The Fall Line Page 8

“Never.”

  “All sorts of ways to throw people off or bring them to you,” Page said. “I’ve practiced almost all of them.”

  “Sense of purpose. Get that from your dad?”

  Page froze. “Hey, fuck you, Collins.”

  “Sorry again,” Farrell said. “Didn’t know that was sensitive.”

  Page was quiet for a minute. “I’ve done good for myself in spite of it all, you know?”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “Jesus, you’re a real asshole. Let me tell you, bud. My mom, last time I talked to her, still waits tables at an all-you-can-eat buffet at one of those casinos on the Nevada side. My old man? Bastard was a fireman in Sacramento when I was a kid. But he likes the mountains, so we move to Tahoe. Only he finds out he likes playing cards more than he did putting out fires. My mom, she got fired once, just for bringing home leftover chicken for me. I’ve done good for myself, remember that.”

  “I’ll remember,” Farrell said.

  Page stared until he was sure Farrell wasn’t lying. “So what’s your rap?”

  Farrell bent low over the ski and filed carefully. He figured he owed Page something. “Had a couple of bad years and decided to come back to the only thing that makes me calm—deep powder. Hope the big empty will wash away the particulars.”

  “Some kind of poet, huh?”

  “Me?” Farrell snorted. “Not sensual enough.”

  “So tell me the particulars.”

  “Nope,” Farrell said, popping the second ski from the vise. “I’m not the sharing sort, Page. Better if we just stick to ourselves.”

  They were silent, both aware the mood had changed for the worse.

  “Every man for himself, huh, Collins?” Page said.

  “That’s what it will be up in that Y.”

  “You just keep your old bones together,” Page said. “I’ll be through that intersection before you even see it.”

  “I believe I’ll be waiting for you at the bottom, Page,” Farrell said.

  “You will,” Page said. “In a heap.”

  Twenty minutes later, Page and Farrell stood in the massive, arching lobby of a building that resembled a bomb shelter more than a hotel. Outside the snow fell so hard they couldn’t see the trees eighty yards away. They waited for Inez and The Wave and the cameramen to arrive. After ten minutes, Farrell decided to go to Inez’s room. When the elevator door opened on the fourth floor, The Wave was leaning against the wall in all his neon glory. Farrell expected to see the normal cocky smirk painted across the rasta’s face. What he saw was the stunned, anxious confusion of a little boy lost in the supermarket. “I feel like a trout,” The Wave said.

  “What’re you talking about?” Farrell asked.

  “I feel like a lake trout, mon,” The Wave repeated, his attention focused more on the elevator door than Farrell. “I have this feeling I’m in this National Geographic Special I saw once. And there’s this lamprey eel that’s just chewed through my lower jaw and settled in for a long suck.”

  With that, The Wave pushed by Farrell into the elevator and stuck a finger into the panel. Farrell jogged down the hall to find Inez, dressed in a bulky, full-length down parka, locking the door to her room.

  “The Wave says he’s a freshwater game fish,” Farrell said.

  “He is the fish?” she said.

  “He seemed dazed.”

  Inez screwed up her face in disgust. “Ah, he admits to me during our conversation that he gets out of his bed this morning and he smokes the marijuana,” she said. “I tell him he smokes, I throw him off the team. He shows me his weakness. Just now he does not yet understand that this is also his strength. I show him today.”

  “He looked like he was about to fall over just now.”

  “No, no. He has … how do you say, II a lafrousse.”

  “I think it’s the jitters.”

  “C’est ga. He has the jitters of the sequence I wish to shoot today. But you watch, when he thinks of me, he is going to understand.”

  With that, Inez hooked her arm through Farrell’s and dragged him down the hall as if she were a dog and he a sled. “This will be something, I swear to you,” she said. “I think I prepare him well for this extreme.”

