“It’s not mine, but I think Omar loaned it to me for the long term; he’s the one that loaded the pack.”
“The hunter.” He pulled the cap from the bottle of the Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve and leveraged a dollop into his coffee. “You have good friends, Lawman. We’ll drink Omar’s whiskey then.”
“Bourbon.” He held the neck of the bottle out to me, but I shook my head. “Working.”
He shrugged and twisted the top back on. “The trail narrows at the falls, and with the timberline, the shoebox can’t go any farther.”
“When did you see them last?”
He thought about it. “An hour before I found the dead man and you.”
“Then they heard the shots, too?”
“Oh, yes.” He sipped his high-octane coffee and smiled. “Don’t worry. They are bedded down, and it will be an uneasy night for them. They’ll wait till the morning if they move, but the weather will break sooner and we can catch them unawares before that if you would like.”
I sipped my own leaded coffee. “I would like.”
He stretched his back, and it was as if the grizzly was rearing behind him. “So, you wanna play some chess, Lawman?”
Virgil had cleaned up from dinner, and we were into our third match and waiting for the weather to settle to make our move. The big Indian had placed a fat candle on one of the rocks and was using the light from it and the fire to examine the fourteenth-century giant blue devil on the cover of the Inferno.
His eyes came up to mine. “Looks scary.”
I studied the makeshift chessboard and tried to remember if the larger stone with the smaller one sinewed together was the king or queen.
“It’s got a Virgil in it; he was a Roman poet.”
He flipped through a few pages. “Dead, huh?”
“More than two thousand years ago. Maybe you were named after him.”
“No-I was named after my great uncle; he was an irrigation ditch digger.” He opened the book about halfway. “What’s it about?”
I moved what I thought was my queen diagonally on the checkerboard that was made from the remains of a Purina feed bag. “It’s a poem, an allegory.”
“Ah, something that’s about something else. Does it rhyme?”
“Only in Italian, not in English.”
His large fingers moved a small, singular rock that I assumed was a pawn, as he continued to study the paperback. “So, that is Italian on one page with English on the other?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “What’s the first thing it’s about?”
“A guided tour through hell.”
He considered the cover again and then tossed the book onto my legs. “I was in Vietnam and federal prison.” He shifted his haunches and looked at me. “I don’t need to go through that again.” Something made a noise outside, a long, piercing cry that mixed with the wind and then died. He glanced toward the opening. “Cougar, female.”
“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.”