Crazy Blood (10 page)

*   *   *

Huge Croft, the Mountain High bouncer, opened the door. The music was loud and there were bodies in various motion behind him. “Wylie. Maybe you shouldn't come in.”

“I'm here to pick up Beatrice.”

“Sky's been extra weird tonight, so maybe just ignore him.”

Wylie nodded and pushed past Croft and into the living room. The number of party people here this late surprised him. Many of them stood mute, staring at him as he scanned the room for his sister. He felt slandered and foolish and mad. He marched into the big kitchen, where the revelers fell silent and avoided eye contact with him. The counters were cluttered with liquor and wine bottles, both empty and full; platters of artful sushi and sashimi; dirty dishes. A guy burped and a girl laughed with exaggerated volume.

He checked the dark theater, where viewers sat beneath a dizzying big-screen Shaun White, tearing up his first Olympic Games. Wylie flipped on the lights and got cussed, turned off the lights and checked the library across the hall, where he interrupted a spirited argument about ski waxes while a pretty girl stood facing a wall of books, laughing.

“She's upstairs,” said Croft from the doorway. “Not the third floor—don't worry. Just the second. Third's, like, forbidden and by invitation only.”

“Yeah, Croft, you told me.” Wylie took the stairs two at a time, feeling eyes on his back. He found Beatrice in one of the guest rooms, part of a circle of girls sitting cross-legged on a big bed. The smell of cannabis was strong and a haze of pale blue smoke hung in the ceiling beams. She looked up at Wylie. Her face was tear-streaked and her pale hair hung down limply. Two girls, sitting on either side of her, both had an arm around her. On her lap she held an overlarge schooner, the last inch of a lime green concoction slanting toward its mouth. “Thanks for comin', Wyles. I'm wrecked and I don't wanna hafta face Sky on the way out. Can you believe that shit?”

“Let's go.”

“These are my best friends. I made them.”

Wylie looked at each girl in the circle, not a one of them over eighteen, it looked, all with the glazed inward air of the stoned. “Ladies.”

“Sky's just a random asshole,” said one.

“Like, if we could just sell him to another mountain. He could be
their
mascot.”

A pause, then giggles.

“In my opinion,” said a freckled redhead, “you are not a bastard demon at all, Wylie. That's a, like, completely fictitional nontruth.”

“Why, thank you. Bea? Let's hit it.”

“Sky was, like, so bizarre tonight,” said another. “When I got here earlier, I went into a bathroom without knocking? Sky was in there by the sink with a gun in his hand. Gave me this freak smile like he's trying to charm me.”

“A gun,” said Wylie.

“Don't ask me what kind or any of that. Medium-size and black.”

“What was he doing with it?”

“I don't know, Wylie—holding it?”

Giggles.

“Let's go get more grasshoppers, girls,” someone said.

“Beatrice?” Wylie asked. “Ready?”

She held out her hand. “So ready.”

Bart Helixon marched into the room, apologizing to Wylie, looking up at the ceiling through the window attached to his glasses as if puzzled. “This is best,” he said. “You should go. You're welcome here, you're always welcome here, but tonight … well. Don't believe a word of what Sky said. Anything for attention. He's drunk and God knows what else. He'll probably forget about it by morning.”

“He can't forget it now,” said Beatrice. “It's been posted all over the world.”

Helixon clapped a hand on Wylie's shoulder and leaned in close. His eye roamed weirdly behind the lens of his optical computer display. “And don't let him under your skin, because that's what he wants. He's just plain out of line with that kind of threat.”

Wylie and Beatrice made it downstairs and almost to the foyer before Wylie heard Sky Carson yelling out behind him, his words booming from the second-story landing through the great room below. “I will accept that apology, Wylie!”

Wylie stopped and looked back at his accuser. Instead of the Bible and phone, Sky now brandished only a black semiautomatic handgun. It looked to Wylie like his own service M9.

