MANA: Incline

The Mana Farms story line frequently contains mature language, topics, and situations. The characters within are fictional beings with weaknesses and faults, and I cannot promise you that you will like them for what they believe, say and do.

New readers, it is strongly recommended you begin this series from the very first story...which can be found on my profile page. Thanks!

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It was ten thirty in the morning while standing in the heavy fog of a recently zambonied sheet of ice, that James Hardy realized what he had to do. The kid, a freshman, was unscrewing a water bottle ever so slightly before placing it back on the rail. For a moment, the kid looked the coach in the eye, but his expression betrayed nothing. He skated away without a care in the world as if bored with the business of being brilliant, when he ought to have been excited, or at least motivated. Instead, he barely flinched when twenty seconds later a senior defensemen called out death threats to whoever had unscrewed his water bottle and soaked his jersey. The team ought to have realized that the kid’s dismissive nonsmile and lip-licking silence betrayed him, but the seniors took it for arrogance. He was, after all, a North.

The Norths of Philadelphia had long made a family business out of Stanley Cups. The kid’s grandfather had won two in his time with the Red Wings. The father one while playing for the Flyers. The elder brother was trying his best for the team in Calgary, and in time, frustrated with the incompetence of the management, he would leave and head south to Tampa and try several more years for them. The elder one was smart, reliable, hard-working and patient like a milkman’s horse, with more of the mother than the father warming up his blood. But this one. This one had all the fire and brimstone of his father, and the speed and hands of his father’s father, but he was standing there, absently scratching at the ice with his blade and trying to convince himself that he wouldn’t rather be getting into trouble with his high school friends back home.

James sighed and blew his whistle. The team gathered around, sticks in hand, chewing on their mouth guards, or spitting onto the ice. Brett North swayed over to the bench with them to listen, but he wasn’t really listening. He was eighteen years old and already thinking about taking his stick tape and winding it again and again around that same defenseman’s car keys when he was showering. Clearly, the father had informed his brightest son that they would single out the freshman...and there was only one way to permanently derail that bullshit: single someone out himself and harass him mercilessly. And Brett North could make a career out of being merciless. Would, James corrected himself. The coach uncapped the dry erase marker and outlined the play on the white board, and out of his eye he watched the kid watching that defenseman like a lion in the grass.

Somewhere in the sinew of his Colorado-fed muscle, James Hardy was thinking again like a horseman, like a man who didn’t breed the best roper and would never own the best, but sure as hell could spot them in the arena. The rest of the team was talented, and a few of them would make it out of the college rinks and into the minors and one or two might play a game here and there when some NHL hot shot got himself suspended or hurt. But this one was a North in the tradition of the Norths and James Hardy had to do what any sensible coach possessing a bored North had to do in this situation.

He took the entire North Dakota string to the Olympic Training Park at Colorado Springs and he put them on the Incline.

Cut into the side of the mountain, and rising thousands of feet at an angle that would cause your heart to stop if you had enough fat on you, the Incline was a Stairway to Heaven if you conquered it, or to Hell if it conquered you. The record for summiting its heights into the thin air of Colorado was somewhere around sixteen minutes. James Hardy had brought the entire team to the first step of it because he wanted to see how close the freshman would come to the top and how fast he could rise to it, but he wasn’t going to tell the team that and he certainly wasn’t going to tell the kid. He pointed to the stairs that rose up into the clouds and blew his whistle. Brett North launched himself at the mountain in a fury, and James Hardy threw back his head and laughed.

That day, inspired by the agony of the Incline, Brett North would turn his back on the stationary bike in his dorm room and buy a mountain bike. He had seen Colorado Springs from the summit and the summit was where he belonged. Coach James Hardy had known what he had not. Agony was the cure for boredom. So he gave away the stationary bike to that senior defenseman down the hall and smiled to himself as he did so. Enjoy going nowhere, he wanted to say to the senior, but instead he only smiled. He focused on nutrition, he jogged more often, he watched videos of the pros he admired, and even more the ones he did not, he became obsessed with percentages of lean muscle and fat, he learned to relax in a sauna and joke around with the triathletes that shared it with him. He skated harder. He learned faster. And when he graduated from the Fighting Sioux, having won them two state titles, they retired his number.

James Hardy, the man who had brought him to the Incline at eighteen years old, would stand shoulder to shoulder with his father and elder brother at the draft. He would follow him on those social networks as he played the minors. When Brett North finally reached the big time and scored his first official NHL goal, James Hardy stood up in a pub, threw his head back and laughed all over again. And then seven months later, after watching the freshman swing his royally sponsored stick at the back of Marty May’s head, Coach James Hardy would drink himself into a heartbroken stupor and die in the middle of an intersection in Denver, Colorado over the Easter holiday.

