her voice, and if the intention by doing so was to paper over the cracks, it was wasted.
‘Look, all I’m saying is that I know how you people must feel. I’m a woman. I get shit on too.’
Sam looked into his soda like there was something dead in there. ‘I can believe that. The last part anyway.’
Marty wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Okay, time we were hitting the road. Listen, it was real nice meeting you. We’re staying with Gerry and Ann another week. Maybe we can all ski together.’
Katie was still looking at Sam. She slipped a hand beneath the table and wound her fingers between his. ‘Yeah. That’d be neat. I don’t know if we can take time off, but if we can, sure.’
Sam looked across at Claire. ‘If we can’t, I sure look forward to sweeping the snow off your car.’
Marty stood up, and the others followed his example, scraping their chairs on the wooden floor, and fussing over their possessions. Marty moved round the table, kissed Katie and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, Sam. Lighten up. Everyone’s a little gassed.’
Sam nodded solemnly.
There were polite noises made and Katie herded everyone out without the assistance of her husband who remained seated, staring into the middle of the abandoned table. He heard the door close and their footsteps crunching in the drive, and was aware of Katie standing behind him, leaning against the doorframe.
‘She was a jerk. Wasn’t it enough to just let her be one and leave it at that?’
‘Should have been.’
Katie pulled up a chair beside him and put her head on his shoulder. He slipped his arm round her.
‘I didn’t even get to serve the after-dinner mints.’
‘I should do it for a living, huh? Dinner parties cleared in minutes. Call Freephone 0800 Sam Hunt.’
‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
Sam sighed. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been kind of cranky all day.’
Katie undid the top three buttons of Sam’s silk shirt, ran her hand over the bone amulet he wore round his neck on a leather thong, and let her hand rest on his warm belly.
‘In fact cancel cranky. Replace with asshole.’
‘Can I help?’
He smiled down at the blue eyes in her pale oval face; the face of a Victorian china doll.
‘Sure. You can load the dishwasher.’
She guffawed and bit his shoulder. He lifted her head and kissed her small rosy mouth.
When Sam and Katie Hunt got to bed an hour later the dishwasher was still empty. The cushions on the sofa however, were going to need some recovery time.
Billy heard his parents climb the stairs and lay awake in the dark listening to their hushed voices as they turned off the hall lights.
His forehead was beaded with sweat and his hands were fists, clenching and unclenching across his chest. He knew he’d had a bad dream, nothing more, but the taste of it was still with him. Lying awake now, he wondered why he didn’t call out to his parents, bring them into his room to sit on his bed and talk to him in calm voices. But he didn’t want to see his parents right now. He wanted to see Bart. The wolf had told him to trust Bart, but Bart was in the yard, banished nightly from the house. Billy waited until he heard Sam and Katie’s door close gently. He gave it a minute and then reached out and turned on his bedside light.
He paused to see if the light from his room would bring an enquiry from next door, and when it didn’t he slipped out of bed and pulled on his plaid jacket.
Finding a torch in the toy box and opening his door carefully, Billy picked his way downstairs and through the house to the kitchen door by the light of the slim beam.
The sky was clear outside, a million stars glittering behind the black jagged silhouette of the mountains. Bart was standing outside his kennel, ears high, nostrils blowing clouds of vapour, face staring towards Wolf Mountain. There was only a tiny twitch of recognition and a small noise from the back of the animal’s throat when Billy knelt beside him and put his arms round Bart’s thick spiky coat.
Boy and dog looked out towards the mountain. Upstairs man, woman and child slept.
Lenny Sadowitz shifted a rogue piece of gum from between his cheek and back teeth before squinting up at the mountain, preparing to holler at his colleague.
‘C’mon, Jim. I got a life to lead!’
The word lead bounced off the rock, returning to his ears in a thin piping voice barely recognizable as his own. He watched his breath swirl in front of him, blew a few rings of frozen air, sucked the cold between his teeth and continued to chew. He leaned forward on the handlebars of the snow cat and watched his companion’s silhouette move silently between the other cat and the unexploded charge he was investigating.
Lenny hated being on avalanche rota. What was the point of being a ski patroller if you ended up miles away from the action on the trails, stuck in godforsaken gullies like this one with as much chance of getting some skiing in as Jim had of pulling that dreamboat waitress in T.J.’s Diner?
Having a white cross on your back impressed the public. It did nothing for the coyotes and the whiskeyjacks, and that was all there was for company in this part of the mountain.
This whole exercise was getting on Lenny’s tits. Why they should have to avalanche the cliffs on Wolf was anyone’s guess. If the loading slopes were a risk to the railroad, then the frigging railroad workers should come up here and blast them themselves. Lenny sure didn’t recall railroad maintenance as part of his job description when he signed up as a patroller.
He glared down the cliff at the thin track just visible between the tunnel mouths, and expelled a white globe of spit in its direction.
Lenny pushed his Ray-Bans up onto his forehead, narrowed his eyes and looked back up at his partner with disgust. The rule was that unexploded avalanche bombs get their location noted and then stay put until spring, when the patrollers simply wander over and pick them up out of the grass. Digging around in eight feet of powder for something the size of a shoe box is not a sensible course of action, especially when that shoe box could just blow your legs off. Not good enough for Jim. He knew where the bomb was and he was damned if he was going to let it lie there until the snows melted.
This was the second bitching day they’d been at this. Jim had thrown the charge yesterday, delighting in the formality of shouting fire in the hole! and then was puzzled and disappointed by its failure to detonate. He knew any danger of it exploding now was nil.
No, stubborn curiosity and a determination to put his house in order were the factors that made Jim decide to go and fetch that wayward bomb, before they carried on with their legitimate day’s work, to blast the bollocks out of the double black diamond run down Spangle Couloir. That’s where Lenny wanted to be, and that’s where Jim was stopping him being.
Jim’s fascination with explosives made Lenny despise him more. Jim was the incendiary expert in the resort but he was a pig on skis. Lenny and the two other guys who took turns to help out ‘lanching in the high season, got all the revenge they needed for being pulled off the trails to do this shit by scoring with any girl Jim looked at sideways. Girls don’t care much about dynamite when they get a chance of a guy with a tan and thighs like iron.
‘Aw Christ. What is he doing up there?’
Lenny got off the snow cat, sinking up to his knees in the soft snow, and cupped his gloved hands to a mouth ringed with white lip salve. ‘Jimbo! I’m losing toes down here. Get a fuckin’ move on!’
He