Hell Is Empty wl-7

by Craig Johnson

  I would have thrown it if I’d had enough energy, but instead, I simply let it slip from my hand. Crouched against the diagonal shaft of the war lance and turned away from the wind, I clawed the bag containing Owen a little closer-if they found me, they were damn well going to find Owen.

  I’d make sure of it.

  I couldn’t raise my arms any longer, and I couldn’t feel my legs. The effort of making that phone call was my last. It was all I could do to continue breathing, and my head dropped against the trade cloth on the lance.

  The pin feathers were clogged with ice and were higher than any owl would’ve ever carried them. They were curled with the absolute cold but still did not move. Taking that as a sign, I used what energy the core of my body had left and closed myself in with the bones of the boy, the book, and the dead man.

  As I lay there looking over his shoulder, I could see something in the snow and frozen fog.

  I smiled as best I could and waited.

  He leaned into the wind and spoke to me, and I was amazed to feel it die down with his voice. “How are you, Lawman?” He came closer, and it was as if he clouded the unsheltered sky. “Do you know how this place really got its name? There was an Absaalooke boy hunting these mountains who was pushed from a cliff by an evil man. The boy fell but was able to reach a cedar branch. As he hung there he was spoken to by seven bighorn sheep led by a great ram by the name of Big Iron. Big Iron saved the boy and gave him the gift of many powers-wisdom, alertness, agility, and a brave heart. Big Iron told the boy that the seven ruled the Bighorn Mountains and that the Absaalooke must never change the name or they would become as nothing.”

  The only air that I could feel moving was from his breath; strangely warm with a vague scent of cedar, and his features began to change; first the signature scar healed itself, then the wrinkles softened and stretched away as if the years were melting. The girth of the man folded into himself and became smaller, like a child.

  “It was fun being big.”

  I tried to raise a hand, but it wouldn’t cooperate. Instead the boy reached out, clasped my shoulder in a surprisingly strong grip, and leaned forward to whisper. “Aho.”

  My head lolled back, and as I looked into the sky, the vaporous trails and darting meteorites of snow subsided.

  At first the view streaked like a dirty windshield, but gradually, small specks of starlight began filtering through and I was sure I was seeing the night sky. The fog and snow was level with the top of the mountain, and it was as if I were resting on a plain of clouds stretching out forever.

  I thought about the thirty-fourth canto and could actually remember all the words of the closing passage. Perhaps it was because it had been specifically final, perhaps it was the relief of finishing the thing, or perhaps it was that last gasp of hope when Dante followed Virgil from that dismal underworld.

  We climbed, he going first and I behind, until through some small aperture I saw the lovely things the skies above us bear.

  Now we came out, and once more saw the stars.

  The waxing moon tossed a dull glow on the surface of the clouds, but it was the scattered layers of stars that held my attention. I looked at them and tried to feel the courageous heat of their battle as they fought against the natural state of all things in the universe: dead cold.

  I could see the thick band of the Milky Way leading back through the galaxy. I tried to raise my head, but it fell to the side. Someone placed a hand on my face, and I looked up as best I could; it was like looking out of a well. “Owen.”

  The face came close but the breath was colder this time, and I could’ve sworn he was chewing gum. “Hey, hey-he’s alive.”

  I could see something-they were Indians the way they always were. Two now, but closer, backlit by the thick stripe of the Milky Way running the distance from horizon to horizon; Virgil’s Hanging Road-the direct path to the Beyond-Country.

  Muffled and strained, I could hear someone speaking with more urgency than I thought the situation deserved. “What did he say?”

  “A name, I think.”

  I wanted to laugh. If I could have formed the words, if my lips could have moved or my tongue cooperated, I would have laughed and told them that sometimes it helps to be dead to confront your demons, and that I had been dead a long time.

