droplets stinging his neck and cheeks. Farrell tucked the diary inside his coat and ran to the truck. He drove like a maniac through the streets of the city toward the mouth of the canyon. He thought of the little girl and of himself at four crying because he’d peed in his pants even though he was toilet trained and the way his father had told him to hush, first gently, then louder until he screamed at him to quiet. His father had handed Farrell to his mother—“He’s got it,” his father had said sadly. “Like my dad and grandmother and her father before her.” Farrell remembered how his father had stomped into a back room and slammed the door shut.

  A half mile up the road, the rain turned to snow.

  Farrell stopped at several lodges before he found the name at the registration desk. He knocked at an oak door. Inez opened it.

  “Collins,” Inez said, her hazel eyes wide. She reached out to squeeze his forearm. “Mais, this is not a good time. I do the interview with Page.”

  Page stood behind her by the bed, which was covered with topographical maps. Beside him were movie and video cameras mounted on tripods. Images of the maps and one of the pillows glowed in an orange tint on a color monitor on the desk.

  Farrell fought the pounding in his chest and at the back of his head. “I know a run called the Y Couloir,” he said with the breathlessness of a spent sprinter. “I think it’s what you’re after.”

  Inez took Farrell’s hands in hers. They were smooth hands. He did not get the warm touch he expected. Inez’s hands were clammy. “All day I wish for you to come,” she said. “Meet me tomorrow, nine o’clock. We talk.”

  She squeezed his fingers once more and closed the door.

  Farrell trudged to the camper. He felt drained, yet somehow happy and relieved that he had talked to Inez again; the ripping sensation that had enveloped him in the Tabernacle was ebbing away. He drove to the end of the road again, backed the truck into the snow wall, and firmly attached the brake. He struggled to open the camper door, which had frozen shut. It gave way with a sharp crack. He climbed inside, trembling.

  Farrell stood there, snow melting at his feet, running his fingertips over the cover of the diary. He slid the book back into its hiding place above the bunk, stripped, wiggled into the sleeping bag, and buried his face in the pillowcase that held Lena’s nightgown. He inhaled deeply, catching only the faintest tinge of her odor. He fell asleep that way: one hand clutching the corner of his wife’s nightgown, the other clamped between his legs. He drifted off into forgetfulness, amazed at the harsh, windmill turns one is forced to make on the steepness of emotional terrain.

  Chapter 4

  FROM THE THICK STAND of cottonwoods below it, the Y Couloir resembles a long bent branch sawed from a gnarled old crab apple tree propped against a rickety old barn wall. Nearly vertical walls of limestone, in many places no more than fifteen feet apart, hem in the ravine, which, as the winter progresses, fills with snow. Still, the powder provides only a partial buffer; the stones on the sides of the chute and those that jut through the snow in the middle of the slash on the side of the mountain are sharp, silent daggers that would slash at a skier’s legs if they made the slightest mistake coming down. Fifteen hundred feet up the chute, after it makes a crazy dog-leg turn to the right, there are ledges and stumps that mark the joining of the two upper arms of the run. Viewed from the bottom, it is a nightmare vision for the two arms leap almost straight up from the intersection of the Y; it is the sort of thing only a mountain goat climbs.

  The danger inherent in trying to slide down such a narrow throat, dodging rock and trees, did not impress Inez.

  “This is bullshit,” she said, leaning back to look up the mouth of the couloir. “Where is the crevasse that waits like the open mouth to swallow the skier? Where is the cliff to jump? This is for the child. I film the limit.”

  The Wave kicked his boot through the fresh powder that still lay in the shade of a Jackpine about twenty feet away. “That’s not child’s play, lady. That’s a freaking screamer run if I ever saw one.”

  Page nodded. “It’s as harsh as I’ve seen in a long time.”

  Inez dismissed them both with a flick of her hand. “Yes, yes, it is steep. Forty, maybe forty-five degrees of pitch, but this is not radical. My audience breaks into laughter if we try to tell them this Y is extreme.”

  Farrell watched a crow off to his left that fluttered its wings in a clearing near the trail’s end. Its feathers brushed pinpoint, stellar crystals into the air. Hearing Inez, the bird cocked its head left, then right, then left again. It hopped forward and opened its beak to reveal a ruby tongue. The crow thrust the tongue out, then snapped a solitary floating crystal. Puzzled at tasting something stronger than cold air, the bird craned its head and snapped again. Inez stepped on a branch, cracking it. Alerted, the crow stabbed a slice of jack pinecone from the snow and flew away. Farrell was mesmerized by the way the bird’s lazy slap of wing stirred an eddy of transparent pink and purple and white in the air. The bird cawed, dropped its cone, and raced off through the trees.

  Farrell said: “So tell me, Inez: what’s extreme?”

  Inez struggled back through a drift, tucking a light meter and a brown pocket notebook in her navy blue jacket. She swung her arms wildly at the three of them. “The trouble with you Americans is you think any situation where for a moment you lose the slope or leave the ground, this is extreme. It is the word used too much … like love. For me, the extreme is the act of balance where even the skier does not know the future.”

  “So,” Farrell said carefully. “You have no regard for the skier.”

  Inez’s fingers curled to their palms. It was, he decided, an involuntary act. She leaned against a tree and studied Farrell. “Au contraire,” she said, just as slow and just as careful. “I wish the skier success, to be a … a champion.”

  “And that occurs …?”

  “At the limit.”

  “Talk about an overused term.”

  Inez took a deep breath and her cheeks hardened. “You wish m
e to be cold?”

  “Just candid.”

  Inez knelt, took the glove from her hand, and traced a series of interlocking circles in the snow. Her eyes went blank, her cheeks slack. She spoke in a husky voice. “I look for the place where the fall without control kills the skier,” she said. “If they fall over the front of the skis, they hit the obstacle or fall off the cliff or the things about them—stumps, rocks, these things—they will crash.”

  “Well, fuck you, lady!” The Wave said. “You may be paying me. But I’m into keeping my body just the way you see it: solid, wise.”

  Inez talked on as if she didn’t hear him: “I do not wish this to happen, the skier to fall. I fear this more than all, perhaps. Mais, I believe that most people want to see this kind of skiing. We are all the voyeurs, no? We have this urge so, so strong to peek through the little holes between the fingers we almost always press to the eyes.”

  She stood. “The patron, uh, how do you say? The customer? Yes, the customer demands that look at the mystery or the film is lost. There must be the danger mortal or the audience does not buy it. This is not the aesthetic only; it is the economic standard. Does my English make sense?”

  In the silence after she spoke, Page crossed his arms and cleared his throat: “Perfectly,” he said. “You want kamikazes like that guy I heard died in your last film.”

  “This was the accident!” Inez snapped, and she turned away. Her voice dropped. “Alan knows his risks and he wants to go there, beyond all who climb and ski before. It slaps me hard when he falls. But this is what it is. Yes, like him, I want skiers to not back away from … their fears.”

  An achy sensation rushed up Farrell’s spine that reminded him of the drug the government’s doctors had threaded into him before they repaired his face. The chemical name was scopolamine, a narcotic that leaves the patient halfway between nod and reality. The doctors called it by its nickname: Twilight Sleep.

  Farrell had the same drugged reaction earlier that morning when he’d met Inez for breakfast in a restaurant on the fourteenth floor of her lodge. They had a panoramic view of the snow-capped mountains spread out before them. Inez told Farrell that her father had been an American, a respected photographer with the Associated Press who died in Vietnam. She had followed slightly to the left of his footsteps, attending film school in Paris. Afterward, she drifted into the climbing and skiing scene at the French Alps town of Chamonix, working first as a for-hire photographer for Americans who enjoyed the fact that she spoke some English. Gradually, she had built a reputation that brought in funding for her films.

  She questioned Farrell closely about his past, queries which he fended off with glib responses. She pressed, and as before, he told her only that his most recent life had ended badly, that he’d come to the Utah mountains to begin again. Farrell could see his answers made Inez even more curious, but he guided the conversation away.

  They negotiated an oral contract. Farrell would guide and ski in those ranges in which he was familiar: Utah’s Wasatch and the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. At Tahoe, Page’s home territory, Farrell would act under his direction.

  “Now,” she said, “I wish to begin interviews tomorrow night.”

  “No interviews,” Farrell said. “My history is my own and I’d just as soon let it die.”

  “Discussion is the foundation of my films,” Inez insisted. “My audience demands the skier’s mind between the shots of action.”

  Farrell said: “No interviews or no cowboy.”

  Inez took a long drag off the unfiltered cigarette she was smoking, squinted, and smiled. “Of course. But you give me the opportunity to remake the negotiation, no?”

  Something about her was fascinating. “How could I resist?”

  Over the course of the meal, they cut the rest of the deal: if she was not happy with his services after the first leg of the shoot, she could fire him without pay, no questions asked. He got assurances they’d be finished by July. Farrell figured with five months lead time before the film hit the European market, his trail would have long since run cold. Even if the FBI or Cortez’s men happened to recognize him, he’d be in the South Pacific or back in Africa.

  Now, standing below the Y Couloir, Farrell wondered whether the deal would hold. He could see that The Wave and Page were thinking of cutting out; Inez seemed more than they’d bargained for. As for himself, hearing her talk about her theories made him only more intrigued.

  She went on in a seductive, yet sarcastic manner: “But I see maybe I choose the wrong skiers: someone who does not wish to find his form again. The beginner without courage. The cowboy who does not wish to ride the horse.”

  The Wave skuffed the snow with his boot. “No one said we’re going anywhere, lady.”

  “Just a little startled with the point of view here,” Page said nervously. “Nothing that can’t be handled.”

  “And you?” Inez demanded.

  “I thought we just got started,” Farrell said.

  “Bien,” Inez replied, throwing her hands on her hips. “Now tell me about something, anything in this canyon, to scare me.”

  “Follow me,” Farrell said. He led them back along the trail to the road. There the snow that had fallen during the night had melted. The pavement shone like a freshly waxed car. Farrell sat on the hood of one of the Japanese four-wheel trucks Inez had rented.

  “People come here, to Little Cottonwood, for soft snow, not extreme skiing,” he said. “It’s steep, but you’re right, by European standards it’s benign. The problem’s the mountains themselves. The Wasatch is a crumbling range. There’s granite up here, but it’s falling apart because of the weather patterns—hot, dry summers, cold winters, the constant wind. The rest of the peaks here are quartzite, a lot softer.”

  “Your point?” Inez asked.

  “The point is that in Chamonix or Verbier in Switzerland or even north of here in the Tetons, the rock’s hard. So you find sheer breaks, not decomposing walls. You find drops like chimney flues. Powder snow as light as falls here won’t stick at truly vertical angles. You need a slope that’s in the sun much of the winter, preferably south-facing, where the snow will constantly melt and freeze to compose a firm base. There’s a bunch of south-facing gullies like that here in the canyon, but only one place—it’s called the Hellgate—that you can get to with the type of terrain you’re looking for.”

  “Yes?” Inez said.

  “But it will be at least six weeks before it settles enough to ski.”

  Inez slapped the side of the truck. “You waste my time.”

  “I lay out options,” Farrell said. “The only radical terrain available now is back-country powder skiing, which doesn’t look dangerous, but is. Or something like the Y Couloir, which will look great on film, but may not measure up to European standards. Or you wait.”

  Inez said nothing. She climbed in the truck and slammed shut the door. She lay back against the neck rest, her eyes closed.

  “This woman’s out of it,” The Wave said.

  “You volunteered, remember?” Page said.

  “Don’t remind me,” The Wave said.

  “How’d she find you?” Farrell asked.

  “Didn’t,” The Wave said. “A friend of hers, a photographer from New York, was out shooting pictures at Mount Bachelor in Oregon last fall—the day I got kicked off the team. Next thing I know, I get a call, Inez wants to see me. She flies in, I do a test, and she signs me. Then I don’t hear a thing until two weeks ago, when I got tickets in the mail to come out here.”

  “What were you kicked off for, the team I mean?” Farrell asked.

  The Wave grinned. “Let’s say I got a real good bad attitude.”

  “You?” Farrell said to Page.

  Page leaned back on the hood with his arms under his head. “She showed up in Taos one day about a month ago, hears I’m around and wants to talk. First person to be interested in me in years.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Had a problem
with a different kind of snow,” Page said. “Kind of got me off track.”

  Farrell winced—he did not want to hear more.

  “A guy really died in the last film?” The Wave asked.

  Page nodded. “That’s what they say. Haven’t seen it myself. But a friend of mine said he caught it at one of those funky ski festivals at Vail. Called it an honest-to-god ski snuff film.”

  Farrell inspected the mountains, thinking about a daredevil who dies on film. He expected to find the idea frightening. Instead it seemed the definition of tranquility.

  Inez flung the truck door open and jumped out. “Collins!” she demanded. “One can ski this Y Couloir more early than this Hellgate?”

  Farrell glanced at the Y. “Even in powder, I think, but you’d want it to sit for a few days after a storm. Sure, later this week, early next.”

  Inez grabbed a pair of binoculars from the truck and peered at the great ravine. “How much time does it take to ski from the top of each arm down to the carrefoure?”

  “Intersection,” Farrell said.

  “Yes, yes. Intersection where the two arms come together.”

  “Let me see those glasses a second,” Farrell said. He focused them on the left of the two spindly channels and then the right.

  “About the same, I should think,” he said after a moment. “No, I take that back. The left arm is probably shorter, but it’s steeper and requires a nasty right turn where the arms converge. The right channel is more direct, but longer. Any skier in that right shot will have to consider his speed at the junction where it dog-legs left and drops to the canyon floor. Too much acceleration and he’s going to crash into that stone wall—break the skis or a neck.”

  “So it’s not a true Y?” said Page.

  “Well, look at it,” Farrell said. “Not in the sense of a letter scribbled on a piece of paper. It’s a Y where the fork is bent to the right off the stem.”

  Inez’s eyes had taken on a glassy dull finish again, her voice had deepened. “Obstacles?” she asked.