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Chapter 2: Aspen
February 1985
 
The day Marco was murdered began with my own swift burial in the snow of Bell Mountain.
 
When the alarm buzzed at 5:00am my first thought was of snow. It had begun falling at dusk, and by bedtime it swirled heavily around porchlights, drifted against the insulated skirting of the Lazy Glen mobile homes. Now, gathering the blankets about my shoulders, I rolled across the bed to the southeast window and wiped away the condensation. The fenceposts edging the trailer park along the highway wore little bakers' toques, about six inches high. The collection of junk motorcycles and half-assembled V8 engines in my neighbor's yard lay sanitized under a respectable coverlet. Snowflakes still swarmed like moths around the porchlights.
 
The blankets trailing like a habit, I shuffled away from the wide lonely bed. I flipped on the hall light and turned up the thermostat, waited for the gas to whump into flame, put the kettle on the stove. From the kitchen phone I dialed the Sundeck, the summit restaurant at the top of Aspen Mountain, and waited. The night crew there bunked next door to ski patrol headquarters. On a stormy night at 11,200 feet they were about as isolated as you can get and still have hot running water. After about a dozen rings, Tim Belden answered.
 
"Yo," he said.
 
"Yo, yourself," I said. "It's Sam Ruykuyser. What've we got?"
 
"Lessee. Oh, eighteen or twenty inches fresh. About ten degrees. Wind southwest at fifteen. Looks like it's drifting pretty good."
 
"How long has the wind been southwest?"
 
"All night, unless the weathervane rimed up and stuck. Velocity got up to thirty, steady, gusting forty. You should have some medium-rare cornices on Bell."
 
"Roger. You guys need anything when we come up?"
 
"Nothing you got. See you later, Rucksack."
 
I trudged to the other end of the trailer and banged on Marco's door, then returned to my own bathroom to shave. I trimmed back the mustache to regulation length -- the hair could wait until payday, though sooner or later one of the supervisors would tell me to cut it. I fingered my long, peeling nose. Around the eyes and below the adam's apple I'm dead white, and I burn badly. Only my face has leathered out -- the beak always toasts after a few sunny days, making me look like Santa's undernourished nephew. I turned, twisted, and tried to look at my back in the mirror. Sometimes when I wake up with a sharp pain over the kidneys I can actually see the muscles knotted up under the skin. After 35 years, I should treat the old machine more gently.
 
When I turned off the water Marco was already banging around in the kitchen. Marco rented my extra bedroom. He had moved in the week after my wife moved out. He paid half the rent and kept me rational. We had become an avalanche team on the Aspen Mountain patrol, one of three two-man teams, responsible for one of the three avalanche control routes on mornings when the mountain carries a fresh load of snow. Last time out we had taken the Little Annie route. That involved a stiff uphill hike through deep snow. This morning we'd probably get one of the easy routes, either North Star and Gentleman's Ridge along the eastern boundary of the ski area, or down the ridge of Bell Mountain, running up the middle of the skiable terrain. With a steady southwest breeze, a small but unstable cornice can grow on the crest of the ridge, overhanging the eastern slope and ready to cascade into Copper Bowl. Our job would be to break that cornice loose before the lifts opened and skiers begain playing in Copper.
 
We would have the mountain to ourselves, with eighteen inches of new powder, for at least the hour it would take to cover the route. I pulled on my stretch pants and headed for the coffee.
 
"Wind southwest all night," I said, as Marco emerged from the refrigerator, bearing cheese. I poured hot water over freeze-dried mud.
 
"Don't drink acid," he warned.
 
"It's legal."
 
"True, but it eats holes in der Margen. If you want a wake- up, toot instead."
 
"I need a warm gentle wake-up, not a jump start."
 
"Speaking of this, I started your car. Let's go have some fun."
 
