Crazy Blood (24 page)

“Practice.”

“Forget that. I like red wine.”

“Let me check the cellar.”

He got a bottle from under the sink and a wineglass from the tiny yachtlike galley cupboard. He felt worldly and important as he handed her the wine. He saw the flames flickering in her eyes and the dusting of freckles on her cheeks. He checked his watch, then turned his attention to the steaks, touched one of them with a fork. Four minutes. Asparagus and rolls, aluminum-wrapped and off the flame, would be ready about then. He sat down across the fire from her.

“This is the only part of the trip I've been dreading,” she said.

“Yeah. It's dark by five and there's really nothing to do.”

“You read a lot?”

“Sure.”

“I was impressed when I saw a book of poems in your trailer that first day I met you.”

“It's in there, if you'd like to try some.”

“Maybe. The wine's good. My trainers say one glass a night, max.”

“That's reasonable.”

“What about you?”

“Overall, I shoot for somewhat reasonable.”

“Your definition of somewhat reasonable.”

“Of course!”

Wylie got the food onto two plates and the plates onto the small table in the trailer. With the door and windows and portholes open, it didn't feel cramped. The screen door kept out the bugs, which were few tonight. A squat votive candle burned between them. He had pictured April Holly sitting across from him in the MPP, but his imagination paled against the real thing. In his imagination, she hadn't been this close.

“I'm still waiting for the terrible awkwardness to arrive,” she said.

“Me, too. I imagined you here, so maybe it's helping.”

“I imagined myself here at this table.”

“We could say things like ‘Pass the salt.' Or get more serious, like ‘That next government shutdown could be a bad one.'”

She smiled and drank more wine, her shoulders forward in the small space and her voice a leafy rustle. “Or I could say ‘How do the planets look through the portholes?'”

Wylie's turn to smile. “And then I could say ‘Mars rocks, but Venus is always my favorite.”

“But then I'd think you were flattering my gender.”

“And you'd be right.”

“So then I might say, to distract you, ‘Great asparagus tonight, Wyles.'”

“This conversation just keeps getting better and better, April.”

They were leaning toward each other, and Wylie could feel the heat from the candle. Her lips were red from the sun and dry alpine air. Golden hair. Her eyes were blue, with little orange flames in them, and they considered him side to side, skeptically, searching again.

“I like our conversation,” she said.

“I like you.”

“It's awfully hot in here,” she said. He blew out the candle. “That won't make a big difference.”

He leaned in and kissed her lips, lightly, briefly. She did the same back. “Walk me to the creek.”

“It's going to be cold.”

“Hot, cold,” she said. “Let me get a few things. Could you put some more wood on the fire?”

*   *   *

April got into her duffel bag in the bed of his truck and came back with a bundle of clothing, a bath towel, and a lidded plastic box. Wylie set three big logs on the fire, then found a towel and a bottle of body wash. He led the way through the aspens to the creek, holding back the branches. Yards apart along the stream, they stripped down and spread their clothes on the boulders.

“Fast in, faster out,” he said.

Wylie felt the shock of the water, heard April gasp. In the good moonlight, she was pale and solid, like ivory or alabaster. Wylie was impressed that she waded in, squatted down, and went under to her neck. She held up her hair with one hand and splashed her face with the other, then rose dripping silver beads. Under the water, he rushed his hands through his hair and under his arms, came up and got the body wash lathered up. The cold went from skin to bone in seconds.

“I've never been in water this cold,” she said. “You wonder how anybody gets used to it.”

“I've got this body rinse stuff.”

“I've got soap, but I think it's frozen solid.”

A few minutes later, they were standing as close to the fire as they could get, hopping in place as they dried off, teeth chattering, skin raised with goose bumps. April ran into the MPP and came back heavily dressed. Then Wylie went in, put on clean clothing and a good fleece jacket, stowed the dining table within the benches. He looked out at April shivering by the fire. He smiled to himself while folding out the bed and unzipping the two-person sleeping bag. You are Wylie Welborn, he thought: protector, provider, lover, luckiest man on Earth.

