“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.
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.