The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  The rock! Farrell struggled to his knees and cast himself belly down on the sharpest point of the boulder so that it jabbed his diaphragm. The chunk dislodged enough to suck in air. But liquid from the melting plug flooded in, too; and he struggled again at the thought of drowning.

  He threw himself on the boulder a second time. The chunk freed. He coughed and spit the awful red tube out, and swooned into blackness.

  Farrell had no sense of how long the avalanche had worked his body. Nor could he say how long he lay, passed out, draped over the front of the boulder. But when he opened his eyes, the shadow of the Grand Teton, which had been above him, was now far down the valley.

  He rocked to his left and brought his hand to his mouth, cringing at the excruciating sting; his front teeth were shattered. He shivered and knew that unless he moved soon, he’d die of shock. He tried to take off the helmet, but it was badly dented and would not budge. He closed his eyes and with the same stick he’d used to clear his throat, he cleared away the broken glass of his goggles. For fifty yards in every direction, he was surrounded by a jumble of snow blocks and tree stumps and frozen earth. A climax avalanche. The beast had passed. No movement. No sound. Only the steady gusts of the warm spring breeze.

  Farrell wanted to cry, but couldn’t. His chest hurt and he reached to feel where the ribs had snapped. His hand closed around the electronic sensor under his shredded coat. He turned it on, the peep! peep! peep! noise coming to him like the cries of a newborn bird.

  He tried to stand, but a burning pain tore through him and he almost collapsed. Somehow he got himself upright. The swelling had immobilized the knee. He might be able to manage a stiff gait. He took a step, screamed, and stopped, panting. He moved like this through ten yards of the mess, trying to focus on the chirps of the sensor. He noticed that the tone rose when he moved downhill. And after another five minutes, he saw neon green glowing amid the rubble. He hobbled and crawled to The Wave, whose left leg thrust away at an unnatural angle below his hip. The rastaman’s face was battered beyond recognition.

  Farrell sat down and stroked The Wave’s matted dreadlocks. The boy made a choking sound and spit up a wad of bright pink blood. One of his lungs is punctured, Farrell thought. Farrell prayed the kid’s spine wasn’t broken and slowly lifted him until The Wave lay in his lap. The Wave’s eyes opened, his lips moved, and then he shut them again while more blood spilled from his mouth. He gurgled when he breathed. A sucking wound. From his past, Farrell heard priests praying.

  At this moment when all seemed lost, over the peeping of the radio transceiver and his mumbled words of prayer, Farrell heard the steady chug of a helicopter. I can save at least one, he thought. He began to sob. He tried to find the chopper in the sky, but couldn’t. Farrell got his arms under The Wave and lifted him so the fliers might see the blazing lime of the rastaman’s snowsuit. It was a struggle, but Farrell got himself and the kid upright; and he stood there facing down the fall line, feeling the vibration of the great pumping heart which now occupied everything around him.

  Epilogue

  TWENTY-SIX DAYS AFTER Farrell and The Wave were rescued from the glacier, Farrell walked on crutches for the first time. Every ligament in Farrell’s knee had been torn or severed. The doctors said it was a miracle he had stood at all, much less hobbled over to save The Wave.

  After Farrell had been released from intensive care, Portsteiner went back to Utah. He returned for Farrell’s first steps, holding Ruby on a leash. Farrell put the rubber-soled crutches in front of him, grimaced in pain, and stepped forward down the white hall. Nurses stood by with codeine should he need it. As he had every day since Dunphy and the other members of the Jackson search and rescue team had raced from the helicopter to his side, he refused all pain medication.

  “Things have been distant for too long,” he told Dunphy, who had wanted to inject him with morphine as soon as he had laid him down amid the snow boulders and the uprooted rocks and brush. “I want to feel this for what it is.”

  When the helicopter touched down at the airport, Portsteiner was waiting. He sat with Farrell on the ambulance ride. Farrell’s tongue had swollen to twice its normal size; it took him three times to make Portsteiner understand what he wanted.

  “That’s a crime, Jack,” Portsteiner had said. “I won’t do it.”

  “Fair,” Farrell gurgled. “Not fair to them. Wave, Page. Others.” Farrell gripped Portsteiner’s hand so violently that the old man finally gave in.

  The rescue team found Ann the next morning a quarter mile below the release zone. The coroner said she had died of massive head injuries.

