Black Hills

by Simmons, Dan

  Hoot seemed to be struggling, trying to break away—to go back to the truck?—but Paha Sapa dragged him onward.

  Paha Sapa realized that the Dodge’s headlights had somehow remained on, but they’d become invisible after only three or four steps into the roaring darkness. The lightning all around them still illuminated nothing. Paha Sapa wondered if they would be trampled by the fleeing white horse turned back toward its barn or field and had a sudden urge to giggle at the thought. He knew that he would never earn a newspaper obituary, but that would have been a great one after seventy years of life.

  He staggered forward—it was impossible to stand upright, and even as they hunkered into a crouch, the wind threatened to throw them both down and scuttle them away across the ditch and fields like so much wind-tossed detritus—and then Paha Sapa decided that they should be even with the driveway, so he tugged the still-struggling and writhing Hoot left and let the wind shove them south.

  Once they bumped into something unmoving and solid in the darkness, but it was only Lincoln’s pickup truck, abandoned in the driveway. The driver’s-side door was wide open, and Paha Sapa could feel the dust already filling the cab. They did not tarry there.

  He found the front porch by tripping over the step. For a second as he fell forward in the howling darkness, he lost Hoot, but then he swung his arms out and around and caught a grip on the stumbling wasichu’s hair and then his collar. Paha Sapa fell forward a few more steps. Already he could feel his lungs filling with the swirling, pressing, flying dirt—grains of sand and silica like so much molecule-sized sharp glass already cutting the insides of his nose and throat. Stay out here for thirty minutes of this, and their bodies, if they were found at all after the storm, would show lungs so packed solid with dirt that the autopsy doctor could compare them to vacuum cleaner bags that had never been emptied.

  The front door! Paha Sapa felt it with the flat of his hand in the darkness and pounded around the edges to make sure. It was a door.

  And it was boarded up.

  Resisting the urge to laugh or cry or to call out to Wakan Tanka or to Coyote the Trickster in a dead man’s glee, Paha Sapa pulled Hoot through the darkness as he felt his way along the house to the left.

  They fell off the low and sagging porch together. Paha Sapa was on his feet in a second, lunging toward the side of the house. If he lost the house, they were dead.

  For a short, sagging shack, the farmhouse seemed to go on forever. Paha Sapa felt boarded windows under his splintered palms. If there was no way into this house…

  He left that thought alone and tugged Hoot along with him. The sturdy mine worker had fallen down and not regained his feet. Paha Sapa dragged him. Drifts were building around his legs as he moved. Paha Sapa suddenly felt disoriented, as if he were climbing a steep cliff—as if the flat, baked earth of this east-Colorado farmhouse were the vertical wall of Mount Rushmore, of the defiled Six Grandfathers.

  Paha Sapa felt a sudden exhilaration welling up in him. He did weep then, the tears turning to clumps of mud on his eyelids, caking and sealing his eyes shut.

  He would not have to be the cause of the Four Heads’ destruction on the sacred mountain in the sacred Hills.

  Wakan Tanka and the Thunder Beings had acted in his stead. Surely this terrible storm, this terrible blotting out, could not be resisted.

  Lincoln and Hoot and Red had talked of President Roosevelt pondering abandoning all of the Plains states and the middle of America if no windbreak of pine trees could protect the farms and ranches and sandblasted ghost shells of the dying towns here and south of here. Suddenly Paha Sapa realized that the gods of the Lakota and the All, and possibly the ancestral ghost spirits of his people, had already acted. For more than five years, the winds had blown and the topsoil had lifted into the sky and the farms had gone fallow and been buried in their own excreta and the ranches had counted their dead cattle in the thousands as the soil dried up and blew away, carrying the last remnants of overcropped grasses with it.

  The gods were acting. Nothing on earth could resist a series of storms like this. Paha Sapa knew that this—this black blizzard, this booger of a duster, this big roller—could not be resisted by mere soft, fat, God-praying wasichu. Paha Sapa knew nature intimately, and this storm, all these increasingly violent storms he’d read about and caught glimpses of in newsreels and experienced in South Dakota’s milder forms were not part of nature. No cycle of nature in the history of North America or the world had seen months of winds like this, years of drought like this, and screaming, wailing, roiling walls of suffocating death like this.

