Sawbones Read online

  He glided shakily into a curve. Movement in the trees to his right drew his eyes. He saw something tawny and low slung with a twitching black-tipped tail. Mountain lion—here and in broad daylight? He knew they lived up in these mountains, had his own up-close-and-personal experience with one. As quickly as it appeared, though, the animal was gone, and he couldn’t be sure he’d seen it at all.

  He returned his concentration to finishing his turn. The imposing lodge and its wide wooden deck came into view. Relief flooded through him. He could hear the din of happy voices as clearly as if he was standing in the middle of the crowd. Lunchtime? He was feeling more confident, and he hated looking like a loser, so he tightened his turns and fought his skis out of the snowplow position and into something more respectable. His speed picked up. Despite his sunglasses, the wind teased tears from his eyes and burned his cheeks. His confidence grew. He was skiing. He was really skiing. As he neared the bottom of the run, he saw a group of about ten people clustered, their backs to him and eyes on a person reclined in the snow. That had to be his patient.

  He planned his approach, and, more importantly, his stop. His ski instruction book recommended a deep snowplow for beginners, but he was no longer skiing like a beginner. His turns had gotten pretty good, if he did say so himself. Intermediate skiers stopped by turning against the hill and digging in their edges. That is what he would do.

  He started looking for a place to initiate his turn, one that would leave him well short of the group. The slope had been swept bare of powder by the wind and a multitude of skis, and he couldn’t find a spot to his liking. The run was wider down here, and the longer he traversed it without a turn or a wedge, the more speed he built up. He saw that he was drawing too close to the T-bar lift. He had to turn immediately, or he’d careen across the tow line. His stomach fluttered, but he ignored his nerves and threw himself into his turn. His skis slid sideways out from under him. He heard the sickening sound of their metal edges scraping against ice, felt the sensation up through his legs. He didn’t fall, though, and he only flailed his arms a little.

  But now he had a long stretch of real estate in front of him before he reached his patient, and no more room on his downhill side for another turn. To his dismay, he was picking up speed much more quickly on the packed snow. As he barreled toward the group, he shifted his weight uphill to dig in his edges, but that only seemed to make him go faster.

  He was out of control, with only fifty feet to go.

  In sheer desperation, he shifted deep into the snowplow position, with his legs bent and his front tips together and back tips wide apart. His skis knocked against each other, and within seconds, his thighs were burning. He sunk deeper, praying. Dear God, please help me not make a buffoon of myself in front of all these people.

  His prayer went unanswered. He rode over the backs of the first person’s set of skis, which brought him to a grinding halt, and he straddled the legs of the next skier. One by one, people tumbled like dominos until he’d taken out everyone in the group beside his patient, except for one woman. For a moment, there was complete stillness and silence. His brain went silly on him, and he thought, Maybe the game is bowling instead of dominoes. I’m only one pin short of a strike.

  He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Is everyone okay?”

  A man under him shouted, “What the hell? You skied over my wrist. Could have chopped it off. Those things don’t grow back, you know?”

  “Belongs in ski school,” another muttered. “A danger to himself and others.”

  “My son is hurt, and you almost skied right over him,” a woman said from the ground beside him. She lifted her face. Her eyebrows were frosted in snow crystals. “You shouldn’t be out here if you can’t control yourself.”

  Patrick closed his eyes. If he was hurting anywhere, the sting of mortification distracted him from it. This wasn’t good. Not good at all. But he had to tell them who he was, so he could help his patient.

  He opened his eyes, smiled grimly, and said, “Did someone call for the Doctor of the Day?”

  Chapter Two: Divert

  Bighorn Mountains, Buffalo, Wyoming

  Saturday, March 5, 1977, 11:15 a.m.

