Snowbound

Twelve

The blizzard continued to gather strength as the night progressed, dumping huge quantities of snow on Hidden Valley and on the high, steep cliffs through which County Road 235-A passed down into the valley. The last two cars to traverse the road-crawling ten minutes apart shortly before 1 A.M., like yellow-eyed animals in the storm-belonged to Matt Hughes and Peggy Tyler, returning from the Whitewater motel. Both sets of tire tracks were obliterated almost immediately.

More hours passed, and still the blizzard remained relentless. Drifts built higher and higher along the cornice at the near, lee side of the western cliff crown, while the screaming wind dislodged other snow from unsheltered places and hurled it downward into the pass in lacy white spumes. Long since rendered impassable, 235-A had a covering of more than eighteen inches by five o’clock.

At five thirty the blow reached its ultimate savagery. The scattered lodgepole pines clinging to the top of the western cliff were bowed double like genuflecting pilgrims, and the swollen cornice collected ever-greater amounts of heavy snow. It went on that way for a time-and then, just before dawn, the low-hanging clouds that sailed continually eastward on the high-altitude currents began to develop fragmentation lines, like amoebas about to reproduce. The snowfall decreased steadily until it was a thin, fluttering curtain. Gray light filtered into the sky, lengthening visibility, giving substance to the bloated shadows along the crown of the western wall.

The blizzard was over; but the destruction it had fomented was only just beginning.

First there was a rumbling-a low-pitched, throat-clearing sound. The overburdened cornice shuddered, shaking whiteness as if a buried giant had awakened and were trying to rise; slender vanguards spilled free in frothy cascades. The rumbling grew louder, and louder still.

And the entire cornice gave way.

Billowing snowclouds choked the air like white smoke, and a massive tidal wave of snow and ice and rock flooded downward with a thunderous, vibratory roar that was as loud as a bomb blast in the early-morning stillness. Granite outcroppings were ripped loose as though they were no more than chunks of soft shale; trees were buried, uprooted, or snapped like matchsticks and carried along. And in a matter of seconds, the plunging mass filled a section of the pass the way a child would fill an excavation in the sand…

Lew Coopersmith sat bolt upright in bed. The deafening noise rattled the bedroom windows, reverberated through the big, shadowed room. He struggled out from beneath the bedclothes and moved in sleep-drugged motions to the window; but from that vantage point he could see nothing to explain the sudden explosion of sound, now lessening into small, receding echoes.

The door connecting his bedroom with that of his wife’s burst open, and Ellen rushed in. Her round, handsome face pale and frightened, silver hair braided into a long queue down her back, dressed in an ankle-length white nightdress, she was a ghostly figure in the semidarkness. “Dear heaven, Lew,” she said, “what is it, what is it?’

Cleared now of all vestiges of sleep, Coopersmith’s mind began to function normally, and he remembered what John Tribucci had told him in the Sport Shop Monday afternoon. He turned fully from the window. “I think,” he said grimly, “that we’ve just had an avalanche.”

John Tribucci knew instantly that they had just had an avalanche.

An early riser by nature, he was in the bathroom shaving when it happened. The magnitude of the noise startled him, caused him to cut his cheek. He put down his razor, tore off a strip of toilet paper, and blotted perfunctorily at the thin ribbon of blood. He could hear Ann’s voice calling to him from the spare bedroom adjacent, the voices of his brother and his brother’s wife in their room down the hall.

Ann was sitting up in bed when he came hurrying in. He sat beside her, took one of her hands. “You all right, honey?”

“Yes. But you’ve cut yourself…”

“Just a nick. I’ll live.”

“It was a slide in the pass, wasn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“It sounded like a bad one.”

He nodded. “I just didn’t think it’d happen this soon, before Christmas, before the baby came.”

“You’d better go have a look.”

“Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Our child is kicking the devil out of me, but I don’t think he’s ready to put in an appearance yet.”

Tribucci kissed her, went out into the hall, and met Vince on the stairs. Neither of them said anything as they hurried down and out into the cold, gray morning.

In the first moment of wakening, Cain thought it was an earthquake.

