Crazy Blood (6 page)

He stopped at the railing, breathing hard, and his mother swooshed to a stop beside him. “You might have to take things up a notch to win the cup.”

“Roger that.”

“You still ski beautifully.”

“It's still inside me. Somewhere.”

“How come you decided to enter the race?”

Wylie thought a moment. “To honor Robert and shut up Sky.”

“Is it more to you than a simple grudge match?”

“I think so.”

“You know the Carsons and us are fine. Finally. There's nothing that needs settling anymore. It's all over.”

“It doesn't feel over to me. It's us and them, and most of them like it that way. It pisses me off.”

“Oh, Wylie—I forgot most of that years ago. I had to. When you were gone, Sky seemed to get smaller and the others less obnoxious. But now, with the Mammoth Cup, there's a new … conflict.”

“I'm going to win that race, Mom.”

“It certainly has the town talking. I heard two customers making a bet on it this morning. Guys from San Francisco—bet each other five thousand bucks. One for you and the other for Sky.”

“I'll bet on me.”

“For myself, Wylie? I'd be happy for you to win. But I'm even happier that you're here. I know these last five years have been, well, challenging. I know you've seen good and bad, and I'd like to hear about some of that, when you're ready. But there's one thing I want you to know: If this little town gets to feel too little, or if for any reason you want to leave and go to a bigger world, I've got your back. I always saw you in the world, Wylie. Not necessarily in Mammoth Lakes, population eight thousand four hundred and thirty-four.”

“I've got your back, too, Mom. And the girls'. I heard about Gargantua. All the stuff they're pulling on you.”

“You are not responsible for us.”

“I disagree with that.”

“I want you to be free. To have something of your own.”

“I'm getting something of my own, Mom. Jesse Little Chief and I are going to build a place for me to live. A kind of trailer I designed.”

“Oh?”

“I drew up some plans last month at the monastery in Germany. A good idea—you'll like it. I got just enough money to get it started.”

“Do what you need to do. Remember when we used to ski just to ski? Because it was fun?”

Wylie nodded. “Those were the days.”

The PA system announced last lift. Wylie and his mother shoved off for the line, but it wasn't much of a line at all, just three adolescent diehards elbowing each other for position on the chair, and a young attendant with a sunburned face and her hair spilling from her cap, awaiting them with a smile.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

The next day, after six hours at Let It Bean, then splitting another cord of wood, Wylie drove down the mountain toward Bishop. It was forty-five miles south, a metropolis even smaller than Mammoth Lakes. Once he got past Crowley Lake, the temperature rose ten degrees. His shoulder and back muscles hummed from the splitting and his hands still buzzed from the vibration of the sledgehammer handle.

A slight smile crossed his face as he looked out at Round Valley, one of his several favorite places in the Sierras. The mountains above the valley loomed high in the west above Highway 395, eight thousand vertical feet of gray rock. The valley itself began to take shape at around six thousand feet, widening and pitching down to form a vast swale, dizzyingly steep. Looking out at it, Round Valley sucked away at his sense of balance the same way the mountains of Afghanistan had. The valley lowered and spread toward the highway, laced by streams and dirt roads, dotted with cattle and willows and black cottonwoods, some of the land planted with hay or alfalfa.

Folded in his coat pocket were Wylie's sketches from the Tegernsee monastery and pretty much his entire savings from cheap living after the war—hopefully enough to get Jesse Little Chief going on the project. He'd done the sketches during the long, chill December nights at the eighth-century Benedictine site, which had been destroyed by the Magyars in the tenth century, then purchased nine centuries later by Maximilian I, who used it as a summer home. To Wylie, the monastery was surreal, scattered by time, ancient but modern, utopian and penal, seemingly part of another world.

