by John Updike
Clark had used LSD and PCP a certain amount before he began to scare himself and the trips had left him with some windows in his head open a crack, so these bright little movies sometimes ran without his asking. One was Mom saying Rex was all cock—a kind of slap in the face when he had just been trying to be friendly, on some basis or other, since for once they were in the house together. He must have been back, at that age, on school vacation from St. Andrew’s, where Uncle Danny had gone for two years before Rutgers and the State Department and Mom for some sentimental snob get-even reason of her own insisted on sending her son, once Beverly Vista ended in the eighth grade. Clark had missed California like crazy and hated the raw Delaware winters and the general boggy climate, like your feet were always wet and your nose was always runny and stuffed-up. People said Delaware was beautiful but to Clark it looked like a crummy little cramped piece of the past, a historical set out in the weather too long, everything brick and tacky and weedy and industrial, there by the dreariest most oil-polluted river he ever saw. The East was full of these greasy black rivers not worth one sparkling gallon of the Hollywood Reservoir. He could see why Mom got out as soon as she could.
Another inner movie was Rex flopping into the pool in that dead-serious silent-comedy way, all to amuse a ten-year-old kid, while Clark cringed in shame at hitting so many twisting pop-ups; he was anxious and kept swinging too quick and just ticking a piece of the Wiffle Ball at the bottom. “Easy, easy,” the Texas athlete might say, “think contact, Superguy.” But Rex never blamed him, just climbed out on the pool ladder, saying something like “He emerges triumphant” in a sonorous third-person voice-over, and took a tug on the Coors can on the glass table and went back to a crouching position on the carpetlike lawn in his sopping jeans and T-shirt, shivering slightly like an underfed dog, water streaming from the points of his beard and the long hair on his head, unaware of how his skull was starting to show through on top. Clark could even see in the little movie what was silk-screened onto Rex’s T-shirt; the front said VIVA LA V.C. and the back had a picture of that spaceman in a polar-bear suit saluting beside that funny stiff flag they had planted on the moon only it was the North Vietnamese flag with its single yellow star on red and Ho Chi Minh’s face was smiling out of the astronaut’s helmet. Mom, too, wanted North Vietnam to win, which seemed strange to Clark, since America had been pretty good to her.
“Rex wasn’t a bad guy, though onstage he went for this wild-man image. It wore him out, actually. We’d play Wiffle Ball or Frisbee in the yard and then come in and watch old movies on Channel Nine until my mother got back or he had to go off on a gig. They broke up when I was eleven. He got to be such a drunk he’d piss on the living-room sofa in his sleep. Mom told me the real problem was he couldn’t take any more of being Mr. DeMott. Of course, there was no Mr. DeMott.”
“Of course.”
“DeMott was a made-up name,” Clark needlessly explained, sensing that he was slightly lost and that this ski-bunny was several steps ahead of him. She was a plain little item looking like Sissy Spacek used to—fine straight strawberry-blonde hair falling around a slightly tense freckled face, with a nose taut like an animal’s, so the nostrils showed—in a booth in the main café at the base of the mountain, called Golddigger’s. The various après-ski groups had shuffled and reshuffled themselves around the long mahogany bar, and some had gone off to eat Mexican down the road and others had piled into a van to go try the new Thai place one valley over, and he had been left here with this girl, as if by plan. He couldn’t figure it out but was letting it happen. She had the washed-out, rabbity, starry-eyed look of a pioneer woman, except for the vivid white band the goggles had left across her face, like the bathing-suit ghosts you see on actresses in a porn video. Clark supposed he would be sleeping with her tonight but wasn’t excited about it yet. Women were a trap—like drugs, like booze, like fame—he had decided a while ago, about the time he left L.A. for these beautiful mountains. God’s country, people called Colorado.
You had to nibble the bait, it was human nature, but you tried to get out before the steel door fell. The lower half of her face held about a three-days’ depth of freckles and tan, he estimated: out from the Coast or Denver or the East for a week of higher altitude. These bitches expected to get screwed. If they couldn’t screw a ski instructor a chair-loader would have to do.
