Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty

by Craig Johnson

  There is no firewood left, no food, no water, nothing, just winter sunshine.

  The touch of the white man’s Indian woman clung in the floral design of the paper peeling away from the bedroom walls like dried leaves and the oilcloth-covered shelves. Tattered dishcloths and rags were stuffed in the cracks of the windows, frozen solid with the seeping moisture and dreadful cold.

  The Indian woman left him and the child.

  What will become of the boy?

  This far from the lodges, the powwows, the meeting places, and the warmth of human interaction, a fire glowed in the darkness of an open closet door; a small set of eyes peered over the pulled-in knees at the warmest spot in the otherwise abandoned house.

  What will become of the boy?

  In a place near the arctic tundra all those silent months, the psychologists said that he spoke to him, keeping a running monologue that had mirrored the conversations that they had had when the man was alive and troubled in his mind.

  What will become of the boy?

  The mummified body of the old man did not smell any longer, a blessing that he died in the winter, holding off the creatures that would return him to the earth. The boy did not allow that when they came, fighting them till his fingers bled from the nails that he dug into the doorjambs. He had become one of those animals, and the social services people commented on the butcher knife that rose from the father’s chest and how ferocious were the two eyes that would someday become one.

  I stared at the flourishes on Virgil’s weapon moving with the wind. The small, delicate feathers hidden among the brass beads were owl and, according to both the Cheyenne and the Crow, the messengers of the dead. Transfixed, I watched the tiny feathers. They were the only things on the spear that didn’t move.

  It arrived slowly, that finger-up-the-spine feeling, but when it struck me, I became completely alert with a shudder that took what little breath I had. My lungs constricted, and I twisted the war lance the way Virgil had shown me. It had seemed so important to him then, and I hadn’t understood—but now I did.

  Rolling the heavy lance over my shoulder, flipping it, and then wrapping my hands around it like rawhide sinew, I arched back and careered it with my entire weight.

  It struck something solid with a liquid thump. It was good that it did because otherwise the momentum would’ve carried me over the east face. The end of the spear disappeared into the whiteout.

  I could see the coyote jaws at the base and the leather wrapping, the red felt, the deer toes, the elk teeth, and the wisps of horsehair that were swinging with the wind and the momentum like the tails of an entire remuda. The painted decorations on the coyote skull were somehow more vibrant in the darkness and snow. The owl feathers remained motionless.

  Hand over hand I pulled it back to me like a fisherman pulling in his catch and, emerging from the mist, there he was. The force of the blow must’ve cracked his sternum like a chicken bone, and the lance had driven all the way in to the hilt. His head was hanging down, the long hair hiding his face completely.

  With each pull, he took unsteady steps toward me, and it was only when I got him within four feet that I could see the blood that spilled like an open spigot. His arm started to rise, and I saw the steak knife in his hand. He swung it faster than I would’ve thought possible, and the blade missed me by the closest of fractions.

  It was all he had, and his next move was a groping, loose-limbed gesture that I caught with my open hand. I fastened what little grip I had left on his forearm and held him there. Slowly his head began to rise, and it took so long, I was sure that he wouldn’t make it, but he did.

  That frightening lone living eye stared at me through the hair, and he choked the words through the freezing strings of blood that hung from his mouth. “Are—you—dead?”

  I kept my eyes on him through the amber plastic and tried to tell him the truth even though I wasn’t sure what that was anymore. I owed him that much. “No.”

  He breathed out a sigh of surprise, and I felt him grow heavy on the end of the lance as we both kneeled to the ground. Our faces were only a few inches apart. I moved my hand farther up the length of the spear, thinking I might be able to jimmy the thing from his chest, but when I did, he used his free hand to stop me. “No.” The hand, slippery with blood, fell away.

  I watched as the shine in the one eye dimmed. He slumped forward, and only leaning against the length of the lance kept him partially erect. I reached across with a clumsy hand and closed the eye.

  I don’t know how long we both sat there, but I began to lose consciousness after a while. They say that one of the more unpleasant aspects of stage three hypothermia is that along with decreased cellular activity, your body actually takes longer to undergo brain death.

  I had a lot of time to think.

  The shaking had completely subsided now, a sure sign that my body had given up trying to warm itself. I suppose my pulse and respiration rates would slow as well and before long my major organs would fail—including my heart.

  I really didn’t think that there was any way Henry and Joe were going to be able to find me in time, and if they did, what could they do? The bag containing the remains of Owen White Buffalo lay on the ground between my knees, but my eyes refused to budge from Raynaud Shade. It was a horrifying yet compelling display; the strands of saliva and blood had solidified and, even if I could’ve gotten the spear loose, he would’ve remained locked in the same position.

  Maybe that was what was happening to me; I was solidifying along with Shade and the mountain itself. It was almost as if even my breathing had stopped. I tried to blink and was shocked when I did. Closing my eyes felt good, and I thought about just leaving them closed but I had one more thing to try to do.

  I shrugged, attempting to get my hand to rise up and unzip my inside pocket. No luck. I couldn’t get the zipper pulled with my glove on my hand, so I dropped my chin, trapped a few fingers against my chest, and pulled the glove loose. I yanked on the small tab and it unzipped, the gymnastics of which threw off my balance. I fell against the lance, only inches away from Shade.

  I sat there for longer than I thought, then pushed my hand up to where I could feel Saizarbitoria’s cell phone and something else in the pocket, and started working whatever it was out from the bottom. The paperback of the Inferno fell onto my lap. I stared at it and watched as it slipped onto the bag containing Owen.

  My attention slowly returned to the phone. I turned it over, stared at the buttons a few more seconds, and then hit the red one.

  Nothing.

  I gasped one of the last warm breaths I had in utter desolation but then watched as the device flickered green with letters that read LOW BATTERY. With a facility I wasn’t aware that my thumb still had, I punched in the 215 area code and then the rest of the number. I pulled at the elastic band of the goggles that had guarded my ears and pressed the phone to my face.

  The phone rang and then rang again in agonizing slowness. It rang one more time, and then my daughter’s recorded voice began speaking. “This is Cady Longmire. I’m unable to answer your call right now, but if you’ll leave a message I’ll get right back to you.”

  “Cady—it’s . . . it’s Dad.” The beep I was supposed to wait for interrupted me and I started again. “Cady, it’s Dad. I’m a long way from home. I just . . . I wanted to tell you that I love you, and that I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry that I’m not going to get to meet her . . .” I could feel my eyes watering. “I heard some news; a little bird told me—well, a big one actually.” I swallowed and tried to come up with some more words but before I could, I heard another beep and the phone disconnected. When I shifted it around, the screen was dead. I had no idea how much of my last message had gotten through.

  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 m
e, 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 déjà 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 door. 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.