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It was only when he didn’t show up at Doc’s Rail Jam that the truth began to sink in. Then the beer started flowing, which smeared the details of any concern that anybody might have still had. So in the end, when Anthony actually showed up in the flesh, the welcome was huge and sodden and overwhelming.

A handful of guys lifted him up onto their shoulders and carried him to the center of the yard, where the two ramps came together under the lights. They stumbled some on the ice and the beer slush, but nobody went down. From his kingly perch on their shoulders, Anthony calmed the crowd, threw back his head, and told his story.

He said that the riding over there was awesome, although not for everybody.

He confessed to having gotten a little bit turned around when he came to a flat spot, and had to pull his left foot out of the binding and skid along on one leg for a while. He confessed further to having gotten tired from the slog (he blamed it on the altitude, and nobody challenged him on it, even though Spruce Peak had a total vertical drop of just under 2,000 feet, which made it no Everest). He also confessed to having sat down on an exposed ledge after a while and fired up some weed and maybe kind of forgotten which way he was supposed to be going by the time he was through. This produced a great cheer from the crowd.

Somebody brought him a beer. He drank it fast, sloshing only a little of it on the shoulders of the guys who were keeping him aloft. They cursed and howled and shook their fists but he kept on with his story.

He said he’d finished his smoke and set off down a little ravine at the end of the flat spot, trying to keep himself oriented toward the front side of the mountain, but what must have happened is that the ravine twisted one way and another until he was facing the back side and didn’t even know it. So down he went. He said he didn’t see any signs of a familiar trail or even so much as a lift pylon, but he wasn’t worried. He traversed a lot, though, trying not to put too much vertical behind him before he ran into the safety of a groomed trail. The longest time went by. Nothing. He tried his cell phone. Nothing. Rather than keep going down he unclipped one boot and skated for a while across the face of the mountain just as straight as he could, looking downward for signs of the familiar. After a while he unclipped the other boot, put the board over his shoulder, and headed up, even though he knew he couldn’t keep climbing in the deep snow for long.

At the suggestion of such hard labor somebody asked if he could use another beer, and he didn’t deny it. The other guys put him down before it could be delivered, rather than risk being spilled on again.

Anthony’s salvation arrived just as the beer did. He told about coming to a clearing from where he could see something he’d never noticed from the mountain: the top of a little wobbly metal windmill, maybe a couple hundred yards below where he stood and off to the left. Wind power meant civilization, he figured, so he calculated its location and set out for it. It disappeared as soon as he got back down into the trees but he kept his wits about him and kept going. Soon something materialized out of the woods. Not the windmill—it turned out he’d overshot that—but a cabin. A little house, with a plowed road up to it and everything. A light on in one of the windows and the television going and smoke coming out of the chimney. He was definitely not on the front side anymore—any moron could see that—but he was saved.

He told how he whooped and shot down the rest of the way, zooming under low-hanging tree limbs and jumping over big holes in the snow that would have eaten a lesser man alive—most of the people in the crowd laughed at this, knowing Anthony’s abilities—and he told of how he flew over the bank that the snowplow had built up and sailed out over the lane, then skimmed the top of the bank on the opposite side and pulled a one-eighty with a Miller flip and landed practically on the guy’s doorstep.

The applause in the yard behind Doc’s was deafening.

Anthony told how the old guy in the cabin sure took his own sweet time coming to the door. The television was on inside like he said and the volume was cranked all the way up and he figured maybe whoever was in there couldn’t hear him over the noise of it. So he knocked louder. There was a button for a bell but it didn’t make any sound that he could hear so he just kept hammering on the door. He hollered a couple of times, too.
Hello,
like you’ll say.
Anybody home?
like you’ll say, even though you know somebody’s home on account of the television’s on.

When nobody came he thought about giving up and walking down the plowed road to the bottom of the mountain and just getting it over with, but he didn’t because who knew where he’d end up? Some back road somewhere on the far side of the mountain, ten or fifteen miles away from civilization. No cars on it and no chance of thumbing a ride anywhere. He sure as hell wasn’t climbing back up to the peak and trying again. Not with this television on right here and the smoke coming out of the chimney. Not with civilization right at his fingertips.

