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Chapter 7: Non-stop

I felt confused and angry. Driving back to town, I tried to identify the
uneasy thought swimming beneath my grief. Something seemed seriously amiss, beyond the fact that Marco shouldn't have been where we found him. But because I was furious with Marco for dying needlessly, I couldn't think
clearly about what that wrong element might be. Instead, the faces --
Marco's black and swollen, Art's pale and flaccid, Hildy's catatonic --
loomed at the front of my mind.

By the time I got back up the mountain, the third non-stop was over and the
course was being repaired for the fourth. Craven asked me to take a sled to
the top of Aztec and wait there. I shoved a sandwich and a can of juice in
my pocket and took off. At the start stood Dick Bester, radio in hand,
awaiting the arrival of his boys. He waved at me.

"I'm sorry about Marco," he said.

"Yeah, thanks."

"Marco and I never got along well, but he was a hell of a guy. A great
skier, a good coach. He's one of those guys you wish you knew better, you
know?"

"Yes, I know." I didn't want to talk about it. "How'd Rusty do this
morning, Coach?"

"He cooled it. He's very smooth on this course. He stood up halfway and was
a second out."

"No kidding. What did you tell him to do now?"

"I want him to go easy but make up that second. No more than one second. I
want him absolutely certain that he'll will tomorrow, but I don't want him
taking risks."

Non-stop is supposed to be practice, a chance for racers to learn a course
so there will be no missed turns on race day. At sixty miles per hour,
leaving the course can have serious consequences. So a major downhill is
preceded by several non-stops. Kids are encouraged to ski the first one
slowly, standing up straight so that the pressure of air resistance on the
chest holds speeds below fifty miles per hour. The second non-stop can be
taken faster, feeling for the quickest line, that route through the course
which takes maximum advantage of the opportunities offered for
acceleration. The third non-stop should be run at 90 percent effort, in a
tuck but in full control. If there's a fourth non-stop, the racers will
regard it as a full dress rehearsal, skied at 99 percent.

The fourth no-stop is, in effect, a race. The skier with the fastest time
on the last non-stop owns a long psychological edge over the rest of the
field. I had a hunch, as I led the sled to the lip of Aztec, that Rusty was
going to make up more than a second.

Evidently the race jury agreed. When the course chief came by, handing out
the start list, I found Rusty slated to start fifth, theoretically the
fastest position on a freshly-repaired soft-snow course with no hard base
underneath. Skiing fifth on a soft-snow course is a privilege and honor,
like batting clean-up. The idea is that the early racers will brush off the
loose stuff, and the next five or ten guys will have conditions as close to
ideal as possible: smooth unrutted snow, as firm and fast as it can be
given the fresh fall. After their passage, the snow is rutted; the course
deteriorates quickly and times grow slower.

At five to one the first forerunner came through, and at one sharp they
started the first racer. I clicked on my watch when I heard the starting
signal over a course-worker's radio, and it took Bib One exactly 49 seconds
to bob into sight around the corner. He seemed to move slowly toward me
along the lane between the trees, his track foreshortened, chin down on his
knees, hands before his helmeted face. Thirty yards from the lip he broke
out of his tuck, set his left ski on edge and dropped his body over it. The
turn began, a long blazing arc to the right, to an apex just at the gate
over the lip. Half a breath from the edge he bobbed up and then down into
his prejump, absorbing the roll with knees and ankles, and then was
whistling through space, hands held low in front of his boots, waiting,
waiting, waiting to pass through the air, waiting while his skis pointed
straight downhill, waiting to touch down and resume control.

"Holy shit," the racer said, and I heard it as clearly as I could see him
through the bright still air.

The landing was soft, and he made it easily, reaching out for the snow with
his legs just a tick early, gathering the snow it, dropping forward and
onto the left ski again for the turn to the next gate. Then he disappeared
behind his own rooster-tail, flying away from me, down and away at over
seventy miles per hour.

The next three skiers made the same jump, one wavering in the air, opening
out of his tuck with a leg and the opposite arm to regain his poise. But
he, too, landed safely and skied away in that dazzling, cascading
snowcloud. The land zone was just beginning to show its ruts.

Then came Rusty, in his red suit with the gleaming black helmet, whipping
around the corner at 47 seconds -- he was two seconds faster on the flats,
probably good for an additional three or four miles an hour entering Aztec.
He set up for the drop-off turn beautifully, carving clean, very little
snow curling off the edge of his ski. But as he dropped into his pre-jump,
I saw a little wobble in the left knee, and as he sailed clean off the lip
his left ski twisted, turning, flashing in the sun, floating away,
separating slowly from the formation, flying on its own trajectory.

And Rusty, flying on one ski, doomed to crash and roll, opened his tuck
ever so little, extended his right leg, the one with a ski, spreading his
arms a bit for stability. He rushed airborne beyond the landing ruts in the
snow, upright. But on landing, he exploded. From the cloud of his collapse
the other ski launched upward, flexing and spinning wildly from its
compression, bent at the tip. A pole squirted across the course.

I announced the crash to my radio and got moving while Rusty's cloud was
still rolling downhill toward the netting.

Rusty lay limp against the fence, unconscious, and just as well: his left
leg was hamburger. Compounded above the boot top, where the tibia is
weakest, the bone showed through the shiny red fabric of his skin suit. I
quickly sliced through the nylon for a better look, and then got hustling:
bright arterial blood pulsed steadily through the ripped muscles onto the
snow. The lower leg seemed to be attached only by a few cords of muscle and
tendon.

