Bill Pronzini: Snowbound

It began to snow again just after Lew Coopersmith left his house and walked over to Sierra Street.

He pulled the collar of his mackinaw high on the back of his neck, moving more quickly under the thickening flakes. Like most residents of Hidden Valley, he did not particularly mind the snow, but then neither did he relish walking or driving in it, especially when the snowfall had been as heavy as it had this winter.

Lean and tall and durable, like the lodgepole pines on the valley’s eastern slopes, he was sixty-six years old, felt forty-six, and surprised his wife, Ellen, every now and then by knocking on the door of her room just after bedtime and asking her if she felt like having a go. There were squint lines at the corners of his alert green eyes and faint creases paralleling a stubby nose, but his narrow face was otherwise unlined. His hair, covered now by a woolen cap, was a dusty gray and showed no signs of thinning. Only the liver spots on the backs of his hands and fingers hinted of his age.

For twenty-two years, up to his retirement four years before, he had served as county sheriff. Police work had been his entire life-he had been a highway patrolman in Truckee and Sacramento and then a county deputy for eleven years before finally being elected sheriff-but he had always looked forward with a kind of eagerness to what were euphemistically termed his Leisure Years. And yet retirement had developed into something of a hollow reward. Shortly after he finished his final term, he and Ellen had moved from the county seat to Hidden Valley-an area both of them had decided upon sometime earlier-and almost immediately he had felt a sense of impotence, of uselessness. He found himself constantly wondering how his former deputy and the new county sheriff, Ed Patterson, was handling things and took to driving over to the county seat periodically and stopping in to talk about this and that, strictly social, Ed, you understand. Even after four years, he still dropped in on Patterson now and then, as he had done when Frank McNeil and some of the others had gotten their backs up about Zachary Cain, the loner type who had moved into the valley the previous summer.

The trouble was, he didn’t know what to do with himself. There was always plenty to do when you were an officer of the law, dozens of things to occupy your time, some excitement to life; but in Hidden Valley, what the hell was there? Reading and smoking your pipe in front of the fireplace and puttering in the basement workshop and watching television and bulling with the locals and the seasonal tourists at the Valley Inn and driving up to Soda Grove occasionally to take in a movie-weekend and evening pastimes, shallow pursuits void of significance or commitment. He felt severed from the ebb and flow of life, put out to pasture. Good Lord, sixty-six wasn’t old, not when you felt forty-six and your mind was just as sharp as ever and you had always been a doer, a man involved, a man empowered. His retirement very definitely had been premature, but the decision could not be unmade and he would have to go on making the best of it, just as he had done for the past four years.

When he reached Sierra, Coopersmith turned right off Shasta Street and went into Tribucci Bros. Sport Shop. In season, the Tribuccis dispensed large quantities of bait, outdoor wear, licenses, and fishing and hunting accessories to visiting sportsmen; now, in winter, the bulk of their business was in winter sports equipment (on a limited local basis), as well as in tobacco products, newspapers, magazines, and paperback books.

The younger of the two brothers who operated the store, John Tribucci, was alone behind the counter at the far end. In his middle thirties, he had a strong, athletic body and shaggy black hair and warm brown eyes under slightly canted lids; he also had a ready smile and a large amount of infectious energy. When he wasn’t tending the shop, he was usually skiing or ice skating or tramping around the woods in a pair of snowshoes or fly fishing for trout or, when he could find the time, backpacking into the higher wilderness elevations of the southern Sierra: Owens Lake and Mount Baxter and the John Muir Wilderness. In an age of electronic depersonalization and ecological apathy and teeming cities and developments which had begun to spread over the land like malignant fungi, Coopersmith thought that any man who took pains to maintain his own identity, who loved and thrived on nature in all her majesty, was worthy of admiration and respect; he accorded both to John Tribucci.

Coopersmith asked, after they had exchanged greetings, “How’s Ann today, Johnny?”

“Fat and impatient, same as ever,” Tribucci said, and grinned. His wife was eight and a half months pregnant with their first child-a major event in their lives after eleven years of nonconception. “Make you a bet she gives birth on Christmas Day.”

“As much as you want a son for Christmas? No way.” Coopersmith winked at him. “Give us a can of Raleigh and a couple packages of pipe cleaners, would you, Johnny?”

“Coming up.” Tribucci took the items from the shelf behind the counter, dropped them into a plastic sack, and made change from the five Coopersmith handed him. He said then, “Snowing again, I see. If it keeps up like this, we’re liable to have a slide to contend with.”

“Think so?” Coopersmith asked, interested.

“Well, the last time we had this much snow-back in sixty-one-there was a small one that blocked part of the pass road; those cliffs will only hold so much before some section or other weakens and gives way. Took the county road crews four days to clear through, the longest we’ve ever been snowbound.”

‘Seems I recall, now that you mention it. Nice prospect.“

“Inconvenient, all right, but there’s nothing you can do to stop an avalanche if one decides to happen. With less snow, though, we should make it through okay.”

“Ah, the joys of mountain living,” Coopersmith said dryly. He picked up the plastic sack. “See you later, Johnny.”

Tribucci laughed. “Ciao. Give my best to Ellen.”

“Will do.”

Coopersmith went out and walked farther north on Sierra, crossing Mooc Street. The snow, slanting down off the western slope on the cold wind, clung icily to his mackinaw and trousers. Except for two cars and a delivery van parked against the two-foot windows along each curb, packed by the village’s single snowplow, the street and sidewalks were empty. But he saw three customers inside the Mercantile as he passed: Webb Edwards, Hidden Valley’s only physician-a quiet, elderly man given to wearing Western-style string ties; Sally Chilton, Edwards’ part-time nurse; and Verne Mullins, another retiree in his sixties who had spent forty-five years with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The store was the largest in the village and supplied groceries and hardware items and drug sundries; it also housed the Hidden Valley Post Office. Holly wreaths and sprigs of mistletoe decorated both halves of the front doors, and a huge, flat cardboard Santa Claus and two cardboard reindeer had been erected in one of the long facing windows.

Between Lassen Drive and Eldorado Street, diagonally across from Garvey’s Shell, the windows of the Valley Cafe cast scintillas of bright light into the dark afternoon. Within the glow, the flakes of falling snow were like particles of white glitter. Coopersmith paused under the jutting front eaves of the building, brushed his clothing and stamped clinging snow from his booted feet, and then pushed the door open and went inside.

The interior was a single elongated room, with yellow plastic-covered booths and vinyl-topped tables along the left wall and a long lunch counter fronted by plastic stools along the right. In the center of the wall above the counter was a huge, varnished, bark-rimmed plaque, cut from a giant sequoia, on which was lettered the menu in neat white printing. The glaring fluorescent tubes overhead gave the cafe a sterile, slightly self-conscious appearance.