In the Tegernsee dorms, the Europeans talked politics, the Irish argued, the Asians Skyped, the Americans listened to music and talked movies, and everyone drank the Tegernsee Spezial beer. It was here that Wylie had first sketched out his first rough design for the module, personal, portable, an idea he got in Kandahar. The MPP grew out of his thought that a self-contained, bulletproof, personal portable environment would naturally be great for war, but a peacetime version would be pretty darned good, too. Something like a tortoise's shell, but stronger. But he wanted it to be stylish, too. He went through many drafts to get a passable approximation, confident that if he ever made it home, Jesse Little Chief—a full-blooded Paiute, schoolmate, platoon buddy, and carpenter supreme—could pull off Wylie's elegant, almost nautical design.

The module was to be made mostly of wood, and it would be towed behind Wylie's truck. It would shelter two persons from extreme Sierra conditions, contain a small kitchen and bath, and have room for provisions, tools, ski equipment, and fishing gear. It would be roughly fourteen feet long and six feet four inches high. One axle, two tires. The general shape of the MPP was a gently rounded rectangle, like an unbaked loaf of bread.

*   *   *

“You should just call it a trailer, because that's what it is,” said Jesse. He was a big man with shaggy black hair, a plate-round face, and still black eyes. He wore shorts past his knees, work boots, and a lined denim jacket against the January cold. They stood in his workshop, a metal building that shared the lot with Jesse's double-wide. Jesse lived north of Bishop, near the Paiute Palace casino and gas station—reservation land rich in poor Indians. Beyond the roll-up door of the workshop, the sun was low and the mountains bathed in wholly orange light. “Straight right angles would save you money.”

“But I want it to be…”

“Difficult?”

“Unusual.”

“Gremlins and Pacers were unusual. Why not just buy a good camper?”

Wylie absorbed this truth but said nothing.

Jesse grunted. Then he spread out the drawings on a workbench and set cans of nails on the corners to keep them down. He ran a big finger along the curving slopes of the trailer. “Teak and maple weather good. I could weld a sloping frame, then notch and groove the planks for the curves you want. That marine hatch is sweet—views and ventilation.”

“I'd hoped you'd like it.”

“Oh, I like it. The whole design. But we could just do the smart thing, go with right angles and save you some bucks.”

Wylie nodded, picturing the MPP as a simple rectangle. Nothing wrong with that, he thought, but … but he had been trying so hard to find his own true shape—through racing, nature, reading, war, and travel. He wanted to fill his shape and fill it honestly. The idea of a
rectangular
trailer made him feel confined and ordinary. He wondered how he had become this fussy. Was he getting old? “For an Indian, you sure are sober-minded.”

“Speaking of that, do you still enjoy a drink from time to time?”

“It's been a while.”

“Let's have a drink and talk about this some more.”

They drove to the liquor store for beer and bourbon, steaks and potatoes, ready-made salad, Funyons, lotto tickets, and cigars. They bought enough food for Jesse's little sister, Jolene, and her friend. Jesse clapped the shoulder of the smaller man and they headed across the parking lot.

“Good to see you again, Wyles.”

*   *   *

Jolene and her friend Tonya took over the second Wylie and Jesse walked into the house. Music was playing. The girls had dressed nicely, done their hair, and put on scent. Wylie felt as if he'd walked into a stage play. Jolene took the two bags that he held, pecked him on the cheek, and gave him an eyelash bat straight out of old Hollywood. “Jolene.”

“You still remind me of a bear. Like your mom used to call you.”

“It's good to be remembered.”

“Look at me. I got beautiful.”

“You did.”

“I'm eighteen now, Wylie. Old enough to enter into a contract legally! You remember Tonya, but hopefully me more.”

Tonya shook his hand matter-of-factly. Jesse looked at Wylie over the top of the open refrigerator, shaking his big head. Wylie grabbed two beers and Jesse found two shot glasses far back in one of the kitchen cabinets, slid the bourbon under one arm, and led the way back out to the shop.

*   *   *

At the workbench, Jesse placed Wylie's small drawings aside and positioned a large desk blotter of graph paper before them. He stripped off the corner-curled, doodle-choked top sheet and fished a thick carpenter's pencil from a coffee can filled with them. They touched beer bottles and drank.

