Inez leaned down to her pack and came out with the helmet camera. “You wear it,” she said to Farrell. “I want the outlaw’s vision.”
Farrell grabbed the helmet from Inez and yanked it down over his head. “You’re fucking nuts,” Farrell said.
“No!” Inez said. “I am the one you look at in the mirror. The fanatic. I want the fanatic’s perspective.”
“You’ll get it, lady!” Farrell said, and without another word, he hoisted his pack, turned, and climbed.
He could not remember the first leg of the pitch; his vision of the world had turned red. But as he rose higher, with Page right behind him, the anger faded into an orange seething. He’d give Inez her desire.
The snow was inconsistent. In places, Farrell and Page floundered in it, gasping for air and grasping for purchase on the walls and on the tiny outcroppings of rock and ice that poked through the surface. In other spots, it was rock-hard, a surface as slick as a hockey rink. At the bend in the couloir the overhang receded, the dripping stopped, and sunshine poured in, refracting through the evaporating water so that violet, blue, and yellow rainbows appeared in the air around them. Farrell led again. Twenty steps up, the firm snow collapsed and his right leg plunged in up to his hip.
“Shit,” he groaned. “I yanked my groin again.”
Page scrambled up to help him free his leg. Farrell moaned as it came free.
“You keep going?” Page asked.
“I’ll try,” Farrell said, massaging the torn muscles.
“You a criminal like she said?”
“Would it matter?”
Page thought about it and shook his head. “At this point, not really. But are you?”
Farrell grimaced and began to climb again. “Yes. I’m a criminal.”
“They say starting over begins with admission,” Page called after him in a hopeful tone.
“I’d say you suffered a relapse lately,” Farrell said, deflecting the attention from himself again.
Page was quiet. He stared after Farrell’s retreating pack. “Guess I have.”
Because of the injury, Farrell was forced to change tactics: he stopped and took his skis off his pack and held one in each hand. With every step he drove the tails of the metal boards into the hard snow to pull himself upward. The motion was maddeningly slow and painful. But he knew if he stopped now, his muscles would chill and tighten and he might have to be carried off the Grand.
High, high above them, the glacier must have been rotting in the strong sun because now thousands of tiny chunks of granular snow poured forth from the rocks above them and to their left. The crystals cascaded down in twists of turquoise and silver, enveloping the couloir with the sound of grain kernels being poured into a stone mill.
Page and Farrell crouched. The ice chunks pinged off the helmet and then ebbed. When it died completely, Page said, “What’s that all about?”
“Dunphy’s map showed another couloir above us that deadends onto those rocks,” Farrell said. He braced himself when another shower of ice spewed down. “The Ford Couloir, I think. Must be nowhere else for the stuff to go but off the cliffs and down into here.”
As that shower began to subside, Page leaned his head back to let the tiny ice needles pelt him in the face. “That will sober you,” he said. The radio on his hip crackled to life.
“Page? Page, answer me?”
Page grabbed the device and held it to his ear. “Go ahead, Inez.”
“Tony is below you, on the right side. He says something about a rain storm of ice.”
“Yeah, it breaks off the top every couple minutes.”
“I want you both to ski through it.”
“Gets pretty heavy,” Page said. “We’d be blind coming through it.”
“Just do it!” Inez said. “I am at the bottom. Ann is some yards below Tony. Hurry!”
Page fingered the button on the radio. “Whatever you say, Inez.”
At noon, they reached the chockstone, a severe pitch of ice and snow and rock that stretched above them for one hundred and fifty feet. Warm wind blew across crevices in the stone, filling the air around them with the rich pitched tones of a flute. Farrell rubbed at his hip and listened to the music. Page mashed down a flat spot at the base of the wall. The action cracked off bits of ice, which bounced down the slope to where they could see Tony strapping himself into an icy cubbyhole on the right side of the couloir, just above the point where the chute became shrouded in darkness. They sat and waited, looking toward the towering dagger of rock called Tepee’s Pillar, a thousand feet below and a half mile to the east.