  This was the gods of his people telling the Wasicun to leave forever.

  Paha Sapa sobbed silently behind his kerchief, sobbed mostly from relief that he would not have to be the agent of the wasichus’ destruction. He was old. He was tired. He knew the enemy too well. He wanted this cup to pass from him—and now it had.

  Inside his heart and brain and chest, the ghost of Long Hair gibbered at him. Paha Sapa could understand the words now, of course—had been able to for most of the decades he had been alive, ever since Curly and the Seventh Cavalry and the battle at Slim Buttes—but he chose not to listen now.

  Suddenly Paha Sapa’s flailing left hand found nothingness… the back end of the house.

  He tugged Hoot’s body through high dirt drifts into the blessed lee of the house, away from the wind.

  But the dirt swirled and intruded and compelled here as well, and it was no lighter. Paha Sapa took his free hand and held it a few inches in front of his mud-caked face even as he pried open his eyelids against the mud and stinging particles.

  Nothing. He literally could not see his hand in front of his face. Lightning leaped and coiled all around him—from an unseen gutter to an invisible metal clothesline post, from an unseen pump to invisible nails in the porch, from the invisible nails in the porch to a never-seen metal fence or gate twenty feet away. The lightning and static discharged and displayed all around him but never illuminated.

  Paha Sapa kept the rear of the house against his right shoulder as he pulled Hoot’s body forward. Now that the wind neither shoved him from behind nor pushed against him as it had out on the road, he felt further disoriented. If it hadn’t been for the farmhouse wall to lean on, he would have fallen on his face and not risen again.

  He realized that there was a wild banging ahead of him, sounding exactly as if someone were standing in the roiling darkness and firing off a heavy repeating rifle or machine gun. Paha Sapa thought of his son.

  It took the wildly flapping screen door hitting him on the head and almost knocking him out before Paha Sapa identified the source of the repeated explosions. He braced the banging screen with Hoot’s body and tried the solid back door. Locked or stuck.

  Paha Sapa threw his shoulder, his full weight, and the last of his energy into it.

  The heavy, paintless door screeched inward, shoving against drifts and piles of sand within.

  Paha Sapa bent over and tugged Hoot inside, slamming the door behind him.

  The howl receded a few decibels. At first, Paha Sapa was sure that it was as dark and dust filled here inside the house as it had been outside—and freezing cold—but then he saw what appeared to be the tiniest of glows. It was like a campfire glimpsed miles away.

  Tugging the groaning Hoot, he crawled toward it.

  It was a kerosene lantern on the floor of the kitchen not six feet away. The glow waxed and waned, but not before Paha Sapa saw the faces clustered around it—only faces, the bodies in dark, soiled garments lost in the darkness—the faces of a whisker-stubbled rail-thin farmer and his thinner wife, their three children, and the wide white eyes of Lincoln Borglum and Red Anderson. They were all huddled around the low-flickering lantern on the floor like medieval worshippers kneeling around some holy artifact.

  The wide eyes had just enough time to register surprise at Paha Sapa’s and Hoot’s appearance in the howling space when the lantern glow dimmed and fl
ickered out altogether. There was no longer enough oxygen in the air to sustain a flame.

  Paha Sapa whispered—Washtay, hecetu! Good, so be it!—and collapsed onto the chipped and drifted yellowed linoleum. He couldn’t breathe.

  An hour later the deafening, unrelenting howl died down to a mere animal’s roar. The lantern was relighted and held the flame. A second lantern was taken down from the counter and lighted by the farmer’s wife. The glow now pushed six or eight feet or more into the swirling gloom. But the monster outside still banged and roared and shoved at the door and boarded windows to be allowed in.

  The farmer was shouting something.

  —Would y’all folks like something to drink?

  Lincoln Borglum, his white eyes now red, nodded for all of them. Paha Sapa realized that he had been lying on his side, eyes open but unseeing, his kerchief choking him, for a long time. He sat up and leaned back against a cupboard under the kitchen counter. Hoot was on all fours, his head down like a sick dog’s, and he seemed to be moaning along with the rise and fall of the wind’s roar and moans.

