Crazy Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

brother. I got the good blood.”
    â€œYou can’t win the cup next year, Sky.”
    â€œI can and will.”
    â€œNo, it’s mine.”
    â€œI’ll do anything on Earth to prevent that.”
    â€œYou can’t beat me, Sky. The cup already belongs to me.”
    *   *   *
    Adam took a cab back to the Monaco Hotel on Geary. He packed and had the bellhop take his bags to the lobby. He went downstairs with his Catton and got a glass of Napa cabernet from the restaurant. He sat by the fireplace and looked toward the street, exhausted by Robert’s fate and by his two grandsons’ unbending dislike for each other. Neither was at genuine fault. The true blame lay on his own son, Richard, and his wife, Cynthia, and the determined Kathleen Welborn. How many times had that story played out in the history of civilization—the married man of success and charm, the flattered young admirer, the shocked wife?
    The wine was unearthly good. He pondered Sky’s pledge to win the next Mammoth Cup for Robert, not sure what to make of it. Sky was certainly capable of winning it. But Sky had also always excelled at the hollow gesture. Sky, who, at age six, had wanted to change his name to White Ice Carson, to be more “marketable” as a skier. Who, at sixteen, had brought impoverished Croatian twins to live with him and Cynthia and train on Mammoth Mountain, then angrily turned them out when his interest in them dwindled. Sky, who had been engaged to and dumped not one but two women, practically at the altar. Sky, thought Adam—boastful and brash and brimming with inborn talent, but still afflicted by moods, like his mother, and by a sliver of fear on the mountain, like my beautiful Richard.
    So, Sky as Mammoth Cup champion? Maybe. He would need to dedicate himself to it.
    But Wylie could win it, too. He had comparable instincts and abilities. And Wylie was serious in ways that Sky wasn’t, quite. He was strong and could summon will. He was both a skier and a racer—two different things. Wylie’s Mammoth Cup win five years ago was the most impressive ski-cross run that Adam had ever seen on the Mammoth X Course. But Wylie would need to find desire. For Wylie, there had always been the next adventure, the next mountain, the next place where the grass would be greener and he could find whatever was missing. Like my beautiful Richard, Adam thought again.
    Now, he thought, the cup stood equidistant between them like a gleaming sword that only one of them could grab first and employ. Which one of his grandsons would he really like to win that race? Well, legally, Sky was the legitimate Carson and therefore an heir. Spiritually? Bastard Wylie might have the edge.
    Adam looked at the magnificent vase that stood in the middle of the lobby, at the elegant furniture, the beautiful marble floor. Through the front windows on Geary he could see the rain coming down and a bellhop with a raised umbrella escorting a woman inside. He thought of Sandrine, almost five years gone now, but he still often awoke in his bed believing that she was there beside him, as she had been for sixty-four years. Sometimes he reached his hand out, expecting her warm skin. Then that free fall into truth.
    But surprisingly to Adam, what he found himself dwelling on in his advancing years were not the staggering losses in his lifetime—Sandrine, a brother, a sister, Richard, a granddaughter, several of his closest friends, and scores of people he had liked and loved—but, rather, the pleasures that carried him through each day. He had his home and his ATV and the Sierra Nevada to roam upon. He could still fish Crowley Lake and Hot Creek and the Upper Owens. He could still ski the more forgiving slopes. He had his reading and the eyes to do it with, thank God. He had the love of Teresa. He had Mammoth Mountain to manage—twenty-eight lifts, three lodges and a cross-country ski center, six