Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

I pushed, but there wasn’t any way to get solid purchase and nothing moved. I tried again, finally throwing my head back in the trough it had formed and staring at the leaden sky. “You have got to be kidding.”

I slipped my glove back on and started digging under the saddle and around my leg and could smell the gas and see where it was leaking. I wasn’t sure if the tank had been ruptured or if one of the fuel lines had been cut or partially torn loose. It wasn’t a lot of gas, but it was gas and the fumes were strong.

My position was awkward, and I wasn’t able to get at much of the snow below my leg, but when I finally got to my knee, I could tell that although my leg hadn’t broken, it was securely lodged in the crack of what felt like ice over a granite shelf.

“Damn.”

I thought about my options: continuing the struggle or waiting for the summer thaw. I carefully placed a boot against the floorboard and pushed.

Nothing, not even a nudge.

I lay there for a few more minutes in an attempt to gather some strength, but the fumes leaking from the gas tank were a little nauseating. I repositioned myself in an attempt to get farther away from the smell as something struck me in the face. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it burned and I swatted it away.

I looked up the thirty feet at the dead man and was rewarded with a bloody grin as he looked down at me with the knit cap pooched up at an odd angle. He flipped another match that landed farther down the embankment.

“Hey, do you mind not doing that?”

He continued to smile with one eye puckered shut and pulled another match from the small box in his hands. You would think that his motor functions would have been impaired by the shot he’d taken in the head.

The next match struck the gas tank, but I slapped it out with my glove. “Hey!”

I pulled the. 45 out and held it so that he could see it. “You remember this?”

He lay there, staring at me, and it was time to put up or shut up. I lodged my foot against the floorboard and grabbed the nearest side of the handlebars with one hand, the fumes from the gas starting to take the hair from my nose.

I gave it all I had.

Nothing.

My head dropped back in frustration, and I clamped my teeth as another match struck the machine and ricocheted off into the snow with a brief, adderlike hiss.

I aimed the. 45 at him. He was smiling again, blood staining his lips, and he ducked a little. “Stop it. Now.”

He tipped the tiny box of matches up and shook it, then slid the cover open further and tried to look inside.

He was out of matches.

I had to laugh, but when I looked back at him, he was trying to climb over the crest of the hill toward me. Not so funny. I looked at the Sig about halfway down. If he got his legs over the edge, he could just slide to his pistol.

I carefully aimed at his extended right hand. “This is the last time I’m going to warn you. Stop.”

He didn’t, and I fired. I didn’t hit his hand but it must’ve been very close, because he yanked it back and looked at me. He wasn’t smiling now, and when he lunged this time, I took careful aim.

I don’t know how long I lay there before thinking of Saizarbitoria’s cell phone in my inside pocket. I pulled it out and looked at it, anything to keep from looking at the dead man who was staring at me, his legs still invisible over the crest of the ridge; definitely Fingers Moser.

I concentrated on getting the cell phone up and operating, pulling it from the Ziploc and turning it around and flipping it open. The phone immediately displayed a splash of green and then the photo of Marie and Antonio. I stared at the display and watched as two words marched across their smiling faces-NO SERVICE.

I slumped back in my new spot, a little away from the dripping gas leak.

Turning the mobile off, I stuffed it back in the plastic bag and sealed it, carefully sliding it into the inside pocket of my jacket. “I can’t even talk to Hector.”

I lay there feeling sorry for myself and then got up on one elbow to reach behind me and see how much of the spilled supplies I could find. The first thing I located was a Snickers bar. I broke it in half and stuck part of it in my mouth-it tasted like a piece of moldy firewood and was like chewing bark. I lay there allowing my saliva to soften it a little, then chewed some more and swallowed.

Figuring there might come a time when I’d want it, I poked the other half into my pocket, flailed my hand around behind me, and finally found something else-the paperback of Dante’s Inferno.

Great, some uplifting literature to help bolster my mood.

I dropped the paperback on my chest and started thinking about my immediate future. The weather was certainly a problem. There had been a brief break in the squall, but to the northwest I could see the broiling bank of storm clouds that was coming next. Pretty soon it was going to start snowing again, and then the wind would pick up and fill my little wallow, effectively turning me into a sheriff Popsicle.

I thought about the hungry cougar back at the lodge and wondered what else there was up here that might be waiting for the opportunity of an easy meal. There are wolves in the Bighorns to go along with the mountain lions and black bears; the Game and Fish said there weren’t any grizzlies in the range, but I knew a few old-timers who called bullshit on that one. I wasn’t anxious to be the bait staked out to discover if it was true or not.

I was pretty sure that the warmth of the partial sun, my body heat, and the engine would thaw the ice shelf underneath me enough that I could dislodge my leg. I just had to find some way of passing the time.

I stared at the book on my chest.

I was going to have to get pretty desperate to start in on that.

Cord never shot an arrow from itself

That sped away athwart the air so swift,

As I beheld a very little boat

Come o’er the water tow’rds us at that moment

Under the guidance of a single pilot

Who shouted, “Now art thou arrived, fell soul?”

“Phlegyas, Phlegyas, thou criest out in vain

For this once,” said my Lord; “thou shalt not have us

Longer than in the passing of the slough.”

As he who listens to some great deceit

That has been done to him, and then resents it,

Such became Phlegyas, in his gathered wrath.

My Guide descended down into the boat,

And then he made me enter after him,

And only when I entered seemed it laden.

I thought about the first time I’d read the epic poem in the old Carnegie library that was now my office. I’d had a draconic English teacher, Betty Dobbs, who had drilled us to the point that I’d had to go to the Durant Library to discover new ways of deciphering the text.

They used to keep a fire burning in the small, marble fireplace in the winter months, and there was a long oak research table that you could sprawl your books onto. The copy they had was a beautiful old tome, the Reverend Henry Francis Cary translation with illustrations by Gustave Dore. The thing had a weight to its presentation that had you believing that you were truly glimpsing hell in a handbasket rather than the moonings of a banished, heartbroken Florentine.

Contrary to popular belief, there aren’t that many descriptions of hell in the Bible, and the majority of images most people carry around in their heads are from the fourteenth-century poem, which means that our contemporary view of hell is actually from the Middle Ages.

A depressing thought, to say the least.

I had gotten to the eighth canto and was amazed at how much history and politics there was in the thing, observations that most certainly passed me by when I was sixteen.

I marked my place by dog-earring a page and placed the book back on my chest. My eyes were tired, I had a headache, and it had begun to snow again. I’d had an eye operation a few months back that had been an unqualified success, so I was pretty sure my headache was from the bump on my forehead and the gasoline fumes and not from my eye.