The Water-Method Man

There was a flat shelf at the base of the slope; surely, I thought, this would slow me down. If not, there was an enormous bulldozed mound of snow piled up to prevent skiers from zipping down into the parking lot. I tried to think of the mound as soft.

'Use your edges!' Merrill screamed. Edges? 'Bend your fucking knees!' Knees? 'Boggle, for God's sake, fall down!' In front of the children? Never.

I remembered the man at the rent-a-ski place, telling me about the safety bindings. If they were so safe, why didn't they do anything?

I hit the flattened shelf off balance and felt my weight fling me back on my heels; the tips of my skis were raised like the bow of a boat. The looming snowbank which protected the parking lot from the likes of me came up awfully suddenly. I saw myself drilled into it like a rifle grenade; they would dig for hours, then decide to blast me out.

The surprise has rarely been equaled: to discover that skis can climb. I vaulted the bank. I was launched into the parking lot. Below me, during my descent, I saw a family of sturdy Germans getting out of their Mercedes. Father Round in stout lederhosen knickers and a feathered Tyrolean hat; Mother Heft in hiking boots and swinging a walking stick with an ice-ax point; children: Dumpling, Dumpier and Dollop, with a baffling armload of rucksacks, snowshoes and ski poles. The opened trunk of their Mercedes waited for me to come down. A great whale's maw waiting for the flying fish to fall. Into the jaws of Death.

But sturdy Father Round, the German, precisely closed his trunk.

... after which I'm forced to rely on Merrill Overturf's description. I remember only a surprisingly soft landing, the result of my warm, fleshy collision with Mother Heft, wedged between my chest and the tail-lights of the Mercedes. Her sweet words were hot in my ear: 'Aaarp!' and 'Hee-urmff!' And the mixed reactions of the children; Child Dumpling's wordless gape, Child Dumpier's sudden avalanche of his belongings on Child Dollop, whose earsplitting wail was shrilly clear from under the rucksacks, snowshoes and ski poles where he lay cringing.

Father Round, said Merrill, quickly scanned the skies, no doubt looking for

the Luftwaffe. Merrill came clambering down the snowbank to where I lay dazed. Mother Heft's great wind had returned and she prodded me with the ice-ax tip of her walking stick.

'Boggle! Boggle! Boggle!' Merrill ran shouting. While on the lips of the bank above the parking lot, a crowd of those who'd survived me came to see if I'd survived. They are reported to have cheered when Merrill held up one of my broken skis and failed to find the other. My safety bindings had released. From the bank the lift attendant savagely hurled my ski poles into the parking lot, across which Merrill gingerly supported me. Insane applause and jeering from the snowbank, to see that I was somewhat marred.

It was then, Merrill claims, that the American couple drove up in their new Porsche. They were apparently lost; they thought they had come to the races in Zell. The man, a frightened one, rolled down his window and stared with considerable insecurity at the yelling crowd on the bank. With pity he smiled at Merrill helping the injured skier away. But the man's wife, big and fortyish, with a jutting chin, slammed her door and strode around to her husband's side of the car.

'Well, dammit,' she said to him, forcing him to roll down his window. 'You and your rotten German and your lousy sense of direction. We're late. We've missed the first event.'

'Madam,' Merrill said to her as he dragged me past them. 'Be glad that the first event missed you.'

*

But I have to take Merrill's word for this, and Merrill is suspect. By the time we were back at the Gasthaus Tauernhof in Kaprun, Merrill was in worse shape than I was. He was having an insulin reaction; his blood sugar was down to zilch. I had to help him to the bar and explain his exploring eyes to Herr Halling, the bartender.

'He's a diabetic, Herr Halling. Give him an orange juice, or something else with lots of sugar.'

'No, no,' Halling said. 'Diabetics aren't supposed to have any sugar.'

'But he's had too much insulin,' I told Halling. 'He's used up too much sugar.' And as if to demonstrate my point, Merrill fumbled a cigarette in front of us, lit the filter end, disliked the taste and ground it out on the back of his own hand. I knocked it away from him and Merrill stared with some puzzlement at what might have been a dull pain coming from the burn. Do you suppose that's my hand? With his other hand, he picked it up and waved it to Herr Halling and me as if it were a flag.

'Ja, orange juice, immediately,' Herr Halling said.

I propped Merrill up against me, but he skidded dizzily off his bar stool.

When he recovered, we watched a rerun of the women's races at Zell on television. The Austrian, Heidi Schatzl, won the downhill as expected, but there was an upset in the giant slalom. The first American girl to win an international race beat out Heidi Schatzl and the French star, Marguerite Delacroix. The video tapes were beautiful. Delacroix missed a gate in her second run and was disqualified, and Heidi Schatzl caught an edge and fell. The Austrians in the Gasthaus Tauernhof were glum, but Merrill and I cheered loudly, in the interests of international hostility.

Then they showed the tape of the American girl who'd won. She was nineteen, blonde and very strong. She came through the upper gates smoothly, but a little slow. When she hit the mid-mark, her time was a bit long and she knew it; she bore down on those lower gates like a skidding bus, skating off one ski and then the other, dropping her shoulder and cutting so close to the flags that she left every one flapping. At the last gate, she performed a ballet on that ice-hard, overpacked snow: she lost her balance and managed to hold her cut with one ski off the ground, like a wing out beside her at her waist. Then she righted herself, touched that wild ski down as soft as a kiss, threw her great ass back over her heels and sat on the backs of her skis down the straightaway across the finishing line, snapping herself out of that deep squat as soon as she crossed the line. She cut a wide, soft, snow-throwing turn just in front of the safety rope and the crowd. It was very clear that she knew she'd won it.

They had an interview with her on television. She had a smooth, handsome face with a mouth as wide as her cheekbones. No make-up, just the white stickum of Chap Stick on her lips; she kept licking them, laughing all out of breath and bold-faced, clowning into the camera. She wore a one-piece stretch-suit as sleek and tight on her as skin; it had a big gold zipper running from her chin to her crotch, and she'd let it open down to her cleavage, where her big high, round breasts pushed out her soft velour pullover. She shared the winner's circle with the second-place finisher Dubois of France - a petite, darting, ratlike lady with snap-out eyes; and third place finisher Thalhammer of Austria, a dark, glowering, shapeless, hulking wonder-woman whose chromosomes, you can bet, were half male. The American was a head taller than either of them and an inch above the interviewer, who was as impressed with her bosom as he was with her skiing.

His English was awful. 'You haf a Cherman name,' he said to her. 'Vy?'

'My grandfather was Austrian,' the girl said, and the locals in the Gasthaus Tauernhof cheered up a little.

'Then you speak Cherman?' the interviewer asked her, hopefully.'

'Only with my father,' the girl said.

'Not just a little wit me?' the interviewer teased.

'Nein,' said the girl, whose face now betrayed a certain tough irritability; she must have been thinking, Why don't you ask me about my skiing, twerp? A bouncy American teammate popped up over her shoulder and held out an unwrapped stick of gum. The big girl stuck it in her mouth and started to soften it up.

'Vy do all Americans jew cum?' the interviewer asked her.