Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

The only air that I could feel moving was from his breath; strangely warm with a vague scent of cedar, and his features began to change; first the signature scar healed itself, then the wrinkles softened and stretched away as if the years were melting. The girth of the man folded into himself and became smaller, like a child.

“It was fun being big.”

I tried to raise a hand, but it wouldn’t cooperate. Instead the boy reached out, clasped my shoulder in a surprisingly strong grip, and leaned forward to whisper. “Aho.”

My head lolled back, and as I looked into the sky, the vaporous trails and darting meteorites of snow subsided.

At first the view streaked like a dirty windshield, but gradually, small specks of starlight began filtering through and I was sure I was seeing the night sky. The fog and snow was level with the top of the mountain, and it was as if I were resting on a plain of clouds stretching out forever.

I thought about the thirty-fourth canto and could actually remember all the words of the closing passage. Perhaps it was because it had been specifically final, perhaps it was the relief of finishing the thing, or perhaps it was that last gasp of hope when Dante followed Virgil from that dismal underworld.

We climbed, he going first and I behind, until through some small aperture I saw the lovely things the skies above us bear.

Now we came out, and once more saw the stars.

The waxing moon tossed a dull glow on the surface of the clouds, but it was the scattered layers of stars that held my attention. I looked at them and tried to feel the courageous heat of their battle as they fought against the natural state of all things in the universe: dead cold.

I could see the thick band of the Milky Way leading back through the galaxy. I tried to raise my head, but it fell to the side. Someone placed a hand on my face, and I looked up as best I could; it was like looking out of a well. “Owen.”

The face came close but the breath was colder this time, and I could’ve sworn he was chewing gum. “Hey, hey-he’s alive.”

I could see something-they were Indians the way they always were. Two now, but closer, backlit by the thick stripe of the Milky Way running the distance from horizon to horizon; Virgil’s Hanging Road-the direct path to the Beyond-Country.

Muffled and strained, I could hear someone speaking with more urgency than I thought the situation deserved. “What did he say?”

“A name, I think.”

I wanted to laugh. If I could have formed the words, if my lips could have moved or my tongue cooperated, I would have laughed and told them that sometimes it helps to be dead to confront your demons, and that I had been dead a long time.

I was lying on my steamer chair swaddled in my battered sheepskin coat, the tactical jacket I’d grown fond of, and a few quilts, despite the direct rays of sunshine cascading down. The only part of me that was free to move was my right arm, which I was exercising by doing twelve-ounce curls in an attempt to balance my electrolytes. Cady thought I was balancing my electrolytes too much and wouldn’t allow me to have a cooler on the deck anymore, but she had been discussing wedding arrangements with Vic when my accomplice had sneaked me another from the refrigerator in the kitchen.

There were a few pronghorn antelope grazing in the pasture behind my cabin that were taking advantage of the tender seedling grass that was pushing up through the darkened soil at the confluence of Clear and Piney creeks. A solo eagle drifted over the ridge and hovered there before plummeting earthward and out of sight-one less black-tailed prairie dog.

It was a beautiful June day, warm with a gentle breeze blowing from the Cheyenne and Crow reservations and, like the high plains summer to come, it stretched with hope. The hills were green, and the grandfather sage shimmered with that ethereal silver that made the Powder River country look burnished. Just above the aforementioned ridge and the rippling foothills that led to the plains proper, I could see the very tip of the snow-covered peaks of the Bighorn range-and Cloud Peak.

I lowered my eyes from the mountains and looked at the hills instead.

Lying there in direct sunlight in the middle of the afternoon with the temperature hovering at seventy-five, I shuddered. The Cheyenne Nation watched me and took the beer bottle from my hand.

Cady and Vic were attempting to find lodging for the forty-some Morettis that would be attending my daughter’s marriage to Vic’s little brother in a little more than a month. As near as I understood from the threads of conversation that were drifting from the kitchen window, some of the more adventurous Philadelphians were going to be sleeping in teepees.

A few of the hazy clouds parted, and a full blast of sunshine struck my face from ninety-three million miles away. I closed my eyes and soaked in warmth; I could see why sunflowers did this all day. Dog panted but refused to seek the relative cool of the crab apple tree my daughter and Henry had planted in the middle of the deck in an attempt to get my little cabin up to nuptial standards. Everybody, including Dog, seemed to be hovering about me as if they were afraid I might drift away and be gone again.

It was possible they were right.

I glanced at the Indian; nobody did silence like the Cheyenne Nation.

We were both dealing with feelings of deja vu, this scene seeming remarkably similar to the one after my last adventure on the mountain a year and a half ago. We had both sat here, drunk beer, and stared off into the distance as I’d re-collected myself from what had been one of the most harrowing experiences in my life-up to now.

I hadn’t been talking much in the last few weeks; there just didn’t seem to be that much to say. I had been gone-now I was back but having a hard time getting all the way back. I studied finished, man-made surfaces with distrust and couldn’t seem to operate the simplest technological devices like television remotes or phones.

It was like a part of me was still up there. I pulled my hand up to finger the sensitive part of my ear that had been refrozen; I hadn’t lost any more of it, even though the in-office raffle had sprung up again, complete with a chart and buy-in squares. My old boss and the now-retired sheriff of Absaroka County was still pulling for full amputation, but so far Vic was in the lead with “tenderness and an increased inability to hear things not wanting to hear,” the last part having been written into the square on the chart hanging on my vacant office door. This had all the earmarks, no pun intended, of being something like what had happened to me eighteen months ago.

Henry had turned and was watching me, and I was sure he was having the same thoughts.

I closed and then opened my eyes when the clouds blocked the sun, and the first thing they rested on was the very tip of that hulking massif. I’d lived in the shadow of that mountain my whole life and had summited it numerous times-never again.

Henry and Joe Iron Cloud had gotten me down to the western cirque on the borrowed buffalo hide. Vic had taken over from Saizarbitoria at Meadowlark Lodge after returning from Deer Haven, which allowed Tommy Wayman and Sancho to clean up my messes as they came: first Hector, who was relieved to see somebody who wasn’t an Indian or Vic; then Beatrice Lin-wood and Marcel Popp, then Moser, Borland in the Thiokol, the dead Ameri-Trans guard, and Agent Pfaff. Saizarbitoria, being the mountaineer, had stayed on the peak until Omar and his multi-million-dollar Neiman Marcus helicopter flew me straight to Billings for treatment, and I’d had tubes stuck in me for the better part of a week before they transferred me down to Durant.