“All yours in here,” he said, stepping out. “I'm going to hang the food so the bears don't get it.”

“Where are you sleeping?”

His heart stumbled, but his words did not. “By the fire. I do it all the time.”

“But that's a two-person bag in there.”

“So let me know if it gets lonely.”

“Oh, it won't. I'm a sprawler. Need help hanging the food?”

“I've got it, April.”

Wylie washed the dishes in the creek, then packed them with the food and lugged the canvas bundle over to the lodgepole pine. He got the rope up and over the right branch, third try, tied the bundle tight, and hoisted. His spirit had fallen with April's sleeping arrangement and he felt rejected and ashamed of the rejection, then angry at the shame, but at least he could be man enough not to show his disappointment. He tied the rope fast to the trunk, smacked his cold, stinging hands together. Wylie Welborn, he thought:
Man.

Back at the MPP, Wylie knocked, then stepped inside. It was dark. He opened one of the storage hatches to fetch his single sleeping bag, which he had anticipated needing. The self-inflating bedroll was there, too. He could smell the soap she'd used, and the faint aroma of her much-advertised shampoo. In one of the commercials Wylie had seen, April smiled and shook her head—after shampooing, it was implied—which threw her hair into curls that stretched and retracted in slow motion like golden springs.

“Good night, April.”

“Good night, Wylie. Four hugs today?”

“Three. Mom, Beatrice, and Belle hugged me when I left Let It Bean.”

“You're one short. So get in here!” He heard the soft rustle of her laughter, a laughter that seemed to Wylie to hold no malice at all. “You didn't really think I'd take over your bed without you in it, did you?”

“You had me going, all right.”

“Hurry up, please—my teeth are still chattering and I'm extremely naked.”

In the darkness, he could make out the shape of her lifted arm, the pale fold of the sleeping bag waiting open. He undressed in record time and got in as lightly as he could. She turned into his arms.

“Does the beard keep your face warm?”

“It froze off once.”

“Do I get to see the hidden face someday?”

“I don't know if you could handle it.”

He felt her fingers cold and small on his face. They kissed. He felt his clarity diminishing and thought,
Onward.
All he knew for certain was the immediate pleasure that was April Holly—the taste of her, the slick bumps of her teeth, her hot tongue prodding his own. He slowly ran his hand down her smooth, warm flank and onto one haunch, still oddly cool, then back up again. He spread his fingers on her cheek and drew her face even closer and she shivered and groaned and they kissed deeply and long.

April rolled back and Wylie climbed on. “I have raincoats,” he croaked.

“Let it rain. We don't need them.”

He entered her slowly. He ordered his sensations to check themselves, which didn't quite work, so he bit the tip of his tongue sharply and thought of their first run that day.

“Does it bother you that you hardly know me?” she asked.

“I love that I hardly know you.”

“What if we're different?”

“Please be very different.”

“You got inside me weeks ago. Now you're inside me for real. Where'd your lips go?”

Wylie kissed her again and, without willing it, everything went big picture: Earth from space, turning on its axis, jet stream white and wispy left to right above rugged land and vast blue sea. Next he was falling dizzily, North America rushing up at him as he steered west, angling for California, coming in fast now, the northern and southern counties peeling from his vision, which left him hovering right here over this meadow, almost close enough to touch the cute little trailer sitting not far from a creek that looked good for trout, beneath a steep chute of snow carved top to bottom by human beings who, by the look of the tracks, must have had a really good time making them.

Then, there was April Holly again. He felt the clenched commotion in her, wave upon wave, then her release. Followed by his own, crazily, electric and full, and announced with a roar. After a brief, shallow doze, they roused each other again, and this time things were longer and slower and Wylie proudly outlasted her five to his one by his count. His whole body trembling, he withdrew and rolled over. He felt like a rubbery tortoise that would never be able to right itself. His heart began to slow. She ran a finger over his face for a moment. Then she worked herself out of the bed, brought a jacket to her chest, and jumped up and down, counting out loud to twelve. Wylie looked up at the bouncing girl, pale flesh, arms and elbows and her crown of curls unfurling to just short of the laminated ceiling of the MPP. She smiled down at him, then tossed the jacket and landed hard on the bed, crawling quickly back under the covers.