  The next few hours passed as Inez worked with her camera crew to get the equipment ready. Tony Carbone was forty-two, with sleepy eyes under a shank of steel gray hair that fit him like a helmet. He stood well over six feet, had a chest like a beer keg and tree-trunk legs. He could chug through thigh-deep powder like a broad-sterned boat breaking lake ice. Ann Queechee, his partner, was only a fraction over five-feet-four, and no more than 110 pounds, yet she moved with the agility of a trained dancer and the strength of an ant; she could carry as much as Carbone: a Panaflex movie camera, gear bag, and a miniature video camera that attached to the side of the rig so Inez would have a daily assessment of the footage she’d shot. Farrell guessed Queechee to be no more than thirty even though the long plait of brown hair that hung out from underneath her hat was flecked with gray.

  During the introductions in the plaza near the giant aerial tram that services the upper reaches of Snowbird, Inez said that she’d recruited Carbone and Queechee from Seattle, where they’d been running a marginal video production business specializing in mountaineering documentaries.

  “You don’t have your own people from France?” Farrell asked Inez.

  “Same eyes, same film,” she said. “I try to do each film new each time. Alors. Make attention, if you please! The Forest Service gives us the permission to shoot outsides the boundaries of the ski area out from the Thunder Bowl. They tell me no one has ever snowboarded there. This is a first.”

  A booming voice broke in: “A first piece of sheer idiocy!” It was Portsteiner striding across the plaza. “Just wanted to warn all you folks that I was against this permit. You’ve got a lot of fresh snow falling on one bitch of a steep slope in the woods.”

  “The rangers of the forest tell me your concerns,” Inez said dismissively. “But your market department says I go. We sign all waivers of liability, no?”

  “You did,” Portsteiner said. “Wanted to make sure your crew did.”

  The Wave, Page, Ann, and Tony shook their heads no.

  “We need this shot!” Inez cried. “You are being paid well. I expect loyalty to my decision.”

  There was a moment of silence while Inez and Portsteiner all examined their faces for reaction. Farrell said, “Shit, Frank. You’ve probably already put explosives out there, what’s the big deal?”

  Portsteiner tugged at his earlobe. “Didn’t know you’d joined in. What’s your name? Collins?”

  “She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  Portsteiner huffed, “Sound of it, there’s nothing you’d refuse to do these days.”

  The two of them glared at each other, until Page broke in and said: “I guess it won’t hurt to go up and see it. Check it out, you know?”

  Slowly, the rest of the crew nodded. Except The Wave, who stood off to one side, staring into space.

  Portsteiner turned from Farrell. “Pack of fools! Well, Ms. Didiot …”

  “Didier,” Inez said.

  “Whatever. I’m going along to dig you all out if I have to.”

  “This is your job,” Inez said. “Now where is my ride?”

  Inez strode off toward a black snowmobile parked on the snow at the edge of the plaza. A driver in goggles helped her move her camera on to the back of the machine. She looked back at them and said: “Well, we go then, I see you there.”

  “She’s not skiing in?” Farrell asked.

  “Can’t stand heights if she can avoid it,” Page said. “She’ll go up in a chair or a tram if it’s the only way. For all she talks about shooting the extreme, she hates coming anywhere near it.”

  During the grueling climb west from the ski area through the loose snow toward the forest where The Wave would surf, the storm gusted and died. Visibility was down to fifteen yards
at times. Portsteiner grumbled. Farrell knew the man was thoroughly pissed; experienced mountaineers such as themselves should have been smart enough to know the sound of a storm building, should have known that slopes as radical as this don’t appreciate new weight, should have known that the bear would only sit still so long until the fresh load disturbed its sleep, forcing the beast to grumble and roll.

  An hour after they’d crossed the boundary rope, the gale slackened. Portsteiner called halt in a thick stand of fir trees and pointed through the thicket toward the bottom of the bowl, where Inez had erected a blaze orange flag next to the snowmobile. Carbone’s radio crackled to life and Inez began shouting orders about the placement of cameras.

  “He’s going to surf here?” Page said softly to Farrell.

  They both examined the series of chutes, rocks, and stumps that littered the hillside between the trees. Farrell looked over at The Wave, who was absentmindedly running his fingers over the bark of a tree.

  “God help him,” Farrell said.

  “Surfo up to this?” Portsteiner asked.

  “He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Page said. “But … this … is out there.”

