"Ski heil," she said airily. "We'll arrive late Friday night. Stay up for us."

He hung up. He stared at the phone. He didn't know whether he was pleased or not pleased that his friends were coming. Well, he thought, at least Susan would be good for some laughs. Thanksgiving. He had forgotten about Thanksgiving. Did he have anything to be thankful for? He would look into the pros and cons before the holiday and act accordingly.

He sank back into bed, pulling the blankets around him, halfhypnotized by the steady, straight, silent fall of snow outside the window and fell asleep quickly and did not dream.

Cully was waiting for him at the chair lift exactly at nine. The word had not yet gone out that the lifts were working and they were alone. The slopes above them shone untracked in the sunlight. Cully had an expression of faraway, almost sensual pleasure on his weathered, tough face as he looked up, but all he said as Michael greeted him was, "It's about time we had it."

As they were putting on their skis, a gray-haired black man of about fifty, his skin almost copper-colored, came out of the shed. He was wearing an old tufted down-lined parka and a peaked corduroy woodman's cap with earflaps. He had a battered old pipe stuck in his mouth and was puffing contentedly.

"Everything ready, Harold?" Cully asked.

"Ready for the thundering herd," the man said. "Enjoy yourself, Dave, this is the last moment of peace you'll have for a long time."

"Harold," Cully said, "this is Mike Storrs. He's working for me this winter. Mike, Harold Jones."

Michael shook the man's hand. It felt like a steel clamp. Jones looked at him closely. "Didn't I see you someplace before, young fella?" His accent was exactly the same as Cully's.

"Maybe. I was here a long time ago for a winter."

Jones nodded. "I thought so. You did all those crazy tricks, like once I saw you somersaulting over a six-foot-high pile of stacked cordwood."

Cully laughed. "The same."

"How many bones you broke since then, Mr. Storrs?" Jones asked.

"None," Michael said. He told himself that the man was referring to skiing and that ribs cracked in barroom brawls didn't count.

"God takes care of fools and drunkards," said Jones. He held the chair that was swinging around on the overhead cable for them and they slipped onto it and started up.

"Who is that old guy?" Michael asked.

"Our chief engineer. Fix anything from a cotter pin to a fractured skull."

"He sounds as if he's from around here."

"He was born here. His great grandfather's got a picture of himself in the town library. He came up from the South on the underground railroad before the Civil War and liked it and stayed, farming a little, doing odd jobs, and some painter who came through town painted his picture. This was a lumbering and farming town until the 1920s. No ski bunnies up from New York and Boston then and no drinking on Sundays, either. The town was dying on the limb during the Depression but the family stayed and then the skiing craze caught on and it turns out Jones owns about a thousand acres he'd been buying up for peanuts all around town. One smart fella. He could retire if he wanted to but you'd have to call an armed guard to get him away from his machinery. His kid works at the Alpina, the waitress. Smart kid, finished high school at the age of fifteen, but she refuses to go to college. Her old man doesn't care one way or the other, he's told me-he's seen the college kids come up here and he says he wouldn't give a broken ski pole for the lot of them."

They rose steadily upward through the swath cut in the forest for the chair lift, the branches of the pines still laden with snow in the below zero sunshine. A deer looked up at them inquiringly but without fear from a spot under a spreading tree where there was still some dried grass showing. There was a slight whirr from the cable but otherwise the silence was absolute and both men understood that to break it would mar that particular moment of the morning of their first ascent of the year to the mountain. Here and there below them, too, there were rabbit tracks and a track that Michael thought was that of a fox. New York, he thought, was continents, ages away.

At the top, they skied down the little slope off the lift and Cully waved to the man who was on duty in the shed in which the great round wheel returned the chairs downhill again.

Without saying anything, Cully skied off on a traverse on the bald top of the mountain. Michael followed him. He had never skied this side of the hill before, because the lift had been installed after his time and new trails cut through the woods. Finally, Cully stopped and they both looked down. A hill as steep as any Michael had skied anywhere before, in America or in Europe, dropped, almost sheer, below them, for a straight hundred yards, then veered sharply to the left, out of sight, into the forest.

"I see," Michael said. "We do the easy ones first and gradually work our way up to the beginners' slopes."

Cully grinned. "They call this run the Black Knight. All the kids do it," he said.

"I'm sure," said Michael. "With parachutes."

"Remember what the man said-fools and drunkards."

"Follow me, you son of a bitch," Michael said and skated off and down, the powder fountaining like foam from the prow of a ship behind him. He whistled tunelessly as he sped straight downhill, to remember to breathe. He had wanted to schuss the whole thing to the turn, but he knew he was out of control halfway down and it wouldn't do to wind up smeared against a tree on the first run of the winter with Cully. As he made his turn to brake his speed, he saw Cully glide past him, his skis together, pointed straight downhill. "Showboat," Michael called and Cully waved a pole debonairly at him. Michael was relieved to see that at least Cully didn't schuss the whole face, but made four turns before stopping and waiting at the place where the run curved into the forest.

