Sky kissed Robert’s hand and folded his unresisting arm back upon the blanket. To Adam, the arm looked no more living than a shirtsleeve. Sky patted Robert’s hand lightly, then gave his grandfather a look of satisfaction. Wylie left the room, and Sky followed. Adam sighed, very tired, and sat back down. He heard his grandsons outside:
“Wylie, I actually don’t forgive you. I always hoped you’d die young and in agony. Still do.”
“Back at you, brother.”
“You’re not my brother. I got the good blood.”
“You can’t win the cup next year, Sky.”
“I can and will.”
“No, it’s mine.”
“I’ll do anything on Earth to prevent that.”
“You can’t beat me, Sky. The cup already belongs to me.”
Adam took a cab back to the Monaco Hotel on Geary. He packed and had the bellhop take his bags to the lobby. He went downstairs with his Catton and got a glass of Napa cabernet from the restaurant. He sat by the fireplace and looked toward the street, exhausted by Robert’s fate and by his two grandsons’ unbending dislike for each other. Neither was at genuine fault. The true blame lay on his own son, Richard, and his wife, Cynthia, and the determined Kathleen Welborn. How many times had that story played out in the history of civilization — the married man of success and charm, the flattered young admirer, the shocked wife?
The wine was unearthly good. He pondered Sky’s pledge to win the next Mammoth Cup for Robert, not sure what to make of it. Sky was certainly capable of winning it. But Sky had also always excelled at the hollow gesture. Sky, who, at age six, had wanted to change his name to White Ice Carson, to be more “marketable” as a skier. Who, at sixteen, had brought impoverished Croatian twins to live with him and Cynthia and train on Mammoth Mountain, then angrily turned them out when his interest in them dwindled. Sky, who had been engaged to and dumped not one but two women, practically at the altar. Sky, thought Adam — boastful and brash and brimming with inborn talent, but still afflicted by moods, like his mother, and by a sliver of fear on the mountain, like my beautiful Richard.
So, Sky as Mammoth Cup champion? Maybe. He would need to dedicate himself to it.
But Wylie could win it, too. He had comparable instincts and abilities. And Wylie was serious in ways that Sky wasn’t, quite. He was strong and could summon will. He was both a skier and a racer — two different things. Wylie’s Mammoth Cup win five years ago was the most impressive ski-cross run that Adam had ever seen on the Mammoth X Course. But Wylie would need to find desire. For Wylie, there had always been the next adventure, the next mountain, the next place where the grass would be greener and he could find whatever was missing. Like my beautiful Richard, Adam thought again.
Now, he thought, the cup stood equidistant between them like a gleaming sword that only one of them could grab first and employ. Which one of his grandsons would he really like to win that race? Well, legally, Sky was the legitimate Carson and therefore an heir. Spiritually? Bastard Wylie might have the edge.
Adam looked at the magnificent vase that stood in the middle of the lobby, at the elegant furniture, the beautiful marble floor. Through the front windows on Geary he could see the rain coming down and a bellhop with a raised umbrella escorting a woman inside. He thought of Sandrine, almost five years gone now, but he still often awoke in his bed believing that she was there beside him, as she had been for sixty-four years. Sometimes he reached his hand out, expecting her warm skin. Then that free fall into truth.
But surprisingly to Adam, what he found himself dwelling on in his advancing years were not the staggering losses in his lifetime — Sandrine, a brother, a sister, Richard, a granddaughter, several of his closest friends, and scores of people he had liked and loved — but, rather, the pleasures that carried him through each day. He had his home and his ATV and the Sierra Nevada to roam upon. He could still fish Crowley Lake and Hot Creek and the Upper Owens. He could still ski the more forgiving slopes. He had his reading and the eyes to do it with, thank God. He had the love of Teresa. He had Mammoth Mountain to manage — twenty-eight lifts, three lodges and a cross-country ski center, six restaurants, two bars, and an untold horde of employees — all subject to the vagaries of snow. Blessed, all-powerful snow. It had always been his life and love and fortune. Not that he was involved with the day-to-day running of the mountain anymore. It was time to sell, and he knew it.
In the early days, Dave McCoy had built the resort of Mammoth Mountain, most of it with his own hands. Young Adam had been one of his many acolytes. Eventually, through his family’s commercial development fortune, Adam had bought controlling share of the resort, and it had been his for the last decade. But by now he had come to believe that, regarding what we love, we are all just janitors for allotted times. Adam had offers on the table from corporations in the United States, the UK, Germany, Japan, China, South Korea, and Dubai. He would make scores of millions of dollars.
Finally warmed by the fire, Adam surrendered his troubles to those of a darker time. He opened his beloved Catton, the finest writer on our great civil war, in Adam’s not always humble opinion. Antietam was coming, still the bloodiest day in the history of the nation, a spectacle of profitless tragedy and waste. The first battlefield in the history of the world that was documented by a newfangled thing called photography. Brother killing brother. Adam read for half an hour, making occasional notes in the margins. When he was done, he riffled the pages quickly and smiled to himself. There were pen scratchings in his Catton going back sixty years!
An hour later, at exactly eleven, Mike Cook, friend and ally and Mammoth Mountain racecourse setter, walked into the lobby. He found Adam and rocked his shoulder, then sat with him for a while as the older man’s mind began to fire again. It didn’t take long. Cook had never seen such energy in a person. Sure, Adam was slower now, but once he got going he still had that unstoppability, that God-given combination of weight and gravity that took him places others couldn’t get to.
Cook helped Adam get his luggage to the door, where a bellhop took over, setting the bags with care into the back of Cook’s SUV. The rain had stopped. The bellhop asked about the current Mammoth Mountain snow level and Adam told him to the nearest quarter inch, adding that another six to eight inches were due on Thursday night. He overtipped the young man, as he did all gratuity-dependent service workers.
“Get me out of this city,” he said to Mike.
Chapter Six
In the cold darkness the next morning, Wylie dug his old Chamonix Racing Saber Three skis from his bedroom closet. They were 180 centimeters long and slim-waisted, with acute, deep-carving edges. He propped the skis against the wall and ran his fingers along the sharp undersides. Dusty, and badly in need of wax, of course. He could hear his sisters banging around in the darkness, arguing over first shower while the hot-water pipe groaned and shuddered. He remembered what it was like getting up this early to get to Let It Bean, followed by ski workouts on the mountain, then school, then another hour or two at Let It Bean, then homework. Even with the special Mammoth School District programs for team skiers and boarders, Wylie had needed more than a little willpower to make it through four years with his 3.0 grade point average intact.
He arrived at Main Lodge just before 7:00 A.M., when the Mammoth ski team had its pick of the best runs. That gave the pros an hour of skiing and boarding before the paying public was allowed in. The morning was clear and cold, eighteen degrees, according to the lodge thermometer.