Cold

One night, long ago, in the old days, an outlaw named Mean Jim was setting up his camp on the shores of a quiet mountain lake, after a long, hard trip. The sky was clear and the moon was full; the water shimmered white. His little fire had burned low. The air was summer warm, and the breeze smelled sweet.

Mean Jim’s skin was warm under his coat, so warm that he was sweating. People stared at him in town, and wondered why he always wore his bearskin coat, even in the heat of the summer sun. But Mean Jim didn’t care. He was cold inside, deep down. It was a cold that lurked beneath his skin, feeding on him. Using him up.

Some folks with smallpox said they felt like that. Like they were burning up with fever but freezing inside their skin. But Jim wasn’t sick. Not in that manner, anyhow. Jim’s soul was lost. He was damned. There was nothing but cold inside where a man should have been.

He had been warm once. There had been a wife, and a house. A little girl and a dog. But the warm was long, long gone. That fire, oh that terrible fire, had done the worst of it.

Mean Jim found the one who lit it, of course. A boy, no older than twelve, with a box of matches in his shirt pocket. Even then, in his grief, Jim wasn’t lost. Not yet. Grief comes from love, and love is warm. But vengeance is cold, and deadly to the soul.

It snowed that night. The blackened timbers of the house were covered over with a billion flecks of white. But the boy’s lips were blue, and Jim’s hands were dripping red. And he was shivering.

The cold had never left him, not since that night. There was no respite from it, no means to stave it off, no means of relief. Jim was cold, and Jim was alone. Mean Jim earned his nickname in the years that came after. And Jim shivered as he robbed and killed and burned his way across the West.

He wore a coat in Texas. The shakes really had started in Missouri. Now, he was shivering in Montana, on the warmest night of the year. Jim wrapped himself up and sat closer to the fire. Maybe it wouldn’t happen tonight. Maybe there might be a rest.

But then the water went still, and the pines stopped swaying. The crickets stopped chirping and the birds stopped singing.

The fire swelled up by itself. He could feel the heat on his skin. But Jim grew colder, not warmer. The cold rose up and clung to him, weighing him down, settling over him like a net around a fish. He was trapped in it, suffocated by it.

Jim held his breath as long as he could. He knew what he’d see when he let it out. Finally, he could hold it no longer, and the breath burst out of him and Jim shuddered at the sight of his frozen breath floating off into the summer dark.

There was a shape in the fire. A boy sitting in the flames, with glacier blue lips and a red stain on his shirt. “Why’re you so cold Jim?” said the Blue-Lipped Boy. “It’s nice and warm over here. Like cornbread, just out of the oven.”

Jim closed his eyes and shook his head as hard as he could. He didn’t answer the Boy. It never did any good to answer him. It never did change anything.

The Blue-Lipped Boy sniffed the air. “Oh, come on Jim. I can smell the cold on you… I can feel what you feel… You’re like an icicle that just can’t melt. I melted them other ones, you know. I played with the piles. They weren’t nothing but charcoal then... “

Jim closed his eyes tight. And plugged his ears. But he still heard the voice in his mind, a whisper like a needle jamming through his skull. “You know, I put them on my finger and wrote their names in my book.. Even the dog…”

Jim was shaking now, like a train that had jumped the track. The cold was a noose around his neck, always tightening, with every word from the dead boy’s mouth, until the cold was pressing so hard that he thought his bones might crack.

“I can fix you right up Jim. You know I can. I did it for them. I can make you so warm you smoke and scream and your burning eyes drip down and leave hot little trails down your chest...”

For years Jim had tried to ignore the Boy. But something snapped inside, and Jim screamed then, yelling until spittle ran down his chin. “Haven’t you troubled me enough? You take everything from me in life, and you’re still at it in death? You ain’t real! You ain’t nothing but smoke and a fever dream. You ain’t been real since the second I slid my knife across your throat twenty years ago. Looking back, I wish I’d killed you slower.”

The Boy grinned then wide, too wide. His teeth were black like soot. “Oh yes, you’ve got quite the taste for it haven’t you? Violence and death. You earned the name Mean Jim.”

The voice stabbed into Jim’s head again. “You killed them with knives and bullets and your bare hands. You killed the good and the bad and the young and the old. Sometimes it took you days to kill them, when you were bored... You’re a naughty, filthy, murderer Jim… Just like me… Can’t we be friends? Won’t you join me in the warm? Come in out of the cold…”

And right then, Jim did want that. He’d never wanted anything more. But Mean Jim was an outlaw, and outlaws are stubborn. His teeth were rattling so hard he could barely choke the words out, but he spat defiance all the same. “We ain’t the same! And I’m not ready to join you in hell just yet, whatever you are.”

The Blue-Lipped Boy laughed and disappeared. The fire burned blue and menacing. The voice returned. “Well you’re right Jim. We ain’t nothing alike. You see, I’m not cold at all right now…”

The cold surged inside Jim, frozen knives stabbing into his insides. He gasped and screamed… The hair froze on his head… His fingers were black with frostbite…

Jim reached for his canteen with his shattered fingers and unscrewed the lid. If he put the fire out, the Boy would leave... He always did.

But this time, the fire didn’t go out when Jim poured the water. This time, Jim felt two hands grip his wrists like iron. This time, Jim felt flames lick at his skin as was dragged into the heat.

“Come on Jim. Let’s get you warmed up...”

The outlaw Mean Jim burned up that night. The lawmen never found anything but teeth and bones. His flesh bubbled and cooked until it slipped off his bones like beef turned on a spit.

Mean Jim burned that night. But to this day, he’s still cold.