Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

As near as I could tell from the voice that echoed back to me from the cirque, Virgil was reading from the Inferno, the words sometimes drifting back to me through the storm. “In that still baby-boyish time of the year, when sunlight chills its curls beneath Aquarius, when nights grow shorter equalling the day, and hoar frost writes fair copies on the ground to mimic in design its snowy sister…”

Virgil’s voice lulled me into a stupor, and I found myself trudging along allowing the cold and snow to envelop me like cotton ticking. I was asleep on my feet, and the boy’s dreams once again became my own.

The almost-man stops the truck near an old wagon with a rounded top alongside a creek bed, high in the mountains. He flings the door open and yanks the boy out by his arm.

Skidding in the gravel as he falls, the boy looks around but there is no one else there. He stays without moving, judging the distance between them and thinking of what he should do, but his mind is like an empty sack-the only thing he can think of is a joke another boy told him on the playground. What is it when an Indian kills another Indian? Natural selection.

He had made up his mind to not give him the satisfaction of his tears; instead, he will be a warrior-what is the worst this almost-man can do to him?

I ran into Virgil’s back again.

I straightened my hat and, coming back from walking sleep, fumbled for my words. “Why’d you stop?”

We were in the shelter of a large crevasse, the blowing snow having arched a bridge over us, providing sanctuary in a false cave. “Someone is up ahead.”

In both a physical and metaphorical sense, I froze in my tracks. I tried to look around the White Buffalo, but visibility was limited and I couldn’t see anything, not even shadows. “How far?”

His voice was quieter than it had been. “Not far.”

I slipped the binoculars up and scanned the area ahead as he leaned against one of the rock walls. After a moment, I tracked something a couple of hundred yards ahead, something darker within the white. It disappeared, so I kept the binoculars on the area and waited. After a moment the fog and snow thinned a bit, and the outline reappeared; I quickly readjusted the power on the Zeisses.

“It’s a cairn.”

“A what?”

“One of these piles of rocks we’ve been following that mark the trail.”

He looked back at the scree field that tilted upward to the right. “No, there’s something else.”

I squinted across the incline with its thousands of pebbles, stones, and boulders. I was looking for a shape, a shape different from the ones I was seeing. I continued to pan my way up the sides of the cliff and across the horizon, dipped down along the valley that led toward the east face and the Wilderness Basin, and lowered the binoculars again. “I don’t see anything human.”

“Huh.”

“Virgil, there’s nowhere else for him to go. He’s boxed himself in on all sides.” I slung the rifle farther onto my shoulder and jammed my hands into my pockets for extra insulation. “Any other direction is a drop-off of a couple of thousand feet.” I could feel the bone in my pocket, and the burden of it was as great as the conditions. Here I was risking Virgil’s life, and he didn’t know that there was any connection with my chase and his family.

I’d just about committed myself to telling him the truth when he spoke. “My grandson.”

I didn’t look at him. “What?”

From the direction of his voice, I knew he was staring down at the side of my face. “I had a grandson, the son of my boy.”

The women in my life have told me that I am the singularly worst liar ever. They also say that this is one of the reasons that they love me. I suppose it was that and the fact that I owed the man that I decided to do what I normally did in situations when I had cataclysmically bad news for somebody I cared about-I dissembled. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know.”

The crusted snow had built up to where I was feeling like a living, breathing snowman. I coughed and could feel something liquid in my chest. In need of some type of movement, and because I wasn’t willing to take my word over his, I brought the binoculars up to my eyes again, even going so far as to lift my goggles onto my forehead and to pull the balaclava down around my throat. “What was his name?”

The muffled quiet surrounded us. “Owen, his name was Owen White Buffalo.”

I concentrated on the aperture and stayed as still as I ever have in my life. “Did you ever meet him?”

I could feel the steady vapor of his breath on the side of my face. “Yes.”

“When…” I tucked my chapped lips into my mouth. “When was that?”

“I was taking care of him many years ago. I had periods when I wasn’t in prison or in the hospitals.” He chuckled. “Sometimes even when I escaped.”

“Uh huh.” The scree field was more visible now, and rather than face him, I continued to look through the binoculars; it was safer there.

He shifted his weight, and I could feel the bear fur brush against my shoulder; it was almost like having a grizzly for a spotter. “I was caring for him on a Sunday afternoon. His mother and father went to Billings, and I took him fishing; we had a deal, and I made him play chess with me the night before. It was one of those warm days at the end of the Hunter’s Moon when the leaves have turned but before the first snowfall-a day that seems to make the promise that winter will never come.”

“Indian Summer.”

“Yes.” He paused for a moment and then continued speaking into my ear. “He was tenderhearted-didn’t like putting the hook through the worms. We’d used up all the bait because he had set the worms free, and he didn’t want to go back to the bar at the landing to get more. I made him go with me in the truck, but he wouldn’t go in.”

I swallowed and lowered the binoculars.

“When I came back to the truck, he was gone. I remember the seat cover; it was one of those saddle blanket ones that you can buy anywhere.”

He wasn’t looking at me any longer but had his eyes focused on the snow.

“I remember the weave of the fabric-what it looked like with him not there, the depression in the seat.” The great bear head lifted. “It was the last time I ever saw him.”

It seemed like time was holding its breath; I could feel the pressure on my lungs and against my eyes, and it was almost as if I was back underwater.

“I don’t know why they didn’t send him. I know that he’s dead. Maybe it’s because he’s not with my people; perhaps his spirit is uneasy and they can’t find him-maybe he can’t find me.” I couldn’t see his eyes under the maw of the grizzly mantle, and the only part of his head that was truly visible was his jaw and the scar that dissected the side of his face like an erosion in an emotionless desert. “If that’s the case, then his body will have to be returned to my people, so that someday I might see him again.”

It was at that moment that the Crow turned and stepped outside the safety of the crevasse, and I heard the only other steady sounds I’d been able to hear besides the voices since I’d crawled out of the pond-two three-thousand-feet-per-second rounds passing through Virgil’s body.

Thwup.

Thwup.

It took a second for my dulled wits to understand what was happening, but when I did, I threw myself into him in a behind and to the side body block, forcing him onto the snowbank to our left. “Damn it to hell!” I yanked the rifle up as I lay over Virgil and, closing my finger around the trigger, trained the sights on the overhang and the ridge.

I played the Sharps along the horizon and could make out just the slightest aberration on top of the outcropping-the outline of something that just didn’t look right. I waited and hoped he would shoot again and miss so that I could be sure that he was where I thought he was. I saw the muted muzzle flash along with the spectacular illumination of the snowflakes between us as another round buried itself into the snow alongside Virgil.