  EPILOGUE

  I was lying on my steamer chair swaddled in my battered sheepskin coat, the tactical jacket I’d grown fond of, and a few quilts, despite the direct rays of sunshine cascading down. The only part of me that was free to move was my right arm, which I was exercising by doing twelve-ounce curls in an attempt to balance my electrolytes. Cady thought I was balancing my electrolytes too much and wouldn’t allow me to have a cooler on the deck anymore, but she had been discussing wedding arrangements with Vic when my accomplice had sneaked me another from the refrigerator in the kitchen.

  There were a few pronghorn antelope grazing in the pasture behind my cabin that were taking advantage of the tender seedling grass that was pushing up through the darkened soil at the confluence of Clear and Piney creeks. A solo eagle drifted over the ridge and hovered there before plummeting earthward and out of sight-one less black-tailed prairie dog.

  It was a beautiful June day, warm with a gentle breeze blowing from the Cheyenne and Crow reservations and, like the high plains summer to come, it stretched with hope. The hills were green, and the grandfather sage shimmered with that ethereal silver that made the Powder River country look burnished. Just above the aforementioned ridge and the rippling foothills that led to the plains proper, I could see the very tip of the snow-covered peaks of the Bighorn range-and Cloud Peak.

  I lowered my eyes from the mountains and looked at the hills instead.

  Lying there in direct sunlight in the middle of the afternoon with the temperature hovering at seventy-five, I shuddered. The Cheyenne Nation watched me and took the beer bottle from my hand.

  Cady and Vic were attempting to find lodging for the forty-some Morettis that would be attending my daughter’s marriage to Vic’s little brother in a little more than a month. As near as I understood from the threads of conversation that were drifting from the kitchen window, some of the more adventurous Philadelphians were going to be sleeping in teepees.

  A few of the hazy clouds parted, and a full blast of sunshine struck my face from ninety-three million miles away. I closed my eyes and soaked in warmth; I could see why sunflowers did this all day. Dog panted but refused to seek the relative cool of the crab apple tree my daughter and Henry had planted in the middle of the deck in an attempt to get my little cabin up to nuptial standards. Everybody, including Dog, seemed to be hovering about me as if they were afraid I might drift away and be gone again.

  It was possible they were right.

  I glanced at the Indian; nobody did silence like the Cheyenne Nation.

  We were both dealing with feelings of deja vu, this scene seeming remarkably similar to the one after my last adventure on the mountain a year and a half ago. We had both sat here, drunk beer, and stared off into the distance as I’d re-collected myself from what had been one of the most harrowing experiences in my life-up to now.

  I hadn’t been talking much in the last few weeks; there just didn’t seem to be that much to say. I had been gone-now I was back but having a hard time getting all the way back. I studied finished, man-made surfaces with distrust and couldn’t seem to operate the simplest technological devices like television remotes or phones.

  It was like a part of me was still up there. I pulled my hand up to finger the sensitive part of my ear that had been refrozen; I hadn’t lost any more of it, even though the in-office raffle had sprung up again, complete with a chart and buy-in squares. My old boss and the now-retired sheriff of Absaroka County was still pulling for full amputation, but so far Vic was in the lead with “tenderness and an increased inability to hear things not wanting to hear,” the last part having been written into the square on the chart hanging on my vacant office doo
r. This had all the earmarks, no pun intended, of being something like what had happened to me eighteen months ago.

  Henry had turned and was watching me, and I was sure he was having the same thoughts.

  I closed and then opened my eyes when the clouds blocked the sun, and the first thing they rested on was the very tip of that hulking massif. I’d lived in the shadow of that mountain my whole life and had summited it numerous times-never again.

  Henry and Joe Iron Cloud had gotten me down to the western cirque on the borrowed buffalo hide. Vic had taken over from Saizarbitoria at Meadowlark Lodge after returning from Deer Haven, which allowed Tommy Wayman and Sancho to clean up my messes as they came: first Hector, who was relieved to see somebody who wasn’t an Indian or Vic; then Beatrice Lin-wood and Marcel Popp, then Moser, Borland in the Thiokol, the dead Ameri-Trans guard, and Agent Pfaff. Saizarbitoria, being the mountaineer, had stayed on the peak until Omar and his multi-million-dollar Neiman Marcus helicopter flew me straight to Billings for treatment, and I’d had tubes stuck in me for the better part of a week before they transferred me down to Durant.

