The snow which had started the night before in celebration of the winter solstice, continued into Friday morning, accompanied by the high winds that yesterday had been tumbling the chairs on the north face. We tried a few runs down from the midpoint on the southern side (unaccompanied by Foderman, who had not received the promised call from Schwartz, and who was either sulking, pouting, or weeping) and then decided to call it quits. It was three days before Christmas, and none of us had as yet done any shopping.
The stores in the valley were largely oriented to skiing needs, of course, but they offered a surprisingly large selection of other merchandise as well, ranging all the way from artsy-craftsy crap to hand-wrought jewelry and Indian rugs. The better to keep our gifts secret (even the tightest triumvirate keeps some secrets), the three of us split up and went our separate ways, arranging to meet for lunch in a place that served charcoal-broiled sirloins, baked potatoes and salad for a dollar and ninety-five cents, cheap at half the price.
The girl in green was looking at a pewter pot in the second shop I entered.
The bell over the door tinkled, I saw the girl, decided to leave, realized she had already spotted me, and wondered what I was afraid of. All right, she had seen Sandy swiping the parka. Let her prove it. I closed the door firmly behind me, and started directly up the aisle toward her. My dear old mother, when she was not worrying silly about my father crashing into a lamppost in a drunken stupor, told me again and again that the only way to conquer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune was to confront them. I was ready for that confrontation now. High noon in the heart of America’s vast snow country.
“Hello,” I said, “how are you?”
The girl in green seemed surprised by my boldness. She had undoubtedly decided that since she was the only witness to the multimillion-dollar robbery three days earlier, we desperadoes would forever avoid her, would spend the rest of our lives like Jean Valjean fleeting Javert. The initial surprise gave way to a quick grin that cracked hard and sharp across her face. She had nice teeth. Otherwise, she was a singularly plain girl, with a dumpling face and frizzy red hair and freckles spattered like specks of paprika across the bridge of her nose and her cheeks.
“Hey, hi,” she said.
“Been up there today?” I asked.
“Just one run.”
“Pretty miserable.”
“Ghastly,” she said. Her voice was a trifle grating, rising in inflection so that every sentence she uttered sounded like a question. “You guys are pretty good skiers,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“I watched you yesterday.”
“Really? We didn’t notice.”
“Who’s the fat man?”
“A friend.”
“Really? Is he Jewish?”
“What?” I said.
“Is he a Jew?” she said.
Her question, to say the least, was somewhat startling. If you are born into a certain New York socioeconomic strata, you don’t go around asking if people are Jewish. You just don’t. You dress British, and you think Yiddish, and sometimes you even contribute funds for the planting of trees in Israel. Several questions of my own came immediately to mind. As, for example: (1) How had she been able to guess, from her distant glimpses of Foderman, that he was Jewish? (2) How was she able to tell for certain that I was not Jewish, and therefore risk asking a possibly offensive question? and (3) What the hell difference did it make?
“He’s a Buddhist,” I said.
“He’s a Jew,” she answered. “Who are you kidding?”
“So?” I said.
“So?” she answered. She had a direct way of looking at a person, green eyes opened wide and unblinking. “He’s going to break his leg if he isn’t careful. He’s in way over his depth.” She paused, grinned, and said, “Or is that the idea?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“To break his leg,” she said.
“I still don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you know what I mean,” she said.
I really didn’t know what she meant We certainly had no intention of deliberately breaking Foderman’s leg, if that’s what she meant. We had made some jokes about it, sure. But fun is fun, and purposely setting out to break a person’s leg (the right one, no less, for the joke to be effective) was something beyond our engineering skill and beneath our sensibility. Anyway, Schwartz was already gone; the joke would be lost entirely if Foderman followed east without his accompanying mirror image. And besides, all our kidding had been done in private; unless this freckle-faced fink was blessed with extrasensory perception, how had she possibly reached the ridiculous conclusion that we were skiing with Foderman in order to hurt him? The entire concept was preposterous. I decided to change the subject.
“That’s a nice pot,” I said.
“It’s pewter,” she said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I admire the way you ripped off that parka,” she said.
I blinked.
“Real finesse,” she said. “Want to stick this under your sweater for me?”
“Stick it up your ass,” I said, and walked out of the shop.
It was snowing quite heavily, and the wind was murderous. From out of the vortex of spiraling biting miniscule flakes, there materialized a hairy, three-headed, shambling monster bellowing to the wind. My encounter with the girl had shaken me more than I’d realized; my initial instinct was to turn and run from this snow beast advancing inexorably in its own white cloud, roaring what seemed at first to be a message of doom. I froze to the sidewalk in panic. The creature lumbered closer, reformed itself in a shifting crystalline miasma, nucleus spreading and tearing apart into three separate hairy cells, still advancing. Squinting through the snow, I now recognized two boys and a girl, each wearing long raccoon coats, arms wrapped about each other, shouting, “Get Semanee!” at the top of their lungs again and again, “Get Semanee! Get Semanee!”, stomping past, almost knocking me off the sidewalk, and then moving off into the flying snow, merging again into a single marauding hair-covered animal, and disappearing entirely from sight as the last echo of their chant died on the wind. Immediately ahead of me now, emerging from the same dizzying tunnel that had spawned the first apparition, there appeared an amoeba-like blob threatening to swallow the valley, advancing on the sidewalk to assume discernible shapes — a half-dozen skiers bellowing, “Up Snowclad!”, all of them wearing buttons that read, “Get Semanee!”
The dawn came a little late.
When we’d first arrived and bought our lift tickets, we were each given buttons bearing the legend, “There is no Snowclad!” We learned later that Snowclad was a fiercely competitive resort some hundred miles to the north, boasting a higher elevation and a greater average yearly snowfall. These, then, were the outraged Snowclad people, here to defend their honor, making goddamn fools of themselves by parading in a snowstorm and bleating the ridiculous words “Up Snowclad!” and “Get Semanee!” What they intended to get was beyond me. The valley? The mountain itself? But onward they came, more and more of them, in pairs and in threes, in dozens and droves, completely filling the wooden walks of the town, wearing their childish buttons and chanting their fanatical slogans — “Get Semanee! Up Snowclad! Get Semanee!” — while the snow kept falling and the wind kept blowing and the end of the world seemed near.