"Pretty good for an old fart," Michael said when he stopped beside Cully. Somehow, he could talk to Cully on the hill in a way that he never could on the flat.

Cully grinned again. "After this it becomes more technical."

"I am with you, friend."

"What I mean by that," Cully said jovially, "is that it narrows and becomes a little steeper and there's a boulder about two hundred yards down in the middle of the trail that you don't see until you're right on it, because it's in a little clearing right after you make a sharp turn out of the woods."

"It sounds like fun," Michael said. "Allez, allez"

From then on, Cully was merciless. Comradely, smiling, but merciless. It was impossible to believe that he spent most of his days at a desk. Huge, overweight, paunchy, balding, he never stopped, never looked back, jumped bumps twenty feet in the air, landed lightly as a bird, a bird made out of steel springs that would not reveal any signs of metal fatigue even under x-ray examination after ten thousand flights.

Michael hung on doggedly, sweating through his parka, his city muscles screaming within his legs, fell twice, wanted to just lie there in the cooling snow, abandoning himself to shameless defeat, but made himself scramble up and pound down after the inexorable broad back below him.

It was nearly noon, and they had done every run on the two hills of the ski area, with only the blessed respite of the trips up on the lifts to allow him time to regain his breath, when Cully finally stopped. From two hundred yards above him, Michael saw Cully bend to take off his skis near the lodge which abutted the parking space. He put on one last, groaning burst of speed and stopped flashily, throwing a great spray of snow over Cully.

Cully looked up. "Showboat," he said, smiling. "Have a good morning?"

"Never had a better," Michael gasped, leaning bent forward on his ski poles. "Thanks."

"It was nothing," Cully said. "But I didn't notice you doing any somersaults."

"I like to do things like that when there are girls around."

"There's one." Cully pointed up the hill. "Maybe she'd like a sample."

Michael turned with difficulty, too tired to take off his skis. High up the slope a slender figure in red was making swift, perfect short turns through the powder. "I think I'll leave tricks to later in the season," Michael said.

Cully laughed. "Maybe you ought to get more sleep at night." He patted Michael's shoulder. "You'll do," he said. "I thought I could shake you and I couldn't." Michael knew that he had been put to some private, simple-minded test of Cully's and he had passed it. It was silly, but he was happy. He knew he had done nothing that should make him feel guilty in Cully's presence, but he had still felt uneasy until now. Cully, he saw now, was doing everything he could, in his taciturn, heavy-handed and merciless way, to show him that he liked him and that they could be friends.

Michael wiped the sweat off his face and forehead with a handkerchief and watched the girl in red come swooping down the hill. When she got near enough, he saw that it was Rita, the waitress from the hotel, Harold Jones' daughter. "Holy man," Michael said, "she really can ski."

"She ought to," Cully said. "She's been on skis since the age of three. Hi, Rita," he said, as she came to a neat, modest stop in front of the two men. "Nice morning?"

"Splendiferous," she said, beaming, looking more like ten years old than sixteen. "It makes you sad, too."

"Why?" Michael asked.

"Tomorrow it will be crawling with people. Today I owned the mountain. Except for you two. I saw your tracks wherever I went," she said, stepping out of the bindings of her skis. "Hey, Mr. Storrs," she said, "those were pretty fancy tracks you made."

"They were Dave's," Michael said. "Mine looked as though they were made by a drunken webbed animal."

She laughed. "I can recognize Dave's. He's been signing his name on these hills since before I was bom."

"Listen, you two," Michael said, finally recovered enough to bend and get out of his skis, "I'm dying of thirst. Let's go into the lodge and I'll treat you to something cold."

"I'm not thirsty," Cully said.

"You dog," Michael said.

"Anyway, I have to go back to the office. I played hooky long enough. Mike, come in if you have time later. You might as well sign the contract. It will make you a rich man for three or four hours, if you don't do anything extravagant, like buying a sandwich." "I'll be there," Michael said. "How about you, Rita? You got time for a drink?"

"Fifteen minutes. Then I have to get back to the hotel. I'm on for lunch today."

"I'll drive you," Michael said. "That'll give you more time." He picked up her skis and with his own on the other shoulder started toward the lodge, while Cully went to where his battered station wagon was parked.

"You shouldn't carry my skis, Mr. Storrs," Rita said in a low voice as she walked by his side toward the steps leading up the lodge. "Why not?" '

"Not everybody in this town is like you," Rita said flatly. "And if they told Mrs. Heggener you were seen carrying my skis, she would say it wasn't seemly."

"Nonsense, Rita," he said, sharply. Then, more lightly, "I make a point of always being seemly."

"I don't want you to get any wrong ideas," Rita said hastily. "Mr. Cully is not one of those people. Not in a million years."

