Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

I could already feel myself drifting away. “I’ve got snowshoes.”

Somewhere in the distance I could hear his voice: “Oh, I think we can do better than that.”

There is a familiar odor to old trucks; it is a comforting smell and it is what he smells now. The knobs on the dash are large and chrome metal and he pushes one in where it stays for a moment and then pops back at him. He blinks and then pulls the knob the rest of the way out, turning it and looking into the red-hot coils inside.

He doesn’t know why they have to fish; he doesn’t like fish, doesn’t like picking bones out of his mouth.

He points a finger into the lip of the cigarette lighter where the burning coil is cooling, but he can still feel the heat.

“Stay here while I go get more worms and some beer.”

So he stays, and he waits.

He puts the lighter back in the dashboard and listens to the breeze shimmering the yellow and stiff leaves of the cottonwoods alongside the Big Horn River. It’s warm and he becomes drowsy, having a dream of his own. A dream within a dream, but this one was real-where his father, eyes wide with whiskey, broke up the furniture and burned it one night.

He has that ability, they say, to blend dreams with life. In the murmuring voices in the next room he overhears the old woman saying it will lead to tragedy.

He unwraps the candy bar the big man left for him, a Mallo Cup in the bright yellow wrapper that feels slick in his hands, wondering who the Boyer Brothers are or where Altoona, Pennsylvania, is.

He starts at the knock on the window of the truck and looks up to see a smiling face with lots of teeth but no warmth. “Unlock the door.”

Snow machines scare me, and this one scared me more than any I’d ever seen before. It was red, blood red, and huge, with some sort of track system all its own. I guess it started out as a four-wheeler, but with all the modifications I really couldn’t tell.

There were lots of other sleds there in Omar’s garage, but it was easy to see why he’d chosen this one for me. A regular snowmobile would have skis on the front and those would take me only so far; with treads on the front and rear, this monster would be able to follow the narrow trails and, more important, be able to climb the rocks that were buried in the snow as well.

It was early morning, about six thirty, and the big-game hunter had returned three times with supplies stuffed under his one arm, including my backpack, my snowshoes, and a leather rifle scabbard. He gestured toward one of the snowmobiles. “This one over here is the fastest, but without experience on these things, especially this one, you’ll end up piled into a tree or off a cliff.” He looked down at the machine where he’d stacked my supplies. “Not that this one’s for the faint of heart-more than a thousand cc’s. I had it special-made in Minnesota. The suspension is custom-reinforced, and the Trax-System will not fail.”

“How fast will it go?”

He studied the machine in the battery-lit garage like it might leave on its own. “Faster than you want.”

“Of that, I have no doubt.” I sat Saizarbitoria’s pack on the utility rack of the ATV. “What if I wreck it?”

“I’ll buy another one, or three.” He rested a much larger pack on the rack with mine and propped the rifle on one of the rubber and metal tracks. “I took the liberty of packing you some supplies. There’s food, drink, a sixty-degree-below-zero bag, and a pair of Zeiss 20?60 image-stabilization binoculars.”

“I don’t want to know how much those cost.”

“About six grand.”

“I told you I didn’t want to know that.”

He reached back with his good arm and pulled something from a shelf. “Here.”

I unfolded a massive amount of newfangled mountaineering gear. “What’s this all about?”

“A few years back one of my hunters was a Denver Bronco; he had a bunch of stuff shipped up here and then left it. It’s too big for me.”

I unbuckled my gun belt, took off my hat, jacket, jeans, and boots, and slipped on expedition-weight long underwear. “Which Denver Bronco?”

“Hell, I don’t remember. I don’t watch that shit-he was a big son of a bitch, though, like you.”

Omar took my sheepskin coat and helped me sort through the pile, handing me a pair of 300-weight fleece pants and a jacket to match, a black Gore-Tex North Face Mountain Jacket and overpants, a balaclava, and a pair of insulated gloves. I transferred my pocketknife into the overpants and found that I could still get my gun belt over the entire ensemble.

“Thanks.”

I pulled on my boots, thought about the cell phone, and then carefully placed it in an inside pocket of the jacket. I picked up the two-way radio and handed it to Omar. “Here, it’s useless to me and I don’t want the weight.” I then picked up Sancho’s pack, unzipped the top, and dumped the contents into Omar’s. Everything but the copy of the Inferno made it in.

I grabbed the thumb-worn paperback and glanced at him. “Saizarbitoria’s idea of a joke, I suppose, or maybe he thought I was going to get bored and have some reading time.”

He lifted the weapon onto the saddle of the machine. “You said they had a rifle?”

I zipped the tactical jacket and put on my hat. “Armalite. 223 with an infragreen scope, but it’s the short barrel, maybe sixteen inches.”

“Dangerous up close, but not so good at distance with that carbine model.” He admired the rifle in the leather sheath. “We call this ‘evening the playing field.’ ”

I turned my head and looked at him.

“I’ve got all kinds of handguns and carbines, but nothing that’ll reach out and touch with the impact of this one-besides, I thought it might be a sentimental favorite.”

I looked at the weapon and felt the rush of heat at the remembrance of how things had turned out with a weapon very much like this one almost two years ago. “Favorite, but certainly not sentimental.” I carefully lifted the. 45-70 from the case, sliding the leather cover away. “The three in the stock holder?”

He sighed. “I don’t even have extra ammo-just brought it up here on a lark as decoration. I never thought I’d be shooting it. You’ve only got the three.”

I nodded, feeling the accustomed weight close to eight pounds. I liked the accuracy of the drop-block weapons, the simplicity and smooth action of fewer moving parts. “Well, this gives me an edge over that short-barreled. 223.”

“If you hit him, he’ll know he’s been hit.” He leaned over and slipped open the butt of a plastic rifle scabbard mounted on the other side of the vehicle. “This is padded and should absorb a lot of the vibration and shock should you hit something.”

“Omar, it’s a museum piece, worth a lot of…”

“Take it.”

I didn’t move, giving him the opportunity to change his mind, and then reached across and carefully placed the Sharps in the boot, and his eyes stayed on the encased weapon. I watched him for a long moment and could pretty much guess what was running through his mind, over and over and over again. “Your first?”

“Yeah.” His eyes came up to mine but then returned to the scabbard. “Does it get easier?”

“Not really.” I cleared my throat and stood there trying to think of the words that would make it in some way better. “He was a bad guy with a lot of notches; he would’ve killed you, raped and killed her, and then who knows how many more he would’ve killed.” He nodded, dealing with the sickness that overtakes your soul when you take a life-the sick/scared before, and the sick/sad afterward. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, what human beings can become.”

When I came back from my own sicknesses he was looking at me. “You gave me some advice, now let me give you some.” His eyes went back to the scabbard. “You better become a misanthrope, too… Kill ’em, kill ’em all. Kill ’em fast.” His hand went to the rifle scabbard. “And from far away.”