by Jill Barnett
Chapter Eight
The odometer had broken at one hundred and eighteen thousand miles, and the front bumper stayed on thanks to an old coat hanger and half a roll of electrical tape. Years of sea and road salt had turned the car’s paint the same dull color of concrete, and the stained interior smelled like dried apple juice, Arrowroot biscuits, and struggle.
Between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, along the snakelike miles of Highway 50, the history of Cantrell Sports Inc. had evolved inside a stinking, broken Chevelle Malibu wagon.
In those early years, Mike had made his living from the back of that Chevy station wagon, selling his first snowboards on weekends and holidays in the parking lot below the face of Heavenly Valley, back when there was still a T-bar on the bunny slope and calling his first board The Cannabis had helped grab the attention of most skiers.
But now it was a lifetime later, and the rental car he had parked at the Stateline casino valet was a luxury SUV with electronic aroma dispensers, GPS, and satellite radio. Behind the casino, up on the mountain, high-speed quads and a six-pac chair carried skiers and boarders to the summit of Heavenly, and board lingo like “smoking a fatty” was no longer a reference to recreational drugs.
From the long windows of a luxury casino penthouse used by ESPN for event after-parties, a majestic view of Heavenly filled an indigo panorama. Dark drifts of plowed snow framed the perimeter of the parking lot, shadowed gondolas dangled from their cables like bats, and steep, pristinely-groomed slopes appeared blue from the February night sky, where every star above the Sierras flickered like distant, approaching headlights and a thin sliver of a winter moon rose above hostile, black diamond trails.
Tonight was a lifetime away from those days of that rusted station wagon, when he had been a young husband and father of two baby boys born fifteen months apart, living with March on little but his pie-in-the-sky dreams, and his absolute belief in the possibility of a new kind of sport.
He remembered one night standing down at the foot of Stateline in the dead of winter, the smelly old Chevy parked somewhere down by the lake, on a Saturday when he hadn’t sold a single board. The streets and sky had been illuminated from the bright lights of the hotel-casinos, Harrah’s, Harvey’s and the old Sahara.
You couldn’t see the stars over Heavenly when you stood in the bold lightshade of the casinos, just stacked floors of lit hotel rooms and the dotted lights of the wide-windowed restaurants topping them. Whenever an electric door opened, the discordant ringing of slot machines would break up any moments of winter silence, just like they still did if you stood there in the winter night air, even with nothing but dreams to bet on. He didn’t gamble his money in those days. His sure thing was an idea, not an endorsement contract with a hotshot skier who lived a life of completely different values.
When he first met with Spider Olsen again, a few months back and after the board’s decision to shoot for the endorsement contract, he and Olsen had laughed about Calgary, where Olsen’s comments about snowboarding and his drunken attention on March made Mike lose his temper and punch his lights out.
They were still two completely different men.
March had asked him once when they were first dating if he believed in destiny and fate. One of the things that separated her from the other girls he had known was the way she asked him questions about things he hadn’t thought of.
Mike understood that a man thought alone, his dreams and plans were often his secret life. Men acted on their ideas. Women talked about them. He’d told her back then he believed every person had some kind of blueprint. But he would never believe his life was completely in someone else’s hands. Somewhere in his bones he knew he had to make his life what it would become.
That dismal night long ago when he was standing on the California and Nevada state line might have been the first time he really understood he could chisel his life out of the great unknown because he had her at his back.
One of the things he remembered being aware of in the days when he was struggling and things were not good was that life carried with it a subdued sense of lost time. The job at Spreckles had been gone, with no regrets. He had a family, but March stood by his side. She had always been there, something that allowed him to take risks because he wouldn’t want to die and be in that last instant of life and regret something he’d never done.
So he didn’t carry the kind of regrets he figured Olsen carried, if the man actually had any kind of a moral compass. Now, tonight, looking down from the ESPN party inside a high-priced Stateline casino, Mike felt disconnected from those years of history which seemed as if they had happened to some other man.
The noise level in the too-slick, too-crowded, too-warm suite grew higher and irritating from the strident sound of young women laughing too loud, while others danced alone, provocatively, to lure the attention of downhill racers, celebrities, and Spider Olsen, who was one of those men who held some strange kind of magnetism for immature and needy young women.
Olsen, barely dwarfed by a towering marble fireplace, stood across the room surrounded by women half his age. Mike spotted a redhead in her early twenties, close to his own daughter Molly’s age, and he had the fatherly urge to tell her to run home and stay far away from Olsen.
As ideal as the man was for a SkiStar endorsement, he was close to fifty years old and the human equivalent of a tomcat. Spider Olsen was the kind of man who was hard on women.
But Mike’s business was boards and skis, not Olsen’s love life. Inside his briefcase was what he came for: his signed endorsement contract. For the next three years, Olsen and SkiStar were one. Those freezing hours of standing on the street below with his empty pockets were another lifetime ago.
Mike turned away from the window wondering what he was still doing there. He’d made his necessary appearance.
Earlier, after the race Olsen commentated, Mike had left the mountain, packed up his stuff and locked up the Tahoe house. Now he had a plane to catch. He wanted to get home tonight. Standing at the window, a looking glass into the world of his past, had merely killed time inside a room he didn’t want to be in.
