The helicopter pulsed above him. “Retreat, retreat,” Inez yelled.
Red neon flashed in the trees uphill and to the left. Page was skiing so fast and solid that Farrell knew in an instant that he’d be first into the tunnel unless …
Farrell aimed his skis toward the highest section of the ledge, made four swooping turns on the steep, pointed the tips at an oblique angle, and shot forward. Just before the outcropping, he yanked his feet to his buttocks and flew. Page reeled to get out of his way. Farrell smashed into the ravine five feet in front of Page, kneeing himself in the chin on impact.
“You asshole!” Page screamed. He whipped Farrell’s right shoulder with his pole. Farrell drew his skis together and accelerated.
The passage in this reach of the couloir was tighter, the snow hardpack with an inch, maybe two of rough corn snow on top. Farrell ripped through it, throwing tiny ice cubes into the air which formed a sparkling mist around his boots, a swirling glittering cloud that rose and flurried about his shins, robbing him of depth perception.
“That’s it, I’ve lost them,” Tony said.
“Another twenty feet,” said Ann. “… and gone.”
“They are mine until they turn into the final drop,” said Inez. “Wave, aim your camera toward the left turn into the bottom.”
Farrell could not see his skis under the shimmering fog at his feet, so he skied by touch. He jerked and skidded once, then found a survival pattern, swinging the skis left and right on a count of one, two. Gone now was the lunacy he’d suffered up high. Gone, too, was the throbbing he’d felt climbing that section of the couloir. Now he solely focused on the left-hand turn he had to make at the end of the chute.
Behind him, Farrell heard Page jam hard on his edges, then fade; and Farrell realized that the loose snow he was kicking up must have obliterated Page’s ability to see.
“Collins has won already,” said Inez, the disappointment palpable.
The truth of why Page had backed off dawned on Farrell before Inez. It was borne by what little information his senses were able to gather in the shifting mist of snow—the race of a bush in his peripheral vision, the chatter his skis made on the hardpack below the glitter, the angle his upper body had adopted to maintain balance; Farrell’s line of descent was too steep. He couldn’t make the hard left turn at this speed without crashing.
Farrell saw the tiny feeder channel where he’d checked the snow pack suddenly appear on his right. He snapped his shoulders and head back and skidded up into it, which slowed him to a crawl almost immediately. He skidded to a halt, cranked his left pole into the snow, and jumped the skis back into the fall line just in time to see Page lay his skis on edge and hug the left wall in a brilliant tight slide into the final 800-foot drop of the Y.
Farrell flung himself after Page, fighting the swell that boiled through his stomach in reaction to the spectacular illusion the steep pitch created; he was that child on the ferris wheel again, rolling over the top, swinging out into thin air. The canyon floor seemed suspended directly beneath his skis and he found himself unable to control his body’s instinctive need to retreat.
Page switched to a double-edged set turn—leaping, then biting the snow with the uphill edge of both skis. It was a physically punishing maneuver, but Farrell realized it was the only way to handle the radical slope; he adopted the tactic, too, bringing his weight to bear on both skis, sinking fully on each jarring contact with the snow, then rebounding high into the air where he could whip the skis around into the next turn. Within four revolutions, Farrell’s back barked, his thighs flamed. The motion had a positive effect as well: the collision between Farrell’s 170 pounds and the loose snow sent a shower of crud and ice down on Page’s back and slowed his competitor’s advance.
“Wave? Wave, do you have this?” Inez cried.
“Brutal, mon,” The Wave responded. “A good hundred and fifty feet of the chute in the lens. But I’m going to lose them if you stay where you are.”
“Stay with the shot,” she demanded.
Page and Farrell drained down the precipice like two splashes of water across a window, one droplet gathering weight and streaking away, the other finding the lead droplet’s path and racing behind.
Sweat burst, then streaked out from under the lip of Farrell’s helmet. They still had another 350 vertical feet until the runout and his lungs felt like they’d been scored with razors.