He told of how he kicked at the door a couple of times and how that knocked the snow off his boots in clumps. He described, complete with elaborate body language, how he nearly lost his footing a couple of times on the slick floorboards, and how the old guy finally got off his ass and turned down the television and came creeping over to the door. He took his own sweet time and came slow, and he acted all suspicious when he got there. There was a curtain over the glass and he slid it open just the slightest bit like whoever was knocking was some kind of burglar or serial killer or whatever. Like it was the secret police come to haul him away. Like it was a freaking grizzly bear on the loose. Did they have grizzly bears around here? Anthony guessed they did. No wonder the old guy was spooked. He didn’t get a lot of visitors up there, that was for sure.

The crowd at Rail Jam Night was starting to lose interest on account of the long subplot about the old guy, and a couple of boarders had begun climbing the backside of the ramps to get on with their runs, so Anthony cut to the good part. How the old dude let him in and smelled grass on him and asked if he had any to spare. Anthony said sure he did, sure as hell he had some, but he wasn’t giving it away. He’d swap some, though, for a ride back to town. That’s what he’d do. No prob with that. At which the dude bounced his old head up and down and said sure, sure, he could arrange a ride. There was a snowmobile in the shed out back and they’d take that. Now where was the reefer? That’s what he called it.
Reefer.

Anthony’s cell phone didn’t work in the cabin and the old guy didn’t want him using the phone for whatever reason so he didn’t call anybody to let them know he was safe. Plus there was the reefer, which was distracting, and a little something else that the old guy had tucked away somewhere. Anthony didn’t want to say exactly what that little something else was, but he sniffed and ran his mitten across his upper lip enough to give people the idea. It was either that or his nose was running thanks to the cold, but it was probably what everybody figured it was.

Anyhow they blew away most of the afternoon watching television and eventually they went out the back door, fired up the snowmobile, and took it down the mountain to the main road. There were tracks in the fields parallel to the road and they stayed in those. The old guy had a big heavy jacket with a hood snugged tight around his face and Anthony pulled his goggles down because the cold wind made his eyes water. They didn’t go all the way to the mountain base but they got close enough. The old dude left him in the field across from the parking lot at Judge Roy Beans. He wouldn’t go any closer. It was like he was a vampire or something. The old guy said he was in a hurry to get home before the light died and he’d have trouble finding his way. He was fumbling with the switch for the headlight on the snowmobile while Anthony got off and freed up his board, and before Anthony got a chance to thank him for the lift, he got it working and roared off. Anthony had to walk all the way back up here and boy oh boy he’d worked up a thirst. He sure could use another beer if nobody minded—and nobody did.

THIRTY-TWO

According to conventional wisdom, if you wanted to go to the movies in Vermont, you had to go to New Hampshire.

Although that may not have been entirely true, it wasn’t far off. There was a movie theater forty-five minutes away in Rutland, after all. But Stacey had gone there once and it was shabby and smelly and her feet kept getting stuck to the floor. The whole experience felt like movie night in prison. They might as well have tacked a bedsheet to the wall and made everybody sit on wooden benches. Rumor had it that there was a theater in Bennington (an hour away) and another in Springfield (an hour away in a different direction), but the odds of their being any better didn’t strike Stacey as all that great.

She hadn’t been a huge moviegoer when she’d lived in Boston, but it was nice to go sometimes and she missed it a little, especially since she didn’t have a television of her own and had to watch with the whole Ramsey family. Which wasn’t that bad or anything, they made her feel perfectly welcome and all, but still. So when Chip invited her to the movies, she didn’t quite know what to think. It turned out to be a Harper Stone film festival, which was an even bigger throwback to the old days before multiplexes and stadium seating. “Where is it?” she asked him, expecting the worst.

