Dan Simmons - Black Hills

His next five hours on the cliff face with the giant Heads are even more dreamlike.

Usually when a driller or powderman has to move laterally across the cliff face as Paha Sapa must tonight, there’s a “call boy” tied into a safety harness and sitting far out on the brow of the Head above the worker. It’s easy work for the money, since all the call-boy has to do is to relay the workingman’s shout to the cable winch operator up in his shack. Then the call boy leans far out to check on the driller’s or powderman’s or other worker’s movement while being held in place by his harness—one wire running back to the shack, one up to the boom arm—and sometimes looking quite comical since he can be standing almost horizontal, feet on the granite, eyes facing straight down, all the while shouting further directions to the winch operator controlling the unseen worker’s movement below.

Well, there are no call-boys this night.

Paha Sapa has explained the new system to Mune half a dozen times, but he went over it again before he dropped over the edge of George Washington’s hair.

— No call-boy, so we’re doing it with this rope this time, Mune. I’ve got enough rope that it’ll go with me wherever the cable does. You keep one hand on the rope here where I’ve rigged it to run by your chair. One hard tug means stop lowering. Two tugs means higher. One tug, pause, then another tug means swing to the right at that level. One tug, pause, then two tugs means swing to the left.

Mune’s ferocious frown of pained concentration makes Paha Sapa think that Mune appears to be trying to figure out the article on quantum effect published by Albert Einstein that Robert mentioned twenty-four years ago. Since then, everyone has heard of Einstein… except, perhaps, for Mune Mercer.

— Here, Mune, I’ve got it all written out on this chart. If we get tangled up, just clip your harness onto the boom wire and walk out on George’s brow a bit and look down to see what the mess is. OK?

Mune frowns but nods doubtfully.

In the end, it all works as well as if there were a call-boy. Paha Sapa has planned the deployment of the dynamite crates and detonators (which he takes down first and stores on a safe ledge, kicking back and forth to the box like a bird returning to its nest) so that he has little lifting or descending to do, and all of that at the beginning and end of each placement. Mostly it is just him kicking and gliding, lifting and placing and wedging and then kicking off and flying sideways through the night air and moonlight again.

Then Mune cranks Paha Sapa up, they move to the next winch shack farther east along the cliff’s edge, and Paha Sapa drops over on his bosun’s chair with his rope in his hand and the easy dream of weightlessness begins again. Improbably, miraculously, there are no hitches, either in the cable or the plot.

Palooka has drilled the holes perfectly. The dynamite crates slip in easily and are concealed by the gray tarps. It is the placement of detonators (since the whole crate of dynamite has to go off at once, rather than single sticks or fragments of a stick) and then the placement and concealment of the long gray wires that take most of the night.

But by 4:43 a.m. they are finished. Even the second detonator box is in place and concealed—the first having already been placed there publicly by Paha Sapa in preparation for the day’s demo blast—along the rim of rock running flat to the east of Lincoln’s cheek.

Paha Sapa drives Mune home, pays him his forty-five dollars, and doesn’t look back as he coasts the ’cycle down the long winding hill to Keystone and home as the sun is rising. For a while he worried that Mune might come to the site and talk to Borglum about the mysterious work in the middle of the night and about dynamite crates labeled fireworks, but now Paha Sapa knows beyond all doubt that Mune Mercer is too stupid and too selfish to notice, care about, or talk about such things. Mune, he knows, will sleep for a few hours and then hitchhike to a speakeasy in Deadwood that’s open on Sundays and then get forty-five dollars’ worth of drunk.

It’s another hot, sunny, windless August day.

Paha Sapa considers sleeping for an hour—except while in a hot bath, he trusts his lifelong ability to wake when he wills himself to—but decides not to risk it. After changing his shirt and splashing cold water on his face, he makes some coffee and sits for a while at his kitchen table, thinking of absolutely nothing, and then, when cars belonging to other Mount Rushmore workers in Keystone begin starting up, he washes the mug and sets it in its place in the tidy cupboard, cleans and sets away the coffee pot, looks around his home a final time—he’s already burned the note he left on the mantel two nights ago regarding taking care of the donkeys if something happened to him—goes outside, kicks his son’s motorcycle into life, and joins the smaller-than-usual procession of workingmen in their battered old vehicles all heading up to Mount Rushmore.

The crowds, he knows, will come later.

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DOES NOT ARRIVE BY NOON, BUT GUTZON Borglum does not start the ceremony without him.

Paha Sapa is the only man on the face of the cliff, perched near Lincoln’s cheek—the carving has not yet exposed the head’s bearded chin—far to the right but still able to see George Washington, the flag-covered Jefferson, and the white granite slope from whence the Teddy Roosevelt head will begin to emerge. The only other men on the mountain this day are the eight workers peering over the top of the Jefferson head where the winch, boom, pulleys, and rope stays attached to scaffolds are holding the giant flag in place until it is time to swing it away and then pull it up out of sight.

The plan is for the five-charge demonstration blast to be detonated first, then an orchestra will play, and only then will the flag be removed from Jefferson’s face. After that, Borglum and a few others will speak to the crowd and radio audience as the head is officially dedicated. There are no plans for President Roosevelt to speak. Just as in the original plans for the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg more than three score and ten years earlier, the presence of the president of the United States is mostly a technicality; others are scheduled to do the speech making.

Borglum has loaned Paha Sapa his second-best pair of Zeiss binoculars so that there will be no question that his powderman will be able to see the Boss raise and then lower the red flag as the signal to detonate the five charges, and the heavy optics bring individual faces into clear focus.

By eleven a.m., townspeople and the curious from all over western South Dakota are arriving and beginning to fill up the bleachers above and to either side of the main VIP viewing area on Doane Mountain, right where, if Borglum gets his way (and when hasn’t he? thinks Paha Sapa) there will be a huge Visitors Center and fancy View Terrace and probably a gigantic amphitheater with seating for thousands, just for patriotic presentations—including, Paha Sapa is certain, elaborate programs literally singing the praises of a certain sculptor named Gutzon Borglum.

For right now, though, Borglum has had his son, Lincoln, take the bulldozer and improve the ruts leading to the center of that viewing area, below and in front of the V shape of the VIP stands and general bleachers. President Roosevelt, Paha Sapa learned just that morning, will not be getting out of his open touring car during the dedication ceremony. Even without his binoculars, Paha Sapa can see the spot where the president’s car will stop, already ringed as it is by bulky microphones on stands, black cables, newsreel cameras, and areas taped off under the ponderosa pines to corral the press photographers. All the other VIPs will be behind FDR as he and Borglum look at Mount Rushmore during the ceremony.