  They passed the next two hours rigging the camera shots. Carbone swung down through the deep snow off to the left and dug a pit in which he could film The Wave from a lower plane. Queechee moved to the right and down the slope to a ledge where she could capture the whole arc of his dance. Page stood off to the left behind The Wave with a radio; he’d give the kid the signal to begin. Portsteiner and Farrell skied around the rim of the bowl to a spot where they could see it all. With the snow falling faster now, the crew looked like ghosts and The Wave a distant neon beacon.

  Farrell looked over at Portsteiner. He knew the old man was more pissed at him than the rest; after all, Portsteiner had been his teacher. He asked, “What’s it doing, Frank?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The snow, you know. What’s it doing?” Farrell said. He liked to hear Portsteiner warm to his favorite subject. There was something pure about it, like the poetry of cowboys.

  “I dug a well this morning above Little Cloud,” Portsteiner chanted, as if he were reciting an often-read bedtime story to a young child. “Seventeen inches new. Been storming regular for almost a month now, you know; the upper snow pack’s almost immaculate in ET Metamorphosis. Some friable depth hoar about five, five and a half feet down, but it’s under pressure. The mountain is as solid as you’ll see it.”

  “This last layer going to hold when The Wave drops in?”

  “That’s what we’re all here to see, isn’t it?” Portsteiner replied. “Whether old grizzly itches in his den.”

  “You talked to Inez this morning?”

  “Had to know what she planned, didn’t I?”

  “What’s the LaChapelle classification?”

  Portsteiner ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “Seems to me that woman’s outside the crystal chart. She’s a slope unto herself, my odd friend. My nose tells me she’s under the stress of irregular creep and glide. And you, too. She mentioned some damn loon idea of a race in that Y Couloir down the canyon.”

  “That’s her plan.”

  “And you’re going along for the ride? You’re as adled as that surfer kid. Look at him, sure as shit he don’t wake the bear, he’ll skewer himself on one of those stumps. You, too, you keep this up.”

  “It’s his life,” Farrell said. “Mine, too.”

  Portsteiner muttered, “That’s a hell of a way to think about things.”

  Farrell shook his head. “You know, that’s always been your problem, Frank—you think everyone has to think a certain way, act a certain way. People will do what they want to, whatever you say.”

  “Jack, you don’t start opening up, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Portsteiner had leaned over so that now his big face was right in front of Farrell’s. There was something gentle and comforting about the old man’s expression. Before Farrell could stop himself, he said, “I ever tell you my earliest memory?”

  “You’ve never told me much about anything but the big dumps you’ve skied,” Portsteiner said.

  “Well, here’s a first. I’m almost two and I’m standing in my crib. I see my Davy Crockett doll, my favorite toy, the thing I loved more than anything else as a kid, sitting on a chair about two feet away. I get myself over the rail of the crib and I’m hanging off the side. I can see the doll on my left, so I kick free, turn in space, and reach. Only I land on the edge of the chair and get the wind knocked out of me.”

  “Serves you right.”

  “Maybe. But you know what I remember thinking? That the feeling I had floating through the air was worth the pain of landing.”

  “So now you want to recapture your youth, that it?” Portsteiner scoffed. “Kind of young for that midlife crisis crap, ain’t you?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Farrell said.

  “Tell me what’s so complicated then.”

  Farrell rubbed at the knot at the back of his neck. Before he could continue, the radio crackled. “We are ready?” Inez’s voice called. She was perched on top of the snowmobile, her camera the wide-angled shot.

  “Ready here,” said Carbone.

  “Okay,” said Queechee.

  “Page?” Inez asked. “The Wave, he is ready?”

  Through the binoculars Farrell could see Page pull the radio from his ear and lean over to talk to The Wave. “He’s not answering me,” Page said, “but I think he’s going to go.”

  “I speak to him if you please,” Inez replied.

  Portsteiner and Farrell raised their binoculars again. The Wave had kicked his way farther east on the slope and was poised on a rise in a stand of tight black spruces. Page handed him the radio.

  “Wave?” Inez said.

  There was no answer.

  “Listen and remember,” she went on. “Think of it. All of that I say this morning. Think of me and go.”