When Sky aimed the gun at them, Wylie got between Bea and Sky and pushed her hard toward the door. There was a second when Beatrice's hand fumbled off the knob and he nearly knocked her over. He looked back at the gun in Sky's hand, pointed straight at them. Suddenly, a string of water glittered from the barrel into the air, began to fall, then broke into diamonds that rained down toward him.

“Do not become a victim of your past!” Sky called down to Wylie. “I am serious, and so is Mother Nature.”

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sky helped his mother get Robert over on one side and hold him there so she could bathe him. It defied physics, how heavy an unconscious 180-pound body could be. The late-afternoon light came hard through the bedroom window of Cynthia's condo, through which Sky could see the peaks of the Sherwins white and jagged to the east. In the meadow out front, Mammoth Creek zigged and zagged, frozen at the edges.

As he leaned in to get a better grip on his brother's hip, Sky thought again about the night before at Helixon's. He had given Wylie a chance to apologize, but of course the bastard had refused. Turned it against him somehow. Which was unfortunate, because Wylie was the danger here, the threat. The asked-for apology was self-defense, Sky thought. How had it gotten turned around?

After all, Wylie had the proven record of violence—a lifetime of scuffles and outright fights right here in Mammoth—often involving a Carson, usually Sky himself. A locally famous sixth-grade battle had landed them both in the hospital with bruised faces and broken bones in all four of their hands. They made a truce and posed for pictures with four black eyes and all four of their casts. The truce had lasted about two months. Now, thought Sky, Wylie is also a veteran of true war. God only knows what he did over there, what deadly things he learned, what impulses he had been encouraged to set loose.

So he had asked for an apology and Wylie had turned it around on him. Again. Wylie had always been good at that—being the aggressor but somehow rarely getting caught at it. A provocateur, a subversive. For example: Who was there to see the shove yesterday on the X Course? Really, no one but himself. Again, Sky pictured going off the course at sixty miles an hour, breaking up on those boulders and trees like some kind of doll, never to ski again. Like Robert.

Snow was falling. He held his brother while his mother bathed his flank. Sky stared out that window rather than look at Robert. He just couldn't look at Robbie for more than maybe one painful second at a time. His mother swabbed away with a sponge and disinfectant soap, her yellow-gray hair pulled into a tight ponytail, humming to herself. “I have a copy of the latest
Woolly
for you,” she said.

“Terrific. I liked the last astrology forecast.”

“I invent the predictions, based on my experiences with people and their birth dates.”

“Isn't that what all astrologists do?”

“It's not a hard science. But my readers love it.”

“The stolen skis and boards story was good, too.”

“Brave of the thief to just walk off the mountain with them.”

“He knows the good stuff, I guess.”

“Sky?” Cynthia gave him her chill blue stare. “That was quite a stunt you pulled last night up at Mountain High.”

“Well, I was drunk, but I meant it.”

“Do the injuries hurt?”

“Substantially.”

“You took a bad fall on the X Course, Sky.”

“No, Mom—Wylie shoved me off the X Course. Big difference.”

“You know, I've investigated a little, and there's a split decision on that.”

No surprise to Sky. His mother was a bold snoop. It amazed him that townspeople would actually talk to her, but they did. She was certainly direct and clear when asking questions. He knew that behind her back they made fun of her, and he'd heard plenty of jokes about her murderous actions of twenty-five years ago. Lizzie Carson took a gun … He'd actually cracked a few jokes about her himself, thinking that this was a fatherless son's right.

In a flash, Sky was back in the women's facility in Chowchilla, sitting in the hot waiting room, age four, Robert and sister Andrea on either side of him, Grandpa Adam and Sandrine there, all of them waiting for one of the stoic guards to lead them back to the visitation center. Sky saw again the tableau that played out over the thirteen years of his mother's incarceration: Mom sitting blue-clad and ankle-shackled to a big round steel loop bolted to the floor, sitting straight up in the immovable steel chair, her straight yellow hair pulled away from her pale face. Even as a four-year old Sky sensed that his mother's composure was requiring every drop of her self-control. Her strength was intimidating and inspiring. Sky had understood that his mother, Cynthia Carson, was a woman who had crossed a great divide. She was feared and lethal. A woman good to her word. A woman who stood and delivered.

