In the Beauty of the Lilies (43 page)

“Haven’t yet. Not in twenty years. Manufacturer made the lift for this speed. Get your ass back loading those chairs.”

“Ease it down, or I’m reporting you.”

“I’m reporting
you
, DeMott.”

“That’s not my name, Tonto. I’m walking.”

The line was building up, and everybody, all these rosy-faced kids in their goggles and headbands, was listening. Clark in his stomach felt like backing down but his body kept stomping away, sloshing his wet-toed cowboy boots through the mashed potatoes here around the ski racks, toward the lodge. As he walked away he could hear Johnny Ponyfoot’s phone ringing—the operator at the top asking what the problem was—and he knew that by the time he got into the lodge management would have heard the Indian’s side of the story. It made him weary. His back ached, his toes felt cold and wet. Let these rube locals have their fucking mountain. Except where else did he have to go? The California he knew and loved had been for boys, a theme park for young people.

He asked Sissy Spacek, “Want something to eat, you? I’m getting squashed.”

“My name’s Hannah. Maybe you didn’t hear it the first time.”

“Hey, you, don’t start scolding. How’d I know you and me were going to wind up on a desert island? Suddenly everybody else is elsewhere. You can get a steak and fries here, or there’s Mexican down the road. New Age Vegetarian closes at nine, we’ve missed it.”

“Or we could get a bite back at my place.”

“Your place? Just like that?” They usually didn’t come this easy any more, not since AIDS.

“It’s a little more than half an hour from here, over in Lower Branch.”

“Lower Branch. That’s a place?”

“It was a fair-sized town, once.”

“One of those. Mined out.”

“It’s just over the line, in Burr County.”

“Jesus,” he said, not knowing why.

She told him, “All Colorado was called Jefferson once, you know that? The Territory of Jefferson. The miners got together and named it. But Congress said it was illegal, somehow. This was just before the Sand Creek Massacre.” She was a little schoolteacher, was what she was. Clark had been sitting here getting zoned out on margaritas and she’d been sipping away at a brandy glass full of soda water with a splash of cranberry. She’d be sober in bed and up for a great time and he’d be a flop. Ten years ago he wouldn’t have known that he could flop at this, too. He thought every time you scored was a success. But now it had become just one more of the things he was mediocre at.

“Always seemed funny to me,” he admitted, “this whole big territory he purchased and not a state in it named after him. Andrew Jefferson. No. Wait. Thomas. Right?”

Uncle Jared had been puzzled and philosophical over Clark’s latest scrap, up there in his corner office high in the lodge like a captain’s bridge, gazing out through plate glass at the white slope served by the triple chair, a profitable glaring expanse dotted by little swaying figures. They trickled down and like silver dollars out of a slot machine got fed right back in. This slope had been the beginning, back in the Forties—a simple T-bar, and then a single chair, before the big double
chairs were run up on giant tubular stanchions to within spitting distance of Bighorn’s needlelike summit. The runs down had such daredevil names as Smoking Gun, Shootout, Aces ’n’ Eights. Jared’s useless withered arm was safety-pinned in its flannel sleeve to the body of his fancy shirt, the white suede yoke set off by a waxy black string tie with a miniature ivory steer’s-skull pull. His old eyes, their color filmed over, picked up an icy green glint when he looked out at the snowfield—his sun-withered profile had an emerald chip in it. He turned and said, not unamiably, “Clark, you remind me of my little brother. Always fearful. Fearful of this, fearful of that. Feeling sorry for everybody, himself foremost. Why the fuck bother, was my way of looking at it. Worst case in any set of circumstances is that you die, and there’s some good to be said for that, when you get to be my age. So what went wrong this time?”

“Sir, Johnny Ponytail was operating that lift at an unsafe speed. I had three small children, one of them a girl, knocked down trying to mount a chair.”

“Your job was to see that didn’t happen. Johnny’s job was to move ’em along. Johnny does his job because he knows not everybody in these parts likes to hire a Ute, though the government says we should. They’re not considered dependable. I said, ‘Let’s see about that.’ Johnny’s been with me a good while. You have any problem with his being Native American?”

“Absolutely none.”

“They were here first. Don’t forget it. They sure as shit don’t.”

“No, sir. But—”

The shrivelled old man eased his weight off the desk, where he had perched on one buttock to gaze out at his mountain,
like a cook easing a heavy pot off a hot stove. “Do you still hear from Teddy much? How in hell
is
your granddaddy?”