Two hundred feet below Page and Farrell, the couloir widened and it was there that the twenty-five feet of blue, rippled ice hung, split by the dagger of rock. There the couloir constricted again to just five yards wide before flooding onto the wide snout of snow that ran to the canyon floor. Farrell hadn’t figured out how to cross the ice and avoid the rock; he prayed Page had.
Fifteen yards above the water ice, Page carved left to avoid the sharp rock jutting in the middle of the chute. With a clear gap in front of him, Page pointed his skis straight down, letting the boards find their own way through the frozen throat. A breath away, Farrell made a similar decision with a slight twist; he accelerated in a quick, rattling shake over the ice, aiming for the bulge that surrounded the stone dagger. The moment his tips touched the lip, Farrell jerked his skis up, barely cleared the outcropping, and landed side by side with Page. They clattered shoulder to shoulder into the final yards of the ravine, neither of them willing to let the other pass, the ragged black lichen tearing at their glowing windbreakers.
Page grimaced, leaned, and tried to ride Farrell into the wall. Farrell shoved back, flinging the blunt end of his ice axe at Page’s thigh, which killed their balance. Together they shot out of the Y Couloir onto the giant mound of snow that drained into the forest.
In the collision of metal and nylon and flesh, Page flipped forward into a series of cartwheels that bore him end over end into the forest. Farrell spiraled left. He ricocheted off the hard upper part of the mound, then skidded sideways, head first through the slush, and smashed into a stand of half-inch cottonwood saplings.
Chapter 11
FARRELL GROANED. HIS HIP pinned his right arm to the ground. Two saplings gripped his head at a painful angle. A tangle of brush twisted his skis up behind him. He tasted blood, but knew nothing serious was broken.
“Who won? Can anybody hear me? Who won the damned thing?” Though Farrell’s earpiece had dislodged, the helmet wall reflected enough of the sound that he knew it was Tony asking the questions.
“Last thing I saw was arms and legs wrapped together like in one of those cartoons,” said The Wave. “They could be hurt real bad.”
A crow glided through his field of vision, then Page appeared holding his right arm close to his side. He’d removed his helmet to reveal a gashed right cheek. “You bastard,” he croaked. “You almost killed me.”
“Yeah,” Farrell grunted. “And you didn’t smack me on the shoulder with your ski pole up there either. Get me out of here, my neck—”
“Fuck your neck,” Page said. “We could have died up there.”
Farrell wheezed and coughed. “You knew the risks.”
Page grabbed the saplings and pulled back on them. The pressure around Farrell’s neck eased. Farrell’s head untwisted, then slipped downhill, further into the gap between the little trees. Page wrenched the two trees together until Farrell gagged.
“Listen now and listen good, you shithead,” Page said. “When I go up a hill, I have every intention of coming down in one piece. You want to go out in some blaze of self-inflicted glory, you do it alone. Not on my time.”
Farrell gulped. A garbled sound curled up from his throat. Page released the tension. Farrell’s elbow slipped out from under his chest and he collapsed forward in the snow. Page was right and he thought: when had suicide become a factor? With his next breath he understood that it had been skulking around since the night he’d seen Timmons slide down the strings of the Apron. Maybe he was the next link in the Farrell chain.
Page flipped the gear on Farrell’s binding
s. Farrell fell away from the skis and flopped onto his side. His eyes stung from the sweat and blood that trickled from his nose.
“Give me a hand up,” Farrell said, his voice like gravel.
“I don’t think so,” Page said. He slogged off through the slush toward the clearing.
Farrell wriggled himself into a sitting position. “Page!”
Page kept moving. “See a shrink.”
Farrell unstrapped the helmet and pried it off. He looked about himself at the skis and the poles and the broken goggles that hung on a branch of a stunted spruce. He sat down hard, shivering.
Page had managed to shoulder his skis and take a few stiff steps up the trail when The Wave raced into the clearing. “Foaming dogs!” he cried. “That was absolutely rabid!”
Then he saw Page’s cut face: “Mon, you look like you’ve been whipped. You okay?”