  A woman with a probe pole working the very top of the slide path discovered the bodies of Page and Tony the next afternoon, not one hundred feet from where Farrell had last seen them. Dunphy figured they’d been sucked directly down and underneath the snow as if they’d been caught in a undertow at the beach.

  “They never knew what hit them,” Dunphy said.

  They gave up trying to find Inez on the third day, figuring she’d been swept into one of the glacier’s deep crevices. A hiker found her pack and smashed camera a week later in a tangle of brush off the slide path. There was a notebook in the pack that contained cryptic entries about the shots in the film, which the local newspaper published under the headline:

  Extreme Diary of an Avalanche Victim

  A story later that same week detailed the fury of Karl Mann, Inez’s German investor, who had arrived in town sure that the publicity of the accident would create a major market for the documentary. None of the film or video Inez was supposed to have shot could be found.

  Farrell heard Mann cursing at the nurses in the hallway before he saw him. Mann, an emaciated blond with a scar in the middle of his chin, burst into Farrell’s room just as they were changing his bedpan and blanched at the sight of Farrell’s toothless smile. Farrell told him some of the truth: that Inez Didier was secretive and didn’t tell anyone much about herself or her methods or how she planned to finish the movie.

  “I’m as upset about it as you,” Farrell said with as much sincerity as he could muster.

  Two hospital orderlies had to prevent Mann from trying to see The Wave, who had lain in a coma for four days before awakening, and was still in intensive care. As Farrell had thought, The Wave’s left lung was punctured. His femur was broken in two places and he’d suffered a severe concussion, but the speech pathologist predicted he’d regain full control of his language ability.

  Indeed, a week after Farrell walked for the first time, the reporters who had unsuccessfully tried to interview Farrell got The Wave to talk. The rastaman held a press conference amid beeping monitors. He was an odd presence on the television screen: the left side of his head had been shaved to let the doctors stitch his lacerations so that he looked like a baseball with part of the cover ripped off—one side smooth and scarred, the other marred by frayed strips of rubber. The Wave told the reporters that during his next scheduled operation the doctors had agreed to set his leg at an angle; so that even if he never walked right again, he’d be able to crouch on his snowboard.

  One reporter asked him about the things Inez had written in her notebook and what he thought she was after. The Wave played with a plastic tube that ran into his arm and said, “She was like Rimbaud, mon. ‘She saw the sunset, stained with mystic horrors, Illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms, like actors in ancient plays.’ ”

  “You couldn’t tone it down even for a minute, could you?” Farrell asked The Wave the next day. He was in The Wave’s room to tell him the hospital had decided to release him.

  “What and miss my fifteen minutes of Andy Warhol, mon?” said The Wave. “No fucking way.”

  “You’ll be out soon,” Farrell said.

  “Ten days, mon,” The Wave said. “I’ll see you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Farrell said.

  The Wave nodded sadly and shook his hand.

  Portsteiner was waiting outside when
Farrell was wheeled from the hospital. Ruby barked and wagged her tail. They drove to Dunphy’s house on the outskirts of Jackson and had a burning party in an old oil can the guide kept around to get rid of autumn leaves.

  “I never stole a thing in my life before,” Portsteiner said as the first reels of film and videotape caught fire and belched up a thick black smoke.

  “Think of it as returning something that was stolen,” Farrell said. “You’re Robin Hood.”

  Portsteiner grunted and threw in another reel. He looked at Farrell, “I went through a lot of it, those files you said she had. Watched a couple of the tapes. Read the diary.”

  “I figured you would,” Farrell said. “You deserved to know.”

  Portsteiner tugged at his earlobe, as if he knew he should tell Farrell he wasn’t responsible for Lena, but couldn’t. Finally he asked, “How’d it happen?”

  Farrell thought a moment about all the particulars, then said, “I used to think that to ski perfectly, you pulled the boards together and let them fly straight down. Didn’t take long before I hit something.

  “Now, I wish I skied more like you, shoulders and head in the fall line, but the hips and ankles sensitive, absorbing the terrain.”

  One by one they fed in the rest of the tapes and the film to the fire. A black smoke belched into the sky, and was taken by a wind that blew off toward the Tetons. Farrell looked through The Wave’s file, took a note from it, and committed it to the flames.

