Inez got up, ending whatever protests they might have. As she walked out, Farrell tried to figure out if there were other reasons she’d want to push them so hard, so fast. For a brief moment he entertained the idea that she was somehow connected to Gabriel, then discarded it as ludicrous. Gabriel dealt swiftly. He did not take slow revenge. Inez, she had her own secret designs.
The Wave opted to practice on the steeps below the KT-22 Chair. Page and Farrell caught a cable car, and a few minutes after ten, they swung past Broken Arrow Peak into the crisp, glorious sunshine. Page tinned his back to Farrell. Below the cable car a web of structural steel lift-line cables hung and Farrell thought that, at age thirty-three, his tolerance for formal ski areas was ebbing. To stay financially solvent, the resorts had to erect so many lifts they’d scarred the natural beauty of the mountains. Alta was one of the few places left that retained a sense of wilderness. He moved to the right side of the car as they crossed Broken Arrow to gaze off into the terrain north of the ski valley. He thought of Lena and how he’d kept her in the dark for so long. He pinched his chest muscle. When Portsteiner had warned him about the cold heart in motion, he didn’t believe in angina. Now he did.
Out on the hill, the downhill skis rode differently than the giant slalom and slalom boards he’d used every day since he’d arrived in snow country almost four months ago. He and Page set the big skis on edge and let them run, their weight and length absorbing and muffling the ripples, gullies, and mounds in the snow.
“A Rolls-Royce ride,” Farrell said, thinking out loud. He picked spots far away, sped toward them, then, like a bobsledder, banked the skis and pressed the outside of the arc. The skis gathered speed. Farrell drew his lips back, exposing his teeth, delighted at the wind’s ginger taste and its deafening whistle.
By the third run they were warmed up. Page was civil, but still clearly ticked off at him. He pointed out the Direct Chute on Granite Chief Peak, where they’d be skiing in two days, and the rock outcroppings where Inez was likely to place Ann and Tony with the cameras. They dropped into the basin below Emigrant Peak, rode the Mainline chair, and considered the Pocket, a series of narrow tubes walled with sheer granite, followed by the moody, north-facing Palisades themselves, stark cliffs cast in perpetual shadow.
Riding the lift for the fourth time that day, Farrell tried to study the four lines of descent they’d be likely to take down the Palisades. Instead, he thought of the fall he and Page had taken. Farrell lifted his ski pole and scrapped away snow that had accumulated near the toe piece of his binding.
He said: “Look, I want to apologize for acting crazy in the Y. It could have gone bad. I regret it.”
Page cocked his chin away from Farrell. “The way I figure it, we don’t have to be close on a slope anytime soon, so you don’t matter.”
“I said I regret it,” Farrell said.
“I only trust what I can see.”
“You trust what you see here, I mean you grew up here, right?” Farrell asked, trying to steer the conversation away from himself.
Page craned his head back toward the lake. “Seven years since I was here last and it’s pretty much the same. California is Tahoe.”
“How’s that?”
“Pioneering spirit, greed, perversity, weirdness, it all took root in the Sierra Nevada,” Page said. “You’ve got thousands of people swarming these hills in the mid-1800s, searching for gold. You’ve got the Dormer party eating each other in the snow. Now it’s hundreds of thousands pulling the one-armed bandits on the south side of the lake. They just recently busted the mayor for running coke.”
“That surprises you?”
“Not me,” Page said. He rolled his head back until it made a light popping noise. “The average person in California lives in what they call a ‘unit’ of say eight hundred square feet, while the newspapers display ads for garish pink mansions. Every day Mr. Joe drives to work in a beat-up Chevy or an old Honda. He’s passed on the freeway by BMWs and Ferraris. And the streets are packed with women with impossibly hard bodies.”
Farrell nodded. “Odds are against sanity.”
They skied across the Siberia Bowl to a catwalk below the Palisades. Page looked at the stark cliff walls. “Even though you see them in the movies all the time, they’re bigger than you think.”
Farrell thought about the weightlessness such a drop would create. He smiled.