Page shook The Wave’s hand off his shoulder and staggered away toward the road. The Wave pushed his dreadlocks back behind his ears and ran to Farrell. “Damn, old one, you’re worse,” The Wave said. “Your face looks like cottage cheese with raspberry sauce. You hurt bad?”
Farrell stared at The Wave for a full five seconds. “No, I’m fine. Just get me up.”
“Who won?”
Farrell groaned as he stood; his hip was bruised and standing had sent the muscle there into spasm. “What?”
“Who got to the bottom first, old one?” The Wave insisted. “I lost you in my lens right near the bottom.”
“Page won,” Farrell said. “I never made it to the canyon floor.”
“Too bad, mon,” The Wave said. “When you made that last insane move to the canyon floor, I figured you had it.”
“Insane …” Farrell repeated. Black spots appeared before his eyes, his knees buckled, and he dry heaved.
“Mon, we’ve got to get you to a doctor,” The Wave said, grabbing Farrell’s elbow.
“That’s what Page says, too,” Farrell mumbled.
Some of Farrell’s strength returned on the hike out, and by the time they reached the road, he was walking on his own. Inez stood on the bank of snow above the trail head, her face aglow, her elbows pressed tightly together at her breasts, her hands splayed about her face like the leaves of an oleander protecting its flower.
“Outrance!” she exclaimed. “Extreme, this word does not come close to make the description of what you do! Only in the French will the language do this feat justice. It’s outrance! Audacity!”
Her enthusiasm swept her away. She jumped the snowbank to run to Farrell as she had to The Wave the week before. She grasped Farrell’s face in her hands, ignoring the blood, and kissed him full on the mouth. The Wave stood off to one side twisting one of his dreads.
“You are magnificent,” Inez said. Her eyes were glassy, half-lidded, and her lips wet and parted. “Myself, I cannot take you further.”
Inez trembled and she hugged him again. She seemed to surround him now the way the ocean did when he scuba-dived, a comforting force that he knew could turn ugly without warning. Inez leaned to Farrell’s unabraided ear. She brushed her lips across it and whispered, “Well, perhaps I take you just a little bit further in Tahoe.”
Farrell flushed. The sky spun. The black dots reappeared.
“You almost killed him up there,” The Wave said.
Inez twisted away from Farrell. “I just test him. Regardez les conséquences!”
“Yeah, look at them!” The Wave insisted. “You almost swept him off the face when you pulled close with that chopper.”
“This is our affair,” Inez said. “You and I have our own.”
Farrell shook his head to clear the bugs which danced in the air. He felt ill again. He brushed between the two of them to clamber up the snow embankment.
“We are in Tahoe by day after tomorrow,” she called after Farrell. “We must keep up the pace or we have no more breakthrough.”
Farrell didn’t reply. He plodded toward Portsteiner, who had just emerged from the woods on the other side of the road.
Inez raced after Farrell and threw her arm about his shoulder. “You cannot stop now, Collins. I think you loved it. Perhaps you think you hate me now. But I think, too, you loved me when you are in the Y Couloir.”
Farrell tried to say something, but couldn’t find the words. He just kept walking while Inez called to him from behind, louder and louder: “Collins! Collins! I see you in Tahoe! I see you in Tahoe!”
Portsteiner swabbed alcohol on the red, raw patch under Farrell’s left eye. Farrell gritted his teeth and focused on the tattered old ski posters and the Hawaii calendar on the far wall of Portsteiner’s office, a jumbled affair with a battered wooden desk, four pairs of skis, and a filing cabinet badly in need of a clerk.
“Never seen a more brilliant move done in such a dumb place,” Portsteiner said. “Odds say both of you should be dead right now.”
Farrell didn’t reply. He stared at the floor until Portsteiner grabbed him by the chin and tugged his head up. “Am I getting through to you at all, son?”
Farrell jerked his head away.
Portsteiner laid gauze along Farrell’s ear and taped it. “You know, you don’t talk, you might get yourself into a drainage you may never leave. Funny. Before you went off to Africa, you were the tautest SOB I ever knew.”