  Perry

  Perry pointed his wedge downhill and let the wind buffet inside his jacket and tickle his nose. The trees were a blur on either side of him. He’d never gone this fast before, except in a car, and it was amazing. He liked this skiing thing. He was just glad his dad hadn’t made them sign up for ski school where he would have had to hang out with a big group of babies all day. Skiing was easy. Why hadn’t they come before? They’d lived in Wyoming for two years, and he could have been skiing all winter that whole time. He could have even had his January birthday party up here. Next year, he would for sure.

  He thought about his athletics schedule for a second. Football season would be over by the time ski season started, so the coach couldn’t tell him not to ski. Did Buffalo High have a ski team? He hoped he wasn’t getting too late of a start at it, but he could learn fast, like he’d done with football. A little thrill ran through him. He could be a racer. A downhiller like Andy Mill. He’d cheered hard for him during the Olympics. Even though Andy had been hurt, he’d wanted to race so badly that he’d stuck his leg in the snow until it was numb before his event, and still finished in sixth place. He was tough, like Perry’s dad. Like Perry wanted to be.

  When you aren’t tall, you have to be tough, and Perry was definitely short. His sister never got tired of reminding him what a shrimp he was. “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” his dad always told him. His dad was sort of right, but a big dog with big fight in him was still best, to Perry’s way of thinking. That’s why he had asked for barbells and ankle weights for his birthday. He’d been using them, too. It wasn’t fair. All his friends were shooting up like weeds. Perry measured his height against a goal mark he’d made inside in the door jamb of his closet every day—the height of his best friend John, at the end of football season—and, to his great disappointment, he didn’t seem to be gaining on it. Or growing any whiskers or chest hair, either. He’d know if he had, because he used a magnifying glass to look every night.

  He snowplowed to a stop. His ankle was shaking and it ached. He’d broken it in football last fall, then hurt it again in December, and he’d only gotten the cast off two weeks before. Skiing with a barely-healed broken ankle? Good thing he’d been using his ankle weights. He grinned. So maybe he was a little tough.

  He looked around him. He could see the big, blocky lodge at the foot of the mountain. He was on the last pitch before the wide-open slope down to its wooden deck. Did he have time to ride the T-bar up for one more run before lunch? His stomach growled. Nope. He was definitely eating the sandwich in his pocket when he got to the bottom. But he didn’t have to be in a hurry to get there.

  His lips stung and he ran his tongue over them. Cracked, dry, and bloody. Setting his gloves in the snow at his feet, he pulled his Chapstick out and rubbed it on. It was too cold to spread well, and it tasted waxy. He kept rubbing until he got a little bit on. As he reached to drop it in his pocket, the stick slipped out of his fingers. It disappeared into the powder by his gloves. That was okay. It hadn’t been doing much good anyway. He slipped a hand back into one of his gloves, wiggling his fingers and pulling it on, then repeating the process on the other side.

  A set of ski tracks headed off the run and into the forest, wide apart, like someone was skiing with their legs in a big V. The trail looked pretty flat and really fun. He could do it. His only worry was if he got stuck. His parents hadn’t let him rent poles, at the recommendation of the old man doling out the equipment. If there were any flat stretches, Perry would have to take off his skis and walk. No problem, he decided. He was going for it.

  First, since his dad was always lecturing him on wilderness survival, he thought through his supplies: one sandwich and his pocketknife. That was it. Not even a Chaptstick
anymore. Probably not everything he would need if he was caught in an avalanche, attacked by a moose, or fell and broke his leg. But none of those things were going to happen.

  His dad had a tendency to overreact to little things. How much school supplies cost, taking out the trash a day late, or losing stuff. So, sometimes his mom, Trish, and Perry kept secrets from his dad because, as his mom always said, “What your dad doesn’t know won’t hurt anyone.”

  Like now, when Perry knew he would be fine.

  Staying in his wedge, Perry turned by taking little steps until he was pointed in the right direction. Then he bent his knees and leaned forward. He gathered speed quickly until he hit the powder. Once, he’d mashed the brakes too hard on his bicycle and gone right over the handlebars. This was almost that bad. He jerked backwards with his arms out to keep from falling on his face. His position made him think of the ski jumpers he’d watched in the Olympics. Those huge jumps were definitely not something he wanted to try, but a small one would be okay.

