Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty

by Craig Johnson

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  The giant smiled in the shadow of the grizzly headdress. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean where did you disappear to? One minute I was standing down there on the lake with you, and the next minute I was alone.” I shook my head and couldn’t help but smile. “Hey . . . I can hear you really well.”

  He looked at me with questions playing across his face along with the reflections of the fire. He took a swig of the bourbon and studied me. “I went up to the west ridge following the trail after you fell. I told you what I was doing. You don’t remember?”

  “No.” I picked up my hat to feel if it was dry, and when half of it wasn’t, I hung it back on the branch the other way. “Virgil, what are you talking about?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he looked at me uncertainly. “After you fell, you were a little disoriented, so I told you to stay put and I would come back for you.”

  I felt my head; it wasn’t as tender and also wasn’t bleeding anymore—the pond water must have washed the cut. “You did?”

  He studied me, even going so far as to tilt his head to get a good look at the side of mine, the bear jawbones, beads, and elk teeth gently clacking together in counterpoint to the tinkling bell cones. “I was very clear. You should have stayed on the ice where you would’ve been safe.” He lifted the bottle to his lips and took another tremendous draught, then lowered it but didn’t offer to give it back. “Maybe you hit your head harder than we thought.”

  “Maybe so.” I shivered again. “Gimme the bottle.”

  “Not until you have really warmed up.”

  “I have really warmed up.” We stood there, staring at each other, and I clutched the sleeping bag a little closer.

  “Turn around and cook your front; that’s the part that needs it.”

  I did as he said and moved in a little closer to the flames at the branch end of the log. He glanced around at the wreckage. “Hell of a fire he set.”

  I nodded at the giant. “You saw him light it?”

  “I did. He made a bomb out of one of those backpack stoves.”

  I studied him and noticed that not even the moccasins he wore carried any black on them. “How did you avoid it?”

  “I told you. I took the trail to our far left. You sat down on the ice of the lake and wouldn’t move.” I turned my head a little in the folds of the sleeping bag, and he extended a hand that blossomed fingers like a gigantic sunflower. “You don’t remember.”

  “No.”

  “That isn’t good.” He made the statement flatly and without judgment, which made it sting that much more.

  I reached up and felt my ear again, then held the palm of my hand against it in an attempt to warm it back to normal. “No.” I sniffed the air, and the smell of wood fire came off his moosehide war shirt, a scent stronger than the fire in front of us.

  Virgil White Buffalo looked down at me and placed an allencompassing hand on my shoulder; I was sure it was more for my benefit than his. “Maybe you’ve gone as far as you can go, Lawman. Maybe you should wait here for the others, and I’ll go ahead.”

  I looked back at the fire. “No.”

  “There’s no dishonor in this. You’ve done everything that you could; everything that could reasonably be expected—of any living man.”

  “No.”

  He took a deep breath, and the flames wavered in his direction. “Then perhaps you should tell me why going after this man is so important to you.”

  I paused. “It’s my job.”

  He watched me. “No, I think it’s something more than that.”

  He removed his hand from my shoulder and waited, and it was that continental-drift pace, Indian wait, an otherworldly motionlessness that only the best hunters have. I turned my head all the way and looked at him, and even in the wind it was as if the feathers and the bear fur that surrounded him didn’t stir a single hair. I was afraid that my faculties had gone again.

  “Virgil?” I was relieved to hear my own voice.

  “Yes.”

  When he spoke, the spell was broken and everything about him came to life again. I stretched my hands out to the flames and tried to concentrate on what had to be done. “Nothing.”

  He nodded as if he knew what I was going to ask, and his head dropped. With happy surprise, he stared at the paperback lying beside my boots. “You’re not reading anymore?”

  I nudged the book with my toe and was a little concerned that I couldn’t feel much of my foot. “It’s kind of ruined.”

  He stooped and picked it up by the binding—it opened to a random page. He flipped the bloated book over and read from the English side of one of the curled pages.

