Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

The boy stands, and there was no fear in him; he could see the other that would welcome him and make him whole again. He dreams of the truck from which he was taken, silent now without his breathing. It is almost as if it is as it was meant to be, in that he never saw himself as a man; never saw himself as tall and broad-shouldered.

He sees the knife the almost-man carries at the side of his leg and worries for his grandfather, the one who has blamed himself for so many things. The one who will sit in the tin shack, the television the only voices to hold the silence of lost battles away-one more tragedy to take the place of all the others. The sound of breaking glass thrown against the thin walls as the boy’s memory stands before him, eagle-armed, waiting to be lifted by his grandfather and the gods.

Shade’s bullet had detoured at the thirty-fourth canto, which described the lowest ring of hell, the ninth circle, reserved for those who would betray. Traitors-Virgil’s last remark. He had warned me about the driver, just as he’d taunted me with the words innocent people, over and over again.

Granddaughter.

Had Virgil developed shaman tendencies since cloistering himself in the mountains? He’d made those prophecies with so much certainty, just as he’d predicted the death of someone close to me as we’d crossed the frozen surface of Lake Marion. I don’t think he’d meant his own death or mine-but then, whose?

Granddaughter.

I was glad it was a girl, if it was at all. I continued to cultivate the fantasy. She would look like my daughter; she would look like my wife. I held that thought since it comforted me above all the others.

I tripped over something, stumbled and caught my balance. I looked to see what it was and saw that I’d angled toward the very edge of the cliffs between Cloud Peak and Bomber Mountain and almost stepped blithely into the limitless void.

The ice water that ran through my bowels wasn’t figurative.

There were swirling masses of snowflakes that changed direction with the brief gusts that moved the air-and then nothing-blackness, farther than I could see, a thousand feet at least.

I breathed in and consciously told my feet to step back. I must’ve been getting close to the Knife’s Edge; as a matter of orienteering, it should’ve been just to my left.

Pushing the goggles up, I glanced in that direction but everything was still invisible. It was as if the world fell away from me in all directions.

I was feeling disoriented and dizzy, so much so that I was afraid I might fall down and a hell of a lot farther than I wanted. I planted the butt of the rifle stock in the snow and kneeled in front of the raised lip at the precipice. My stomach surged, and I felt nauseous, almost as if I had fallen.

My lungs burned as I forced air in and out, and I finally laughed at myself for coming so far to almost end like this. The laugh echoed across the divide and bounced back at me again and felt so good, I did it a few more times.

It was a good thing I’d stumbled over the stones at the edge, or I’d have joined the Thunderbirds of Crow legend. I thought about how it would’ve felt flying for those few brief seconds before I dropped like a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound side of beef.

I reached out and patted the rocks piled at the edge that had up to this point resisted the urge to follow their brethren below. The flat of my hand thumped against their raised surface.

It didn’t feel right.

The snow was stubborn where it had melted from the warmth of something underneath and then frozen again. The rifle fell to my side and clattered in an attempt to throw itself over the edge, but I slapped it still and pulled it back to me. I finally pushed the chunks of ice and snow away, revealing what appeared to be the great, silver-humped back of a grizzly bear.

“Oh, Virgil.” My voice sounded strange in my mouth, and my eyes risked tearing; I could feel them freezing in the stubble on my face. “Even dead you find a way to save me.”

I sat there for a while with my hand on his immense back and then carefully stacked a rock cairn at the edge of the cliff with the few loose stones that I could find so that if anything happened to me, someone would recover his remains.

It was the closest I’d come to just quitting, sitting down in the snow and going no farther. I would just stay here with my buddy and collect snow till the spring thaw.

But that wasn’t what he wanted.

I thought about all the things that Virgil had told me and wondered what he’d been thinking about when he died. I imagined that he was probably thinking about the same thing I’d be thinking about when my journey ended: about his family, his loved ones-and even the not so loved.

Rising up slowly, I was aware of the weakness in my legs, the numbness in my feet and hands, and the fog in my head-it was as if I could feel myself, bone by muscle by tendon, slowly coming apart. The headache had returned with a dull thumping and with pain behind my eyes. I thought about the dreams I’d been having, what they meant, and maybe even who could’ve sent them.

I looked down at the mass of fur, once again covering with snow.

He wanted his grandson back, and I was the only one here to do the job.

Feeling the bone in my pocket, I knew it was time to go get the rest of Owen White Buffalo. I could feel the cold, creeping ruin that Raynaud Shade brought with him, an infection that trailed him like a curse. He and I were coming down to it now. There would be nowhere to go for either of us.

I picked up the rifle that I’d left lying in the snow and turned east. I looked at Virgil for just a moment more. “A-ho, baa-laax.”

I stepped down onto the Knife’s Edge on my numb feet, my hobbled legs, and with a headache that split my skull with the shearing force of a blue-green glacier.

A lot of people who try to climb this mountain make it this far but no farther. You can convince yourself that you’re on solid ground and nothing’s going to happen to you up to this point, but when you have nowhere to look but down, the game changes. I had the benefit of not being able to see very far, but it was as if the dancing flakes snapping into the distance and disappearing from view were pulling at me, reaching and trying to take me with them into the darkness.

I thought again about the spirits that I’d encountered in the mountains more than a year ago and the resonance they’d placed in my life, even though I still refused to believe that they existed. Maybe they’d left me, deserting me in the same manner in which I had deserted them.

There was a high ridge to the left that flattened and then sloped away, unlike the one on the right side that just fell off precipitously. If I fell, I was going to concentrate on falling to my left.

The snow was deeper on the downhill side, making it that much more treacherous, so I found myself listing to the ridge. I put a gloved hand along the edge, using it like a rail, and kept my vision sturdily planted ahead of me in hopes that my meandering boots wouldn’t lead me astray.

There were shadows ahead, indistinct and nebulous, writhing with the flying snow. I tried to concentrate on the shapes, but as soon as I looked, they would swirl away and dissolve in the dark air.

It was getting a little spooky so I did what I usually do when I got those feelings; I took off my one glove and slipped the. 45 from my holster. The long gun was fine, but I couldn’t see further than twenty feet and decided the sidearm would do for indiscriminate shooting. There wasn’t anyone else up here other than Raynaud Shade, so it wasn’t like I was going to hit anybody who was innocent.

There was no reason for it, but I stopped, hesitating on taking that next step almost as if I were standing in a minefield. My head was killing me, but I must’ve heard the faint click in my synapses. He was somewhere out there, and it was possible that he was seeing better than I was.