“He doesn’t write me as often as he used to, but I would have heard from Mom of any change. He and Grandmom keep busy driving each other to the doctor and puttering in the greenhouse. One of Esther’s boys, Ira, really runs it now.”

“I tried to get Ted to come join me in New York—make him a junior partner in McMullen. Old Jimmy had us where we were cleaning up, the suckers were forcing money down our throats. My fool kid brother couldn’t take the pace and ran himself home to Emily.”

“I guess we can’t all be ambitious,” Clark said. Was this to be his punishment, hearing these old facts, worn smooth with the telling, told once again?

“I always liked Emily. Good-looking woman, never mind the leg. Your mother’s the one with the spunk, though.”

“She’s amazing,” Clark lamely contributed, while Jared, careful of the useless arm, eased the stiff weight of his skinny body into his old-fashioned wooden-armed swivel chair. “Even now,” Clark thought to add. “I talked to her on the phone a couple weeks ago and she’s all excited about marrying her new boyfriend, this Boston banker brought in to help run Columbia, now that Coca-Cola owns it. He’s married to somebody else, but that wouldn’t worry Mom.”

Jared mused, “Never could quite figure out where she got it. My dad didn’t have it, I know that. Born licked. Left us all in the lurch.” The old man’s eyes were looking at something Clark would never see, a vanished scene—a table, a room, frame windows giving on an uphill cobbled street holding trolley tracks—that took away the glint. He became impatient. “Son, you’re here on her say-so,” he told Clark. “Don’t think you’re better than our other hands.”

“I don’t, sir, it’s just—”

“If your damn granddaddy hadn’t been such a sissy he’d of gotten a piece of Bighorn, most likely. It was all Jim McMullen had to keep me quiet, when ’29 called all the margin players in, those we’d let get way over their heads. He thought it was worthless. He’d been stuck with it himself, as security. Eight thousand acres of emptiness, Lucille—that was my bride back then—”

“I know. My grandparents have shown me photographs.”

“Eight thousand acres of emptiness, she called it, and gave me a horselaugh. It didn’t help our marriage.”

“No, I guess it wouldn’t.”

“But I took it. The East was played out for me. There was silver and gold traces, still, in the old tunnels. The Utes who worked the old girl before were still around, or their kids were. Two dollars a day for crawling on your belly with a candle on your head didn’t look so bad then. Then the war made the copper worthwhile again. Best damn thing ever happened to this country, that war. God bless war, that’s what I’ve learned to think. Stirs it up, the whole kaboodle. The first one took something out of me, but the second put it back. We even reworked the old tailings, with the improved methods. Henderson still had the big smelting plant down on Cinder Creek, so the transport was economical; the rails had been laid. You have to smelt the copper-pyrite ores; copper oxide needs the leaching. Molybdenum was the coming thing, after the war. It used to be just a by-product; they dumped it out with the gangue. But a couple smart chums of mine from Denver saw there was going to be a market for recreation, and we gave the old girl’s guts a rest. There’s more good in her, though, for them that would have the desire and the new equipment. It was a slow start, with the skiing. To the ranchers
and apple farmers around here, snow had never been anything but a nuisance. Before the jets, you couldn’t expect to see Easterners. Some winters the snow wouldn’t show up, and others too much did. Before Sno-Cats came along in the Sixties there wasn’t any what you’d call grooming. We’d take a big two-man cross-cut saw out and saw off the tops of the moguls. Honest to God, saw ’em off like tree stumps! You could say it’s been one helluva ride. Ninety-three last January, and I can still remember my own name. Can even get it up on occasion, when I’m having a naughty dream.” He swivelled challengingly, with a brutal squeak of the rusty spring. “So you’re asking yourself why is he running off at the mouth? You’re kin, Clark. Kin’s strange stuff. Sticks to you for no good reason. I haven’t seen my brother since our mother’s funeral but if he walked through that door I’d do a jig standing on my head, that’s how pleased I’d be to see him. We were Paterson boys together, for a while. Needed to do things his own way, and that was just like me. That was the Wilmot style.” Gingerly Jared moved his butt forward to the edge of his chair, to give Clark the benefit of a filmed-over, colorless stare. His good hand on his knee was like tobacco leaves wrapped around chicken bones. It had a tremor the bad hand didn’t. “But, young fella, you got no right to disrupt an old man’s show. Learn to take orders, or it’s back to your momma, or whatever other broad’ll give you a bunk.”

During this monologue Clark had been fascinated by the old man’s boots: they were cream-colored with a swirling wealth of stitching and leafy tooled relief, and heels higher than an inch, and inflexibly pointy toes: a young buck’s boots, with red-plaid polyester pants tucked into their raked, scallop-cut tops.

