Black Hills

by Dan Simmons

No response. The only sounds are the rush of the trains, the hum of traffic on the bridge pavement, the slight whisper of wind through the giant cables and countless suspending bridge wires, and the constant honk–rumble–muted roar from the city behind them.

  Paha Sapa hears voices and goes to the railing of the promenade deck. Four men in coveralls are on a scaffold strung below, smoking cigarettes and laughing, while one of them makes a halfhearted display of passing a paintbrush over the scrolled metalwork descending below the wood floor of the deck.

  Paha Sapa clears his throat.

  —Excuse me…. Can any of you gentlemen tell me if there’s a Mr. Farrington working on the bridge today?

  The four look up and two of them laugh. The fattest one, a short man who seems to be in charge of the work detail, laughs the loudest.

  —Hey, what’s with you, old fellow? Are those braids? Are you a Chinaman or some kind of Indian?

  —Some kind of Indian.

  The short, fat man in the stained overalls laughs again.

  —Good, ’cause I don’t think we allow any old Chinamen to cross the bridge on Saturdays. Not unless they pay a toll, anyways.

  —Do you know if there’s a Mr. Farrington still working here? E. F. Farrington… I don’t know what the E or F stands for. I promised a friend I’d look him up.

  The four men look at one another and mumble and there’s more laughter. Paha Sapa doesn’t have to work hard to imagine what Mr. Borglum would do if he came across some of his workers smoking on the job, only pretending to work, and treating visitors to the monument with this disrespect. As Lincoln Borglum once said to him—After a while, everyone realizes that my father wears those big boots all the time for a reason.

  A tall man with a straggly mustache—Jeff to the fat crew leader’s Mutt (Paha Sapa had always gotten the two comic strip characters mixed up until he met a tall, skinny, mustached worker at the Monument named Jefferson “Jeff” Greer, not to be confused with “Big Dick” Huntimer or Hoot or Little Hoot Leach)—gives out a strange giggle for a grown man and says—

  —Yeah, well, Chief, Mr. Farrington’s still working here. He’s up on the top of the nearest tower. He’s one of the bosses.

  Paha Sapa blinks at this news. If Farrington had been thirty when Big Bill Slovak met him in 1870, he’d be ninety-three now. Hardly the age for someone to be employed and still working atop one of the towers here. A son, perhaps?

  —E. F. Farrington? Master mechanic? Older man or young?

  More inexplicable giggling from the men below. It’s the Mutt crew chief who answers this time.

  —Farrington’s a mechanic, yeah. And he’s as old as Moses’s molars. Don’t know about the “master” part, though. You oughta go up and ask him.

  Paha Sapa looks up at the looming stone tower. He knows there’s no stairway inside or on the outside of the solid-stone double-arched monolith, much less an elevator.

  —It’s all right if I go up?

  The tall one, the Mutt, answers.

  —Sure, Chief. The bridge is open to the public, ain’t it? We don’t even charge for you to walk across no more. Go ahead.

  Paha Sapa is squinting into the sun.

  —How?

  Short, fat Jeff answers and the sudden silence of the other three is suspicious.

  —Oh, any of the four cables will take you up. I prefer the one to the right of the promenade. If you fall from that one, you don’t go all the way to the river—the tracks or promenade or car lanes’ll break your fall.

  —Thank you.

  Paha Sapa has had enough of these men. He hopes that they’re not typical of all New Yorkers.

  Mutt speaks again.

  —Think nothing of it, Sitting Bull. Say hi to your squaw for us when you get back to the reservation.

  FOUR CABLES run the width of the river and beyond, each finding support just below the summit of its respective tower. Two of the cables rise on either side of the promenade here at the beginning of the long walk and arch up to the Brooklyn Tower, some 208 supporting cable wires, called suspenders, coming down from them, more scores of diagonal cable wires—“stays” in naval terminology—also coming down from the tower to help support the roadway. In the center of the river, coming down to the roadway, the four cables dip in that most perfect of geometric forms—a catenary curve. Paha Sapa’s son, Robert, who loved math and science so much but who often seemed more poet than geometrician, once described a catenary curve to Paha Sapa as “the universe’s most artistic and elegant response to gravity—the signature of God.”