  “They all wore robes with hoods hung low, that hid their eyes, tailored—in cut—to match those worn by monks who thrive in Benedictine Cluny.

  So gilded outwardly, they dazed the eye.

  Within, these robes were all of lead—so heavy . . .”

  He lowered the pulpy mass and looked at it from the cavernous depths of the grizzly cape. “Leaden cloaks; he is on to something there.”

  I reached over and plucked my steaming pants from the limb.

  “Life is like that.” He flipped through a few more limp pages. “You collect things as you go—the things you think are important—and soon they weigh you down until you realize that these things you cared so much about mean nothing at all. Our natures are our natures.” He grunted. “And they are all we are left with.”

  I dropped the sleeping bag—my underwear was reasonably dry—and struggled to get the damn pants on. Without the gloves, my hands were stiff and cold. “You think?”

  The bass rumbled in his chest, but his eyes stayed on the paperback. “I think.” He raised his head, but this time his black eyes stayed with the fire. “All the horrors in this book are the horrors of the mind, and they are the only ones that can truly harm us.” He reached behind him and culled the bottle of bourbon from the rocks, then turned and poured the remainder of the liquor onto the log near the flames where the fire, now blue in tint, leapt forward and strung its way down the charred bark. “I think that’s enough old damnation for now.” He gestured with the book in his other hand. “Do you mind if I keep it?”

  I hastily retrieved my gloves as he tossed the bottle onto the other side of the log. “You’re not supposed to litter; don’t you remember the commercials with the crying Indian?” He ignored me till I gestured toward the Inferno. “I thought this kind of literature didn’t suit your tastes?”

  He shrugged. “One can be too picky—books are hard to come by this high.” He stuffed the blown-out, spine-split paperback inside his shirt. “Almost as hard as shelves.”

  I tried not to laugh. “I bet.” I took the fleece from its drying rack and put it on, picked up my jacket and stuffed my arms into the sleeves, and deposited my assortment of phones. The jacket had thawed and was even warm, but I flapped my arms around in an attempt to gain a little mobility anyway, then reached down and fumbled with the zipper.

  When I looked up again, Virgil was still watching me. Patiently, he stepped forward and zipped the jacket, and I felt like I was being dressed for school.

  His voice echoed as it resounded through me, and once again his words were the last thing I could hear. “Leaden cloaks.”

  The forest is never silent, no matter the season; there are always sounds, and the trick is simply slowing yourself to the point where you can hear them. My situation was different, though. I can’t explain it, but it was almost as if I was laboring under a selective deafness; I couldn’t hear the wind or the sound of my own footfalls, but I could hear voices—at least I had been able to hear Joe’s, Henry’s, and now Virgil’s.

  “My grandfather told me the story of how, before I was born, his mother, my great-grandmother, died. Our village was on the Little Big Horn. He said that one day when he was very young the sun was very hot and the lodge skins were propped open so that any breeze might pass through,
but even these winds were hot.”

  I tried to concentrate on his words and glean the warmth from them as I stumbled forward through the deepening snow.

  “A large party of my people was moving camp into the mountains, and my great-grandfather told my great-grandmother to water his horse while they were gone. My great-grandmother forgot this until the afternoon when she went to the horse that had been staked out near the lodge, but when she approached, he was startled and pulled the stake from the ground and ran away toward the pony-band.”

  I stumbled but caught my footing and continued on after the giant.

  “My great-grandmother ran after the horse, but she tripped and fell. When she got up, there was a man there with the horse’s lead, and he handed it to her. She took the rope, but when she did, she saw that it was not one man, but two. She thanked them and then watered my great-grandfather’s horse and returned to the lodge.”

  His strides were longer than mine and, even with him carrying the pack, I was having trouble keeping up. My mind was wandering, but I kept being brought back to the trail by his voice.