“Now, in case I croak tomorrow, to nobody’s great surprise,”
Jared had said, “here’s a piece of wisdom I’m passing on: money gives, and pussy takes. You need to get your act together, son. You need a trade.” That had been the word from Great-Uncle Jared.

He and the girl—Hannah, Sissy, he struggled to remember—stepped out into the parking lot. The packed and rutted snow underfoot squeaked. The mounds plowed up around the lot were fifteen feet high, though spring was in the air and there had been considerable melt on the south slopes. She led him to her pickup, a Ford Ranger a couple of years old, with those square double headlights and plenty of slanted mud streaks on the underside. His own little ’84 Nissan Maxima V6 waited a few steps away, calling him back to his two rooms in the lodge near the lifts, back to his bed, his Michael Crichton paperback, his sleep. Up at six-thirty tomorrow. “Maybe we should put this off to another time,” he suggested. “You drive home, and I’ll get a burger down at the Wendy’s.”

“Don’t be so chicken,” she said, smiling and flaring her eyes wide, so the whites gleamed, there at the side of her muddy Ranger. “I won’t bite.”

Pussy takes. Clark actually nodded off for ten minutes when the heater warmed up the cramped little cab. The side of his skull bounced on the window frame; he folded his ski cap to make a pillow. There was a chill deep through him that was hard to shake but why would he be scared of this little freckled schoolteacher type? She drove mostly downhill from Bighorn, south from the lights, neon and otherwise, of the shops and restaurants and ski boutiques and sharp-gabled condos that had accumulated at the foot of the mountain, along the two-lane highway. The lights dwindled to a scattering of windows back from the road, tucked up in the forest like faint Christmas lights. There was a sudden
lonely brightness around a shacky café advertising in fading letters
TOPLESS ENTERTAINMENT NITELY
. They passed on the left the huge cement-colored ghost of the Henderson copper-smelting plant, its steel-roofed sheds and diagonal feeder chutes and bucket belts crouched in an encirclement of slag heaps like some great crusty engine of war disabled during battle. The ruin was still owned by a company somewhere; the mineral war could be resumed. The cab radio murmured the news of early March 1987: bodies of those drowned and trapped were still being pulled from the British ferry
Herald of Free Enterprise
, which capsized on its way from Zeebrugge, Belgium. In Bergenfield, New Jersey, four teenagers were found dead in an exhaust-filled garage, apparent suicides; three were high-school dropouts and the fourth had been recently suspended from classes. In Rome, the Vatican condemned test-tube babies and artificial insemination, while in Washington, the reaction to President Reagan’s claim of “full responsibility” in the Iran-contra affair has remained mild. Japanese investors, it has been calculated, last year bought up to six billion dollars’ worth of American real estate.

After some miles this mysterious girl left the highway for a narrower road that went uphill for a while, through close masses of pines and firs, and then turned down again. Clark felt these motions in his leaden, dozing body. He was travelling miles, way out on a limb. Once, when his eyes fluttered open, he saw far below, as if he were in an airplane, a nameless vast lake, flat as a mirror, giving back to the moon its own cold light. The moon picked out the slender pale trunks of the aspens and birches at the edge of the sloping dark forests of featureless evergreens. Clark seldom came in this southwesterly direction; his trips when he took them were north to
Route 70, which went to Denver one way and back to California, through Utah and Nevada, the other.

Hannah woke him by braking to a stop and taking a turn at a cluster of weathered signs one of which said
LOWER BRANCH
. The forest—a national park, perhaps—had fallen away; they were in high ranch country now, miles of rolling open grassland interspersed with wooded clumps, and not a light anywhere but the diffused, sickly moonlight. His stomach ached; he could taste all the salt from the margaritas and his septum stung from the two lines of coke he had done on a toilet seat in the Golddigger’s men’s room. The Ranger turned left onto a dirt road and bumped and rattled for a half-mile, at just the speed that made the most of the corrugations. This bitch had misled him: he thought from sizing her up that she had a rental, probably with a girlfriend or two, not far from Bighorn. Well, by the time they got to the sex he wouldn’t owe her much consideration. Except he needed to get back and she was his ride. They came to what looked like a fence of new barbed wire, its points glittering in the headlight beams. There was a gate she had to get out to unlatch, giving him time to study a sign that said in smallish grouted silver-filled letters, L
OWER
B
RANCH
—T
EMPLE
E
NTRANCE
.