Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  —All the others were too far away or too high in their mountains—although we did try to wipe out some of them—but the Blackfoot are just too tough. They’re scary people, Long Hair. The men will kill you just to take your teeth to gamble with, rolling them on a blanket like dice, and the women will chop off your ce and hang it on their lodge pole as a children’s toy.

  The ghost laughs again.

  Paha Sapa returns to the campsite, folds up the dry tarps, closes his valise, and walks back to the town of Busby.

  HE’S ON THE ROAD by midnight.

  Poor Tommy Counts the Crows, assigned by Mr. Strange Owl to make sure that Paha Sapa did not steal anything, had fallen asleep by ten p.m. Paha Sapa made sure the tools were returned to their right places and left the young man sleeping, pushing the rebuilt motorcycle a hundred feet down the road before kick-starting it to life.

  The electric headlamp was new to motorcycles in 1916 and Paha Sapa has repaired but never replaced the original one on Robert’s machine. The beam it casts is flickery and not very bright at the best of times. On the road headed west tonight, he would have turned it off completely and navigated by moonlight, except that a solid cloud cover has moved in and the moonlight is too diffused to drive by. It’s still bright enough, however, for Paha Sapa to see that the Crow houses he’s passing on either side of the road tend to be tumbledown hovels and shacks… not so very much different, he decides, from the majority of tumbledown hovels and shacks he saw on the Northern Cheyenne reservation or, for that matter, on Pine Ridge and the other Sioux reservations in South Dakota.

  —Long Hair? General? You still here?

  “You can call me Colonel. What do you want now? To tell me how tumbledown the shacks and hovels are here in Crow country?”

  —No. I wanted to explain to you why I didn’t push the plunger down on Mount Rushmore. But the shacks did make me think of it.

  “I know why you didn’t push the plunger down on Mount Rushmore, Paha Sapa. You lost your nerve. But do you have another explanation?”

  —The cemetery on Pine Ridge Reservation… the one at the Episcopal mission church and school. The cemetery where Rain and her father are buried.

  The ghost says nothing. The purr and putter of the Harley-Davidson J’s rebuilt engine, working perfectly now, is the only sound in the night. It’s cool enough that Paha Sapa is wearing the long leather jacket Robert left him.

  Paha Sapa considers not continuing—this ungrateful ghost does not deserve a conversation, much less an explanation—but after a while he goes on:

  —Every once in a while some boys… men too, I think… on the reservation would sneak into the cemetery at night and carry out some vandalism there. Most of the crosses and headstones were made of wood, of course, so they just kicked those apart, but a few of the larger headstones—the Reverend de Plachette’s, for instance—were of stone, and the vandals took crowbars or sledgehammers to the stone, smashing it as much as they could, tipping over what they couldn’t smash.

  The ghost’s voice sounds weary.

  “You didn’t want to be just another cemetery vandal.”

  —When I heard both Borglum and the president say that the Mount Rushmore heads would be there for a hundred thousand years, I could imagine the vandalized and broken fragments of the heads being there that long. Every culture honors its dead leaders—you’re honored at this place we’re headed. The thought of being like those vandals who come to the cemetery out of their stupidity and frustration and urge to destroy other people’s remembrances because they’re unable to create anything themselves… it felt wrong.

  “Very noble, Paha Sapa. So you’ll let the Wasichu Stone Giants stand astride your sacred Paha Sapa and prairie rather than be a vandal.”

  —Your Wasichu Stone Giants have already risen and done what they did to us, Long Hair. Vandalizing Borglum’s life’s work wouldn’t have changed that. Look on either side of the road.

  The headlight flickered and danced, illuminating little. But visible in the cloud-filtered moonlight were more shacks with packed dirt for front yards, a huddling of shacks in lieu of a community, filth where high-grass prairie had once grown.

  “I know. I came this way in my last days alive, remember? I remember this prairie glistening after morning rains. I remember the flowers stretching from horizon to horizon here, just as the buffalo herds did. You Indians were always filthy in your ways, Paha Sapa. We could smell your garbage heaps from twenty miles away. The only thing that made you look and seem noble was the fact that you could keep moving, leaving your buffalo-run heaps of rotting carcasses and giant mounds of stinking garbage behind you. Then we came and you ran out of room.”