"I know," Michael said, still keeping his tone light. "He's most seemly, too-in his own rough way, of course."

He leaned the two pairs of skis against a wall and poked the poles into the snow beside them. "I've been dreaming about a cold beer since nine-thirty this morning," he said. "Following good old Dave Cully down the hill is warm work."

"Isn't that man something?" Rita shook her head admiringly. She had been skiing without a cap and her cropped black hair trembled as she moved and there were still little flakes of snow in it that made gleaming highlights over her forehead. Her skin, Michael noticed, was considerably darker than her father's, and was glistening with youthful health. "Imagine being that old and fat and still skiing like that," she said.

"He's not much older than I am," Michael said with dignity as they mounted the steps.

"Oh, I'm sorry." Rita put up her hand to her mouth, abashed. "I didn't mean to offend you. Anyway, you're not fat." She giggled.

"I will be," Michael said, "if you keep giving me those huge portions at the hotel every meal."

"If you're going to ski with Dave Cully, you better keep your strength up."

At the self-service counter inside, he picked up a cold beer and she took a Coke. They sat at a comer table, after Michael had taken off his parka. His shirt, he saw, embarrassed, was dark with sweat, but Rita didn't say anything about it. She drank slowly, through & straw, while he finished the beer in three voracious gulps, then went back for a second. "Nectar," he said with a sigh, after he had taken the first swallow of the second bottle. "One day I would like to own a brewery and swim in the vats."

"Mr. Heggener likes beer, too. He always has a bottle before dinner."

Michael was tempted to ask about Mr. Heggener, but refrained. Whatever the girl might say, however innocent, she might regret later.

"I want to thank you," Michael said, "for remembering to leave a bottle of wine for me each night." He had gotten into the guilty habit of rinsing out the second glass and drying it and returning it to exactly the same position it had arrived on the tray so that in the morning whoever came in to clean up would suppose that he had drunk the whole bottle himself. Better the reputation of a drunkard than of a lecher!

"With Madam Heggener around, we make sure we don't forget anything."

Michael got off the subject of Mrs. Heggener quickly. "You ski awfully well, you know."

Rita shrugged. "I was bom here. I ski like all the kids."

"I know. I met your father this morning."

"He was whistling when he left the house at dawn," Rita said. "At last his lifts were working."

"He remembered me. Not too fondly. He said God protects fools and drunkards."

"That's Daddy." She laughed. "He's an outspoken man." She had unzipped the top of her ski suit and dropped it around her waist. She was wearing a boy's cotton shirt and he noticed that there was no sign of perspiration coming through the thin cloth. She was flat and thin and angular and he saw that he could have put his fingers easily, with something to spare, around her fine-boned wrists. "Rita," he said, "have you ever been hurt? Skiing, I mean?"

She looked surprised. "No. Should I have?"

"I mean, you're so slender and your bones . . ."

"Skinny, you mean." She looked wistful. "My mama swears I'm going to develop. I'm stronger than I look. I have to be. I've been rassling with my brother all my life."

"Have you ever raced?"

Rita laughed, something surprisingly condescending in the sound, as you might laugh at a child who had amused you with a silly question. In a moment she was an adult. "Have you ever heard of a black downhill racer?"

"Not really," Michael said, sensitive to what was behind the question. "Still, before Jackie Robinson, there never was a black second baseman in the National League, either."

"I've talked about it with my daddy," she said seriously. "Give it another fifty years, my daddy says. In fifty years I'll be sixty-six. How many sixty-six-year-old girls, black or white, do you know of in the Olympics? And I'm not even the good one in the family. You ought to see my brother. . ."

"How old is he?"

"Eighteen."

"What does he do?"

"He works with my father."

"Maybe we can all three of us ski together one day," Michael said. "He gets Thursdays off." She looked pleased with the invitation. She changed from moment to moment, child to adult, adult to child. "And you?"

"Mornings, mostly. I usually start work at lunch and go on till ten p.m."

"Maybe we can arrange it for next Thursday," Michael said. "One day a month with Dave Cully does it for me, thank you. And I don't like to ski alone."

"That would be very nice. If you're not busy with Madam."

"Oh," he said, "you know about my being assigned to her?"

"News gets around. A little town . . ."

"How does she ski?"

"Very well," Rita said. Again she sounded condescending, but this time not because of her color. "Considering her age."

Michael laughed. "You know," he said, "I'm older than she is."

Rita giggled, suddenly very childish. "I did it again. I'm sorry." "That's all right," Michael said, thinking that he had to get used to people Rita's age regarding everyone over thirty as decrepit and on the brink of extinction.

They finished their drinks and went out to where the Porsche was parked, with Michael carrying the two pairs of skis and Rita not objecting now. He put the skis in the rack and the poles in the back of the car and Rita sank luxuriously into the passenger seat. "Mr. Storrs," she said, "do me a favor, please."

"Of course."