Great-Uncle Jared had promised him chair-loading would just be a transitional job, until a spot higher on the staff opened up. His mother used to take him and Rex to Squaw Valley over Christmas when this was still a fashionable thing film people did. Clark had loved the blank dazzle of the slopes, the sliding leaping motion of the sport, the ultra-violet blueness of the mountain sky. Mom would stick him in a kiddie class all day, but at best they went twice a year—again during the Washington Birthday week—and then, when he was around twelve, they stopped going altogether, maybe because Rex wasn’t with them any more; he skied like a pro, until his morning nips and the beers at lunch made him lazy and reckless. So Clark’s skiing never got good enough. Three times he had failed the test for instructor, with all these baby-faced twenty-year-old rube locals brought up on skis smirking. “If you dun’t haff zuh reflexes by aitch sebenteen, the botty has too much to remember”: this was the consolation offered by Bighorn’s head ski instructor, Rolf Koenig, from Austria’s Wild West, a crew-cut dimple-chinned Nazi type who even pushing fifty wedeled down the lift-line like a feather twirling to the floor.
Clark met resistance everywhere in the hierarchy of Bighorn, as Jared and his Denver partners had named the resort back in the Forties, when rope tows and single chairs and bear-claw bindings were the state of the art. The founder’s great-nephew didn’t like taking orders and wasn’t much good at giving them. He thought the lodge cafeteria should deëmphasize artery-pluggers like cheeseburgers, French fries, and glazed doughnuts; he thought that somebody would be killed one of these bright sunny days if Art Marling, the head of Patrol, continued to open expert trails when the spring melt was exposing rocks and stumps. “Experts don’t hit rocks,” Art told Clark.
“Yeah, but a lot of non-experts go down anywhere where the chain isn’t across. You see these teenage girls that can hardly snowplow. Their boyfriends talk them into it.”
“That’s their problem, then. The trails are clearly posted,” Art told him, giving him that dead-eye, do-it-my-way stare that always made Clark see red, though he usually cringed and backed off. His worst fight at Bighorn had been with Johnny Ponyfoot, the middle-aged full-blooded Ute who was operating, that particular Sunday, the new triple chair up to Silver Saddle, the halfway point. The trails down were broad and gentle but to keep the weekend crowds moving the lift had been so speeded up the chairs were slinging around the pulley wheel and chopping into the backs of the skiers like machetes. The skier in the middle, with no sidebar to grab on to, was especially threatened; three times that morning some little kid failed to get his ass in his slick Gore-Tex jumpsuit up on the seat in time and went sprawling in the slush here at the base, headfirst in the thousand bucks’ worth of flashy equipment his parents had poured all over him like Technicolor paint. At the speed the chairs were moving, a snagged skipole could break an arm, crossed skis a leg. It was aggravating work in any case, the trios of skiers nosing up to the mark half-hidden in the slush waiting for you to catch the chair and ease it under their butts like a bedpan—it got to your back, and your nerves, the way the chairs kept coming, blang, blang, whoosh, blang, blang, whoosh. The third time he had to pick up a sprawled little guy and settle him, red-faced and teary, on a stopped chair, he signalled ease off to Johnny, and was rewarded with an acceleration that had him grunting and the skiers giggling as they hurried up to the mark a second ahead of the chair. Clark saw red and put a hand up to halt the line and planted himself in front of the next chair, daring it to knock him down. The cable was braked, bouncing and swinging chairs halfway up the mountain. Clark stepped to the shed and opened the door and told Johnny, “H
ey, ease it down a notch, for Chrissake. You’re going to kill somebody.”
“Haven’t yet. Not in twenty years. Manufacturer made the lift for this speed. Get your ass back loading those chairs.”
“Ease it down, or I’m reporting you.”
“I’m reporting you, DeMott.”
“That’s not my name, Tonto. I’m walking.”
The line was building up, and everybody, all these rosy-faced kids in their goggles and headbands, was listening. Clark in his stomach felt like backing down but his body kept stomping away, sloshing his wet-toed cowboy boots through the mashed potatoes here around the ski racks, toward the lodge. As he walked away he could hear Johnny Ponyfoot’s phone ringing—the operator at the top asking what the problem was—and he knew that by the time he got into the lodge management would have heard the Indian’s side of the story. It made him weary. His back ached, his toes felt cold and wet. Let these rube locals have their fucking mountain. Except where else did he have to go? The California he knew and loved had been for boys, a theme park for young people.
