Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Paha Sapa looks up, squinting into the sunlight. Lincoln Borglum and his men have folded the huge flag away, secured the boom arm and pulleys, and have left for the staircase. Lincoln had better hurry if he wants to be introduced… the fringes of the crowd are breaking up, the VIPs have left their seats, the president’s Secret Service men and aides are clearing a path for the automobile.

This is the time, Paha Sapa realizes. Now. This second.

The detonator box is between his knees, the plunger still raised.

He is still sitting that way an hour later when he raises his head, lifts the binoculars, and looks down.

Almost everyone is gone. The president’s car is long gone. The parking lot is almost empty. The reviewing stand is being dismantled.

There’s motion above Paha Sapa and he looks up to see Gutzon Borglum dropping toward him. Of all the hundred or so workers who’ve learned to move across the face and faces of Mount Rushmore, no one floats with a lighter or surer touch than Gutzon Borglum.

The Boss drops to the ledge and steps out of the bosun’s chair and safety harness. He looks down at the detonator box still secured and armed between Paha Sapa’s knees.

— I knew you wouldn’t do it. Where did you hide the dynamite crates?

Keeping his right hand on the plunger, Paha Sapa points out the various hiding places on and under and around the various faces.

Borglum shakes his head—he is wearing his broad-brimmed hat, the red kerchief is still around his neck—and sits on the ledge, propping one powerful forearm on his knee.

Paha Sapa has to fight the hollowness in him in order to speak at all.

— How long have you known what I was going to do?

Borglum shows his nicotine-stained teeth.

— Don’t you know? I’ve always known what you were planning to do, Paha Sapa. But I’ve also always known you wouldn’t do it.

The statement makes no sense but Paha Sapa has the urge to ask the Boss how he learned his, Paha Sapa’s, true name. The detonator is still fully charged. The plunger is still raised.

— Paha Sapa, you remember our meeting in the Homestake Mine. The handshake?

— Of course.

Paha Sapa’s voice sounds as weak and hollow and defeated as he feels.

— You’re so damned arrogant, Old Man Black Hills. You think you’re the only person in the world with the gift you have. Well… you’re not. You got those bits of my past when we shook hands that day—I felt them flow into you—but I got bits of your past and future. This day has been as clear to me as our shared memories of you counting coup on Custer or the face of your tunkašila.

Paha Sapa looks at Borglum and blinks and tries to understand this but cannot. Borglum laughs, but not cruelly, not out of some victory. It’s a tired but strangely satisfied sound.

— You know, Paha Sapa, that doctor you snuck off to see in Casper is a damned quack. Everyone knows that. You need to see my doctor in Chicago.

Paha Sapa has no reply to that. Borglum looks up at the Washington head, then at Jefferson, then at the white field of granite that will be Teddy Roosevelt.

— I think the president was really impressed. Now I’ve got to go beg the Park Service for another hundred thousand dollars so that I can finish everything. They’ll think that I’m lying when I say I can get everything done with only a hundred thousand bucks, and they’ll be right… but it’ll keep us going.

Borglum cranes his red-kerchiefed neck to look up at Abraham Lincoln looming over them.

— One of the things I saw that day in the mine, Paha Sapa, is that in nineteen forty-one I’ll… well, we’ll see if that comes true. I believed in all the rest, but I don’t have to believe in that if I don’t want to. Shall we take those damned contact wires off now?

Paha Sapa says nothing as Borglum undoes the wires from the detonator box terminals. The Boss tosses the gray-painted cables aside and then sets the detonator box gently next to the other one. In his place, Paha Sapa might have tossed the detonator over the side of the cliff, but the boxes are expensive and Borglum is a man who watches every penny when he can. Not in his own life, of course, but for the Mount Rushmore job.

With the detonator harmless, Paha Sapa finally can speak again.

— Are the police on the way, Mr. Borglum? Waiting below?

Borglum looks at him.

— You know there are no police waiting, Paha Sapa. But I need you to tell my son where all the crates of dynamite are. Are they usable on the job?

— Most are. I have some more crates in the shed next to my house that aren’t so good. Someone should check those and get rid of them.

Borglum nods. He pulls a second and smaller red handkerchief from his pocket and mops the sweat from his forehead.

— Yeah, Lincoln will take care of those too. We’ll check the sticks in these boxes and store them up in the powder shed for now. You going to take a little vacation… go away for a little while?

Paha Sapa understands nothing.

— You’ll let me go?

Borglum shrugs. Paha Sapa realizes, not for the first time, how powerful the sculptor’s hands, forearms, shoulders, and personality are.

— It’s a free country. You’re overdue for a real vacation. I’m gonna have the boys work on the Lincoln head here through September and start the serious honeycombing for Teddy Roosevelt in October. But when you come back, I’ll have a job for you.

— You have to be kidding.

The quality of Borglum’s grin and gaze shows that he is not.

— I don’t think you should be powderman anymore, Old Man, although I know it’d be all right if you were. I thought maybe you should work with Lincoln on supervising the drilling and bumping on the TR head, then work with the second team to start the serious work on the Hall of Records and the Entablature. We’ll talk about it when you get back from vacation.

They stand then, both men easy on the narrow ledge with nothing between them and two hundred feet of clear air other than their experience and sense of balance. The long August day is shading into a golden evening that—suddenly, sharply, inexplicably—feels more like the benediction of autumn than the constant test of endlessly blazing summer.

Borglum is slipping into his bosun’s chair and safety strap and Paha Sapa looks up to see a second bosun’s chair dropping down for him on its almost invisible steel wire.

PAHA SAPA HAS THE SIDECAR LOADED AND IS READY TO LEAVE at dawn, but Lincoln Borglum and a work crew show up early to check out the extra stored dynamite and transport it elsewhere. The younger Borglum knows what’s going on and acts embarrassed, almost apologetic, but powdermen Clyde “Spot” Denton and Alfred Berg, as well as Red Anderson, Howdy Peterson, Palooka Payne, and the other men carrying the crates out to the waiting truck are just confused.

It’s Red who asks the question.

— Where you goin’, Billy?

Paha Sapa tells the truth.

— Home.

He’s dug up the coffee can from the backyard so he has all his remaining money in the sidecar. He’s also loaded everything else he’ll need for the rest of his life—some food for the trip, a change of clothes, the oversized leather jacket Robert left for him when he went in the Army, and the loaded Colt revolver.