Dan Simmons - Black Hills

— I never wanted that, my darling husband, my dearest. What I want is here…

She touched his chest over his heart.

—… and here…

She brought his hand to the upper curve of her abdomen, just below her remaining breast.

— Do you understand? Do you? Because if you don’t… then the hell with you, Black Hills of the Natural Free Human Beings.

— I understand.

He put his arm around her. The orchestra started up again, playing something popular, no doubt, in New York dance halls.

Then Rain surprised him completely.

— Wayáčhi yačhiN he?

He laughed aloud, and not at the problems with her gender language, but simply in delight that she knew the words. How did she know the words? He did not remember ever having asked her to dance.

— Han. Yes.

He took her in his arms there in the aspen trees above the new lake and they danced late into the night.

BY THE TIME Paha Sapa quits work at five p.m., the white halos are gone from around his coworkers and have been replaced by a pounding headache that gives him vertigo as he plods down the 506 steps to the bottom.

Everything is in place on the cliff for tomorrow’s festivities except for the five actual demonstration charges. No one will be allowed on the cliff face in the morning except Paha Sapa as he rigs those charges. A skeleton crew will work from above to rig the flag on the boom arm and pulleyed cables over the Jefferson head. The rest of the final preparation in the morning will be down on Doane Mountain where the press and crowds and important personages will be gathering.

Borglum is back and waving aside those workers who are scheduled to work on the flag covering the next day, obviously about to give them their final directions. But Paha Sapa needs no final directions and he slips away to the parking lot, kicks Robert’s motorcycle into life, and follows the dust cloud of homeward-bound workers down the mountain road.

A third of the way down the hill he has to swerve the motorcycle into the trees, get off, fall to all fours, and vomit up his lunch. The headache seems better after that. (Paha Sapa, who has dealt with so many kinds of pain for so long, has not had a serious headache like this since Curly the Crow scout almost split his skull open with a rifle butt sixty years earlier.)

Once home, Paha Sapa heats water for another hot bath to help rid himself of some of the pain and stiffness, but ends up falling asleep in the tub. He wakens in cold water and darkness with a jolt of terror— Has he slept too late? Did Mune wander off to a speakeasy when Paha Sapa failed to pick him up at the appointed time?

But it’s only nine fifteen. The days are getting darker earlier now. It feels like midnight to Paha Sapa as he dries himself off and watches the water swirl out of the tub.

He can’t face dinner but he packs some sandwiches and sets them in an old burlap bag—he doesn’t want to bring the lunch pail. He realizes how stupid and sentimental this is, willing to blow himself apart but not wanting the lunch pail that Rain used to put food in for him blown apart. Stupid, stupid, he thinks, and shakes his aching head. But he leaves the sandwiches in the burlap bag.

He goes to the old blacksmith shop in Keystone, now the only gas station, and has the retarded boy there, Tommy, fill the motorcycle’s little tank. It would be too absurd if his plot failed now due to running out of gas.

Driving up the mountain to fetch Mune (whose own Model T succumbed earlier this year to too many drunken collisions with trees and boulders and who is now dependent upon his equally drunkard and unemployed friends for transportation), Paha Sapa thinks of how his plot—he’s only recently begun thinking of it as a plot, but that’s what it is ( the Gunpowder plot! his tired mind decides)—depends now on the idiot Mune Mercer. If Mune has wandered off with his idiot friends, believing more in Saturday-night whiskey than in the promised Sunday-morning fifty dollars… well, the plot is over. Paha Sapa simply cannot get the crates of dynamite from the Hall of Records canyon to the ridgeline summit or then deploy those crates on the face without the help of at least one man to run the winches.

Except that Paha Sapa has spent years of sleepless nights trying to find alternatives so that he can do it alone. If Mune is gone, Paha Sapa knows that he’ll spend the night hauling those crates of dynamite down the canyon and around the valley and then up the 506 steps himself, one crate at a time, and then go dangling out in space without a winch handler if he has to. But he also knows the night is not long enough for that approach, even if his energy were to hold out.

So, again, it all depends on Mune Mercer. Paha Sapa finds himself chanting a prayer to the Six Grandfathers to help him with this one element that is out of his control. The prayer reminds Paha Sapa that, before noon tomorrow, he finally has to compose his Death Song.

Incredibly, miraculously, Mune is there at the appointed time and waiting outside and is even relatively sober.

The problem now is first cramming the giant into the little sidecar—in the end Mune looks like a huge cork in a tiny bottle—and then getting the little motorcycle with all that extra weight up the last mile of road to Mount Rushmore. With that final miracle granted, Paha Sapa glides the motorcyle across the empty parking lot and into the cover of trees. The moon has risen a little earlier tonight and it is even fuller.

— How come you parkin’ here in the trees?

Mune’s massive brow is furrowed.

— In case it rains, of course. I don’t have a cover for the motorcycle or sidecar.

Mune frowns up at a sky free of all but a few light clouds. It has not rained in five weeks. But he ponderously nods his understanding.

It’s only eleven p.m. and music comes from the direction of the sculptor’s studio. Paha Sapa walks Mune to the base of the stairway and again the giant balks.

— Hey! I hate these fucking stairs. Can’t we take the tram?

Paha Sapa presses the big man’s sweaty back.

— Sshhh. This is all to be Mr. Borglum’s surprise, remember? We’re not using any of the power equipment. You walk up to the Hall of Records canyon winch—all the cranking’s by hand tonight, remember—and I’ll go around and up the canyon. Just send the wire down…. I’ve got all the hooks and palette cables down there. When I send the crates of fireworks up, just stack each one outside the cable shack. But be careful with them. We want the show to be for the president tomorrow, not just for the two of us tonight.

Mune grunts his understanding and starts clunking his slow way up the stairway. Paha Sapa flinches, thinking that the thud of the giant’s hobnailed boots will be enough to bring Borglum or someone checking to find out what all the racket is.

The next hours are a dreamscape.

Paha Sapa has nothing to do between lifts of the dynamite crates and stands there in the shifting puzzle of moonshine and moon shadow, looking up at the black silhouette of the winch boom and shack, always waiting for Mune to change his mind, or discover that the crates so crudely stenciled as fireworks—caution! handle with care! are actually filled with dynamite and then just run away, but that does not happen.

Finally the last crate and covering tarps are gone, the narrow steel wire comes down a final time, Paha Sapa shines his flashlight into the Hall of Records tunnel to make triply sure that he’s sent everything up, and then he clips on the bosun’s chair he’d stored there, whistles once, and relaxes as the cable lifts him three hundred vertical feet to the top of the ridge.