Hell Is Empty wl-7

by Craig Johnson

  I stamped my feet again, seriously trying to keep them from freezing. “What’d the hunters do?”

  “Oh, after the bear was killed they fooled around and built a kind of half-assed raft and tried to get the horse because it had some expensive tack on it.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “One of them drowned.”

  I looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope; watched it happen-big like you. He went down but never came back up.” He gestured with his lips toward one of the ridges to our east. “Saw it all from right over there.”

  “What’d the hunters do then?”

  “They got the hell out of here.”

  “They left him?”

  The giant looked down at me as if to discern which particular village was missing its idiot. “They already lost one horse, one bear, and one man; nobody else wanted to go.” He actually yawned. “Can’t say that I blamed them.”

  I glanced out at the lake. “The man and the horse are still down there?”

  “Yeah; the bear, too.”

  “Did anybody report it?”

  “You’d be in a better position to know that than I would.” He took a deep breath and tried looking toward the ridge above us to the north. “Different rules up here. Good for the water spirits, though. Not much water in the high country, and they need the company. That or the Water Monsters took them in revenge for their defeat at the hands of the Thunderbirds.” He glanced at me. “They had the help of a human hunter, you know.”

  “You don’t say. I must’ve missed that in Bible school.” It was Sunday morning, after all.

  “Yeah, people don’t remember that part. See, the reason the Thunderbird had to go get help was because the Water Monsters kept eating his young.”

  I pushed my hat back for a closer look at Virgil’s face. “Really?”

  He studied me for a few seconds and then returned his eyes to the ridge, giving me the full view of the indented part of his forehead where a drug dealer had pounded it with a claw hammer. “The Water Monsters or Long Otters would come whenever there was a fog and eat the young Thunderbirds before their feathers were mature. So the Thunderbirds got the help of one of my people to do battle against the Long Otters. The warrior shot them with arrows and poured red-hot rocks down the Water Monsters’ throats to kill them.”

  “That’d do it, in most cases.”

  Virgil smiled, suffering my trace of sarcasm. “Yes, then the warrior was given many powers by the Thunderbirds so that he could change his shape, becoming many different animals and birds. He lived by the big water for many years but came down with a case of lice and longed to go home.”

  The big Indian could see me smiling at the details of Crow mythology.

  “Lice? You’d think if you had all those powers, you could get rid of lice.”

  A little indignation crept into his voice. “Hey, this stuff is handed down.”

  “Right.”

  He ignored me and continued. “Anyway, the warrior remembered that he wanted to return to his native land, the Yellowstone Country. He turned himself into a crow and flew home. Once his travels were over, he saw an elk by the river and thought he would kill it.”

  “A crow could kill an elk?’

  “It was a big crow. Anyway, it grabbed him and drew him into the water where the Long Otters were waiting. The Thunderbird thundered and shook the earth, but the Water Monsters paid no attention and tortured the warrior, finally asking him if he knew what he was. He said he was a crow. They told him, no, you are an Indian and you have killed many things here in the water, but we do not wish to kill you. We will release you back to your people-and that is how the Crow got their name.” He sniffed a little in indignation. “It is also how the Elk River or Yellowstone got its name, but that is not so important.”

  I nodded my head. “And the moral of the story is?”

  He raised an eyebrow, and it was as if the dent in his forehead was looking to dig deeper. “What is it with you white people and morals? Maybe it’s just a story about what happened.” He paused for a moment. “If an Indian points at a tree, you white people are always thinking, What does that mean? What does the tree stand for? What’s the lesson in this for me? Maybe it’s just a tree.”

  “Okay.” I wanted to get going but was still curious. “What happened to the young Thunderbirds?”

  “How the hell should I know?” He glanced up to where the sky would’ve been if we could’ve seen it. “My great uncle, the ditchdigger, he said they grew up and populated the earth as eagles.”

  I waited for more, but there didn’t appear to be any so I asked the next question that had been on my mind. “Virgil, back down the trail at the meadow, did you know there was only one of them in the Thiokol?”

  He continued to study the lake, possibly looking for either a hoof or a monster that might be sticking out of the ice. “Yes.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  The double head dipped, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a grizzly shrug. “You had to arrest that one before you could come after these. I thought I could keep an eye on them while you were busy.” He studied me. “You don’t tell me everything down below, Lawman, and I don’t tell you everything up here. Like I said, the rules are different this high-we do not have the final say.”

  “How so?”

  He breathed deeply and thought about it. “Down there-it is so loud and so busy we can block them out, but up here is different.”

  I wasn’t sure I knew what he was talking about, which was nothing new with Virgil White Buffalo, Kicked-in-the-Belly band, Crazy Dogs warrior society. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give it a shot. “Virgil, that wasn’t you down at the West Tensleep parking lot that drew me over and showed me where the Thiokol had gone, was it?”

  He looked around, his gaze stopping here and there as if he were seeing something or someone I wasn’t. He didn’t move for a moment, then the wind struck his wide back as if urging him onward, and the dark hollows above his cheekbones turned toward me. “There is the singing water and the drumming rock and this is the way of it. Listen.”