I put on a tourniquet and called for help. "Let's get a backboard and a
hard splint," I ordered dispatch, and while I checked for other injuries
Craven himself turned up with a backboard.

"I haven't moved him," I said. "He's unconscious so there may be head
trauma. Vitals are okay but he could lose that foot if we don't hurry. It's
not getting any circulation."

Craven recruited a couple of course workers and we gently tied Rusty onto
the backboard. Then I twisted his lower leg as closely back into alignment
as I could, wrapped a dressing tightly around the wound, and while Craven
splinted the leg I packed snow around it to slow morbidity.

We moved Rusty off the hill and into the ambulance in record time, skiing
straight down the perfect surface of the racecourse. Horowitz himself
crewed the rig. Craven and I slammed the doors shut. Then we loaded the
sled on the chair and rode up together.

"You must have seen him crash," Craven said. "What happened?"

"He lost his left ski at the take-off at the top of Aztec and tumbled after
he landed on the right ski. There was a lot of snow flying around, but I'll
bet he punched his left foot straight into the snow and jammed it. He had
to be going at least seventy, so he just about ripped it off."

"It's happened before."

"Yeah."

"Good handle, Sam."

"Screw you, Jack. You're the guy who doesn't want me here."

"I never said that. I said you don't belong here. I said I wouldn't fire
you, but I think you're wasting your time patrolling. I'm on your case
because you're a screw-up. You're a good EMT, but you gave up a career to
do this. That's dumb."

"This I can get from my mother. I don't need it from you."

Craven scowled. His voice grew quieter, but more intense. "I'm a
Mormon, Sam. We're raised to work hard and build a family. Build a life. If
I'd had your education I wouldn't be wasting it. Wasting an education is a
sin. I thought you're a quitter, and I don't want quitters on this squad.
But I was wrong about that. You do good work under pressure. You're not a
quitter. I don't know what your problem is, but if I were in your position
I'd be out of here and into medical school without even packing. I'd be out
doing myself and everyone else some good."

That was the longest speech I'd ever heard from Craven, and it was so
self-righteous that I exploded. All that anger I'd been harboring about
Marco came boiling up, aimed straight at the boss.

"That's inspirational as hell," I told him. "Don't be such a snob. You
think a doc does more valuable work that we do? Half the docs I knew in New York were more interested in what was happening inside their BMWs than in the lives of their patients. It's going to take a damn good surgeon to save Rusty's leg, but if you and I didn't do a hell of a job here what chance
would he have? And don't give me any of that driven-by-God stuff. My family
is Dutch Calvinist. No one works harder. My grandfather was a laborer in
the Otis plant in Yonkers for fifty years, starting when he got off the
boat when he was fifteen. He put three sons through college. Maybe I will
go back to school someday, but I'll do it when I figure I can be happy at
it. I'm not going to do it because it makes God or grandpa or my wife
happy. Right now I like being the best medic on the patrol, and you should
be glad to have me. I'm trying to deal with losing two friends in two days
and I don't need some fanatic telling me to get my butt in gear."

We had come to the top of the lift, and I skied away as fast as I could,
leaving Craven to unload the sled. By the time he had the thing off the
chair I was already riding the summit lift. I watched the rest of the
non-stop from the top of Aztec, and didn't have to collect any more bodies.

All I could think about was Craven's evangelism. Marco had been wrong about him. Craven wasn't a corporate soldier, he was a puritan -- forged and
tempered and his attitudes set for life.

Craven rubbed me the wrong way to begin with, but school was a subject that
put me on the defensive. The end of my academic career had been the last
straw for Carole. In New York, her Madison Avenue job had paid the rent
while I sliced cat brains.

When I announced that I couldn't handle the city any longer, Carole was
generous. "I'll give you a year to clean out your head," she offered.
"Aspen will be fun, but then we'll pick up where we left off."

As I settled in and began to talk about Aspen as a permanent arrangement,
she balked. "I didn't bust my butt putting you through school so you could
vegetate in the snow," she said.

"You didn't put me through school."

"I certainly did. I housed you and clothed you for three solid years."

"You mean we moved into your apartment and you didn't like the clothes I
picked for myself."

"Right, and it's still my apartment. I'm still paying the rent." Which was
true. The New York apartment had been sublet, because we intended to
return. If I really wanted to know where Carole had gone, I could simply
call her tenants.

But I didn't want to know, yet. Our last fights had been so vicious, I had
no stomach to speak with my wife at all.

"You're not dragging me back into that morass," I had said. "I'm not going
back to a life I hated just so you can be married to a Ph.D."

"You think you're some kind of trophy?" she said. "Don't flatter yourself.
I'm tired of being dirt poor in Aspen. We're each making five bucks an
hour. It's sick. I want my own career back. If I'm out of the market for
another year I'll never get back in."

"Does it have to be New York?"

"It has to be a city," she insisted. "It has to be someplace we can make a
living. I want to feel we're building something."

"We can build something here."

"All we're doing here is wasting time. Wasting today, wasting tomorrow. And
we're wasting all that time you studied. When I think of what we went
through in New York just so you could do research, and I think of that time
as down the toilet, it makes me want to puke."

So Craven was simply repeating what Carole had told me often enough: it was
time to return to the real world, to put away childish things, to be once
more among the menschen. I wouldn't listen to Carole, and I certainly
wouldn't listen to Craven.

But it was easier to brood on Craven than to think about Carole, or Marco,
until the race ended. When I checked out, it was time to stop my at the
hospital to fill out the papers on Rusty. And I'd have to look in on Hildy.