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  Wylie sat in the Mammoth men’s ski team locker room, gearing up with the other skiers and boarders, some of whom he knew and some of whom he had never met. Ruled by the cold air of the locker room, their movements were efficient and their conversations brief. Most were younger, but some were his age and even older. As he bent down to clamp on his boots, Wylie could feel their eyes on him, sizing him up, gauging him against the young champion who had suddenly left here without warning. Boots on, he sat for a long moment in this room he knew so well, also gauging himself against the boy he had been those very long five years ago.

  A boarder introduced himself as Daniel and said he was twelve and that he wanted Wylie’s autograph.

  “I was twelve when I joined this team,” said Wylie.

  “I don’t have a paper, but can you can sign my cast?” Daniel gave Wylie a pen from his pack, then pulled up the left sleeve of his jacket. The battered and much-autographed plaster cast began just beyond his first row of knuckles and extended halfway to his elbow. Wylie scribbled his name amid the others and gave back the pen.

  “How’d you manage this?” asked Wylie.

  “X Course. Went off Goofball wrong and couldn’t land. Hit a tree.”

  “That’ll do it.”

  “Dislocated two fingers on my other hand but didn’t say nothing. So I can keep skiing.”

  “Let’s see.” Wylie took the boy’s hand and asked him to straighten the pinkie and ring fingers, then try to make a fist. The middle knuckles were swollen and scraped. Range of motion looked maybe half of what it should be. “At least tape them together. Keep them from getting worse.”

  “They don’t bother me.”

  “You can be brave and smart at the same time.”

  “My uncle in Colorado Springs fought in the war, too. Aunt Maya says he stays in his room all day.”

  “Write him a letter or text or something.”

  “I do. Sorry what happened to Robert. He was a great guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going to race again?”

  “With all my heart.”

  “You might want to lose twenty pounds first,” said Sky Carson, throwing open his locker door with a bang. “Or you’ll sink on those old skis.” Uneasy laughter dwindled to a hush, and the racers’ movements accelerated. One of the older skiers held open the door and half a dozen of the thirteen athletes tromped out with quick looks at Wylie or Sky, or both. “You’ll sink like a pig in mud,” Sky continued.

  “Looks like you already have.”

  “I was at Helixon’s ‘til four.”

  The last athletes hustled out, and in the quiet the women’s lockers banged dully through the wall.

  “Beatrice was still there when I left. Looking mighty fine.”

  “She’s seventeen.”

  “With her mother’s genes.”

  “Shut up now, Sky.”

  “Okay. Silence while you walk on water.”

  Wylie carried his skis to the patio, where the men’s freeski coach had gathered the team. Coach Brandon Shavers was in his late thirties and married to Andrea Carson, sister of Robert and Sky, a granddaughter of Adam. Coach Brandon studied Wylie from behind his sunglasses while condensation wavered up from his nostrils to the lenses. “Wylie Welborn. I heard you were back. But you can’t just show up and get free practice time, man. You have to be on the team. You’ll have to go back and buy a lift ticket. Just like the other tourists.”

  “I’d like to try out for the team.”

  “Everyone wants to try out for this team. So they get an appointment. That’s basic respect for my time.”

  “You don’t look overly busy right now.”

  “Seriously, Wylie, you want to use the mountain, you have to be on the team. There’s an online application, and paper ones in my office. Take your pick. It’s a hundred to apply, and five grand a year if we pick you. We’re worth every penny. And who makes the team isn’t up to just me anymore. There’s a committee. It’s a process. Not like before.”

  “Just let him ski today,” said Daniel, the boy with the arm cast. “I want to see how he does it.”

  “Sorry,” said Coach Brandon. “Okay, men—up we go. I want the u-twelves and u-sixteens up first, then the eighteens, then the old farts.”

  “Go Mammoth!” yelled Sky, brushing past Wylie and fitting his racing goggles up on his beanie.