  Foolishly, I thought he was going to say something more. “What?”

  “I am serious now. Listen.”

  I finally got his meaning and stood there trying to hear the report of Shade’s. 223, cries for help, or even Water Monsters and Thunderbirds, but all I could hear was the wind and snow scrubbing the high country like an unforgiving brush. “I can’t…”

  “Listen.”

  I tipped my hat back in exasperation. “What the hell am I listening for, Virgil?”

  “They follow you still.”

  My skin prickled, and my mouth grew dry. All I could think of was what had occurred since my experience on these mountains more than a year ago. I thought about almost drowning in Clear Creek Reservoir, racing a borrowed horse across Forbidden Drive in Philadelphia, hunting a killer in a ghost town, and being drugged on a mesa in the Powder River country. Strange things had happened to me in all those places, including the parking lot at West Tensleep only yesterday, but I’d filed all those instances away as explainable phenomena. What stood before me now was much larger and more powerful than the giant cloaked in a bear hide. As strange and mystifying as it might be, I needed to know. “What are you saying, Virgil?”

  “The Old Ones, they have spoken to me for the first time-or maybe it is the first time I have been able to listen.” He smiled a little and turned his head to catch the corners of the wind as it redirected itself around him, and it was like the snout above his head tested the air. “They tell me to watch over you and to keep you safe-which is all very strange.”

  I stood, now especially anxious to stop talking and get moving.

  “They don’t watch over white men.”

  Slipping the rifle strap onto my shoulder, I took a few steps toward the opening that led toward the trail. “Well, I don’t know what to say to that, Virgil.”

&n
bsp; He let the smile play on his lips like a warped board. “You saved an Indian the last time you were up here, yes?”

  I froze, and not because of the temperature, and thought about how Henry had taken a bullet that could’ve easily been mine. “Sort of.”

  “So…” The giant nodded his great, hooded face, the slight glimmer from the reflection in his pupils remaining steady as he lowered his head to look me in the eye. “What Indian are you saving this time?”

  It was a command performance asking for a response, but now was not the time to discuss things that would derail the entire venture. It was hard, but I remained silent.

  The wind gusted against him again, but he stood in front of it, unmoved. “Still keeping secrets from me, Lawman?”

  A few flakes blew into our protected area and lit on my face, burning like ash. “Maybe it’s like you said; up here we don’t have final say.” He was still, like a hunter is before the defining act, and all I could feel was the sympathy I’d had for the giant when I’d heard the boy’s name.

  “No, we don’t.” He shrugged the cloak higher with a roll of his shoulders; maybe the inactivity of not moving was beginning to have an effect even on him. “You have great sorrows burning in your heart, and you’ll have more sorrows with someone very close to you in the not so distant future. The Old Ones have told me this, and that’s probably the most important thing I have to say to you.”

  I readjusted my goggles and watched the world suddenly glow as if in a warm fire. “Are you telling futures now, Virgil?”

  He smiled as he stood and approached me. “I am. How do you like yours?”

  “Couldn’t you have just told me I was going to be rich someday?”

  He considered it. “No. Now, do you have something you wish to tell me?”

  I chewed on the inside of my lip. “Not just yet.” I readjusted my hat. “And now, if you’re through gazing into your crystal ball, how about we get going?”

  He stared at me a few moments more with the smile still in place and then raised his arm, inviting me to take the lead. “I’ll assist you for as long as the Old Ones tell me to.” With the next statement, the smile faded a little but was still there. “Pax?”

  I smiled back till I was sure my teeth were going to crack. “Pax.”

  Rather than follow the trail and face the drifts, Virgil decided that we would make better time crossing the frozen, windscrubbed flat of Lake Marion or Dead Horse, depending on your Maker.

  After climbing over a few boulders, I removed my snowshoes and attached them to the pack. We stood at the precipice of the expanse, and I studied the ridge at Mistymoon that appeared and disappeared with the changing cloud currents. “We’re also going to make some pretty majestic targets out there on the ice if somebody, and I mean Raynaud Shade, is aiming a laser sight at us from up on that ridge.”

  Virgil had draped the remnants of a wool trade blanket across his face for protection against the wind, and pulled it down with a forefinger to address me as he scanned the deadstand, beetle-killed trees. “No one there.”

  I stepped off onto the slick surface under the skim layer of snow that the wind had left as change. “Fine with me; you’re a bigger target than I am.”

  He muffled a laugh as he re-covered his face with the red cloth and then wrapped one of the grizzly arms across it and over his shoulder with the panache of a high-fashion model. “Like a tin bear in a shooting gallery?”

  Boy howdy.

  After a couple of hundred yards I came to the conclusion that the surface was slicker than I’d thought, and the light layer of driven snow made ball bearings under my boots, causing me to slip and catch myself with each step. It was getting to be like a tightrope act, and I was about to turn and tell Virgil to forget about this route when I took a long split and rolled to my right, the weight of the pack and rifle forcing the side of my head to strike the ice with full force.

  “Where are we going?”

  “If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”

  He watches as the almost-man drives the truck, newer than his grandfather’s. The truck is loud and he watches the strange territory pass by the window, growing higher and more rocky-mountains unfamiliar to him.

