Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Then the overlapping loudspeaker squawk, emphasized by the natural echo basin of the curved cliff face above his narrow granite ledge, becomes even more garbled and irritating as William Williamson launches into his welcoming speech.

Paha Sapa pulls the smaller of the two detonator boxes closer and carefully takes the ends of the two wires, from which he’s stripped back the insulation with his pocketknife, runs his thumb and forefinger up each to clean it of dust, and then threads each of them through a hole in each post and carefully wraps the excess around the two threaded terminal posts. When he’s sure the contact is clean, he screws the Bakelite terminal post coverings down tight onto the wire.

“I met one of these four presidents you’re about to blow up, you know. Shook hands with him. He talked to me about my graduation from West Point. Later, he met Libbie at a reception and said, ‘So this is the young woman whose husband goes into a charge with a whoop and a shout.’ ”

Long Hair’s voice in his head almost makes Paha Sapa fall off the dynamite crate. Almost three years of silence from the damned ghost and he chooses now to begin babbling again?

“It was Old Abe, of course. The fellow whose cheek you’re leaning against. In ’sixty-two, the other officers and me serving under General McClellan in the Army of the Potomac talked seriously about marching on Washington to replace that incompetent gorilla with our choice of war dictator, Little Mac himself.”

Paha Sapa paws at the air as if swatting away a gnat.

— Be quiet. You’re dead.

“I’m just waiting to see if you’re going to do this thing or if you’re going to lose your nerve… again.”

Paha Sapa has heard this Custer-laughter many times before. The Wasicun obviously did not have an especially charming laugh even in life—it sounded too much like a mischievous boy’s nervous cackle—and sixty years in the grave has not improved it.

— You can’t stop me, Long Hair.

Again the insufferable laughter.

“Stop you? I don’t want to stop you, Paha Sapa. I think you should do this thing. Have to do this thing. It’s long overdue.”

Paha Sapa closes his eyes for a few seconds to block out the white glare, the heat, the maddening literal double-talk of the noise from below repeated in its amplified echo. He wonders if the wasichu ghost is trying to confuse him… trick him… or perhaps just distract him at the coming crucial moment.

“None of the above, old friend,” Custer whispers to him. “I’m serious. No man—especially no man bred from a warrior people—can keep receiving these insults and injuries for so long without striking back—and striking back boldly. Do it , Paha Sapa. Blow these damned stone heads to hell today, right in front of the cameras and the president and God himself. It won’t change a damned thing—your people will still be defeated and irrelevant and forgotten—but it’s a warrior people’s answer to such humiliation. Do it , for God’s sake. I would.”

Paha Sapa shakes his head, more to free himself of the voice than in reply.

Up until now he has felt no fatigue or pain while he’s spent the long morning and interminable afternoon on this thin ledge, in this intolerable heat. Now the pain flows in as if Long Hair’s ghost has opened a door for it. Paha Sapa is suddenly so tired he wonders if he will have the strength to crank the handle against the resistance of the detonator box’s coils to charge it, or find the strength to raise the plunger against that friction and push it down.

“See what I mean, Paha Sapa? You’ve gone two nights without sleep and have been working on this hill three solid days and nights without a break. You’re going to pass out and your body is going to tumble down the cliff here and be a footnote in the history of this dedication ceremony—the White House will send Borglum a note expressing its sadness at the terrible tragedy of the death of one of his workers—and these damned Heads will still be here. Blow them now. What the hell are you waiting for?”

Paha Sapa raises the binoculars. A fat man he doesn’t recognize is speaking into the main microphone. President Roosevelt is smiling. Borglum is leaning casually against the president’s touring car and he doesn’t have his hand on the red flag yet.

When Paha Sapa speaks, it’s in a stilted whisper. If someone from below is looking at him through binoculars, he does not want it to be seen that his lips are moving.

— You’re cursing, Long Hair. Didn’t you promise your wife that you wouldn’t curse?

The ghost’s laughter echoes in Paha Sapa’s skull again, but it is not quite so grating this time.

“I did, yes. I made that vow in eighteen sixty-two, in Monroe, Michigan, shortly after Libbie and I had been introduced at a Thanksgiving party and only one day after she had, regrettably, seen me inebriated on a public street there in Monroe. I prayed and I admitted sin and I vowed that I would never touch liquor again as long as I lived, nor would I take the name of the Lord in vain or use ungentlemanly language ever again, no matter how frequently my occupation and mean comrades urged me to. But I did not make the pledge to Libbie that day, oh, no—I made it to my older sister Lydia, who, in good time, conveyed it to young Miss Elizabeth Bacon, who had indeed seen me in my unforgivable condition while spying out through the drapes of her upstairs window there from Judge Daniel Bacon’s home. But Libbie is dead, my Indian friend, as is your own dear wife, and all our vows have expired with them.”

— Shut up. You just want me to die. You just want to be released.

Long Hair laughs again. “Of course I do, damn you. I’m no soul waiting for Heaven, no ghost waiting to pass upward and onward, just a memory tumor of Paha Billy Slow Horse Slovak fucking Sapa. We’re both tired of this life, this world. Are you just waiting for more pain and loss? What are you waiting for, Paha Sapa? Trigger the goddamned fucking detonator now .”

Paha Sapa blinks at the shouted obscenities echoing in his aching skull. Has the ghost finally gone mad?

Then again, why is he waiting? He fully intends to set off the demonstration blast, then listen to the dedication, and only then—after detonating a single stick of dynamite to get the crowd’s and cameras’ attention—only then set off the twenty-one crates’ worth of explosive.

But the ghost has a point… why wait?

He realizes, blushing, that it’s because he wants to hear if President Roosevelt will speak after all, even though he’s not scheduled to, and if he does, what he will say. He realizes that he’s worked five years blasting and helping to carve this monument and wants to hear what the president of the United States thinks of it. He realizes, through fatigue as real as the granite under and behind him, that he wants the president and guests today to be proud of the work done on Mount Rushmore.

“Oh, that is so goddamned pathetic… ” begins Long Hair’s ghost.

Paha Sapa ignores him. Borglum has begun speaking to the president and guests and has the red flag in his hand.

The detonator boxes, chosen by Borglum himself, are made in Germany and are a little more complex than the old wire-it-up- and-push-down boxes that Paha Sapa used in the mines.

First he takes the handle of the demo-charge detonator box and cranks it four times to the right, charging it. Then he clicks the handle to the left, releasing the plunger safety, and raises that plunger against considerable friction. It is ready to send the current to the detonators in each dynamite crate.