  * * *

  Instead of skiing, Wylie once again helped his family through the 7:00 to 8:00 A.M. rush at Let It Bean. This was crunch time at the coffee pub, with scores of skiers and boarders impatient for their caffeine and pastries before the mountain opened at eight. His mother took the orders and Steen kept the pastries and breakfast burritos coming from the small kitchen; Beatrice and Belle jostled and made the coffee drinks while the steamers hissed and the shots of espresso gurgled into the paper cups, and the tourists watched with glazed anticipation. Beatrice looked pale and tired. Wylie wondered if it was the late night at Mountain High.

  He went back to the kitchen and dropped the empty pastry racks into the big sink and drew the hot water. When his sisters left for school just after eight, he took over making the coffee drinks and tried to be chipper for the customers, but his heart wasn’t in it. He felt that he had grown into a decent man, then returned to this place of his great launch, only to be enslaved again by the hospitality industry, needy tourists, and a pay grade just barely north of minimum wage.

  He recognized some of the regulars, who’d been coming here for as long as the place had been open. It seemed less busy than in the older days. During a very quiet time, he sat with the regulars by the window, caught up a little. One of them handed him a sheaf of white paper stapled in the upper left corner.

  The Woolly

  A Journal of Mammoth Lakes

  January 30

  ROBERT CARSON IMPROVING

  Story by Cynthia Carson

  “Still bats but still at it,” said a regular.

  “You seen that hunter’s camo she’s wearing now?” asked another. “Can barely see her coming! Then all of the sudden, she’s all over you, asking you questions.”

  The sitting area went quiet for a beat. “Awful about Robert, though. God, he was just … here. What a great guy. How’s he doing, Wylie? Is Robert going to get better?”

  “The doctors say no.”

  “You were a medic. What do you say?”

  “Semimedic. But Robert is out of my league.”

  “I heard the break was at the vertebra where the hangman’s knot goes.”

  Wylie winced inwardly, glancing at The Woolly. “I saw some guys make it I didn’t think would. So, you know…” He suddenly wished he was far from here. He set the paper on one of the tables and went back behind the counter to clean out an espresso maker.

  When the crowd failed to reconvene, he drove home and split the firewood by hand, something he was good at. The sledgehammer rang against the wedge, the logs cracked open and the air filled with the wonderful smell of fresh pine. Wylie imagined the ski-cross course on which Robert had met his end, and how he, Wylie, might handle the landing that had defeated Robert. Strange, thought Wylie, but Robert had made that landing what, over a thousand times? It was not a hard one. Not for Robert.

  Hours later, he had stacked enough wood on the deck to last for two weeks, then covered it with a blue tarp. In the small family room, he turned on the old desktop and went online and found the Mammoth ski team’s Web site and printed out the application. He filled it out and dug five twenties from his stash and clipped them to the sheet.

  Ten minutes later, he set it on Brandon Shavers’s desk. The coach at the men’s freeski team regarded him with the same expression of wariness that most Carsons reserved for Welborns.

  “Sky told me Robert is going to his mom’s,” said Brandon.

  “We thought that would be best for him.”

  “I don’t know why Adam puts so much faith in your judgment.”

  “You don’t know
a lot more than that.”

  “Adam is getting older.”

  “Just as sharp.”

  Brandon glanced down at the application, riffling the twenties with a thumb. “I can’t fast-track this app. It’s up to the Mammoth Racing Committee, not just me.”

  “That’s Adam and you, like before, right?”

  “Not anymore. We had to bring in Vault Sports and Chamonix. And Gargantua Coffee, big-time. Gargantua just stepped up as lead sponsor for all of the Mammoth ski and board teams, and the Mammoth Cup. So next year’s race is now officially the Gargantua Mammoth Cup. You’ll be seeing Gargantua’s logo everywhere you look around town. Even in your dreams, my friend. And so will all your loyal customers at Let It Bean, which, of course, is the whole point. The Gargantua guy is Jacobie Bradford the Third, one of the coolest corporate weenies you’ll ever meet.”

  Wylie recorded this bleak data with a sinking feeling in his gut. His mother hadn’t been kidding about Let it Bean’s getting run out of town. “So now three companies decide who skis for the Mammoth team and who doesn’t?”

  “Plus me and Grandpa. Money talks.”

  “Screams.”

  “Depends. If money ever comes your way, you’ll think it has a strong, smooth voice.” Brandon tapped the bills on the application and gave Wylie an amused look. “Sky says you’ve promised to win the Gargantua Mammoth Cup. To honor Robert.”

  “That’s why I need to use the X Course.”

  “Wait just a minute. You win the cup five years ago, ditch us, then show up and expect to win it again? That’s your plan?”

  “It’s become my plan. I have to get on the X Course, Brandon.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Brandon leaned back and crossed his arms and offered Wylie a tight smile.

  Wylie managed to control his basic instincts, including the desire to strangle this man. “Fuck it.”

  “The usual Welborn answer.”

  Wylie snapped the money off the application and walked out.

  * * *

  Wylie looped back to Let It Bean to pick up his mother, as agreed. His nerves were still buzzing when he walked in.

  “Okay?” she asked.

  “Just thinking.”

  “You have that look.”

  “Even the marines couldn’t beat it out of me.”

  They dressed out in the Let It Bean bathrooms and Kathleen collected her skis and gear from the kitchen. Steen smiled and waved as they headed out. At Main Lodge, Kathleen insisted on paying for the two half-day tickets that would get them the one remaining hour of skiing. The way we ski, thought Wylie, an hour will be enough.

  They rode chair 25 to the black-diamond run at the top of Mammoth Mountain. With the cold wind in his face, Wylie studied the snow-covered Sierras cascading down toward the flat plate of silver that was Crowley Lake, and the White Mountains beyond, hunched in snow. From this perspective, there was no real vanishing point except the featureless pale sky behind the Whites. The immensity boggled him. Wily felt his mother’s gloved hand digging into his knee and saw that she was seeing what he was seeing.

  They slid off the chair and gathered themselves at the top of the run. The earth knelt below them and the wind blew the snow against their backs. Wylie felt the sharp shards of it needling through his ski mask and he pictured Robert in his bed, life withdrawing from his body.

  With a sharp cry, Kathleen dropped onto the Cornice. Wylie heard the rasp of her skis and saw the first burst of snow rise behind her. He counted five and launched. First came the sudden head-spinning pitch from horizontal to vertical, the brief second when the body senses free fall. The cure is commitment, so he leaned back nearly flush to the mountain, landed, and angled left, away from the trampled middle of the run. It was powder here and he found his rhythm, sweeping past his mom with a war whoop, but she quickly carved inside him and threw a rooster tail of sun-spangled crystals back his way. Wylie used the wider angles and kept Kathleen in front of him, and he was surprised at his age, his ponderous weight, his uncertain reflexes, and his general foreignness.

  Down the mountain they braided. Wylie felt the altitude as a thin absence in his lungs, his pulse climbing, his respiration deeper and faster as he straightened out on a long, straight run and let the speed build. He heard the rush of his skis, felt the freedom, the magic of parting air. Coming out in a hard right carve, he drove his inside shoulder downhill and felt the crunch in his side. Kathleen was a blur at the far edge of his goggles. For a moment, he had everything right and felt like he used to, but then it was gone, and halfway through the mid-run moguls his thighs were burning and he sensed little joy between himself and the skis. The moguls almost did him in. Far down, the downhill run leveled into a wide expanse, at the end of which stood the lodge. Wylie saw the miniature figures streaming into the building, and more miniatures moving across the parking lot at this late hour, trudging for their cars, sun glinting off the skis and boards slung over their backs.

  He stopped at the railing, breathing hard, and his mother swooshed to a stop beside him. “You might have to take things up a notch to win the cup.”

  “Roger that.”

  “You still ski beautifully.”

  “It’s still inside me. Somewhere.”

  “How come you decided to enter the race?”

  Wylie thought a moment. “To honor Robert and shut up Sky.”

  “Is it more to you than a simple grudge match?”

  “I think so.”

  “You know the Carsons and us are fine. Finally. There’s nothing that needs settling anymore. It’s all over.”

  “It doesn’t feel over to me. It’s us and them, and most of them like it that way. It pisses me off.”

  “Oh, Wylie—I forgot most of that years ago. I had to. When you were gone, Sky seemed to get smaller and the others less obnoxious. But now, with the Mammoth Cup, there’s a new … conflict.”

  “I’m going to win that race, Mom.”

  “It certainly has the town talking. I heard two customers making a bet on it this morning. Guys from San Francisco—bet each other five thousand bucks. One for you and the other for Sky.”

  “I’ll bet on me.”

  “For myself, Wylie? I’d be happy for you to win. But I’m even happier that you’re here. I know these last five years have been, well, challenging. I know you’ve seen good and bad, and I’d like to hear about some of that, when you’re ready. But there’s one thing I want you to know: If this little town gets to feel too little, or if for any reason you want to leave and go to a bigger world, I’ve got your back. I always saw you in the world, Wylie. Not necessarily in Mammoth Lakes, population eight thousand four hundred and thirty-four.”

  “I’ve got your back, too, Mom. And the girls’. I heard about Gargantua. All the stuff they’re pulling on you.”

  “You are not responsible for us.”

  “I disagree with that.”

  “I want you to be free. To have something of your own.”

  “I’m getting something of my own, Mom. Jesse Little Chief and I are going to build a place for me to live. A kind of trailer I designed.”

  “Oh?”

  “I drew up some plans last month at the monastery in Germany. A good idea—you’ll like it. I got just enough money to get it started.”

  “Do what you need to do. Remember when we used to ski just to ski? Because it was fun?”

  Wylie nodded. “Those were the days.”

  The PA system announced last lift. Wylie and his mother shoved off for the line, but it wasn’t much of a line at all, just three adolescent diehards elbowing each other for position on the chair, and a young attendant with a sunburned face and her hair spilling from her cap, awaiting them with a smile.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next day, after six hours at Let It Bean, then splitting another cord of wood, Wylie drove down the mountain toward Bishop. It was forty-five miles south, a metropolis even smaller than Mammoth Lakes. Once he got past Crowley Lake, th
e temperature rose ten degrees. His shoulder and back muscles hummed from the splitting and his hands still buzzed from the vibration of the sledgehammer handle.

  A slight smile crossed his face as he looked out at Round Valley, one of his several favorite places in the Sierras. The mountains above the valley loomed high in the west above Highway 395, eight thousand vertical feet of gray rock. The valley itself began to take shape at around six thousand feet, widening and pitching down to form a vast swale, dizzyingly steep. Looking out at it, Round Valley sucked away at his sense of balance the same way the mountains of Afghanistan had. The valley lowered and spread toward the highway, laced by streams and dirt roads, dotted with cattle and willows and black cottonwoods, some of the land planted with hay or alfalfa.

  Folded in his coat pocket were Wylie’s sketches from the Tegernsee monastery and pretty much his entire savings from cheap living after the war—hopefully enough to get Jesse Little Chief going on the project. He’d done the sketches during the long, chill December nights at the eighth-century Benedictine site, which had been destroyed by the Magyars in the tenth century, then purchased nine centuries later by Maximilian I, who used it as a summer home. To Wylie, the monastery was surreal, scattered by time, ancient but modern, utopian and penal, seemingly part of another world.

  In the Tegernsee dorms, the Europeans talked politics, the Irish argued, the Asians Skyped, the Americans listened to music and talked movies, and everyone drank the Tegernsee Spezial beer. It was here that Wylie had first sketched out his first rough design for the module, personal, portable, an idea he got in Kandahar. The MPP grew out of his thought that a self-contained, bulletproof, personal portable environment would naturally be great for war, but a peacetime version would be pretty darned good, too. Something like a tortoise’s shell, but stronger. But he wanted it to be stylish, too. He went through many drafts to get a passable approximation, confident that if he ever made it home, Jesse Little Chief—a full-blooded Paiute, schoolmate, platoon buddy, and carpenter supreme—could pull off Wylie’s elegant, almost nautical design.