Snowman (2 page)

Her retainers began a slow mocking charade of greeting her, which did little to restore the good humor that had characterized her personality on the nightclub stage in Los Angeles where she had won her title.

"Where'd these turkeys come from?" she said, loud enough to be heard by the Vikings. Cathy closed her eyes as though to avoid the sight of a car crash.

The instructors decided to ignore the remark. They kept the elegant cool which had made their astoundlng number of sexual conquests a source of envy to other men.

Cathy stationed Janice at the window of the coach, positioning her so the potographer could get some publicity shots.

The local news team arrived in a van and was induced to film the royal entourage on its journey up to the lodge. The persuasion took the form of a promise by Cathy to buy some more spots on the wilderness that was
Sierra Update
, a program largely given over to weather reports for hunters, skiing conditions. and interviews with colorful ice-fishing personalities in the area.

They got to film more than they had expected. While Cathy watched in horror from the company jeep, the instructors took their revenge on Janice by lashing the four drays into a frenzy, nearly overturning the wagon. Their passenger screamed helplessly from the back seat while she held on to the collapsing frame of the door.

On their arrival at the lodge, the driver held open the door for the Snow Queen and said:

"Welcome to the Mustang Ranch, sister."

Cathy pulled in between the factions and managed to restore order. By this time, the instructors were threatening to quit. Janice, with tears creating a bayou of mascara, was led through the lobby up to her suite overlooking Cobra, the advanced ski run. She shouted at the top of her voice:

"If there wasn't a twenty-five-hundred-dollar cash prize in this I'd go back to L.A. right this second."

In the executive offices, Monte Dale, the director responsible for the birth of the resort, "a Disneyland on snow," was listening intently and with a growing sense of anxiety to Cathy's account.

He was a small, ferrety man who watched his weight with the same attention he gave the company's money. Great Northern Resorts was his responsibility, and the twenty-five million dollars the company had shelled out on his say-so would make him unemployable if the ski resort turned out to be Death Valley.

"What do you mean, she can't ski?" He pointed an accusing finger at Cathy.

"Well, she lied. You were there at the Roxy when she was interviewed."

"She should have been disqualified if she can't ski."

"I know that."

"Cathy, with sixty contestants, how did we get this lemon? Who
did
this to us?" Paranoia was finding a permanent residence in his tirades.

"There was no way of testing her in L.A. It was ninety-eight degrees and the girls were in bikinis."

"Get her ass on the slopes. She's going to be skiing by this afternoon. Tell Barry that I want him to teach her."

"Barry's out giving a downhill exhibition for the new arrivals."

"I don't give a damn."

"But Barry thinks of himself as a performer."

"That's the bottom line, Cathy," he said, dismissing her and glaring at the sales charts on his office wall. "Barry gets five hundred a week for two hours' work a day and all the foxes he can handle. This once he can make an exception and teach a yo-yo the fundamentals."

"Monte, she doesn't want to learn. She's afraid."

"I don't want to hear about it. Get them together."

Cathy waited at the bottom of the expert's slope for Barry Harkness, the resort's name downhill skier. He was a prima donna who had been recruited from Vail. Nominally in charge of the ski school, he did little but practice, though all his efforts hadn't qualified him for the U.S. Olympic team. An almost-ran with the temperament of a soprano, off the slopes he appeared at the resort's social functions and danced all night at the Snowplow Discothèque or stood being admired by a throng of women. But he was worth it to Great Northern. His name was plastered on all the ads the resort ran, because despite his Olympic failure, he was still a celebrity with skiers. Not many people can ski down a twelve-thousand-foot mountain at seventy miles an hour without crippling themselves.

An audience applauded his downhill run, and Barry greeted them with a wave of his poles and a fey smile. Janice and he would make a perfect couple, Cathy thought as she edged into the group of instructors. They'd produce large massive-boned Nordic children with straight teeth and ruddy skin, who were complete idiots.

Cathy took Barry aside, razzle-dazzled him with flattery, then laid her dilemma on him. She concluded by saying, "You've never seen anything like her—all woman, could be Farrah Fawcett-Major's twin sister."