  Paha Sapa also knows that each of the four major cables on each side ends in a giant anchorage, each anchorage an eighty-foot tower in its own right—a sight when the bridge was first built and New York was a low city—and each weighing 60,000 tons. And in each of those anchorages, all that weight of the towers, the roadway, the trains, the people, the thousands of miles of wire, and the dead weight of the cables themselves is carried, the way the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals carry the weight of gravity from the arched interior, into anchor plates each weighing more than twenty-three tons a plate, and those plates, sitting at the bottom of a stone mass equal to a 60,000-ton pyramid, are linked to anchor bars twelve and a half feet long, which link to smaller links, which eventually lead to red-painted giant iron eyebars protruding from the huge anchorage of stone, iron, and steel, each eyebar connected to its cable, the four cables together sustaining the full weight of the bridge.

  But none of that is important to Paha Sapa now. He has to decide if one of the four cables is actually walkable. He wants to talk to this Mr. Farrington.

  So Paha Sapa stands at the south railing of the promenade, looking down at one of the four broad cables that runs up to the tower. At this point it dips below the level of the promenade deck and, farther back toward the New York shore, beneath the level of the bridge itself. The metal-covered and white-painted cable is not very large for something carrying so much weight—only 153⁄4 inches in diameter, the same size as the other three supporting cables—but he remembers that there are 5,434 wires in each major cable, each of those wires bundled and crimped in clusters of other cables within the main cables.

  Big Bill Slovak loved that number—5,434. He thought there was something mystical about it. Even wasichus, it seemed, had their faith in spirits and signs.

  Paha Sapa easily vaults over the low railing onto the cable that descends past the promenade on the right side. It’s easy enough to balance on—a pipe with a diameter just under sixteen inches—but the painted and curved metal is slippery. He wishes again that he hadn’t worn these uncomfortable and slick-soled cheap dress shoes.

  He guesses that the cable rises about 750 to 800 feet from this point to its pass-through notch near the top of the tower about 275 feet above the river. Big Bill could have told him the exact length. Actually, he did tell him the exact length of the supported land span of the bridge here and its cable, 930 feet, but that span (and its cable running alongside behind him) runs behind him a couple of hundred feet to the anchorage.

  Perhaps about 725 feet of rising cable ahead of him. And it rises at an angle of about 35 degrees. Not sounding very steep until you’re actually on such a pitch or slope, Paha Sapa knows from his many years in mines and his two years at Mount Rushmore. Then a slip can be a dangerous thing.

  There is a skinny cable running alongside the cable on the right side of the main cable and hanging about a foot out and perhaps three and a half feet higher than the big cable. It’s a handrail of sorts, but one would almost have to lean out over the drop to hang on to it. The gap between the main cable and the “handrail” thread of steel is considerable. Paha Sapa assumes it’s used more for some sort of harnesses or for hooking on gear or lowering equipment to scaffolds suspended from the main cable than as any sort of real railing.

  He hops back over the railing onto the promenade deck. Several men bustling by look at him strangely but obviously assume he’s a bridge worker and hu
rry on.

  Walking back to where the rude clowns were on their scaffold hanging out of sight below the promenade deck, Paha Sapa looks at the untidy pile of material they left up on the deck. It’s only the coil of extra rope that interests him. He lifts one end, stretches it, examines it. It’s not what he’d choose to replace his eighth-inch steel cable to hang off Abe Lincoln’s nose in his bosun’s chair while carrying a steam drill but it’s better than clothesline.

  Paha Sapa takes his folding knife out of his pocket and cuts off an eight-foot length of the rope.

  When he vaults back over the opposite railing back onto the large cable, it takes him only a few seconds to fashion a quick Prusik knot around the “handrail” cable. Bringing the doubled length of line back, he undoes his belt—wishing he’d worn his much broader workman’s belt—then refastens it with the ends of the rope looped twice and knotted in a smaller Prusik knot at his right hip.