  I had spent the majority of my time in a place in Memorial Hospital that not many people knew about, a tiny little patio in the back that was built for the doctors so that they could have a place to go smoke before they all got healthy and stopped doing such things. It was there that I’d developed the pattern of allowing people to speak to me before talking to them, just to make sure they were really there.

  Then I had come home and spent most of my time on the deck.

  I was having trouble being indoors.

  I’d also been having trouble concentrating, and that was another reason I’d stopped talking; I was getting tired of the strange looks people were giving me when I opened my mouth. I guess the things I was saying didn’t make much sense.

  I listened to the few house wrens and goldfinches in the new crab apple and a meadowlark in the pasture a little away. The sun cast its warmth through the hazy clouds, and my eyes slowly closed again as my head slipped sideways; maybe it was the sun, maybe it was the beer, maybe it was just that I’d thought that I’d never get warm again.

  “Just because he was not there does not mean he was not there.”

  I opened my eyes and wobbled them over to where he sat in the adjacent steamer chair; we might as well have been on a cruise. This was the first thing he’d said today, other than “How is the patient,” but I think that was meant for Cady more than me. He didn’t say anything else but sipped his own beer-and then mine.

  “Hey.”

  “WYDOT discovered the Jeep you mentioned on the slope leading down to Tensleep Canyon; they must’ve rolled it. The man and the woman were both dead.” He studied my wrapped hand that I tucked into my coverings like a mummy returning to the tomb and then handed me back the half-bottle of Rainier. It shadowed the blown-out, spine-ripped paperback of Dante’s Inferno that I’d decided to read again; something light for summer.

  His dark eyes came up, and I suppose the period for silence had ended, but with Indians you never knew. I balanced my electrolytes again, without wiping off the bottle, just to show him that I valued our friendship over personal hygiene, and continued the running argument that we’d been having for weeks. “He was there.”

  The Bear nodded and watched the birds as they skimmed back and forth between the crab apple and a struggling cottonwood at the corner of my cabin and said nothing. Like I said, with Indians it’s hard to tell.

  “What about the location of Moser’s body and the four-wheeler?”

  He blinked, pleased at having waited me out. “They were recovered along with the Thiokol and the other prisoner-and the one you left at Deer Haven.”

  “Hector.”

  “Hector.” He took a deep breath and exhaled from his nose like a shotgun blast, something more playing on his face. “You know, I do not think he liked the idea of being alone on the mountain surrounded by Indians.”

  Vic joined the conversation from the open doorway behind me with the phone in her hand. “Speak of the devil.” She walked over to my chair and absconded with my beer, just as the Cheyenne Nation had, and handed me the phone. “Pancho Visa.”

  She took a sip.

  “Hey.”

  “Tough.”

  The gangbanger had been calling me sometimes twice a day to check on my progress. I brought the phone up to my undamaged ear. “Hector, you’ve got to stop calling.”

  “No, wait. I’m jus’ sayin’. This is important. How you doin’, Sheriff?”

  I watched as Vic lowered the bottle, and I was amazed and aroused by the way she could drink from the thing without allowing the slightest bit of lipstick to remain. “Hanging in there. Hector, is this a legal call?”

  “Umm… Yeah. Was that that hot deputy of yours on the phone?”

  “What do you want, Hector.”

  “Oh yeah. The public defender here in Houston, David Thompson, wants to know if you’ll write a letter to the judge requesting a leave of absence…”

  “Requesting leniency.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Leniency. Do you think you could do that?”

  “Yep.”

  “I mean, it’s pretty important. It would get me off the chair.”