He nodded approvingly. "Okay, she gets a lesson." Then, having second thoughts, he asked the instructors who had served in her retinue, "What's this muttin really like?"

"She's got a loose deck," said one.

"Love it," Barry replied, an uncomplicated emotion playing across his impassive face.

"She won't be easy," said another.

Cathy listened patiently to the macho, juvenile chatter, hoping the challenge would entice Barry.

"She'll be screaming by the time she's off the chairlift, and we'll be snowplowing by cocktail hour," Barry said confidently.

"Twenty dollar's says you von't," said Erich, the Kitzbühel
Wunderkind
. He had been hired in spite of bad references (three paternity suits against him the previous season) when Monte had insisted on having somebody with a German accent, to lend European dignity to the instructional staff.

"My method never fails," Barry began expansively. He nodded to Cathy, treating her as one of the boys. "Her arches and ankles will be aching. Muscles pulled in the calves. Her can'll be sore, and that's when, gentlemen, I'll recommend my St. Moritz special foot bath . . ."

"How's it work, Barry?" Cathy asked.

"I run a hot tub, add a jigger of rum, two of Lavoris, and a squeeze of Vitabath to make the water bubble. Muffin takes off her warm-ups, slips into a robe. Then I plant the flags for the Giant Slalom."

"If you skied like you pork you'd be an Olympic gold medalist," Baxter, a lean ex-Aspen skeptic, said.

"Barry, you can't make a conquest just talking. It's time you met Janice," Cathy said.

"You're on for twenty, Kraut," Barry said. "Anyone else?"

In the timeless universe inhabited by the Snowman there was no sense of location. He had been formed in the graveyard of Antarctica just as the ice age, the Pleistocene Epoch, was ending and Neolithic man was beginning to evolve.

The extreme climatic changes which altered the land masses of what came to be known as Asia and the Americas forced the Snowman to adapt to his surroundings and gradually mutate.

As he grew larger, he fed on dying whales and sharks in the Antarctic, and when this source of life became scarce, he moved on. The hair on his body had become rock-hard bonelike extensions, and his gray skin had been able to absorb ice and fuse it so that it shielded him from the elements.

As his appetite increased, his digestive tract and biochemical glandular functions became more sophisticated. He had always been a flesh eater and through the ages had fed on the various species of man which had evolved. Java, Peking, and Heidelberg man lived in caves to protect themselves from the cold and from this enemy who preyed on them. But as temperatures became warmer and deserts formed, the Snowman was driven higher and higher into the Trans-Himalayan mountainous regions, where the volcanic activity had subsided. There he had an ample supply of animals, which he stalked relentlessly, until they too began to disappear.

The Snowman had left the Lhotse Face almost ten years before. He had moved from the Himalayas when his food supply had run out. It had been a journey governed by primordial instinct, blindly, almost tropisticly. He had drifted down the East Siberian Sea, carried along by an iceberg which was moved by the current through the Beaufort Sea to North America.

Through Alaska, Canada, down into Washington and Oregon, he had gone in search of hunting grounds and the permanent glaciers which afforded him protection in the spring and summer. But he was always on the move, driven, searching for a more plentiful food supply and the frozen wastelands which his body required. For almost a year now, he had been embedded in a giant sérac in the California High Sierras. The supply of mountain deer and bears and the eagles which had their aeries below the sunmmit had provided him with sustenance.

There had been virtually no snow even as the temperatures fell, and so he was secure. Snow threatened him, the strange menace of flakes zigzagging through the winds created a formation in the air which he could barely see. It aroused his fear, and on blind impulse he would leave the ice to strike wildly at the whiteness, the movement engulfing him.

Snow was his enemy, his constant antagonist. He sensed that it waited, an ill-defined pursuer which had the power to destroy him. He had to fight that glistenlng white blanket which filled the sky.

Through the glaze of six feet of ice, the Snowman clawed his way to the surface, confronting his nemesis.