  Trees flashed by him on either side. Tall ones with thick piney branches and baby ones with just their tops sticking out of the snow. He ran over one of the baby ones. A pinecone fell silently to the snow beside him. It was so quiet that the silence seemed loud. All he could hear was the wind in his ears and the chittering of an angry squirrel.

  Every now and then his tips would go under deep powder, and he’d have to fight to stay upright. A few times he almost hit a tree, which was a little bit scary. But mostly he just felt strong and free. His dad had never skied through a forest before, or at all. Perry was the first one in his family to do something this cool.

  A reverberating crack ripped through the silence. It felt like something had punched his eardrums. His heart started beating like a bass drumroll. He snowplowed so hard that his butt nearly hit the ground, but he couldn’t stop, not until his skis wedged against trees on either side of the trail.

  The silence was even louder now, except for his heavy breathing. He tried to slow it down, but it didn’t do much good. He still sounded like his dog Ferdinand after he’d been chasing a jackrabbit.

  What had made that noise? Had a tree split from the cold? He’d learned in school that they could do that. If that was what it was, it could have fallen on him. He scanned the forest, looking for a fallen tree or anything out of the ordinary. About one hundred feet away through the trees, he saw something move. It was a person in a white camo snow suit, wearing one of those caps with an attached face mask that covered up the neck. The person slung a long narrow bag of gear onto the back of a yellow snowmobile and mounted up. What’s in the big bag? This wasn’t a great place for a picnic lunch. Or for trapping, and the only thing still in season for that was weasel—which Perry only knew because John’s dad was into trapping and talked about it all the time when Perry spent the night at their house.

  The person turned and saw him. Perry waved, but the person didn’t wave back. Perry almost shouted a greeting, thinking maybe the person couldn’t see Perry because he was blending into the forest, but then he realized that didn’t make sense. His coat was red and yellow. He would stand out against all the snow, not blend in. Then he considered warning the person about the crack he’d just heard, but, before he could, the person looked away.

  His stomach did a funny flip and started hurting, something it was doing lately whenever he got nervous. He jerked his hand out of the air and turned as fast as he could, ready to ski like mad out of there. But the path back to the ski run was more uphill than he’d thought when he was skiing out. He groaned. It wasn’t steep, but it definitely wasn’t flat. He’d have to walk up it. He slid one ski forward, which sent him backwards instead of forwards. He tried it again with the same result. It felt like there were eyes drilling into his back, and, for all he knew, the person was getting closer to him. He needed to get back to the trail, ASAP. Suddenly, he knew what he had to do. To keep himself from going any further downhill, he put his skis in a reverse wedge, with the front tips out and the back tips together. It worked. His backward momentum stopped, and he was able to take a few tiny steps up the slope.

  Then he heard the snowmobile fire up. He was close enough to smell exhaust blowing toward him on the wind. It revved a few times, and, after a couple of seconds, the engine noise caught and held. The snowmobile was moving, hopefully going in the opposite direction from Perry. Perry kept creeping slowly up the hill. The engine sound grew fainter. He leaned against a tree to rest, sweat dripping down his back. He felt strangely lighter. Relieved.

  The person hadn’t been friendly, but there had been nothing to be scared about. He was just being a big fraidy cat.

  Still, he was all alone out here, and no one knew where he’d gone.

  Perry started inching up the path again, a little faster this time.

  Chapter Three: Skip

  Bighorn Mountains, Buffalo, Wyoming

  Saturday, March 5, 1977, 11:20 a.m.

  Trish

  “Are you, like, even going to try skiing?” Brandon Lewis tugged one of Trish’s long, blonde braids.