I cooled the coffee with half a cup of milk, gulped it down, and followed Marco into the night. The snow had thinned, the air felt dry, crisp, calm and silent. The snow was dry, too, light and downy where I brushed it off the porch rail. It squeaked underfoot. While Marco double-locked the trailer door, I shrugged into last year's faded red uniform parka. Management sells 'em to us cheap when they're worn out. In the east, beyond town and the day's work, clouds still hung dense on the peaks. The sun had no chance to break through for a couple of hours yet.
 
The key was broken off inside the ignition switch of my old Saab. Marco had started the car with the stubby screwdriver I had safety-wired for that purpose to the shift lever. The car muttered happily, discoloring the snow that covered the tailpipe. Warm air was already flowing over the inside of the windshield.
 
We brushed snow off the windows and I climbed into the car, checking as always for the pistol under my seat. Then I backed out of the drift so Marco could get at the right-side door. The headlights flooded white aluminum siding, and a couple of dogs barked, as I slalomed between the trailers.
 
We pulled out onto the snowpacked highway and Marco began slicing the provolone. I took a cigar-sized hunk. "What is it with you and Italian food?" I asked. "I'd have thought your family was strictly wurst und schnitzel."
 
"I've always liked the southern cooking better. Molto simpatico. More passion. And the ladies want it, you know. When you tell an American girl you're Italian she doesn't expect some lugerhead. She wants Mastroianni or Giannini."
 
"Some Mastroianni, living in half a Frigidaire."
 
To get his green card, Marco had found a job where they needed a real Italian. Lew Shapiro had a pizza joint called Luigi's, on Arapahoe Boulevard in Boulder. Lew brought Marco in for the summer, taught him how to make pasta sauces and pizza crust, and advertised that he had a real Italian chef.
 
We passed just half a dozen cars and pickups on the winding road into town. As we drove up-valley the clouds closed overhead. It was still snowing above 10,000 feet. It would be two hours yet before the valley saw the sun, but the deep gray of dawn was giving way to a bright silvery haze as I parked in the employee lot below the Ski Corp. marketing office. Marco reached into his parka for the little bottle, and huddled over the spoon. Then we climbed out of the car.
 
A couple of snowcats snorted black diesel as they trundled down the slalom hill, and the lift department bods were busy shovelling out the bottom of lift One A. We plodded past them through the deep snow to the locker room and got into our boots. Marco went to phone his girl while I checked in at the first aid room, where the day's roster was taped inside the door.
 
As expected, we had drawn the Bell route. Fred Bloom, the Aussie patroller with the piratical gold earring, sidled up and peered at the roster. "Ah, fellow avalanchero," he said, draping a heavy arm on my shoulder. "I see that once again we have Dawn Patrol. Are we ready to sally forth?"
 
"Yep," I said. "Let's go court some death."
 
I took a couple of avalanche transceivers from the recharging rack, and a couple of walkie-talkies. I stuffed the faded old parka in my locker, climbed into my bright new one and grabbed my skis. Marco waited outside with our avalanche packs, each containing a rope, snow shovel and probes. "Hildy will fly in this afternoon," he grinned. He stepped into his skis and skated toward the lift. I followed, swinging the pack in one hand.
 
One A lift was still running slowly so that Mutt and Jeff, the two good old boys who manned the loading platform on weekdays, could pound the snow off the seats swinging by. Mutt had a raggedy old broom and he swung it like John Henry, landing it flat on the seat of each chair in an explosion of powder. We watched him at work for a minute, while we buckled up our leather waist packs and slung the avvy packs across our chests. Then we shuffled forward to load. Behind us, the other avvy teams straggled aboard as the chair came up to speed.
 
One A is short. We offloaded and traversed through the trees into Elevator Shaft, then skied the smooth new snow down to Five. Marco's skiing style was based on the idea that if you carve big, perfectly smooth long turns you don't have to twist your knees much, and he kept his bindings set loose. Big long turns mean high speed, and it was a joy to watch him move effortlessly at about 45 miles an hour. Jerry Mendoza, the surfer, often said Marco shouldn't need bindings at all -- he could stand on his skis the way a surfer stands on a board.
 