  Not exactly the kind of safety margin that Mr. Borglum would okay at the work site, but better than nothing.

  Paha Sapa notices a horizontal cable—almost certainly a stay against winds—connecting the handrail cables about thirty feet up this main cable and overhanging the promenade, and there are a few other such steel wire stays and tie-downs on the long, steep rise up to the tower, but he knows it will take just a few seconds to undo the two friction-hitch knots, move the rope beyond the obstacle, and tie on again. It shouldn’t be a problem.

  Paha Sapa begins walking briskly up the steepening incline of the cable, the rope in his right hand, occasionally pulling it taut enough to provide stability when a strong gust of wind hits him from the south.

  Within a couple of minutes he’s approaching the height of the tower arches that he knows from Big Bill are 117 feet above the roadway—the two center cables run between the arches to the tower—and he pauses to catch his breath and look around, pulling the Prusik knot tighter as he does so.

  The feeling of exposure is somehow greater than his usual work hanging two hundred feet and more above the valley floor on the mutilated Six Grandfathers. The proximity of the rock there gives a sense, however false, of something to grab on to. Here it’s just the 153⁄4-inch cable under his slick soles, the whole cable taut but seeming to sway a little, and the tiny handrail wire that definitely is moving against the rope and with the wind. He knows that it’s a little more than 276 feet from the top of the towers to the river, but anyone falling from one of these two center cables would never get to the river—his body would crash onto the promenade deck or, from this right cable, more likely onto the train tracks far below. If he leaped really hard over or under the swaying, almost-invisible-from-below handrail cable to his right, he guesses he might make it all the way to the automobile lanes below.

  He turns around and looks at Manhattan.

  The city is glorious in the midmorning light, the dozens of new tall buildings gleaming white or sandstone tan or gold. Thousands of windows catch the light. He sees countless black automobiles moving along the riverside roadways and streets, many lining up to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, all looking like a line of black beetles from this height.

  A small group of pedestrians has gathered at about the spot on the promenade deck where he jumped over the railing, and he can see the white ovals of their lifted faces. Paha Sapa hopes that he isn’t doing something illegal—why would it be illegal?—and remembers that Mutt and Jeff, both bridge workers, told him that this is the way he could find Mr. Farrington on the tower. Of course, odds are strong that Mutt and Jeff were just making fun of an out-of-town “Chief ” and a rube to boot.

  Paha Sapa shrugs, turns around, and continues his climb. Even used to working at heights as he is, he finds that it’s better if he focuses his gaze on the spot where the now steeply rising cable fits into a black notch near the pediment of the tower about a hundred and fifty feet above him. The wind coming up the East River from the south now is quite strong, and he has to release his gentle grip on the sliding rope for a moment to tug his cloth cap lower and tighter. He has no intention of losing a two-dollar hat to the river or having it run over by traffic on the New York–bound lanes.

  Near the top, the sense of exposure increases as the great stone wall and the top of the two gothic arches come closer and closer. He finds that he’s setting one foot in front of the other for balance. The angle of approach is at its steepest here. Seeing how small the openings for the two cables are, he wonders if it’s even possible to get onto the top of the tower from this cable. There is an overhanging pediment that stretches about six feet beyond where both cables enter the tower, but it looks to be about seven feet high and has no steel grips or decent handholds on it. Paha Sapa would have to untie from the now freely moving thin handhold cable and leap up toward the flat overhang, hoping to get his arms over and either find something unseen to grab on to or use the friction of his hands and forearms to keep from falling backward. And if—when—he did fall, the chances of him being able to fall back onto the main cable and keep his balance there on its few inches of slippery, curved top surface are very small indeed.

  But when he reaches the immense wall of giant stone blocks and overhanging pediments, he sees that if he gets down on his hands and knees, he can crawl into the square notch through which the cable and steel wire pass.

  Inside in the relative darkness, stone just sixteen inches under him now, there’s an aged wooden ladder to his right and sunlight above. He coils the rope over his shoulder.

