Crazy Blood by T. Jefferson Parker Page B

more than hospitals were prisons.
    Cynthia carried the buckets of bathing and rinse water into the bathroom. Still humming, then not. “Did you hear about April Holly coming to Mammoth?” she called out.
    â€œChip, chip,” he muttered.
    â€œDid you?”
    â€œYes, Mom. Great.”
    â€œMaybe our little town can learn from her,” she half-yelled from the bathroom.
    â€œLearn what? How to be a self-obsessed Olympic celebrity?”
    â€œYou know what I heard from Brandon? April is engaged to be married to her longtime boy, but her camp thought she was falling in with the wrong kind of people in Aspen. So they brought her here.”
    Sky found this to be very funny. “Wait ‘til she gets a load of me,” he said to Robert, smiling slightly.
    â€œWhat did you say?”
    â€œNothing, Mom!” Sky summoned all of the determination that he so obviously lacked, according to his mother, and brushed a hand through his brother’s freshly washed hair. Even unconscious, Robert struck Sky as truly good and deserving of his deepest love. Deserving of a lot more than that, thought Sky. But what else could he give Robbie now but love? He reached out and lifted Robert’s left eyelid and looked into the clear blue emptiness. “I’ll win that race, Robert,” he said. “Mark. My. Words.”
    *   *   *
    As usual this time of evening, Sky hit Slocum’s restaurant for happy hour and ran into his group in the bar. The team skiers and boarders had claimed their high, round bar tables in the middle of the room. Thanks to them, the decibel level was very high. Johnny Teller and Greg Bretz and Tyler Wallasch were there, and so were Kelly Clark and Arielle Gold, which turned up the star power to eleven on a scale of ten. Local snowboard contenders Johnny Maines and Suzanna Scott were arguing loudly but with good humor. Sky joined the boisterous table talk. There was no better antidote than this to his mother and her dire pronouncements. Sky loved this part of being a racer, being in a room where every person knew who you were and what you’d accomplished and they just wanted to watch you being cool. And see exactly how you did it.
    To his left, someone said, “Sage has got his whole routine so cold, every detail, man, right down to the way he holds the edge on his method, or the angle of his head on the back-side launch. It’s, like, choreography.” Sky immediately countered that Sage’s whole style was “tweaked out because he has no idea what he’s going to do next. It isn’t planned out at all, dude—and that’s why he looks like he just fell out of bed. And that’s what makes him great.” Sky knew little about board slopestyle—Sage Kotzenburg’s gold medal Sochi event—but he couldn’t pass up the chance to pontificate in front of an audience. He observed himself performing the Sky Carson act, pleased that he was so good at it.
    Tourists and locals manned the booths along the walls, looking up with curiosity at Sky and his young comrades enthroned on their higher pedestal tables. Sky knew that this audience was here because he and his friends were champions, or soon to be—the best athletes you would see up on this mountain, or anywhere really. Some would become Olympians. He and his peers pretty much ignored these onlookers because they were not ski or board professionals and did not take the risks of professionals, because, in fact, most of them skied and boarded badly, and looked fucking idiotic skiing and boarding badly in the expensive snow fashions they wore so they would look like professionals. Sky knew this was just his pride, but pride was all you had unless you went Olympic and podiumed; then you had fortune, too, so much fortune that it boggled the mind.
    He drank two neat Stolichnayas. He couldn’t be in that room with Robert and not feel disheartened. It took his spirit