A quick glance at his watch and he waded through a Heffneresque crowd of ski groupies, uncomfortable when he was followed by too many, too-young and too-hungry female looks.
“Mike.” Olsen shook his hand.
“I need to get the airport.”
“My offer still stands. Wait until tomorrow and the network jet will take you back in the morning. It’s still early.”
Mike shook his head. “Mickey has a game tomorrow. I promised March I’d be home yesterday. I’m already pushing it.” Olsen gave him a look they both understood, so Mike clapped Spider on the shoulder. “With the right woman, marriage works.” Leaning closer, he added, “But I can guarantee the right woman is not in this room.”
“You’re probably right.” Olsen laughed. “But there’s more fun here than in any of my marriages, so I’ll suffer through.”
Twenty minutes later, Mike drove down the steep hairpin turns of Kingsbury Grade, a shortcut that would put him in the flatlands of Gardnerville and take at least twenty minutes off his trip to the Reno airport. He sailed around one turn and the car went suddenly dead. No power. No lights. Zilch.
With no control and tight steering, he struggled to pull hard into a turnout and set the parking gear, then turned the key. Nothing happened, so he popped the hood. But even the engine compartment light was out.
He reached inside and hit the GPS call button on the headliner console and waited. No ring, no answer, no monotone voice wanting to give him movie times and make dinner reservations. He swore under his breath—it was cold as death outside—and shrugged into his jacket, leaned against the car and pulled out his cell, waiting impatiently for a signal. The words ‘no service’ lit his blue screen.
With so little moon, the road was pitch black; overhead, just an unending bowl of night sky and the saw-like shadow of Ponderosa pines backed by crests of the snow-covered Sierra Mounta
ins. From the valley below, small lights flickered from an occasional farm, a cold, long walk that could easily make him miss his plane.
For a day that had started out as the answer to SkiStar’s problems, things were going into the toilet fast. Twenty two degrees had been the last outside temperature reading on the dead SUV. To make the plane, he didn’t have time to screw around, so he grabbed his bag from the backseat and started walking down the mountain, checking his cell every few minutes for a signal.
Behind him, distant music and the growl of a big block engine sounded from up the road, so he turned just as the gleam of headlights came at him from around a sharp turn. He stepped into the road and headlights and waved his arms. A three quarter ton truck swerved and barreled past, country music blaring from inside the closed crew cab.
“Don’t stop, asshole,” Mike muttered. “I’m freezing my ass off here.”
Ahead a red flash of brake lights suddenly illuminated the road, and he ran toward the truck as the tinted, driver-side window hummed down.
The man inside wore an expensive Stetson low on his head. In the reflection of dashboard lights, he looked all clean-cut cowboy in that Tim McGraw way, and a little older than their oldest son, Scott, late thirties maybe. As the driver reached to turn down the radio, Mike spotted the dark silhouette of a guitar case on the passenger seat, hay on the floorboard, and a tattered leather briefcase with white sheets of music stuffed inside.
“I broke down a mile or so back,” Mike told him. “I’m trying to catch a flight out of Reno.”
“I saw the car.” A soft Southern drawl coated the driver’s deep voice and the door locks clicked. “Hop in.” He shoved the guitar and music in the back of the crew cab.
“I appreciate this.” Shaking hands, he said, “I’m Mike Cantrell.”
“Rio Paxton.”
Mike recognized the name from years back, when Rio Paxton had been chosen Country Singer of the Year, youngest in history, and his songs were all over the radio. There had been some kind of talk of burnout, cancelled concerts and the kind of wild behavior that could consume someone caught in the fires of instant fame. Rio Paxton and Olsen could have compared notes on screwing up life.
Paxton must have seen his recognition. “Yeah. That’s me. Wunderkind. I incinerated pretty fast and very publicly. I still can’t remember 1989.”
“My youngest son was born in ‘89. He can incinerate a few things himself. Just dropped the bomb that he wants to can college and join the professional snowboard circuit.”
“Cantrell?” Rio paused, then looked at him curiously. “Like Cantrell snowboards?”
“You got it.”
“Is your son any good?”
“Yeah.”
“’89? He’s only a year or two younger than I was then. Keep him in school and out of the spotlight.”
“I’m trying. It’s hard to talk to a hardheaded teenager with no experience.”
“He knows everything. Didn’t we all?”
Within minutes they’d launched into natural male conversation—car engines (horsepower) and music business, snowboards and horse ranches near Sparks, talk that filled the time along the straight asphalt roads toward Reno.
The airport was on the town’s southern outskirts, built and expanded on a desolate plain of Nevada’s vast chaparral; it was easy, accessible, efficient and made for the kind of travel that after age fifty made Mike occasionally long for a life much simpler, in a place unlike ebullient San Francisco, and removed from the complicated lifestyle he’d carved out for himself and his family. A man’s dreams could change.
They pulled right up to the airport curb. No cabs, no limos, no waiting in lines of people blocking the sidewalks and unloading carts full of luggage, no interminable drive into the city from the airport.