  —Yes.

  It’s not the truth of it, or at least not all the truth, but Paha Sapa is too weary to argue.

  HE REACHES A HARD ROAD—paved—before two a.m. and has seen signs to the battlefield from his road from Busby and now more directing him south along this paved highway. One way or the other, the Custer battlefield is less than a mile to the south and then back a mile or two the way he has come.

  The town of Garryowen—obviously named after Custer’s and his regiment’s favorite song—appears to be composed of two houses along the road to the south, and the placed called Crow Agency looks to be composed of three buildings along the road to the north. He turns right and drives the eleven miles north to the little town of Hardin—small, but big enough to have a five-and-dime and a post office. The motorcycle’s tires sound strange to him as they hiss and hum on pavement.

  HE DOES NOT GET BACK to the battlefield until almost eleven a.m.

  Not wanting to be arrested for vagrancy in Hardin (and, as a strange Indian hanging around a wasichu town in the middle of the night, Paha Sapa knows this is a real possibility even with his motorcycle to show he’s not a hobo freshly hopped from a freight train and with a pocket full of money to back up that argument), after finding the five-and-dime and post office in the darkness, he drove back out of town and down by the river, rolling out of sight behind willows, and lay on the tarp until sunrise. Why he felt he had to do what he is going to do at the battlefield in the daylight rather than in darkness was a mystery even to him, but he knew he was not going out there at night.

  Perhaps, he thought wryly as he lay there counting the few stars that deigned to show themselves between the slow-moving clouds, this Indian who has spent most of his life carrying a ghost from that battlefield is afraid of ghosts after all.

  Sunrise was a cloudy, milky affair and the air was far cooler than normal for the fifth of September, the breeze chilly enough to send Paha Sapa rummaging in his gladstone for a sweater to slip on under Robert’s wonderful, perfectly aged and faded leather jacket. Unlike Mr. Strange Owl’s emporium in Busby, both the five-and-dime and post office were open on Saturday here in Hardin, but the latter did not open until nine thirty. Before he finally weighed, stamped, and handed James’s The Ambassadors to the postal clerk for mailing back to the Rapid City public library, he had put in a dollar, although he was certain that the overdue fines would be much less than that. Leaving town, he suddenly realized that he was ravenous. He saw Indians—Crow men with their black cowboy hats and distinctive Crow way of walking, half cowboy and half ruptured duck—going into a diner on Main Street. Paha Sapa parked the motorcycle diagonally at the curb alongside the old Model T’s and various jury-rigged attempts at ranch-worthy pickup trucks and went in to have breakfast. He ordered two eggs (sunny-side up), steak (medium rare), pancakes on the side, toast, orange juice, and asked the waitress—also a Crow, but not as sullen as most he’d known—to keep the coffee and maple syrup coming.

  “A hearty meal for the condemned man?”

  Paha Sapa jumped at the sudden sound of the voice in his ear and looked around. No one was near. Paha Sapa’s lips didn’t visibly move as he answered.

  —Something like that. I’m hungry.

  “Have you composed your Death Song yet?”

  A wave of
guilt flowed over Paha Sapa. Lakota warriors were not fanatical about singing their death songs when they had little time to do so before the end—sometimes the death songs were composed by relatives and friends and chanted after the man’s death—but Paha Sapa had no relatives or Lakota friends left alive and he felt that he’d be betraying Limps-a-Lot, who believed in such things, if he didn’t at least try. Often he wondered if Limps-a-Lot had found time to chant his own Death Song before the Hotchkiss guns had opened up.

  No personal death songs had occurred to Paha Sapa and none did now in the glow of the largest breakfast he’d eaten in years and five cups of coffee. The only song that came to mind had been one that Limps-a-Lot himself had shared when Paha Sapa was nine or ten years old:

  Wi-ća-hća-la kiÅ‹ he-ya

  pe lo ma-ka kiÅ‹ le-će-la

  te-haÅ‹ yuÅ‹-ke-lo e-ha pe-lo

  e-haÅ‹-ke-ćoÅ‹ wi-ća-ya-ka pe-lo

  The old men

  say

  the earth

  only

  endures.

