Sky held the lead, taking the best and shortest line into Shooters. Wylie stayed hard upon him, inches off his fall line, heard the rattling hiss of pursuit just feet behind him. Wylie felt enemy skis crunching over the backs of his own, then the terrible shimmy of deceleration.
“Coming through, Wylie!”
He flew into Shooters two yards behind Sky, the world abruptly closing around him — tree trunks and branches flashing by in the diminished light, the snow frozen to ice here in this cloistered forest.
“Coming through!”
He felt the rough grating of skis riding over his own again, kept his poles forward and free, dug mightily after Sky, who by now had claimed an impassable line out of the first chute and into the next. Wylie came up hard behind him, heard the skis still rasping behind him. The chute was long and narrow, and Wylie shot through flashing spokes of shadow and sunlight. The chute resolved in a hard right bank and he sensed that Sky was going too fast to take such a high line into it. Risking much, Wylie checked his speed, inviting Sky to take a safer, lower angle into the bank.
More shear and grind behind him. “Coming through, Welborn!” Skis clattered over the backs of his own again; then he felt a nanosecond of wobble. Wylie jabbed behind him smartly, felt his pole point hit snow. Sky chose the lower line into the bank, tucked tightly and made his move. It took less than a second for Sky to sense his mistake. Wylie saw him glance back, then bunch still tighter, setting his left pole, driving his uphill shoulder into the turn. Wylie had the higher line. He saw that they would converge exactly on the apex of the curve — Sky on the downhill side and Wylie narrowly above him. Whoever took the turn would have the lead into the long final straightaway and finish.
Sky streaked in from the left. He glanced at Wylie again and Wylie saw the blue beard and the wild white of eyes behind the goggles. The gate rushed them. Wylie freed all the speed he had in him, drew his shoulders up and out, and bumped past Sky. Sky quivered upon contact, then drove over the backs of Wylie’s skis for a higher line that would send him out of the turn first. At desperate speed, Sky came even with Wylie, then tipped up on one ski to speed alongside Wylie, poles out for balance but all physics against him. He went down like someone thrown from a train, then spun off into the trees and out of Wylie’s sight.
Once through Shooters, Wylie hogged the fast middle course with fierce abandon. For you, Robert. He heard no one behind him. The seconds seemed eternal. He crossed the finish line alone and threw up a huge rooster tail of snow in the out-run before looking back uphill. Bridger Burr and Josh Coates followed a hundred feet back. Ten long seconds later, Sky came essing down in the slow sway of concession, waving one acutely bent pole to the cheering crowd, his right arm tucked weirdly up against his side.
On the middle podium, Wylie raised to the filled grandstands his first-place trophy and an oversized replica of his ten-thousand-dollar check. The trophy was cast in the form of a gorilla holding up a chalice that had Gargantua Mammoth Cup I engraved around its lip. The check’s background depicted a gorilla’s face coming up behind Mammoth Mountain like a sunrise.
Wylie heard the applause and the loudly amplified announcers’ voices, saw the cameras flashing. He felt very strange. He’d never been so stuffed with gratitude and with belief in tomorrow and with strong love for what he saw around him. Could all of this really come from winning a simple ski race? It seemed unlikely. But what was wrong with winning a ski race? And what was wrong with setting your sights on the biggest ski-cross race of all, and winning that, too? Was being the best ski crosser in the world any less an accomplishment than being the best actor or baker or poet or doctor or the best anything else?
And speaking of life, did that have to be only about holding parts together, locking things in, keeping the memory boxes properly stowed? Couldn’t it be about playing up? Dreaming bigger? Nailing it? He reminded himself that this moment was a beginning and he knew that the road ahead would be long and rugged. For an example, he glanced down at the blood-smeared hole in his snow pants, just above the left boot, Sky’s doing at the bottom of Launch Pad. That hurt.
He looked out at April and Kathleen and Steen. Then at Beatrice and Belle with their beanies pulled snug for warmth over their shorn heads. At Jesse and Jolene. All his people sitting close together in the stands. He could see their smiles and puffs of breath as they pounded their gloved hands together and yelled to him. Falling snow muffled the sound. To the left side of the grandstand, behind the roped-off media area, on an asphalt walkway leading up from the lodge, stood Sky and Cynthia and Hailee, and a woman Wylie had not seen before. Robert sat among them in his wheelchair, bundled against the cold.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Twenty hours later, a drastically hungover Wylie Welborn sat in the stands with his family, waiting to see April’s final slopestyle routine. She had already won the cup on the first of her two finals runs, untouched by any of her competitors. The common wisdom on a clinched competition was to play the second run safe and get yourself to the podium in one unbroken piece.
“Think she’ll try that back-side double-cork ten-eighty, Wyles?” asked Belle.
“No reason to try it now. X Games probably.”
“I want to see it. Never been landed by a chick. Not in competition, for reals.”
The day was cold again, and both Beatrice and Belle scrunched close against their brother on the butt-numbing grandstands. They wore their heaviest parkas, and beanies with earflaps tied snugly down. It had been Beatrice’s idea to shave their heads in partial penance for their thievery. After ordering them to write essays on why they had stolen, and why they should not have, an octogenarian juvenile court judge had sentenced them each to five hundred hours of community service — which would average approximately five hours per week over the next two years — spring and Christmas breaks excluded. They had done their first sixteen hours back in December, at town hall, apologizing and serving hot chocolate to people who were trying to reclaim their stolen bikes, skis, and boards at a well-publicized weekend open house. Belle had told Wylie that the judge, the Honorable Caroline Hoppe, had attended both days of the event, helping herself to the spiked eggnog and glaring at her and Beatrice occasionally, making sure they took their penance seriously.
As Wylie watched on the big monitor, April shook herself loose behind the start gate, slid in, crouched, and waited. Up top, the breeze was stronger, and April’s well-known golden curls swayed below the rim of her turquoise-blue helmet. She wore the white and turquoise-blue colors that matched her eyes, had long been her signature uniform, from which she never varied.
Last night, the painless, wine-drinking Wylie had cooked for April her “lucky precompetition dinner” — a thin skirt steak done Mexican-style with onions and tomatoes, a baked potato buried in sour cream and bacon bits, asparagus, and chocolate pudding, served at 5:48 P.M., April’s lucky preevent dinnertime. After dinner, he had watched her arrange toiletries and grooming products on her bathroom counter, each bottle, tube, and tub paired with its identical mate. The couples faced each other, front label to front label. The pairs stood in descending order by height, the tallest beginning back at the mirror and the rest winding out to the counter’s edge, then along the front of the sink and back to the other side of the mirror. She hummed, her concentration was total, and she said nothing. Then a long shower.
Her lucky precompetition bedtime was 8:48. April told Wylie that all her lucky times ended in forty-eight because it had been lucky to her even as a toddler. So Wylie lay beside her in bed as she listened to music through earbuds. It was plenty loud enough for him to hear. At exactly 10:48, he nudged her, as instructed, and she pulled out the buds and turned over. For half of the night, she thrashed and called out through dreams that seemed disturbing even to Wylie, but he remained good to his word not to wake her. After that, she slept like the dead. Then, this morning, he had made for the seemingly refreshed April Holly her “lucky precompetition breakfast” of black coffee, scrambled eggs, and two packs of small waxlike chocolate doughnuts, served at 8:48.