He had been born in San Francisco, and natives of that city are sometimes consciously, always subconsciously aware of the network of faults on which they live and of what happens when the pressure in those faults becomes too great and the earth begins to shift as if in orgasmic release. The deep guttural rumbling, the rattling, skittering vibration of windows and boards and bed which pulled him up out of sleep were sensations not new to him. Immediately, fuzzily, he thought: Quake, big one, Christ it’s finally happening-and flung the covers away from his body and rolled out of bed. He was without equilibrium and fell jarringly to his knees. Pain burst through his left kneecap, and the sharpness of it flooded his mind with abrupt reality.

He struggled to his feet and felt sweat icing on him in the cold room. The cabin was no longer trembling, and the sudden roar had given way to a strained quiet. He thought then, sluggishly: What the hell? and walked naked into the front room. Leaning against the windowsill, he peered beyond crystallike glass.

Lights on all over the village below. Sky clearing, lightening, and a gentle snowfall now; the storm was finished. To the north there was a sifting cumulus of what appeared to be snow, like a white dust cloud settling. It meant nothing to him.

He turned away from the window. His head had commenced to throb with hangover, and he felt vaguely nauseated; he was shivering from the cold. Maybe something blew up, he thought, but it was a dull speculation. He did not really care what it had been; it was over now, it was unimportant, it could have no bearing on his existence.

Cain went back to bed and lay waiting for the sleep he knew would not come again.

Matt Hughes said, “I’d better get down there. If that slide is as bad as it sounded, I’ll be needed in more ways than one.” He crossed to the bedroom closet, shedding his pajamas, and began to dress quickly.

Rebecca drew the blankets tightly against her throat and did not look at her husband. The sheets were sleep-warm, but she was still touched by the same cold as on the night before. The masculine odor of Matt’s body and the faint lingering perfume he had brought home with him were vaguely repellent in her nostrils.

The sound of the avalanche and the spasming of the house had startled her badly at first; but once she had known what it was, once Matt had jumped up and run to the windows and begun shouting about a pass-cliff slide, the apprehension had left her, and she was calm. He hadn’t seen that, though; with maddening condescension he had told her not to be frightened, that everything would be all right-as if she were the intrinsic child and not he.

He said now, as he buttoned one of his soft-wool shirts, “John and Vince Tribucci were right, after all. But there’s nothing we could have done; you can’t control nature or counteract the will of God.”

I wish you’d stop talking about God, Rebecca thought. You’re always talking about God, you make such a mockery of religion. But she did not say anything.

Hughes put on his mackinaw and stepped around the foot of the bed to kiss her absently on the forehead. “Depending on how bad it is, I’ll come back home or call you from the Mercantile. Either way, I’ll let you know soon.”

It had not even occurred to him, she knew, to ask her along-or to question why she was not eager of her own volition to accompany him. She said, “All right.”

When he was gone, Rebecca lay thinking about the slide to keep from dwelling on last night’s experience with Zachary Cain-and on what she had done in this same bed after returning from the cabin. If the pass had been blocked, it meant they were now snowbound for, probably, several days. Was that bad or good? A little of both, she supposed. Nobody could come into Hidden Valley, which meant no mail and no fresh supplies: a minor inconvenience. And nobody could leave the valley, another inconvenience for most, particularly since this was the Christmas season. It also meant that Matt could not meet his current mistress and that he would therefore be forced to spend tonight and the next few nights with his wife. Forced, that was the key word; forced. Still, it was what she wanted-wasn’t it?

I don’t know, she thought then. I don’t know what I want anymore.

And got up listlessly to face another day.

Peggy Tyler’s mother-a faded prototype of her daughter-came running upstairs and opened the door to Peggy’s room without knocking. She was fully dressed and had been in the kitchen making coffee. “It must have been a slide,” she said breathlessly. “It must have been a terrible slide in the pass, I don’t know what else it could have been.”

“I guess that’s what it was,” Peggy said. She was normally a heavy sleeper, and while she had been awakened by the roaring and the quaking, her mind was still wrapped in languid dreams of a warm sun and a warm sea. Her body ached pleasantly; there was a gentle soreness in her loins, and her breasts and nipples tingled from the remembered manipulations of Matt Hughes’ hands and lips. The fucking had been very good last night: some of the best she’d ever had. Of course, the reason for that was Matt’s magnificent Christmas present, which he had presented to her with a kind of shy expectation, as if he had been afraid she would not be pleased, the moment they had entered the motel room.