  You spoke

  truly.

  You are right.

  It sounded good. If he thought of nothing else between here and the battlefield only some fifteen miles south, he might try chanting that in his last seconds.

  But now he whispered to the ghost—

  —Not yet. I’ll think of something.

  The ghost’s reply was low and—Paha Sapa realized to his surprise—serious.

  “Next to ‘Garry Owen,’ I was always partial to ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.’ I had the regimental band play it the day we rode out from Fort Abraham Lincoln that last time. It always made some of the troopers and all of the watching, waving wives blubber.”

  —Let me get this straight, Long Hair. You want me to chant “The Girl I Left Behind Me” as my Death Song?

  “Why not? It sort of applies to both of us, although Rain left you behind rather than the other way around. I left Libbie behind—we both knew it could happen, although I don’t think either one of us really believed it—but she never abandoned me. All those years alone as a widow… ”

  Paha Sapa was in a good mood from the giant breakfast—certainly the best breakfast he’d eaten since Rain had died—and he didn’t want it spoiled by morose thoughts, his or his ghost’s.

  —Well, I don’t have a regimental band with me today, so I don’t think I’ll try “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

  Then, without thinking about it, he whispered—

  —Are you frightened, Long Hair?

  Paha Sapa half-expected the irritating boyish laughter, but it did not come.

  “Of the bullet in the brain… your brain… no. Not at all. But since you asked, what I’m frightened of is that this magic forty-five-caliber bullet might put you out of your misery forever but won’t kill me—since I am, after all, only a ghost. Imagine still being conscious and thinking and aware, through what’s left of your senses, after they bury your dead and rotting body in the ground… down there in the darkness and loam, with the worms, for how long until the last of your brain is consumed and…”

  —All right, all right. Do you want me to leave a note asking that my remains be cremated?

  Paha Sapa meant it as a joke, although he was feeling a little ill after the helpful cascade of images, but Long Hair’s ghost evidently took him seriously.

  “I’d appreciate it, my friend.”

  Paha Sapa shook his head, noticed that other men in other booths had noticed him whispering to himself, left a very large tip, paid his check, and went back to the restroom—the first indoor plumbing he’d had at his disposal in many, many weeks (his shack in Keystone had an outhouse) and a great luxury.

  “A hearty bowel movement for the condemned man.”

  —Oh, do shut the hell up. I beseech you.

  Paha Sapa thought that he had never used the word beseech aloud before, and he felt ridiculous doing so then. But the ghost of General (Colonel at the time of his death) George Armstrong Custer did shut up long enough for Paha Sapa to enjoy the miracle of indoor plumbing.

  The restroom was very clean.

  IT IS LATE MORNING when he turns off Highway 87—a modern two-lane highway busy with trucks and dark cars—back onto the gravel road he took from Busby. The entrance to the battlefield park runs off to the right of this smaller road. There is a sort of gate at the entrance to the park or monument or whatever it’s become, but no one is there, and Paha Sapa is relieved at that. He spent enough of his life’s savings on the huge breakfast.

  Paha Sapa has almost no sense of recogntion as he rides his son’s motorcycle down the narrow strip of road along the ridge where Custer died. Below is the Greasy Grass—what wasichus still call the Little Big Horn—and he can see the giant cottonwoods where the hundreds of lodges of the Sioux and Cheyenne had stretched out of sight around the bend in the valley to the south.

  The ghost’s self-imposed silence has not lasted long.

  “I do have one regret.”

  —Other than getting yourself and a third of your regiment killed, you mean?

  Paha Sapa feels sorry he’s thought that even as he thinks it. It’s too late in the game, as the Mount Rushmore workers and baseball players might say, for petty jibes.

  The ghost doesn’t seem to have heard.

  “I just wish I’d had a chance to drive—ride—whatever you do—this motorcycle you and your boy rebuilt. I rode a bicycle once, but it’s not the same.”

  Paha Sapa has to chuckle.