Lift Five goes straight up the Ridge of Bell, passing a couple of boarded-up mine entrances. Aspen Mountain is honeycombed with old silver mines; since the mine claims are still technically valid, the tunnel entrances aren't in the ski company's permit area, so we don't mess around with them. The cornice, however, was definitely in our jurisdiction, and we looked at it carefully as the lift swept us close above. Five hundred yards long and two to five feet high, it was small by big-mountain standards, but impressive when you consider that it had built up in the course of a single night's blizzard. Figuring something over a pint of water in a cubic foot of windpacked snow, we were about to send six tons of junk down the Back of Bell. A pint's a pound, the world around.
 
At the top of Five we skied through lightly falling snow onto the freshly rolled surface and cruised to the summit lift. Marco stood quietly on his skis, flexing his knees a bit. I skied a few yards to the side, snaking easy little turns with the 207cm Stratos I've had for ten years. The bases were worn through to the screws holding the edges on, and wood showed through the fiberglass at the tip, but they were still my favorite skis in every kind of snow. I loved the sweet way they entered and cut the snow. It felt as if the nerves and muscles of each foot ran out through the hickory laminates right to the tip and tail of the ski.
 
We had to wait a couple of minutes at the foot of the summit lift; the crew was still shovelling out the upper station. It was snowing only
intermittently now, and the clouds had lifted a bit. We set our packs down. The other four avvy guys joined us.
 
"We've had a week of sun, so the west-facing slopes have a good suncrust," Marco said. "They're stable. But if the wind left any new snow over that crust, it could slide off. Be careful."
 
At the Sundeck, Marco hiked over to the magazine to pick up half a dozen bombs. I dropped my pack outside patrol headquarters, twisted out of my skis, and ducked inside. Tim was wolfing powdered eggs.
 
"Yo, Rucksack."
 
"Yo, Bedlam. Forecast?"
 
"This'll break up. Then there's another system due in tonight. Downhill training starts today and the race department's going nuts. They'll want all the cats out rolling Ruthie's, and they they're going to get dumped on tonight. The Corp. will have kittens."
 
"How sure are you it's gonna snow again tonight?"
 
"White man cut heap firewood."
 
"They ought to postpone the race."
 
"Ski Club don't want to, Ski Association don't want to, Ski Corp. don't want to. Only the racers, coaches, gatekeepers and patrol want to, and they don't have thousands of bucks tied up."
 
Marco is a good example of what happens to racers when the show must go on. They screw up their legs, or their necks, or whatever. We were set to host the U.S. Alpine Championship downhill on Sunday. Downhill racing has gotten faster over the years, but it's generally pretty safe when held on hard snow, which racers prefer. With fresh snow, the courses slow down upredictably. Digging a tip into deep soft snow at sixty knots is no fun, and if anyone hates a soft-snow downhill as much as a racer, it's the guys who have to cart off the bodies. I wondered who dragged the dead gladiators out of the Coliseum.
 
Carrying thirteen pounds of dynamite between us, Marco and I skied along Lift Three into the trees. Among the spruce and fir, protected from the wind, the snow lay deep, smooth and light, and we began really to ski. The snow boiled up my chest. This is what my life is for: a silent forest, a sense of speed and weightless floating, snow cold and bracing in the face, timing your breaths for the apex of each porpoised turn, flashing past the trees in early morning delight. We skied on either side of the lift cut, weaving betweeen the towers and the trees, plunging effortlessly in great crystal clouds as the sun, now breaking through the overcast, exploded into rainbows around us.
 
We burst out of the cut into Deer Park and swept to a halt on the freshly rolled snow. Dave Harris turned up half a minute later, the engine of his snowmobile crackling sharp in the cold air. We grabbed his tow rope for the short ride to the summit of Bell, swinging wide for momentum to carry us around the corner past the lift terminal. We ducked under the chairs and coasted onto the ridge and its cornice.
 
The sense of exposure along a sharp alpine ridge never fails to exhilarate me. Even this domesticated ridge, with its chairlift spinal cord, is exciting. To the left, the steep, open Face of Bell drops wide into Spar Gulch. To the right, the narrow Back of Bell runs fall away into Copper. We stopped to look at the snow, to absorb the voids, to turn on our transceivers. Marco waved me on.
 