  In the boxes that Portsteiner had taken from Inez’s room and truck, there was also a cardboard portfolio of letters from Henri Rassond, some from as recently as March. Farrell thought about doing the noble thing and not looking; he succumbed and read three. Rassond still loved Inez and wanted her to return to France.

  The more recent letters were smudged, stained with drops of water. Farrell didn’t burn any of them. The next day he boxed the letters and mailed them to Rassond with no return address included. For some reason he kept the copy of Inez’s father’s book.

  The morning of Portsteiner’s flight back to Salt Lake City, Farrell wrote a letter to Page’s father to tell him that after everything that had happened, his son still loved him when he died. He knew it was not true, but close. Farrell sent a note to The Wave at the hospital which contained the address of the rehab center his mother was in in Arizona. Next he called the attorney in Switzerland and made arrangements for the rest of his cash to be placed into a trust that would anonymously disburse annual payments to The Wave.

  At the airport, Portsteiner made an offer of a desk job back in Utah. There was no enthusiasm in the tender; Farrell knew Portsteiner regarded him with the conflicting respect and unease he would accord any unstable slope. They shook hands awkwardly, then Portsteiner was gone.

  Before Farrell drove south out of Jackson, he called Stern in San Diego and told him he was coming in. The agent was furious, wanted to know where he was, to fly there and give him protection. Farrell refused and hung up. He called his mother. She was shocked and then cried when he said Lena was still dead. She told him his father made noises when she showed him his picture, but she’d never known how to explain that his son had died with a wife whom he had never known.

  It was eighty degrees, summer weather, and flies buzzed inside the cabin of the truck and Ruby bit at them when they left Jackson. Thirty miles out, he stopped and got out at a rest area above the Snake River, swollen and roaring from the melting snows. He cinched the brace tight around his knee, leaned on the cane, and walked slowly down through the shade of the trees to the edge of the rushing water.

  Farrell stared at the swirls of gray and blue, thinking how Gabriel hung off the side of his boat and how Sorolla’s paintings showed that life can either be clarified or distorted by brilliant light. He thought that the river was like the dreams he’d had in the hospital after the avalanche. There he’d heard longing voices call to him in the darkness, and he’d turned and called back to them in languages he did not know, but understood. He had stumbled toward the voices, never seeing their bodies. Every time this happened, he woke up sweating and afraid.

  A raft appeared on the river, full of tourists shrieking as they entered the rapids. Farrell studied them the way a scientist might observe apes in the wild. He watched one boy who crouched in the front of the bucking raft, his fingers white from the grip he’d taken on the rope, his mouth open to the spray. Farrell understood the boy, but did not smile for him.

  He waited until the raft faded from view. He placed Inez’s father’s book and Lena’s diary and her nightgown in the water. He watched them bob for a moment, then climbed back up the hill before the current could suck them away into the chill of the white water.

  Acknowledgments

  I AM GRATEFUL TO all those who helped me in the research that led to this book. Special thanks to skiers Scott Roach, Rick Wyatt, and Jim Colinson of Salt Lake City, Utah; Harry Baxter and Bill Briggs of Jackson, Wyoming; and Brian Taylor and Mike Sockness of Squaw Valley; as well as filmmaker Greg Stump and extremists John and Dan Egan.

  My appreciation goes out as well to Rico Varjan, Ph.D., for his insight into the minds of risk takers and the emotional bereft and to my friend and fellow deep powder addict Jim Erickson, who was there when I first thought up the story.

  In a strange way, I’m likewise indebted to California financier Richard Silberman for getting caught by the FBI trying to launder money for the mob; following his paper trail taught me much about the peripheral world of the drug trade. Reporters Rick Shaughnessy and David Hasymeyer were great partners and mentors during this period.

  In the writing I am beholden to Jincy Willet Kornhauser and members of my weekly writers group for their constant support and criticism during the early drafts of the book; to my gracious agent, Linda Chester, and her wonderful associate, Billie Fitzpatrick, who helped me bring the manuscript under control; and above all, to my editor, Sarah Gallick, who fought long and hard to see this novel published.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1995 by Mark T. Sullivan

  cover design by Heather Kern

  978-1-4532-6875-9

  This 2012 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY

  MARK T. SULLIVAN

  FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.

  Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.

  MysteriousPress.com offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.MYSTERIOUSP
RESS.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom

  MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia