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  He inhaled, ooo-rahed as of old, then launched off the half-pipe start and into the air. He landed balanced and shot the bowl, tucked for speed, and claimed his line against imagined enemies. He felt his heavier weight and took the first bank with some reserve, carving it mid-level, neither high nor low, weight mostly on the outside ski, poles touching down lightly, legs synchronous yet independent. The steep schuss into the first jump, Launch Pad, happened faster than his brain could fully comprehend. He launched into the jump and pressed it hard—weight forward and ski tips jammed down to keep the air from getting under and flipping him. He landed well, tucking into the long straightaway, then off the ramp at Goofball, landing well again, then carving hard through panel two into Dire Straights. He tried for the old velocity, but he couldn’t quite find it, or be found. He tucked, jonesing for blankness of mind and shedding of thought, but all he felt was old, fat, and overpresent. He could hear the heave of his breath—a long time since he’d felt winded on the X Course.

  He handled Conundrum well, pressing the jump hard again, soaring high and landing smoothly, hounded by the shadows of the ski lift stanchions and unstoppable images of Robert. Then through Shooters, a series of narrow rock and tree-lined chutes that opened to a long final straightaway and the finish. He tucked through the sprint, legs quivering as he braked and curved to a stop on the out-run. He glided to the orange mesh fence and draped himself over it, panting.

  “One minute ten seconds,” said Brandon Shavers, looking at his wristwatch, the walkie-talkie still held to his ear.

  “Not bad,” said Wylie.

  “My guys average six seconds less. That’s six long seconds, Welborn.”

  “I can be six seconds better in a month.”

  “I’m going to send you down against Sky.”

  “Anytime.”

  “How about right now? Get back up to the start. Maybe you’ll wake up a little with some competition.”

  Sky Carson was already at the X Course start area, limbering up away from the rest of the team, which had gathered to watch. As Wylie slid to a stop two lanes across from him, Sky stopped mid-stretch. “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars I win,” he said, then cranked over at the waist and looked through his legs back at Wylie. “Payable tonight at Mountain High.”

  “I don’t have a thousand dollars.”

  “And apparently no confidence, either.” Sky smiled, completed his stretch, then turned to his teammates. “Friends, simpletons, countrymen—who is going to win this here shoot-out?”

  “Kick his ass, Wylie!”

  “Kick his ass, Sky!”

  The team jostled along the orange security mesh, hooting and pushing one another for the best spectator positions, well back of Wylie and Sky.

  On the count, Wylie launched with a grunt and found himself trailing Sky Carson’s piercing war whoop before they had even come to the first bank. His legs still felt heavy from his first run and now he had Sky’s snow and ice to eat. His jump at Launch Pad was weak and he tried to carve the first gate high, but the slush slurped his speed, and coming into the first good straightaway, Sky Carson had ten feet on him.

  With only two skiers on the course, Wylie used the open snow to get uphill of Sky and away from his glittering exhaust. Harder work, but it paid off. He made up distance on the straight and more on the second jump, Goofball, coming high and tight into the next bank. Suddenly, Sky skittered and checked, and Wylie came nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with him. Wylie dogged him through the next gate, tight through the panels, and onto Dire Straights, where he locked in close like truckers do, drafting the soft air behind Sky, hounding him, close enough to hear the rasp of Sky’s skis as well as his own. Sky trailed a pole in warning.

  Dire Straights was Wylie’s wheelhouse. Sky knew it, defending expertly, stuck close to his fall line, using his light quickness to deny Wylie the pass, keeping his pole points high and threatening. He took the next bank low and fast. Wylie cut above him, a shorter line through the apex but harder to make. Held it. Coming out, Sky again dodged into his path, backslapping his pole against Wylie’s helmet. Wylie’s ears rang and he crouched deeper and came even. There were no more than six feet between them. Ahead lay Traffic Jam, a tight series of turns whose entrance offered hardly enough room for two friendly adjacent skiers. But the leader coming out of it would carry real advantage into Conundrum—the last jump before Shooters, then the final long schuss to the finish line. A high outcropping of jack pine and reddish boulders marked the beginning of Traffic Jam, where the side-by-side racers could collide if neither man gave.

  Instead, they sped like demons. Sky swept higher with his pole and Wylie heard the crack of it on his helmet again. They blasted into Traffic Jam dead even. This race was Wylie’s to win now; he knew it was all right here, the moment he could take the lead. He dug deeply once, hunched his shoulders, and brushed past Sky into the valley and the lead.

  Cut off from his line at fifty miles an hour, Sky crossed uphill behind Wylie, over the backs of his skis, hoping to overtake or trip him. Wylie hogged his line, blocking, his legs burning and losing strength. Behind him, Sky’s skis clattered noisily over his own, and the strange drag made it feel as if he was braking. Then the clacking ruckus behind him gave way to a short, sharp yelp. Coming out of the turn, he checked and glanced back at Sky, who was badly off-course and careening through trees and boulders, still upright, slaloming precariously between the big rocks as if on fast-forward. Near the beginning of the Conundrum ramp, Wylie swept to a stop and looked down. Sky lay planted in the snow between two large rocks, arms and legs akimbo, not moving.

  Already some of freeskiers behind them were hooting and yelling and picking their way down into the gorge where Sky lay. Wylie saw Brandon sidestepping his way up from the finish area. Wylie took a deep breath and slid off the course and down into the ravine.

  By the time Wylie got to him, Sky was up and leaning against a boulder, rubbing his left shoulder, watching his teammates working their ways toward him. Wylie saw them hustling down through the trees and snow. One of them had Sky’s skis, another his helmet.

  “You all right?”

  Wylie studied him; Sky studied him back. His cheeks and forehead were scraped and his blond hair was matted with blood and pink runoff. “You shouldn’t have knocked me off the course,” Sky said calmly.

  “I didn’t. You lost your nerve.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  Wylie looked up the ravine at his teammates picking their way toward them, their voices caroming down the rocks. He pulled his goggles down to his throat. He was still breathing hard and he could feel dull pain where Sky had poked him with the pole.

  “Wylie, you disrespect me. That makes me angry. It’s a difficult emotion to deny. Ask my mother.”

  “This can’t be about her.”

  “Everything is about her. Her blood is in me, is it not?”

  Wylie considered his half brother. Sky had one face he gave to the world—cool guy, wiseass, extreme athlete, and champion. And another that Wylie had only seen when they were in private or nearly so, a darker thing, but with something vulnerable and hapless in it, too. Sky wore it now.

  “What Kathleen did to my mother and what you just did to me are enormously disrespectful. This is a Welborn characteristic—disrespect.”

  “That’s just nonsense, Sky.”

  “Then make our bad history good. Say you respect me.”

  Wylie did not. He heard voices closer now, heard the crunch of coach Brandon’s skis climbing up the grade from the finish.

  “Then at least apologize for running me off the course.”

  “I barely brushed you. Sky, did you hit your head after the helmet came off?”

  “No—I did not hit my fucking head after my helmet came off. You should not have run me off the course.”

  “You should not have stabbed me or whacked my head.”

  “What do you propose to do about it?”

  Wylie considered. “
Forgive, I guess.”

  “But you ran me off the mountain and I don’t forgive you.” Sky’s blue eyes were decisive and nonnegotiable.

  The skiers converged variously and Coach Brandon huffed up the last few yards, breathing hard. “Carson? You okay?”

  “Great, actually!” Sky held up his goggles, one lens thoroughly smashed in the wipeout. “Though I’d like to state for the record that one Wylie Welborn cracked my goggles with his pole, like viciously. I assume there are witnesses.”

  “I saw him do it,” said Platt. “Right before gate three.”

  “No!” said Daniel. “Sky poled Wylie. I saw him.”

  “Wylie knocked him off the course!” said Kosnovska. “I watched it happen!”

  “Sky stabbed him, just like Danny says!” countered a junior whose name slipped Wylie’s now-agitated mind.

  “Maybe I’ll kick both of you half-assed brothers off my team,” said Brandon. “You’re supposed to be leaders. Look at you.”

  “Chip,” said Sky. “Chip, chip.” He pulled the ruined goggles over his head and let them dangle at his throat. He pushed off the boulder and stood uncertainly, shaking his left hand as if his fingers had cramped. He stared at Wylie for a short moment, and Wylie saw the contempt melt into a smile as Sky turned to his teammates. “Any of you hair balls going to Mountain High tonight?” he asked. “Drinks on me!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Just before midnight, Wylie lay reclined in his boyhood bed, with blankets and a sleeping bag heaped over him to fight the cold, his head against the wall, reading Rexroth.

  The sun drops daily down the sky,

  The long cold crawls near,

  The aspen spills its gold in the air,

  Lavish beyond the mind.

  He wondered why his own attempts at poetry were so consistently bad. His notebook lay on the nightstand beside him, unopened, a pencil still marking where he’d stopped. Did you have to be born with poetry in you? Which made him think of Sky and what he’d said about the blood of his mother being inside him, carrying a malice that today showed in Sky Carson’s pale blue eyes. Sky had gotten to him. Wylie had never seen Sky so completely … decisive. Wylie had never looked directly into Cynthia Carson’s eyes, but he had seen her from a near distance, and studied her through binoculars once—scary—and found pictures of her on the Internet, and, yes, she had that same conviction in her eyes, the same certainty. Everything is about her.

  His phone buzzed and he opened Beatrice’s text: “Mountain Hi crazy. Can u come get me?”

  The attached video had been shot from the first-floor great room of Mountain High. It was noisy and Bea’s phone camera was aimed unsteadily upward at the second floor, where Sky Carson stood at the railing, wearing only boxers and the shattered ski goggles around his neck. He held a black book in one hand and a phone in the other, which he was using to shoot selfies of his injuries.

  When Bea zoomed in, Wylie saw that the scrapes on Sky’s face were a rawer pink now and his right shoulder wore a blue bruise. His left knee had swollen and the first two fingers of his left hand, which held the book, were splinted and taped together—white tape against a black leather Bible.

  There were dozens of people in the big living room, all looking up at Sky, most holding phones. Wylie recognized Helixon and Hailee, a bunch of the Mammoth team skiers and boarders, old friends, local souls.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” Sky called out. “Twenty-five years ago, something terrible happened here in Mammoth Lakes. A demon bastard was conceived and later born. He has haunted this town for one quarter of a century. We all know him. We have tried to forgive him. We have tried to forget him. But today the demon attacked me on the mountain during practice on the X Course. Behold.” Sky scanned his phone over his bruised shoulder, then his fattened knee, then aimed it again at his scraped-up face and shattered goggles. The crowd murmured, then stilled. “I was attacked from behind and forced off the course and into the rocks at high velocity. I’m lucky to be standing here before you. And very happy to be. But this attack left me thinking about my responsibility to the mountain and to you people and to myself. How much more of this are we to take? What kind of man am I? When should wrong be battled instead of tolerated? After what happened today, I stayed up there on the mountain, asking Mother Nature, What should I do? I received an answer, and it was loud and clear. Mother Nature has asked me to accept an apology from Wylie Welborn for what he did today. To turn my other, nonbruised and nonabraded cheek. But she also tasked me to tell Wylie that if ever tries to force me—or anyone else—off her mountain ever again, the consequences will be severe. Mother Nature was not specific, but she said the consequences will be severe. This, then, is my line in the snow. Apologize, Wylie Welborn, for what you have done. And for your own safety and well-being, promise never to do it again.”

  The crowd murmured again and someone offscreen slurred,”Yeah, man, Sky, break the demon bastard curse.…”

  Wylie watched as Sky held the Bible to his heart. Sky held the phone out for a macro shot and the crowd went wild.

  Wylie threw on a coat and started down the hallway. He knew his light-sleeping mother would ask him where he was going this late, and, in fact, from the darkness of her bedroom, she did.

  “Out, Mom.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everything is fine.” Except not, Wylie thought. Except Bea’s not asleep like she’s supposed to be; she’s up at Mountain High, watching Sky Carson make crazy threats.