  There was a time when his grandfather took him to a place like this, telling him stories of the mighty warrior that had helped the Thunderbirds in their battle against the Water Monsters. He said the man had gone so far that he had forgotten who he was and from where he came. This will never happen to you because you will find the hard edges of the earth rounded by those who love you, he had said.

  After many miles the boy begins to cry, softly at first and then stronger.

  “Shut up or I’ll really give you something to cry about,” the almost-man said.

  I lay there for a few seconds and fought against the concussion, but my eyes refused to focus. I closed them for a moment and thought I could hear something in the ice as though the plates of frozen water were colliding underneath me, grinding like glaciers. I opened my eyes and watched the snow skim across the surface toward me and could feel the warmth of my face adhering its skin to the lake.

  I peeled my face away and looked at the sky, half expecting Virgil to yank me back up to a standing position, but nothing happened.

  I stared at the lower part of the clouds that raced overhead and could hear a thumping noise, loud and insistent. The noise was steady, but it wasn’t coming from above-rather, from below. I could feel it in my back, through the expedition pack, as it set up a rhythm. It was a song in counterpoint, one that I’d heard before but was unable to identify.

  The noise settled into my heartbeat and the pounding in my head. My legs moved okay, but when I pulled my hand away from my temple, there was blood. The pain was tremendous and once again reminded me of the headaches I’d had only a few months ago, before my eye operation. I stretched my jaw and probed the wound under my hat-more blood. “Well, hell…”

  My hat fell off as I rolled onto the pack on my back and sat there looking for Virgil.

  There was no one.

  As far as I could see, there was no one on the ice of Lake Marion but me.

  I immediately felt panic, disconnected the breast strap, and shrugged the pack and rifle from my shoulders. I wrestled myself to my feet, assuming that with Virgil’s weight he had hit a soft spot in the ice and had broken through.

  I kneeled, sweeping my arms across in an attempt to find the hole that must’ve been covered by the snow, but there wasn’t anything. I scrambled my way back along my tracks but could see only the dull, opaque sheen of the flat surface with not so much as a crack.

  My head was still killing me, but I couldn’t stop jerking it from left to right in an attempt to find him. I took a deep breath and stood, turning three hundred and sixty degrees, but there was nothing except undisturbed lake. I walked in a spiraling circle emanating from where I’d fallen, fully expecting the giant Crow to be somewhere in my field of vision, either approaching or disappearing into the blowing snow, but he wasn’t there and there were no prints.

  I stretched my jaw again and blinked my eyes. “Virgil!”

  “Virgil. Virgil…”

  My voice ricocheted off the cliffs, and I swallowed and stood there for a moment more before noticing that my hat was skimming away on the surface of the lake. Carefully, I trudged across the smooth, hard surface and had just begun to lean over to grab it when a ripping gust carried it out toward the center until it lodged in a small drift a good twenty yards away toward the ridge. I sighed and thought about how I’d lost my last hat and how I damn well wasn’t going to lose this one.

  Figuring I’d not have to backtrack if I took the entire load with me, I gripped the strap of the pack and hoisted it, picked up the Sharps and examined it to see if I’d done any damage, but it appeared intact. I put the rifle on my shoulder and looked through the binoculars.

  All I could see were the acres of beetle-kill pine that spilled over the ridge and down the valley to
ward me. I followed the trail to make sure Virgil hadn’t gone ahead and then followed it behind to see if he’d retreated.

  I lowered the binoculars and looked around just one more time, forcing his name from my lungs like a bullhorn. “Virgil!?”

  Nothing.

  I approached my hat and watched as it started to flip up again. I scrambled over and got ahold of the crown and tried to pull it up, but it stuck to the ice, probably from the warmth of my head.

  I yanked at it this time, scattering the snow and revealing a freeze-dried, mummified hand.

  I blinked hard to clear my head, thinking that it must’ve been a frozen branch, but it was still there when I opened my eyes. I knelt down and used my hat as a fan to scatter the snow that had built up around the thing.

  There was a lot of skin left, with a few tendons, and the nails were purpled and black. The wrist was bent, the thumb contracted toward the palm, the forefinger extended and the other three digits slightly curved, almost as if that one finger were pointing up the trail.

  I was sure this had to be the hunter that Virgil had mentioned in his story about the dead horse, though it seemed odd that the body of the man had drifted north, away from where the accident had occurred.

  There was a ring on the one finger, so I thought I should retrieve it for identification purposes and reached down to carefully remove it, but when I did, the entire hand broke off in mine. Kneeling there holding it, the whole situation felt rather surreal, not to mention macabre, and I was beginning to think that I’d hit my head harder than I thought.

  “Jesus…”

  To make matters worse, my disturbing the hand had loosened the ring so that it was now sliding back and forth on the bony finger. More carefully this time, I placed the ring between my own thumb and forefinger and slid it off the end. It was silver with coral and turquoise wolves chasing each other around the band, and I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen it before. There was an inscription on the inside, but the print was far too fine and worn away for me to see what was engraved.