The Ski Jumpers, page 17
Pops grabbed another can of Coke from the cooler and handed it to Anton and said to me, “We’re gonna go see the little kids jump” and without waiting for my reply left me standing there with the coach.
We watched them disappear into the woods between jumps before he turned to me and said, “I am Matti Rantannen. You know me?”
“I think I do.”
“Your little brother has very high thought of you.”
“He’s loyal, I’ll give him that.”
“You are coached by my friend Steve Brag, yes?”
I nodded. “He coaches all the juniors from Minneapolis. Well, the juniors and seniors both. I guess he’s the club coach.”
“He is good friend. We jump together for many years.”
“Was he a good jumper?”
“He was very good at drinking beer and skipping curfew and chasing girls.” He winked. “But yes, even better at ski jumping. Very strong. Like you Bargaards.” He gripped the front of his thighs. “I saw your father jump too. In Chicago at the Soldier Field. I remember it yes.”
“He’s told us about that a hundred times.”
“He was very best that day.”
He gestured at the jump, and started walking toward the staircase up to the take off. I didn’t know if I was supposed to follow him or not, but he paused and waved me along. Together we climbed the flight of stairs that led to the scaffold and stood on the platform there.
Matti pointed to the top of the transition and said, “You get shy here. Your weight shifts to the heels yes? You are not afraid, but it looks like you are.”
I knew exactly what he was talking about, but couldn’t make the correction as much as I tried. It was a subtle mistake, but like so many things in that sport it was the difference between going the farthest and going the tenth farthest. Or twentieth. “Yep. I can feel that. And I want to be committed. I’m trying. But I swear to god I think it’s the vibration from the mats. They’re weird. I feel like I’m skiing down a gravel road.”
“But all these other jumpers here”—he waved his hand in the direction of the soccer field, to imply his team—“they are forward and they are on same gravel road yes.” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Stand on track now. Show me inrun.”
I stepped on the mats and set my feet apart and lowered into my inrun position: knees out front of my feet, thighs parallel to the scaffold, stomach and chest laid against my thighs, my shoulders stretched beyond my knees, my arms straight back, my forearms resting on the back of my hips, my head leading the way, eyes intent, from thirty feet away, on the take off. I remember the sensation of being coiled, and eager, even after a full day of jumping, to rocket into the air.
“This is perfect position,” Matti said. He’d gone in front of me so I could see him from his feet to his armpits, but not his face. “From here you can jump like kangaroo yes. But”—and now he stepped to me and put one finger on each shoulder and pushed me back two inches. “From here you jump like a little old man.”
It was true. From that position, I could hardly stay balanced on my feet, let alone leap forward at the take off.
“And still you are outjumping half of my team. Do you know how?”
“My timing’s good. I pile the hell on ’em.”
“You think you just make it so yes.”
The truth was, I didn’t know how I was jumping so far. I had no idea what I was doing in the air that compensated for my mistake on the take off. In answer to his question, I shrugged.
He smiled, and nodded, and put his hands on his hips. “We never see you before, Johannes. How come no?”
“We mostly just jump at home. At Wirth Park in Minneapolis and out in Bloomington on Big Bush.”
“You do not wish to go on bigger jumps? Against better jumpers?”
“I’ve never thought much about it, to be honest. I just love doing it. With Pops and Anton.”
Now he squinted at me. Probing. After a moment, he said, “You fix this here, and you will beat all my guys. Then we will talk again yes.”
Halfway down the stairs he stopped and turned and put a hand on my chest. “You wait here,” he said, then hurried down the remaining five or six steps. There was a concrete slab at the bottom, and he stepped off to the side of it and said, “You jump from there. Land in telemark down here.” He pointed at the concrete.
It was a hell of a ways. “Why?” I said.
“Because I say to yes. From inrun position you jump.”
I got into my inrun.
“Wait,” he shouted. “You feel that? You feel your knees yes.”
“Yes.”
“You feel those mudderfucking knees. Those shins yes.”
“Yes.”
“Then jump.”
I did, up and out and at the mercy of this strange man. I no sooner could have landed in a telemark from that height than I could have jumped back up to the eighth stair, but I was able to keep my balance and stayed on my feet, albeit in a squat. When I stood up straight I looked over at him.
“It is okay there is no telemark.”
“Why did you ask me to do that?”
“I want to be careful! So I know you can land at bottom of hill. You get your shin hairs on the plastic yes. The knees out front. Then you will see. I will have fun watching.”
“All right, man.”
“One thing more: what size are your boots?”
“I’m a size twelve.”
“That is some forty-five or forty-six European?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It is okay. I am knowing. Remember: tomorrow, knees.” He demonstrated with his own short legs.
* * *
*
The next morning, as we pulled into our parking spot beneath the jump, Matti was there with a big box under his arm. When I got out, he handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I said.
“It is right boots.”
“I can’t afford these,” I said.
“Your father, he buys them.”
I tried to hand them back, but he put a stiff hand up. “You need all the same as team guys. So it is fair. I give Jake a good deal.”
