Chairlift

 He cut through the dispersed chairlift line with his music too loud to hear anyone and thought he got a lucky solo chair when a woman on a snowboard skittered out and joined him. And they were off. He was here for a funeral, flew in last night. His friend died too young. A horrible accident. Both not surprising and shocking all the same. If one of them had to go early, it was probably always going to be Ryan. He planned to take the day at Wolf Creek before driving back to Alamosa that evening. Services tomorrow. The snow looked soft but left over. Skied out. A few days old.
They went to Adams State together 20 years ago. He moved on after college, San Diego area, then a scattering of marketing jobs up the coast until he landed in Ocean Side. There he met his wife. They sold hand dyed yoga mats at the local market on Saturdays. Surfed in the mornings—nothing over a couple feet—and worked from home. They paid too much for rent, but they were happy. Blinky everyone called him. You know the three eyed fish in the Simpsons? That one. Somebody said he looked like Blinky when they came back to the dorms on mushrooms freshman year. It stuck.
His heart ached the closer he got. An Uber to the San Diego airport, to Denver, and then a little plane as it zipped over the dunes at night. Too bumpy to read. He sat and stared at where the dunes should be and thought of Blink. They shortened it and by sophomore year he wasn’t known as anything else. Just Blink. He hadn’t skied in years and his feet hurt. It was colder than he remembered too. He wore wired headphones picked up at the gas station in South Fork because the ones he used for surfing didn’t fit beneath his helmet. The white wires snaked out from beneath the helmet’s ear pads and fluttered in the wind and disappeared into his jacket pocket. It was obvious he couldn’t hear but the lady on the chairlift kept talking.
He pulled out the right ear only. She had this really colorful snowboard. Later she explained it was a custom board by some artist out of Golden.
“The rabbit is a thrill seeker,” she said. She may have said that later, but that’s what stuck. Her board featured a psychedelic rabbit looking like it took too much. “Think about it. They’re just like hiding out all day and night. Hoping not to get eaten by something bigger than them. Munch on whatever, make more rabbits. What else is there? So, that’s why they bolt across the highway. Right as you drive by. The closer the better. Everybody needs a little something.”
“What about the ones that don’t make it?” he asked.
“That’s the point,” she said.
They left the bar up. Her idea. She motioned to it and he shook his head no. The lady couldn’t have been older than him, but it’s hard to tell. Somewhere between mid-thirties to early fifties. She wore an oversized coat, dark mirrored goggles and helmet with a little snub visor. Her mittens looked leather. She slapped her board every once in a while, against her free boot. Bits of snow falling thirty, forty, fifty feet below. He quietly held on with his left hand when she smacked her snowboard and didn’t know why he couldn’t ask her to lower the bar. He’d always been scared of heights.
Blink was arrested at the Rabbit Ears Motel in Steamboat. Back when they thought it would be a good idea to make the near five-hour drive with a briefcase full of drugs, unload it on his friend in the dorms at the college there, and then back in one day. The cop who pulled them over must have seen a three eyed fish operating a motor vehicle and asked to search the car. It didn’t help Blink told him they were on a day trip. To Steamboat. From Alamosa. And back. It went about as well as those things go and the law never searched the trunk because Blink said no. He was always good with cops.
He wasn’t good on cocaine and that’s what got him at the Rabbit Ears. Noise complaint. Arrested him for general belligerency. It was the same cop who pulled them over earlier. As they took Blink away, the cop kept asking him. What was in the trunk? What’d you have in there? The whole trip was a wash after bonding him out with five grand in cash. But at least they spent the night and rode some good snow the following morning. Blink was like that. Too much fun. He didn’t think you’re really meant to live like that. But Blink did.
She wore her hair down. Dyed blond. It must have been. It blew every which way beneath her helmet, and she looked like the type of person who either doesn’t care what you think of her or didn’t notice. Either way. He wished he was one of those people. The kind of person who never dwelled on what they thought of him, of what he said when he was drunk. The kind of person who didn’t get so nervous. He hated when people knew he was nervous. That was what he liked about her. He nodded along and removed his other ear-pod and paused his music. She asked what he was listening to, but it didn’t matter and went on to something else.
When he said he lived in Ocean Side, she told him about a time she visited the southern California coast with her father. She was maybe twelve or thirteen. Sometime before she started high school, but after her parents divorced. It may have been La Jolla. They walked the beach and she kept finding all these star fish drying out on the sand. They were dying, she said. She gently picked one up, feeling its little suckers on her palm and she waded into the surf and sent it home. Her father found another and did the same. And they did that all afternoon, and the pain of her parents’ divorce went away a while. Why did she do that? Tell that story? She wish she didn’t have to always fill the silence, with strangers especially. This guy didn’t want to hear about rabbits and star fish. She stared down at her board and smacked it against her dangling boot and watched the snow fall all the way down the slope. Some kid face planted toe side. His friend laughed and stopped and helped him up. She hooted below and the guy on the lift stared out into nothing.
