Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

I had spent the majority of my time in a place in Memorial Hospital that not many people knew about, a tiny little patio in the back that was built for the doctors so that they could have a place to go smoke before they all got healthy and stopped doing such things. It was there that I’d developed the pattern of allowing people to speak to me before talking to them, just to make sure they were really there.

Then I had come home and spent most of my time on the deck.

I was having trouble being indoors.

I’d also been having trouble concentrating, and that was another reason I’d stopped talking; I was getting tired of the strange looks people were giving me when I opened my mouth. I guess the things I was saying didn’t make much sense.

I listened to the few house wrens and goldfinches in the new crab apple and a meadowlark in the pasture a little away. The sun cast its warmth through the hazy clouds, and my eyes slowly closed again as my head slipped sideways; maybe it was the sun, maybe it was the beer, maybe it was just that I’d thought that I’d never get warm again.

“Just because he was not there does not mean he was not there.”

I opened my eyes and wobbled them over to where he sat in the adjacent steamer chair; we might as well have been on a cruise. This was the first thing he’d said today, other than “How is the patient,” but I think that was meant for Cady more than me. He didn’t say anything else but sipped his own beer-and then mine.

“Hey.”

“WYDOT discovered the Jeep you mentioned on the slope leading down to Tensleep Canyon; they must’ve rolled it. The man and the woman were both dead.” He studied my wrapped hand that I tucked into my coverings like a mummy returning to the tomb and then handed me back the half-bottle of Rainier. It shadowed the blown-out, spine-ripped paperback of Dante’s Inferno that I’d decided to read again; something light for summer.

His dark eyes came up, and I suppose the period for silence had ended, but with Indians you never knew. I balanced my electrolytes again, without wiping off the bottle, just to show him that I valued our friendship over personal hygiene, and continued the running argument that we’d been having for weeks. “He was there.”

The Bear nodded and watched the birds as they skimmed back and forth between the crab apple and a struggling cottonwood at the corner of my cabin and said nothing. Like I said, with Indians it’s hard to tell.

“What about the location of Moser’s body and the four-wheeler?”

He blinked, pleased at having waited me out. “They were recovered along with the Thiokol and the other prisoner-and the one you left at Deer Haven.”

“Hector.”

“Hector.” He took a deep breath and exhaled from his nose like a shotgun blast, something more playing on his face. “You know, I do not think he liked the idea of being alone on the mountain surrounded by Indians.”

Vic joined the conversation from the open doorway behind me with the phone in her hand. “Speak of the devil.” She walked over to my chair and absconded with my beer, just as the Cheyenne Nation had, and handed me the phone. “Pancho Visa.”

She took a sip.

“Hey.”

“Tough.”

The gangbanger had been calling me sometimes twice a day to check on my progress. I brought the phone up to my undamaged ear. “Hector, you’ve got to stop calling.”

“No, wait. I’m jus’ sayin’. This is important. How you doin’, Sheriff?”

I watched as Vic lowered the bottle, and I was amazed and aroused by the way she could drink from the thing without allowing the slightest bit of lipstick to remain. “Hanging in there. Hector, is this a legal call?”

“Umm… Yeah. Was that that hot deputy of yours on the phone?”

“What do you want, Hector.”

“Oh yeah. The public defender here in Houston, David Thompson, wants to know if you’ll write a letter to the judge requesting a leave of absence…”

“Requesting leniency.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Leniency. Do you think you could do that?”

“Yep.”

“I mean, it’s pretty important. It would get me off the chair.”

“I’ll have Ruby write it up and I’ll sign it.” I reached for my beer but was denied.

“Cool. I don’t have the address, but I’ll get it and call you back.”

“You don’t have to, I can get…” The phone went dead in my hand. “Expect another call from the Bank Americard Bandit.” I gave the receiver back to Vic and looked at Henry. “What about the Ameri-Trans guard?”

He took my beer from Vic and drank. “The dead one?”

I nodded and tried not to think too much about the confrontation in the overhang. “The dead one.”

Vic walked past me, then turned and sat on the leg rest by my feet. “He had a criminal record that had gone undiscovered by Ameri-Trans. A chronic gambler, he was more than a quarter of a million dollars in debt. He had made a deal with Shade, but as everybody suspected, the money turned out to be bullshit.”

“You left quite a trail of prisoners and weapons the whole way.”

It had been like this, everyone asking me questions and then not being satisfied with my answers. Most had given up, but giving up was not in the Cheyenne or the Philly/Italian lexicon-there were only tactical retreats and then reattacks. If we were going to get past this, then I was going to have to ask some questions, which was something I didn’t want to do. I looked back at the mountain. “They didn’t look for the cave hard enough.”

The Cheyenne Nation was dressed for spring in worn jeans, moccasins, and a tan work shirt rolled at the cuff. He wore his hair loose because that was the way my daughter liked it. “It was a solid rock face, Walter. There were no ledges, caves, or crevices large enough to hold a marmot, never mind men the size of Virgil and you.”

“What about the hand?”

He took a deep breath and pointed. “There was no hand in that coat when the medical personnel removed it from you. I was there.”

I couldn’t help but put my own hand into the pocket of the tactical jacket. “I told you I lost it.”

Vic sipped my bottle of beer, a luxurious token to my recovery. “There wasn’t enough time to examine the area in and around Lake Marion in detail, but the rangers said they found a branch sticking out of the ice where you said you found the hand with the ring on it.”

It was quict again, and I was thinking about not talking.

Henry gazed at the mountains and one in particular. “I brought the lance to the state archeologist, Bill Matthews, and he confirmed that it is over a hundred and fifty years old and in remarkable shape.” He grew silent for a moment, and we listened to the birds making their bright, life-affirming sounds. “Matthews got curious when I told him the story Virgil supposedly told you about the drowned elk hunter who confronted the bear. He said he had heard this same story, researched it, and discovered that it did, indeed, occur.”

“There you go.”

His face slowly turned to mine. “Walter, it happened in 1898.”

I sat there, feeling as if I were sinking into the deck chair, falling away from everything and everybody I knew. I had fought so hard on the heights of the mountains to get back to them, and it seemed as if no matter how hard I scrambled to hold on, I was slipping away. “When was the last time Virgil picked up his supplies on the mountain?”

His eyes remained steady on mine. “More than five months ago.”

I fiddled with the lint in my pocket-I suppose still looking for a hand other than my own. “No one but me has seen him or heard of him or anything?”

“No.”

I returned to silence.

He stood, and I watched as he walked across the deck and looked at the mountains.