Page pointed at a scar in the middle of the cliff. “About ten years ago, I saw a guy come flying out of that chute there going sixty miles an hour. He couldn’t see this ice ledge in the flat light and he got nailed: twenty-six stitches in the gash on his legs the skis made wind-milling him.”
“Shit.”
“You don’t want to miss at all up here. You’ll get Inez’s peek through the hands.”
They took another lift up the hill. Farrell asked, “This the side of the lake you grew up on?”
“The other side, near Heavenly,” Page said. “Big difference, really. Here the skiing is steep and relentless, which requires concentration and a quiet nightlife. South side, it’s pretty flat, so you need the honkey-tonk casinos and flashy clothes to cover up how boring the skiing really is.”
“Your family still here?”
Page pursed his lips and crossed his arms.
“Mother is. Father, I don’t know. Don’t care.”
Page swung his skis in the air underneath the chair. Farrell observed him out of the corner of his eye. He wanted to trust Page. But he figured it was unlikely Page would trust him. He decided to keep quiet about the book The Wave had found. Steep faces of the mountain towered all about them. Farrell idly wondered what Inez had in store for them. He smiled again.
Near the top of the lift, Page nudged Farrell and waved toward a steep rock wall on the ridge to their left. “They call it Adrenaline,” he said. “Big drop. You game to see how these boards will handle it?”
“The unexamined life isn’t worth living,” Farrell said.
“Who said that?” asked Page.
“Damned if I know,” Farrell laughed. “It’s all this talking with The Wave. You start remembering bizarre quotes.”
Page broke into his own laugh. “The kid’s kind of looney tune, isn’t he?”
A thick stand of spruce trees fringed the upper-right-hand lip of Adrenaline Rock. Farrell asked Page about stumps hidden under the snow at the bottom of the stone wall. Page said with the snow base at more than 130 inches, any stump or rock was buried at least three feet under. Still, they decided to ski below the cliff just to make sure. They found that, although the light was flat, the snow was still deep and unconsolidated; if they timed it right, the landing would be soft and easy.
On top again they crossed to the backside of the ridge to a saddle above Adrenaline. Page said because of the shadows, the best bet was to hug the trees, then break to the rock at an angle.
“There’s a lip on it you can’t see that will kick you into the air,” Page said. “But the formation itself juts out a bit below the takeoff, so you’ll want to drive out into space and drop your tips almost immediately.”
“You go first,” Farrell said. He skied along the fringe of trees to where he could see the stone ledge and the landing zone.
Page dropped very quickly through two arcs—his head cocked left so he could examine the takeoff zone with his good eye—veed his skis to control his speed, then set them together and raced straight at the rock. He hit the lip and rose like smoke, effortless; his body wafted forward; his loose, red anorak flapped in the breeze; his skis floated side to side.
“I’ll be damned,” Farrell said. He could see that Page had entered the state of “flow,” where experts presented with a challenge stretch to the limits of their capabilities. Though he had entered the state only briefly on several occasions, Farrell loved the experience. In flow, time stops, unforeseen unities are revealed, the brain fires in rapid, even bursts. People in the chair lift gasped and pointed at Page. Farrell nodded; for both t
he participant and the audience, flow was the ultimate stunt—a conscious, yet unconscious, escape from reality. Page’s flight over Adrenaline was clear, extended, and stable, an African gazelle in the full stretch of its bound.
When he was twenty feet from the ground, Page relaxed his hips and let his deer legs reach for the slope. He hit, drew his knees back to his center, and froze for a split second in a deep crouch. He sprang from it, up and out, pell-mell, to swallow the last fifty yards of the hill in five turns.
Farrell skied down to him and slapped him on the back. “That was incredible.”
“I was up there forever,” Page gasped. He swallowed and sucked for air again. “When I came over the front, I almost crapped for a second because I couldn’t tell how the slope changed. I held on, though, and about halfway down my eye got wide and I could see it all, every crystal in the snow, every grain in the rock coming up at me. The skis absorbed perfectly; no need to lay your hip into it at all.”