They rode like that a while. The wind snapping at her coat collar the only sound. As the chairlift climbed out of the treed gully—down there most of them still green despite years of beetle kill all over this side of the mountain—the wind picked up and she swung her feet beneath her, the world turning more blue than white now as the sky expanded around them and she noted Alberta Peak shred with tracks as they were now three days after the latest storm and she wished she could have made it up here sooner.
They bounced over the next tower when she saw the rental sticker on his skis and asked what brought him to Wolf Creek. Then she silently scolded herself for talking too much. He was a little hard to hear, he talked more to his ski boots than to her.
“Visiting old friends from college,” he said. “Adams State. But not ’til tomorrow. I came in a day early.”
“You still close?” She asked. “With your group from college? I haven’t seen mine in years outside of posts on Facebook.”
“I mean not for a long time, but back then we were inseparable.”
“Me too,” she said. “I don’t know where the time went.”
The image of her rental in Denver, the one by the park. When she was drunk, or really when she took molly, she found herself seeking, always seeking more—drugs, alcohol, guys, attention. The first time she slept with Romy’s boyfriend she didn’t mean to. The night flashed back to her like a dream. It couldn’t have been real. But it was and she went on like that a while. That whole summer, into fall, and it got sloppy and Romy found her. Barely lucid. One hand down his pants, the other running through his hair. He groaned. She didn’t see Romy again for a long time. They bounced past another tower. Skiers and snowboarders far below on crisscrossing groomed runs.
He turned to her. “You always think you’ll find the time, you know? Come back and have it be like it always was.” He laughed. “Stomp around the dorms again, play disc golf with a thirty rack. Smoke cigarettes ’til dawn. But then you never do. It never happens. This is the first time I’ve been back since I transferred my junior year.”
“How did you end up at Adams State of all places?”
His voice rumbled.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, you’re good,” he said. “Yeah, I played sports, well that first year I did. Weird place to go, especially right out of high school.”
“Where was that?”
“Jersey, you?
“Figured,” she said. She liked the way he talked. He kind of spit his words from the corner of his mouth. She had guessed he was from New York or somewhere back east. Romy had talked like that. He didn’t have much of an accent, but his cadence sped up like a passing train and then slowed at times to a low rumble. She missed that. People don’t talk like that in the Valley.
“I could tell,” she said. “Me, I went to high school outside of Denver. You know Grandview?”
He shook his head no.
“My mom moved to Del Norte in middle school,” she said “Spent a lot of weekends here. It seemed like a trap when I was younger, but it gets it’s hooks in you, this place.”
“It sure does,” he said.
Blink never wanted to leave the Valley. They used to take drives up through the old mining camps outside of Creede. Smoking weed. Fly fishing. Not catching very much other than the sun off the water. He dreamed a lot. Blink did. The kind of friend whose dreams were infectious, all-inclusive even. You could almost mistake them for your own. They planned on riding bikes from here to the coast, starting a goat farm just east of the canyon. A music venue on the Rio Grande. A plot of land where all of them could just exist, like they were, into forever. That’s the thing about the Valley. Its canvas still blank enough for anything. Now he longed for any dream at all.
“What do you do in Ocean Side, for work, I mean?” she asked.
“I work for an agency placing ads online,” he said. “You know those banners you scroll past? That’s me.”
“Interesting,” she said.
“It’s really not. But I can work from home. Schedule is the same every day. It’s nice, you know, not having to take work with you when it’s over. Like I can leave it all at the office and come back the next day and not think about it. Sometimes it’s nice being in a routine. Simple, I guess.”
“You mean leave it on the couch?” she asked.
He laughed. “Yeah, well not having to dwell on it after hours.”
He and Blink lived together once. It didn’t last long. Nine months, if that. They moved into a cabin along the Rio Grande north of South Fork. It was this dilapidated summer camp with cabins for six hundred a month used mostly for migrant workers in the tourist season until all these white kids with heads full of psilocybin started snatching them up. By August, they had rented three full cabins. That’s when he started to notice Blink losing control. Kayaking the Rio Grande in the dead of night. Going six, seven days without sleep. Inviting all these random people to stay with them. It got to be too much. And then Blink almost burned down the whole place. He awoke to the piercing fire alarm, hammered in his own right, flames and smoke and Blink laying prone on the kitchen floor. He pulled him out onto the lawn and ran back inside making sure nobody else was in there and he put it out with a fire extinguisher. They didn’t get their deposit back. Last thing Blink remembered was being hungry for bacon.