  “When they returned, my grandfather said she told them that she would be going to the Beyond-Country, that two of her sons, my grandfather’s two brothers who had died in the wars, had come to take her there.”

  Virgil stopped at the top of the ridge, and I ran into him, knocking my hat over my face. When I pulled it away, he had turned and was looking down at the half-filled tracks that led west around Mistymoon, across the meadow and into the freezing fog.

  “They wrapped my great-grandmother in a buffalo robe, and she went away in her sleep. I tell you these things even though we Crows are forbidden to speak of the dead—you know this?”

  I was breathing hard, trying to catch what was left of my breath. “I’ve heard it said.”

  He nodded and knelt down to give closer inspection to the tracks, even going so far as to blow in them to clear away the drifting snow, his breath like a bellows. “The experiences you had before, the one on the mountain that you have chosen not to share with me—have you told anyone else about them?”

  I knelt down with him, curling my arms around my knees. “No, not really. I discussed it briefly with Henry, but that’s all.”

  His eyes rose after the grizzly’s as he looked north and west into the strands of mist. “The ones you call the Old Cheyenne.”

  I shivered and not just because of the cold. “Yep.”

  “They are not only Cheyenne.”

  I looked through the binoculars, tracing the edge of the cornice with the power of the Zeiss lenses; the tracks continued across a sloping meadow and around the overhang to our left. “Where does he think he’s going?”

  His shoulders rose. “Up.”

  The satellite phone had no clock feature that I could find, and I was afraid to see what the water might’ve done to my pocket watch, so I glanced west to try to figure out the time; there was a vague glow within the clouds. “Late in the afternoon—they’re going to have to settle down for the night somewhere.”

  “Yes.” He stood and stared down at me. “What did the Cheyenne say?”

  I glanced up at him. “What?”

  “The Cheyenne, Henry, what did he say about the Old Ones?”

  I tried to realign my thoughts, but my mind remained off topic. “The Cheyenne, Henry, said . . .” I forced myself to concentrate. “He said that he wasn’t singing.”

  “Singing? ”

  I stood and was a little uneasy, feeling confused and angry. “When I carried Henry and this kid off the mountain, I was dehydrated, hypothermic, concussed . . .”

  “Like now?”

  I bit my lip but could hardly feel it, remembered the balaclava and pulled it up over my nose. “Worse; a lot worse.”

  He laughed. “Well, the evening is young.”

  I was fully annoyed now. “I thought I heard singing, and when I finally . . . when I got him back to the trailhead and the emergency people, the EMTs . . . I asked him if he thought—if singing with the kinds of injuries that he’d sustained was a good idea.”

  The giant grunted and repositioned the base of his lance. “What did he say?”

  I forced the next part out with my breath. “He said what singing?”

  “Hmm.”

  I stepped around him and looked up at his chin. “Hey, Virgil?”

  It took a while, but he finally looked down at me and it seemed like I’d gotten the attention of Mount Rushmore. “Yes?”

  “To be honest, I don’t care about any of that stuff right now. I’ve got two innocent people who are being led off to God-only-knows-where by a schizophrenic sociopath and no backup besides a seven-foot Indian who wants to stand here and discuss paranormal phenomena.” I breathed deeply after my little tirade, watching the clouds of vapor fly from my face and thinking about what exactly I was going to do if Virgil, my only volunteer, dropped my pack in front of me and went back to the comforts of his cozy cave.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment but then smiled. “Just curious.” The indentation in his forehead deepened as he turned a little toward me. “Would you be upset if we continued the conversation while we walked?”

  Now I was feeling stupid, and my head was starting to pound again. “Of course not; I just want to focus on what’s important.”

  He smiled some more, then turned and continued over the top of the tracks on a course of north by northwest, his words tossed over his shoulder. “Me too.”

  I was feeling bad about my little outburst. “I’m sorry, Virgil.”

  The snout of the bear cloak swung around, but I still couldn’t see his face. “It’s all right; I suppose I have become talkative in my isolation.”