By now Pops was out of the car. “Take the boots, Jon,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure if I was talking to Pops or Matti, or if I should be embarrassed or flattered or something else.
For the first time, I watched Matti smile. He punched me on the shoulder and said “Knees.”
A pair of red Adidas high back boots rested in the box. Brand new. The same boots all the ski team guys wore. We adjusted my bindings and I got ready and to this day I can still remember the sensation of putting those boots on for the first time and walking as though I couldn’t get off my tiptoes. As though I might fall on my face with every step. It was alarming to think of jumping in them, but since all the best guys wore them, I figured I could, too.
And I did. It took the morning to acclimate, but by the afternoon session I was doing everything Matti had told me to, and the results spoke for themselves. I was jumping twenty or twenty-five feet farther than the two days previous, putting me right in the thick of things. It was strange and exciting to be there, and to give a damn about my performance. But I took to it, and by the time the Fourth of July competition came around, Pops had me convinced I could pull off a Soldier Field–style upset.
The morning of the competition it stormed; sheets of rain blew across the valley and up the landing hill in front of the strong winds that moved it. The trees shook and lightning quivered and for a while it looked like the competition would be canceled, but before noon the weather passed and all the jumpers worked on clearing the landing hill of leaves and small branches and right at one o’clock, as scheduled, the competition commenced. We tied our canvas bib numbers on and ascended the jump. Being a junior skier, and an unknown one at that, I was number four to Anton’s three, so we as much as led the charge.
I remember Anton’s first competition jump, and the way my stomach lurched after him as he took his first ride, his seemingly weightless flight, the way he disappeared from view still high in the air and didn’t return until he was skiing across the grass on the outrun. I remember the voice over the PA system announcing his distance, fifty-one meters, and the audible hush of the other skiers at the top of the jump who couldn’t believe that distance from the tyke who’d just gone. I could hardly believe it myself.
I remember how worried I was that I’d not match him, even though my training rides had been ten or twelve meters beyond his distance.
I remember how I thought, at the top of the jump, as I squatted to fasten my bindings, sliding the cable up over the heels of my boots and latching down the front throws, that all I had to do was what Matti had encouraged me to, and drive my mudderfucking knees forward through the transition.
I remember almost forgetting to strap my helmet on before I pulled out onto the inrun.
I remember one of the other guys from the Minneapolis club telling me to have a good one as I gripped the railing at the start, and the way I focused all of my concentration on my knees as I gained speed.
And I remember a feeling of cockiness as I sped toward the takeoff: I’d done what the esteemed coach told me to do, I had stayed in that ready position, I had kept my knees out front, I was loaded for goddamn bear, as Pops would later recount.
So lost was I in those thoughts that I almost forgot to jump, but I did, and quick and effortlessly, so that I was in my flight position even faster than usual, and I remember the very specific feeling of lift. And for the first time in my life the sensation of the pause that would become for me the best indicator of a good jump. It happened at the height of my flight, and if I’d not heard so often about it I might have bailed on the jump right there. But because I had, I let it ride, and pulled with my whole body. It felt like someone had a hand on my suit and was lifting me from above.
Of course, I had to land. Every jump must. And for me, on that day, that jump, I alighted at sixty-four meters. A telemark at that distance was impossible, but I managed not to drag my hands behind me on the plastic mats as I squatted in my landing.
I remember Anton’s second jump measured fifty-two meters.
I remember my second jump was only sixty-one meters, but it scored the same because I was able to land in a telemark, and my style marks were higher. Good enough to win the junior class and take fourth place overall. Anton was fifth place among the juniors.
I remember all that perfectly. Perfectly. And I remember, later, driving home across Wisconsin in the dark, passing through towns with firework shows lighting up the night, the three of us singing Eagles’ songs together and recounting the weekend like we were wizened old men already and had had the time of our lives.
Somewhere in the dark of that night, on a stretch between towns, I remember craning my head out the station wagon window and looking at the starlit sky, and wondering—only for a moment, one I quickly reprimanded myself for—if maybe Bett was right, at that fateful dinner at Vescio’s, about God.
The Meat Market
I SOMETIMES THINK ABOUT THE WATER in the deepest trenches of Lake Superior. As I understand it, some of that water is residual of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, whose retreat more than ten thousand years ago cut much of the landscape I consider home. I think of it as the old water, and it’s to those inky depths I retreat when the bedlam of my thoughts engulf me. It occurs to me now that the image that always surfaces in me—of a darkness beyond ken, but whorled with the moonlight from millennia past, like the black granite knuckled with ice so dominant on the Highway 61 roadside now—is what likely awaits my consciousness on the other side of this illness. It’s a familiar place, that imaginary underwater world, one that’s always brought peace and quiet, and if I try hard enough, I can even get comfortable with the idea of spending my last months and years swimming down there.
I mention all this because it was to those depths I’d gone after Kristi went out to smoke again. I sat alone, in the corner of the pool room, listening to the cracking billiard balls and the rising music but hearing only my own self-admonishments. How had I let my brother out of my life? All those years were gone forever, and the weight of them was as heavy as the melted ice at the bottom of the lake. I drank a beer and let myself sink into the comfort of my old water oblivion.