The radio crackled again, but at this height there was interference; Inez’s voice was garbled. Finally Tony turned and made a twirling motion with his hands as if he were swinging a lariat.
“That must be our cue,” Farrell said, and for the third time that morning snow cascaded into the chute below them.
“Looks like it’s going to be like when you were a little kid,” Page said, “and you’re running through the sprinkler on a hot summer’s day. Only this is going to sting.”
“You want the helmet?”
“She said it’s all yours,” Page said. “I’ll just duck through quick.”
“Page.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll see you at the bottom.”
Page smiled. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Page took several long breaths. Farrell could see he was timing his turns, hoping to enter the ice storm in midarc so he wouldn’t have to shift his balance blindly. He jumped around on the boards, pointed them into the thick snow, and began a series of whirling turns until he disappeared into the icy spray. Farrell flipped on the helmet camera and followed, trying to weave turns in an opposite composition so he wouldn’t get caught in the ruts Page had made and be thrown into the walls.
The stream of rubble spilling from above surged. Farrell skied into it, wrapped now in a silver shroud. The flow of ice chunks, heavier than before, beat about his shoulders and rang off the helmet. He raised his hands to protect himself. The action threw him back on the tails of his skis and he fell through the curtain of snow, wincing at the shrill chatter the helmet made, trying to get his downhill ski to grab at the slope, knowing it wouldn’t hold. The jarring motion of the ski vibrated up through his leg to his groin. He cried out.
Farrell slipped by Tony, who tried to reach out to grab him, but missed. He crashed off the near wall and slid again. Now he slipped into the dark part of the chute, his hands splayed out beside him to create friction and slow his rush. Ann was set up close to the upper entrance of the cave and Farrell roared by her, clawing the snow. For an instant, he considered letting go, to become a casualty critics could write of when they reviewed Inez’s next film. But then his mind twisted the icy half dome of the cave into the grinning mouth of Jorge Cordova and he knew that more than anything, he wanted to live. Not for himself. For Lena. For revenge.
He arched his back and got himself up on his hip, his hands flat on the slope. Just as Inez came into view—with her camera lights blazing in the darkness—Farrell pushed off the snow with all his might; and he careened toward the mouth of the cave.
He flashed past Inez off-balance, but upright, blinking in the brilliant glare around her. Fifty yards and he was down, propped against a boulder, retching from the bitter apple taste that flooded his mouth, a taste that he realized was once the beloved Northern Spy tartness of adrenaline.
The Wave crouched over Page, who lay pale on the snow. Above Page’s right eye was a bruised slash from which blood pulsed in sudden, grotesque bursts. “Bitch,” Page groaned. “That bitch of a rock came out of nowhere.”
“It must have nailed him when he came through that shower, mon,” The Wave said to Farrell.
Farrell knelt next to Page and held snow to the cut until the blood slowed. Page’s pupils were round, but fully dilated. A sign of shock. With his knife, Farrell cut an extra T-shirt into strips. He wrapped them around Pa
ge’s head.
Inez scrambled down from the cave, beaming at them all.
“Incredible!” she cried. “I believe I get the shot of you, Jack, under the icicles just as you come up again. On film, I think it looks like you are behind glass bars! How appropriate!”
She took a step forward as if to hug him. Farrell caught her hands and held them away from him. “Enough,” he said firmly. “I’ve had enough.”
“Enough!” Inez laughed. “We just begin! We must hurry now if we want to get the shots on the glacier. The Wave is next. First to snowboard the Grand this early in the year!”
The Wave scowled. “Bag the glacier. We’ve got to get Page to a doctor.”
“Page is fine,” Inez said, barely looking at him. “He slides past me and looks right at the camera. I see the blood, but it is not so bad.”
“That stone must have hit him like a slingshot,” Farrell lashed out. “His right eye’s almost closed. He’s as good as blind.”
“Patch him up!” Inez ordered. “He makes it to the glacier at least.”
“I don’t think your soul can take another Valoir,” Farrell said.