One thousand dollars-cash.

Dollar sign-one-zero-zero-zero.

After a gift like that, the fucking just had to be very good.

Her mother said, “Thank the Lord it didn’t happen earlier. You didn’t get home until after one; suppose it had happened while you were driving through the pass? You might have been killed!”

“It didn’t happen while I was driving through the pass.”

“It might have. Where were you so late again?”

“I told you before, Mother,” Peggy said. “I’ve joined a group in Soda Grove that’s putting on a Christmas pageant, and there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Mrs. Tyler sighed. “We might be snowbound; there certainly is the chance of it. You won’t be able to go to work today or maybe for the rest of the week.”

How awful, Peggy thought. She said, “I have some sick leave coming. Look, Mother, let’s not get into a panic, okay? If we’re snowbound, then we’re snowbound. It’s no big thing.”

“Well, we’d better go see, we’d better go find out right away. Get dressed now, don’t dawdle.” Mrs. Tyler went out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Peggy had no desire to leave the warmth of her bed; but if she didn’t, her mother would come back up and there would be an argument, and she felt too good today to want to argue about anything. Oh hell, she might as well get up then, and anyway, the time was not far off when she could spend whole days in bed if she felt like it-not far off at all, now.

Leisurely, she swung the covers back and stood up and padded across to where her purse sat on the dresser. She took out the sheaf of fifty-dollar bills Matt Hughes had given her and stroked the money with one finger, smiling; then, reluctantly, she tucked it away again in the compartment where she kept her bankbook and began to dress. When she went downstairs to join her mother a few minutes later, she still wore the same smile.

In the cabin at Mule Deer Lake, Kubion and Brodie and Loxner slept unaware of what had happened at the entrance to Hidden Valley; the thunderburst of the avalanche, diminished by the distance, had not disturbed them.

Loxner and Brodie were quiet in their beds, sleeping soundly. Kubion dreamed of spiders-black, cold, feathery-soft; crawling over him with mouths gaping in wet red hunger-and trembled and trembled and trembled.

The Tribucci brothers and Walt Halliday were the first Hidden Valley residents to reach the slide. They met on Sierra Street where it narrowed into County 235-A, and from there they could see it clearly through a light sifting of snow. Solemnly, wordlessly, the three men tramped up the sharp incline of the roadway and stopped when they could go no further, staring at the solid blockage rising up into the gray morning sky.

Sheer slabs of granite and splintered trees with branches and strips of bark torn away, protruded from the irregular surfaces like shattered bones. The western cliff face seemed steeper than it had been, scarred with an inverted fanshell chute that shone blackly against the dove-colored surroundings. In the stillness you could hear the mounded snow and ice and rock settling with a soft rumbling sound, like a thin echo of the slide itself.

Halliday said, his voice subdued, “Bad. Jesus, about as bad as it could be.”

Both Tribuccis nodded gravely; there did not seem to be anything else to say.

Several other Hidden Valley residents began to arrive, among them Lew Coopersmith and Frank McNeil and Mayor Matt Hughes. They, too, were quietly stunned by what they saw.

Hughes said finally, “My God, do you suppose anybody was in the pass when it happened?”

“Not likely,” Vince Tribucci answered. “What with the amount of snow dropped by the blizzard last night, I doubt if the road was passable even before the slide. If it had to happen, this was probably the best time for it.”

Hughes blew on chilled hands; in his haste he had forgotten his gloves. “I’d better get on the phone to the county seat and let them know about this and ask them to get men and equipment out as quickly as possible.” He turned and hurried back to where he had left his car.

Frank McNeil turned to John Tribucci. “How long you figure it’ll take to clear through?”

“From the way it looks, I’d guess at least a week. But if we keep getting heavy snows, it could take two or more.”

McNeil pursed his lips sourly. “Merry Christmas,” he said, “and a Happy goddamn New Year.”