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.
None of the booths was occupied, and only two of the stools; sitting side by side midway along the counter were Greg Novak, a long-haired, brittle-featured youth in his early twenties who worked for Joe Garvey and who also operated the village snowplow, and Walt Halliday, owner of the Valley Inn-plump, mild-eyed, wearing black- rimmed glasses which gave him a falsely studious look. Behind the counter were Frank McNeil and his sixteen- year-old son, Larry; the youth, recruited to help out during Soda Grove High School’s Christmas vacation, as he had been during each summer vacation the past few years, was washing dishes in a stainless-steel sink at the far end, and McNeil stood talking to Novak and Halliday. Dressed all in white, like a hospital orderly, the cafe owner was a ruddy complexioned man in his mid-forties, with a blunt face and bristle-cut red hair. In addition, he possessed a sordid sense of humor and a complaining attitude: Coopersmith did not much care for him. But his food was good, his coffee even better than Ellen’s, and he was therefore tolerable for short periods of time.
The three men glanced up as Coopersmith entered and called out greetings. He lifted his hand in acknowledgment, slid onto a stool three away from Halliday. “Coffee, Frank,” he said.
“Sure thing.” McNeil drew a mug from the urn on the back counter, set it before Coopersmith, put a spoon beside it, and immediately went back to stand in front of Novak arid Halliday.
“As I was saying,” he said to them, “Christmas shopping is a pain in the ass.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Halliday said. “I kind of get a boot out of it. How come you’re so down on Christmas, Frank?”
“It’s all a bunch of commercialized bullshit, that’s why.”
“Listen to Scrooge here.”
Novak said, “So what did you find for your wife in Soda Grove, Mr. Halliday?”
“One of those clock radios, the kind that comes on automatically like an alarm in the mornings and plays music instead of ringing a bell in your ear.”
“Sounds like a nice gift.”
“She’ll like it, I think.”
“You’d probably of done better to get the same thing I’m giving my old lady,” McNeil said.
“What would that be?”
Without bothering to lower his voice in deference to the presence of his son, McNeil answered, “Well, I’ll tell you. It’s maybe six, seven inches long and what you call durable, guaranteed not to wear out if you treat it with care. You can use it any time of the year, and the old lady appreciates it more than anything else you can give her. And the best thing about it, it doesn’t cost you a cent.”
“That’s what you think,” Halliday said, smiling.
“Only one problem with a gift like that, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I ain’t figured out how the hell I’m going to wrap it.”
The three men burst out laughing, and Coopersmith sipped his coffee and wondered what had happened to the spirit of Christmas. When he had been young, Yuletide was a time of innocent joy and genuine religious feelings. Now it was as if Christmas had evolved, in no more than half a century, into a kind of wearisome though bearable space-age anachronism: people going through the motions because it was what was expected of them, worshiping mechanically and superficially if they worshiped at all, no longer caring, no longer seeming to understand what it was all about. And so there were dirty jokes and scatological remarks told in all manner of company, and everybody laughed and pretty much agreed that it was just a bunch of commercialized bullshit, can’t wait until it’s over for another year; it made you feel angry and sad and a little ashamed.
McNeil came down to stand in front of Coopersmith, still chuckling, his face red and damp in the too-warm air circulating through the cafe’s suspended unit heater. “Need a warm-up, Lew?”
“No, I don’t think so. Thanks.”
McNeil leaned forward, eyes bright, eyes leering. “Say, Lew, you hear this one? I like to bust a gut laughing first time I heard it, and same goes for Greg and Walt there. There’s this eight-year-old kid, see, and he wakes up about 2 A.M. Christmas morning. So he goes downstairs to see if Santa Claus has come yet, and sure as hell old