Blink was arrested for the second time in late fall. He had a lot of girlfriends. They fell hard for him. He guessed he fell hard for him too. But it never lasted long. They’d disappear for days or weeks and he’d come back and want to get married and the one that fall felt different he said, until it wasn’t. The cops were called for a domestic. More arguing than anything. It always sounds worse than it is. He was picked up for a warrant. He never did make it to court in Steamboat. That ended up changing things between them. That night, Blink used his only call to ring the cabin’s landline. Nobody really had a cell phone back then. He picked up the call laughing. Music in the background. Girls. An unusually warm October evening. He had to cradle the receiver close to his ear to hear Blink on the other end.
“They just booked me,” Blink said. “They set a cash option. It’s only $300, this time. Come bond me out.”
He pulled the phone cord into the husk of the burned-out kitchen. “Listen, I can’t. Not right now.”
“What do you mean, come fucking bond me out,” he said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I’m in no shape to be in a police station. I’ll come in the morning.” The sound of girls giggling. He was laughing and telling them to be quiet.
“They don’t care what state you’re in,” he said. Shouting into the phone. “Just bring the money. Bring the money. Don’t leave me in here. Hey, you hear me. Bring the money.”
He hung up the phone. Although he bonded him before seven the next morning, their relationship was never the same. Looking back, he wish he bonded him that night. Things could have been different. He wished they were different.
The chairlift took a sharp steep climb as it rolled toward its final pitch. The Alberta face above them. To the south, the Knife Ridge and the ragged San Juans dotted into the ever-nothing. There wasn’t anything out there. She liked that places like that still existed. Where there was still a whole lot of nothing.
She once told Romy that she saw an emptiness in her. That was before. They had been drinking and walking home through the park. She wanted Romy to come with her, to Thailand. She was scared to go alone. Romy said no. She knew Romy would say no. Romy was always onto the next hurdle, this school, that test, the next job. Thailand didn’t fit. Looking back, she must have been jealous.
“That’s mean,” Romy said. “You know that? Just because you can flutter off and do whatever, doesn’t mean you’re free. You think you’re different, that you’re somehow better than me. But you’re just as trapped as I am. Probably more so.”
He asked what she did for work.
Work? She thought of the ranch outside of Saguache where she wrangled cattle a few summers for a woman rancher, or the failed attempts at school, first it was art school, then literature, then nursing — none of them took—she taught English two years in Thailand, met a guy and moved to Costa Rica where she cleaned weekly rentals, and then a string of starts and stops in the Valley — teaching Yoga, hawking organic produce, substitute teacher — all the while living mostly off what her father calls her stipend. Five thousand a month. It’s not that she’s not grateful, no, it’s just that sometimes she wonders what it what have been like if she were on her own, truly on her own. She’d never know. It stoked this familiar guilt somewhere just below her rib cage and that’s why she had her mother move in with her and that’s why she tried working with kids and that’s why she was never able to do anything with her life.
“In-between things right now,” she said. “Trying to get up here as much as I can.”
“I hear that,” he said.
That’s not even true, she thought. That she would get up to Wolf Creek as much as she can. She missed this last storm, well, she missed the deepest days. She’s not working. There was no excuse. What day was that? Tuesday. It all went to shit on Tuesday. She felt it first in her hands—a tingling—and then in her lower abdomen. It became hard to breathe. You’d think she had a tight yoga teacher stomach, ripped and rock hard. But it was the way she held onto things. Tensing her gut like she did when she was stressed. She was always stressed.
Tuesday, the guy she’d been seeing wanted to get drinks with some of his friends coming in from Denver. She hadn’t drank since Romy found her in the apartment near the park. Going on twenty-seven years. It’s not the drinking that’s the problem. It’s the sitting. It’s the unstructured time. It’s the stories of kids in swim class, of promotions, of the crushing boredom she felt around these people. She couldn’t go. She hated feeling bored. He’d have to understand she couldn’t go.
“I don’t understand,” he had said to her when she wouldn’t change out of her soft pants. “You’re not coming?”
“Go without me,” she said.
“That’s weird,” he said. “They came to see us.”
“I’m not going. I can’t. I don’t know why you care what they think so much. They’re boring. They bore me”
“If I’m going without you,” he said. “I’m not coming back.”
She plopped on the couch. Her mother upstairs. They fought in whispers, with looks, like warring submarines in the Gulf. Silent steel. She wouldn’t get up. She couldn’t.
“It hurts me too,” he said and then he left.