  Again there was no answer. The Wave handed Page the radio back and stood, peering off into the storm.

  “And action!” Inez yelled into the radio.

  Through the glasses, Farrell saw The Wave stiffen at the command. He twisted his body left and right to rid his lower back of tension.

  “Action! Action!” Inez yelled.

  The Wave mouthed something, but Farrell couldn’t make it out. The Wave shuffled forward to get his board in motion. He cut a marginal first turn and almost hit a tree. He leaned back hard on the tail of his board and it sank and stalled. Farrell got the sense The Wave didn’t know what he was doing there on the hillside in the middle of a storm.

  “This kid’s toast,” Portsteiner said.

  In an instant that totally confused Farrell, The Wave’s hands shot forward and his face contorted into a sheer red fury. He fell dead down the slope, the snow hissing behind him in a low-trajectory rooster’s tail. His back was to Farrell and Portsteiner now, and he rocked his hips and knees into the hill, carving the snow in a precise arc. Near a gap in the glade, he laid his right arm at his forehead, left arm at his knees and sliced back against the grain, right at Farrell, moving very, very fast. Twenty yards across the slope, he drove the board against a drift, watching as the maneuver threw a wave of snow into the trees.

  The board gathered speed. The Wave forced his weight out over the front, seducing the slope’s gravity, coursing over the back of the comatose bear. Now he flew almost directly down the face of the bowl. He dodged a stump at thirty-miles an hour. He gasped for air, holding it as he ripped over a hummock toward a twist of spruce and cottonwood branches. He ducked. Not enough. His head jerked back as the fork of a limb caught one of his dreadlocks and tore it away from his scalp. A curdling scream echoed in the bowl. Blood spit into the air like fine mist behind him.

  The Wave kept going. He screamed again and aimed himself at a lip in the snow, shooting across the hill, hitting the lip at full throttle. The Wave shot high into the
air. During the early flight, he grabbed the tail of his board, and at the apex of the arc, he rocked his whole body forward. He seemed to hover above the snow, the tip of his board pointing straight down the hill like a juggernaut. His left hand was clutched in a fist. Blood coughed off his head. He was snarling.

  “Jeeeesus H. Christ,” Portsteiner whispered.

  The radio crackled, the voice almost imperceptible: “Avarices, avarices, tu brute.” It was Inez on the radio. Then louder, in English: “You have this Tony, no?”

  “If I don’t, I should be shot.”

  “Ann?”

  “You bet.”

  The Wave landed and rocketed toward a thin snake of a gully. He dropped the board into it, and rushed, gliding so fast that the straight trunks of the pines appeared to slow him into a jerky pattern of movement, the way a strobe light will freeze the actions of a dancer. Farrell strained forward against the tongue of his ski boots, strained against the competing emotions of fear and love, trying to anticipate the kid’s next move.

  In the instant when the trees formed an impenetrable wall and he should have crashed, The Wave bent limbo, his shoulder blades digging the snow like the outrigger of a catamaran and he fired to his left. He jetted the board up an embankment and hung his limp body in space. The board crowned and he twisted his hips and threw his hand out palm down, as if he could balance there on the powder, a delicate, almost feline sculpture.

  He whipped the tip over, shattering that porcelain moment, and popped back on the board, smoothing it into long, snakelike turns. He seemed to goad Inez’s cameras to try to ignore him. He flew through the last sequence of arcs faster than any snowboarder Farrell had ever seen.

  The Wave finally reached the flat about thirty-five yards in front of Inez’s camera and capsized in the deep snow. His head lolled to one side. Flecks of saliva boiled at the corners of his mouth. His eyeballs rolled. Blood from his wound trickled down between his eyes and formed a spider’s web of red on his face. He touched a glove to the open sore and winced at the sting.

  Inez yelled into the radio: “Cut! Cut! Everyone shoots this good?”

  Before she got her answer, Inez’s hands fluttered at her side as if they had a life of their own. She reached up, tore off her hood, and wrenched off the headset. She waded through the deep snow to The Wave, who crouched as she approached, tense, an animal at bay.