I'm surrounded by beauty, he thought.

They made love again once before sunrise and once after; then Wylie got the fire going for coffee. Later they took the fishing rods and meandered down to Breakfast Creek arm in arm, like adolescents. Wylie rigged a short one-weight fly rod and showed April how to flick out the fly and let the riffle take it along. He used his two-weight with a black ant pattern. The brook trout were famished, as always, and they put back the small ones and in an hour had enough for breakfast.

*   *   *

Before lunch, they made two runs down Madman, then ate and slept like the dead in the MPP, then made another two runs before sunset.

Near sundown, they sat on rocks at the top of Madman, considering separately the vastness around them, snowshoes strapped to their backs and ready to go. Wylie tried to admit his emotions in small quantities because they were far from normal for him. The setting sun burnished the western face of the mountains above them with a light promising darkness.

“I've never boarded at night without lights,” she said.

“You know Madman by now. Be the snow.”

“I'm happy, Wylie. A new kind of happy. All I can think about is this snow, and that I don't have to compete on it. And that I've got this man who is my secret and friend. And this hidden place. I'm not April Holly wearing a medal. Or April Holly for Salonne. I'm April Holly doing what I love to do.”

“I like that.”

“Or maybe I'm just April Holly, loved into idiocy by a large bearded love bear.”

“I like that, too.”

“Dark enough yet?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have to go back?”

“We've got provisions for four more days.”

“And guests arriving tomorrow.”

“You'll like Adam and Teresa.”

“I want to put out the No Vacancy sign. Do you have one?”

“We could carve one up.”

“God knows what they'll think of me. But I have one more day of invisibility with my secret mountain man. I'm going to devour it.”

“Ready? I'll lead this time.”

“I want to lead.”

“Madman is all yours, April.”

*   *   *

The next day—Wylie Welborn's twenty-sixth birthday—was the best birthday of his life. He and April skied and napped and cooked lunch. They hiked a steep escarpment and sunned themselves on a flat boulder. By the time they came back to the MPP, Adam and Teresa had made camp. They sat under the bear-foiling lodgepole pine, each with a fat book open. It was still warm for fall, but when the sun went down, the temperature fell like a dropped rock.

That evening, Adam cooked ribs and corn he'd brought up from Bishop, and Teresa made drinks, and Wylie and April built a fire and kept it fed. They ate and talked late around the fire and had birthday cake made by Teresa. At one point, pleasantly drunk and feeling less weighted than he had felt in his adult life, Wylie looked at April. He smiled at her across the rippling flames and she smiled back. He saw otherness and strength and beauty and he marveled that two of the same species could be so different. He felt nothing to hide. He wanted to declare.

“Wylie,” said Adam. “I saw two of your runs down Madman today. You looked fast and relaxed. If you win the Mammoth Cup, that's an awfully good beginning and a pass to Aspen for the X Games. I'm offering to send you there, then on to Europe for the FIS World Cup tour if you can make that cut. And, of course, the spring qualifiers back stateside, for Olympic selections. There's no use getting ahead of ourselves, but I want you to know that money won't be a problem for any of that. Happy birthday. I've made the same offer to Sky, of course. Just so it's all on the up-and-up.”

Wylie had to tell himself that he'd heard the words, not dreamed them. Or conjured them in a bourbon haze. He felt April's hand squeeze his leg. He was aware of Adam and Teresa watching, their eyes four distant orange windows. And he thought, This is what it is to be in love, and to have a living father who is well pleased by you. “Honored, Grandpa.”

*   *   *

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked.

“I'm sure.”