We always skied potential avalanche terrain one man at a time. If the slope let go and the skier was buried, his partner, watching from a safe position, could call for help and then begin searching. I shuffled along the cornice, stopping every two yards to jump hard on the snow, trying to cut the overhang loose. Sometimes the snow felt solid, but sometimes a healthy kick sent a couple of cubic yards of windpacked snow sagging and rolling into the deep pillow of powder below. No avalanche resulted. The Back of Bell was deep but stable, and safe to ski. A few smaller chunks tumbled into the trees, turning into larger snowballs until they sank of their own weight and stopped. They left dotted lines in the surface, running straight down the fall line.
 
A hundred yards along the ridge I stopped, and waved to Marco. He stepped off the cornice and larked three turns through perfect bottomless powder before cranking a hard left to traverse across the slope below me. Nothing slid, and he leapfrogged ahead, along the ridge, jumping and cutting. No slide.
 
The cornice was highest a few yards below Tower 12. Marco paused there, jumped hard a couple of times, and waved me along. I skied cautiously to within ten yards and stopped. The cornice could hold one skier, perhaps not two. Marco leaned on his poles and peered over the edge. "Too big," he said. "Let's bomb it."
 
I dug a two-minute fuse out of my parka and skied quickly past Marco, handing the cord off without stopping. When I reached a safe distance, Marco shrugged out of his pack, pulled out a bomb, and set it on the snow while he put the pack back on. Then he pushed his ski pole deep into the snow and withdrew it, leaving a hole down which the bomb, a cardboard cylinder four inches across, would slide. Using the non-sparking brass pick, he inserted the fuse, then secured it with a wrap of electrical tape. He lit the fuse with an igniter. In the bright sunlight, the fuse burned invisibly, only a thin white plume of smoke rising from its end. "Fire!" Marco shouted. Then he dropped the bomb carefully in the hole, and skied quickly away to join me.
 
I checked my watch. After two minutes I held my breath. When a fuse burns too long I always have nervous visions of going in to recover a dud, and was determined to give any bomb a full 15 minutes before trying it. But then, at two minutes 15 seconds, to my great relief, a sharp crack blew a geyser of snow and smoke upward -- and outward, over the Back slope. Ten yards of cornice toppled out of the bright snow cloud and sagged silently into the trees between Back Number Two and Back Number Three.
 
We turned and continued down the ridge, still testing anc cutting the cornice, until it tapered out where the ridge began its final drop into the mouth of Copper Bowl. Here the wind, sweeping around the face of Bell, had drifted deep inot the big moguls under the lift, where Aspen's rubber-knee hotshots love to show off for an appreciative crowd of lift riders. While the underlying base was packed hard and slick, and therefore might be considered a risky propositioin under a load of new snow, this was a northern exposure, and the sharp moguls themselves could be expected to cup and hold the powder. I didn't think it would slide, but Marco paused at the top. "Let's not take chances," he said. "Let's track out the top."
 
I skied slowly out onto the steep, traversing right from the Face side toward the Back side, jumping the tails of my skis hard every few yards, looking for a weakness in the snow. Under that fresh snow were the big, rolling moguls, like a hidden sea; my skis rose and fell on them, unseen beneath the smooth surface. The snow wouldn't slide.
 
I reached the edge of the trees, kick-turned and beckoned to Marco. He followed, traversing about ten feet below my tracks, laying a groove in the snow parallel to mine. When he arrived at the trees he, too, stopped and kick-turned. He waved me on and I headed back out, traversing to the left this time, kicking, kicking, kicking. It didn't go, and it didn't go.
 
Then it went.
 
I've never seen anything go so fast. Usually only what lies below you slides off, and you can come to a stop on the newly-revealed crust underneath. This time I was bowled over instantly.
 
When the snow stopped moving I was skiless, sightless and helpless, locked immobile and frightened half to death.