Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

“Might be the one I saw down at Deer Haven Lodge yesterday. Maybe she’s tracking me.”

He took a deep breath and studied the board. “No. That noise, that call-she’s looking for her mate. Not the heat call, but the one of loss.” He noticed me studying him. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Good to know.”

“She might eat some of that dead guy down there; how much of him do you have to bring back?” I didn’t respond, and his eyes came back to mine. “These convicts-are you going to kill more of them?”

“Not if I don’t have to.” I thought about the man we’d put underneath the tree boughs by the four-wheeler. “So far I’m one and one.”

“You let one live? That’s good.” He moved another large stone with sinew and no twig, and I thought I remembered it being a bishop. “Maintains a balance.”

He looked at the opening again, the flickering light reflecting the scar that ran across his face like chain lightning. “Three men, one woman.”

“Two convicts, two hostages.” I studied the board, the ambiguity of the pieces reminding me of my life.

“You’re sure?”

I took my eyes from the collection of stones between us. “Of what?”

“Who is who.”

I pulled my hat down and shouldered the rolled collar of my jacket further up onto my back as a draft struck my neck. “What makes you ask that?”

“These escaped convicts, they had help?”

“A woman. Beatrice. She’s back down the road at Omar’s cabin.”

He nodded. One of his large fingers rested on another stone, the turquoise and coral wolves on his ring chasing each others’ tails. He nudged the piece forward. “This woman, are you sure she is the only one who is helping them?” He finished the move and then looked at me.

I ignored the board and looked back. “There was talk that they were going to meet somebody up here, somebody who was going to lead them out of the mountains.”

He sat there like that, unmoving, his eyes reminiscent of the dead ones that I’d stared into at the base of the cliff. He suddenly reared back with a thunderous laugh that echoed off the rock walls. After a few moments he stopped, and the slits of his eyes would’ve knapped flint. “Seems like every time I see you, you’re accusing me of something, Lawman.”

I moved another impromptu game piece. “You brought it up.”

He chuckled. “Not about me.” He moved another stone that might have been a knight, and not for the first time I began wondering if the game was crook. His face stayed on the board as the grizzly one watched me, and it was almost as if the bear head was the one that finally spoke. “Checkmate. Go to sleep, Lawman.”

“Unlock the door.”

The boy doesn’t move, just stares at the dashboard of the truck. He knows this almost-man-knows the meanness in him. Saw him once at the Greyhound bus station in Hardin placing ash at people’s feet with the lost dreams of his eyes. They had seen each other for what it was worth, and they had both known that the hanging road was the line between them-even then.

The tap again. “Unlock the door.”

Not of our people, says the large man about the almost-man. Stay in the truck and do not unlock the door.

“Unlock the door.”

Do not unlock the door.

“Unlock the door.”

He turns his face to look at the almost-man, who raises a fist as if to break the glass and it is suspended in the air there like a falling tree, trapped by its branches. He thinks how angry the big man will be if he returns and finds the glass in his truck broken.

“Unlock the door.”

He unlocks the door.

These dreams were so real they left me shaken and unsure of which world I was in. I shrugged the buffalo hide farther up onto my shoulders and listened to Virgil snore-I was sure in no less a decibel level than that of a real grizzly-and then rolled over and returned to my restless, vision-haunted sleep.

“Bad dreams?” Virgil woke me with a hand on my arm, and I have to admit the rawhide-laced lance in his other hand was a little disconcerting. The weapon was about eight feet long with a painted coyote skull near the hilt, and it was wrapped in red flannel and studded with brass tacks, elk teeth, horsehair, and deer hooves that rattled when he moved. “It’s time-they’re asleep.”

I stretched my eyes and tried to clear my head. “How do you know?”

He stood and pulled the grizzly head back from his own, the snow falling like dandruff. “I have been watching them.”

It was a little more than a quarter-mile walk following Tensleep Creek. I had the advantage of the recovered snowshoes, but Virgil had the advantage of knowing the terrain, and we followed his footprints and walked in the rut where we’d dragged the dead convict.

He’d been right about the weather, and the full moon shone above us, broken by the passing clouds like camouflage. We made our way across the same ridge, the cold grinding the snow beneath us as the deer toes on Virgil’s spear clack-a-tated like wind chimes.

“Hunter’s Moon.”

I glanced up again thinking about the Native designations that even NASA had agreed upon for each monthly moon; Hunter was October. “Little early for that.”

His voice resounded in his chest. “Never too early for that; besides, it’s a moon and we’re hunting.” He stopped just below the ridge, careful not to concede a target even when no one was looking. “In the Snow Moon, I about froze my ass off.”

I had to think-February.

“What month is it now?”

“May.”

“Hmm…” He grunted. “Day of the week?”

“I believe it’s Sunday, early Sunday morning.”

It was clear and colder than before, and the moonlight made it feel as if, even in the wallow, we were walking across a spotlit stage. I was rested and feeling a lot better, the bruise on my leg not giving me any trouble. Virgil continued to carry my pack; I’d asked him why, but he’d only shrugged and walked on. I had the Sharps over my shoulder, just in case we didn’t have the element of surprise that the big Crow Indian had guaranteed.

We followed the frozen creek through another ridge and stayed to the left before crossing into the open again, still following Virgil’s earlier tracks. The timberline was on a hillside to our right, and he motioned for me to follow him to an area that overlooked a four-way split in the stream that made a wide meadow before the falls. In the cerulean light of the moon, I could make out only one rectangular outline nestled in the aspens below.

You could see where the driver had circled to the right, but then, when faced with the steep incline and more trees, had returned to the field to the west and parked.

We were going to have to take the long way to the east and circle the meadow or backtrack in plain view across the creek. We chose the long way, and it took the better part of a half hour, but I felt assured as we looked down on the vehicle that we hadn’t been seen. I adjusted the binoculars that Omar had thoughtfully given me, and my eyes drifted in and out of the shadows playing across the snow.

The area around the Thiokol had been trampled flat; there were no lights, and no one was outside-at least as far as I could see with the aid of the powerful optics.

“There has been no movement for two hours. They are city people and don’t know that the bad things happen at night?”

I shrugged the binoculars from my eyes. “They know about bad things, day or night. I’ll bet they’re asleep. It’s where I’d be if you hadn’t woken me up.” I was just starting to figure out a plan on how to approach the vehicle when in my peripheral vision I noticed Virgil holding the expedition pack out to me. I stood, took it, and rested it against the tree beside me. “You headed back?”