  The farmer stood, staggered in the whirlwind, and went to the sink. Paha Sapa could see things six, eight, ten feet away now, and his eyes marveled at the murky clarity.

  The farmer pumped and pumped and pumped at a pump handle at the sink. Surely, thought Paha Sapa, a pump could not work now that the world had been destroyed.

  The farmer came back with a single cup filled with water and handed it around, small sips for everyone, starting with the children, then the four guests, then his wife. It was empty when it came back to him. He seemed too tired to go refill it.

  Thirty or forty-five minutes later—Paha Sapa was guessing; his watch had stopped in the first minutes of the sand’s intrusion—the roar died a little more, and the farmer and his wife invited the four of them to stay for dinner.

  —Mostly just greens, I’m afraid. And the Injun’s welcome too.

  It was the farmer’s hatchet of a wife speaking.

  Again, Lincoln Borglum spoke for them, but only after he pulled mud and more solid dirt out of his mouth.

  —We’d be much obliged, ma’am.

  And, after a minute’s silence and still no movement from any of them save for the children crawling off into the darkness to do whatever they were going to do, Lincoln again.

  —Say, you folks wouldn’t have any use for two really big submarine engines, would you?

  PAHA SAPA SMILES as he hangs in the blazing cliff-bowl of August light and heat. He is under Abraham Lincoln’s roughed-out nose. It gives a little shade as the hot blue-haze afternoon thickens toward evening. He slides in the last of the charges. It is almost time for the four p.m. blasting after the men scurry off the faces.

  Then Paha Sapa’s smile dies as he remembers the lost exhilaration when he realized a year ago that those storms from the Thunder Beings, perhaps from the All himself, were not going to drive the wasichus out of the world of the Natural Free Human Beings.

  It would have to be him after all.

  President Roosevelt will be there in just a few days, this coming Sunday, for the unveiling of the Jefferson head.

  Paha Sapa has much to do before he can allow himself to sleep.

  12

  Bear Butte

  August 1876

  PAHA SAPA’S ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY COMES AND GOES, BUT THE boy is too busy fleeing for his life across the plains toward the Black Hills and his hanblečeya to notice the date, which he would not have noticed even if he had stayed in the village.

  Limps-a-Lot advised him to ride with his two horses during the night and hide from Crazy Horse and his men during the day if necessary, but that is not necessary. The rain that started pouring down on him the night he left the village at midnight does not and will not let up. For three days and nights it pounds down, accompanied by thunder and lightning that keeps Paha Sapa away from the few trees along the rare streams and causes him to hunker down even while riding, and even in the bright blur of daytime the visibility is only a few hundred feet as the gray curtains of rain roll across the soggy prairie.

  Paha Sapa travels by both day and night, but he travels slowly and he travels wet. Never in his short life has Paha Sapa witnessed a Moon of Ripening Berries this wet and stormy. The usual end-of-summer month is so dry that the horse herds never stray from what little water is left in the streambeds, and grasshoppers proliferate until walking through the high, brittle, brown grasses becomes a matter of wading through waves of leaping insects.

  Now, after three days and nights with no sleep, almost no food, and a constant diet of fear, Paha Sapa is totally disgusted with himself. Any young brave his age should be able to find shelter and start a fire even in such a rain: Paha Sapa’s flint and steel strike sparks, but he can find nothing dry enough to burn. Nor can he find shelter. The shallow caves and overhangs he knows about are along the streambeds, but now those banks are under three feet or more of water as the streams flood far beyond their banks. Despite his bundles of clothing and gear being carefully wrapped in layers of inside-out hides, everything he owns is soaked through. For a few hours each night, huddled beneath one of his horses, Paha Sapa clutches two blankets around himself, but they only make him wetter and more disspirited.

  And then there are the voices.

  The dead Wasicun’s voice is more strident than ever, growing louder whenever the poor boy tries to sleep. But in the few days since Paha Sapa touched Crazy Horse and had all the man’s memories flow into him—at times Paha Sapa feels that the violation was like being pissed on and being forced to swallow it—the gabble and gibber of all those memories that are not his have made Paha Sapa ill.

  The other-memories are not as clamoringly insistent as the ghost’s night babble, but they are more disturbing.