Twenty minutes later, Farrell stood above Adrenaline. For a moment he considered backing away. Usually these moments of anticipation yielded a calm, lucid screen. Not this time. Faced with the possibility of true escape, the odd weight of the evening before returned. His head turned jittery, like one of those old silent movies, every frame kicking the next, herky-jerky. In every one of those blips on the screen he saw his wife and he realized he hadn’t really known her.
Farrell twisted his body left and right to rid himself of the feeling that would not yield. He told himself to just go, that fleeing into the unknown would offer relief. He forced his eyes open much wider than normal, snow-plowed the skis, then, just as Page had done, pulled them together and let them skim to the rock. The snow bulge at the edge of the cliff chucked him high into the air. He hadn’t expected to be thrown so far and he gagged. His arms and legs curled toward his trunk. He fell in the fetal position.
It had been years since Farrell had sailed off something that tall. He knew that, as a matter of course, there’s a shrieky list of things that races through your mind when you go over the invisible hump in the air and accelerate downward; you pray a gust of wind will not blow you sideways and crunch you; you pray that your ski tips stay parallel to the slope and do not invert; you pray that the landing is smooth and not strewn with stones.
All those responses were familiar. This retreat response—coiling up like a baby, desperate to be back on the rock instead of barreling into the air—was new and terrifying. Sure, there had always been before an instant of pure fear, then the flood of chemicals through the veins and the wicked, blazing smile as he glared the future down. Now, in those snap moments above Adrenaline, dread of the unknown slapped Farrell hard across the mouth. He panicked. He dropped like a bomb.
If his innate will to survive hadn’t taken over in the last seconds, he’d have been a goner. He kicked his legs out and forward. He smacked the ground like a plank tossed carelessly from the roof of a house under construction. The muscle in his groin tugged. His balance was thrown. He ripped along at fifty, back on the tails of his skis, struggling for control. Gravity, old bear’s friend and enemy, had him. He stabbed at the snow with his poles, thrust his hands forward, tried every trick he knew to recapture his stance.
Soft, dense snow did him in. It grabbed at the inside edge of his uphill ski and knocked him over as casually as a paper cup in a gale. He did two flips and landed on his back. He came to rest facedown in the snow, wondering how the hell he’d gotten out of that alive.
He was digging the snow out of the nape of his turtleneck when Page skied up. “By all rights it should be dark right now,” Farrell said, his voice shaking. “It’s never happened before. Never.”
Page clicked out of his bindings. He knelt next to Farrell.
“There was nothing wrong with that jump, Collins,” Page said. “You punched the takeoff. Sure, the landing was shaky, but in the air I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Farrell trembled. “This was different. I’m going down before I hurt myself.”
“What do I tell Inez?” Page asked. “Are you in or out for tomorrow?”
“I don’t know what I am,” Farrell said and he skied away in shaky, snow-plow turns.
Farrell paced in his room in a failed effort to soothe himself. He doused his face in cold water. Nothing helped. He’d always been able to shove his experiences and memories in separate little compartments. Now the walls were breaking down. The past was mixing with the present in ways that he did not understand, in ways that tortured him. He grabbed his jacket. He needed to move.
The narrow road to South Lake Tahoe leaves Tahoe City under a canopy of tall firs; it hugs the shore through small villages and around pristine inlets; after ten miles, it climbs into Placer County through a series of switchbacks and hairpin turns above a bank that gives way for a thousand feet to the water of Emerald Bay. Two hours before sunset, Farrell arrived at the locked gate to the Eagle Point Park, which sits on a cliff that juts a quarter mile out over the water. He parked the truck off the road behind some trees. In a drawer in the back he found the binoculars in case he wanted to examine the mountainsides. With the hands of an arthritic, he reached for Lena’s diary. He did not want to read it, but he had no choice; the past was buffeting him like a high wind. He locked the camper and set off up the path toward the tip of Eagle Point. Farrell sat on a log, trying to reassure himself that his center would hold.