  —I can see the whole Seventh Cavalry on Harley-Davidsons.

  “We’d need leather jackets. And some sort of new insignia.”

  —Skulls, perhaps.

  They arrive at what a small sign announces as last stand hill. Paha Sapa parks the motorcycle and starts to take the valise with him but then thinks better of it. He’s put the Colt into a canvas bag with a shoulder strap, but he leaves that in the valise. This isn’t the place. There are three cars parked here: two old Fords and a fancier Chevrolet. He sees a few people in summer linens moving among the white crosses and headstones on the grassy hillside.

  Paha Sapa stops at a stone monument put up not long after the battle here. The names of the Seventh Cavalry dead are listed on a bronze plaque burnished gold by age and touch.

  “Are we tourists today, Mr. Paha Sapa?”

  —I thought you might want to see where you fell.

  “I don’t, especially. Besides, my bones aren’t buried there. They moved me to West Point. Libbie’s buried there next to me.”

  Paha Sapa looks down across the hillside, opening his vision to the ghost within him. The headstones, not all with names, were set where the men’s mutilated bodies were found and buried where they fell.

  Why did he ride up the couloir onto the bluffs with the warriors that day? He can’t really remember. To count coup? Why? As a young wikasa wakan in training, he hadn’t even cared about such things… or so he’d thought.

  Paha Sapa goes back to the motorcycle and drives south along the ridgetop, the gravel road barely wider than a walking path. There are no other cars here beyond Last Stand Hill. In ten minutes, the slowly moving motorcycle covers the three or four miles that separated Custer and his men from the rest of the Seventh Cavalry—and rescue. But Reno and Benteen didn’t attempt a rescue, Paha Sapa knows; they merely listened to the shooting go on and on to the north and then, horribly, fall silent. They had their own problems to deal with.

  A little sign by a walking path says weir’s ATTEM TO RESC E C TER. Someone has shot the missing letters out with a high-power rifle. Paha Sapa drives on to a gravel parking area where an intact sign reads reno and benteen monument and battlefield.

  The ghost’s whisper is almost inaudible even coming from inside Paha Sapa’s head.

  “Libbie fought until she died to keep Reno from having a monument or mention anywhere on the battlefield. As soon as she died, they gave him one.”

  —Do you care?
/>
  “No.”

  This time, Paha Sapa leaves the gladstone in the sidecar but takes the canvas bag, hitching the strap easily over his shoulder. In the bag is some bread, bologna, and the loaded Colt.

  He walks across the broad crown of the hill toward the cliffs and valley.

  “You’re hurting terribly, aren’t you, Black Hills?”

  Paha Sapa considers not answering but decides he will. What harm can it do now?

  —Yes. The cancer has its grip on me today.

  “Would you… do this thing… just because of the cancer? I mean, if you hadn’t failed at Mount Rushmore?”

  Paha Sapa does not answer because he cannot. But he hopes he would not be here with the Colt just because of the pain and disease. It bothers him a little that he’ll never know.

  Almost out of sight of the parking lot, he finds a smooth place to sit. The grasses here come up almost to his shoulder when he’s sitting in them. The clouds are breaking up some now, allowing patches of sunlight to move across the rolling hills and curving valley below, and everywhere the grasses are moving in languid thrall to the wind.

  “Benteen and Reno had a better hill,” says the ghost, his tone calmly, coolly professional rather than wistful or envious. “I could have held out here all day and night with my men… if I’d had this hilltop.”

  —Does it matter?

  There comes the faintest echo of sad laughter. It’s as if the ghost is already leaving him. But not quite yet.

  “Paha Sapa, did you see those ravens? They followed us down the road. All the way in.”

  Paha Sapa saw them and sees them now, perching on a rail twenty yards away on a splintered old fence that runs from the parking lot, perhaps delineating the end of the park boundary. The two ravens are watching him. Watching them.

  He doesn’t like this. Who would? Ravens are symbols of death for the Lakota, but then most things are in one story or another. Some say that it’s the ravens that carry the wanagi of dead people up to the Milky Way to begin the spirit-journey there. Others, including Limps-a-Lot, did not believe this.