Inez slapped Farrell hard across the face. He took it and the next and the next, just as he had accepted Lena’s blows so many months before. When she stopped, blood trickled from his lip.
“Do you get him up or do you want the endless ennui of the prison walls?” she snarled.
Farrell looked down at Page. A deep red circle the size of two hen’s eggs had formed on the T-shirt. Tony and Ann reached the bottom of the couloir. Ann knelt next to Page and checked his pulse. “He’s bad,” she said. “Probably a concussion.”
“We’re going to need a helicopter,” Tony said.
“No!” Inez cried. “No one goes anywhere until I say so.”
She pointed at Ann and Tony. “Or you don’t get your money.”
Then she pointed at The Wave. “And you don’t find your mother.”
And finally at Farrell. “And you rot in jail.”
They all froze, staring at her and the jittery way she twirled her finger in the air.
Farrell took a deep breath. “Fuck you, Inez,” he said. “I’m calling in the chopper.”
He grabbed Page’s radio and tried to call, but the only response was dull static. The Wave pointed up at the rocks. “We’re blocked off.”
Inez smiled in victory. “You see, on the glacier the radio works. We kill two birds with the one rock: help poor Page and get the shots I need.”
Page groaned again. “I’m okay to make it there,” he said. “But not if we don’t move soon.”
Farrell grabbed Inez by the collar. He whispered hoarsely, “If he doesn’t make it, I’ll kill you.”
Inez made a kissing noise. “Such emotion, my outlaw. How I wish I had the cameras on.”
She struggled free of his grasp. “Who will lead?” she asked.
None of them answered.
“I said, who will lead?”
They just stared at her.
“Fine,” Inez said uncertainly. “I will lead.”
Inez got her pack on and set off along the ridge. Slowly the others picked up their packs and followed. The Wave, Tony, and Farrell took turns supporting Page. Their route wound across a small ridge behind the jut of a massive outcropping called the Black Dike and out onto a small open snow field. Because of his height and strength, Tony was best able to support Page. So he and Farrell switched packs. The cameraman’s load was brutish, and it weighed heavy on Farrell’s torn leg muscle. He fell twenty, now thirty, now fifty yards behind the others.
Three-quarters of the way across the snowfield, as the rest of the crew approached a gap between the steeplelike rock of Tepee’s Pillar and the great cliff that formed the Grand Teton’s east face, the air reverberated around Farrell: Woomph!
Snow sagged all around him. His hip seized up and he grimaced, kneeling to relieve the pain. He saw it then: tiny lines running out over the surface of the snow like the support strands on a spider’s web. He placed his hands on white crust and froze.
He stayed that way for a full three minutes, sure now that he was in the release zone, sure now that the snow pack would crack and a 100,000-ton load would move off the sleeping bear. But it didn’t. By the time he figured it was safe to look up, Inez and the rest of the team were more than a football field away, perched at the crest of the ridge in back of Tepee’s Pillar. Farrell struggled to his feet, fixated on the silvery cracks. Gingerly, he took a step and then another and another until he was beyond the farthest gray line.
“Oh, God … oh God, thank you,” he whispered. He took his time now, stopping every few feet to listen to the snow and his own breath.
“What takes you so long?” Inez demanded when he finally reached them. “The helicopter comes in one hour. We must get to the glacier now.”
“We don’t go anywhere,” Farrell said. “The snow settled back there.”
“I feel nothing,” Inez scoffed. “You just try to deny me my film.”
“It settled, Inez,” Farrell insisted. “The whole place is shaky.”
“It’s two o’clock,” Inez said, pointing at the sun, which was approaching the flank of the Tetons. “The shadows, already they are moving on to the glacier. I will lose my beautiful light soon.”
“The snow moved, Inez,” Farrell said again.
“The snow, she always moves,” Inez snapped. “She creeps, she glides, she turns in her sleep. It is normal. Besides, look around you. The helicopter cannot land here.”
She was right. It was too narrow and too steep; the only place a helicopter could put down was out there, far down the slope of the glacier where it flattened out.
“All right,” Farrell said. “But we wait until the chopper comes and then we move to it.”