She spent three days there on the couch as the snow piled up outside her patio door. She had thought of Romy for the first time in years. A while back, Romy sent her a friend request. She ignored it forever, then saw her at a show at Red Rocks from afar and pretended she didn’t but accepted the request the next day. Then liking public posts, turned to texts, then calls, and then they met in Denver for a group dinner and they talked all night and laughed, and it almost felt like it always was. Romy invited her to her wedding. She didn’t make it. She had a trip planned. Once in a lifetime. Romy’d understand. Eventually, all her patio lay under a perfect white. She liked how it could cover the ugly in anything.
“When you flying back?” She asked.
“Sunday,” he said. “Gotta clock back into the couch. Those ads aren’t going to post themselves.”
She didn’t offer a polite laugh, or chuckle at his bad joke. He liked that. Blink only laughed when he meant it too.
“You doing anything else?” She asked him. “While you’re here?”
“Not much, just a thing at Society Hall,” he said.
“That’s fair,” she said. “Not all that much going on ‘round here anyways.”
Blink had asked him to stay. Before he left for San Diego his junior year. But what was here for him? There wasn’t anything here. They were on the disc golf course at the tail end of the semester. The trees had finally budded. The wind was calm. He asked as they walked the sixteenth hole. It was warm. The setting sun lit behind him. Blink was in a good place. He was mostly sober. He was sleeping well. He had a new girlfriend who was into readings at the bookstore and climbing in Penitente Canyon. He was happy. Blink smiled when he asked him.
“Bro, don’t leave,” Blink had said. “We can get another place on the river. Amanda and I found a little spot in Monte. A three bedroom. It’s got space for horses.”
He laughed. “What do you know about horses?”
“Whatever, I can learn,” Blink said. “It’s about connection, no different than anything else.” In his memory, Blink ran his hand through waist high grass while he said that. The light splintering behind him. But that was probably made up. He knew that, but still. “You just gotta be cool with them and they’ll be cool with you.”
“What are you planning on doing with horses?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Blink said. “Bro, it doesn’t matter. Come stay with me.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I already signed a lease. I’m leaving Monday.”
Blink said that’s cool and walked on. He would call his wife and replay that memory and wish he stayed, at least that summer. It was so painful he could hardly get the words out when he called her. The light of the Walmart sign and the Wendy’s parking lot from his open blinds. He slept with the blinds open when he was alone in cheap hotels. She listened and then said they would have never met. If he stayed, they wouldn’t have a life together.
They rode on toward the ridge, and the chair took them above a high pine forest, while to the south, Wolf Creek’s hike-to terrain rose above a band of clouds, the Valley behind them. The hapless families slaloming through the blue runs and the little bands of trees. In the far distance, narrow streaks of rock. A stark objection against white on white. He asked how much snow they got.
“I think it was like thirty inches in three days,” it was exactly thirty-seven but for some reason she felt weird knowing that.
“You hit it when it was good?” He asked.
“I wish. Had to take the dog to the vet,” she lied. “Poor guy had to see a specialist in Lakewood.” That part was true, but that was last month.
Another low rumble. “What’s his name, your dog?”
“Her name is Althea,” she said.
His eyes lit up behind his cheap goggles, and he placed a hand behind the chair, so that he could face her square. He smiled.
“I have an Althea too,” he said. “A cat.”
She laughed from her belly and they talked about their shared love of the Grateful Dead, of shows and years and stories and the chairlift rolled past the sign instructing riders to lift the bar, but their bar was never lowered, and he shimmied his poles out from under him and she smacked her snowboard one last time.
He and Blink loved the Grateful Dead. That cop in Steamboat? Blink always said later that he summoned the courage to tell him no, that he couldn’t search the trunk because he could hear Jerry on their low-fi speakers in the old sedan. It was like Jerry told the cop no, not him. He liked that story. The way Blink found meaning in the smallest things. Like his love of the coda to Mississippi Half Step.
Across the Rio Grande.
Across the Lazy River.
That was their River. He and Blink’s. Sometimes they’d just sit there on the edge of the water, watching the sun come up. Endless summer nights. Everybody else asleep. And, yeah, Blink slurred his words, he was sure he did too. And they talked about what they hoped their lives would be. They’d refuse to settle down. They’d never get married, or take a desk job, or stop listening to the Dead. They’d never leave the Valley. He promised he’d keep chasing whatever it was they sought when they were nineteen. In the morning mist, Blink smiled and he threw off his clothes, and in that cold June dawn he waded into the river and set out afloat. Blink called to him to get in. But he couldn’t.
He watched from the riverside.
“Were any of your old friends Deadheads?” She asked.
Blink floating eyes closed in the cold Rio Grande, Cheshire smile, singing, no, screaming, “Across the Lazy River. Across the Rio Grande-o.”
“Yeah,” he said. “There was this one guy.”
“Seeing him tomorrow?” she asked.
The sound of his memory. Headlights on the highway.
“No, not this time,” he said.