Tahoe’s water was the color of Lena’s irises, Farrell thought. He changed his mind and decided cynically that the water was a darker green like the Swiss papers that arrived on his desk at least once a week after his trip to Baja. He remembered how the sheaves crinkled, how they’d snapped like fresh ten-dollar bills between his fingers. He’d lock his door when the documents arrived. He’d read them for accuracy, then punch three holes in the pages and insert them in the black binder which he secreted in the back of his credenza. Some days, he’d examine the arc of his activities and find himself shifting unconsciously in his chair like a five-year-old waiting for recess. There was an aroma that seethed from the green sheets, an acrid fume of some European chemical agent the gnomes in Zurich and Basel used to seal the ink. Perhaps it was his imagination, but Farrell remembered that when the ledger lay open on his desk, he smelled swimming pools on summer days. Once he held the pages in a bunch, flipping through them quick, front to back, so that the line of zeros in the lower-right-hand corner of the stack seemed to pulse to the Latin beat of his secret life.
In a second binder, he kept copies of his terse orders to attorneys in distant countries, of wire transfers to the Grand Cayman accounts, to banks in Panama and Guatemala and Vanuatu and on. With each new piece of paper came the immediate rush of knowing he’d beaten the odds, that he had risked and won. Farrell got a kick out of examining the telegrams, the computer printouts, and the various deeds, loan documents, and warrants that detailed the assets of Bahia Vision, Inc., the company he had organized to channel the illegal profits of Gabriel’s clients into legitimate investments. Between June 1986 and December of that year, Bahia Vision purchased a thirty-two-unit condominium development in Midlothian, Texas; a controlling interest in a shopping mall off Route 20 toward Tyler, Texas; 243 acres of commercial land near Englewood, Colorado; and ownership and development rights on four separate parcels totalling 225 acres of property southeast of San Diego along the U.S.-Mexico border. Total value: $16.5 million.
Of all the deals, the land buys along the San Diego border with Tijuana intrigued Farrell most. The thousands of desolate acres there had been talked about as a free-trade city between the two countries for so long that Farrell knew he could have bottled the saliva that had dripped from speculators’ mouths over the years and watered his lawn with it until 1995.
Every parcel on Otay Mesa had flip-flopped its way through dozens of hands in the previous decade, which made it almost impossible to know who owned what and why. By the time Farrell closed the second deal, he knew that an investigator would hav
e as much success using a divining rod as parcel records to do a competent title search on the properties.
Into that dirt poker game, Farrell dumped first $2 million, then another $4 million, then $2.5 million. He watched the money seep into the dun border soil. Invisible. All but untraceable.
On the days when he consummated these deals, he’d surged with confidence. Six months after the fishing trip, Jim Rubenstein praised Farrell for how well he was running his division. He gave Farrell a raise and a bonus. In the meantime, Farrell stashed several hundred thousand dollars in his secret account. He would look at the new balance printed by some computer far off in Zurich and a warm feeling would surround him. He imagined that an athlete seeing a photograph of himself in action would feel the same way; it was an echo of the true experience. At home, he showered Lena with gifts: bracelets and clothes and a white BMW sedan. At the dinner table, he prattled like a hophead over the intricacies of his latest deal. He drank too much and giggled when Lena had to lead him to his bed.
Between deals, however, when he was breaking no new ground, Farrell became bored. Worse, the illegality of his activities gnawed at him. The symptoms were subtle: his knee vibrated under his desk; he bit at his fingernails until the quicks were raw; a tic developed under his right eye, knots formed between his shoulder blades. On those days, he left work early, got his scuba gear, and swam in the ocean. Down a fathom or more, he’d flip over on his back and float, staring at the orange sunbeams that reached him in the depths.
Farrell looked at the green waters of Lake Tahoe and thought about the fact that, in the early stages of their disease, alcoholics and addicts will deny the power of their habit. They will believe in the truth of a fabricated world. This will continue, warping everything around them, until a rock smashes the glass of lies.
Farrell wrapped his arms around himself as if he were wearing a straitjacket. He thought it somehow fitting that babies were the rocks that shattered his illusions.
November 28, 1987
The Fall Line Page 21