Watching the racers prepare, Wylie felt that edgy shimmer of adrenaline in his core. He yawned. He wondered what competition would be like again, after five years without it, unless you counted survival in combat as competition. Maybe that was the greatest competition of all. Certainly the most consequential.
“Robert’s going to win today,” said Beatrice. “He’ll put everything into it for Hailee. He’s romantic like that.”
“God, look at Sky Carson,” said Belle. “Doesn’t he ever get tired of being himself?”
Sky Carson had gone to the staging area’s barrier, over which he now rested his arms, helmet off, poles in one gloved hand, chatting up some girls and hamming for the cameras. He was trim and lithe, with a head of blond Carson hair, a sharp nose, and blue eyes. Like several of the many Carsons who had settled in Mammoth Lakes, Sky was a gifted athlete. Wylie had grown up with him and knew Sky as a high-energy egotist or sullen bully, depending on his mood. Meds were long rumored. Wylie and Sky had never gotten along, often much worse than that. A running public feud had begun in childhood. Same father; different mothers. Antagonists. Rivals. Bad blood.
Today, Sky had dressed in a pattern of exploding stars and stripes instead of Mammoth Mountain ski team blue. In a nod to the youthful snow-apparel industry, ski crossers — unlike USSA downhill racers — were allowed to wear casual clothes of their own choosing in competition. A race official trudged over on snowshoes, and Sky barked like a dog at him, then turned back to his audience.
The grandstands stood to the right of the starting gates, and the crowd could see down the course only as far as jump two, known as Goofball. After that, the start-gate spectators would view the action on a huge monitor perched across the course, opposite the grandstands. For those preferring to see the finish of the race live, more grandstands had been set up down the mountain, near the vendor booths and sponsor displays.
The racers finished their loosening-up routines and made short starts, then settled into their starting gates. Wylie’s heart was beating hard and he yawned again, which he used to do incessantly before races to balance his oxygen/nitrogen mix.
A moment later the gates flew open and the four ski crossers dropped into the half-pipe start, war whoops sharp in the thin alpine air. Wylie heard the grind and hiss of the skis. Robert grabbed the lead out of the first right bank, held it down a short straight and into Launching Pad, jump one. Wylie could see his skis shuddering but tight together, his neat turn inside the first paneled gate, then his sudden burst of speed out. Robert had more hours on the Mammoth X Course than anyone, even his brother, and his home-course advantage was real. Sky hounded him, just a hair outside and behind. The two other men — one of them the previous year’s X Games silver medalist, Bridger Burr from Colorado, the other a nineteen year-old racer, Trey Simms from Squaw Valley — formed a tight knot no more than two yards back. Wylie saw they were hitting fifty miles per hour on this first straightaway. In his gloved hands, his sisters’ grips tightened.
The racers sped down the straight, bunching even more tightly. Wylie guessed if Sky maintained his number-two position in and out of the second jump — Goofball — he would try to pass his brother on Dire Straights, which was wide and steep and had always been one of Wylie’s favorite places to pass. Dire Straights schussed into Conundrum, jump three, the highest and most dramatic of the jumps, a Mike Cook signature. From there, the course then curved steeply into Shooters, where positions could be improved only at peril.
The racers launched off the Goofball ramp, dropping slowly through the air and out of sight. A thousand sets of eyes, Wylie’s among them, rose to the video screen, onto which the ski crossers, now much larger than life, came floating airborne toward them in a tight multicolored formation in which each man, ski, pole, and rippling bib hung painterly composed and balanced against the pale blue Mammoth sky. Sky Carson landed a nanosecond behind Robert, but just as Wylie had foreseen, Sky precariously stole inside on gate 2 and passed Robert onto Dire Straights. Burr stuck right behind him, using Sky’s draft to pass Robert, too. Trey Simms held fourth, back by twenty feet.
Heading into the next turn, Simms set too brash a line and clipped Burr from behind. It looked like no more than a brush, but Wylie knew better. Burr tore off-course and went down, smashing into the right-side netting, then somehow broke free to spin like a big eight-pronged child’s top to a stop on the bank.
“Ugh,” said Beatrice.
“Scheiss and a half,” said Belle.
The three remaining racers ground out of the turn side by side, their poles feeling around them like the canes of blind men. They accelerated down the straight and launched off Conundrum as if linked. They soared identically, bunched and oddly still. Wylie’s breath caught at this brief beauty.
As he landed, Robert’s skis shuddered violently on a patch of ice. He rose from his crouch to check his speed, caught more ice, and — still going at what looked to Wylie like sixty miles an hour — shot off-course, scattering bystanders and flattening sapling pines, throwing snow high in an unstoppable ballistic calamity. Off the embankment he flew, rising higher and higher, pivoting slowly, then, on his descent, backstroking with his poles in a braking windmill.
The ski lift stanchion was set back from the X Course several yards, wrapped in padding. Safety padding could be thin, in some cases no better than a T-shirt pulled over a telephone pole. In Wylie’s experience, and in ski-racing lore, stanchions drew you to them as if they were magnets and you a metal shaving, and the faster you were going, the less you could resist their pull. Their mojo was bad and strong. To Wylie, Robert’s line of descent looked fated. Loudspeakers broadcast the amplified whop of him hitting padded steel, and he dropped to the snow like a bird having hit a window.
Thoughtless, Wylie was out of the stands, slipping and sliding fast down the snow steps for the lower course. When he got to Robert, there was already a small crowd. Wylie barreled through and knelt beside him.
Robert was unconscious and his head was turned acutely. His helmet lay nearby in two pieces, with the chin strap still fastened. Wylie found Robert’s pulse and the rise of his lungs beneath the layers of his clothes. His skin was hot and slick, and when Wylie lifted his brother’s eyelids, he saw uncomprehending black pupils set in their irises of blue. Spine, he thought, bone and nerves: Sgt. Lance Madigan, Kandahar, shot in the neck by a sniper.
Wylie stood and hollered “Away” to the onlookers so Robert could get some air. Unable to resist, and because racing is about winning, he checked the big screen, to see Bridger Burr cross the finish line inches ahead of Sky, nailing gold and his place in the Winter X Games the following week in Aspen.
Chapter Five
Adam Carson sat beside his grandson Robert’s bed in St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco. The Carson patriarch was eighty-seven years old and feeling every second of those years. He disliked cities and their inescapable noise, and he had been here since Robert’s accident two weeks ago. A big man, he sat forward on the chair, elbows on his knees, chin resting on the bulbous knuckles of his interlocked fingers. He had hands like driftwood. His hair was gray, straight, and cut unfashionably.
Finally, the endless Carsons and in-laws who had traipsed into this room today to sit and whisper and blubber over Robert were gone. Visiting hours were long over, thank God. But Adam had made arrangements for two of the most important of those visitors to return together for the first time, instead of separately. He heard footsteps coming his way.