At some point Ingrid texted to say goodnight. Clara and Delia would stay the night. They’d just started a movie. It was nice to have the company. Tempted as I was to call her then, to say goodnight, of course, but also to find some equilibrium, I only texted, and said goodnight and told her I loved her. I waited for Anton to reappear and when, after as long as it took to finish my beer, neither he nor Kristi did, I got up and ambled past the bikers still shooting pool to enter the main barroom.
One group of determined young men still sat in a row along the stage, tossing dollar bills at the dancer and raising shot glasses and rousing bawdy toasts into the otherwise subdued space. But most of the remaining crowd, and there were plenty of low-slung shoulders hunched around the room, were as old as me. Men not there for the dancers or the drugs, but only to see if there was still a reflection in their glasses of bar-rail whiskey. The lights seemed dimmer, the music louder but also mellower. So mellow I could hear an old timer getting a private dance at a table near the pull-tabs tell his companion that this snowy night was the anniversary of his wife’s death. I couldn’t help but watch him for a moment. His lachrymose eyes—as red as the woman’s fingernails combing through his mostly gone hair—conveyed a grief as ancient and of the moment as the wind still blowing outside.
The phone behind the bar rang. One of the swains elbows-up at the stage stood and staggered toward the table still manned by Phil Johnson. The guy wore a Timberwolves jersey over a hooded sweatshirt and a flat-brimmed baseball cap cocked at an angle above his sunglasses. He leaned in close to Phil, bought a cut of meat and pocketed something else, then headed to the men’s room, hollering for one of his partners to join him.
Anton, whom I hadn’t seen in what seemed a long time, rounded the corner just as the guy in the jersey and sunglasses did, and grabbed him by the hood and said something into his ear and as fast as it all happened, the bouncer, a big guy I’d originally mistook for one of the bikers, was up at the stage with Anton, clearing the whole crew out of the bar. They stumbled by, saving their complaints until the bouncer had shoved the last of them, and then they turned in a kind of disorganized unison and started shouting obscenities at my brother and his muscle. When Anton came back into the barroom, he headed straight for Phil. I followed.
“So many assholes,” he said to me, then to Phil, “How’s business?”
“What’s with the vegetables?” I said.
Phil grabbed two red onions and held them up like he was cupping breasts. “It’s all part of the ruse.” He put the onions in a canvas shopping bag, then put the peppers and tomatoes in, too. “Business is good. The meat market’s closed.”
Anton nodded. “Thank fucking god. Put those in the walk-in downstairs? I’ll get them later.” He nodded at the dozen or so cuts of meat still sitting on either side of the table.
“Sure thing, boss.”
He moved slowly, stacking the meat two packs at a time in a separate shopping bag.
Anton turned to me. “We can get down to it now, brother.”
“Get down to what?”
He arched an eyebrow. “Catching up. Having a proper drink.” He waved at the bar. “The great goat fuck should mellow now. Come on.”
We walked to the other end of the bar and took two stools. He surveyed the remaining lonely hearts and drunkards. A new dancer was standing at the jukebox, punching numbers onto the pad. She stood obliquely, her head resting on her shoulder, long black hair raining down her shoulder and back. She was still there when the woman on stage descended the staircase and headed straight for the dressing room, pausing only long enough to kiss Anton on the cheek.
As soon as she was gone he hailed the bartender. “Hey, Barb, you met my big brother yet?”
She held the microphone to her throat. “The spitting image,” she said through her voice box.
“He’s way better looking than me,” Anton said.
“Some of the girls think so, too,” she said, and winked at us.
“You got a bottle of my reserve down there?”
She reached into a cabinet under the cash register and pulled out a bottle of small-batch Four Roses. She poured us each a couple fingers and set the glasses down and Anton said, “Pour yourself one, Barbie.”
She put a single finger in another glass, added a splash of water, and raised it in our direction before quaffing it all at once. She wiped her lips on a bar napkin and put her microphone to her throat. “That one was for your dad.”
“Hear, hear,” Anton said, tipping his glass at Barb and then clinking it on mine.
“To Pops,” I said.
Barb washed her glass in the trio of sinks under the bar and set it on a rack to dry, then filled a paper bowl with pretzels and placed it in front of us. “Shout loud when you need more,” she said. “I’m your girl.”
“You’ll always be my girl,” Anton said.
He took a deep breath and seemed finally ready to settle in for an uninterrupted drink, looking around the place as though seeing it for the first time all night. “Every day it’s something different in this goddamn place,” he said. “Assholes and fights and fucking drug addicts and dancers. But right there”—he pointed the lip of his glass at Barb—“is the calm in the eye of the storm. She’s been pouring ’em here for twenty-two years. Can you believe that?”
“That’s a lot of nights on her feet,” I said.
“She had cancer whenever it was, maybe five years ago. Hence the robot voice.”
“Yeah, one of the women from over at the barge office told me.”
“Kristi,” he said.
“Missy,” I said.
“Maybe Sheb was right after all.”
