The Runner Read Online Free Page B

there. After a while, Hogue began putting more pressure on Alaia to provide him with a steady income. Sometimes Jim rented out the
    Alaias’ condo and pocketed the proceeds. Around town, they began to see him in the company of the Eastern European girls who worked in the shops and bars. When they came back home once
    they found their bed covered in dog hair. Another time, they found multiple long-distance calls on their phone.

    “He got me those skis at a swap meet, though,” Dr. Alaia recalled, pointing to a pair of
    nice skis leaning against the wall. “I would have had to pay six hundred bucks for those skis in L.A. without the bindings. I love them, they’re great skis. So you know, I have to give him credit for that.” Susan rolled her eyes.

    There were strange holes in the stories Hogue told. One time the Alaias’ niece came to
    visit. Because she was a horsewoman, they thought she would get along well with Jim, who
    spoke of having grown up on a ranch. Instead, Jim avoided her. “He never talked about
    horses—said what kind of horse do you like, where did you ride,” Susan Alaia remembered.
    Hogue brought over a copy of the FLEX exam, the test that foreign doctors take to become
    certified in the U.S. He had obtained a copy of the test, he said, for his girlfriend in Russia, who was a doctor.

    “He was going through the questions, he read one to me, and asked me if I knew the
    answer,” Dr. Alaia recalled. Hogue seemed upset when Dr. Alaia answered a question correctly.
    “I felt a note of dejection in his voice that I knew the answer and he didn’t,” he said. Of course, Dr. Alaia added, there was no reason why Hogue should have known the answers to the
    questions on the test or felt sad, since he was a doctor, and Hogue was not.

    Living in Telluride is the fulfillment of Dr. Alaia’s lifelong dream of endless mornings
    and afternoons on the slopes, and also perhaps of acceptance into a private club. His heroes are the local developers who had the vision to turn a busted-out mining town into a ski resort, and through the gift of his capacious enthusiasm, it is possible to fall in love with the mighty vision he was sold of sunstruck winters without end. “I was here the day the ski area opened on
    December 7, 1972,” he said, pointing to a framed newspaper clipping on the wall. Listening to him talk about Telluride is like listening to an old man’s memories of a pretty girl he kissed when he was young. As he remembers the day that his dream was realized, he smiles the inward smile of a lifelong introvert whose high intelligence and skills had combined with a shy nature to isolate him from normal human companionship and to lose himself in work and hobbies.

    “I was a practicing orthopedic surgeon, heavily into joint replacement in Southern
    California,” he said. “One of the things that brought me to California was the fact that I was a boater and a skier and I could do both in the same week. In fact, one of the first weeks I came out here, I went skiing one day and water-skiing the other day I happened to subscribe to something called the Kiplinger Letter. And one day, I saw an ad about Walt Disney putting up the Mineral King resort. I still have the posters for Disney’s Mineral King task force in my garage. I can’t bear to throw them away,” he added as his eyes mist over. He paused for a moment before he
    continued on.

    The Mineral King boosters were led by a plastics engineer named Hap Wood who had
    some connections to Disney, who helped lobby the forest service to let Disney establish a ski area. Ronald Reagan, before he became governor of California, got the pass for the road to go into Mineral King. “I skied it twice by helicopter. The skis I skied it with are still in the closet,”
    Dr. Alaia said, pausing again. “I am not sure why I get emotional about that. But anyway, I was president of Mineral King Ski Club in 1972, happily, just for a couple of years, and we made