Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty

by Craig Johnson

  I closed the phone and tucked it away.

  “That should get their attention.”

  Keeping an eye on the cloud mass that seemed to be leaning on me, I worked my way around the west side of the lake. If I was lucky, I’d get them pinned in the open meadow adjacent to the big peaks, and I would have cover at the ridge of Mistymoon Lake. Raynaud Shade would have the choice of either giving it all up or taking a chance on the delivery of a high-powered, high-mortality package at long distance.

  I began to climb to the next level that would lead to Lake Marion and started feeling the burn in my legs, mostly the tops of my thighs. I was doing pretty well with my lungs, but my legs were another matter, and after twenty minutes more I was starting to resent the supplies in Omar’s pack—the very supplies that, if everything went bad, were going to be responsible for keeping me alive. I trudged on, every once in a while lifting my face to scan the ridge where they’d disappeared.

  When it happened, it hit like a wall. The second front of the storm came in. I knew it was just the barometric pressure, but it still felt like I was being inhaled by that giant blue devil on the cover of Saizarbitoria’s book. The exhaling riptide came quickly, and I watched it bend the trees like a sweeping claw as it topped the extended northern backbone of Bald Ridge.

  It was like the winter had shattered, and the shards were now blowing in my face, small bits of the last season, blasted and blown.

  My eyelids were starting to freeze, and I remembered the amber-tinted goggles that were hanging around my throat. I fumbled to pull them up as I climbed and concentrated on just putting one foot in front of the other as I pushed up the last part of the hillside trail where I’d last seen the three. Every time I looked away from my boots I’d stumble and veer from the path, so I tried to focus on their tracks. It was only when I got to the point where Shade had called me that I almost stumbled over the huge man in the grizzly bear hide. He was sitting on a boulder with the lance balanced between his knees, his back to the storm, his moccasined feet stretched out onto the path.

  His booming voice carried above the keening wind that bucked me sideways as I stood above him.

  “He left this for you.”

  In the surrealistic amber hue of the blowing snow, the giant sat holding a small human femur in his gigantic hands.

  11

  “You know, when the Iichihkbaahile formed people, we used to have ears at the back of our heads so that we could hear if anything was sneaking up from behind.”

  I’d been listening to Virgil’s galloping monologue for about ten minutes now. “Does that include white people?”

  “I suppose. Even with all your faults, you’re people too, right?”

  “Right.” I watched through the bizarre view afforded by my goggles as the massive grizzly skin swayed along the trail, the hind claws dragging across the snow as if the White Buffalo was packing a bear in a fireman’s carry.

  “The reason they got moved to the sides was because while he was working, us people kept moving our heads back and forth to see what the Iichihkbaahile was doing.” He paused on the trail for a second, and I almost ran into him. “Doesn’t that sound like something white people would do?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Anyway, now we only know what goes on when it’s right beside us.” He’d hung back a moment, just long enough for me to hear the statement, but I said nothing in return, so he went ahead and we shambled our way across the hill adjacent to the frozen surface of Lake Marion. The giant was providing a partial wind block as the ferocity of the storm blew down the ridge at our left and followed the contours of the valley into our faces.

  Personally, I was glad for the insulation.

  Virgil had handed the bone to me as if it had little significance, asked me what I thought it meant, and then started off as if this had been his plan all along.

  I found it hard to believe that he was their guide; more than likely that portion of Raynaud Shade’s story was, like the money, simply leverage to get the others to follow wherever he led—but where was that? If Virgil really didn’t have any connection with these people, then why had he reappeared and taken up my cause in pursuing them? It was impossible that he knew about his grandson, which meant there was no personal stake in all of this for him. He’d helped me enormously a few months back and had even gotten himself seriously injured in the process. Why was he chancing that again?

  I stumbled on the slick surface of one of the rounded stones along the shore. It was hard to keep up with Virgil’s extended stride. One of the promises I made myself was that I wouldn’t be the one to tell the man about the fate of his grandson; it would’ve been like pulling the trigger on an avalanche.

  At least I now knew what was in the duffel, but why would Shade have taken the remains of the boy with him? Why had Shade left the bone for me on the boulder? What could he possibly have hoped to gain from antagonizing me any further? Did he know of the connection between Virgil and the boy he’d killed? Had he left the bone for Virgil and not so much for me? Did he even know Virgil existed?

  There was a thicket of trees just off the path on a peninsula that divided the two main parts of the lake that provided a remarkable amount of cover. Virgil pulled up short under the snow-covered overhang and sat on a fallen log, turned, and looked at me. “I thought you might need some more help.”

  I nodded and stamped my feet, allowing some of the snow I’d collected on my snowshoes to fall off, and was just thankful to be out of the wind. “I figured.” I could feel the weight of the leg bone in the inside pocket of my jacket, along with the weight of the words I was trying not to speak. I settled on some others as I looked out at the lake from the relative shelter of the trees. “We must be getting up close to ten thousand feet.”

  “They will rest before they reach the final ridge, so we will also rest.” His two heads turned, and he looked through a narrow opening at the table-flat distance between the ridges that were as tall as skyscrapers. “What is it the whites call this lake?”

  Slipping the rifle off my shoulder and lowering the goggles, I came over and sat on the log with him. “Marion.”

  “Hmm . . . I call it Dead Horse.” He paused for a moment, and it was a pause I was used to, the pause that a lot of people have before they tell someone with a badge something. “There was a party of elk hunters up here doing a little fishing last fall, and they had their horses tied off to a group of dead pines down by the rocks.” He flipped a massive paw from the cloak. “A bear came down from the ridge over there and started circling toward the horses while those elk hunters were fishing over this way. The horses went crazy and most of them pulled free, but there was one that was tied up pretty good. He kept yanking on that lead until finally it broke off the base of the trunk with a bunch of the rocks still attached to the roots. The horse bolted, trying to get away from the bear, but the dead tree fell in the lake and dragged the horse in after it. You could see him fighting to get loose from the halter, but he just disappeared into that water, kicking the whole way down.”

  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.�
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  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.”

  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.”