Mike took Rio’s card. “I appreciate this. I’ll send you some new equipment for the ride.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, but I will.” Mike grabbed his bag from the seat. “Thanks, again, man.” He shook Rio’s hand. “I would have missed this flight.”
“Glad to help out.”
Mike shut the truck door with more than enough time to deal with the rental car agency and easily make his flight. There was no need to rush through the automatic glass doors.
Behind him came the sudden rumble of a Ford big block and the truck pulled away, the mute, distant CD sound of Jerry Jeff Walker singing Up Against the Wall You Redneck Mother.
PART TWO
I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love.
—Joyce Carol Oates
March
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
—A. E. Housman
Chapter Nine
It was two a.m. when I awakened to the incessant ringing of the doorbell, and Mike’s side of the bed was still empty. But he’d called me earlier to let me know he was coming home, late apparently. “March,” he’d said, “I’ll be there, but I’ve had one helluva a day, good and bad.”
When he was out of town, I had this habit of chain-locking the kitchen doors, which drove him nuts. I climbed out of bed just as the phone began to ring. I guess he had lost his patience, and was now resorting to using his cell phone to wake me up.
Ignoring it, I stumbled out of the room and downstairs, muttering about the faults of men and husbands in particular. He had a set of damned keys. Where did he leave them this time?
Both the doorbell and the phone rang again and again. “I’m coming!” I pulled open the door, not exactly smart for a woman who locked the place up like Fort Knox. By the time the thought crossed my mind that it was two in the morning, the door was open and I was staring at a dark uniformed cop standing in what looked like parade stance, tall and straight, illuminated by a muted yellow bug light Mike had just replaced the Sunday before.
“Someone’s home,” he said into the black cell phone at his ear, and a few seconds later the house phone stopped ringing.
It was damp out and cold, and I was wearing only a thin sleep tank and drawstring bottoms, so I wrapped my arms over my chest.
He looked me in the eyes with an expression that was strained and serious. “Mrs. Cantrell? Mrs. Michael Cantrell?”
Like dense fog rolling in, an alien kind of emptiness settled over me, starting from the place where my heart had just stopped beating. I felt separated from the scene suddenly unraveling before me, and what was happening hit me with such clarity it took a moment to speak. “Is Mike alive?”
“I’m sorry.” His look, his whole demeanor was one I would come to recognize over the coming months as an awkward mix of apprehension and pity. People don’t know what to say to a widow, especially when you were the person who had to tell her she had just become one.
Mike Cantrell was dead because he was in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong moment. Just a few miles from home, a driver going the wrong way on one of San Francisco’s one-way streets killed my husband of thirty four years and the father of our four kids.
My mind spun from thought to ironic thought. He had flown back home safely. He hadn’t been driving his Porsche, the car most likely to kill him, because he refused to park it in the airport parking lot where people dented doors and banged bumpers. He was driving the sedan, a heavy, expensive, German car made of hard steel, with airbags and an engine that could reach top speed on the autobahn. A big engine and air bags, all those things that are supposed to protect you.
He had spent his adult lifetime driving in traffic and fog, those years driving that crappy old Chevy up to the mountains where the roads were snowy and slick and sometimes covered in deadly black ice. He’d flown in all kinds of planes all over the world. But a one way street just blocks from home brought his life, his glorious and wonderful life, to an end?
“I’ve had one helluva
a day . . . ”
My whole world changed inside of a mere second. You hear that expression, even say it sometimes, having no real idea of the horrific truth of it. Life changed with a few words, two of which sounded so cheap. I’m sorry. The officer was sorry. I couldn’t do anything but stand there in front of that poor, apologetic messenger of death as tragedy punched me right in the face.
Crying felt impossible, because every human emotion spun around inside of me all at the same time. I turned away to see Mickey standing on the stairs, baggy pajamas hanging off his hips, watching, curious, his hair poking out like it had when he was three.
How do you tell your children the most important person in their lives was dead?
I found out how: You stand there, a phlegmatic shell in a zombie-like state, and say words you never think about saying, and then you watch some beautiful, innate part of your children evaporate right before your eyes. And that was only the beginning of one of the worst parts of life: dealing with death.
The numbness began to leave me a week after Mike’s memorial service, when I had left the house for the first time and was hiding in the park where we had gotten married. I’d just had too much of everyone who wanted to be there for me, even my best girlfriends who, like everyone, watched me as if I were a vial of nitroglycerin.
Thank God for my kids. Because of them I couldn’t disappear. I couldn’t curl into an amebic ball or drive off and never come back. The family had to stay a family come what may.
Day in and day out, we all watched each other, circling like beaten dogs with fearful and wary looks that had never been in our eyes before. Somehow, we needed desperately to find between us something other than our kindred pain or the complete and utter fear. We tiptoed around each other, awkward and silently bleeding until there was more meaning when we didn’t talk than in anything we actually said.
A moment’s impulse was what made me run from the house, away from friends calling to see how I was, from the business that had been my husband’s life continuing on; from the tax forms needing to be signed; the bills that had to be paid; the mundane things that went on when everything inside of me screamed, Stop! Stop! Stop! The world had stopped.