Farrell held a piece of ice to the swelling above his eye.
“Just do me one favor,” Portsteiner said. “Tell me what happened when you left here that time and disappeared for three months before you took off for Africa.”
“No.”
“I’m trying to be your friend, Jack. Friends talk.”
Farrell saw that the old man was telling the truth, he was trying to be his friend. Farrell did not know how to start. Finally, he said: “Maybe there are some snow crystals you just couldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” Portsteiner said, and he took a seat next to Farrell.
“My great-grandmother, father’s side, had what they called ‘the spells,’ ” Farrell began. “Her son, my grandfather, hung himself. My father was thirteen when he found him in the garage.”
“I don’t see—”
“Let me finish,” Farrell said. “There were times when I was at the dinner table as a kid. For no reason at all, he’d go off. And my mother, she’d sit there and take it until he’d kind of gotten it out of himself. Sometimes he’d cry. She’d put down her napkin and give him his pills and he’d stay in this darkened room for a couple of days.”
“What did the doctors say?”
“That it was some kind of imbalance, manic-depression,” Farrell said. “He’d stay on the pills, he’d be fine. He hated them, though. Thought they made the world something it wasn’t.
“So every once in a while, he’d stop taking them. He worked out of the house. He was an attorney, but because of the spells, he just got jobs writing contracts and things. Anyway, I’d come home from school and my mom would be out and he’d have the stereo blasting and would be dancing with the vacuum cleaner. Honest to god, it was real fun sometimes.”
Farrell put the ice down and took a drink from the beer Portsteiner had opened for him. “I remember this, too. I must have been nine and my mom was at the drug store. I made some crack about having nothing to do. So he just loads me in the car, eight-thirty in the morning, and off we drive—three and a half hours—him singing at the top of his lungs, down to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
“We come back nine hours later and there’s my mom all pale, sick to her stomach, and she knows he hasn’t been taking his pills.”
“You got it, Jack—that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“You went home that spring and saw them, what happened?”
Farrell turned away. “There’s some things better not talked about.”
Portsteiner pursed his lips. “You hate them, your parents?”
“No,” Farrell sighed. “I still love them, c
an’t help it.”
“This isn’t the kind of thing you can handle alone.”
Farrell stood up. “I’m finding that out. I’ve been reading about someone who went through an awful time, worse than me, it seems. Listening to stories worse than my own seems to help, sort of.”
“I’ll change those bandages tomorrow.”
“Won’t be here,” Farrell said. “Going to Tahoe for this week, then Jackson Hole next. I’m in show business, you know.”
Portsteiner grabbed Farrell by the elbow as he headed toward the door. “Not a good idea, son. The woman scares me.”
“Really? I kind of like her,” Farrell said. “She’s wild, unpredictable. Takes me places.”
“I think I know you, Jack,” Portsteiner said. “You go with her, you may not be able to get away.”
Farrell shook his arm free, annoyed. “What are you talking about? I can leave her anytime I want. This is one thing I know how to handle.”
They stared at each other in silence. Portsteiner laid his big hand on Farrell’s shoulder. “The heart of a cold victim is irritable and sensitive to jarring,” he said. “Rough handling of a cold victim may cause the heart to stop or beat irregular. Gentle treatment is necessary.”
Farrell lips rolled in on themselves in a grotesque version of a smile.
“E. R. LaChapelle,” they both said.
Later that afternoon, the sun was warm enough that an old gray cat lay like a rug on the stone front steps of the lodge while Farrell loaded his things into the truck. Portsteiner’s nonprescription painkillers had cut the edge off the ache in his hip and his chin, but his forehead and the bone around his eyes still pounded. He figured the drive to Tahoe would take him fourteen maybe fifteen hours over two days. Just as he’d told Portsteiner, if he wanted to, he simply wouldn’t show up. There was always Montana. The thought of Inez’s lips running across his ear returned; he would continue at least through the cliffs at Squaw Valley.
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