Brett North paused now, the lid to the water bottle soft in his hands, thinking quite suddenly about James Hardy, his breath caught in his throat, then he twisted the lid and placed it back on the ground.

Therese was coming up from behind, her face looking up at the San Gabriel Mountains. Above the treeline the sky was a robin egg blue, but down at the base of it all she could see was a boulder grey atmosphere choking the throat of the hills. The tang of pine and sage billowed down from the foothills, cool and crisp, promising her that blue sky above. She took a deep breath and looped her arm through Brett’s.

“So we climb dis together?” she sighed.

“Yep,” Brett replied, his focus half on the water bottle at the ground. “You don’t have to come. I told you it wouldn’t be your sort of thing.”

“No, no,” she tried to smile, “I want to try dis ting you do. Dis?”

“Incline,” he murmured.

“Incline,” she echoed. She looked up at the terraced trail stitched haphazardly through the trees and grumbled at it like a man does at the commute he takes to work. For her, it would be long and slow and the air polluted. She glanced at Brett. He was somewhere else, his golden-green eyes scanning the mountain like a young Hamlet encountering the ghost of his father. Obviously, the mountain meant something to him, she decided, otherwise he wouldn’t punish himself in this daily routine as she had recently discovered he did. The joggers making their way up the side of its face did not have the same haunted look as Brett. He looked hungry. Angry. She unloosed her arm from his.

“It’s not the real thing,” Brett quickly explained, sensing her recognition of his own transparency, “But it’ll do. It’s a mountain. It’s a trail. And it’s steep.”

“De other one, it’s in dis Colorado state?”


“Yep,” Brett answered.

“It is steeper?”

“It hurts more, yes.” Brett replied.

“De other jockeys, de just jog the track.”

“They go in circles,” Brett murmured. “I go up. That’s what I learned from the Incline.”

“An who taught you this?” she perceived.

“No one,” he replied.

“Ah,” she added. She bent down to take a drink.

Brett snapped to attention. He spun away from the mountain. “Don’t.” He stood there rigid and intense until she put the water bottle back down. Seeing the shaken expression in the frown on her face, he attempted an explanation. “Cooties. Mine are nasty.”


She feigned a light-hearted giggle. “Not ready to swap cooties wit me yet?”

Brett sensed her disappointment, her unease. He turned to her. “Rex Leroi is typing bullshit for the papers. Eddie Ne is half a man now. Solomon Rushton is getting old enough he can barely mount anything. Frankie is retired and breeding. Your brother is an idiot who overthinks everything. Point is...someone has to inherit the growing vacancy in racing. And it isn’t going to be Laurence.” He glanced at her. “Sorry.”

She surprised him by smiling. “So you are an at-lete. An a good one. An you like to win. An you ‘ate to lose. Dis is no surprise, Brett. You may not overtink as much as Laurence, but you can be just as insensible when it comes to what I understand about dem.”

He gaped at her. She rolled her eyes. “I agree wit you.” She nodded to the mountain and the sky above it. “You’re an Orion. Out to kill all de beasts of de earth. De hunter. You belong up dere.”

“Well,” he sighed, “I’m not the only one standing here who belongs up there.” The moment he said it he realized how corny it sounded and when she giggled he definitely wanted to detract it, but she was already hiking up the mountain, throwing her head back and laughing. He wasn’t quite sure what it was that had possessed him to drive her to UCLA the other day, to take her hand and pull her right into the admissions office, to tuck course catalogs and forms into her purse, to scoop her up into his arms and carry her to the astronomy and physical sciences building. It hadn’t been an overwhelming need to have her closer, though that would certainly be a perk...she was growing on him,...he watched her long brown hair swaying back and forth behind her as she ascended the trail into the mountains. All he knew was that in an instant he realized she deserved better than anything her brother with his limited worldview could give her and that just as some coach had driven him to Colorado Springs and pointed him at the Incline, someone had to drive Therese Leclerc to UCLA and have her shake hands with her own sort of mountain.

“GODDAMMIT BRETT!” came the scream from behind him as Santa Castillo-Reyes, late to the mountain, picked up the water bottle to take a swift drink. The entire front of her shirt was soaked.

“You are a slow learner,” Brett chided.

“You’re an immature asshole!”

Therese was looking down from twenty steps up, her eyes focused on the water bottle. “Cooties?” she echoed to Brett as he raced past her fleeing Santa’s exasperated latin curses.

“Told you mine were nasty.” He took her hand and pulled her up the mountain with him.


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