He asked Sissy Spacek, “Want something to eat, you? I’m getting squashed.”
“My name’s Hannah. Maybe you didn’t hear it the first time.”
“Hey, you, don’t start scolding. How’d I know you and me were going to wind up on a desert island? Suddenly everybody else is elsewhere. You can get a steak and fries here, or there’s Mexican down the road. New Age Vegetarian closes at nine, we’ve missed it.”
“Or we could get a bite back at my place.”
“Your place? Just like that?” They usually didn’t come this easy any more, not since AIDS.
“It’s a little more than half an hour from here, over in Lower Branch.”
“Lower Branch. That’s a place?”
“It was a fair-sized town, once.”
“One of those. Mined out.”
“It’s just over the line, in Burr County.”
“Jesus,” he said, not knowing why.
She told him, “All Colorado was called Jefferson once, you know that? The Territory of Jefferson. The miners got together and named it. But Congress said it was illegal, somehow. This was just before the Sand Creek Massacre.” She was a little schoolteacher, was what she was. Clark had been sitting here getting zoned out on margaritas and she’d been sipping away at a brandy glass full of soda water with a splash of cranberry. She’d be sober in bed and up for a great time and he’d be a flop. Ten years ago he wouldn’t have known that he could flop at this, too. He thought every time you scored was a success. But now it had become just one more of the things he was mediocre at.
“Always seemed funny to me,” he admitted, “this whole big territory he purchased and not a state in it named after him. Andrew Jefferson. No. Wait. Thomas. Right?”
Uncle Jared had been puzzled and philosophical over Clark’s latest scrap, up there in his corner office high in the lodge like a captain’s bridge, gazing out through plate glass at the white slope served by the triple chair, a profitable glaring expanse dotted by little swaying figures. They trickled down and like silver dollars out of a slot machine got fed right back in. This slope had been the beginning, back in the Forties—a simple T-bar, and then a single chair, before the big double chairs were run up on giant tubular stanchions to within spitting distance of Bighorn’s needlelike summit. The runs down had such daredevil names as Smoking Gun, Shootout, Aces ’n’ Eights. Jared’s useless withered arm was safety-pinned in its flannel sleeve to the body of his fancy shirt, the white suede yoke set off by a waxy black string tie with a miniature ivory steer’s-skull pull. His old eyes, their color filmed over, picked up an icy green glint when he looked out at the snowfield—his sun-withered profile had an emerald chip in it. He turned and said, not unamiably, “Clark, you remind me of my little brother. Always fearful. Fearful of this, fearful of that. Feeling sorry for everybody, himself foremost. Why the fuck bother, was my way of looking at it. Worst case in any set of circumstances is that you die, and there’s some good to be said for that, when you get to be my age. So what went wrong this time?”
“Sir, Johnny Ponytail was operating that lift at an unsafe speed. I had three small children, one of them a girl, knocked down trying to mount a chair.”
“Your job was to see that didn’t happen. Johnny’s job was to move ’em along. Johnny does his job because he knows not everybody in these parts likes to hire a Ute, though the government says we should. They’re not considered dependable. I said, ‘Let’s see about that.’ Johnny’s been with me a good while. You have any problem with his being Native American?”
“Absolutely none.”
“They were here first. Don’t forget it. They sure as shit don’t.”
“No, sir. But—”
The shrivelled old man eased his weight off the desk, where he had perched on one buttock to gaze out at his mountain, like a cook easing a heavy pot off a hot stove. “Do you still hear from Teddy much? How in hell is your granddaddy?”
“He doesn’t write me as often as he used to, but I would have heard from Mom of any change. He and Grandmom keep busy driving each other to the doctor and puttering in the greenhouse. One of Esther’s boys, Ira, really runs it now.”