“No, we film first,” Inez said. “We get him down there. We go now.”
And before he could say another word, Inez slogged out across the great shoulder of snow that hugged the side of the cliff. Below her spread the Tepees, an eight-lane freeway of white that spilled down the mountain into the forest far, far below. Inez sank in the snow to midshin on every step, so that she moved with the turkey stride of an old man with a cane. Farrell massaged his thigh as the others silently picked up their packs to follow her.
“You coming, mon?” The Wave asked.
“In a minute,” Farrell said. “I’ve got to rest this leg.”
“Oh, we can wait no longer, mon,” The Wave said. “ ‘We too take ship oh soul, Joyous we too launch on trackless seas, fearless for unknown shores.’ ”
“I give,” Farrell said.
“Whitman, mon,” The Wave grinned, and he set out after Ann and Tony and Page and Inez.
Farrell massaged his muscles for another minute, then looked up. The crew was moving in a tight pack across the snow mound.
He yelled, “You’ve got them too close together!”
The afternoon wind had picked up, smothering his voice. He got the pack on and lumbered after them as fast as he could go.
Later, Farrell would recall he wasn’t sure how he knew. But within thirty-five yards, he understood he was crossing terrain without foundation; the six of them were perched on a hollow overhang of ice and snow twenty feet high: a rotten cornice, a snow bridge with no support underneath.
“Spread out!” Farrell screamed. “Page! Tony! Ann! Wave! Move back toward me!”
They all heard him this time and turned in their tracks. Tony raised his hand to his brow, trying to block the sun. The dull growl of a waking beast ripped the still air. Farrell saw a swirl in the thick white goo off to his right, an eddy twirling after a retreating wave. The snow around Farrell buckled and ran.
Then the whole thing gave way and him with it. As he went, Farrell instinctively unsnapped the strap that held the pack tight against his chest. There was a split second where he felt the weightlessness of the deep powder turn. He saw The Wave, Ann, then Tony and Page, and finally Inez pitche
d forward in a violent snap.
An avalanche’s force creates so much friction in the first few moments that cold snow can be superheated into blocks, pillars, and spears with the hardness of granite and the keenness of scissors. These violent chunks of snow smashed and cut Farrell’s legs out from under him. His left knee tore and he tumbled into a pummeling white. The slide crashed over him. In the darkness there were angry animals with heavy paws, with sharp claws and hungry teeth. The beasts swatted him. They mauled him. All wanted to feed. A powerful force raked him in the stomach and his jaw popped open. He gasped for air. But before he could get any, snow crammed in so far he thought his jaw would split and tear away. He was struck in the lower back. Another blow smashed into the side of the helmet, denting it; and Farrell went limp, sure now that he was finished. He dropped away and in that instant he saw a bright light and Lena stood in it.
Something, a chunk of ice, a bush or a rock, snagged on the shoulder strap of the pack, dislocating his right arm at the shoulder and ripping the pack from him. The action spun him toward the surface where, like a balloon released from deep under water, he burst out on the snowy torrent as it rumbled down the glacier. Farrell whipped and flopped downward. He windmilled twice. Two of his ribs gave way. Then, as suddenly as it had embraced him, the slide flicked him aside like an insignificant bug.
He landed facedown, convulsing on impact. He tried to breath, but his nose and mouth were packed with snow, frozen plugs that wrenched his jaw away from his head like a pig with an apple in its mouth. He tried to scream, but no noise escaped. He managed to roll over, squinting at the sun which shone through the cracked kaleidoscope of his goggles. Farrell had the terrifying thought that he would suffocate in the clean air of a warm spring Wyoming day.
He sat up. His right arm dangled helplessly at his side. He dug frantically at the frozen mass with the fingers of his other hand, but only chips came loose. Next to a rock not far away he could make out a sharp stick. He crab walked to it, ignoring the searing pain. Farrell rammed the stick into his mouth and chiseled at the obstruction until he felt it cut the back of his throat. Still, the air would not come. His head began to swirl.
The Fall Line Page 41