  He got to his truck. Letting himself in, he thought he saw movement at the base of the little hill behind the house, in the trees and patchy snow, about where the toolshed into which he had crashed once stood. He paused. A deer, maybe. Too cold for bears. He saw nothing. If it was anything, it didn’t move again. He slammed the truck door and drove to Mountain High.

  * * *

  Huge Croft, the Mountain High bouncer, opened the door. The music was loud and there were bodies in various motion behind him. “Wylie. Maybe you shouldn’t come in.”

  “I’m here to pick up Beatrice.”

  “Sky’s been extra weird tonight, so maybe just ignore him.”

  Wylie nodded and pushed past Croft and into the living room. The number of party people here this late surprised him. Many of them stood mute, staring at him as he scanned the room for his sister. He felt slandered and foolish and mad. He marched into the big kitchen, where the revelers fell silent and avoided eye contact with him. The counters were cluttered with liquor and wine bottles, both empty and full; platters of artful sushi and sashimi; dirty dishes. A guy burped and a girl laughed with exaggerated volume.

  He checked the dark theater, where viewers sat beneath a dizzying big-screen Shaun White, tearing up his first Olympic Games. Wylie flipped on the lights and got cussed, turned off the lights and checked the library across the hall, where he interrupted a spirited argument about ski waxes while a pretty girl stood facing a wall of books, laughing.

  “She’s upstairs,” said Croft from the doorway. “Not the third floor—don’t worry. Just the second. Third’s, like, forbidden and by invitation only.”

  “Yeah, Croft, you told me.” Wylie took the stairs two at a time, feeling eyes on his back. He found Beatrice in one of the guest rooms, part of a circle of girls sitting cross-legged on a big bed. The smell of cannabis was strong and a haze of pale blue smoke hung in the ceiling beams. She looked up at Wylie. Her face was tear-streaked and her pale hair hung down limply. Two girls, sitting on either side of her, both had an arm around her. On her lap she held an overlarge schooner, the last inch of a lime green concoction slanting toward its mouth. “Thanks for comin’, Wyles. I’m wrecked and I don’t wanna hafta face Sky on the way out. Can you believe that shit?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “These are my best friends. I made them.”

  Wylie looked at each girl in the circle, not a one of them over eighteen, it looked, all with the glazed inward air of the stoned. �
�Ladies.”

  “Sky’s just a random asshole,” said one.

  “Like, if we could just sell him to another mountain. He could be their mascot.”

  A pause, then giggles.

  “In my opinion,” said a freckled redhead, “you are not a bastard demon at all, Wylie. That’s a, like, completely fictitional nontruth.”

  “Why, thank you. Bea? Let’s hit it.”

  “Sky was, like, so bizarre tonight,” said another. “When I got here earlier, I went into a bathroom without knocking? Sky was in there by the sink with a gun in his hand. Gave me this freak smile like he’s trying to charm me.”

  “A gun,” said Wylie.

  “Don’t ask me what kind or any of that. Medium-size and black.”

  “What was he doing with it?”

  “I don’t know, Wylie—holding it?”

  Giggles.

  “Let’s go get more grasshoppers, girls,” someone said.

  “Beatrice?” Wylie asked. “Ready?”

  She held out her hand. “So ready.”

  Bart Helixon marched into the room, apologizing to Wylie, looking up at the ceiling through the window attached to his glasses as if puzzled. “This is best,” he said. “You should go. You’re welcome here, you’re always welcome here, but tonight … well. Don’t believe a word of what Sky said. Anything for attention. He’s drunk and God knows what else. He’ll probably forget about it by morning.”

  “He can’t forget it now,” said Beatrice. “It’s been posted all over the world.”

  Helixon clapped a hand on Wylie’s shoulder and leaned in close. His eye roamed weirdly behind the lens of his optical computer display. “And don’t let him under your skin, because that’s what he wants. He’s just plain out of line with that kind of threat.”

  Wylie and Beatrice made it downstairs and almost to the foyer before Wylie heard Sky Carson yelling out behind him, his words booming from the second-story landing through the great room below. “I will accept that apology, Wylie!”