Wylie loved the way the man drew so effortlessly and simply, as if his hand had eyes and a brain in it. Minutes later, Wylie beheld a rotated view of the MPP. The trailer was simpler and better than he himself had imagined—a graceful container with rounded transitions. It looked to be of one piece rather than pieces connected. Two portholes instead of one. And double doors for more and easier access.

“Beauty itself, Jesse.”

“A bitch to build. What's your time line?”

“I want it badly. Spring? Early summer?”

Jesse studied him, nodding. “You specified an interior for two. Who's the lucky lady?”

“Can you build me one of those, too?”

“Just so you know, Jolene turns seventeen next month.” Wylie nodded. “Tonya's even younger. I worry about them. You're only a kid once.… Look, I'll use scrap and salvage where I can, keep the cost down. Start with a junked trailer chassis, but a good one. I'll build this thing to last.”

Wylie brought the wad of bills from the pocket of his coat. “Here's two grand down. I lived cheap and saved some.”

*   *   *

They barbecued in the dirt yard between the double-wide and the haggard barbed-wire fence that marked the property line. The smoke rose into the cold night air and the Sierras hovered high and pale in the west. The stars were clear and close. Wylie refilled the shot glasses while Jesse prodded each steak with the tongs. “I should have stuck with you after the war,” Jesse said. “Should have traveled with you. I regret that now.”

“You were right to come home when you did.”

“Was I? I haven't accomplished one damned thing.” Jesse looked at him, stepped back from the billowing smoke, and sipped from his glass. “Thanks for the news from your journeys.”

“Least I could do.”

Jesse added some mesquite chips to the fire and looked at Wylie through the shifting billows of smoke. “But I'm glad we ended up fighting together. After barely knowing each other at school, what were the chances of that? One of those coincidences that change your life. But the war wasn't what I thought it was going to be. Maybe I got what I deserved, after drinking all night before and signing my life away the next day.”

“That's pretty much how I joined up, too. It's amazing just how dumb we were,” said Wylie.

“Really, it is. But we did it. We made it out alive.”

“When I hear about the war now, it doesn't sound like the war I was in.”

“No,” said Jesse. “Grunts shouldn't look back all the time like they do.”

“No, they shouldn't. We did what we did. I don't think about it, but I'll never forget it, either.”

Wylie and Jesse shifted positions again. The barbecue smoke seemed to follow them. “Have you ever told anybody?” Jesse asked in an offhand tone of voice.

Wylie was a fine compartmentalizer, adept at stuffing memories into imaginary boxes and setting them high on his mental shelves. There, they wouldn't fall down and hurt him, but he could find them if he needed them.

“Fuck no. I just say I was like a medic. That's good enough for most people.”

“Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. And it's true: You were an unofficial medic. You did some real good when the corpsmen weren't around. Best tourniquet guy in the company.” There was a long silence as Jesse prodded at the fire with the tongs. “I've told you a hundred times, but I want to thank you again for … sticking by me that day. It wasn't your idea, but you finished it for me. We could have got prison for that. It's a debt I'll always owe you.”

“Look. That skinny killed Sergeant Madigan and was trying to kill us, Jess. And we did what we did and it's not changeable. Sometimes when you cross a line, the line goes faint, or even away. That can be a good thing, as in our case.”

“Do you think we were right?”

“I don't think about it at all. Ever. Really. Except with you and some of the guys. I saw Lineberger and Carrasco in Germany. Lots of talk.”

“Still, thanks.”

“Jesus, Jesse—I've told you a hundred times not to thank me again, and here you go.”

“I'm just a dumb stubborn Paiute.”

“Me, too.”

“That's what got us into all this!”

They laughed at this as they always did and drank a shot of bourbon; then Wylie refilled the shot glasses again. Jesse pulled the steaks away from the flame and got the platter ready.

“How many countries did you end up seeing?”

“Fourteen.”

“Lots of ladies on your travels?”

“More or less.”

“French the prettiest?”

“Tied for first with all the others.”

“That's funny.”

“True, even.”

“And you always had mountains to ski?”

“Yeah. I never got that out of my system. I still haven't.”