“I tried to get Ted to come join me in New York—make him a junior partner in McMullen. Old Jimmy had us where we were cleaning up, the suckers were forcing money down our throats. My fool kid brother couldn’t take the pace and ran himself home to Emily.”
“I guess we can’t all be ambitious,” Clark said. Was this to be his punishment, hearing these old facts, worn smooth with the telling, told once again?
“I always liked Emily. Good-looking woman, never mind the leg. Your mother’s the one with the spunk, though.”
“She’s amazing,” Clark lamely contributed, while Jared, careful of the useless arm, eased the stiff weight of his skinny body into his old-fashioned wooden-armed swivel chair. “Even now,” Clark thought to add. “I talked to her on the phone a couple weeks ago and she’s all excited about marrying her new boyfriend, this Boston banker brought in to help run Columbia, now that Coca-Cola owns it. He’s married to somebody else, but that wouldn’t worry Mom.”
Jared mused, “Never could quite figure out where she got it. My dad didn’t have it, I know that. Born licked. Left us all in the lurch.” The old man’s eyes were looking at something Clark would never see, a vanished scene—a table, a room, frame windows giving on an uphill cobbled street holding trolley tracks—that took away the glint. He became impatient. “Son, you’re here on her say-so,” he told Clark. “Don’t think you’re better than our other hands.”
“I don’t, sir, it’s just—”
“If your damn granddaddy hadn’t been such a sissy he’d of gotten a piece of Bighorn, most likely. It was all Jim McMullen had to keep me quiet, when ’29 called all the margin players in, those we’d let get way over their heads. He thought it was worthless. He’d been stuck with it himself, as security. Eight thousand acres of emptiness, Lucille—that was my bride back then—”
“I know. My grandparents have shown me photographs.”
“Eight thousand acres of emptiness, she called it, and gave me a horselaugh. It didn’t help our marriage.”
“No, I guess it wouldn’t.”
“But I took it. The East was played out for me. There was silver and gold traces, still, in the old tunnels. The Utes who worked the old girl before were still around, or their kids were. Two dollars a day for crawling on your belly with a candle on your head didn’t look so bad then. Then the war made the copper worthwhile again. Best damn thing ever happened to this country, that war. God bless war, that’s what I’ve learned to think. Stirs it up, the whole kaboodle. The first one took something out of me, but the second put it back. We even reworked the old tailings, with the improved methods. Henderson still had the big smelting plant down on Cinder Creek, so the transport was economical; the rails had been laid. You have to smelt the copper-pyrite ores; copper
oxide needs the leaching. Molybdenum was the coming thing, after the war. It used to be just a by-product; they dumped it out with the gangue. But a couple smart chums of mine from Denver saw there was going to be a market for recreation, and we gave the old girl’s guts a rest. There’s more good in her, though, for them that would have the desire and the new equipment. It was a slow start, with the skiing. To the ranchers and apple farmers around here, snow had never been anything but a nuisance. Before the jets, you couldn’t expect to see Easterners. Some winters the snow wouldn’t show up, and others too much did. Before Sno-Cats came along in the Sixties there wasn’t any what you’d call grooming. We’d take a big two-man cross-cut saw out and saw off the tops of the moguls. Honest to God, saw ’em off like tree stumps! You could say it’s been one helluva ride. Ninety-three last January, and I can still remember my own name. Can even get it up on occasion, when I’m having a naughty dream.” He swivelled challengingly, with a brutal squeak of the rusty spring. “So you’re asking yourself why is he running off at the mouth? You’re kin, Clark. Kin’s strange stuff. Sticks to you for no good reason. I haven’t seen my brother since our mother’s funeral but if he walked through that door I’d do a jig standing on my head, that’s how pleased I’d be to see him. We were Paterson boys together, for a while. Needed to do things his own way, and that was just like me. That was the Wilmot style.” Gingerly Jared moved his butt forward to the edge of his chair, to give Clark the benefit of a filmed-over, colorless stare. His good hand on his knee was like tobacco leaves wrapped around chicken bones. It had a tremor the bad hand didn’t. “But, young fella, you got no right to disrupt an old man’s show. Learn to take orders, or it’s back to your momma, or whatever other broad’ll give you a bunk.”