“Up in Woodstock,” he said, “at the town hall. They show movies on the weekends, since there’s nowhere else to go.”

Stacey brightened. “As a public service,” she said. She hadn’t yet made it up to Woodstock, but everyone said it was a lovely little classic Vermont village—nothing at all like this grim old has-been mill town where she’d found herself, a place that sidled up to Spruce Peak as if it were tugging on its coatsleeve, looking for a handout.

“I guess that’s the general idea,” Chip said. “There’s a lot of money in Woodstock. Permanent money and tourist money both. They’ve got a farmers’ market up there that’s never had a farmer anywhere near it, I’ll tell you that. All this imported stuff from Europe and places. Everything costs an arm and a leg.”

“You know how it is with some people. The more they spend the better they feel.” She was thinking of Brian.

“Tell me about it.” He was thinking of his parents.

*   *   *

They went up early and ate good burgers at a little place on the corner, and when that didn’t take up much time and there was still an hour or so before the movie started they walked the streets of the village. The sidewalks were busy and the stores were all open late, and the trees were lit with white lights that twinkled through thin branches. It felt to Stacey like the kind of moment where people in their situation might be walking arm in arm or hand in hand—but they didn’t, and that was all right, too.

Chip was correct: There was definitely money in Woodstock, big-time. The houses and storefronts were immaculate, for one thing. But there was more to it than that. It was as if the village fathers had long ago passed an ordinance that said you had to keep your place not just perfectly maintained—the paint fresh, the brickwork pointed, and the brass on every metal surface polished to a high sheen that glowed even in the faint light of those tiny twinkling Christmas bulbs—but that you actually had to strive for and achieve a certain measurable level of
charm.
How was that possible? What was it that caused a town like this to turn itself into something that Walt Disney might have billed as Vermontland?

Competition, Stacey figured. Competition and pride, if you kept in mind that pride was one of the seven deadly sins. The more they walked down the streets and lanes of Woodstock, the more she was sure of it. The library was a showplace. The covered bridge that spanned the river, lit with a pale white disk of a moon, looked like a painting Norman Rockwell had rejected for being too cute. The tourist places—a couple of inns and a handful of B and Bs and one little motel—were all lovely, but they paled in comparison to the places where regular people lived, at least in tiny ways. A wooden doorstep with scuffed paint. The hinge of a shutter that had somehow dripped a little rust. In other words, it looked like the people in this town who didn’t
need
to make their places gleam were spending more time and money on it than the people who
did.
It was pride and competition, all right. Pride and competition and out-of-town money.

She didn’t know what to expect from the movies at the town hall. Would it be the real thing, just a little village up here in the woods making its best effort to bring in a little bit of culture? Or might it go the other way, and be just a bunch of rich people from New York amusing themselves? She floated both of these ideas to Chip. He thought for a minute and then laughed. “You’ve got me,” he said. “My guess is it’s a bunch of rich people from New York, doing such a good job of pretending to be the real thing that we won’t be able to tell the difference.”

“Oh, great,” said Stacey.

“Or else a little of both, and we’ll have to figure out who’s on which side.”

“No problem,” she said.

There was a line of people waiting outside the town hall, and once they got inside there was hardly a seat left. Some folks seemed to have programs, just single sheets of paper folded in half the short way, but Stacey couldn’t manage to get her hands on one. She was curious, though. By the look of the technology, there was grant money somewhere behind this operation. She thought she’d like to see who was supporting it.

The room echoed with a murmur of hushed voices and a low rumble of boots on hardwood, all of which came to a stop when a tiny white-haired woman approached a podium alongside the screen. She was no taller than a fourth-grader, thin verging on disappearance, and dressed in an elevated version of the Vermont sweater-and-corduroy aesthetic.

Stacey leaned toward Chip. “Imported money.”

“I’m withholding judgment.”

“My bet’s on the table. You know what I think.”

The tiny old woman climbed to the podium, took the microphone in both hands, and tipped it downward, aiming it toward her upturned face.