Janice's suite was on the first floor. Amid bouquets of flowers, bowls of fruit still covered in yellow cellophane wrap, she languidly posed in front of the mirror. The boutique inventory of size ten warm-ups, jackets, parkas, jumpsuits, and sweaters lay like a rummage sale on the king-size bed. In an improved temper, Janice pirouetted for Cathy around the room. Her breasts bulged out of a bra too small for her, and she made no effort to cover up when Barry poked his head in.

"Cathy, do they make thermal bras?" she asked.

"Not this year."

After the introductions were made and the principals identified, Cathy stood back and observed the prospective seducer and his victim smiling coyly at each other. Now if she could just get him to put those curves on skis and make a respectable pass down the beginners' slope, Monte would climb off her back and confine his attention to the sales team.

"Ever been on skis?" Barry asked.

"On water, around Catalina," Janice said proudly.

"Not on snow?"

"The only time I really truly enjoy snow is when I see it in the movies."

"Janice, why don't you get dressed and Barry'll take you out to the ski school and show you some of the fundamentals," Cathy said, carefully avoiding the word "teach" with its ghastly implications of working.

"You won't let me fall, will you?" Janice asked in a childlike voice.

His eyes moved from her face to the bed, then back again. "I'll be holding you," he said.

"See you two beautiful people outside in ten minutes," Cathy said. "We'll shoot some publicity stills of you and Barry."

"Thank God for sexual attraction," Cathy told Jim Ashby, who studied a press handout with Janice's biographical data and gave her a melancholy look.

"She was a cocktail waitress."

"A singing one," Cathy persisted. "Couldn't you stress the entertainer aspect of her career?"

"A singing waitress in a Santa Monica German beer garden? That's entertaining?"

On the ski-school slopes Barry and his pupil, who was on the short, one-meter skis, were staggering hand in hand before the lodge photographer.

"She must be a pretty fair piece of tail for Barry to make such a horse's ass out of himself," Ashby observed.

"That's what I sold him on," Cathy replied.

On the slope above them, Barry was trying to console and encourage Janice.

"Press your ankles forward till they rest on your boots. Weight on the balls of your feet. Don't move your upper body . . . everything comes from the legs."

She tried to digest the information as she clung nervously to his arm.

"You're going too fast and I'm afraid."

Barry skied midway down the mini-hill and extended his arms, but Janice remained rooted to the spot. She turned her head and watched small children skiing down the icy runs. Their expressions of exhilaration and freedom apparently affected her. She turned her skis to the parallel position and skied down to Barry. In another moment the two of them were moving down together, and there was something touching about Janice's innocent elation.

"That's good—good—good," the photographer barked as he clicked.

"Before and after," Ashby said. "It's got human interest. You get yourself a Snow Queen and in ten minutes she's skiing. I'll do a spread with pictures and run a tear-out so you can use it for promotion."

The pieces were falling together, miraculously, Cathy thought, relaxing for the first time that day. Barry and Honeypie would look gorgeous in the color brochure, and sales would be bound to pick up.

"She's doing fine," Monte said, joining them. Accompanying him was Ken Atkins, his sales manager, a hangdog man in his indeterminate fifties who spent his days sopping up abuse from Monte because of the slow sales.

The company had expected instant success, for the rather naive reason that they had made a huge investment and wanted immediate returns on their money. But the sales matched the slugish economy. People weren't quick to snap up Chamonix (the one-bedroom-and-loft apartment) or Innsbruck (two bedrooms and den) or the luxurious St. Moritz (three beds, den, and loft which could sleep twelve).

A fortune in advertising had been spent celebrating the virtues of Sierra, the quality of its buildings, the authenic Finnish saunas, the exciting night life at the Snowplow. What had induced people to come up for Thanksgiving was that fifteen chairlifts and gondolas were in operation, and lift tickets and ski instruction were free, while charter flights round trip from L.A., subsidized by the company, cost a mere twenty dollars. If they didn't pack them in for Thanksgiving, it would be a long cold winter. Cathy had persuaded Monte to hold a drawing and give a Chamonix model to the lucky winner.

But the weather refused to cooperate with them. Sierra had the highest annual snowfall in California, but this year the snows had been late and the lower slopes were barely covered for the opening.