  Trish tilted her head and looked at him from under her eyelashes. She was sitting on the bench of a picnic table out on the deck, facing him. The ski chalet blocked the wind. People were milling around without their jackets in the bright sun. She could almost imagine she and Brandon were on their honeymoon at a fancy European ski resort, as long as she didn’t look too closely at the attire of the people around her, which was mostly blue jeans and Carhartt.

  “Not without you,” she said.

  “I can’t ski. The finals are really important to me, you know?”

  “It’s okay. I’m having fun.” She raised her cup of hot chocolate to her mouth.

  The state finals basketball tournament was the next weekend in Laramie, and Brandon was a starting forward on Buffalo’s boys’ team. He wanted to go to the University of Wyoming, but he really needed scholarship money. It was important that he play well in Laramie in front of the Cowboys coaching staff. The boys’ team had won state two times in a row only a few years back, too, so they were determined to take back their title, even if it meant sacrificing winter sports. He couldn’t risk an injury on the ski slopes.

  The girls were defending their own state title, too. Trish would have loved to be playing, but she was languishing on second team junior varsity. Coach Lamkin didn’t even seem to know she was alive most of the time. The bajillion games of horse Trish had played with her dad didn’t seem to be paying off, although jogging with him had—she always lasted longest in conditioning drills. And conditioning was important now that all the girls’ games were full-court like the boys.

  Trish gave her boyfriend the once over. She loved watching him play basketball. She loved watching him do anything, really. He had curly blond hair that almost touched his shoulders in the back. He was tall, and, while there wasn’t an ounce of fat on his body, he had nice muscles in his arms and shoulders. When she had seen him in swimming trunks at the town pool last summer before they were dating, she’d been mesmerized by his six-pack abs. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was to be dating such a fox.

  They’d broken up for a while before Christmas. And he’d even gone out with her archrival Charla Newby. But only once. Trish had called him and told him she missed him, and they’d gotten back together. Things weren’t exactly the same as before, though. He made her promise she wouldn’t boss him around and embarrass him in front of his friends, for starters. That was no problem. She could admit that she hadn’t been the easiest girlfriend before, and she would have walked across glass to get him back. Also, he was a little more stressed out, working hard like he was toward a scholarship, and occasionally that made him less patient with her. But he was her soulmate, the boy she was going to marry, and she was willing to work for their relationship. He’d given her his letter jacket and class ring. That meant something, right? She kept them in her locker at school, though—a secret from all of their over-protective parents.

>   And the parents were their major problem, especially Brandon’s mom. Mrs. Lewis blamed Trish’s family for her brother being on trial for murder, and she’d blame them even more if he was convicted, because Trish and her mom were the star witnesses against him at his trial. Brandon wasn’t allowed to see her outside of school, although that didn’t stop them. They found ways to be together. Like they’d done today.

  Trish and Brandon avoided talking about his relatives or the trial. It was better that way.

  A short, slim man in a shiny gray business suit passed by their table. He slipped and caught himself on Brandon’s shoulder. “Sorry,” he said.

  Brandon nodded. “It’s cool, man.”

  Trish looked down at the man’s feet. He was wearing narrow, lace-up loafers with smooth soles. Not the right footwear for icy decks at ski lodges.

  Another voice turned her attention away from him. “Trish Flint, is that you?”

  Vangie Sibley had a strong Tennessee accent, so her voice was pretty easy to recognize. Trish turned toward her. Vangie and her mom were basically best friends. Trish hadn’t seen Vangie in a while and couldn’t believe how much her belly had grown. She was so pregnant that it looked like her stomach was about to explode. “Oh, wow, Mrs. Sibley, you look . . .”

  “Like I’m hiding a watermelon under my shirt?”

  Trish’s cheeks grew hot. “I’m sorry. I didn’t, I guess, um, I mean you look great.” And she did. Her dark eyes sparkled, and her black hair looked super cute in its pixie cut. She looked almost young enough to be a student at Buffalo High, but she was old. Nearly thirty probably. “When is your baby due?”