  Paha Sapa climbs up and out of the hole onto the top of the New York Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The wind is even stronger here, blowing the tails of his clumsy suitcoat and still trying to steal his hat, but it’s no factor up here on this broad, flat space. Paha Sapa tries to remember the magical numbers Big Bill recited to him about the tower tops: 136 feet wide by 53 feet across?—it was something like that. Certainly a wider expanse of segmented stone blocks up here than Mr. Borglum has left to blast and carve for the Teddy Roosevelt head at the narrowest part of the ridgeline south of the canyon where he wants to put the Hall of Records.

  Paha Sapa walks easily back and forth on the top. No work crew or 93-year-old E. F. Farrington up here—the clowns tricked him after all. He hadn’t really expected the old man, of course, but he thought there might be a son or grandson working up here.

  He walks to the east edge and looks out at the view. The cables and their gleaming suspender wires dropping away steeply below make his scrotum contract. The cars on the roadway about 160 feet below seem much smaller, the sounds of their tires on the roadway a distant thing. Paha Sapa guesses that it’s about a third of a mile to the Brooklyn Tower… 1600 feet perhaps?… but the view of that tower is astounding. There is a large American flag flapping atop that tower, and he can see small human figures there, but if that’s where Farrington is working… forget it. He’s not in the mood to try to descend one of these four continuing cables and climb again, perfect catenary curve or not.

  Looking from the south edge of the tower top, the sheer drop to the river there seeming a lot more than a mere 276 feet, he sees ferries moving to and fro, the river filled with ships, and larger ships moving or anchored in the bay beyond. The Statue of Liberty lifts her torch on an island out there.

  He looks back to the west. The fairly recently completed Empire State Building rises above the other high buildings like a redwood amid ponderosa pines. Paha Sapa feels a sudden catch in his throat at the beauty of that building, of these towers—and at the hubris of a race of his species that would construct all this and put it into motion. (Eight weeks later, he’ll see the Empire State Building again when he and thirty other workers follow Mr. Borglum to the Elks Theater in Rapid City to watch King Kong. Borglum will have seen it and have been so enthused about the movie—“the ultimate adventure!” he’ll call it, “a real man’s picture!”—that he’ll lead a caravan of old trucks and coupes and Paha Sapa on Robert’s motorcycle [with Red Anderson in the sidecar] to go se
e it again. Mr. Borglum will walk into the theater, for the hundredth time, without paying a cent—for some reason the Great Sculptor believes himself exempt from such petty fees as movie tickets—but Paha Sapa and the other men coerced by their boss into seeing the movie will shell out an outrageous twenty-five cents each. It will be worth it to Paha Sapa, who will look at all the images of New York at the end of the movie and think of his moments atop the western tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.)

  At this moment on the morning of the first of April 1933, Paha Sapa has no thoughts of giant apes swinging from any of the buildings he’s admiring. The morning has been cloudless until now, but suddenly a few moving clouds obscure the sun, sending their shapeless shadows flitting over bay, steamships, island, ferries, the southern point of Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn. When two of these newcomer clouds diverge, Paha Sapa watches a shaft of almost vertical sunlight reach down and strike the water to the south of the bridge. The reflection is so bright that he has to raise his hand to shield his eyes.

  Without warning there are men standing all around him.

  Paha Sapa actually jumps in alarm, thinking that police have somehow managed to sneak up on him and are going to handcuff him and haul him away down the cable—no small feat, that.

  But these are no wasichu police.

  The last time he saw these six old men, they stood hundreds of feet tall and were each surrounded by a corona of brilliance. Now they are just old men, all but one of them shorter than Paha Sapa. They wear dress-up buckskins and moccasins, the tunics adorned with necklaces and chestplates of bones, everything augmented by the most beautiful beadwork, but the once-white deerskin has grown dark and smoky with age, as have the faces and necks and hands of the six old men.

  The oldest and closest of the Six Grandfathers speaks, and his voice is now just the voice of an older Natural Free Human Being, not of the wind or stars.

  —Do you understand now, Paha Sapa?

  —Understand what, Tunkašila?