  Paha Sapa is overwhelmed. He has only eleven rather uneventful years of his own to remember, while Crazy Horse thought himself to be thirty-four years old this summer when he poured all his memories into Paha Sapa’s aching brain, and—somehow, despite his will not to—Paha Sapa’s vision saw forward another year or two to Crazy Horse’s death by bayonet.

  Paha Sapa remembers nothing of his own parents, of course, since his mother died at his birth and his father months before then, but now he can remember the boy Curly Hair’s, or Curly’s, parents, his Brulé mother and holy-man father named Crazy Horse. He remembers clearly, too clearly, the time in Curly’s sixteenth summer when, after Curly performed bravely in a raid against the Arapaho (and was wounded in the leg by an arrow, but only after killing several Arapaho, but it’s Paha Sapa who now remembers the pain of that arrow), Curly’s father, Crazy Horse, gave his son his own name and forever after went by the name Worm.

  Paha Sapa’s memories of his own recent childhood are now invaded by the false memories of Curly–Crazy Horse’s years with his Oglala Lakota band, but Curly–Crazy Horse’s memories are tinged red with memory-emotions of violence, near insanity, and a constant strangeness. Paha Sapa is the adopted son of Limps-a-Lot and hopes to be a holy man like his respected tunkašila, but Curly–Crazy Horse, the son of another holy man, wanted—has always wanted—to be heyoka, a dreamer and servant for the Thunder Beings.

  Paha Sapa, cold, frightened, hungry, feverish, and infinitely lonely this rainy midnight, is setting off alone for his hopeful hanblečeya—alone—in the Black Hills, while in his intruding memories he sees Curly Hair’s four-day ceremony, during which that boy-man’s Vision was given to him. He sees Curly Hair being taught and helped and supported and his inipi interpreted by his pipe-bearing elders and relatives and holy men. Paha Sapa fears, deeply, that he will never receive a vision from Wakan Tanka or the Six Grandfathers beyond these invading, obscene visions of other people’s ghosts and minds and futures, but now he has to suffer memories of Curly–Crazy Horse’s successful hanblečeya and that strange man’s celebration and acceptance as a Thunder Dreamer.

  No men have chanted or will chant Tunka-shila, hi-yay, hi-yay! for Paha Sapa, a
s he remembers in these alien memories the band’s men chanting for young Crazy Horse.

  Paha Sapa has never touched a winčinčala’s, a pretty young girl’s, winyaˇn shan, yet in these new memories now echoing in the boy’s feverish brain, he clearly remembers having sex with No Water’s wife, Black Buffalo Woman, and half a dozen other women. It is… confusing.

  Paha Sapa has never suffered an injury worse than the bruises and bloody noses of boyhood, but now he remembers not only Curly–Crazy Horse’s war wounds, but also the sensation of being shot in the face at point-blank range by the outraged husband No Water. He tries to avoid the other-memory, but the sensations of the pistol ball sliding along his teeth, opening his cheek, and smashing his jaw are too strong to shut out.

  Most disturbingly this endless black, rainy night, Paha Sapa’s feverish mind tries to deal with the fact that he—Black Hills—has never hurt another person beyond rough childhood play, while the memories of Crazy Horse bring him the joyous-sick recollections of shooting, stabbing, lancing, killing, and scalping many—Crow, Arapaho, another Lakota, and wasichus almost too many to count.

  Paha Sapa is afraid that he is dying.

  His head aches so fiercely that he pauses every quarter hour or so to vomit, even though his belly has been empty for hours. The constant, solid rain makes him so dizzy that he has trouble staying on Limps-a-Lot’s roan, Worm, and the mare, Pehánska, is acting more like a white snake, rearing and pulling the line and trying to escape, than like a white crane this terrible midnight.

  Paha Sapa’s head is full of pain, mucus, and memories that he does not want, cannot stand, and knows he shall never free himself from.

  And to make the night more hopeless, he is sure now that he is lost. He thinks he should have reached the Black Hills after three days and nights riding, but in his stupid child-inexperience navigating in the rain with no real landmarks (or those few he knew flooded), he is sure that he has somehow missed all of the Black Hills, the Heart of the World.