“Do the dogs need permits to use our sidewalks?” Steen shouted out. Wylie saw by his smile that he was trying to be funny, but the councilpersons and mayor shot him looks as he stood there red-faced. Wylie helped him collect the exhibits.
Chapter Twenty
Adam and freeski team coach Brandon Shavers stood at the head of the Mammoth X Course. The August morning was warm for the Eastern Sierra, and a wildfire burning to the northwest had spread a blanket of gray-white smoke over the mountains.
Adam looked at his watch. “Mike Cook is never late,” he said.
“Actually, I told Mike ten o’clock,” said Brandon.
“But you told me nine,” said Adam.
“I wanted to go over a few things. This Gargantua Cup is keeping me up nights.”
The X Course was snowless and the boulders stood exposed. Adam picked his way down the course for a look from the first jump. So easy to picture this run in its full bloom of snow, and to see himself not sidestepping down the rocks as a rickety octogenarian, but carving youthfully through the turns, throwing rooster tails of snow behind him. At eighty-seven years old, he wasn’t quite up to the X Course, though the gentler Mammoth Mountain runs were still heaven on Earth for him. What really made him aware of his age wasn’t his skiing, but how damned slow he had become at the mundane daily tasks: getting his socks on, tying shoes. He could go crazy, waiting for old Adam Carson to get out of his way.
Beyond the physical, Adam was also now suffering what all serious skiers and boarders suffer in late summer — the dread that it wouldn’t snow again until almost next year. Adam and people like him talked snow and thought snow and dreamed snow. Their bodies craved it. The young people called this “fiending,” and Adam kind of liked that word. Plus, in Adam’s case, since his livelihood was snow, he felt a businessman’s practical fear that another terrible warm winter was surely coming. Adam had lived the Sierra snow for most of his life and he saw that the snow came later and left earlier now, that the averages were down and the ski seasons were shorter, and he believed that only a fool could deny that the world was heating up.
Brandon caught up with him, breathing a little quickly. “Grandpa, what I’m hoping to do is reconfigure this course for the best Mammoth Cup ever.”
“You can’t. You’re not the course setter.”
“Well, yes, I know that. But Mike is open to reason, and I’d like to talk to you about some changes.”
“Fire away, Brandon.”
Adam looked at this grandson-in-law, then back to the course, and in a heartbeat he was back in the United States Army recruiting center in San Francisco seventy years ago, just turned seventeen, thinking about signing up for the war. A sergeant who looked a lot like Brandon looked now — upright, blockish, and somehow untrustworthy — said he would do his best to get Adam into some action in the Pacific. The Japs were on the run. Adam expressed interest in the European theater, because of the mountains and the snow. The recruiter had said that of course, with the German surrender, Europe was slowing down but that he’d see what he could do. It was August 3, 1945, a Friday.
The following Monday, Adam was on foot in the weirdly cold city, headed back to the recruiter to sign up after a weekend of soul-searching, when he heard that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He signed up anyway. Very difficult, saying good-bye to Sandrine. Aside from Sandrine, Adam had no direction in life except to go down mountains of snow on heavy wooden skis, faster than anyone else, but there was no place to sign up for that.
“I’d just like to tighten up this course a little,” said Brandon. “I love Dire Straights and Shooters and the schuss to the finish. I love Goofball and Conundrum — you know how many magazine shots we get taken on those? But what I’d like to do is add two new gates. And maybe consider flattening out Dire Straights a little.”
“Why?”
“I want to slow the whole course down, just a hair. Grandpa, the USSA and boarding brass are all leaning this way for the other courses, mostly for safety. I mean, what happened to Robert was just a terrible accident. And, you know... Nick Zoricic dying at the World Cup finals. There’s going to be backlash, and I want to be ahead of it. I honestly think a more technical course would be safer and help the Mammoth team.”
“Specifically, Sky.”
“Well, him for sure — and Scotty and Trevor, and for certain Maria and Becky. Pretty much all of them.”
“But not Wylie Welborn,” said Adam.
“No. Not him. He’s more of a straightforward downhill racer.”
“Whereas ski cross is supposed to be a combination of downhill and slalom.”
“Right, Grandpa, and BMX and motocross and NASCAR and speed skating all that other stuff they say. And that’s not just PR talk. There’s something very... primal about ski cross.” Brandon smiled knowingly. “You’d have torn up this course in your day.”
The U.S. Army recruiter had given Adam the same fraudulent smile when he said he might be able to get Adam over to the French Alps, or maybe Switzerland.
“Brandon, my gut tells me to let Mike make whatever adjustments he sees fit. We’ve talked about the extra padding on the lift poles, of course. What we had was sufficient, but he wants to double up on it, out of respect for Robert, and to admit that bad luck can defeat good plans.”
“I know Mike listens to you.”
“I’m not going to ask him to change one inch of this course.”
“I thought you’d like to give Sky a more level playing field.”
“Sky and Wylie grew up on this thing.”
“With all due respect, Grandpa, sometimes it seems to me that you favor Wylie over your own.”
“He is my own.”
“You know.”
“He’s got the Carson blood, Brandon. He didn’t even have to marry into it.”
Brandon blushed and his mouth tightened like a plastic coin purse. Adam was surprised to see him so taken aback. “Maybe I overcompensate,” Brandon said.
“You make Andrea happy.”
“I try very hard at that. I’ve never so much as raised my voice to her. She’s my... priority. We gave you three beautiful great-grandchildren. They are Shavers, and I’m very proud of them. But Grandpa — I have a problem here. Wylie badly embarrassed the team by throwing our biggest sponsor in the fish derby pool. Twice. After embarrassing the team by coldcocking Sky at Slocum’s that night. He could have really hurt Sky. And you know what gets me most about all of it? Not one word of apology out of Wylie.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“What kind of a team player does that?”
“I’m aware that you and Wylie have some history.”
“He called Andrea a ‘fat twat’ when she was a sophomore in high school. That hurt her feelings because she was insecure at the time. And somewhat overweight.”
“Wylie was in sixth grade, wasn’t he? And you broke his nose for it.”
“I had to do something. Now I’m the coach. I have to do something again. So, here’s the deal, Grandpa. The other night I decided to reread the bylaws. And I realized that the selection of the ski and board team membership is up to the committee for each team. But as I read further, I found out that the, well, deselection of an individual team member can be done by each team coach, respectively. The term gross misconduct is open to interpretation, but I think Wylie’s qualifies.”
“So you can throw Wylie off the ski-cross team.”