“You can investigate all you want, Mom,” said Sky. “But Wylie Welborn shoved me just past Conundrum. Where this happened…” He glanced at Robert, all he could endure.

“Oh, I believe he's capable of that, son.” She looked up at him. “But what if it was your nerves kicking in?”

“It was a shove, Mom.”

“Your father never had the nerve for winning.”

“Not again, Mom. Please, not all that again.”

“He
almost
had the nerve.”

“That's not what G-pa says. G-pa says Dad
did
have the nerve but—”

“Of course, nerve is what separates racers at the highest levels, don't you think? My God, your father had everything else a racer could want.”

Sky dared another glance at Robert. He looked peaceful and utterly relaxed, and Sky wondered if there was any awareness in him at all. He had seen a news report recently about these newfangled scans that could show brain activity not detectable before. Although the doctors were quick to say that this didn't necessarily mean the patients could improve.

“Robert had nerve,” she said. “And he had good racing judgment, too. That's why this is a tragedy, not just an accident.” Cynthia rinsed and squeezed the sponge, then patted Robert's temple with it. “I advise you against threats of any kind, Sky.”

“Too late. I asked for the apology and promised punishment if he does anything like that again. I've stated my terms.”

“You could forgive him.”

“Why should I forgive Wylie for running me off the course? That is not right.”

“My whole life, I've tried to explain to you the importance of consequence.”

The Queen of Consequence, he thought: a lifetime of damnation in exchange for one squeeze of a trigger. Well, five squeezes. Sky had often wondered what his life would have been like if his father had shot his mother, rather than the other way around. But really, what was the point of that? “You've explained that to me maybe a billion times, Mom.”

Sky looked out at the Sherwins. A snowplow clanked up Minaret toward the mountain. The top of the mountain was locked behind a white wall, which meant snow was falling there. In his mind Sky again replayed his race against Wylie the previous day, scrolled forward to Wylie ramming him on that high-speed, precarious turn. Wylie threw his shoulder, for sure. Why else would he have gone off-course? Nerves? No. There had been no pressure. It wasn't even a real race.

“More important, if you're going to beat Wylie in the cup, you'll have to train much harder, Sky. Off-season, too. And cut the drinking way back. Of course that was—”

“One of my father's weaknesses.”

“Yes, it was. Of my three children, though, you are the one who is the finest
natural
skier—”

“Though I lack discipline and nerve.”

“You're a better skier than Wylie Welborn, but—”

“He's a better racer.”

“When you train harder, and learn to control your nerves, you'll be ready to beat him. For instance, you know you should be in Europe now, on the World Cup circuit, like you were last year and the year before that.”

“Robert needs me here,” he said absently.

“And you need to commit, Sky.”

“You've told me that a billion times, too.”

“Because you've never committed to anything that isn't easy. The way you race. The way you drink and show off. The way you pledge yourself to people, then discard them. Especially women. You do what's—”

“Easy. I only do what's easy.”

“Very much like—”

“My father.”

“And yet the seeds of championship are in you. I was the hardest-working woman in my racing days. My body was very strong and sound. My commitment was never questioned. On your father's side is God-given talent. No one had greater nerve and commitment than your grandfather Adam. And of course a perfect body. You have that body, too.”

He felt his blood heating up, that first tremble and bubble. “I can't be like them, Mom.”

“But you can excel. I'll help in any way I can. And Robert can help, too. He's still here, in body and spirit, aren't you, Robbie? Robbie is in the prison of his body, but he can emanate blessings and advice, though he cannot speak outright. You have roughly one year until the race, Sky. But very much to do if you want to win it.”

“I'm going to win the damned race and I'm not going to let Wylie run people off the mountain. If those are the first real commitments I actually stick to, fine. I admit my mistakes. I'm twenty-five years old.”

“Old enough to grow up.”

“I'm growing up, Mom. I'm growing up.”