As Sean fooled around, registering with a tolerant patroller, two guys in Mambo suits slid past on Volkl P9s. They looked like pretty hot skiers. Sean turned to smile at them, maybe give them an O with his thumb and forefinger to let them know he was part of the brotherhood of hot skiers too.
The older guy looked back impassively. ‘Fun-run, huh? Guess that’s goin’ to feature big in the next Greg Stump video.’
His streamlined companion laughed and they slid past, making sure the costumed contestants, but not the patrollers, saw them when they slid under the ski-trail tape and jumped off the cornice.
Sean squirmed with embarrassment. It had been his idea in the bar last night to enter this dumb thing. Thought it would be a hoot. But the old crumblies took it seriously, and the cool guy was right. This was for kids. ‘I’m not going to wear a dumb piece of cloth with a number,’ whined Sean to Barney the clown, who had lost the bindings war and was trying to step back into his ski with a boot clogged with snow.
‘So don’t wear it, man. You won’t win anyhow. You ski like a girl.’
Sean spat, squinting towards the cornice. ‘Yeah?’
Barney looked where Sean was looking and understood. They checked out the patroller, busy putting a bib on a seven-year-old dressed as a witch, and pushed forward towards the tape. Beneath them, a double black diamond mogul field stretched all the way to the foot of Beaver, running parallel to the easy green trail. It was a bitch of a run. Bumps as hard as rocks, narrow and hemmed in on both sides by trees that kept its challenge out of the sight of the beginners on the green trail. The fun-run wasn’t taking them anywhere near it and it had been closed to stop the kids slipping in by mistake on their way to the start of the big safe highway down the hill. But it was nothing they couldn’t handle. Sean looked at the tracks of the two guys who’d just leapt in there, snaking through the bumps in perfect semi-circles, then glanced across at his clown companion.
‘Let’s do it.’
They slid beneath the tape and dropped in.
Barney whooped and absorbed the first big bump with a grunt, losing it slightly but recovering in time to make a series of three small turns that checked his speed. The Indian chief on his heels was going for it in a big way. He wanted those guys to see him. He wasn’t a soft kid. He could ski the bumps like the best of them, even in this crazy cheap head-dress Shelly had got for him. He jumped off the top of the first bump and overtook Barney on the next, finding time in the air over the next to give him the finger.
Barney was hot on his heels, laughing and shouting, ‘I’m there, man! I’m there!’
Sean misread the next bump and it threw his weight back. His thighs screamed with the effort of recovery but it gave Barney the time he needed and put him ahead. They were half-way down the trail now, the Beaver Lodge and chairlift in sight in the narrow gap between the pines. Barney sliced on ahead and then Sean caught an edge. It was all over. He flew over the top of his skis, arms out like a genuine priest giving benediction, landing on his chin with a dull wet thud, and carried on tumbling sideways into the trees. Sean’s world went white, sharp and ice-cold; he gasped for breath as the fall winded him, punching the air from his lungs with a frozen fist.
The fall was short but violent, and Barney was gone as Sean finally came to a gasping, groaning stop between two tall pines well off the trail.
‘Jesus Christ!’ He groaned and slowly and methodically checked that his limbs were all pointing the right way. Nothing broken. No harm done. He wiped his snow-covered face and started to laugh, lying where he came to rest, in a huge drift beneath the tree. Sean was thankful he was right in amongst the trees, but not wrapped round one with his skull smashed in. Lucky, lucky, lucky. No one would see him here. Not even if they were skiing past. The humiliation of one of those guys popping their heads over him and asking if he was all right would be more than he could bear. He was safe here. He pushed himself up on one elbow and started to brush the snow from his chest.
Around him were all the sights and sounds of normality, the melancholy creaking and banging of the Beaver-chair twenty yards away on the other side of these trees and the low voices of people talking on that chair. The pines above him swayed in a light wind and far away shrieks of laughter accompanied someone wiping out and enjoying it. Everything as it should be.
He laughed at his plight, and shook his head, thinking of the tale he would have for the guys.
And then behind him, in the trees, a dry rustling sound.
He swung round to locate it and the feathers of his broken head-dress turned with him, like the plumage of a wounded and frightened bird. His eyes widened, and the metallic taste of adrenalin coated the inside of his mouth as he distended it to make a sound that it had never made before.
The Beaver-chair was noisy, all right. So noisy that the people swinging up the hill on the gunmetal-grey seats didn’t hear Sean Bradford.
Even though when Sean’s screaming started, he screamed for at least half a minute until the biological machinery enabling his scream was silenced forever.
The big man from New York in a lemon yellow one-piece ski-suit was not pleased that the chairlift station was unattended. He turned to his wife snowploughing to a halt behind him with their daughter and made a face. ‘Guess they don’t go big on safety or service in Canada.’
He unhooked his poles from two fat wrists and ushered his equally fat, sullen daughter towards the clanking chairs, turning solemnly on their own round the pylon and jerking empty back up the hill. The tiny wooden hut was deserted. There was no one around at all. No one to shovel the snow onto the mounting platform. No one to wipe the snow from the seats. No one to say have a nice day and ski safe.
‘I tell you, Marsha, if any of us fall getting on this contraption I’ll sue the balls off this resort.’
Marsha nodded in agreement, too tired from following her portly partner around the mountain all day to argue or disagree. She and her daughter stepped herring-bone fashion, clumsily like ducks, up to the snow-covered wooden plank that was the primitive mounting platform. Heads turned to look behind them, they waited for the next chair to scoop them up.
It did so without incident, and the father slid forward to catch the next one.
Out of the trees a man in a Silver Ski Company jacket stumbled towards the station. The father stepped back from the chair and let it go. He had a few words to say to this guy all right.
Sam Hunt gasped as he made it to the snow fence surrounding the hut, his head still spinning, his vision trying to sort itself out as his eyes swivelled in their sockets. He was going crazy. He didn’t even remember blacking out this time. Just waking up staring at the odd shapes of sky made by the gaps in the tree-tops above him. The branches had swayed and bowed, changing those shapes of sky for a least a minute, accompanied by Sam’s breathing and the sound in his ears of blood coursing round his body, before he had realized that he was on his back in the snow, in the trees above the Beaver chairlift station.
Sam had felt like screaming. He had sat up and looked wildly around him as though something might be waiting for him to stir. But he had been alone. Alone and cold.
He had stood up with difficulty in the thick drift and stumbled towards his station, tripping and being whipped by low branches as he’d waded through the snow-covered deadfall to where he was last conscious. When he saw the chairlift station and its one customer in a yellow suit, his vision was still swimming, and his heart was battering in his chest.
The New Yorker looked at this man with distaste. An Indian. He might have known. He leaned on his pole and waited for the figure to reach the place he was paid to be. When Sam got there, his line of travel heading for the hut, a lemon-yellow arm with a pole barred his way.
‘Hey, buddy. Don’t you think you should shut the chair down if you want to take a leak?’
Sam stopped and looked into the man’s face. Cold grey eyes looked back, full of contempt and aggression.
Sam