  “I’ll have Ruby write it up and I’ll sign it.” I reached for my beer but was denied.

  “Cool. I don’t have the address, but I’ll get it and call you back.”

  “You don’t have to, I can get…” The phone went dead in my hand. “Expect another call from the Bank Americard Bandit.” I gave the receiver back to Vic and looked at Henry. “What about the Ameri-Trans guard?”

  He took my beer from Vic and drank. “The dead one?”

  I nodded and tried not to think too much about the confrontation in the overhang. “The dead one.”

  Vic walked past me, then turned and sat on the leg rest by my feet. “He had a criminal record that had gone undiscovered by Ameri-Trans. A chronic gambler, he was more than a quarter of a million dollars in debt. He had made a deal with Shade, but as everybody suspected, the money turned out to be bullshit.”

  “You left quite a trail of prisoners and weapons the whole way.”

  It had been like this, everyone asking me questions and then not being satisfied with my answers. Most had given up, but giving up was not in the Cheyenne or the Philly/Italian lexicon-there were only tactical retreats and then reattacks. If we were going to get past this, then I was going to have to ask some questions, which was something I didn’t want to do. I looked back at the mountain. “They didn’t look for the cave hard enough.”

  The Cheyenne Nation was dressed for spring in worn jeans, moccasins, and a tan work shirt rolled at the cuff. He wore his hair loose because that was the way my daughter liked it. “It was a solid rock face, Walter. There were no ledges, caves, or crevices large enough to hold a marmot, never mind men the size of Virgil and you.”

  “What about the hand?”

  He took a deep breath and pointed. “There was no hand in that coat when the medical personnel removed it from you. I was there.”

  I couldn’t help but put my own hand into the pocket of the tactical jacket. “I told you I lost it.”

  Vic sipped my bottle of beer, a luxurious token to my recovery. “There wasn’t enough time to examine the area in and around Lake Marion in detail, but the rangers said they found a branch sticking out of the ice where you said you found the hand with the ring on it.”

  It was quict again, and I was thinking about not talking.

  Henry gazed at the mountains and one in particular. “I brought the lance to the state archeologist, Bill Matthews, and he confirmed that it is over a hundred and fifty years old and in remarkable shape.” He grew silent for a moment, and we listened to the birds making their bright, life-affirming sounds. “Matthews got curious when I told him the story Virgil supposedly told you about the drowned elk hunter who confronted the bear. He said he had heard this same story, resear
ched it, and discovered that it did, indeed, occur.”

  “There you go.”

  His face slowly turned to mine. “Walter, it happened in 1898.”

  I sat there, feeling as if I were sinking into the deck chair, falling away from everything and everybody I knew. I had fought so hard on the heights of the mountains to get back to them, and it seemed as if no matter how hard I scrambled to hold on, I was slipping away. “When was the last time Virgil picked up his supplies on the mountain?”

  His eyes remained steady on mine. “More than five months ago.”

  I fiddled with the lint in my pocket-I suppose still looking for a hand other than my own. “No one but me has seen him or heard of him or anything?”

  “No.”

  I returned to silence.

  He stood, and I watched as he walked across the deck and looked at the mountains.

  Kasey Pfaff had suffered from a few of my symptoms but to a lesser degree, and it looked as if McGroder was also going to be fine. Beatrice was awaiting sentencing by the Feds and being held in the Big Horn County jail, and Tommy Wayman gave Ruby a call periodically to let us know how she was doing.

  My attention was drawn back to Vic as she turned and looked at Dog, spread out on the deck like a Kodiak, reminding me even more of Virgil. I hadn’t told anybody about Virgil’s living coat-hell, things were bad enough with everybody thinking I was a nut.

  The Cheyenne Nation’s voice broke my reverie. “The memorial for Owen White Buffalo is to be held on Thursday. Will you be able to go? I think Eli delayed the services until you were better. He would like to speak with you.”