“Christ, what are you doing!”
“She has to breathe,” Price said, and Cam dropped to one knee and grabbed at her, tugging the mask up again.
Her eyes were wide behind her goggles and he thought she was hyperventilating. She knew how serious her mistake had been. A flap of jacket sleeve hung from her left elbow and on the rock between them was one thin looping spatter of blood like a signature, dark as oil.
“We’re still safe here!” Price said, and McCraney added, “There’s no way we’ve hit the barrier yet.”
“How do you feel?” Cam asked. “You think it’s broken?”
“Let her breathe!”
Lorraine shook her head and Cam took her wrist, feeling for any deformity beneath her sleeve, working all the way up to her shoulder. Then he shook his head too. “Do you hurt anywhere else? No? Good. Somebody bring us a hunk of ice.”
Price didn’t move but Doug Silverstein turned away.
“Hold on,” Cam said. “I need a few pieces of that rope.”
Silverstein handed him the entire bundle, then hustled uphill toward a field of snow.
Cam had two canteens in his backpack and removed one, dumping it over her arm, trying to flush out any nanos she’d embedded there. Price was probably right that they were above the ever-shifting barrier, but Cam had learned to be pessimistic.
“Who’s got a spare hood or something?” he asked.
He tied her sleeve shut, covering the rip with an extra pair of gloves, as Silverstein returned with too much ice.
“I thought this was to keep the swelling down,” Silverstein said. “She won’t even feel it through her jacket.”
“She will.” Cam met her eyes. “Hold it there as long as you can, okay?” Lorraine nodded and her mask worked, like the words thank you were percolating up. Cam stood and turned his back. “You’ll be all right,” he said.
* * * *
Sawyer hadn’t waited and Manny had gone with him, but Hollywood was standing right where Cam had last seen him, head bent over a crummy gas station map he’d folded down into one square. Erin hadn’t moved either, except to sit and rest.
Cam jogged through another burst of grasshoppers. He nearly ran. The urge to escape Price and the others was that strong. It might have been better if he’d stayed in the midst of the pack, herding them, but there was a limit to how much responsibility he would accept.
They would catch up. They had to.
Erin rose to her feet and Cam saw her glance past him at the others. She had always been very attuned to his moods. His and Sawyer’s. “Thanks for waiting,” he said, and gave her butt a swat, and she took his hand for a moment until their pace made it clumsy. His breath felt hot in the thick hair of his beard, matted against his cheeks and neck by his mask.
“I guess I’m still not convinced,” Hollywood said as the two of them approached. “It really seems like we’re gonna lose time heading out this way.”
Cam shrugged and kept walking. Hollywood turned to follow, lowering his map, and Cam was glad he left it at that.
There was no point in arguing anymore.
Ahead, trudging after Sawyer and Manny, Bacchetti reached a swath of loose, shattered boulders that spilled for a thousand feet from a hump of stone above Chair 12. Cam and his buddies had called this rock the Fortress of Solitude, after Superman’s secret hideaway. They’d had names for every gully and cliff on the mountain. Smoker’s Hole. The Cock Knocker. Paradise.
Cam entered the rock field with Erin and Hollywood exactly where Bacchetti had started across, but the markers here were hastily assembled piles rather than the neat stacks they’d erected at 10,000 feet. Twice he lost the trail. The uneven jumble was all granite, split into square-cornered blocks as small as a fist and larger than a car.
He paused to orient himself, unsettled, even frightened, and saw that Sawyer and Manny were already at the lift.
Chair 12 topped out at 9,652 feet, which meant Bear Summit had been able to advertise itself as the highest ski area in California. This was almost true. “B.S.,” as the locals called it, sat unquestionably lower than Heavenly in Lake Tahoe, which claimed a wedge of terrain up to 10,067, but that section of Heavenly lay a stone’s throw across the Nevada state border.
Cam had also skied bigger and better mountains. Extreme terrain at B.S. was limited to a half dozen ravines, but that was okay. He knew each run intimately, the best jumps, every powder stash. Working at a small-time resort also meant crowds were a rarity — and Bear Summit hired people that the ritzy, brand-name places in Tahoe wouldn’t touch. People like Cam.
“Watch it,” Erin said, over a sudden clack of rocks, and he glanced back to see her gripping Hollywood’s arm as the boy regained his balance.
Cam looked forward again and almost fell himself when the slab underfoot shifted. Then a ghost turned his head.
He expected to see grasshoppers but there was nothing there.
* * * *
Before the winter he turned thirteen, Cam Najarro had seen snow only in movies and TV shows. Until then, it was almost possible he’d never been farther above sea level than the tops of various roller coasters and Ferris wheels.
Money wasn’t the issue. Cam and his brothers were sixth-generation Californian, an eternity by white standards, and their grandpa had been the last to slave in the orange groves and garlic fields for lousy cash wages. Their father was a college graduate who had been promoted to district manager of an office supply chain before succumbing to early heart disease. He made a point of taking his family on weeklong vacations each year. He usually packed them into their Ford station wagon on holiday weekends as well. It was important to him that his sons understand there was more to the world than their own urban neighborhood. He did not want them limited in any way.
For much the same reason, he never allowed them to wear their older siblings’ hand-me-downs, though that would have meant less overtime for him. And if his decision made for birthdays and Christmas mornings of more underwear and socks than new toys, at least the Najarros looked good.
Their father treasured pride and appearance above all else.
For him, the highlight of each day had been to sip one beer in the living room of their three-bedroom home, which he invariably described to his own brothers as “right on the ocean.” In English. Always in English. Maybe Cam was never offended by Bear Summit’s half-truths because his father indulged in the same habit of exaggeration. The city of Vallejo, where they lived, actually sat deep inside the San Francisco Bay — and in any case, three blocks of commercial properties lay between them and the flat, listless green murk of the delta.
Their father loved the ocean like he loved them, almost formally, and from a distance. He did not fish or swim. He would have drowned since he never took off his shoes, much less unbuttoned his shirt. He just liked to look and listen and maybe walk in the sand. That alone was victory to him, having grown up landlocked in a cow town near Bakersfield.
He couldn’t have realized he was restricting his sons’ perspective in exactly the way he’d worked so hard to avoid. Their vacations ranged north or south for hundreds of miles, but always along the coast that he found so exotic — the Santa Cruz boardwalk, Disneyland, the Pismo Beach pier. He raised a generation of lowlanders who would keep their eyes and their own dreams facing west toward the Pacific.
Cam was the only one to break free.
* * * *
Hollywood quit moving as soon as they emerged from the rock field and waited for Price and the others, raising one arm, calling, “This way! You got it!” Erin hesitated, but picked up the pace again before Cam could grab at her. Good girl.