Sky rounded the hillock and saw Ivan out a hundred yards ahead, barking furiously at a pack of bony stray dogs closing in on him in a rambling, low-snouted fashion. But Ivan’s leash had miraculously caught between some rocks! Without this restraint, he would probably have already raced to his own death, but Sky saw no good fortune in the snagged leash. All he could envision was Ivan stuck there and unable to run, soon to be torn to ribbons and devoured by the marauders. Torn to ribbons right in front of you, said his father.
Sky didn’t think he’d ever get there. Then he was there, grabbing the snagged loop end of the leash without stopping or even slowing down. But when he took up the leash, a weird slackness greeted him and the collar came hopping back along the rocky ground toward him while newly freed Ivan sped in the other direction, toward the dogs.
“IVAN! NO!”
Sky put everything he had into the sprint. Running was such a crude, slow thing compared to downhill skiing. He yelled as loudly as he could, hoping to frighten or confuse the dogs. Ivan was fast, but suddenly he stopped, cocked his ears, and looked silently at the pack moving up the arroyo toward him. Sky dug in, knowing he’d trip and fall on the sharp rocks, cut his knees badly enough for stitches, maybe even lacerate or crush both patellas, which would ruin his workouts for weeks and reduce his Mammoth Cup chances from slim to none. Of course he would fuck everything up.
Before Sky knew it, Ivan was in his arms, solid and squirming wildly. Sky tucked him against his side like a football and kept charging toward the pack, hollering. The dogs stopped and waited a moment, ears and tails up, before splitting off in halfhearted, sideways retreats. Sky stopped, clutching Ivan fast and watching the dogs, which watched him and Ivan as they blended into the desert.
He spent the rest of the day inside the cabin in light, sporadic sleep. Ivan prowled the interior for vermin. Then night came, and with it an eternity of waking hallucinations arranged in the maddening nonlogic of dreams. He lolled on one lower bunk, sweat-drenched and shaking, stripped of willpower, his muscles aching like the flu he’d sometimes had as a child, but much worse. In these flulike fevers, the world was black-edged and huge, and Sky was minuscule within it. Powerless. Helpless. The bunks across from him appeared to be immense ramparts of frame and fabric, and Ivan, on the other lower bunk, seemed the size of a bison. A huge snake with scales the size of Sky’s head appeared outside all four cabin windows at once, as if preparing to constrict it. A naked, wizened crone threw open the door, smiling broken pillars of teeth, curling a come-hither claw at him. And all the while, the voice of the Black Not goaded him. You cannot. You will not. You will never. You are not.
So he closed his eyes, but this was worse. He became a small whirling thing, plummeting through a bottomless, black sky. At first, he was small as a pea, but the velocity of his fall rubbed away at him, sanding him down to the size of a mote of dust, then to a thing even smaller than dust, until he was nothing but nerves and senses, helpless in this huge and tactile world. Then he wasn’t there at all, and this was not a bad thing. A goddamned relief, actually. He was gone but the world went on. Fine. So good to feel no pain. He lay there trembling.
Ivan never took his eyes off him.
Sky pulled himself up and off the bed and stumbled to the picnic table and his boxes of provisions. He dug down into the first box but couldn’t find it, though he was sure he’d put it there. So he upended the second box and out tumbled the snacks and the teeth-cleaning biscuits for the dog, more Soylent, the bottled water, another bottle of tequila, some underwear, socks, his iPod and computer tablet, and, finally, the handgun!
It was a trim little thing, a.38-caliber autoloader with nine shots. It was here for times like this, when he seriously considered trading the Black Not for the much kinder black forever. He stared at the weapon while he tore open the box of dog treats and, without looking, dropped one into Ivan’s mouth.
It would take only a few seconds, he thought. Already loaded. You check the chamber. You unsafe it. You hold it to your temple and close your eyes. No pain forever.
The Black Not had gone quiet now, as it always did when Sky got out the gun.
The implication was, Of course you can’t do it.
Because he was Sky Carson, who lacked nerve, just as his father had lacked nerve, according to Cynthia. Who knew everything. Every single thing. And clearly did not lack nerve.
Because he was Sky Carson, a mid-pack ski crosser forever trying to catch Robert and Wylie and whoever else was racing well on any given day.
Because he was Sky Carson, royally born and genetically gifted. But assaulted on his own X Course by Wylie. And what had Sky done about it? Nothing. He had responded with a threat that people saw as comic but had taken no real action at all. Made no defense of his honor. If that wasn’t lack of nerve, what was?
Because he was Sky Carson, knocked out cold with one punch by Wylie that night at Slocum’s. In front of his friends and fans and the waitress he liked, and half of Mammoth Lakes.
Because he was Sky Carson. Of course he couldn’t pull the trigger.
He couldn’t even pick up the thing.
Sky poked at it with an index finger, as if trying to see if it were alive. Vision off, he kept missing. Then his fingertip caught the front sight and the gun spun and came to a stop with the barrel facing away from him and the grip waiting for his hand, just inches away, an invitation.
He still couldn’t pick it up.
Because Sky Carson couldn’t even answer an invite from God.
Dad, what should I do?
Pick it up, you fucking coward.
He went to the open bottle on the kitchen counter, tilted it up for a long swallow of the añejo, then veered back to the bed and fell in.
The next two days were similar, but without Ivan trying so hard to get killed by a pack of wild dogs. Sky tightened up the dog’s collar and got him outside every few hours on the leash to do his business, then pretty much dragged him back inside the cabin for the next assault from the Black Not. Sometimes Sky argued with the voice, denying the terrible emotions the voice made him feel. Sometimes he yelled. In quieter moments, he fed the dog. Threw a wadded-up sock for him. Drank Soylent. And tequila to blunt the pain.
By the third evening, he was exhausted. Then late that night, after several hours of torment that left him looking down on the gun once again, sobbing at his lack of courage, Sky fell into a sleep that lasted well into the next afternoon.
He woke up and drank a double helping of Soylent flavored with powdered raspberry mix. Downed some pretzels, too. He washed himself with bottled water and a little tablet of motel soap, rinsed with fistfuls of the water, air-dried in the sun and put on clean clothes, then headed north for Mammoth Lakes.
Coming up Highway 203, Sky looked out at the forest and the mountains looming high and he felt that strange sense of newness that always followed the Black Not. As if he was seeing things in a fresh way. Familiar but different. Old but new. It made him feel as if he’d been away a long time. The afternoon had turned cool and the sky beyond the mountain looked gray and solid as granite.
He caught the light red at Old Mammoth Road and watched the cars coming down from the village. He saw Johnny Maines roaring down Main toward him on his yellow motorcycle. Sky was always kind of impressed by how Maines could control the big Harley on tight turns even when the weather was bad. He’d seen Johnny slide through ice on the bike as if he were snowboarding it. Sky saw the fly-rod tubes that were strapped to the back of the motorcycle, vibrating with the speed; then he saw a flag of brown hair waving behind Johnny and realized he had a passenger. Even with the helmet and sunglasses she was wearing, Sky recognized Megan, for sure, holding Johnny tight around his middle, and damned if Megan wasn’t smiling as Johnny ran the red light and turned the loudly farting Harley right in front of him.