  “Self-imposed isolation. You know there are no charges against you. You’re a free man and can go wherever you’d like.”

  I suppose it was the sheer bulk of the man and the deepness of his voice, but even though he was a good two paces ahead on the trail, his voice sounded as close as if he were talking into my ear, the sore one. “Where would I go, back to the VA hospital?”

  I wanted to be sure that Virgil understood that there were no official reasons prohibiting his return to civilization. “Back to the Rez? I don’t know . . . You’ve got a son who lives over in Hot Springs.”

  “He wouldn’t want me there, and I have none of my people left on the reservation.”

  “Last of your kind?”

  “Yes, in a way. Something like you.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got a daughter in Philadelphia.”

  “A daughter, yes. When she has her daughter, she will not carry your name.”

  I laughed at the ridiculousness of our conversation as we were slogging our way toward the crown of the Bighorn Mountains.

  “She is to be married this summer and when she has the daughter she now carries, that daughter, your granddaughter, will carry another man’s name.”

  I stopped, but he kept walking.

  His voice drifted back as the fog slithered over the meadow and surrounded us. “C’mon, Lawman, we don’t have time for all this talk—we have innocent people to save, remember?”

  “Virgil, have you been talking to Henry? I mean, did he . . .”

  “I have not spoken with the Cheyenne—they are a handsome people, but they are difficult.” We reached the cornice, and he floated into the mist, only his voice remaining. “I don’t know how I know these things; perhaps they’re told to me by the Old Ones, but I know in my heart of hearts that your daughter will bear a daughter.”

  He reappeared next to a rock shelf and placed the pack on the ground between us. “Do you want a candy bar?” He unsnapped the top and sorted through a few items, finally bringing out two of the aged Mallo Cups. “I want a candy bar, and these are my favorites.”

  He handed me one, took one for himself, closed up the pack, and threw it back on one shoulder as if the burden were a windbreaker. “I had a grandson once and a daughter. I had a beautiful wife.
Family is important, don’t you think? I mean, they can make you crazy, but they’re very important.”

  He knew he had a grandson? How did he know about Owen? Was it something that his son had told him while he was in my jail? I brushed a hand up to the pocket of my coat and could feel the bone there.

  He was watching me, and I knew he had noticed my hand, but then he turned and started off. “C’mon.” He chortled. “Innocent people.”

  I climbed over the top of the cornice and followed the hulking mass of him swaying with the effort of battling the headwind. “You know that story I told you about my great-grandmother, the one about her meeting her two sons, the brothers of my grandfather?” He mumbled, and I assumed he was eating his Mallo Cup. “I saw her the other day.”

  I paused before responding this time. “Your great-grandmother?”

  I could see him gesturing. “Yes, she was a strong woman, built like my father.”

  “Your dead great-grandmother?”

  “Yes, but do not refer to her in that way—it’s disrespectful.” I started to stuff the Mallo Cup into my coat, but he spoke without turning. “You should eat that.”

  I looked up at him and then back at the candy bar. It was easier to eat than to argue, so I unwrapped it and fumbled part of it into my mouth—it broke off like balsa wood in the cold.

  He continued along the winding rock outcroppings as I concentrated on his words and his footsteps. I wondered how he was able to keep his feet warm with only the moccasins to protect them—he didn’t seem to mind the cold at all.

  “I was near water, or in water, I can’t remember. I was small, young. I turned and she was there, holding her hands out to me. I never met her, but I knew it was her. You know how you know these things?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  He finished his candy bar and stuffed the wrapper in his pocket. “I told her that I couldn’t go with her; that I had things I still had to do. She said that she knew of these things so she left me there.” He stopped and knelt down again, the fog and falling snow so thick that I felt like I was watching him on my old television at home, the one that didn’t get any reception. “Do you think that means I’m meant to follow the Hanging Road to the Beyond-Country with the Old Ones?”